Michael McClain, a longtime lobbyist for utility giant Commonwealth Edison who was also a close confidant of then-House Speaker Michael Madigan, has always insisted that what federal prosecutors claimed was an elaborate scheme to bribe the powerful speaker was nothing more than relationship-building.
But at McClain’s long-awaited sentencing hearing Thursday, a judge called it a “false narrative” to suggest what McClain did was time-honored legal lobbying or simply passing along job recommendations from a politician.
If it was aboveboard, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah said, why would he try to conceal it so elaborately?
“Aligning with Mr. Madigan made good strategic sense from your point of view, but that was a criminal alliance,” Shah said. “You preferred secrecy and lies. You preferred Mr. Madigan. You chose his way, and the consequences of that choice are yours to bear.”
Minutes later, Shah handed McClain a two-year prison sentence for his central role in a scheme to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in no-work contracts and other perks to Madigan associates in exchange for the speaker’s help with ComEd’s ambitious legislative agenda.
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Dressed in a charcoal gray suit and lavender shirt and tie, McClain, 77, showed little outward reaction when the sentence was announced.
But after the hearing concluded, McClain grew emotional as he hugged his wife and children, pausing to wipe tears from his eyes and telling each repeatedly, “I love you.”
The judge ordered McClain to report to prison by Oct. 30, though his lawyer, Patrick Cotter, said he plans to file a motion asking he remain free on bond pending an appeal. Both McClain and Cotter declined to comment as they left the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
McClain is the third of the four defendants to be sentenced in the “ComEd Four” case. Earlier this week, former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore was also given two years in prison by Shah. John Hooker, the utility’s former top internal lobbyist, received a year and a half behind bars at a hearing last week. Consultant Jay Doherty, the former head of the City Club of Chicago, will be sentenced next month.
Of all the players swirling in the bribery scandal, however, from precinct captains and political directors to legislators and lobbyists, it was McClain who held the ultimate catbird seat.
He toiled for years in relative obscurity, known mostly by Springfield insiders and political reporters as the former legislator from downstate Quincy with the thick prescription glasses who always seemed to be hanging around Madigan’s office suite in the Capitol.
But it was through his close relationship with Illinois’ most powerful and reticent politician, prosecutors say, that McClain was able to leverage knowledge of the speaker’s thinking to induce ComEd executives to lavish money on Madigan’s cronies and scramble to meet his myriad other demands.
In asking for a significant prison term, Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur said Thursday that McClain “held the keys to Madigan’s kingdom,” and called the ComEd scheme “an upside down world, largely flipped that way by McClain, where Madigan and McClain called the shots.”
“This kind of conduct is illegal and this kind of conduct has never been acceptable,” MacArthur said.
McClain’s attorney argued that McClain merely passed along “a handful of job recommendations” from Madigan because of his powerful position as speaker and the fact that they were close friends.
“Doing so was legal and constitutionally protected lobbying,” Cotter wrote in a recent sentencing memo. “The government’s failure to make the critical distinction between a favor done with intent to lawfully curry favor with a public official, as opposed to the trading of gifts for actions done by that official, was at the heart of this case.”
In court Thursday, Cotter urged the judge to recognize that McClain “is a man of his times and his place.”
“He was literally born into politics … he has spent nearly his entire adult life in Springfield,” Cotter said. “In his heart, Mike believed that trying to get on the good side of politicians is acceptable. … Mike believed that he stayed on the right side of the law.”
Cotter also said that McClain refused to testify against others in the case and paint them as criminals “because he doesn’t believe in his heart that it is true.”
“He’s not modern enough of a man to have bought into this notion that that’s how you deal with these problems, that you sell out other people and say whatever you have to to help yourself,” Cotter said. “He’s not that man.”
But MacArthur said McClain’s conduct was a far cry from any legal form of lobbying, likening it instead to running a “Benefit Fulfillment Warehouse” where McClain was able to pull things of value such as lucrative contracts off the shelves, box them up an deliver them on Madigan’s behalf.
“Mr. McClain’s illegal conduct cost ComEd $1.3 million in payouts, but it has cost society as well,” she said.. “The Illinois House of Representatives should be the people’s house, where bills pass on their merits and not by the payments of bribes.”
The 24-month prison term handed down by Shah was far less than the 70 months once pushed by prosecutors. On Thursday, MacArthur said they were reducing their request to 36 months based on the sentences already imposed on other defendants as well as new information about McClain’s ill health.
Near the end of his lengthy argument Thursday, Cotter said that regardless of any prison time, McClain has already paid a serious penalty.
“Mike has sustained economic ruin,” Cotter said. “He lost his life savings, he lost his home, his job, his pension. … He’s also had his reputation destroyed. A reputation he spent 40 years building.”
But Shah refused the defense’s request for probation, saying McClain corrupted a system that’s supposed to benefit the public and twisted it for his own gain — and Madigan’s.
“There’s nothing wrong with building coalitions, understanding your opponents and allies and generating goodwill to get a seat at the table,” Shah said. “There is also no reason that can’t be done openly and honestly, in a way that doesn’t need phony contracts, false invoices and concealed jobs.”
