‘A tale of two Mike Madigans': How the ex-Speaker's trial testimony offered his life story but also route to 7 1/2-year sentence

Chicago Tribune

15-06-2025

Months before a federal judge sentenced former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to prison on Friday, the once-mighty state Democratic Party chairman took the witness stand in his corruption trial in an attempt to save himself.
The only politician in America to serve 36 years as a House speaker guided jurors through his version of a complex personal and political life where few have gone before.
For a high-profile Chicago politician that some called the 'sphinx' because of his secrecy, Madigan's decision to testify demonstrated he could not sit by and let his fate play out without speaking up.
On Friday, Madigan found himself in a different posture, pleading for mercy as he asked for more time with a family that included an ailing wife.
'When I look back on my life, being speaker is not what gives me the most pride,' Madigan said. 'I am most proud of being a good husband, a good father and now a good grandfather.'
In sentencing Madigan to seven and a half years in federal prison and fining him $2.5 million, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey made it clear that Madigan's decision to testify at trial had cost him dearly. The judge called some aspects of his testimony about the details of the alleged schemes 'a nauseating display of perjury' that was 'hard to watch.'
Blakey said he was struck by what essentially was 'a tale of two different Mike Madigans,' a play on the theme of a Charles Dickens classic, adding that the space between good and evil is 'a line that passes right through the heart of every single person.'
'Hero or villain? Well, I suppose both are true,' the judge said.
By many accounts, Madigan was a good family man who often helped people who needed it without expecting anything in return, Blakey said. That made it all the more difficult to reconcile Madigan the politician, convicted in a yearslong bribery scheme to use his public office to boost his private law practice and enrich his closest associates.
'This case is really sad because the defendant is a dedicated public servant, apart from the crimes committed in this case,' Blakey said. 'He's also a good and decent person. He had no reason to commit these crimes, but he chose to do so.'
Madigan's surprise decision to take the stand in his own defense provided Illinoisans extensive and personal details about a man who, whether they knew it or not, had shaped much of their lives.
During his 50 years as a state lawmaker, Madigan held sway on monumental issues, from the state income taxes Illinoisans pay, to the roads they drive on, to the candidates they get to vote for each election cycle. He even made the House clock stand still long enough to beat a midnight deadline so his beloved White Sox could build the South Side stadium where fans watch the team play.
Madigan's version of his life story was curated and highly subjective, of course, but it was a story only he could tell. He portrayed himself as something many in Illinois politics never saw: a sympathetic character whose parents 'never told me that they loved me.'
He revealed his own father's struggles with alcohol, how his father slapped him on the head when he came home drunk early one morning and how his father wanted his only son to refrain from excessive drinking. He recounted a whirlwind romance that culminated in marrying a woman with a young daughter who had a contentious relationship with her biological father and would eventually win four terms as attorney general.
For decades, Chicagoans knew Madigan as a larger-than-life power player who racked up multiple Democratic victories. But his courtroom comments came as he fought for his own freedom. There were no highlight reels about fighting for workers, securing pork-barrel projects or forging consensus with lawmakers to pass gay marriage and concealed carry laws.
Madigan presented himself as a person whose natural inclination was to avoid confrontation, an attempt to explain why he went to co-defendant Michael McClain, a lobbyist, former lawmaker and longtime Madigan confidant, to help hire former precinct captains and aldermen as well as deliver bad news to legislative colleagues.
But Madigan's extraordinary four days of testimony, in the end, weren't enough. Federal prosecutors punched back. They argued successfully that the feel-good stories Madigan told opened the door to present more evidence designed to undercut his rosier testimony, including with a tape in which he famously said 'some of these guys have made out like bandits.'
After 11 days and 64 hours of deliberations, jurors came back with a split verdict that found Madigan guilty on 10 of 23 criminal charges.
Despite Friday's sentencing, Madigan is still expected to battle on appeal to overturn the verdict and rewrite a legacy that now paints him as just another crooked Illinois politician, one who squeezed ComEd to put his cronies into no-work jobs while the fate of the utility's legislative agenda rested in his hands.
Ever since the Madigan investigation exploded six years ago, he has argued that he simply made job recommendations for people over the length of his half-century career, considered it a part of his job, and rejected the allegation that he took official action in exchange for a thing of value — insisting he never engaged in an illegal quid pro quo.
'When people ask me for help, if possible,' Madigan testified, 'I try to help them.'
When Madigan was born 83 years ago, his father was a cog in the Democratic machine who became a political stalwart as 13th Ward superintendent. Madigan's mother was a homemaker, and his sister was five years younger. He grew up in the Marquette Park area on the city's Southwest Side.
'My father dominated the house,' Madigan said. 'My mother was quiet and reserved.'
'In that house,' Madigan testified, 'the word 'nurturing' didn't exist. My parents never told me that they loved me. They never embraced, never hugged. That was just the condition that existed at the time.'
