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CHICAGO (CN) — The federal corruption trial of ex-Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan continued Monday with testimony from former Chicago alderman-turned FBI informant Danny Solis.
Solis is one of the government’s star witnesses for the remaining “episodes” of corruption charges against Madigan, following the close of the “ComEd” episode last week. His testimony on Monday stretched from Shanghai to Springfield, Illinois, and involved suitcases full of money, illicit business deals, his affair with a Chinese language interpreter and an Indiana farm reportedly once owned by Oprah Winfrey.
But the real meat of Solis’ testimony for jurors on Monday involved two property developments that were pending in his city ward in 2017. One was for a high-rise apartment building in the city’s West Loop neighborhood, the other for a proposed hotel in Chicago’s Chinatown area.
With Solis’ help, prosecutors claim, Madigan hoped to have the developers of these projects hire his law firm Madigan & Getzendanner for real estate tax work.
Solis served as alderman of Chicago’s 25th Ward on the near southwest side from 1996 to January 2019. The ward grew to include more parts of the trendy West Loop area in 2015 and saw significant development while he was alderman. He also served as the city’s zoning chair from 2009 to January 2019. The two positions made Solis an influential presence in Chicago and Illinois politics, as real estate projects in Chicago with zoning issues had to pass through the zoning committee.
But Solis had skeletons in his own closet. He attended an Aug. 18, 2014, meeting with Madigan, Madigan’s law partner Bud Getzendanner, Chinese property developer Kin Chong and Chong’s stateside representative See Wong.
“I believe it’s a good firm, and I wanted to curry political favor with Mr. Madigan,” Solis told jurors and federal prosecutor Diane MacArthur on the stand Monday, regarding his presence at the 2014 meeting.
Unbeknownst to Solis and others at the meeting, Wong was wearing a video wire for the FBI — and as Wong was leaving the meeting, Solis suggested Chong’s project would benefit from hiring Madigan & Getzendanner.
“If he works with the Speaker, he will get anything he needs for the hotel,” Solis tells Wong in the video.
The government also had other evidence Solis had accepted kickbacks and favors from lobbyists and political operatives operating in the Chicago area while he was in office. Solis openly said as much on the stand Monday, detailing how he’d gotten trips to massage parlors for sexual favors, Viagra, sports tickets, a paid trip to Las Vegas, and the free use of a farm in Indiana for his son’s graduation party.
So after FBI agents showed up at Solis’ door on June 1, 2016, and showed him some of the dirt they had on him, he agreed to cooperate with their then-ongoing corruption investigations. His deferred prosecution agreement on a single bribery charge, which he signed with the government in December 2018, became public in April 2022.
He told jurors on Monday that the FBI had him focus on other issues between June 2016 and early June 2017 — referring to Chicago’s longest-serving alderman Ed Burke, convicted last December on separate federal corruption charges. Solis’ contact with Madigan picked up again starting in mid-June 2017. That’s when Solis says Madigan contacted him about a pending Chicago property development that caught the then-speaker’s interest.
“I was reading an article about a proposed real estate development … and the way the article read it seemed to say that it was in your ward,” jurors heard Madigan tell Solis in a June 12, 2017, call.
From there, Solis testified that he helped arrange a meeting between Madigan and the developers of the so-called “Union West” apartment project at the Madigan & Getzendanner law office on July 18, 2017. He secretly recorded video of that meeting, which jurors also saw Monday. But before that, on June 29, he met one-on-one with the Union West developer Andy Cretal in another secretly recorded meeting.
Solis suggested Cretal hire Madigan & Getzendanner, and while the developer was outwardly noncommittal, he didn’t shoot down the possibility outright.
“We’re gonna need some help on real estate taxes,” Cretal told Solis.
Solis told jurors Monday that he was pretty sure the developer understood that hiring Madigan & Getzendanner would be a good idea.
“I think he understands, so I think it’ll be ok,” Solis told Madigan on a recorded call from July 12, 2017.
“Very good, ok,” jurors heard Madigan respond.
On a prior, June 23 call, Solis used the phrase “quid pro quo” to refer to what Cretal “understood.”
“I think they understand how this works, you know, the quid pro quo, the quid pro quo,” he said.
Madigan made a point of chiding Solis on that point before the July 18 meeting with Cretal, not knowing that Solis was recording the speaker’s admonishment.
“You shouldn’t be talking like that,” Madigan tells Solis with the Union West developers in another room. “You’re just recommending our law firm … because if they don’t get a good result on their real estate taxes, the whole project will be in trouble.”
Around the same time, part of the property that Chong wanted to develop in Chinatown was a state-owned parcel of land being used as a parking lot. Moving forward with Chong’s hotel project would require transferring it from Illinois’ to Chicago’s ownership, an issue jurors heard Madigan and Solis discuss by phone.
However, jurors also heard Solis ask Madigan to keep discussions about the Chinatown development on “the QT.”
When MacArthur asked him why he wanted to keep the issue quiet, Solis explained he was worried then-Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and other Illinois Republicans might use it as political ammo against Chicago Democrats.
“I didn’t want people, especially in Rauner’s camp, to think this was something they could do against Democratic aldermen in the city,” Solis said on the stand.
Solis will likely speak more about the Chinatown deal on Tuesday. He has been on the stand since late Thursday afternoon, though there were no trial proceedings on Friday. His testimony is expected to last several days at least.
The rest of Madigan’s trial is expected to run into January.
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