CHICAGO (CN) — Closing arguments in the federal corruption trial of ex-Chicago alderman Ed Burke were in full swing on Thursday, two days after prosecutors and defense attorneys both rested their cases on Tuesday.
Throughout the day, Burke himself sat dispassionately at the defense table or milled about outside the courtroom, dressed in a pinstripe suit with a blue pocket square.
U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur actually began the government's closing arguments on Wednesday, but she had so many issues to tackle that her speech continued into Thursday and still took up the entire morning and part of the afternoon. Over the course of about six hours — during which at least one juror briefly fell asleep — she meticulously summarized the 19 overlapping corruption charges Burke and his codefendants Peter Andrews and Charles Cui collectively face. She also laid out the timeline, from 2016 to 2018, over which the government claims those wrongdoings took place.
“These actions taken by each of these three men flipped our system from right to wrong, from legal to illegal, from above board to thoroughly corrupt," MacArthur said Wednesday.
Using color-coded charts, she repeated to the jury that there are four "buckets" of incidents that the charges apply to. Burke is involved in all of them, facing 14 charges for bribery, racketeering and extortion. Andrews, formerly one of Burke's top aides, is implicated in only a single bucket and faces five charges for extortion and making false statements to federal investigators. Cui, a local property owner and immigration lawyer, is likewise only implicated in a single bucket. Federal prosecutors also charged him with lying to the FBI, as well as multiple bribery counts.
There is no evidence of Burke or his codefendants directly asking for cash payouts in any of the "buckets", MacArthur said, but three of them involve Burke allegedly trying to get business and property owners into hiring his law firm Klafter & Burke.
“Edward Burke was a powerful and corrupt politician and this was his racket, his pattern of corrupt racketeering," MacArthur said.
It's undisputed that Burke was, for many years, one of the most powerful and well-connected politicians in Illinois. Besides being Chicago's longest-serving city councilor, holding office from 1969 until 2023 when he chose not to run for re-election, he also served as head of the city's powerful finance committee for over three decades and was an ally of ex-Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, who is similarly facing 23 federal racketeering charges with trial slated to start next April. His wife Anne Burke, who has attended several days of trial, is also a former Illinois Supreme Court justice.
But the case against Burke depends on whether he used power and influence for selfish ends — for his own if not for himself. In the single bucket of charges which does not involve his law firm, the government accused Burke of trying in 2017 to strongarm Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History into hiring Molly Gabinski, his goddaughter and daughter of his longtime city council ally, former alderman Terry Gabinski. He wanted the museum to offer her a paid internship position, at one point implying that he could kill a visitor fare hike the museum wanted to implement if they did not comply.
In another bucket set between 2017 and 2018, Burke and Andrews allegedly held up renovations to a Burger King franchise in his ward until the wealthy franchise owner Shoukat Dhanani made overtures of hiring Klafter and Burke. A third episode, built on conversations secretly recorded by ex-city councilor-turned FBI mole Danny Solis, paints Burke as refusing to help move along renovations and tax funding to Chicago's Old Post Office between 2016 and 2018 until he "landed the tuna" — that is, signed on the Old Post Office's new owner 601W Companies as a Klafter & Burke client.
“As far as I’m concerned, they can go fuck themselves,” Burke said in a conversation that Solis recorded in October 2017, after Solis informed Burke that 601W was seeking tax increment financing for the Old Post Office renovations. “Good luck getting it on the agenda.”
"This was Mr. Burke's way of saying he was in charge," MacArthur said of Burke's alleged stonewalling of the Old Post Office renovations.
The final incident involving Cui in late 2017 has the commercial landlord hiring Klafter & Burke for tax appeal work at one of his properties, in exchange for Burke trying to help him get permits for a pole sign at another property.
But as Burke's defense attorney Joseph Duffy pointed out after beginning his own closing arguments on Thursday afternoon, no one in any of these buckets ever passed money to Burke. And fees for property tax appeal legal work are not always guaranteed.
“When they get a client they don't know if they’re gonna get one dime until it goes through this whole lengthy process,” Duffy said.
Additionally, Molly Gabinski never took a job at the Field Museum and their fare hike went ahead as planned, the Dhananis finished their Burger King renovations without ever hiring Klafter & Burke, and though Cui did hire Klafter & Burke, he never secured the pole sign permits he wanted.
Even in the Old Post Office affair, though an affiliate of 601W did eventually hire Klafter & Burke, Duffy painted this more as the result of Danny Solis' selfish meddling than Burke's own ambitions. He claimed Solis repeatedly "chased" 601W's acquisitions director Harry Skydell over the course of 2016 and 2017 in a bid to have 601W hire Burke, the exact incriminating outcome Solis' FBI handlers were hoping to catch the then-alderman in. Without results, Duffy argued, Solis could have faced jail time for his own corruption allegations.
“It was just a continuous harassment of Skydell because Solis needed somebody to hire Ed Burke. Why? Because Danny Solis did not want to go to jail. It’s that simple,” Duffy said.
Duffy also attributed some of Burke's more colorful comments, such as the "they can go fuck themselves" remark, to the 79-year-old's "old Irish temper."
“He never intended, or thought he was doing, anything wrong,” Duffy said.
Duffy's closing arguments will conclude tomorrow, though between the other defendants' closings and attorneys on both sides still needing to hash out jury instructions, it's yet unclear when jurors will begin deliberating the case.
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