Madigan's parents also were 'very strict' about his schoolwork, particularly after a nun saw he scored better than she expected on his fifth grade exam at St. Adrian, a Catholic grammar school, and told his parents to 'get on my case.'
'And so, as it was in those years, they got out the whips, and they went to work,' Madigan testified. 'So I became a more diligent student.'
In Madigan's seventh and eighth grade years, yet another nun urged him to go to St. Ignatius for high school, one of a handful on his father's approved list, and then, after high school, going to the University of Notre Dame became a 'foregone conclusion.'
Along the way, Madigan held jobs typical of a family embedded in the Democratic machine, which by 1955 was beginning to be run by Mayor Richard J. Daley. He worked a couple of summers as a junior laborer at a nearby Chicago Park District nursery when he was around 14 or 15, helping to grow trees and bushes for the park system.
He then landed a job on a 'dirt truck' under his father's jurisdiction, picking up discarded mattresses and broken refrigerators placed on curbs and scooping dirt piled up by street sweepers and shoveling it into a truck to haul to a dump.
Eventually, though, he convinced his father to be reassigned to a garbage truck, a job that came with a 'nightly interrogation' since his father supervised ward services.
'This became difficult,' Madigan testified. 'And my father had been an alcoholic who had quit drinking. He carried an anger problem, short fuse. And so when something went wrong or something went against his wishes, why, there would be a display of anger. And if anybody happened to be in the line of fire, why, it was not a pleasant experience. And in my case, why, it just — it just had me develop a habit where I never wanted to disagree with him, So if I'm in a conversation with him, he's not happy, he's disparaging me, I would just say, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, sir, yes, sir, yeah, yeah, yeah,' just to get out of the conversation.'
The vignette appeared to be aimed at explaining why Madigan habitually gave brief 'yeah' or 'mmhm' answers to questions, such as an attempt to diffuse prosecutors' arguments that his innocuous phrases condoned alleged misdeeds.
Madigan also testified his father's alcoholism played into a life lesson once when the young Madigan came home around 2 or 3 a.m. 'greatly under the influence of alcohol.'
'My father greeted me at the door, and I got a good, solid slap right across the side of my face,' Madigan said.
Later that morning, Madigan's mother sent him to his father's office for a 'very somber meeting.'
'My father really never talked about drinking until this meeting. … He was very concerned that I might have the same problem that he had,' Madigan explained. 'And he extracted two promises out of me. Number one, never drink on an empty stomach. Make sure you have some food in your stomach before you drink. Number two, never drink before sundown. Never drink before sundown. And so I told him I would abide by that, and I have.'
Advice from his father shaped many other parts of Madigan's thinking, from his longtime support of organized labor to making an extraordinary political connection while attending law school at Loyola University.
In between his first and second year in law school, he worked as an assistant to the 13th Ward alderman, handling often angry and frustrated constituents with requests that ranged from needing a tree trimmed to getting their garbage picked up on time.
'It left me with a lifetime understanding that people like myself involved in government and politics should strive to be responsive to the citizens of the states, citizens of the nation,' Madigan said.
He later worked as a law clerk in the city of Chicago Law Department, a spot right next to the office of Mayor Daley.
'We developed an acquaintance relationship,' Madigan said, adding: 'He knew my father.'
When Madigan graduated from law school in 1967, he took his first job as a lawyer in the same city Law Department. He then landed a job as a hearing officer at the Illinois Commerce Commission, which oversees utilities. But he soon learned a lesson in politics when a Republican committeeman started pulled strings.
'I was a Democrat, and I was involved with the local Democratic organizations in the 13th Ward,' Madigan testified. 'That organization issued a newsletter, and I wrote a column for the Young Democrats. The newsletter fell into the hands of the local Republican ward committeeman, who also happened to be the Republican Cook County chairman.'
But instead of getting fired immediately, as the GOP official wanted, the ICC chairman gave Madigan time to find another job. He landed back in the city law department, once again as part of the Daley administration.
Madigan's political career would soon rise. He won a vote among precinct committeemen in 1969 to replace the 13th Ward's Democratic committeeman, who had died. He won election as a delegate to the state's constitutional convention, which crafted the 1970 Illinois Constitution, which is still in place today. One of his fellow delegates was Richard M. Daley, Hizzoner's son and a future Chicago mayor himself.
Thanks to Democratic Party slating, Madigan soon won his House seat for the first time in 1970, and he spent his first term 'not active,' but rather 'just observing and attempting to learn.'
After Madigan's father died, the new lawmaker befriended a gregarious veteran, Rep. E.J. 'Zeke' Giorgi, a Rockford Democrat who excelled in retail politics.
'My personality was very strident,' Madigan said of his early days as a lawmaker, 'and I didn't do well interacting with the other representatives.'
