Fidel Marquez had gone from successful ComEd engineer to the utility’s legislative affairs leader when he hit the proverbial fork in the road.
A master of “the grid” with good people skills, Marquez found himself in a notoriously gray and morally slippery area compared with working out on the line. Before long, he learned his bosses had been running a sophisticated and secret scheme to influence then-House Speaker Michael Madigan in a bid to win hundreds of millions of dollars in rate hikes.
“When he hit that moral fork in that road, he made the wrong choice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Chapman told a federal judge Thursday. “He chose to go along with it.”
But that was far from the last twist in Marquez’s journey. After being confronted by the FBI in 2019, he agreed to go undercover, helping to build a case that would rock the Illinois political landscape and land Madigan, ComEd’s former CEO and others in federal prison.
On Thursday, seven years after that fateful decision, Marquez’s remarkable story came full circle as U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland sentenced him to two years of probation for his role in a massive conspiracy to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to do-nothing subcontractors favored by the speaker.
In handing down the sentence, Rowland said Marquez’s level of cooperation was unusual even in a courthouse with a long history of defendants cutting deals with the government.
The judge also remarked on the country’s current political times, telling Marquez more people are needed to “stand up and say ‘I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to participate in this.'”
“If we can’t have ComEd stand up to this stuff, we are sunk,” the judge said. “We’re in real trouble if we don’t have powerful entities saying ‘enough’ to corrupt politicians.”
Before the sentence was handed down, Marquez, 64, who rose from humble beginnings to become ComEd’s senior vice president of external affairs, stood in court dressed in a gray suit and apologized.
“I sincerely regret my actions and participation in the bribery of Michael Madigan. I am ashamed,” he said, leaning both arms against the lectern and reading from notes. “I did not like what was taking place, but I could have tried to do more, and I didn’t.”
Marquez said he’d “spent the past seven years trying to do my best to help stop the abuse and the corruption that was taking place” though he added he was not “negating” his role in it.
Near the end of the 90-minute hearing, Rowland said it was “sickening” that ComEd officials sold out ratepayers for profits, leading not only to the criminal convictions of its former CEO and others, but also an admission of guilt by the utility giant and millions of dollars in fines and other penalties.
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“What about the ratepayers? Who is watching out for the parents who are trying to keep their lights on?” the judge asked, as Marquez nodded. “I’m not talking about the parents like you and me, I’m talking about the ones that are struggling. It’s sickening.”
In addition to the term of probation, Rowland handed Marquez a $50,000 fine, but opted not to order him to do 300 hours of community service as requested by the government.
Marquez’s sentencing was one of the final loose ends in a historic investigation that exposed corruption at the highest levels of Illinois government and brought down Madigan, the then-leader of the Illinois Democratic Party and undisputedly the most powerful politician in the state.
Among the attendees in court Thursday was Amarjeet Bhachu, the former head of the U.S. attorney’s office public corruption section and lead prosecutor on the Madigan investigation. Before the hearing began, Bhachu, who retired shortly after Madigan’s conviction last year, walked over to Marquez at the defense table and greeted him with a warm handshake.
Marquez began working with the FBI in early 2019, after agents confronted him at his mother’s home in Hammond, Indiana, where he was helping her with cancer treatments, and played wiretapped phone calls of him that they said showed him committing crimes.
He went on to make multiple undercover recordings of his own, both audio and video, that provided the backbone for the biggest single allegation in the indictment against Madigan: that the speaker supported ComEd-friendly legislation in exchange for a stream of benefits from the utility.
Marquez pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiracy to commit bribery. In exchange for his truthful testimony, prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of probation instead of prison time.
In a sentencing memo earlier this year, Marquez’s attorney said the bribery scheme was already underway when Marquez was roped into it, and that his nearly immediate agreement to cooperate with the FBI was “likely far in excess of what they actually thought would happen.”
“The agents’ success in obtaining Fidel’s help was not for the reasons they expected,” attorney Christopher Niewoehner wrote. “For Fidel was motivated not because he thought he needed to save himself from criminal jeopardy – the typical reason that people cooperate with the FBI – but because he thought that what Madigan was asking of ComEd was wrong, and he thought he could help stop it.”
Niewoehner wrote that to Marquez, “the demands from Madigan were a one-way street,” with the speaker, through McClain, always initiating the requests “for a favor for some Madigan connection.”
“No one at ComEd affirmatively proposed hiring Madigan’s people. It was not something that ComEd wanted to do – it was essentially a necessary evil from Fidel’s perspective,” Niewoehner wrote. “As Fidel understood it, ComEd acquiesced in Madigan’s demands because the company could be punished if it did not.”
In court Thursday, Niewoehner, a former federal prosecutor who handled key cooperators in other high-stakes political corruption investigations, said in his estimation, Marquez “truly is the most extraordinary cooperator in the living memory of the U.S. attorney’s office.”
His counterpart, Chapman, largely agreed, saying that if the label “super-cooperator” existed, Marquez would likely qualify.
Chapman, who worked long hours debriefing Marquez over the years and shepherded his grand jury testimony, grew emotional while talking about Marquez’s qualities as a wonky engineer who could talk endlessly about the inner workings of ComEd’s electrical grid.
“He genuinely cared about that job … he took it very seriously,” Chapman said, pausing at one point to keep his composure.
Regardless of Marquez’s early agreement to cooperate, Chapman said the bribery system he and others at ComEd maintained was “entirely durable” and “designed to last through time.”
“This wasn’t a one-and-done,” he said, noting it lasted more than eight years and was only interrupted by the FBI’s investigation going overt in May 2019 with the execution of a series of search warrants.
Chapman also said the scheme has further undermined the public’s trust in government even in a state with an indisputably sordid history of political corruption.
“The reality is that the conspiracy will cast a long, cynical shadow over Illinois government for a long time to come,” Chapman told the judge.
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Madigan, who had a record run as speaker and served for years as the leader of the state Democratic Party, was convicted by a jury a year ago on bribery conspiracy and other corruption charges. The jury found him guilty on 10 of 23 counts, including a multipronged scheme to accept and solicit payments from Commonwealth Edison to Madigan associates for do-nothing subcontracts.
Madigan also was convicted on six out of seven counts — including wire fraud and Travel Act violations — regarding a plan to get then-Chicago Ald. Daniel Solis, who testified at length in the trial, appointed to a state board.
The jury acquitted Madigan of several other schemes alleged in the indictment and deadlocked on other counts, including the overarching racketeering charge.
The same jury deadlocked on all counts involving his co-defendant, longtime confidant Michael McClain, and prosecutors later opted not to retry McClain and dropped the charges.
Marquez was also a star witness in the parallel “ComEd Four” bribery case, which ended in 2023 with the convictions of McClain, former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, former top internal ComEd lobbyist John Hooker, and Jay Doherty, a ComEd consultant and the former head of the City Club of Chicago. They are all currently serving prison sentences.
Madigan, 83, entered the medium-security federal facility near Morgantown, West Virginia, on Oct. 13 to begin serving his 7½-year sentence.
Meanwhile, Madigan’s appeal of his conviction is pending before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments have been set for April 9.
Pramaggiore and McClain are also appealing.