Former Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan’s $158,000 annual state of Illinois pension is being halted following his high-profile corruption conviction.
Timothy Blair, executive secretary of the Illinois General Assembly Retirement System, said Thursday he “sent the letter out today” to notify Madigan the pension system will stop sending his monthly checks because Illinois law bars elected officials in the legislative pension plan from collecting payments once they are convicted or enter a guilty plea in a felony tied to their government job.
But Blair said Madigan will receive his nearly $13,170 pension check for February because that has already been processed.
In a felony case that rocked Illinois politics, a federal jury on Wednesday convicted Madigan on 10 of 23 counts, including bribery conspiracy and other corruption charges focused heavily on a Commonwealth Edison bribery scandal and his plot to get a state board appointment for alderman-turned-government-mole Danny Solis.
The jury deadlocked on several counts — including the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge that accused Madigan and co-defendant Michael McClain of running Madigan’s operations like a criminal enterprise — and acquitted Madigan on several others. Prosecutors have yet to decide if they will retry Madigan on the deadlocked charges.
A sentencing date for the 82-year-old Madigan, of Chicago’s Southwest Side, has yet to be set.
Madigan lost the speakership in January 2021 as an expanding federal probe started to clearly indicate he was a target. He had served a nationwide record 36 years as speaker but a group of 19 House Democrats, mostly women, refused to back him for another two-year term as leader of the chamber.
Soon thereafter, Madigan, who was first elected to the House in 1970, resigned as a state representative. He was indicted in March 2022.
Since his retirement, Madigan has been collecting his monthly legislative pension payments, receiving more than $521,000 with this month’s check, Blair said. During his half-century in office, Madigan contributed $352,345 into the pension system, Blair said in an email.
The state retirement system is unable to claw back any of the pension money Madigan has already received, Blair said.
The same federal jury that convicted Madigan deadlocked on six charges against McClain, a former ComEd contract lobbyist and ex-lawmaker from Quincy who spent years as Madigan’s close confidant.
McClain was receiving a legislative pension of about $1,685 per month when his retirement checks were suspended in May 2023 following his conviction in the “ComEd Four” trial. That trial also led to convictions of the utility’s former chief executive officer and two other lobbyists. Each is challenging the convictions.
Before his pension was suspended, McClain collected $313,800 in legislative pension payments. A House lawmaker more than 40 years ago, McClain contributed $34,706 to the retirement fund.
Madigan’s pension was halted only weeks after Attorney General Kwame Raoul, a Democrat, concluded the ex-speaker’s former chief of staff, Tim Mapes, also should lose his $154,000 annual pension because of his 2023 conviction for lying to a federal grand jury and attempting to obstruct the probe into his ex-boss.
Mapes, whom the longtime speaker also appointed clerk of the Illinois House and executive director of the state Democratic Party that Madigan chaired, had not been receiving his pension since February 2024. Mapes’ pension was temporarily suspended and placed under review following his sentencing to 2½ years in federal prison.
The legal question before the attorney general’s office was whether Mapes should lose his pension permanently because his grand jury testimony came nearly three years after he was ousted from Madigan’s government and political organizations in 2018 amid a sexual harassment scandal. Under state law, a felony conviction triggers the loss of a state pension only if the crime in question was connected to a person’s government job.
In the letter to a top state pension official, Raoul’s office maintained that matters about which Mapes perjured himself were directly connected to his more than two decades as a top governmental aide to Madigan.
