Ex-US Rep. Luis Gutierrez allegedly lobbied Speaker Michael Madigan for ComEd board appointment for Juan Ochoa, according to new filing
Two months ahead of trial, federal prosecutors late Tuesday revealed new details and evidence they intend to use against four people accused in an alleged bribery scheme between Commonwealth Edison and then-House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Among the new revelations: Former McPier boss Juan Ochoa is expected to testify how he enlisted the help of a member of Congress in 2017 to help repair his tattered political relationship with Madigan and ultimately secure a lucrative position on ComEd’s board of directors.
Though the congressman is not named in the document, multiple sources have told the Tribune he is ex-U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez.
Gutierrez could not be reached for this story and it was unclear if he has a lawyer.
The filing alleged that Ochoa tapped Gutierrez to make the request because he had endorsed Madigan in the prior election cycle and Ochoa “felt Madigan owed the member of Congress a political favor.” Ochoa and Gutierrez met with Madigan at the speaker’s office, where Madigan agreed to recommend Ochoa for the $80,000-a-year ComEd board seat, according to the filing.
Ochoa also asked Gutierrez to set up a meeting with “another public official” to discuss the ComEd board appointment at about the same time, according to the filing. Prosecutors do not name that official, either, but sources told the Tribune he is then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Mayoral calendars obtained by the Tribune via an open records request show that Emanuel and two of his aides met with Ochoa and Gutierrez at City Hall on Nov. 17, 2017, though the topic of the meeting was not included.
After Madigan’s longtime confidant, Michael McClain, called the speaker in 2018 to tell him the Ochoa appointment was going through, Madigan said that he would reach out to Gutierrez personally so the congressman would be the first to know, according to the document.
“I mean, (Gutierrez is) the reason I would talk to (Ochoa),” Madigan is alleged to have said on the July 17, 2018, call, which was secretly recorded by the FBI.
Gutierrez, who left Congress in early 2019, has not been charged with wrongdoing, and it was not clear if he’d be a witness at trial.
The Tribune first attempted to reach Gutierrez about his alleged involvement in the Ochoa appointment in July 2021, but he never responded.
An attorney for Ochoa, Ricardo Meza, declined to comment specifically on the allegations Wednesday, but confirmed that Ochoa would take the witness stand.
“We expect he will testify truthfully about everything he knows,” Meza said.
McClain, 75, of downstate Quincy, was indicted in November 2020 along with former ComEd CEO Ann Pramaggiore, ex-ComEd lobbyist John Hooker, and former City Club of Chicago head Jay Doherty. All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Another defendant, former ComEd Vice President Fidel Marquez, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify for the prosecution.
McClain’s attorney Patrick Cotter, had no comment on the filing Wednesday. Doherty’s attorney, Gabrielle Sansonetti, and Michael Monico, who represents Hooker, also declined to comment. Attorneys for Pramaggiore were not immediately available.
The trial, which is scheduled to begin with jury selection on March 6, promises to be the biggest political corruption trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse since ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich was convicted by a jury in 2011.
It will also offer a preview of many of the allegations against Madigan himself, who was indicted along with McClain last March on racketeering conspiracy charges alleging an array of corrupt schemes, including the alleged plan to use the power of his office to steer ComEd money to his cronies. That case has been set for trial in April 2024.
The new details on the alleged ComEd scheme were revealed in a 126-page filing known as a Santiago Proffer, which prosecutors are typically obliged to submit in advance of a conspiracy trial describing specific evidence, statements and actions between alleged co-conspirators they plan to present to the jury.
Many of the details in the document filed Tuesday have already been revealed in other court filings. But the government proffer lays out in the highest relief so far what some of the key witnesses are expected to tell the jury, as well as some of the recorded phone calls that will be played in court.
In one newly revealed wiretapped call from 2018, Madigan was captured remarking to McClain that the associates they’d helped out made a pile of money without doing much in return, including one person who made “a buck-fifty a year,” apparently a reference to $150,000 annually.
