Former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke used his power ‘to punish and extort,’ prosecutors say in closing arguments of corruption trial

CHICAGO — Ed Burke, for years the most powerful alderman in Chicago, resident historian of the City Council, anointer of judges and head of the influential Finance Committee, sat back in his chair in a federal courtroom Wednesday as closing arguments in his landmark corruption trial got underway.

Across the room, Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur made a sweeping gesture toward Burke, telling jurors they’d heard a “steady drumbeat of unlawful activity” over the past several weeks. And at the center of it, she said, “is this man.”

Burke, dressed in a dark gray suit, green tie and his trademark ivory pocket square, held a slight frown but did not otherwise react..

That dramatic beginning was followed by more than three hours of MacArthur painting an excruciatingly detailed and unflattering portrait of Burke, the fallen 14th Ward power broker who for decades stood at the pinnacle of the old Chicago Democratic political machine.

Despite the polished veneer he presented to the public, Burke was corrupt to the core, MacArthur said, petty, fiercely protective of his own power, and constantly looking for a chance to line his own pockets.

“Mr. Burke’s hand was out again and again, demanding money and benefits from the very people he was supposed to act on behalf of,” MacArthur told jurors. “Ed Burke was a powerful and corrupt politician and this was his racket.”

Arguments in the landmark racketeering trial are capping off a hot-button case that laid bare the inner workings of Chicago politics.

Closings are expected to be lengthy, with prosecutors’ initial argument expected to last about five hours in total.

Burke’s lawyers will then have a chance to address the jury. They’ve previously said there was no evidence Burke ever demanded anything in exchange for an official act and noted that for all of the allegations, he was never paid a dime by anyone.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall has said she is hopeful jurors will get the case by the end of the week.

Among the spectators in Kendall’s 25th-floor courtroom was Chris Kennedy, a scion of the Kennedy family who ran for Illinois governor in 2018. Kennedy sat and chatted with Burke’s wife, Anne, the former chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, before the jury was called in.

Also in attendance was current Alderman Jim Gardiner, 45th Ward, who told one of Burke’s lawyers he came over to watch after attending the City Council meeting. During a break in the action, Gardiner, who recently was the subject of a separate federal bribery investigation but has not been charged, walked up to Burke and shook his hand. “Good to see you,” Burke said.

As MacArthur got into the meat of her argument, she displayed some of Burke’s own words to the jurors, reminding them of some of the case’s most memorable moments, including when Burke said a developer could “go (expletive) themselves” after they allegedly acted too slowly in giving his private law firm business.

It was a theme she hammered at again and again, painting Burke as a classic Chicago “where’s mine?” ward boss, willing to use the power of his elected office “to satisfy his own greed and to line his own pockets.”

“Edward Burke used his public authority and his power to punish and extort,” she said. “Edward Burke used his power to get what he wanted for himself.”

MacArthur then launched into a detailed recitation of the 19 counts of the indictment, which were color-coded to match the individual charges to Burke and his two co-defendants and assign each to one of the four main alleged schemes.

The racketeering case alleges that Burke used his significant City Hall power to try to get business for his private law firm from developers of the Old Post Office, owners of a Burger King in his Southwest Side 14th Ward and a developer desperate to install a sign for a Binny’s Beverage Depot in Portage Park.

He is also accused of threatening to block an admission fee increase at the Field Museum to retaliate against officials who failed to give a paid internship to a daughter of one of his longtime City Council allies.

During the Burger King episode, Burke made the link between his public power and his private business extremely explicit, MacArthur said.

Burke was aggressive about getting face time with the Texas-based owners of the Burger King, and during a phone call with the owner’s son, he said they were going to “talk about the real estate tax” representation and also the need for them to discuss expediting the eatery’s permits.

“This was a direct, in your face, ‘I want your business’ move by Mr. Burke,” MacArthur said, adding that linking his firm’s hiring with the permit approvals was corrupt. “This statement alone ... shows you Mr. Burke crossed those lines and committed a crime.”

While Burke’s team has argued that the alderman was concerned about the Burger King having the proper permits to move forward on the job, MacArthur told jurors that was just a “pretext” for Burke to seek law business from the owner of dozens of restaurants in the Chicago area.

MacArthur maintained Burke was “attempting to leverage his position, his power” as a public official by talking about permits, but she contended the fight over permits merely served as “background noise” because he wanted to meet with the Burger King owners to solicit tax appeal business.

Burke entertained the owners at a private country club and pitched his law firm to handle Burger King tax appeals, MacArthur said. Burke did not sign a simple letter of aldermanic support for the project, MacArthur said, because Burke “had yet to see” if he would get any tax business.

She also argued that Burke moved to have the Burger King remodeling shut down when the owners failed to give him business, and when Burke saw activity at the restaurant, he called co-defendant Peter Andrews Jr.,a longtime aide who responded he would “play as hardball as I can.”

MacArthur used that comment to tell jurors that Andrews should be called “Hardball Pete,” a contrast to the softer label of “Part-Time Pete” that his defense team presented to the jury in its opening statement last month.

The Burger King owners eventually did not give Burke any legal business, MacArthur said, but that does not mean Burke and Andrews should get a “free pass.”

The alleged Field Museum shakedown, meanwhile, “had nothing to do with protecting one of the jewel museums of the city,” MacArthur said. Instead, it was all about doing his former City Council comrade a favor.

MacArthur played a key wiretapped phone call in which Burke dressed down the Field Museum’s government affairs director over the perceived oversight, telling her, “If the Chairman of the Committee on Finance calls the President of the Park Board, your proposal’s gonna go nowhere.”

“That is a true ‘take your breath away’ moment,” MacArthur said.

Burke’s muscle created “a panic station situation” at the museum, she said. The museum’s then-president, Richard Lariviere, who was good friends with Burke, immediately snapped into action, calling the alderman and apologizing profusely while promising to get to the bottom of what happened. “When you call, Ed, we jump,” Lariviere said on the recording.

In a flurry of emails and meetings, the museum’s top officials strategized on how best to placate Burke, who had a history of making fee increase proposals difficult for the city’s museums and could easily quash theirs.

MacArthur’s arguments are slated to pick back up Thursday morning, when she will outline the evidence the jurors heard about the pole-sign matter and — perhaps most significantly — the alleged scheme to shake down developers of the Old Post Office.

Some of the most intriguing evidence in the trial centered on the Old Post Office, specifically the videos of Burke secretly recorded by ex-Alderman Daniel Solis, 25th Ward.

Solis, who turned FBI mole in 2016 and cooperated extensively against Burke and others, secretly recorded dozens of conversations with Burke that were played for the jury. He was called to the stand Tuesday by Burke’s defense in an attempt to dirty him up, poke holes in his cooperation and suggest that Solis enticed Burke and fed him FBI-scripted lies to try to get Burke to say incriminating things on tape.

Prosecutors declined to question Solis on the stand, indicating that their closing arguments could focus largely on the tapes themselves — not the man who made them.

The recordings include lines that have surely stuck in jurors’ minds, perhaps most memorably when Burke asked Solis on a wiretapped call, “So did we land the, uh, the tuna?” when talking about getting the Old Post Office business.

Burke, 79, who served 54 years as alderman before leaving the City Council in May, is charged with 14 counts including racketeering, federal program bribery, attempted extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity.

His longtime ward aide, Andrews, 73, is charged with one count of attempted extortion, one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, two counts of using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity and one count of making a false statement to the FBI.

Real estate developer Charles Cui, 52, is facing counts of federal program bribery, using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity and making false statements to the FBI.

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