For the second time in the span of seven months, then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan called up Chicago Ald. Danny Solis after reading about a proposed real estate development in the alderman’s ward.
“Danny, I think there’s a, a proposed development in – it’s called Peoria Park,” Madigan said in the January 2018 call, apparently conflating a separate effort to build an apartment complex called “ParkWorks” in Pilsen with the mixed-use tower project in Chicago’s booming West Loop neighborhood. A little more than a mile apart in Solis’ 25th Ward, both bordered Peoria Street. The Pilsen project was never built.
“Is that gonna go ahead?” Madigan asked Solis, the chair of the Chicago City Council’s all-important Zoning Committee.
Solis told Madigan that he believed it was, though he wanted to check to make sure. He promised to call the speaker back the next morning with an answer.
“And you know why I’m interested,” Madigan said, more of a statement than a question.
“Yes, yes,” Solis responded.
Nearly seven years later, the former alderman explained the wiretapped exchange to a federal jury. Solis told the jurors that Madigan wanted Solis to introduce him to the developer behind the West Loop project in order to pitch his property tax law firm’s services.
Read more: Ex-Chicago Ald. Danny Solis, who secretly recorded Madigan for FBI, takes witness stand
“Did you understand that without Mr. Madigan expressly saying he wanted an introduction to the developer?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur asked Solis, during his third day on the witness stand Tuesday in the former speaker’s corruption trial.
“Yes,” Solis replied, eyes trained on the prosecutor. His gaze never wandered to where Madigan sat at the head of his defense table in the middle of the courtroom.
The powerful speaker had made a similar call to Solis the previous June, again asking without asking for an introduction to another West Loop apartment developer. The first call, made a little more than a year after Solis began cooperating with the FBI, sparked the feds’ interest in Madigan and kicked off an informal partnership between the two Democrats.
At the direction of FBI agents, Solis suggested he’d make his approvals of zoning changes necessary for the Union West apartment complex – the project Madigan called him about in June 2017 – contingent on the developer hiring the speaker’s law firm.
It wasn’t true; Solis had already committed to supporting the zoning changes. But jurors on Monday saw secretly recorded video of Solis pushing Madigan’s firm to the developer and video of the developer sitting down at the downtown Chicago law offices of Madigan & Getzendanner. Solis followed up on the issue at least three times, according to wiretapped calls prosecutors played Monday and Tuesday.
Solis brought several developers to Madigan’s law office over the next year, including those Solis put on the speaker’s radar. Each time, the alderman would introduce the developers to Madigan and his law partner. Solis would make occasional comments while Madigan’s longtime law partner Vincent “Bud” Getzendanner did most of the talking.
By the time they were arranging for a meeting with Old Chicago Post Office developer Harry Skydell in late summer 2018, the meetings had almost become routine; Solis remarked that it was Getzendanner’s presentation that “really seals the deal.”
Madigan had expressed interest in meeting Skydell after a June 20, 2018 meeting with the developer of the Union West project. In a post-meeting chat in Madigan’s private office, Solis asked for help getting appointed to a state board in the future. The alderman promised the speaker he would “continue to get you legal business.”
Madigan then brought up Skydell almost immediately.
Solis asked about a state board seat at the FBI’s direction, he testified Tuesday. But both men followed up on their commitments after the meeting. Solis asked Skydell if he’d be willing to meet with Madigan, and the speaker put together a list of state and city boards Solis might be interested in – along with their compensation.
Solis saw the list again on Tuesday. MacArthur handed him the manila folder Madigan originally sent it in – with the speaker’s business card paperclipped to the top of the dozen pages.
In a meeting with Madigan a few weeks later to discuss the future appointment, the alderman said he planned on running for reelection in 2019, but intended to only serve half of his term. Then he would be ready for an appointment.
But it was a lie. In fact, more than two years into his FBI cooperation at that point, Solis knew he wouldn’t be able to run again, though he wouldn’t publicly announce his decision to not seek a sixth full term for a few more months.
Tie-less in a pink button down shirt, the normally formal Madigan went over the list of state boards with Solis, offering anecdotes about some of the names he came across. Solis said he was surprised by how much the members of certain state boards made each year.
“The ones that impressed me – I guess you can guess which ones really impressed me,” Solis said. “The Commerce Commission and the Labor (Relations Board) – they’re both in the hundreds. I’d be very interested in those two.”
The two then discussed how Madigan would go to the assumed future Gov. JB Pritzker for the appointment and how they’d navigate the politics of getting confirmed in the Illinois Senate.
After a few minutes, Solis made an even bigger promise than he’d made over the phone weeks earlier.
