Michael Madigan trial: Judge seen as RICO expert

Chicago has long been known as a place where there are no coincidences. But one of the biggest political racketeering cases in the city’s history — USA v. Michael J. Madigan — actually did land randomly at the bench of a judge nicknamed the “Son of RICO.”

U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey turned 5 the year his father G. Robert Blakey’s revolutionary legislation, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, was signed into law.

The statute, designed to go after organized crime, made the elder Blakey into legal royalty. His son chose a legal path that, for the most part, kept his boots on the ground. “Jack” Blakey spent most of his career as a prosecutor, both for the federal government and at Cook County’s rough-and-tumble criminal courthouse.

But he kept in touch with the RICO legacy, helping draft the Illinois racketeering legislation that focused on powerful street gangs. And in 2014, as a nominee for the federal judgeship, his introduction to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee also mentioned his famous father.

“It is a twofer,” then-Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, said of Blakey. “We are getting Jack and his dad. … If there is any state in the union that needs experts on RICO, it is Illinois.”

This week, Madigan — a former Illinois political powerhouse fallen spectacularly from grace — is going to trial on RICO charges he abused his considerable clout for personal gain. The government accuses him and co-defendant Michael McClain of bribery, wire fraud and conspiracy. But the backbone of the indictment is racketeering. And presiding from the bench will be Blakey, who sometimes seems to know RICO even better than the attorneys in front of him.

The world RICO built

It became an extraordinarily powerful tool, one that is credited with hobbling the Mafia across the country. And its basic principle — charging broad conspiracies — has expanded far beyond mob cases. RICO has been used to go after street gangs, sex cultists, college admissions cheats, international soccer officials and R. Kelly.

In the Madigan case, prosecutors have used it to target alleged public corruption. Madigan, the Southwest Side Democrat who reigned as speaker of the Illinois House for decades, is accused alongside McClain, a lobbyist and longtime ally, of running their government and political operations like a criminal enterprise. Their goal, prosecutors have said, was to increase Madigan’s clout and enrich himself and his associates.

Madigan and McClain have pleaded not guilty, and over two-plus years of pretrial hearings they have tried to attack the charges and the potential evidence on a microscopic level. Blakey has declined to grant their bigger requests and the indictment remains intact.

But defendants have won some of their arguments about what evidence jurors can hear. In a blow to prosecutors, for example, Blakey barred them from playing a potentially damning wiretapped conversation in which Madigan allegedly told McClain some of their friends had “made out like bandits” with the contracts they’d landed for them.

The trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday with jury selection, and proceedings are expected to last into December.

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Blakey, according to attorneys who have practiced in front of him, is well-suited for complex RICO cases even apart from his family pedigree. He is quick-minded, they said, well-organized and has little patience for lateness or sloppy preparation.

In court, he is talkative and sometimes quippy, but rarely casual. He is not shy about interrupting or correcting attorneys. He doesn’t have much of a poker face, and even sitting on the bench he appears to be constantly moving: furrowing and unfurrowing his brow, rubbing his beard, talking with his hands.

Dramatic flair

The former theater major has an actor’s flair for an attention-grabbing one-liner, such as last month, when he point-blank asked Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover how many murders he was responsible for. Hoover’s attorney, who is seeking his release from a life sentence, later filed paperwork saying Blakey should recuse himself, saying his comments were “vaguely intimidating,” “entirely inappropriate” and showed bias.

In some ways, Blakey is the polar opposite of the late U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber, who oversaw the Madigan-adjacent “ComEd Four” trial last year in his typically laid back style and gave the lawyers, including McClain attorney Patrick Cotter, great leeway in making their arguments.

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At one recent hearing, Blakey abruptly cut off Cotter when he felt the high-energy attorney was being a bit too disruptive.

“Counsel, counsel,” Blakey said. “I want to make sure we get great habits now, because we are going to be on trial together for a long period of time. When I start talking, you have to stop, OK? When the witness is giving you an answer, you cannot talk over the witness, all right?”

Tony Thedford, a defense attorney who represented a client in a racketeering trial before Blakey last year, told the Tribune he found the judge to be “extremely knowledgeable” in that area of the law. Federal RICO cases require a working knowledge of state statutes, so Blakey’s time as a Cook County prosecutor likely helped him, Thedford said.

“You have to be ambidextrous when it comes to RICO,” he said.

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Attorney Jonathan Bedi said Blakey is “committed to efficiency” but also thoughtful, recalling sentencing hearings where Blakey seemed to truly listen to what the defendants had to say.

“I think he takes time to understand the complexities of the law but also, more importantly, the human side behind each defendant,” Bedi said.

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Attorneys in front of Blakey should prepare for the judge to be an active participant, asking questions and challenging them, Thedford said.

“You’ve got to be nimble on your feet,” Thedford said. “You’d better be prepared walking into that courtroom. You better be prepared. Whatever your point of view is, whatever argument you want to make … you will be exposed if you are not.”

Blakey was born in 1965 in South Bend, Indiana, He grew up in a thoroughly Notre Dame family: Blakey’s father got his undergraduate and law degrees there, and was a prominent law professor there before receiving emeritus status in 2012. In time, Blakey and all seven of his siblings would attend the university. Blakey has said there was no real question of him going anywhere else: “It was the only place I wanted to go and the only place I applied,” he told a school publication in 2012.