“Some of these guys have made out like bandits, Mike,” Madigan allegedly told McClain.
“Oh my God,” McClain responded, coughing. “For very little work too.”
Prosecutors emphasized that exchange, writing in the filing that “many of the Madigan subcontractors made out like thieves, just as Madigan observed.”
The filing also outlines for the first time how Pramaggiore’s relationship with Madigan and McClain allegedly helped her further not only ComEd’s goals, but her own promotion to the utility’s parent company, Exelon.
In one recorded call in May 2018, according to the filing, Pramaggiore thanked McClain profusely for her promotion, saying, “the only reason I am in this position is because ComEd has done so well, and you guys have been my, my spirit guides ... I love you guys.”
Pramaggiore even explored ways to put Madigan’s former chief of staff, Tim Mapes, into a job where she could “hide his contract in someone else’s” after he was ousted by Madigan following accusations of sexual harassment, the filing alleged.
Mapes was charged in 2021 with lying to a federal grand jury about the case and is awaiting trial.
Other revelations in the government filing include:
— A ComEd lawyer is expected to testify that McClain had such a long-standing and close relationship with Madigan that he was sometimes referred to within ComEd as a “double agent.”
— Agents who searched McClain’s personal vehicle in 2019 discovered a handwritten ledger allegedly showing he was at Madigan’s beck and call “24/7,” helping to manage the speaker’s ever-growing list of associates working as ComEd subcontractors as well as the “allotment of interns” Madigan was sending to the utility giant each summer.
— In 2016, McClain wrote a letter to Madigan saying he wanted to let his “real” client know he was retiring from lobbying, but still willing to do “assignments” for him. “I am at the bridge with my musket standing with and for the Madigan family,” he wrote, according to a copy included in the filing.
— Prosecutors also intend to call Ed Moody, the former Cook County recorder of deeds and longtime 13th Ward precinct captain, who will testify Madigan told him it was OK that he was being paid by ComEd for doing next to nothing because he was “a valuable political operative” and that campaign work “was what was important to Madigan.”
— Prosecutors plan to call “various current and former members of the (Illinois) General Assembly” to testify about the sway Madigan held over just about every aspect of political business in Springfield. And professor Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman, has been tapped as an expert witness who will describe for jurors “the structure, method, and operation of the Chicago political machine.”
The ComEd conspiracy charges alleged McClain, a former legislator and lobbyist whose connections to Madigan go back to their time in the General Assembly together in the 1970s, orchestrated a scheme to funnel jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the utility to Madigan-approved consultants in exchange for Madigan’s assistance with legislation the utility giant wanted passed in Springfield.
The indictment also alleged ComEd agreed to hire numerous summer interns from Madigan’s 13th Ward, and install Ochoa on the company’s board of directors in order to curry favor with the then-powerful speaker.
ComEd, meanwhile, entered into a deferred prosecution deal with prosecutors in July 2020, agreeing to pay a record $200 million fine and cooperate with the investigation in exchange for bribery charges being dropped in three years.
Madigan, who was dethroned from the speakership in January 2021, has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against him. He’s also vigorously defended making job recommendations, both before and after his indictment. Not only is “helping people find jobs not a crime,” Madigan wrote in 2020 to a legislative panel, it’s not even “ethically improper” for politicians to make job recommendations.
“To the contrary, I believe that it is part of my duties as a community and political leader to help good people find work — from potential executives to college interns, and more,” Madigan wrote. “What an employer chooses to do with that recommendation rests solely with their discretion.”
According to the filing, Marquez will testify that after Pramaggiore became CEO of ComEd, she sought to build up a relationship with Madigan that she thought was poor and detrimental to the company’s goals.
