It was Jan. 12, 1983, and the newly installed Democratic Speaker Michael J. Madigan stood on the Illinois House podium, surveyed the kingdom he now ruled and picked up the wooden gavel that symbolized his rise to power.
He declared it a “new era” in Springfield.
Unlike others who would slam the gavel to bring the House to order, Madigan often held it by its barrel-shaped head and gently tapped with the handle. He didn’t need to smack it.
He was “The Velvet Hammer.”
While making national history by serving 36 of the next 38 years as speaker, Madigan earned the nickname for his persistent but often subtle ways of beating down opponents.
His toughest critics called him ruthless, an iron-fisted powermonger whose sole purpose in life was to win, to keep the gavel, to hang on to that power. Yet the Southwest Side lawmaker’s friends, and even some foes, called him a political and legislative genius.
Now Madigan’s final legacy will be on the line this week in one of the most anticipated public corruption trials in Illinois history. A 23-count federal racketeering indictment alleges Madigan ran his government and political operations like a criminal enterprise.
Jury selection begins Tuesday before U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey, with opening statements a week later, and the high-profile spectacle expected to roll deep into December. Madigan and his co-defendant, Michael McClain, a longtime confidant, former lawmaker and retired contract lobbyist for ComEd and other top companies, have pleaded not guilty.
Personification of power
A protege of Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s legendary Boss, Madigan grew into that rare Illinois politician who both defined and embodied clout.
Anyone who wanted to get anything done in the Illinois General Assembly needed to go through Madigan. Governors, lawmakers, lobbyists, and, yes, even mayors of Chicago knew their legislative agendas would wither without Madigan’s imprimatur, and he knew they knew he controlled the fate of which bills would pass or fail in the House of Madigan.
Over the years, he made time stand still to pass a stadium bill to keep his coveted White Sox in Chicago, muscled through an income tax increase with epic speed, used the pope’s own words to endorse gay marriage legislation, impeached a wayward governor of his own party and cut deals for casinos, schools, guns and pork-barrel projects.
“He’s like Superman. Not even kryptonite can affect him,” the late Rep. Bob Molaro, a Chicago Democrat, once said as he polished the Madigan legend.
Not everyone saw it that way, of course, particularly Republican critics and downstaters fed up with Chicago dominance in Illinois politics.
Former House Republican leader Jim Durkin of Western Springs once derided Madigan for a failed legacy of “absolute power and control” that left “unbalanced budgets, broken pension systems, tax increase after tax increase, with nothing to show for it.”
Usually Madigan’s legions of admirers defended him, including labor leaders, trial lawyers and a platoon of loyal former staffers who lined up well-paid jobs as lobbyists and raised campaign cash to keep him on the throne.
Now all of Illinois will see a case unfold that alleges Madigan crossed the line when he squeezed what amounted to ghost jobs and contracts for allies from ComEd and AT&T Illinois, two major utilities that won lucrative legislative victories.
Corruption allegations
ComEd allegedly put Madigan’s choice on the board of directors and gave numerous internships to college students based in his legislative district, which housed the 13th Ward, where he long reigned as Democratic committeeman.
In addition, prosecutors accused Madigan of scheming to line up property tax appeal business for his private law firm by trying to orchestrate the sale of a parcel of state-owned land to a developer looking to build a hotel in Chinatown.
McClain, along with three others, was found guilty last year in the ComEd Four trial on charges related to a conspiracy to bribe Madigan to win his support for the utility’s legislative agenda in Springfield. All four defendants are asking a judge to throw out those convictions.
Madigan’s high-powered legal team has repeatedly attacked the charges he faces, fighting at a granular level to keep certain recordings and other evidence from being presented to the jury while also waging a loftier, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to get key counts dismissed. The leave-no-stone-unturned legal strategy — fueled by $8 million from Madigan’s campaign fund — reflects a common tactic Madigan used for years in Springfield, where he regularly tried to win the game before his team took the field.
