Apparent slip-up during ex-ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore cross-examination leads to revelation about interview with feds

The cross-examination of former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore took a dramatic turn Tuesday when she inadvertently opened the door to questions about a 2019 interview with prosecutors where she denied knowing about the utility paying subcontractors connected to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The apparent slip-up occurred while Pramaggiore was being asked about a recorded call with then-ComEd executive Fidel Marquez, who told her that the subcontractors, including former 13th Ward Ald. Frank Olivo, were being funneled through a contract with lobbyist Jay Doherty and that they didn’t do any work.

As she had testified on direct examination Monday, Pramaggiore tried to explain she didn’t remember the call with Marquez because she was busy with other things and figured he had handled it.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streicker kept pressing, asking her again, “So you didn’t remember the call?”

“No, and I think I shared that with you when I came in for the interview,” Pramaggiore blurted out, a comment that was followed by whispering among attorneys and a request by prosecutors for a sidebar with the judge.

When her testimony resumed, Pramaggiore was forced to reveal to the jury that she’d agreed to be interviewed by investigators with her attorneys present in September 2019, four months after being confronted by the FBI and having her cellphone seized.

At the so-called “proffer session,” neither Pramaggiore nor her attorneys knew that the FBI had secretly recorded hundreds of conversations as part of the probe, including her chat with Marquez that February. The tenor of the meeting changed suddenly when Pramaggiore and her team were confronted with the tape.

“So, Ms. Pramaggiore, after the call was played for you during the interview, the interview was terminated, right?” Streicker asked.

“Yes,” Pramaggiore answered in a clipped, high-pitched tone.

“You and your counsel terminated the interview?” Streicker asked, prompting Pramaggiore’s attorney, Scott Lassar, to jump up and object.

U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber sustained the objection, and instructed the jury to disregard the question.

Later in the line of questioning, Pramaggiore grew defiant, insisting that she has remained consistent in her recollection.

“If I had remembered the conversation, I would have shared it with you because it proves my innocence,” she told Streicker. “I told (Marquez) to take it to (then-ComEd CEO Joe Dominguez) and to get rid of the subcontractors.”

Streicker also pointed out through her questioning that at the time she sat down with the government, Pramaggiore had known for months that the investigation focused on the subcontractors under Doherty, her friend and longtime head of the City Club of Chicago.

When the FBI confronted Pramaggiore in May 2019 and seized her cellphone, the search warrant mentioned the names of the specific subcontractors, including Olivo, 13th Ward precinct captains Ed Moody and Ray Nice and former 23rd Ward Ald. Mike Zalewski, Streicker noted.

“If you tell me that, I assume it’s correct,” Pramaggiore said about what was contained in the warrant. “It was quite an event, so I don’t remember if I paid attention to the details.”

The highly anticipated cross-examination of Pramaggiore came in the 20th day of testimony in the “ComEd Four” bribery trial, where she and three others are accused in an alleged scheme to bribe Madigan in order to help the utility’s legislative agenda in Springfield.

On Tuesday afternoon, one of Pramaggiore’s co-defendants, ex-ComEd lobbyist John Hooker, also took the witness stand in his own defense, cracking jokes and sprinkling in his witty sayings dubbed “Hookerisms” as he took the jury through his remarkable life story.

Speaking in a homespun, folksy style, Hooker, 74, testified how his wife, his “high school sweetheart,” died suddenly in the late 1960s, leaving him to raise their 18-month-old daughter. At the time, he was working in the mailroom at ComEd, which he’d joined shortly after graduating from Farragut Career Academy on the city’s West Side. Eventually he took night classes at Chicago State University and earned a degree in marketing, he said.

“I had some ups and downs in life that derailed me a little bit, but I persevered,” Hooker said.

Throughout his climb at the utility, Hooker said he was constantly confronted by racist attitudes, including when he was first sent to City Hall in the 1980s as a company liaison, where some of the Black aldermen viewed him as an Uncle Tom.