Working closely with McClain, who often referred to the speaker as “our friend” but almost never by name, Pramaggiore arranged for payments to be made to Madigan-approved associates through Doherty’s consulting company, Jay D. Doherty & Associates, and several other lobbying firms that served as “intermediaries,” the government filing alleged.
“Marquez is expected to further testify that while paying individuals as requested by Madigan and McClain did not guarantee legislative success, the purpose of the payments was to influence Madigan and to ensure Madigan did not act against ComEd and its legislative requests and agenda due to a failure to fulfill his hiring requests,” the filing stated.
The depth of Pramaggiore’s relationship with Madigan, McClain and Hooker is vividly outlined in her allegedly gushing comments following her advancement from ComEd CEO to the top position at an affiliate, Exelon Utilities.
In the May 2018 recorded call with McClain, Pramaggiore attributed her success to the trio and that she had made Madigan her “first call” when she learned of her promotion, making him “one of the few people that is in the know,” prosecutors said.
After thanking McClain for her promotion, she allegedly told him she would need his “help in a lot of different ways,” including for “strategizing nationally.”
She allegedly showed her appreciation for the Madigan team by exploring how to hire Mapes, whom Madigan tossed immediately in June 2018 following a midlevel clerk’s news conference in which she accused Mapes of harassment and sexual harassment.
Mapes served Madigan as his chief of staff, the clerk of the Illinois House and as executive director of the Madigan-led Democratic Party of Illinois.
In a recorded call on April 19, 2019, Hooker allegedly explained to Marquez that Pramaggiore wanted Mapes to work for her and wanted to “pay him but hide his contract in someone else’s,” according to the filing. Hooker allegedly suggested to “put him in as a consultant with McClain.”
Prosecutors noted in the filing that McClain had suggested to Marquez a similar arrangement, suggesting that ComEd could “hide things” by employing Mapes as a consultant through a third party.
But prosecutors wrote they expect a witness to testify that Pramaggiore “abandoned her plan to hire Madigan’s former chief of staff after she discovered the existence of the federal criminal investigation.”
Even so, the method of concealment had been used for years “to great effect” with subcontractors, prosecutors said.
The document also underscored the significant role that Hooker played in Madigan’s political effort to stay in power.
In 2019, a group was seeking to change the process for redrawing the legislative districts every year, arguing the new maps should be fairer and not dominated by political leaders like Madigan, a master of tilting districts to favor Democrats.
Prosecutors explained in the filing that the proposed change would have created an independent commission through a voter initiative on a statewide ballot, meaning Madigan “would lose the ability to affect district boundaries in his favor and in favor of the Democratic Party.”
Madigan opposed the proposed change, and Hooker headed a group that went to court to block the proposal. Arguing the case for Hooker’s group was Michael Kasper, who has served as Madigan’s top lawyer in government and Democratic politics.
In a lengthy recorded discussion with Marquez in February 2019, Doherty noted that Hooker checked in with him about Madigan’s allies getting the subcontracts and that Hooker headed the group that led the opposition, according to the filing.
According to the filing, Doherty suggested the arrangement is one that " I don’t think I’d tinker with that ... I really don’t.”
Marquez is expected to testify that he understood Doherty to be telling him that “there would be negative consequences from terminating the contract that sent payments to the Madigan’s subcontractors, even though they did no work.”
The coziness of Madigan’s operation with ComEd that Marquez is expected to explain to the jury is his belief that McClain asked the company to hire as an external lobbyist a friend of Madigan’s son, Andrew, prosecutors said.
Marquez allegedly did not wish to hire him, dragged his feet and complained to Pramaggiore, who suggested that Marquez reconsider, according to the filing.
“The lobbyist was thereafter hired,” the filing stated.
Prosecutors also said McClain made requests that included wanting to know whether ComEd’s legal department was “finding legal work for the father of Madigan’s son-in-law,” and asked the utility to keep him apprised of what bond companies and litigation attorneys the company used so he “could brief Madigan,” according to the filing.
Read the filing below:
