At its core, the alleged bribery scheme involving ex-Speaker Michael Madigan and utility giant Commonwealth Edison is an alarmingly familiar lesson on how often-cozy relationships between business leaders and politicians can catch the attention of federal prosecutors.
Like so many federal corruption probes before it, the case is replete with powerful political characters, bit players, well-connected lobbyists and big-business clout.
Unlike the investigations that felled two consecutive Illinois governors: Operation Safe Road and Operation Board Games, the ComEd bribery investigation has no official nickname, but still it has reverberated across the state’s political landscape.
Then came something of a political earthquake on Wednesday, when federal prosecutors returned a grand jury indictment charging Madigan and longtime confidant Michael McClain with racketeering conspiracy alleging an array of corrupt endeavors, including the ComEd bribery scheme.
The 22-count indictment, which alleged Madigan’s elected office and political operation were a criminal enterprise that provided personal financial rewards for him and his associates, had been anticipated for more than a year and half amid reports of FBI raids and wiretaps involving some of Madigan’s most trusted associates.
The first big shoe dropped in July 2020, when ComEd admitted in court that it gave contracts, law business and jobs requiring little or no work to friends and political allies of Madigan in hopes that he would look favorably upon the company’s Springfield agenda, which started scoring a string of big wins in the General Assembly in 2011.
Major indictments followed, including charges against McClain, a former legislator and lobbyist, as well as Madigan’s former chief of staff, Democratic legislators, and ComEd executives, lobbyists and consultants.
The far-reaching bribes-for-favors investigation, along with lingering fallout from multiple #MeToo outrages among his allies, eventually weakened the speaker’s once-unassailable political status and eventually cost him the top job in the House.
The 106-page indictment returned Wednesday, meanwhile, outlines new examples of how Madigan was allegedly aware of — and at times personally participated in — the ComEd scheme.
Among them, according to the charges, was a May 2018 phone call in which Madigan allegedly instructed McClain to talk to then-ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore about giving a lucrative consulting contract to retiring 23rd Ward Ald. Michael Zalewski, a longtime Madigan ally. In the same conversation, Madigan also told McClain to “go forward with” the appointment of former McPier CEO Juan Ochoa to ComEd’s board, the indictment alleged..
Around the same time, Madigan also talked to McClain by phone about working to “kill” a 2018 bill in the House that would have imposed more restrictive requirements on retail electric suppliers, legislation that ComEd opposed, according to the indictment.
Defense lawyers have previously argued that there was no quid pro quo arrangement between Madigan and the utility and that actions described in the indictment were routine practice that falls well within the bounds of legal political horse-trading.
Madigan’s attorneys on Wednesday blasted the indictment as “baseless.”
“Mr. Madigan vehemently rejects the notion that he was involved in criminal activity — before, during or after his long career as a public servant,” attorneys Sheldon Zenner and Gil Soffer said in a statement. “The government’s overreach in charging him with these alleged crimes is groundless, and we intend to prevail in court.”
But prosecutors had alleged that not only did the co-conspirators know that what they were doing was illegal, it was enormously successful, with ComEd receiving at least $150 million in legislative benefits over the length of the scheme.
Over and over, the utility appeased Madigan’s requests — often mediated by McClain — ranging from Ochoa’s appointment to the ComEd board of directors to giving students in the speaker’s 13th Ward power base a hefty batch of internships each summer, according to prosecutors.
Meanwhile, ComEd’s legislative victories stacked up, including a massive smart-grid system designed to improve service and a formula-rate-making plan in 2011 that critics charged was too lucrative for the company.
In 2013, the legislature endorsed a trio of accounting techniques that helped ComEd’s bottom line despite opposition from the Illinois Commerce Commission. And in 2016, the company won support for a consumer subsidy for some of its nuclear power plants and the thousands of jobs that went with them.
But the company’s alleged scheme began to unravel in 2019 with a series of FBI raids. ComEd agreed in July 2020 to pay a $200 million fine in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office that required them to cooperate for three years in exchange for bribery charges being dropped.
Two months later, ex-ComEd Vice President Fidel Marquez pleaded guilty to bribery and revealed he’d been cooperating with the government, recording conversations with McClain and others along the way, court records show.
In November 2020, a federal grand jury brought an indictment against McClain, Pramaggiore, former lobbyist John Hooker and Jay Doherty, the longtime head of the City Club of Chicago who’d worked for years as a ComEd consultant.
Another longtime member of Madigan’s inner circle, Tim Mapes, ousted by the speaker in a 2018 sexual harassment controversy, was indicted in May 2021 on perjury and obstruction of justice charges over allegedly lying to a federal grand jury investigating the ongoing ComEd fallout. He has pleaded not guilty.
Two former Democratic Chicago lawmakers who later worked on ComEd matters, Rep. Eddie Acevedo and Sen. Annazette Collins, were indicted on tax counts that arose from the ComEd scandal.
