9 months after federal bribery conviction, former Speaker Madigan disbarred

CHICAGO — Nearly six decades after becoming a lawyer, former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan has been disbarred following his convictions on federal corruption charges — including bribery — earlier this year.

The longtime Democratic power broker, known for his fastidiousness, even beat the Illinois Supreme Court to the punch.

Two months before he reported to a West Virginia prison in October, Madigan filed a motion with the high court to have his name stricken from the roll of attorneys admitted to the state bar, according to court records. An administrator for the Supreme Court’s Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission wrote that “on the date” Madigan filed his Aug. 19 motion, she was investigating Madigan’s criminal conduct.

“Had Movant’s (Madigan’s) conduct been the subject of a hearing, the Administrator would have introduced the evidence described below, and that evidence would have clearly and convincingly established the misconduct set forth below,” ARDC Administrator Lea Gutierrez wrote before spending the next four pages explaining Madigan’s convictions.

She then concluded that the former speaker deserved to be disbarred for having “committed criminal acts that reflect adversely on his honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer” due to his February convictions on bribery and wire fraud.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court approved Madigan’s motion, although the official order mistakenly listed his middle name as “James” two of the five times it appeared on the document. The others correctly stated it as Joseph.

It’s not uncommon for lawyers under threat of disbarment to just file for their own removal instead of waiting out a hearing; ARDC records indicate that since the 1970s, nearly 60% of the nearly 1,300 attorneys who were ultimately expelled from the Illinois bar opted for “disbarment on consent” by asking the court to strike their names from it.

But that statistic doesn’t include two of Madigan’s allies convicted in 2023 of bribing the former speaker in the related “ComEd Four” trial. Anne Pramaggiore, the former CEO of electric utility Commonwealth Edison, and longtime Springfield lobbyist and Madigan confidant Mike McClain, saw Gutierrez file complaints to disbar them 10 days after the former speaker made his motion. Both of their law licenses have been suspended since their convictions.

Madigan’s law career began in 1967

Madigan has been a lawyer since shortly after his 1967 graduation from “Loyola University, here in Chicago,” as he put it during his high-stakes run on the witness stand during the end of his trial in January. In law school, he met Vincent “Bud” Getzendanner, who would eventually become his longtime law partner in a practice focused on real estate tax appeals.

In his turn testifying at trial, Getzendanner agreed with a government’s lawyer’s characterization that Madigan “was the rainmaker for the firm” and was more “focused on client acquisition and business development” made possible by his wide network built over a career in public life.

It was the former speaker’s pursuit of new clients in the form of high-powered real estate developers that ultimately gave the feds — who’d investigated Madigan before but came up short on charges — a fresh angle to probe him.

In 2017, Madigan called then-Chicago Ald. Danny Solis, who had connections with all the city’s most powerful developers due to his chairmanship of the city council’s influential zoning committee. Unbeknownst to the speaker, Solis was a year into his cooperation with the feds and the FBI was listening in. Eventually the alderman’s handlers would instruct him to seek Madigan’s help getting appointed to a lucrative state board position in exchange for introducing more potential clients.

Though the jury in Madigan’s case ultimately deadlocked or voted to acquit on the majority of charges related to his pursuit of law clients, the feds were able to parlay Solis’ access to the speaker into a full-blown investigation that encompassed allegations that had nothing to do with Madigan’s tax appeals practice.

The former speaker reported to a federal prison camp in Morgantown, West Virginia, last month after losing the fight to remain free while his newly hired high-profile team of appellate lawyers work on overturning his conviction. In a 73-page brief filed earlier this month, Madigan’s attorneys alleged “the prosecution improperly criminalizes the rough-and-tumble business of state politics”

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.

Hannah Meisel

Hannah has been covering Illinois government and politics since 2014, and since then has worked for a variety of outlets from NPR affiliate stations to a startup newsletter. She’s a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I’s Springfield campus, where she received an M.A. through the Public Affairs Reporting program and got her start reporting in the Capitol.