CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors are asking for a lengthy 12 ½-year prison sentence for former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, calling the longtime Democratic power broker “steeped in corruption” and alleging he lied on the witness stand when he testified in his own defense earlier this year.
In their 72-page filing Friday evening, prosecutors also called for a $1.5 million fine in addition to prison time for the 10 corruption charges — including bribery — on which Madigan was convicted in February.
“The crimes charged and proven at trial demonstrate that Madigan engaged in corrupt activity at the highest level of state government for nearly a decade,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “Time after time, Madigan exploited his immense power for his own personal benefit by trading his public office for private gain for himself and his associates, all the while carefully and deliberately concealing his conduct from detection.”
But in a competing filing published to the court docket two hours later, Madigan’s attorneys argued the former speaker should only serve five years’ probation, including a year of home detention followed by community service.
Madigan is scheduled to be sentenced June 13.
Along with Madigan’s legal arguments for no prison time, his attorneys also filed hundreds of pages of character letters asking U.S. District Judge John Blakey for leniency in sentencing, upon which Madigan’s lawyers bolstered their request.
“Throughout his 83-year life, Mike quite literally changed the lives of tens of thousands of people in his district on the south side of Chicago,” Madigan’s filing stated. “He positively impacted millions of people throughout the State of Illinois. The more than 200 letters submitted on Mike’s behalf demonstrate that this is not hyperbole.”
Madigan, who stepped away from public life in early 2021 as the feds’ investigation swirled around his inner circle, spent five decades in the Illinois House, including 36 as House speaker — the longest tenure of any legislative leader in the country. He also spent 23 years as head of the state’s Democratic Party, granting him even more power over Illinois’ political landscape.
Split verdict
After three months of testimony from more than 60 witnesses and dozens of hours of secretly recorded audio and video, a jury convicted Madigan on 10 of 23 counts he was facing. But jurors acquitted the former speaker on seven counts and deadlocked on another six, including an overarching racketeering charge.
The former speaker’s convictions involved alleged bribery from electric utility Commonwealth Edison, which hired five of the speaker’s allies on no-work contracts at various times from 2011 and 2019 — an eight-year period during which ComEd was pushing for major legislation in the General Assembly. The jury also convicted Madigan on supporting counts related to an alleged scheme to help get Chicago alderman-turned-FBI mole Danny Solis appointed to a lucrative state board position, though he was acquitted of the bribery charge pertaining to the same alleged scheme.
Some of the trial’s most dramatic moments came in January, when Madigan made the stunning decision to testify in his own defense. The high-risk move opened him up to blistering cross-examination from lead prosecutor Amarjeet Bhachu, who left the U.S. Attorney’s office in March and isn’t a party to sentencing recommendations.
Over two days, Bhachu sparred with the former speaker, and weeks later he and his colleagues quoted Madigan’s testimony back to the jury during closing arguments in an attempt to prove he’d lied on the witness stand.
Prosecutors leaned on that alleged perjury once more in Friday’s sentencing memorandum, counting his “obstructive conduct” as a key justification for their sentencing recommendation.
“Madigan has expressed no remorse for his crimes, nor has he acknowledged the damage wrought by his conduct,” prosecutors wrote. “Indeed, Madigan went so far as to commit perjury at trial in an effort to avoid accountability, and he persists in framing his actions as nothing more than helping people.”
Madigan repeatedly claimed — and his attorneys repeatedly argued — that he was ignorant of the fact that the collective $1.3 million his allies earned from their ComEd contracts was for performing no work. Instead, the former speaker and his lawyers framed those contracts as the result of mere job recommendations, which they argued was a core component of Madigan’s job as speaker.
But as a result of Madigan’s testimony, U.S. District Judge John Blakey reversed a pre-trial decision and allowed prosecutors to play a damning wiretapped phone call for the jury in which Madigan laughed about ComEd contractors having “made out like bandits.” In the call, the former speaker’s co-defendant, longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain, laughed, too, replying, “for very little work.”
Prosecutors cited that call in its Friday filing as evidence the former speaker wasn’t forthcoming when he "testified that McClain never said he believed or suspected that any of the people that Madigan had referred to ComEd were not working.”
“This testimony was a lie,” the feds wrote in their filing.
Prosecutors also ripped Madigan’s attempts on the witness stand to distance himself from McClain, his longtime close friend and advisor, which the feds said “completely undermined” the former speaker’s “credibility as a witness.”