Giorgi's 'personality was completely different than mine,' said Madigan, an understatement to anyone who knew the secretive Madigan and the always-talkative Giorgi. 'He was open, outgoing, did very well at relating to other people, understanding other people, and being able to work cooperatively with them. So he gave me an education as to how I should change my methods and how I should conduct myself differently than I had when I first arrived.'
Madigan said the most important lesson he learned from Giorgi was that 'it's really important to strive to know and understand other people. You know, it's one thing to have your own ideas. But in life, but in particular in a legislative body, it's really important that you understand that everybody comes there with their own ideas. They're entitled to support positions that they support, and everybody should be given due respect.'
Madigan told jurors he 'developed a lifetime friendship' with Giorgi, who is known as the father of the Illinois lottery and the House champion of riverboat gambling.
It became clear in Madigan's testimony that experiences with his father and with Giorgi influenced how he handled the speakership.
While establishing himself in Springfield during the mid-1970s, Madigan also met a woman who would become his wife, Shirley, a former flight attendant from Oregon, who worked at a Chicago law office where he would stop to discuss politics with a friend.
'It was a real quick romance,' Madigan said, 'and we got married, and we developed a family of three immediately because she had a daughter from a prior marriage who was about 10 or 11 years old at the time.'
Madigan embraced the dual role of being a husband to Shirley and also a father to her daughter, Lisa, as they settled into the 13th Ward's West Lawn neighborhood.
'Shirley had gone through a very difficult divorce, a very contentious relationship with her first husband,' Madigan said. 'And my view was that … I would treat Lisa as my daughter, that I was not the biological father, but I had married Shirley. And, you know, I understood at the get-go that this was a — this is a dual package here. And so I just took on the parental responsibilities.'
Madigan testified about Lisa's 'contentious relationship with her biological father' and the time he heard her crying while talking on the phone.
'I took the phone out of her hands, and her biological father was on the phone shouting at her,' Madigan said. 'And the language was so vile that I don't want to repeat it, but he was using the 'F' word as part of his expression.'
Madigan testified he told Lisa that she never again had to see or talk to her biological father. Madigan said he received numerous threatening letters but avoided a physical confrontation with him, a point the Madigan team used to support the argument that he was non-confrontational on thorny matters.
A Tribune review of courtroom transcripts revealed Madigan's deep reach into his background drew significant questions from Judge Blakey outside of the earshot of the jury and the courtroom audience.
Blakey, in a private sidebar with lawyers outside of jurors' earshot, wondered about the relevance of Madigan testifying about 'some emotional incident' from decades ago. Ultimately, though, Blakey allowed Madigan's team to use the story to demonstrate the longtime speaker's 'approach toward confrontation or how he interacts with people and how he responds, certainly those things are relevant.' But Blakey gave a warning: 'That's not a blank check to bring in every possible experience.'
The Madigan family grew as he and Shirley had three additional children, Nicole, Tiffany and Andrew, all of whom are now adults. Madigan adopted Lisa.
Over the years, Lisa Madigan drew the most political interest. A former state senator who became Illinois' attorney general in 2003, she looked on track to be the first woman to be governor of Illinois. But that expectation took an abrupt turn in July 2013 when she sent a blast email that shook the state's political landscape. Despite raising money at a faster clip than incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, she said she would not challenge him.
Why? '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. With speaker Madigan planning to continue in office, I will not run for governor.'
Ever since, many have pondered what would have happened if the speaker had stepped aside at that point. Instead, Lisa Madigan ran for reelection as attorney general, completed her fourth term and joined a private law firm. In her final days as attorney general, she would swear in her father to the speakership during a festive ceremony in 2019.
'Congratulations,' she said. 'You're the speaker again.'
That would be Mike Madigan's last term as speaker before his own caucus ousted him two years later as the federal investigation began to close in.
The Madigan & Getzendanner law firm also took center stage in the courtroom as prosecutors sought to tie Madigan's public actions to his attempts to land business for a practice that focused on winning property tax appeals.
Prosecutors used testimony from disgraced former 25th Ward Ald. Danny Solis — who chaired the City Council's zoning committee — to buttress allegations about Madigan making deals with Solis to help score real estate business for the law firm.
The straitlaced Madigan testified he had no idea until news broke in January 2019 that the feds had ensnared Solis in a sordid mix of city business, campaign contributions, bribery, sex, prostitutes and Viagra pills. Federal authorities flipped Solis, who helped take down Madigan and 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke, who spent a record 54 years on the City Council and went to prison for racketeering, bribery and extortion.
One pivotal moment in the Madigan trial was a 2018 recording in which Solis told Madigan that developers the speaker wanted in his law firm's portfolio, as Solis explained, to 'understand how this works, you know, the quid pro quo, the quid pro quo.'