“This is what I want to tell you, Mike: I’ve helped you in the past. I’m gonna continue to help you,” Solis said before listing off several major real estate developers in Chicago. “There’s a lot of good stuff happening in my ward. And you’ve been very good to me and I’m gonna help you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Madigan said.
As for the future board appointment, the speaker assured Solis it would be taken care of.
“Just leave it in my hands,” he said.
Solis then pivoted to Skydell’s upcoming visit to Chicago, saying he would arrange a meeting for Madigan’s firm to pitch its services. When the alderman asked if there was “anything else you’re interested in,” Madigan told Solis there was “one thing you can do,” holding up a business card for a nonprofit his son Andrew Madigan was trying to do business with.
“Just ask him, ‘Give Andrew something,’” Madigan said of the nonprofit’s director, who the speaker said didn’t return his son’s calls after an initial meeting in Solis’ office.
The speaker then dropped the business card back into the envelope with his own, along with the document about state boards, Solis testified Tuesday after inspecting the card from his perch on the witness stand.
Much of Tuesday’s testimony focused on the lengthy but ultimately fruitless saga of an attempt to develop a piece of land currently used as a parking lot in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood. Solis brought it up to Madigan as they debriefed after the July 2017 meeting in which the alderman brought the Union West developers to the speaker’s law office.
The developers interested in the Chinatown land, Solis promised, would be interested in contracting with Madigan’s firm for property tax work. But the land would first need to be transferred from state ownership to the city of Chicago, which could then sell it to the developers.
Madigan put his longtime friend and advisor Mike McClain – a recently retired Statehouse lobbyist – on the project. McClain, who the jury has heard in multiple wiretapped calls earlier in the trial describe himself as an “agent” of the speaker, is Madigan’s co-defendant in the government’s case.
Read more: Madigan co-defendant had unparalleled access to speaker, ex-top aide testifies | ‘My client is the speaker’: Jury hears wiretapped calls of Madigan co-defendant, longtime friend
McClain met with Solis twice in the fall of 2017. The alderman explained in one secretly videotaped meeting that helping bring the development to fruition was like a “legacy” project for him, as he wasn’t sure he’d run for city council again in 2019.
After describing the importance of the project to McClain, Solis was also frank about how Madigan believed the Chinatown developers intended to hire his firm for property tax work.
“So in the past I have been able to steer some work to Mike,” Solis said. “And these guys will do the same thing.”
The pair’s December 2017 meeting then turned to politicians they believed should be more careful, as McClain mentioned he’d recently read the U.S. Department of Justice was sending 40 more assistant U.S. attorneys to Chicago. Though they were assigned to help with gang cases, McClain predicted they’d quickly want to go after white collar crime, naming possible targets including then-state Rep. Luis Arroyo and then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval.
“He’s very aggressive and he says and does some things that I think eventually will get him in trouble,” Solis said.
Sandoval’s aggression did prove to be a hurdle the following spring as the legislation to transfer the Chinatown land from state ownership to the city met with challenges in Springfield. Sandoval, the powerful chair of the Transportation Committee in the Illinois Senate, hadn’t moved the bill. McClain, Solis and Madigan all suspected it was leftover bad blood from his daughter losing her bid to the Cook County Board in a primary election in March.
In an April 23, 2018 call between McClain and Solis, the alderman described Sandoval as “a piece of work.”
“You know, I think he’s an indictment waiting to happen, frankly,” McClain said. “Just the way he talks — if the feds ever taped anybody around him, you know, they’d be after him.”
McClain was unaware that at that very moment, the FBI had wiretaps both on Solis’ cell phone and his.
But his earlier prediction came true: the feds indicted Sandoval in late 2019 after public raids on his offices and home. They also arrested Arroyo that fall in an unrelated bribery scheme. Sandoval died of COVID-19 complications in late 2020 after cooperating with the feds post-pleading guilty to accepting red light camera-related bribes, while Arroyo is serving a prison sentence after pleading guilty to attempting to bribe a sitting state senator on gambling-related legislation.
Another name mentioned in McClain and Solis’ earlier conversation, former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo, was also indicted for tax evasion related to no-work contracts McClain arranged for him with both electric utility Commonwealth Edison and AT&T Illinois. Both alleged schemes also make up the framework of the government’s case against Madigan and McClain.
McClain had hired Republican lobbyist Nancy Kimme for the Chinatown land transfer project, believing she would be able to work with Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration and shield the fact that Madigan, the governor’s political nemesis, was behind the idea.
But despite Kimme’s efforts, on the last day of lawmakers’ spring legislative session in May 2018, McClain had to tell Madigan that “hurdle after hurdle” ultimately meant the bill wouldn’t be going anywhere.
“Yeah, sure, alright,” Madigan said. “I mean, put the file in the drawer for a while.”
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