CHICAGO — By early 2019, Mike McClain had been a fixture around the Statehouse in Springfield for the better part of 50 years, first as a Democratic lawmaker in the 1970s and then as a high-profile contract lobbyist for decades.

Although he officially retired in late 2016, McClain could still be seen in the marble corridors of the Capitol building. He was especially likely to be in the third-floor office suite of his longtime friend, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, where his top aides and staffers were located.

McClain shared the secret to his success as a lobbyist during a conversation with one of these top staffers in February 2019; but he had no idea that FBI agents were listening to his call.

“Your client is just Mike Madigan,” McClain said. “It’s not the Democratic Party that’s hiring you… it’s not whoever’s hiring you, it’s not your mom and dad. The only person you care about is Mike Madigan. And if you think that way and frame your conversations that way, he or she will never second-guess you.

A federal grand jury heard that call Thursday, and others liked it, too; because prosecutors listened to nearly three dozen wiretaps recorded on McClain’s mobile phone between 2018 and 2019. Also seated in the courtroom were McClain and Madigan themselves. Using the former speaker’s authority, the two set up a “criminal enterprise” and engaged in blackmail and bribery.

McClain had already been convicted for his role in bribing the speaker with jobs and contracts for political allies at the electric company Commonwealth Edison, where McClain was the company’s top outside lobbyist for decades.

Read more: 40 years after he came to power and almost 4 years after his fall, former Speaker Madigan goes to trial | ‘ComEd Four’ found guilty on all charges in bribery case linked to former House Speaker Madigan

The two had a friendship dating back to the years when they were both representatives of the young state. And over the years, McClain became one of Madigan’s closest friends and advisors.

But the feds also allege McClain acted as the speaker’s “agent”; McClain sometimes used the term while performing what he referred to as “missions” from Madigan. One of those assignments in late 2018 involved convincing a senior state representative to retire before he was ready.

On the witness stand Thursday, former State Rep. Lou Lang (D-Skokie) described a phone call between him and McClain in November 2018, just two days after the 15th lawmaker won re-election.^This time.

Lang testified that he believed he would be promoted to House majority leader (a position second only to the speaker) when the new legislature convenes in January 2019, as he had in two previous cases involving Madigan’s case. may rise to the position of speaker himself.

Read more: Former lawmaker testified: Madigan’s confidant called on him to resign on the speaker’s order | Wiretaps show Madigan, through McClain, removed his ally from the legislature to protect himself

But McClain’s call provided a cold reality check. Lang had been publicly accused of sexual harassment earlier in the year but was quickly cleared by a Legislative Inspector General investigation.

Madigan had demanded that Lang relinquish his title as deputy majority leader after unrelated allegations of sexual harassment within the speaker’s political organization first emerged in the spring, at the height of the #MeToo movement. Shortly after the accusations against Lang, an employee of the speaker’s office accused Madigan’s longtime chief of staff of sexual harassment, which led to the speaker firing him.

Read more: Emails shown at trial detail Madigan world’s response to 2018 sexual harassment scandal

During the Nov. 8, 2018, conversation, McClain said she received a report that another woman was threatening to come forward with harassment allegations if Lang was reinstated in a leadership position in the House Democratic caucus.

“So I’m not talking anymore,” McClain said in a phone call played for the jury Thursday. “I represent someone who cares deeply about you and truly thinks you should move on.”

Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, Lang said there was no confusion about who McClain was talking about.

“The call made it clear that my career was at a dead end because the speaker was in control of my ability to move up the ranks,” Lang said.

Former lobbyist Mike McClain (left), a longtime confidant of former House Speaker Michael Madigan (R), is photographed at his previous hearings in public corruption cases at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago. (Capitol News Illinois photos by Andrew Adams)

McClain also urged Lang to follow the path he and many former lawmakers have taken: lobbying. He even assured Lang that he would help send Madigan’s clients his way, but Lang told Bhachu he believed the promise was “just an incentive to convince me to leave.” Ultimately, Lang resigned from the General Assembly in early 2019 after serving more than 30 years in the House of Representatives and has been operating as a registered lobbyist ever since.

Prosecutors also held a series of meetings between McClain and Madigan in which they discussed Lang’s situation and strategized on how best to push him into retirement. In a September 2018 conversation, Madigan asked McClain to “sit down with Lang,” and McClain did so at a breakfast meeting in late fall.

In another phone conversation a few days before his big talk with Lang, McClain asked Madigan when he should “lower the blast” on Lang, “because he doesn’t understand.”

Such conversations contradicted Madigan’s defense attorney Tom Breen’s opening statement earlier this week, when he claimed that Madigan was “completely unaware of what people were saying behind his back” in more than 200 wiretaps expected to be played at trial.

“There may be a reason why these people do what they do,” Breen said. “They have no authority to speak on behalf of Michael Madigan in this way. He doesn’t talk like that, he doesn’t act like that. “He never made any demands from anyone.”

But other recordings played in court Thursday also showed McClain acting at Madigan’s request. For example, in a May 2018 call during the final week of the General Assembly’s spring legislative session, Madigan asked McClain to step in front of former lobbyist Sam Panayotovich, a former lawmaker who left a message at the speaker’s office and asked to speak with him. Madigan.

“Are you in a position to advise Mr. Panayotovich to stay away from me?” Madigan asked McClain.

Within 10 minutes, McClain called the lobbyist and briefly explained to him that “the outlook wasn’t good at all” for the speaker to have a meeting with Panayotovich and his lobbying partner, Joe Berrios, who had recently been defeated in re-election. He made a bid for Cook County Assessor after his opponent accused him of widespread corruption.

Before more than 30 wiretaps were played Thursday, prosecutors also showed the jury a December 2016 letter McClain sent to Madigan. In the letter, McClain wrote: “He said he wanted to inform my ‘real’ client that I was retiring as a lobbyist” but that he was willing to perform “duties” for the speaker.

The letter, addressed to both the speaker and his wife, Shirley Madigan, read, “At the end of the day, I stand with my rifle on the bridge for and with the Madigan family.” “I will never leave your side, Shirley and Mike.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government news to hundreds of news organizations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article appeared for the first time Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.