Former Chicago Ald. Daniel Solis, who turned government mole to help federal investigators build cases against Ald. Edward Burke and ex-House Speaker Michael Madigan, has been charged with a bribery count.
The bare-bones, one-count criminal information alleged Solis, who abruptly retired as 25th Ward alderman in 2018 before his cooperation with the FBI was revealed, corruptly solicited campaign donations from an unidentified real estate developer in exchange for zoning changes in 2015, when Solis was head of the City Council Zoning Committee.
Those general allegations had already been made public by attorneys for Burke, who revealed in a court filing in 2020 that Solis had cut a deal with the U.S. attorney’s office known as a deferred prosecution agreement that meant he likely would escape conviction for his alleged misconduct.
As part of the deal, Solis was to be charged with taking campaign cash from a developer, but the U.S. attorney’s office agreed to drop the case if he continued to cooperate in the ongoing investigations, according to that filing.
The U.S. attorney’s office has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of a deferred prosecution agreement with Solis, but the charge filed Friday is likely the first step to finally putting it on the record.
Sources told the Tribune the case had been brought before a federal magistrate judge, and that its three-year window was scheduled to run out this year, meaning it would have to be extended.
The information had not been uploaded to the U.S. District Court docket as of Friday evening, and an arraignment date had not been set.
A spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Lausch declined to comment Friday.
Solis’ attorney, Lisa Noller, could not immediately be reached.
Solis’ agreement was believed to be unprecedented for a public official allegedly caught betraying the public trust — but then again, so was his cooperation.
By secretly recording conversations with Burke and Madigan over the phone and in person, Solis was in uncharted waters even in a state with a long history of government cooperators, becoming a linchpin in a sprawling investigation that targeted two old-guard members of the Chicago Democratic machine.
The deferred prosecution agreement means Solis will not only escape any jail time — he’s likely not going to be prosecuted for the crime at all. What’s more, the deal could allow the 72-year-old Solis to keep collecting his nearly $100,000 annual city pension, which could easily bring in a sizable sum from the taxpayer-funded system over the remainder of his lifetime.
Last, year, the Tribune interviewed nearly a dozen longtime members of the city’s legal community, including several who worked on public corruption cases for the U.S. attorney’s office, and none could remember such an arrangement being made for a public official caught abusing their office.
Solis’ work as an FBI mole began in mid-2016, when he was confronted by investigators who had secretly listened in on hundreds of his phone calls over the course of nearly a year, including conversations where the alderman solicited everything from campaign donations to sexual services at a massage parlor, court records show.
From August 2016 to May 2017, Solis wore a hidden wire and secretly recorded meetings with Burke, the then-powerful Finance Committee chairman and dean of the City Council. Many of the early conversations had to do with the massive renovation of the old main post office in Solis’ 25th Ward, which had also been a focus of the investigation of Solis, according to court records.
Those conversations, in which Burke allegedly talked about how he could use his position as Finance Committee chairman to push the developer to hire Burke’s private real estate tax firm, formed the backbone of prosecutors’ first request to a federal judge to tap Burke’s City Hall telephone lines on May 1, 2017, according to court records.
Some of the conversations Solis allegedly recorded with Burke have already entered the city’s political corruption lexicon, including one on May 26, 2017, when Solis told Burke he’d recently spoken with the post office project’s developer.
“So, did we land the, uh, the tuna?” Burke asked, according to the indictment.
Later in the conversation, Burke said he wanted to meet with the developer himself, and promised Solis there would be a “day of accounting” for him if Burke’s law firm wound up getting the developer’s business.
Solis entered into his deferred prosecution agreement with the government on Jan. 3, 2019, the day after Burke was first charged, according to Burke’s lawyers. Burke was indicted five months later on racketeering conspiracy and other charges alleging a host of corrupt schemes, including the allegations involving the old main post office deal. He has pleaded not guilty.
Meanwhile, Solis was also recording Madigan, the longtime House speaker and head of the Illinois Democratic Party and at the time widely considered the most powerful politician in the state.
According to the blockbuster 22-count racketeering indictment filed against Madigan last month, many of the recordings made by Solis centered on the sale of a piece of state-owned land in Chinatown that developers purportedly wanted to turn into a commercial development.
Though the land deal never was consummated, it’s been a source of continued interest for federal investigators, who in 2020 subpoenaed Madigan’s office for records and communications he’d had with key players.
Solis recorded numerous conversations with Madigan as part of the Chinatown land probe, including one where the speaker told Solis he was looking for a colleague to sponsor a House bill approving the parcel’s sale, according to the indictment against Madigan.
“I have to find out about who would be the proponent in the House,” Madigan allegedly told Solis in the March 2018 conversation. “We gotta find the appropriate person for that. I have to think it through.”
The indictment also alleged that Madigan met with then Gov-elect J.B. Pritzker in December 2018 in part to discuss a lucrative state board position for Solis, ostensibly as a reward for helping Madigan win law business.
Before that meeting, Solis allegedly recorded Madigan telling him the speaker’s communication with Pritzker did not need to be in writing,” according to the indictment. “I can just verbally tell him,” Madigan allegedly said.
Later in that same conversation, Madigan was recorded asking Solis to help steer insurance business to Madigan’s son, the Tribune has reported.
Madigan has pleaded not guilty, and his son, Andrew, has not been charged.
Solis’ cooperation, meanwhile, is at the center of pending motions by Burke’s attorneys to have evidence gleaned from the wiretaps on Burke’s cellphone and City Hall offices thrown out of court.
They accused prosecutors of directing Solis to have “scripted interactions” with Burke and lie about the post office deal to curry favor with the government in his own case. At the time, Solis himself had been recorded “committing a number of different crimes,” the defense motion stated.
“The government did not disclose that it instructed a desperate (Solis) to record his conversations with Ald. Burke, even though (Solis) told the government that he had no knowledge of Ald. Burke ever having been involved in corrupt activity in the 25 years they served together on the City Council,” their motion stated.
Burke’s lawyers alleged that despite Solis’ best efforts, Burke never agreed on tape to provide any official action in exchange for private business.
But in a filing earlier this year, prosecutors dismissed that notion, saying that the undercover recordings and other evidence revealed at least 23 instances in which Burke talked with Solis about an illegal scheme to extort legal business related to the post office project.
U.S. District Judge Robert Dow is expected to rule on the motion soon.
