Jury sees relentless ComEd job placement requests from Madigan co-defendant

[November 09, 2024]  By Hannah Meisel

CHICAGO – Had they been any other job applicants, electric utility Commonwealth Edison likely wouldn’t have given a second look to candidates who made “politically inappropriate” comments during an interview, failed basic screening tests or didn’t even show up to take those tests – twice.

Some of the company’s top executives wouldn’t have bent over backwards to find placements for a disbarred lawyer, a man who “bombed” his interview, or a woman who’d already “refused” five interview opportunities and indicated she wouldn’t be willing to work emergency “storm duty” shifts expected of all ComEd employees.

But those weren’t just any job applicants, according to hours of testimony a federal jury heard on Thursday. They were recommended by former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and passed to ComEd by the speaker’s longtime friend and advisor Mike McClain, who was also the utility’s longest-serving contract lobbyist in Springfield.

In one wiretapped call played Thursday, McClain summed up his philosophy about companies like ComEd responding to requests from influential public officials.

“That’s what happens when you’re in this game,” he said in a 2018 conversation with Madigan’s son, Andrew. “You never know, maybe someday you can ask for a favor.”

Prosecutors have interpreted Madigan and McClain’s job recommendations as repeated solicitations of bribes from ComEd, alleging that in exchange, the powerful speaker helped push the utility’s preferred legislation in Springfield.

A jury last year already convicted McClain and three other former ComEd executives and lobbyists for orchestrating the bribery scheme. Now McClain and Madigan face their own bribery and racketeering trial, which just wrapped its third week and is expected to go well into January, according to a new estimate from U.S. District Judge John Blakey on Thursday.

The former speaker’s legal defense claims prosecutors are attempting to criminalize job recommendations made by public officials. McClain’s attorneys frame getting Madigan’s recommendations hired at ComEd as relationship maintenance with the most powerful politician in Illinois – a feature of any good lobbying strategy.

ComEd’s former top lawyer testified earlier in trial that he didn’t believe the Madigan allies he helped to get hired had a direct link to the utility’s victories on three key bills between 2011 and 2016, which he helped pass afteryears of hard-fought negotiations.

But ComEd’s chief internal lobbyist-turned-government mole, Fidel Marquez, has told the jury otherwise during his three days on the witness stand so far.

Marquez, who became a cooperating witness the same hour the FBI approached him early one morning in January 2019, has repeatedly told the jury that the dozens of job recommendations he fielded over the years were intended to “keep Madigan positively disposed to our legislative agenda.”

The first two days of Marquez’s testimony were focused on the utility’s contracts with the speaker’s political allies, including a law firm owned by major Democratic fundraiser Victor Reyes and the appointment of businessman Juan Ochoa to ComEd’s board. The jury also saw a series of undercover videos Marquez made detailing how Madigan’s top political workers and other allies were indirectly paid thousands of dollars monthly for performing little to no work for the utility.

But on Thursday, jurors got a glimpse of Marquez’s overflowing inbox as prosecutors took him through nearly 80 email exhibits related to job and internship requests for everyday people, mostly from Madigan’s 13th Ward power base on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

McClain could be relentless in his requests, sometimes refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer, even when Marquez told him that an applicant was rejected by a certain ComEd department because he or she was unqualified.

The jury saw three months’ worth of emails about one applicant who, Marquez told McClain, didn’t have the minimum qualifications for even an entry-level analyst job . Still, Marquez secured the candidate an interview for ComEd’s IT support team in the winter of 2014 after McClain told him Madigan “asks about him every week.”

But it didn’t go well.

In addition to lacking technical skills, the applicant didn’t even have the sort of “soft skills that might compensate,” ComEd’s vice president for IT told Marquez in an email.

“Some of his comments were politically inappropriate and could use some polishing,” the email said. “This would be a HUGE stretch to extend him a position if we had an opening.”

