By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com

CHICAGO – By early 2019, Mike McClain had been a fixture around the Statehouse in Springfield for the better part of 50 years, first as a Democratic lawmaker in the 1970s and then for decades as a high-profile contract lobbyist.

And though he officially retired in late 2016, McClain could still be spotted around the marble halls of the Capitol building. He was especially likely to be in the third-floor office suite occupied by his longtime friend Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, along with his top deputies and staff.

It was in a conversation with one of those top staffers in February 2019 that McClain shared the secret of his success as a lobbyist – though he had no idea FBI agents were listening in on his call.

“Your client is only Mike Madigan,” McClain said. “It’s not the Democratic Party … it’s not anybody that hired you, it’s not your mom and dad. The only person you care about is Mike Madigan. And if that’s the way you think, and that’s the way you frame your talking points, he’ll never second-guess you.”

A federal jury heard that call and others like it on Thursday as prosecutors played nearly three dozen recordings of wiretapped phone conversations captured on McClain’s cell phone between 2018 and 2019. Also sitting in the courtroom were McClain and Madigan themselves, on trial in a case alleging the two engaged in racketeering and bribery, abusing the former speaker’s power to form a “criminal enterprise.” 

McClain has already been convicted for his role in bribing the speaker with jobs and contracts for his political allies at electric utility Commonwealth Edison, where McClain was the company’s top outside lobbyist for decades.

The pair had a friendship that stretched back to when they were both young state representatives. And over the course of many years, McClain became one of Madigan’s closest friends and advisors.

But the feds also allege McClain acted as the speaker’s “agent” – a term McClain himself would sometimes use to describe his work doing what he called “assignments” from Madigan. In late 2018, one of those assignments involved convincing a veteran state representative to retire before he was ready to go.

On the witness stand on Thursday, former state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, recounted a phone call between himself and McClain in November 2018, just two days after he’d won reelection for the 15th time.

As he’s done in two previous trials related to Madigan’s, Lang testified that he believed he’d be promoted to House majority leader – a position second only to the speaker – when the new legislature was seated in January 2019. He even thought that someday he might ascend to speaker himself.

But McClain’s call delivered a cold reality check. Lang had been publicly accused of sexual harassment earlier in the year, though he’d quickly been cleared by a Legislative Inspector General investigation.

Madigan had requested Lang relinquish his deputy majority leader title after the first woman’s allegations that spring, which came on the heels of unrelated allegations of sexual harassment within the speaker’s political organization at the height of the #MeToo movement. And not long after the accusations against Lang, an employee of the speaker’s office accused Madigan’s longtime chief of staff of sexual harassment, which led the speaker to fire him.

In that Nov. 8, 2018, call, McClain said the speaker’s office had received notice that another woman was threatening to come forward with harassment allegations if Lang was reinstated to a leadership position within the House Democratic caucus.

“So this is no longer me talking,” McClain said in the wiretapped phone call, which was played for the jury on Thursday. “I’m an agent for somebody that cares deeply about you, who thinks that you really oughta move on.”

Under questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, Lang said he had no confusion as to who McClain was talking about.

“The call made it clear that my career had dead-ended because the speaker was in control of my ability to move up the ranks,” Lang said.

McClain also urged Lang to follow the path he and many former lawmakers have gone down: lobbying. He even assured Lang that Madigan would help send clients his way, though Lang told Bhachu that he believed the promise was “just an enticement to get me to leave.” Ultimately, Lang did resign from the General Assembly in early 2019 after more than 30 years in the House, and he has been a registered lobbyist ever since.

Prosecutors also played a series of calls between McClain and Madigan in which the two discussed the Lang situation and strategized about how best to push him to retirement. In a September 2018 call, Madigan asked McClain to “sit down with Lang,” which McClain did at a breakfast meeting later that fall.

In another wiretapped call several days before his big talk with Lang, McClain asked Madigan when he should “lower the boom” on Lang “because he’s not – he’s not getting it.”

Such exchanges undercut what Madigan’s defense attorney Tom Breen said during opening statements earlier this week when he claimed Madigan was “completely ignorant of what people are saying behind his back” in the more than 200 wiretap recordings expected to be played at trial.

“Those people may have a motive in doing what they are doing,” Breen said. “They don’t have authority to speak that way for Michael Madigan. He doesn’t talk that way, he doesn’t act that way. He’s never made a demand on anyone.”

But other recordings played in court on Thursday also demonstrated McClain acting on a request from Madigan. For example, in a May 2018 call during the last week of the General Assembly’s spring legislative session, Madigan asked McClain to head off a former lawmaker-turned-lobbyist named Sam Panayotovich who’d left a message with the speaker’s office requesting a conversation with Madigan.

“Are you in position to advise Mr. Panayotovich to stay away from me?” Madigan asked McClain.

Within 10 minutes, McClain called the lobbyist and briefly explained to him that “the optics just aren’t good” for the speaker to have a meeting with Panayotovich and his lobbying partner Joe Berrios, who’d recently been defeated in his re-election bid for Cook County Assessor after his opponent accused him of rampant corruption.

Prior to playing the more than 30 recordings of wiretapped calls on Thursday, prosecutors also showed the jury a December 2016 letter McClain sent to Madigan, in which McClain wrote that he “wanted to let my ‘real’ client know that I am retiring as a lobbyist” but said he was “willing … to do ‘assignments’” for the speaker.

“At the end of the day I am at the bridge with my musket standing with and for the Madigan family,” read the letter, which was addressed to both the speaker and his wife Shirley Madigan. “I will never leave your side, Shirley and Mike.”

 

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.