Before an election, Madigan searched for flaws in Republican nominating petitions to block them from the ballot before a single vote was cast. Once races shaped up, he monitored Republican candidates for weakness and poured in big money if he sensed a potential upset.
Before voting on a bill in Springfield, Madigan would see if he could tweak it to expand his power or help his Democratic troops with a festering local issue. He would sew up support before he called a bill for a vote in the full House.
When he lost the speakership in January 2021, Madigan was weighed down by the burgeoning ComEd investigation. He’d been identified as “Public Official A” when ComEd agreed to pay a $200 million fine, and he was blamed for Democratic setbacks in the November 2020 election, including a loss on the Illinois Supreme Court and Gov. JB Pritzker’s push for a higher income tax on Illinoisans with the biggest paychecks.
Once he realized 19 Democrats led mostly by women refused to back him, Madigan suspended his quest for one more term as speaker. By that time, McClain already had been indicted in the ComEd Four case, a moment Madigan used to issue a statement that sought to assure the public that he had “always gone to great lengths to ensure my conduct is legal and ethical.”
“If there was credible evidence that I had engaged in criminal misconduct, which I most certainly did not, I would be charged with a crime,” Madigan wrote.
A product of his city
Madigan grew up with a Democratic pedigree.
Now 82, Madigan is the son of a 13th Ward precinct worker who landed a job in the office of Cook County Clerk Michael Flynn, the Democratic committeeman of that same ward. Madigan’s father, worked in county government with a rising politician named Richard J. Daley.
That connection would pay off years later when the younger Madigan went to law school at Loyola University, and the father told his son to look up then-Mayor Daley at an athletic club on Michigan Avenue. The law school student soon found himself working as a city law clerk.
Madigan’s father, who would work as the superintendent of the 13th Ward, died in 1966, and the mayor helped the young Madigan land a job as a hearing examiner at the Illinois Commerce Commission, a precursor to his long interest in state-regulated companies.
Then came 1969. The late ward superintendent’s son became 13th Ward Democratic committeeman, showing an aptitude to counting votes even then as he took over the politically potent ward post on a 49-31 vote of precinct captains. He also won his first post in Springfield, joining future Mayor Richard M. Daley among the delegates to the state convention that wrote the Illinois Constitution still in place today.
Madigan next won his first House race in 1970, took office in January 1971 and rose in stature with the elder Daley’s help.
McClain, now 77, joined the House in the 1970s following the death of his father, Rep. Elmo “Mac” McClain, D-Quincy, and soon befriended Madigan. The Chicago Daily News named McClain one of the “13 movers and shakers” in the term covering 1977 and 1978.
Madigan’s early days can be culled, in part, from an oral history project at the University of Illinois Chicago about the life of Richard J. Daley and a deposition Madigan gave in a federal lawsuit, both documents prosecutors have carefully reviewed. But Madigan’s path to becoming the all-encompassing political titan came thanks, in part, to the luck of the draw.
When Madigan became minority leader in 1981, the year carried added significance. Lawmakers would redraw legislative district boundaries to match the every-10-year federal census. But the House to be elected in 1982 also would be reduced from 177 members to 118 following a voter-approved 1980 Cutback Amendment championed by a maverick named Pat Quinn and driven by a furious public backlash over lawmakers sneaking through a major pay raise.
Democrats and Republicans in the legislature and a commission deadlocked on drawing the new map but broke the tie when a Democrat’s name was drawn from a hat. The Democrats, as expected, tilted the map in their favor, and Madigan won the speakership following the 1982 election. McClain lost reelection but soon became a lobbyist with an important friend.
When Madigan lifted the gavel in January 1983, his first address as speaker nodded directly to the public outrage behind cutting the size of the House by a third: “When we don’t conduct ourselves in a manner which gives confidence to the people of our state, then we have failed in our duty.”