“The multitude of recorded conversations, emails, and documents presented at trial established a uniquely close and longstanding relationship of mutual dependence between Madigan and McClain and demonstrated that Madigan was lying when he tried to distance himself from his key operative,” prosecutors wrote.
“Madigan assigned McClain, and only McClain, to carry out the most sensitive assignments and requests and to engage in the most potentially politically explosive conversations when Madigan wanted bad news delivered, including to legislators who served under Madigan.”
The jury in February deadlocked on all six counts pertaining to McClain, but he faces his own sentencing in July on charges related to the ComEd bribery scheme after a jury in May 2023 convicted him and three other ex-utility executives and lobbyists for their roles.
Plea for leniency
Of the more than 200 letters filed Friday with Madigan’s legal arguments for a non-custodial sentence, many came from former constituents or other Illinoisans who wrote about how the former speaker helped them in some way.
Letters also came from prominent faith leaders across the state, 40 former staffers, prominent labor leaders and three dozen former elected officials, among them several Republicans like former Gov. Jim Edgar. Attorneys also included an op-ed in support of Madigan penned by former GOP Gov. Jim Thompson before his death in 2020.
All four of Madigan’s children wrote lengthy letters, including former Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, whom the former speaker adopted after marrying her mother Shirley in 1976. In addition to writing about how Madigan operated in the world of Illinois government and politics that her adoptive father introduced her to, Lisa Madigan’s letter highlighted what the former speaker’s attorneys called “a key consideration” for Madigan’s sentencing: his wife’s health.
“Mike keeps my mother alive,” Lisa Madigan wrote in her letter, which said Shirley Madigan suffers from “a severe lung disease” and has “rarely been well enough to leave the house” in the last five years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as she’s “extremely susceptible to infections” and has been hospitalized three times.
“She is able to remain in their house primarily because of the care my father provides,” Lisa Madigan wrote. “He shops for groceries, brings her food (as you heard during the trial), does laundry, and generally takes care of her and their house.”
Lisa Madigan was referring to a lighthearted moment on one of the wiretapped calls played for the jury in which the then-speaker read a menu of soup options to his wife over the phone.
Madigan’s attorneys wrote that even “one day of imprisonment” for Madigan “will upend her (Shirley’s) entire life.”
“Mike presence is medically necessary to provide the direct assistance, supervision, and emotional support required to maintain Shirley’s well-being in a familiar home environment, which is paramount for patients with Shirley’s conditions,” the filing said, going on to refer to Madigan as Shirley’s “caretaker.”
The former speaker’s lawyers also referred to Madigan’s own age as a mitigating factor for sentencing, though leaned more heavily on kneecapping prosecutors’ arguments that a 12 ½-year sentence would serve as a deterrent.
“The defendant respectfully submits that a sentence of imprisonment would be greater than necessary to protect the public or deter him from criminal conduct,” the filing read. “Mike does not pose a risk of committing new crimes. He will never hold public office again.”
Madigan’s attorneys went on to detail “intense public embarrassment for (the former speaker) and his family,” which they argued “is a significant punishment in and of itself.” They also claimed the former speaker’s grandchildren “are teased at school” because of Madigan’s criminal case.
“As one example, Mike was publicly compared to a mob boss,” Madigan’s filing read. “Politicians also continue to use Mike as a cheap political shot, without any regard for his history of good works and positive impact on Illinois. ... He will also live the rest of his years as a felon.”
Other notable letter-writers on Madigan’s behalf included former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Tom Kilbride, Democratic mega- fundraisers Michael Sacks and Fred Eychaner and Chicago Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. While many former Democratic allies of Madigan penned appeals to Judge Blakey, only a few currently hold office — among them state Reps. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago, and Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, along with Auditor General Frank Mautino.
Several authors of Madigan’s character letters had testified in trial, including his former law partner Vincent “Bud” Getzendanner, whose time on the witness stand was spent trying to explain the ethical firewall the Madigan & Getzendanner real estate law firm had with official state business.
In his letter, Getzendanner joked that he was “pretty sure” Madigan was “only human” and also poked a hole in the longtime Springfield mythology Madigan’s daily lunchtime apple, which he said demonstrated the former speaker’s “famous willpower.”
“Strangely enough, on many occasions I subsequently found an unexplained residue of chocolate chip cookie crumbs on his plate,” Getzendanner wrote, later apologizing to the judge for his sense of humor.
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