On the phone, Madigan's reaction sounded potentially like a subtle acknowledgement. But Madigan told jurors Solis' comments caused a 'great deal of surprise and concern.'
'I decided that I wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Solis to give me an opportunity to tell him that I would not be involved in a quid pro quo,' Madigan said.
A few days later, Madigan testified that he spoke to Solis, who 'genuinely appeared to recognize that he had made a serious mistake.'
In that particular allegation, one involving Madigan's alleged pressure on developers of a West Loop high-rise to give him business, the jurors acquitted him of four counts.
In all, the former speaker was convicted on Feb. 12 on 10 of the 23 corruption counts he faced. Jurors deadlocked on the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge that Madigan and co-defendant Michael McClain, a ComEd lobbyist, ran the ex-speaker's government and political operations like a criminal enterprise. Jurors could not reach a consensus on any charges against McClain, who stands convicted in the separate 'ComEd Four' case.
But the jury convicted Madigan on a series of allegations tied to his talking about getting Solis, a key government mole who testified at length during the trial, appointed to a cushy paid position on a state board during the same conversations in which Solis promised to help Madigan acquire business for Madigan's law firm.
As he wrapped up his days of denials, Madigan's testimony provided one more glimpse into what he now was thinking: 'One of my regrets is that I ever had any time spent with Danny Solis.'
Prosecutors won pivotal rulings late in the trial to present key evidence to counter the Madigan team's position that he simply sought to help people find jobs.
Blakey allowed jurors to see a video of Madigan's 2009 oral history interview with the University of Illinois Chicago about how he used to handle patronage when it was legal during the 1960s and 1970s heyday of the first Mayor Daley's Democratic machine.
The video showed Madigan explaining how he taught people who wanted government jobs to sell Democratic candidates to voters like a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.
'They wanted a job in the patronage system,' Madigan said. 'I would tell them, 'Yes, we can put you in a job. But you're going to work for the Democratic Party.' '
Madigan attorney Todd Pugh argued putting the recording into the trial would open a 'Pandora's box,' given that anti-patronage laws had changed the hiring landscape.
Lead prosecutor Amarjeet Bhachu countered the 'reason the Pandora's box is there is because' Madigan's own direct testimony involved an 'unnecessary inquiry into what Mr. Madigan had done for 50 years.'
Blakey followed up on his prior warnings: 'At multiple times, and whether it's a Pandora's box or whatever, whatever kind of box, it was … opened up on the direct testimony of the defendant.'
Prosecutors also convinced Blakey to allow the infamous 'bandits' recording of Madigan and McClain talking about longtime labor leader Dennis Gannon getting a $150,000-a-year ComEd consulting contract.
'Some of these guys have made out like bandits, Mike,' Madigan told McClain as they both chuckled.
Madigan's team argued the comment should have been barred because Gannon's position was not included in the charges against the ex-speaker. But Bhachu maintained it was fair because Madigan portrayed his motivation for a half-century of job recommendations as being 'solely for altruistic purposes, to help constituents.'
In his own testimony, Madigan said the 'bandits' conversation with McClain had nothing at all to do with the no-work ComEd subcontractors at issue in the case. Instead, Madigan testified, they were talking about lobbyists in Springfield who would get paid big money to work six months out of the year.
Prosecutors dismissed the counts against Madigan in which the jury deadlocked. Madigan is expected to appeal the sentence and request to remain free pending the outcome.
The jury also deadlocked on six counts against McClain. He was convicted two years ago in the far-reaching 'ComEd Four' trial, an outgrowth of the Madigan investigation. McClain and three others also found guilty in that case are scheduled for sentencings later this summer.
The government previously dropped a single count of bribery against Solis despite his own checkered history. Solis keeps his six-figure City Council pension, and Madigan's $158,000 annual pension was suspended immediately upon his conviction.
In his remarks near the end of Friday's three-and-a-half-hour sentencing hearing, the judge found himself musing about Illinois' sordid history of corruption, saying he was not trying to sentence 'a social problem' but instead the single defendant who was before him in the courtroom.
He also reflected on the measure of a man, acknowledging how difficult it is for politicians to achieve the level of integrity of someone like President Abraham Lincoln.
'It's really hard to be Honest Abe right?' Blakey said. 'He's a unicorn in our American history. Being great is hard. But being honest is not. Being honest is actually very easy. It's hard to commit crimes. It takes effort.'
The fact that Madigan was a 'man of his word,' as he testified and as many who wrote letters of support agreed on, 'cuts both ways,' Blakey said, since he also 'kept his word with his co-conspirators and co-schemers.'
In the end, Blakey said, the forces that landed Madigan in his courtroom were perplexing.
'He had no reason to do the things that he did in this case, and the fact that he is a good man and chose to do it is mystifying,' Blakey said. 'But he did it.'