The Madigan mystique
For most of his tenure as speaker, Madigan’s power grew exponentially, but he seared himself into the General Assembly’s history books early on with two extraordinary power plays: passing the 1988 legislation to build a White Sox stadium and the 1989 proposal to increase the income tax.
After years of fits and starts, the White Sox threatened to move to Florida if Springfield could not come up with a way to build a stadium to keep the team in Chicago. It’s a move that sounds a lot like the White Sox’ effort to squeeze public support for a new stadium in Chicago today, but the night of June 30, 1988, in Springfield will be remembered as one of a kind.
With only 20 minutes left before the midnight deadline, the Illinois Senate passed the stadium bill. Republican Gov. Jim Thompson had pleaded for hours to make sure Chicago did not lose its elite status as a town with two baseball teams. He then raced across the rotunda and ran desk to desk begging for votes. Madigan feverishly worked his Democratic caucus.
Amid deafening cheers and jeers, stadium opponents burst into a White Sox fan favorite when an opposing pitcher is knocked out of the game: “Na, na, na, na! Hey, Hey-ay! Gooooood-bye!”
A roll call stalled six votes short of the 60 needed to pass, and Florida broadcasters on live TV prepped to declare the Sox were headed to St. Petersburg.
But it was not over. This was the House of Madigan.
The Madigan-Thompson forces kept pressing until the governor convinced one last Republican to cast the 60th vote, and Madigan’s majority leader slammed the gavel, declaring the bill passed at 11:59 p.m.
Stunned Floridians compared the Illinois political maneuvers to those of Iran or Cuba. Still today, the official roll call in the secretary of state archives shows the bill passed at 12:03 a.m. July 1, but courts upheld the earlier time declared by Madigan’s majority leader.
Madigan had more up his sleeve the next year.
In the 1989 spring session, the speaker pulled off one of Springfield’s all-time stunners — more consequential than the White Sox deal given that stadium funding was heavily tied to hotel taxes and other fees paid mostly by out-of-towners.
After years of staunch opposition to Thompson’s call for an income tax increase, Madigan shocked everyone. He introduced his own smaller, temporary income tax hike, and it thundered through the House with only Democratic votes in less than six hours.
When early word of Madigan’s upcoming surprise was telegraphed in the morning papers, a shellshocked Thompson rushed up the grand staircase and into the speaker’s office. Madigan later recounted how he confirmed the plan, dubbed Operation Cobra. He held up one of the papers that headlined the scoop and gave Thompson a one-word message:
“Banzai!”
After a few tweaks in the Senate, Thompson signed the legislation, which raised money for schools and cities, a gift for Chicago’s newly inaugurated Mayor Daley, son of the Boss.
Many years and governors later, Madigan would show a slower, patient resolve as he put together a bipartisan coalition to pass another income tax hike in 2017, this time following an unprecedented two-year budget stalemate with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner that wrecked state finances. Rauner had failed to bend the speaker into accepting the governor’s conservative “Turnaround Agenda.” In his losing 2018 campaign for reelection, Rauner summed up his frustration:: “I am not in charge. I’m trying to get to be in charge.”
Nobody needed to ask why.
Impeaching Blagojevich
Madigan, the longtime Illinois Democratic Party chair, presided over one of the state’s most jarring and historic moments in 2009 when the House voted to impeach his fellow Democrat Rod Blagojevich, the only Illinois governor branded with this inglorious distinction.
Despite a series of major public spats, Madigan co-chaired Blagojevich’s successful 2006 reelection campaign along with Senate President Emil Jones. And the three Chicago Democrats worked to mask election-year budget woes by dipping into the state’s pension funds to plug financial gaps, a move that put the woefully underfunded retirement systems deeper in debt.
But the shrewd politics that got Democrats through the 2006 campaign did not prevent the Blagojevich hurricane on the horizon. Only days after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Blagojevich was arrested by the FBI on charges he attempted to sell the U.S. Senate seat that Obama vacated. The governor also was charged with shaking down leaders of a racetrack and a children’s hospital for political donations.