Marquez forwarded the feedback to McClain, who responded with a disappointed warning invoking Madigan by referring to him as he so often did as “our friend.”

Mike McClain, the former top contract lobbyist for electric utility Commonwealth Edison, exits the Dirksen Federal Courthouse on Wednesday, Nov. 6 with his attorney Patrick Cotter. McClain is on trial alongside ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, his longtime friend. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)

“Okay…..” McClain wrote back, employing his signature excessive ellipses. “I hate being in a position to have a string of ‘no’s’ to our friend….”

Later in 2014, Marquez was not being as responsive as McClain would’ve liked to his emails about scheduling job screening tests for two applicants for meter reader jobs. After a few emails with no reply from Marquez, McClain wrote him a lengthy note one evening that November.

“I was at dinner last night with a friend of ours and he started talking about you,” McClain wrote, again referring to Madigan. “He said ‘are there two Fidels?’ I asked him what did he mean and he said sometimes Fidel is totally responsive and engaging and I feel sometimes he is not with us.”

McClain said he agreed with Madigan’s observation, saying there were times he believed Marquez did “not feel the urgency of a request. Urgency.”

McClain went on to write that Marquez’s failure to answer his emails left McClain unable to respond to Madigan’s inquiries about his hiring requests.

“I do not know how to respond to our friend who believes in his mind there should be a hard and quick favorable response,” McClain wrote. “Please help me…. It troubles me greatly…”

Two months later, McClain followed up on the names he’d submitted for meter reader jobs. Marquez informed him that the first candidate failed both tests, but could retake them in 90 days, while the other was a “no call, no show twice.”

McClain, however, was undeterred.

“Can we hire them anyway?” he wrote. “Temp jobs? Internships?”

McClain reiterated that the men were “recommendations from our Friend” and said that unless they “have three heads I would strongly recommend that we try to help.”

But a few years and many more difficult job placements later, McClain praised Marquez for the way he fielded a call from an official at Chicago-based natural gas utility Peoples Gas. In a wiretapped May 2018 call, Marquez told McClain about how the official called him to vet a real estate professional named Tom Volini, who happened to be a friend of Andrew Madigan.

Volini had done work for ComEd in the past, and Marquez said he was “highly professional” and “very competent.” But the Peoples Gas official still seemed skeptical of the recommendation because Volini was being “pushed really hard” on the company.

“So I said, ‘You know, you guys need to evaluate this but this is obviously important and you guys oughta consider it,’” Marquez recounted for McClain.

“Good,” McClain said. “Perfect…Well done.”

Later that day, McClain relayed the story to Andrew Madigan in another wiretapped call.

“She said, ‘Well, I’m gettin’ pressure to hire him,’” McClain said of the Peoples Gas official. “And Fidel says, ‘Soooo?’ That’s what happens when you’re in this game. You never know, maybe someday you can ask for a favor. That’s how this is. You can’t be offended with that. So you got pressure too? Are you kiddin’ me? Yeah, we got pressure.”

Even after his official retirement from lobbying in late 2016, McClain was still active in passing along job recommendations to Marquez, and he treated ComEd’s paid internship program with equal vigor to his campaign for full-time candidates. Though McClain had successfully pushed to increase the number of internship spots ComEd set aside for the 13th Ward each summer from six to 10, emails show he was constantly pushing for more.

Many of the intern applicant resumes shown to the jury on Thursday showed the college students had previously worked at least one summer in the 13th Ward office. McClain pushed back on rejections of students who weren’t working toward degrees in STEM – a term McClain was apparently unfamiliar with, according to one email. And if a candidate was rejected for having a too-low grade point average, McClain fought for that minimum to be waived.

He did, however, back off on his quest to get one former ComEd intern a repeat internship for the summer of 2018 when Marquez told him that the student – a theatre major – had a 1.1 GPA.

“Holy Mackerel,” McClain emailed back. “Even mine were higher than that!!!!!!!!!”

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