He studied theater as an undergraduate, which attorneys who practice before him are not surprised to hear. Every courtroom, after all, is a stage. No matter how serious the legal issues, there is always an element of performance.

Blakey began acting in high school and went on to star in student productions at Notre Dame, including “King Lear.” After graduation, he trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

But soon, as Notre Dame has characterized it, he felt a call to public service. He went back to South Bend for law school, and his two Notre Dame degrees make him, in the school’s parlance, a “double domer.”

Trial work, he found, was not terribly different from the stage.

“You understand the basics of good storytelling. You understand what the important part of a narrative is and how it relates to your audience,” he told a Notre Dame publication in 2015. “That’s what lawyers do.”

The background in drama shows through, Bedi said.

“I think you can sometimes see that with his sense of humor, comedic timing,” Bedi said. “A trial is theater, so it makes sense.”

Legal rise

After earning his law degree, Blakey clerked for a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, worked as a researcher for his father, and spent time at a downtown Chicago law firm.

In 1996 he began work as a Cook County assistant state’s attorney, including as a member of the prosecution team in the case of notorious Mafia hit man Harry “The Hook” Aleman.

Blakey later became a federal prosecutor in Miami, where his work included a RICO investigation targeting the Cuban Mafia; in 2004 he transferred closer to home, to work at the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.

In 2009, then-State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez tapped him to bring some federal flavor to Cook County courts.

She named Blakey head of the Special Prosecutions Bureau, which handles specialized or particularly complex cases. His first mandate, she told reporters, was to draft legislation that would give state prosecutors more power to go after public corruption — a category of crimes largely handled by the feds.

Blakey’s efforts led to Illinois’ own RICO statute, which passed in 2012.

But the bill only gained real support in the state legislature after lawmakers rewrote the language specifically so that it only applies to street gangs — not labor unions or political organizations with a clout-heavy constituency.

Still, it was a coup for Blakey, who told reporters as the bill awaited the governor’s signature that he saw it as a powerful tool.

“With a racketeering case, instead of just peeking through the keyhole and seeing one shooting, you get to open up the door and show a jury everything that led up to that shooting,” Blakey said in 2012.

Since then, only two RICO cases have been brought by Cook County prosecutors: a 2013 case against West Side gang the Black Souls, and a 2014 case charging an Outfit-connected burglary ring.

No other RICO prosecutions have been brought in Cook County, according to a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office.

Blakey’s second stint as a Cook County prosecutor lasted about five years, during which he became one of Alvarez’s top advisers and helped navigate her administration through what seemed like an endless parade of scandals and heater cases.

Blakey took point on Cook County’s first-ever prosecution under the Illinois terrorism statute: the “NATO 3” case. Three men were accused of plotting to attack police stations, Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters and then-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home in the days leading up to the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.

They were on, Blakey said in court, a “mission of hate,” hoping to send a “wake-up call for their twisted, anarchist revolution.”

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, characterized the men as simply foolish, drunk or stoned simpletons who were manipulated by undercover cops into making Molotov cocktails.

The weekslong trial was hotly contested. In the end, jurors acquitted them of terrorism-related charges, convicting instead on less serious counts related to making explosives and misdemeanor mob action.

The split verdict was widely seen as a major loss for prosecutors, a characterization Alvarez rejected, maintaining that she would bring the charges again “with no apologies and no second-guessing” and noting that the explosives convictions carried real prison time.

Blakey also found himself immersed in a major heater case after the Chicago Sun-Times in 2011 began its investigative series looking into the death of David Koschman, who was punched during a 2004 drunken Rush Street altercation with a nephew then-Mayor Richard Daley and suffered fatal head injuries when he fell. Alvarez made Blakey her point person in the politically charged reinvestigation of the case.

Alvarez unsuccessfully fought Koschman’s mother’s request for a special prosecutor to reinvestigate her son’s death. The state’s attorney insisted her office was taking an even-handed look at the evidence, even though it had twice concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge Daley’s nephew, Richard Vanecko.

Blakey was among several of Alvarez’s top advisers who sat down with the Tribune in 2012 to talk about the case, saying they saw no issue with the way the lead prosecutor, Darren O’Brien, had handled it in 2004.

According to Alvarez’s team, at that time there was no admissible evidence that could have been used to file charges, including a positive identification of Vanecko as the one who threw the fatal punch.

Days after that interview, then-Cook County Judge Michael Toomin appointed Winston & Strawn partner Dan Webb as a special prosecutor. In his strongly worded ruling, Toomin criticized Alvarez for seeking to “denigrate the evidence against Vanecko” and going out of her way to find “legal justification for Vanecko’s use of deadly force.”

Vanecko meanwhile, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, pleaded guilty in 2014 and was sentenced to 60 days in jail and 30 months of probation.

Blakey was nominated to the federal bench in 2014. He had long left Alvarez’s office by the time video was released of a white cop fatally shooting Black teen Laquan McDonald, the fallout of which led to Alvarez’s primary loss to Foxx in 2016.

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During his Senate Judiciary nomination hearings, Blakey was asked to define his judicial philosophy. Fitting for a former theater student from a Catholic university, he spoke about playing his role, and paraphrased the New Testament.

“I would characterize my philosophy as a devotion to the law, a devotion to the role that we play in society, that limited role, but important role,” he said. “In a variety of contexts, a great deal of power is given, and to those who are given power, much is expected.”

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