Consultant Jay Doherty spent years as the face of the vaunted City Club of Chicago, glad-handing with a who’s who of the city’s power set at public luncheons, where he often plugged the utility giant he counted as his biggest client: Commonwealth Edison.
But it was that connection to the upper crust of Chicago political world — and the hidden deals happening underneath — that wound up being Doherty’s downfall.
On Tuesday, more than two years after his conviction in the “ComEd Four” bribery trial, Doherty told a federal judge his skills for bringing people together served him well in his career and charitable work, but that somehow he lost his way.
“Sometime over the years, instead of seeing my job as a means of service, it became simply a way to make more money and build myself up. To gain, not give,” Doherty said, standing at the lectern in a rumpled blue suit and reading from notes in a clear voice. “This happened so slowly, your honor, over time, that to be honest I did not see this even within myself, and I am deeply ashamed that I did not see it.”
Doherty stopped short of admitting he’d committed any crime. In sentencing Doherty to a year in prison, however, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah said that while Doherty’s statement was admirable, his role in the case was more than just some moral lapse.
By agreeing to be a pass-through for secret payments to associates of then-House Speaker Michael Madigan, Doherty and his eponymous consulting firm “were the metaphoric cash in an envelope that amounted to bribes,” corrupting the state’s legislative process and Doherty’s own penchant for bringing together government interests, Shah said.
“You cheated the very thing that you put a face to at the City Club of Chicago,” Shah said. “Once people think government and public policy is a game, a sport, they forget that the rules and the law exist for a larger reason. The law is not just something to work around to score points in a game.”
Doherty, who turns 72 next month, showed no visible reaction as the sentence was handed down. He was ordered to report to prison by Sept. 30.
After the hearing, Doherty walked out of the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse without commenting to reporters, donning a baseball cap as news photographers ran after him down the street.
A longtime political consultant and lobbyist, Doherty was the last of the four defendants to be sentenced in the landmark ComEd Four case, which has dragged on amid the death of the trial judge, fights at the U.S. Supreme Court and a review by the Trump administration of a law used by prosecutors to convict the four of cooking the utility’s books.
Last month, former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and lobbyist Michael McClain, who was one of Madigan’s closest confidants, were each sentenced to two-year prison terms. Ex-ComEd executive John Hooker, meanwhile, was given a year and a half behind bars.
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.
Prosecutors had asked Shah to give Doherty 15 months in prison, arguing in a recent court filing that he was “integral” to the scheme to pay off a cadre of Madigan associates, including former Aldermen Frank Olivo and Michael Zalewski and 13th Ward precinct captains Ed Moody and Ray Nice, by making them do-nothing subcontractors under Doherty’s company, J.D. Doherty and Associates.
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.
“Doherty’s discreet handling and willingness to conceal the true nature of the payments were vitally important to the subcontractor arrangement,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sarah Streicker, Julia Schwartz, and Diane MacArthur wrote in their filing.
In court Tuesday, Streicker argued that while Doherty wasn’t the only intermediary used to further the scheme, he was there from the beginning and kept his mouth shut about it for more than eight years.
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“They needed a pass-through,” Streicker said. “They needed an intermediary who would be discreet … an intermediary who would be willing and enthusiastic. Jay Doherty was that person.”
In arguing for probation, Doherty’s lawyers said he “was a bright light in the most respected areas of Chicago” who, in addition to his work leading the City Club, was an active booster of Misericordia, the Special Olympics and other charitable ventures.
Regardless of any prison time, Doherty has been severely punished already, his attorneys said. His wife divorced him and moved to California, he’s lost his career and reputation and currently lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment.
“It’s not just the heavy hand of justice that garners respect for the law … grace and compassion garners respect for the law too,” lead defense attorney Gabrielle Sansonetti told the judge Tuesday.
Unlike the previous hearings for the other ComEd Four co-defendants, Doherty’s sentencing played out Tuesday in a largely empty courtroom. Aside from his two attorneys, no one showed up on his behalf.
The defense did, however, submit nearly 80 letters from supporters who praised Doherty’s leadership and kindness, a group that included clergy, charity leaders, police officers, lawyers and politicians.
Among them: Christopher Kennedy, a nephew of slain President John F. Kennedy; longtime Chicago attorney Jack George, a former partner with Mayor Richard J. Daley; and John Harris, the onetime chief of staff to convicted ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“Jay is an honest man,” Sansonetti said. “He is a good person. He is selfless and caring. He takes his responsibility to be a good human being seriously, and that is in painful and direct contrast to what has happened to him over the last seven years.”
Sansonetti also downplayed Doherty’s conduct, arguing there was a “gaping hole in the evidence of this case” that failed to show Doherty, who lobbied largely in Chicago and Cook County government, knew of any specific exchange with Madigan or the ComEd legislation moving through the state capitol.
“Jay did not work in Springfield,” Sansonetti said. “He did not work with Madigan. He did not discuss the hiring of these subcontractors with Madigan at all.”
In light of the recent Supreme Court opinion upping the bar on what is required to prove bribery, Sansonetti said, the allegations for which Doherty stands convicted are “based on that very big tail wagging the dog.”
“His inability to admit that he has committed a crime in this case isn’t a deficiency in Jay’s character, it is a lack of clarity in the law,” Sansonetti said.
The son of a pharmacist and small-town mayor, Doherty grew up in McHenry with nine siblings. Early in his career, Doherty served as a fundraiser and political consultant for Democratic candidates in Chicago from members of the Kennedy family to Mayor Harold Washington.
Doherty began lobbying the Washington administration for ComEd in the mid-1980s and rose to be one of the utility’s biggest boosters, including at the City Club where he would later pitch the company and invite executives — including Pramaggiore — as keynote speakers at the institution’s well-covered luncheons.
It was at those events that Doherty began honing his role as a connector for people, putting executives for companies such as ComEd that depended on state action at the same table with power brokers such as Madigan, who held the keys to their legislative success, according to evidence in the ComEd Four trial.
Doherty perhaps described it best himself on undercover recordings in the case, including one where he told then-ComEd Vice President Fidel Marquez, who was secretly cooperating with the investigation, that ComEd “saw the value of being able to sit next to people in soft situations.”
When Marquez asked him what the Madigan associates were doing for ComEd, Doherty answered “not much.” So why pay them all that money?
“That I guess can be answered in Springfield with Madigan,” Doherty said in the February 2019 recording. “And to keep Mike Madigan happy, I think it’s worth it. I mean, just ’cause you’d hear about it otherwise.”
In his remarks to the court, Doherty said Tuesday that he realizes now how he’d changed over the years.
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“My focus centered on how I could be the big man on campus and make money,” Doherty said. “I did not hold the line on my own values and the values we teach our four young children. … The best that I can do is to tell you in the entire community what I know I did wrong.”
Doherty then listed three examples: failing to inquire about specific tasks the ComEd subcontractors under his control were supposed to perform; deluding himself into thinking it was ComEd’s responsibility and not his; and not backing out when he learned they weren’t doing any work.
“Instead, I mistakenly let year after year go by and I did not ask any questions or challenge anyone,” Doherty said. “Judge, that was wrong.”
In sentencing Doherty, the judge said that for all his talk about “soft” relationships, Doherty ultimately “played the hard game of passing money on to Olivo, Nice, Moody and Zalewski.”
“Behind the scenes, you played a criminal game that undermines all that the soft power of persuasion, organization and debate is meant to achieve … how civic, lawful democracy is supposed to work,” Shah said.