Friends ask, “Why hasn’t Mike Madigan been charged yet? After all, he’s been examined for a few years. “
My Answer: The federal attorney is not sure he can prove that the former Illinois House spokesman personally did something illegal.
I define public corruption as receiving an undeserved personal gain at the taxpayer’s expense. There are obviously illegal forms of corruption – as well as “legal corruption”. In the latter there is political gain, but no demonstrable personal gain.
For example, a few decades ago in Springfield, there was a passionate debate over Illinois’ ratification of the US Equal Rights Amendment (an effort that narrowly failed in Illinois). As the debate raged in the State Capitol and within earshot of others, a bald woman offered a legislature about $ 500 if they voted for the ERA amendment. This is clearly an act of public corruption, and I remember she was convicted for it.
Similarly, Chicago resident Alderman Ed Burke was apparently caught by a telephone bugging device that said he had a required city license in hand until a small restaurant owner agreed to register with Burke’s law firm for the property tax complaint. If this is proven in court, it in turn means seeking personal gain in return for releasing a license that it controls.
But if nobody wins personally and there is never any communication between an officer and a possible bribe about something in return, where is the illegality?
Mike Madigan has been a Springfield legend for decades because he never left his fingerprints or voice prints on anything. He doesn’t use email or phone. Instead, he winks and nods, say some insiders, and you can’t accuse a man of winking.
Nor does he appear to have received any personal gain from government transactions. He didn’t have to because he got his millions running a law firm that appeals for property taxes in Chicago – most major builders sign up to be represented by Madigan.
This is a holy fraud, one might say, of the appraisers, some of whom were Madigan maids, doing city building audits. Then a property tax law firm like Madigans (there are half a dozen, all closely associated with the Chicago Dem politicians) comes along and appeals to the property owner’s clients.
And voilà, the rating is reduced to about where it should be. Everyone wins, you could say property owners get a tax break, and an elected official / private attorney like Madigan “earns” a hefty fee outside of the government. All perfectly legal corruption.
(Note: Years ago, when I was running a statewide corporate organization, a real estate tax administrator told me, “Jim, my business owns real estate across America, and Chicago is absolutely the only place in the nation that we need to hire a property tax attorney ! ”)
But did Madigan actually do something illegal? I don’t know, and I suspect that the US attorney for the Northern Illinois District also doesn’t know – or is afraid he won’t be able to prove it in court – that Madigan did it.
To paraphrase an old saw about big juries and their propensity to prosecute, a criminal jury would convict a ham sandwich today if they wore a re-elected Mike Madigan t-shirt. But, given the recent US Supreme Court rulings rewriting the definition of illegal public corruption, would such a conviction stand on appeal today?
That brings us to the politics of the US attorneys in Chicago. In cases of public corruption, they have had a conviction rate of more than 95 percent over the years. Many high-ranking elected officials, like our late Governor Jim Thompson, got their start in politics as anti-corruption US attorneys who put down many “bad guys”. This is how a US attorney hates losing in court; Not only is it embarrassing, but it also tarnishes the glamor of his future career.
For the past several years, U.S. attorney Madigan’s phalanx of attorneys has been squeezing staff over what the speaker might have said, what he might have done.
In that regard, I have a good friend who was “measured for a striped suit” (he spent time on it) as part of the conviction of former Illinois governor George Ryan.
A friend said this about prosecutors grilling politicians who are close to someone they are looking for: “They are brutal. They threaten to send you to the slammer and throw away the key. They threaten your wife, your family. They scare you so much that if a person admits something that isn’t even true when the government gets it off their back, you might understand. “
Will Madigan be charged? I dont know. If so, you can bet the U.S. attorney is confident he can convince a jury – and higher appeals courts – that Mike Madigan is guilty of illegal corruption.
For many years Jim Nowlan was a Senior Fellow and Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked for three unindicted governors and published a weekly in central Illinois.