Jurors on Thursday heard the first of some 200 recordings in the trial of ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a blockbuster corruption case that hinges in large part on government wiretaps and secretly recorded video.
“This is no longer me talking,” said Michael McClain, Madigan’s confidant and now co-defendant, in the wiretapped November 2018 phone conversation with then-Skokie Rep. Lou Lang.
“I’m an agent, somebody that cares really deeply about you, who thinks that you really ought to move on,” McClain said in the call.
On the stand Thursday, Lang said he knew McClain was saying he was simply a messenger for Madigan, who was no longer interested in giving Lang a more powerful position within the House.
“The Speaker wanted me to leave,” Lang told jurors, saying that he believed if he went quietly then Madigan could use his influence to throw some business his way.
Lang has already testified twice for the U.S. attorney’s office about the embarrassing episode that ended his political career, which centered on an accusation of sexual harassment that Madigan believed was about to go public.
Last year he took the stand in the perjury trial of former Madigan chief of staff Tim Mapes as well as the “ComEd Four” bribery case, in which McClain and three others were convicted.
“I appreciate you leveling with me,” Lang replied to McClain in the phone call played Thursday. “I wouldn’t do anything to damage my speaker or my caucus. He’s been very good to me.”
Lang wound up resigning days before he was to be sworn in for a new term in January 2019.
Prosecutors have played up the episode to reinforce that Madigan called the shots in Springfield and was consumed with staying in power above all else. The recordings also buttressed allegations that McClain acted as an “agent” for the famously reclusive speaker, delivering messages and completing “assignments” for his boss even after McClain’s retirement from lobbying in 2016.
Before the wiretapped call was played, Lang gave jurors a meticulously detailed view of how bills made it through the House – or didn’t.
And he reiterated what prior ex-legislators have said on the stand: Madigan had final say over which bills had a chance of becoming law and which would languish in committee.
“Every once in awhile the Speaker or (Madigan’s) chief of staff would just say ‘hold the bill.’ Sometimes there’d be an explanation and sometimes there wouldn’t,” Lang said. “… The ultimate decision-maker was always Speaker Madigan.”
Also expected to take the stand Thursday is State Rep. Bob Rita, D-Blue Island. Rita also testified in the ComEd Four and Mapes trials.
Madigan ruled the Democrats “through fear and intimidation,” Rita told jurors in the ComEd Four trial.
Madigan, 82, of Chicago, who served for decades as speaker of the Illinois House and the head of the state Democratic Party, faces racketeering charges alleging he ran his state and political operations like a criminal enterprise, scheming with utility giants ComEd and AT&T to put his cronies on contracts requiring little or no work and using his public position to drum up business for his private law firm.
Both Madigan and McClain, 77, a former ComEd lobbyist from downstate Quincy, have pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
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