Acevedo has pleaded guilty. Collins has pleaded not guilty.
A plethora of Madigan allies — and even some former political foes — have played cameos in the ComEd investigation but have not been charged.
They include clout-heavy attorney Victor Reyes of Reyes Kurson, who was allegedly hired by ComEd early in the scheme in an effort to please Madigan.
Also included were Madigan’s former 13th Ward Ald. Frank Olivo, and former Cook County Recorder of Deeds Ed Moody, a legendary door knocker in Madigan’s political operation. Documents have tied both of them to ComEd jobs.
Zalewski, who first turned up in the investigation when his house was raided in May 2019, wound up landing a consulting contract with ComEd that paid $5,000 a month, according to the charges.
And Ochoa, a onetime political nemesis of Madigan, was appointed to ComEd’s board at the speaker’s request, a part-time position that paid $78,000 a year, according to the indictment.
At the center of the sprawling probe is McClain, a former House lawmaker from Quincy who served with Madigan in the 1970s and 1980s and then became a contract lobbyist for ComEd and many other top-shelf clients. The Tribune first reported the feds raided his house in Quincy in May 2019.
McClain often sat on a bench outside the wooden doors of the speaker’s 3rd floor Capitol suite. He would hold court for former legislators and Madigan staffers who left state government to become lobbyists for companies that relished their connections with the man who ran the House for a nationwide record 36 years.
One of the speaker’s frequent dinner companions, McClain had Madigan’s ear and helped him with campaign strategy and political fundraising. McClain even sent out fundraising pitches to political friends that he called “the most trusted of the trusted.”
Before the November 2018 election, McClain pulled their names from a “magic Excel sheet” filled with political pals and urged them to give to a “secret” project for House Democrats and “HIMSELF,” an affectionate Irish term he used to identify the speaker. That election gave the speaker his all-time biggest Democratic majority, a 74-44 political edge over Republicans.
McClain also created a firestorm when he rounded up current and former ComEd lobbyists to send more than $30,000 in checks to Kevin Quinn, a onetime Madigan worker ousted over his own sexual harassment allegations in 2018.
Bank records obtained by the Tribune showed they started cutting the checks to Quinn in September 2018, the same month Madigan wrote an op-ed in the Tribune vowing that he had “made it a personal mission to take this issue head-on and correct past mistakes.”
A Madigan spokeswoman said the speaker was not involved in the effort to help Quinn, who is the brother of 13th Ward Ald. Marty Quinn, Madigan’s field general.
The Tribune would later learn that the feds had recorded McClain’s telephone conversations, though it was unclear how much interaction caught on the wiretap included the famously cautious Madigan.
Pramaggiore abruptly resigned in October 2020, less than a week after ComEd and parent company Exelon acknowledged they had received a second federal subpoena in the burgeoning probe.
Long viewed as a star in the corporate world, Pramaggiore left after having been elevated to CEO of Exelon Utilities. The indictment shocked business leaders.
When Pramaggiore first ascended to CEO of ComEd in 2009, the company elevated Hooker, the chief lobbyist, to executive vice president for legislative and external affairs.
Hooker lobbied the legislature for years, building relationships with lawmakers and spreading around ComEd goodies so frequently that, as one insider said, his arrival at the Capitol on session days was like a visit from Santa Claus.
After retiring from ComEd, Hooker remained in action for a while as a lobbyist subcontracted to work on ComEd issues for a lobbying group whose star is Michael Kasper, the onetime top House lawyer under the speaker and longtime attorney for the Illinois Democratic Party that Madigan led.
In 2016, Hooker chaired a group that successfully sued to keep off the ballot a proposal to overhaul the once-a-decade process in which Illinois lawmakers redraw the district boundaries for legislators, a process that Madigan had used deftly to build up record Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
It was the same year that Exelon first convinced the legislature to approve a financial package that helped save some of the company’s nuclear plants and the jobs that went with them.
In addition to his indictment, Doherty made headlines as a result of the Tribune obtaining a series of emails to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, telling her as the ComEd investigation was ramping up that ComEd “duped” him. “I was an innocent bystander,” he texted the mayor, saying he knew nothing about the utility’s alleged efforts to bribe then-Speaker Madigan.
The Mapes indictment is unusual because he was charged with perjury after he received immunity, an arrangement where he simply had to tell the truth to the prosecution’s satisfaction.
Mapes spent decades as Madigan’s chief of staff, served as executive director of the Madigan-run Democratic Party of Illinois and later became clerk of the Illinois House, giving him a trio of positions all aimed at pushing the Madigan agenda.
Mapes allegedly lied to grand jurors when he said he had no knowledge that McClain had communicated with two unnamed state representatives in 2018 on behalf of Madigan. Sources identified the Democratic lawmakers as Rep. Bob Rita of Blue Island and former Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie. Neither of them have been charged in the case.
Since his ouster in 2018, Mapes has received more than $400,000 in pension payments.
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