Madigan gave Blagojevich a few days to resign, but Blagojevich refused. At that point, the speaker professed the charges fit the man: “I’ve had an opportunity to get to know Mr. Blagojevich over six years, and so I was not surprised.”
Madigan soon would rap the gavel when the House voted to impeach Blagojevich. The Senate then voted to kick him out of office, and then-Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn moved up.
Blagojevich would be sentenced to 14 years in prison but got out after about eight years when Republican President Donald Trump commuted his sentence. Madigan’s willingness to back Blagojevich for a second term despite knowing his deep flaws is a rare example of how the speaker’s politics boomeranged.
Forging consensus
Madigan often took the lead on heater issues, few more contentious than when a federal appeals court in 2012 ordered Illinois to approve a concealed carry law, a victory for gun rights advocates who fought for years to eliminate Illinois’ status as the nation’s only state with a concealed weapons ban.
Madigan brought all sides together in 2013 and built an unusual coalition to pass a compromise that even managed to override a Quinn veto.
Despite rising from a socially conservative neighborhood, Madigan also helped secure the votes to pass gay marriage legislation in the fall of 2013. He cited the remarks of Pope Francis to help supply political cover for lawmakers wrestling with their religious beliefs: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and he has goodwill, who am I to judge?”
The secretive Madigan only said he’d helped persuade “over five” lawmakers to support the bill but not more than 10.
In between votes on gun rights and gay rights, Madigan and his daughter, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, aired an unusual public display of their differences. The attorney general had accumulated campaign contributions at a pace faster than Quinn, and the political world chattered constantly over whether she would run against him in 2014. But one day she ended speculation with an email. “I feel strongly that the state would not be well served by having a governor and speaker of the House from the same family and have never planned to run for governor if that would be the case,” she wrote. “With Speaker Madigan planning to continue in office, I will not run for governor.”
In one of the more intriguing chapters outlined in the Madigan-McClain indictment, federal authorities allege Madigan greenlighted utility efforts to kill a pro-consumer bill backed by his daughter and opposed by ComEd around the time he was pressing the utility to give positions to two political associates.
As she negotiated with ComEd in the spring 2018, prosecutors alleged, Lisa Madigan’s father was trying to get the utility to put Juan Ochoa, the former chief of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, on the utility’s board of directors and secure a $5,000-a-month contract for former 23rd Ward Ald. Michael Zalewski.
Ochoa got the appointment, Zalewski got the contract, but the bill stalled. It was her last spring session as attorney general.
At the ComEd Four trial, former Cook County Recorder of Deeds Ed Moody, a noted 13th Ward precinct captain, testified that Madigan arranged a contract with the utility for him and that payments passed through Madigan associates. Moody said Madigan delivered a stern warning: “I control that contract, and if you stop doing political work, you’ll lose that contract.”
Madigan was a major player in the world of patronage dating to his alignment with the first Mayor Daley. Over the years, Madigan made inroads in many governments, but he was so successful in the Chicago Streets and Sanitation Department’s bureau of electricity that it even became known as “Madigan Electric.”
McClain’s friendship with Madigan gave him frequent access. He often sat on a padded bench outside of Madigan’s suite in the Capitol rotunda, hung out in a conference room next to the speaker’s office and dined with him at night.
McClain affectionately called Madigan “Himself,” a term with Irish-gaelic origins that refers to the head of the house. The Tribune also obtained emails that showed McClain used the term when asking loyalists, “the Most Trusted of the Trusted,” to raise campaign contributions to help the House Democratic “Caucus and HIMSELF.”
The ComEd Four trial also hinted at Madigan’s prowess for collecting campaign cash, including from the utility and its employees.