Hooker says he won everyone over by playing it straight. “My job was to meet with everybody. When you see me talking to ‘X’ or ‘Y,’ that was me talking about ComEd’s business,” he said. “I became acceptable to all 50 aldermen and I was proud of that.”

As a lobbyist for a state-regulated utility, Hooker said he was friendly with Madigan but never part of his inner circle. “I was ComEd all the way,” he said. “I’ve never been to his house, and he’s never been to mine.”

Asked if he went on a trip to Turkey with Madigan and Pramaggiore that has come up in previous testimony, Hooker quipped, “No, I’m not really a world traveler. The only turkey I deal with is at Thanksgiving.”

Hooker’s direct testimony will continue on Wednesday.

Charged in the ComEd Four case are Pramaggiore, Doherty, Hooker and Michael McClain, a former lobbyist and Madigan’s trusted confidant.

The indictment alleged the scheme included steering $1.3 million in payments from ComEd to Madigan-approved subcontractors, appointing businessman and former McPier boss Juan Ochoa to the utility’s board of directors, hiring a clout-heavy law firm headed by political operative Victor Reyes, and stacking the utility’s summer internship program with candidates sent from the 13th Ward.

All four have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers have contended the government is trying to turn legal lobbying and job recommendations into a crime.

Madigan and McClain face a separate racketeering indictment that is set for trial next year.

The heart of the government’s case is the dozens of wiretapped phone calls and secret video recordings of meetings that have been played for the jury over the past five weeks.

Pramaggiore, a theater major from Dayton, Ohio, who earned a law degree and rose to become one of Chicago’s top female executives, took the witness stand to try to mitigate some of the damage done by those FBI wiretaps, which at times showed her seemingly at ease with participating in Illinois’ notoriously rough-and-tumble political system.

The call that Pramaggiore was confronted with during her interview with prosecutors took place on Feb. 18, 2019, when Marquez, who was secretly cooperating with investigators, asked her how he was supposed to tell Dominguez about the arrangement with Doherty subcontractors.

“I met with Jay, uh, Jay pretty much, well, he did say, ‘Well, you know all these guys do is pretty much collect a check, um, and you should just leave it alone,’ " Marquez said on a recording. “‘Don’t mess with it, just leave it alone, um, otherwise things can go, you know, bad for us in Springfield.’”

At one point in their discussion, Pramaggiore blurted, “Oh my God.”

Pramaggiore testified in her direct examination she was “taken aback” that Marquez was telling her that there were subcontractors originally lined up years before by her predecessor, former ComEd CEO Frank Clark, but still getting paid.

On Tuesday, Streicker tried to poke holes in that explanation.

“You were so taken aback, you forgot this call?” Streicker asked.

Pramaggiore also attempted to explain another part of the call highlighted by prosecutors, where she told Marquez, “We do not want to get caught up in a … disruptive battle where, you know, somebody gets their nose out of joint” and they’re forced to give someone a five-year contract.

On direct examination, Pramaggiore had testified she wasn’t specifically talking about Madigan getting his nose out of joint — just that it was a bad time in general to rock the boat. “I didn’t use Madigan’s name,” she said.

Streicker on cross-examination put the transcript of the call on the monitors for the jury, pointed Pramaggiore to it and asked, “That was your first reaction to hearing this news?”

“It is my first reaction,” Pramaggiore said.

In her roughly six hours of direct testimony, which began Thursday, Pramaggiore said she had no idea the company she headed from 2012 to 2018 had been paying lobbying subcontractors out of her own budget — let alone that they were former elected officials and precinct captains with strong ties to Madigan, then the most powerful politician in the state.

“No, we weren’t bribing Speaker Madigan,” Pramaggiore said bluntly at one point Monday.

On cross-examination Tuesday, the confrontation over the proffer session came during what was otherwise a poised performance on the part of Pramaggiore, who stood her ground amid questions about her relationship with Madigan and her understanding of what efforts were being undertaken to stay in his good graces.

Pramaggiore acknowledged that she majored in theater at Miami University in Ohio. She said she initially wanted to be an actor, but “that didn’t go so well for me so I shifted to costume and makeup design.”