Before he imposed the sentence, Shah asked McClain if he wanted to speak. Seated at the defense table, McClain thanked the judge but said he would defer to his lawyer’s written submissions, which included a personal letter from McClain himself.
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“Your honor I’ve got a perfect lawyer and … I think I want to stand with everything that we have submitted to you,” McClain said.
The hearing marked an important — but certainly not final — milestone in McClain’s legal saga, which began in May 2019 when the feds raided his home. Four years later, in May 2023, he was found guilty along with three others on all counts in the ComEd Four trial. That was followed by another trial with Madigan himself that ended earlier this year with a jury convicting Madigan on 10 felony counts, but hanging on all counts against McClain.
The sentencing also happened to come six years to the day that the Tribune first reported the feds were looking into thousands of dollars in checks that McClain and other ComEd-connected lobbyists had sent to Kevin Quinn, a top Madigan political operative ousted after he was accused of sexually harassing a campaign staffer.
Later in 2019, the Tribune first disclosed McClain’s cellphone had been wiretapped by the FBI — which ultimately formed the lynchpin of the entire investigation.
The son of an Illinois lawmaker, McClain may not have been a household name before the investigation went public six years ago, but Illinois has since gotten to know him in a level of detail far beyond most criminal defendants.
Through four criminal trials, including the perjury case against former Madigan chief of staff Tim Mapes and a separate bribery trial of former AT&T Illinois boss Paul La Schiazza, there have been dozens of wiretapped calls played in court and hundreds of his emails publicly displayed, conversations that painted a picture of how McClain used his unfettered access to Madigan to get some of Illinois’ top executives to scramble to meet their demands.
The wiretaps and other evidence revealed McClain’s use of crude code words for Madigan, often referring to the speaker as “our Friend” or “Himself,” as well as his penchant for archaic military terminology, such as when he told Madigan in a retirement note he would remain “at the bridge with my musket” for the speaker.
The communications also captured McClain at his most blunt, telling Pramaggiore in an email in 2016 that ComEd’s reluctance to kick more money to a Madigan-preferred law firm would have dire repercussions down the road.
“I know the drill and so do you,” he wrote to Pramaggiore. “If you do not get involved and resolve this issue of 850 hours for his law firm per year then he will go to our Friend. Our Friend will call me and then I will call you. Is this a drill we must go through?”
McClain’s attorney on Thursday stressed that McClain should not be defined solely by what was captured on the tapes or in emails, or how others have used those words to demonize him.
“Mike McClain is not a symbol, he’s not a caricature, he’s not a stereotype,” Cotter said. “He’s a person. He’s a real individual person. He’s multifaceted, as we all are, and your honor, he is much more than a handful of quotes from emails or tapes or even the testimony at trial.”
Cotter noted that witnesses at trial all testified McClain was an extremely skilled lobbyist and hard worker, someone who sought, as all good lobbyists do, to build relationships with powerful politicians and advocate his clients’ positions.
He also wrote in a recent court submission it would be “unjust” to make McClain a scapegoat for the state’s history of political corruption or some abstract symbol “to promote whatever current notion (prosecutors) maintain of ‘good government.’”
“Mr. McClain has not held political office in over 30 years,” Cotter wrote. “He is neither responsible for, nor is it just to punish him to any degree for generations of the way politics has been conducted by other people in this state, or practices that pre-date his birth and may, one suspects, continue in various, perhaps different, incarnations long after he is gone.”
McClain and his three co-defendants — Pramaggiore, Hooker and Doherty — were convicted on all counts in May 2023 after a two-month trial.
The bulk of the ComEd allegations centered on a cadre of Madigan allies who were paid a total of $1.3 million from 2011 through 2019 through allegedly do-nothing consulting contracts. Among the recipients were two former aldermen, Frank Olivo and Michael Zalewski, precinct captains Ray Nice and Edward Moody, and former state Rep. Edward Acevedo.
In addition, prosecutors alleged ComEd also hired a clouted law firm run by political operative Victor Reyes, distributed numerous college internships within Madigan’s 13th Ward fiefdom, and backed former McPier chief Juan Ochoa, a friend of a Madigan ally, for an $80,000-a-year seat on the utility’s board of directors, the indictment alleged.
In return, prosecutors alleged, Madigan used his influence over the General Assembly to help ComEd score a series of huge legislative victories that not only rescued the company from financial instability but led to record-breaking, billion-dollar profits.
Among them was the 2011 smart grid bill that set a built-in formula for the rates ComEd could charge customers, avoiding battles with the Illinois Commerce Commission, according to the charges. ComEd also leaned on Madigan’s office to help pass the Future Energy Jobs Act in 2016, which kept the formula rate in place and also rescued two nuclear plants run by an affiliated company, Exelon Generation.
Madigan, meanwhile, was convicted in a separate trial of an array of schemes that included the ComEd bribery payments. He was sentenced in June to seven and a half years in prison.
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At the end of his remarks Thursday, Shah called that outcome for Madigan a “comeuppance, I suppose.”
But he said McClain must pay a price of his own.
“It’s important for the punishment to reflect the harsh fact that this was corruption,” the judge said.