By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]
CHICAGO – It’s been a month since the jury in former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s federal corruption trial last heard the name of star government witness Danny Solis during opening statements.
The government’s brief explanation that the ex-Chicago alderman agreed to cooperate with the FBI after “abusing his own office” – and the defense’s description of Solis as a “real criminal” who took bribes of cash, Viagra and prostitutes – may well have faded from jurors’ minds during four weeks of testimony related to electric utility Commonwealth Edison’s alleged bribes to Madigan.
But late Thursday afternoon, the jury saw Solis in the flesh as the disgraced politician entered the courtroom, taking the witness stand for the first hour of testimony that could stretch past the first week of December.
“My name is Daniel Solis, S-O-L-I-S,” the ex-alderman said, as Madigan peered intently at him through reading glasses he’s taken on and off during trial, pen poised with a nearly filled yellow legal pad on his lap. “I was alderman of the 25th Ward.”
“I was charged with bribery,” Solis said of the singular charge prosecutors brought against him in April 2022 after nearly six years of cooperation. “For trying to solicit campaign contributions from a developer that had a pending application in my zoning committee.”
Solis had been chair of the Chicago City Council’s powerful Zoning Committee for a decade before he left office in 2019.
Solis testified that he’d entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the feds years before, and that he’d been promised the case against him would disappear – contingent on his truthful testimony in Madigan’s trial. The single count of bribery would otherwise carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, he said.
“As long as I cooperated with the federal government and I cooperated truthfully, that charge would be dropped,” Solis said.
Prior to Solis’ appearance that began 45 minutes before trial broke for its usual weekend schedule, the jury heard again from FBI Special Agent Ryan McDonald, one of the lead agents in an investigation that long predated Madigan but nevertheless caught the powerful speaker in its tenterhooks. McDonald had previously testified about the feds’ wiretaps on Madigan co-defendant Mike McClain and detailed how he and another agent approached ComEd executive Fidel Marquez and asked him to cooperate with the FBI in January 2019.
Guided by questions from Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, who has also long been involved in the investigation, McDonald laid out the decadelong timeline of FBI interest in Solis, dating back to a 2014 meeting between Solis, Madigan and a real estate developer. That developer, See Wong, was already cooperating with the FBI after he’d been caught committing fraud related to an apartment complex he’d built in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood.
“Mr. Solis requested Mr. Wong and his client attend a meeting with Michael Madigan,” McDonald said, detailing what led up to the Aug. 18, 2014 meeting at the speaker’s property tax law firm office in downtown Chicago.
The developer-turned-FBI mole had been pursuing a letter of support from Solis for a hotel project in Chinatown, which was in Solis’ 25th Ward. Solis allegedly told Wong that he’d lend his support if he and his associate, a Chinese real estate developer, met with Madigan about the speaker representing the project on property tax appeals.
Jurors saw a brief excerpt of Wong’s video recording from the day of the meeting during opening statements from Madigan’s attorneys. In the clip, Wong and Solis were leaving Madigan’s office after the meeting and the alderman assured him, “You’re gonna benefit from being with the speaker.”
Within the week, Solis penned the all-important letter of support for the project. The FBI began wiretapping Solis’ phone a month later.
McDonald acknowledged that an administrative error led to a search warrant affidavit from June 2016 – the time of the FBI approach – accidentally being unsealed and available for public viewing in January 2019. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on the explosive revelation that Solis had been cooperating with the government for 2 ½ years, secretly recording conversations with powerful Chicago Ald. Ed Burke, whose City Hall office had been raided by the FBI in dramatic fashion in November 2018.
The feds used evidence obtained by Solis in Burke’s corruption trial last year, but prosecutors did not call Solis as a witness, instead deciding to preserve his testimony for Madigan’s trial. They didn’t even question Solis when Burke’s attorneys called him as a witness in their defense case.
In an email shown to the jury while McDonald was on the witness stand, McClain forwarded one of the articles to an assistant in Madigan’s 13th Ward office, suggesting she share it with the speaker.
Less than a week later, the newspaper reported that Wong had been secretly recording the August 2014 meeting at Madigan’s law offices.
“Had Mr. Solis’ cover effectively been blown by these newspaper articles?” Bhachu asked McDonald.
“Yes,” McDonald replied.
McDonald told the jury that the FBI’s unfolding investigation hadn’t been focused on Madigan until 2017, a year into Solis’ cooperation with the FBI. It was then that Madigan called Solis and asked the alderman to introduce him to the developer behind a major proposed apartment project in Chicago’s booming West Loop neighborhood.
Per Solis’ cooperation agreement, the alderman told his FBI contacts, who then directed Solis to conjure up a ruse: Solis told Madigan that the developer understood that it would get the necessary approvals for its project if it contracted with the speaker’s law firm.
For the next year, Solis would continue leading Madigan into the FBI’s trap as the speaker sought more introductions to real estate developers. Projects Madigan inquired about included the redevelopment of Chicago’s Old Main Post Office and potentially putting an apartment complex on a parcel of land in Chinatown that was owned by the state and being used as a parking lot.
In 2018, the FBI directed Solis to seek Madigan’s assistance to be appointed to a seat on a state board that paid at least $93,000 annually, and to make the ask contingent on bringing the speaker more property tax business. But incoming Gov. JB Pritzker never made the appointment.
Cross-examination of McDonald grew hot as Madigan attorney Dan Collins accused the FBI of creating a trap just to see if the speaker would fall into it.
“Just as you directed Solis to say false things to Madigan, the same is true of other folks,” he said, citing the involvement of McClain and Statehouse lobbyist Nancy Kimme in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to get the state to transfer ownership of the Chinatown land so it could be sold to the developer. “So you know that after Danny Solis told false information to Nancy Kimme, she talked to Mike McClain about it.”
“Yes,” McDonald replied.
“That false information – it spreads, right?” Collins asked.
“I don’t know,” McDonald said.
In the brief time Solis was on the witness stand Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur was only able to lead him through basic questions about his cooperation agreement with the government and some of his personal background and duties as alderman and zoning committee chair.
Solis testified that he first met Madigan in the late 1980s while pushing for school reform legislation in Springfield several years before he was appointed to the city council in 1996. The ex-alderman immigrated to Chicago with his mother and sisters from Mexico at age 6, eventually becoming a community activist and finally alderman for more than two decades.
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