At one point, Madigan asked the utility to raise $450,000 at an annual Democratic fundraiser during the middle of negotiations over a major utility bill that eventually passed, according to Fidel Marquez, a former utility executive who pleaded guilty in the case. Marquez testified he was “surprised” by the size of the demand, an increase of as much as $200,000 from previous fundraisers coordinated for Madigan by ComEd and its parent company, Exelon.
McClain, ComEd’s key lobbyist, landed in the middle of a #MeToo firestorm when he rounded up several utility lobbyists to set up contracts to help out Kevin Quinn following his ouster from the speaker’s political and government operations over sexual harassment allegations. A Tribune review of bank records showed Quinn, the brother of Madigan’s handpicked 13th Ward Ald. Marty Quinn, received at least $31,000.
An affidavit cited an FBI recording of an Aug. 29, 2018, call between Madigan and McClain, who said: “So, speaker, I put four or five people together that are willing to contribute to help a monthly thing, for the next six months, like I mentioned to you.”
Federal attention
As the most powerful politician in the state for decades, Madigan has long come under scrutiny.
Federal authorities investigated Madigan over allegations that he misused state resources and abused his power for political purposes during the 2000 campaign. Questions centered on House staff members who were dispatched to legislative districts. In turn, Madigan aides said staffers were merely out bolstering legislators’ abilities to provide constituent services, not providing political help to vulnerable candidates.
No charges were filed against Democrats, but House Republican chief of staff Mike Tristano went to prison. Now Madigan’s own former chief of staff, Tim Mapes, ousted in another sexual harassment scandal, is in prison for lying to a federal grand jury examining the current Madigan case.
In early 2014, the Tribune documented more than 400 current or retired state and local government employees who worked elections for Madigan, donated regularly to his campaign funds, registered voters for him or circulated candidate petitions on his behalf.
One of the first known secret recordings of Madigan then came in August 2014–though it would be nearly five years before it was publicly known. The recording was done by a businessman as Madigan pitched his property tax appeal services during a meeting with an associate of a developer who wanted to build a Chinatown hotel.
The meeting at Madigan’s law office was arranged by then-Ald. Daniel Solis, who himself would later record Madigan as well as then-Ald. Edward Burke, who went to prison last month for shaking down business owners and developers.
But Madigan showed no signs he anticipated the gathering storm. By 2018, the speaker was looking forward to Democrat Pritzker besting Rauner, struggling to get past the #MeToo scandals of misbehaving aides, and allegedly hooking up Zalewski and Ochoa with ComEd while greenlighting the utility to kill his daughter’s bill. The speaker was also unknowingly recorded regularly by Solis, who is expected to be a key witness in the trial.
Once Pritzker won, he worked with Democratic supermajorities in the 2019 spring legislative session to pass recreational marijuana, casinos for Chicago and five other communities, sports betting, higher taxes on gas and cigarettes, and a $45 billion pork-barrel program that included $50 million in grants to be doled out by the Illinois Arts Council, then chaired by Shirley Madigan, the speaker’s wife.
But during the closing weeks of that session, federal agents quietly raided a series of homes and offices of Madigan allies, including that of McClain. While Madigan told reporters that fall he was “not a target of anything,” the Tribune disclosed before 2019 was over that federal authorities had tapped McClain’s phone and quizzed four people about Madigan’s operations.
November 2020’s political setbacks following Madigan’s designation as “Public Official A,” the lingering political resentment over the #MeToo scandals and McClain’s indictment put the speaker’s attempt to keep his position in jeopardy. He made one last push to hang on but came up short.
His last full day as speaker fell exactly 38 years after the day he first picked up the gavel. He voted for Rep. Emanuel “Chris” Welch, the Hillside Democrat, to succeed him the next day. A few weeks later, Madigan resigned from the party chairmanship he’d held since 1998 and the House seat he’d held for just over 50 years.
The only gavel that counts for “The Velvet Hammer” now is in Judge Blakey’s hand.