Asked about the smart grid legislation that she worked to pass in 2011, Pramaggiore agreed that it was a big success for the company and for her own career. She was promoted to CEO of ComEd months later.

At one point, Streicker showed Pramaggiore a thank-you letter she sent to Madigan after passage of the smart grid bill. “I am forever grateful,” she wrote in script at the bottom.

Asked whether the sentiment was true, Pramaggiore replied calmly, “I was forever grateful for everybody who ever voted for that bill.”

Pramaggiore also navigated tough questions about a 2018 effort to kill a bill supported by Madigan’s own daughter, then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan, which allegedly the speaker had given the go-ahead for to the ComEd lobbying team.

Streicker tried to pin Pramaggiore down on an email McClain sent about a coded “kill” message from Madigan, but she didn’t take the bait.

“I think it’s a message in response to our information that we were sending to him that this was a bad bill,” Pramaggiore said. “If ComEd wanted to kill a bill it was our job to do it.”

Streicker also questioned Pramaggiore about her dealings with Will Cousineau, one of Madigan’s top government staffers who testified under an immunity agreement last month that the speaker sent him out to rally lawmakers and organized labor to support the 2016 Future Energy Jobs Act legislation.

The bill, though focused on saving two Exelon nuclear power plants, also allowed ComEd to extend a beneficial formula rate procedure that helped increase the company’s bottom line.

On Dec. 2, 2016, the day after the FEJA bill passed, McClain sent an email asking if Pramaggiore had time to meet with Cousineau, who McClain said “was extremely helpful in us acquiring the necessary votes in the Illinois House.”

Pramaggiore testified Tuesday she wasn’t sure who Cousineau was, but did meet with him and later interviewed him for a job. Cousineau wound up rejecting ComEd’s offer because he wanted more money, she said.

In his testimony, Hooker said rising in the ranks of ComEd as an African American was “tough” because “most of the other employees felt it was affirmative action.”

“Needless to say they didn’t value that, or value me or think I was qualified to be there,” he said.

Once he got to Springfield, he said, McClain helped show him the ropes, including how to develop relationships with both Republicans and Democrats, whom Hooker referred to as “all those R’s and D’s.”

“I decided I was going to work with everybody,” he said. “I was going to meet everybody, tell ’em who I was and where I was from and build a relationship.”

Hooker also buttressed the prior testimony of Cousineau, saying that the speaker told Cousineau to go out and rally proponents for the 2016 FEJA bill because support was waning in the last day of the fall veto session.

Along with saving the two nuclear power plants and the jobs that went with it, the legislation also gave ComEd an extension of a formula rate system that allowed the company to have more stability and predictability in revenues. Consumers paid slightly more, but clean job advocates also advanced their cause.

“I have to say it is a coalition bill,” Hooker said, a line that prompted several jurors to write in their notebooks.

He also told of how ComEd rallied a coalition to defeat the bill being pushed by the speaker’s daughter in 2018, her last full year in office. The legislation would have provided low-income assistance, which appealed to Black lawmakers because many of their constituents fell into that category.

“It was going to be her legacy bill,” Hooker said of the attorney general.

But Hooker said he helped convince lawmakers that the problem with the bill was that it was a “cost shift” because the customers who would see the assistance would be underwritten by other customers whose rates would go up.

Hooker said he worked on turning around enough votes “so that we would have a majority against it rather than for it.”

In his testimony, Hooker clasped his hands together and often chuckled at his own jokes. He described at length how being a good lobbyist meant developing relationships with lawmakers, reaching compromises and building coalitions.

Among the people who taught him the trade was McClain, who Hooker said could often be “pushy.” While McClain knew everyone in Springfield and was close with Madigan, he “didn’t wear it on his forehead,” Hooker testified.

“Mike was well known throughout the Capitol both with legislators and other stakeholders,” he said.

Asked by his attorney, Jacqueline Jacobson, what he meant by a “stakeholder,” Hooker said, “like the AARP.”

“That’s a senior citizen’s group,” Hooker said with a smile. “I happen to be a member.”

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

rlong@chicagotribune.com