In August 2018, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan asked then-Ald. Daniel Solis to help steer insurance business to Madigan’s son during a meeting about the alderman’s potential appointment to a lucrative state board, the Tribune has confirmed.
Madigan’s pitch, which was secretly recorded by Solis, was detailed in the blockbuster 22-count racketeering indictment filed against Madigan last week. According to the document, after Madigan and Solis talked about Solis’ possible board appointment, Madigan asked the alderman to “help a relative of Madigan and the relative’s employer obtain business from Organization B,” a Chicago-based community group.
Sources have told the Tribune that the relative was Andrew Madigan, the ex-speaker’s only son, who is an executive for Alliant Mesirow Insurance. Organization B named in the indictment is The Resurrection Project, a Pilsen-based group that’s received millions of dollars in state funds and political donations from Solis’ ward organization and other Chicago politicians over the years.
Neither Andrew Madigan nor The Resurrection Project has been accused of any wrongdoing.
Raul Raymundo, the nonprofit’s chief executive officer, confirmed the FBI reached out to his group last fall.
“The FBI contacted us about Alderman Solis and Andrew Madigan,” Raymundo said in a statement. “In response, we fully and truthfully cooperated with the FBI and will continue to do so. At no point were we pressured to do anything for anyone.”
Without addressing specifics, Raymundo said The Resurrection Project “retains brokers and vendors and always evaluates them for best practices, services and competitive pricing before they do any work” for the organization.
Raymundo said he takes pride in being transparent but would have no further comment “because this is an ongoing investigation.”
Michael Madigan, who has denied wrongdoing, pleaded not guilty to the charges in the indictment during a brief hearing Wednesday.
His lawyers, Sheldon Zenner and Gil Soffer, were not immediately available for comment Thursday. Andrew Madigan did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
Earlier this week, the Tribune requested state comptroller records involving The Resurrection Project’s public funding. They showed the group received a $5 million grant that started July 1, 2019, the beginning of the first full budget year under Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
The grant helped support Access to Justice, a statewide program designed to mitigate the consequences of deportation and family separation and expand community-led legal services, including for immigrants facing proceedings that could jeopardize their residence in Illinois and former inmates working to reintegrate their families.
The development of the Madigan-Solis meeting comes as several suburbs within Michael Madigan’s sphere of political influence have come under increasing federal scrutiny, including McCook, where longtime Mayor Jeffrey Tobolski pleaded guilty in 2020 to extorting a local restaurant and other fraud charges and is cooperating with federal authorities.
The FBI raided McCook’s Village Hall in 2019 as part of that probe, as well as town centers in Lyons and Summit. Madigan’s son has sought insurance business with those towns.
This overlap of Andrew Madigan’s insurance business with the political world long dominated by his father has raised questions about the longtime speaker’s public and private interests.
The reference in the indictment to Andrew Madigan’s business, even though he was not specifically named, is one of at least two veiled references prosecutors made in the 106 pages that outlined the case against the ex-speaker.
The Tribune previously reported the indictment also made a reference to $22,500, the exact amount of a 2017 consulting contract that an Illinois affiliate of AT&T disclosed to regulators. The AT&T affiliate is under federal scrutiny for potential criminal charges.
Madigan’s discussion with Solis allegedly unfolded Aug. 2, 2018, in a meeting where Solis, then the 25th Ward alderman, expressed interest in getting a state board post, which would pay more than $100,000 a year.
That conversation apparently was a ruse, since Solis at the time of that conversation had been cooperating with federal investigators for more than a year after being caught in criminal wrongdoing stemming from his position on the City Council’s Zoning Committee, court records show.
Then-Speaker Madigan, anticipating Pritzker would defeat Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, allegedly said he would help Solis land a job by going to the future governor.
“That’s what I would do,” Madigan allegedly explained, saying Solis would “come in” to the state position with the new governor.
Solis allegedly assured Madigan “there’s a lot of good stuff happening in my ward” and that the alderman would help Madigan land business for his private property tax law firm.
In return, Madigan allegedly assured Solis he would help get a state post: “Just leave it in my hands.”
According to the charges, Madigan then asked Solis to help his son get business from The Resurrection Project. There was no other mention of the exchange in the 106-page indictment.
Pritzker beat Rauner in November 2018 and took office in January 2019.
The Tribune first noted Andrew Madigan’s success in building the business within his father’s sphere of political influence in 2012, reporting his company had swiftly picked up business in more than a half-dozen suburbs, including three in which the speaker did favors for suburban mayors around the same time those suburbs hired the firm.
Chicago Heights Mayor David Gonzalez benefited from Madigan’s political machine in the closing days of an election. McCook’s Tobolski, who was mayor and a Cook County commissioner, got Madigan’s assurance that a legislative effort targeting dual officeholders was going nowhere. And Bridgeview Mayor Steven Landek was appointed to an open seat in the state Senate with Madigan’s help and is still in the upper chamber.
At the time, all three mayors said their connections to the speaker had nothing to do with their decision to hire the younger Madigan’s insurance firm. Tobolski now has resigned his public posts.
One longtime broker in Chicago Heights had accused Gonzalez of giving business to a firm Andrew Madigan pushed as “payback” for Michael Madigan’s help in the city election. The mayor had said it was a false allegation from a bitter man.
Also at that time, the speaker’s spokesman, Steve Brown, said any attempt to connect Andrew Madigan’s business to the work of his father was “kind of a stretch.”
Brown was referring to a Tribune series about ties between Madigan’s government decisions and the impact on clients of his private property tax law firm, saying the speaker had called those reports “garbage.”
“I talked to the speaker … and he said to me, ‘It looks like the garbage haulers are on a new route, and now they’re trying to dirty up my family,’ ” Brown said. “So that’s really about all I would have to say about any of this.”
Madigan was ousted in January 2021 when he could not garner enough votes to extend his nationwide record 36-year reign as speaker after he was implicated in the ComEd bribes-for-favors scandal.
