Wiretap: In pushing for Madigan-backed appointment, ex-ComEd CEO sought to ‘take good care’ of ‘our friend’
CHICAGO – Chicago businessman Juan Ochoa had heard little more than crickets in the six months since then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan asked for his resume in November 2017.
Ochoa and his political mentor, soon-to-be-retired Congressman Luis Gutierrez, had met with Madigan to ask for his backing for an appointment to electric utility Commonwealth Edison’s board of directors. The board member who’d recently vacated the seat had been a Latino, Ochoa explained to the speaker, and he felt it should remain “a Latino seat” because “Latinos are grossly underrepresented on corporate boards.”
As it happened, the Democratic powerbroker was already scheduled to meet with the CEO of ComEd’s parent company, Exelon, later that week, and agreed to pass on Ochoa’s name.
Prosecutors allege the push for Ochoa’s appointment to the ComEd board was part of a series of bribes Madigan solicited and the utility gave in exchange for favorable legislation in Springfield. Ochoa has not been charged with wrongdoing, but he appeared in a Chicago federal courtroom on Tuesday as a witness in Madigan’s bribery and racketeering trial.
By May 2018, Ochoa had only heard from ComEd once about the process to get vetted for the board – though he had heard from Madigan twice, most recently to inform him that he would likely be seated on the ComEd board at its quarterly meeting in August.
Behind the scenes, however, Ochoa’s recommendation was receiving pushback from inside the company. A background check turned up items including a foreclosure on a property after Ochoa stopped making mortgage payments and a lawsuit he initiated when running for Berwyn village president in 2013, which a judge dismissed in addition to ordering him to pay attorneys’ fees.
Additionally, ComEd’s former top lawyer testified to the jury last month, there was a worry about bad press Ochoa had received after ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed him CEO of Chicago’s Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority in early 2007. Ochoa’s appointment came on the heels of Blagojevich’s reelection victory, but critics viewed the job as a reward for helping the governor raise money and organize Latino voter support in the campaign.
Though it had been over a decade when ComEd executives were vetting Ochoa, Blagojevich was still politically toxic as the Democrat had been imprisoned for six years at that point after a dramatic corruption investigation, arrest, impeachment and eventual conviction.
But when longtime ComEd lobbyist Mike McClain communicated ComEd’s hesitations about Ochoa to Madigan in May 2018, he either was unaware of or chose to water down the full scope of pushback, boiling it down to “financial problems.”
In a wiretapped phone call, McClain told Madigan that some utility executives were thinking of giving the board seat back to its previous occupant, Jesse Ruiz, who’d stepped down for an ultimately unsuccessful run for Illinois Attorney General in a crowded primary. In light of the competition, ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore had a question for Madigan.
“Is it important to you for Juan to be on the board?” McClain asked on Pramaggiore’s behalf. “If it is, she’ll keep pushing. If it’s not … she’ll try to find something that would compensate him equally.”
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Madigan asked McClain how much a board member is paid annually: $78,000.
“Maybe I’ll take the appointment,” Madigan joked, before giving his directive. “Mike, I would suggest we continue to support Juan Ochoa, but keep me advised as to how much pushback there is.”
Two weeks later, Madigan asked McClain if there was an update on Ochoa’s appointment.
“Mike, my recommendation is go forward with Ochoa,” Madigan told McClain in another conversation intercepted by the FBI. “So if the only complaint about Ochoa is that he suffers from bankruptcy twice, so did Harry Truman.”
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That same day, McClain called Pramaggiore with a message from the speaker: “He would appreciate if you would keep pressing,” McClain said.
“Okay,” Pramaggiore replied. “I will keep pressing.”
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It would be another year until Ochoa was officially appointed to ComEd’s board and attended his first meeting in May 2019. In the weeks and months that followed, details of the government’s investigation into ComEd, Madigan and his inner circle would become public, and Ochoa ultimately chose to seek a renewal after his yearlong appointment – a shorter time than he’d waited to become a board member.
Pramaggiore and McClain were convicted last year for their roles in bribing Madigan, along with two other former ComEd lobbyists. McClain is facing charges alongside Madigan in the current trial.
Read more: ‘ComEd Four’ found guilty on all counts in bribery trial tied to ex-Speaker Madigan
Ochoa was not a natural beneficiary of Madigan’s help; the two had a falling out years earlier over Ochoa’s firing of a former Madigan staffer when he headed MPEA, though attorneys on Tuesday didn’t elicit testimony about the bad blood.
But Ochoa was close with Gutierrez and his successor, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. The two had endorsed Madigan in 2016 when the speaker was facing a rare primary challenge from a political newcomer named Jason Gonzales.
As Madigan’s lifelong home and political power base on Chicago’s Southwest Side had shifted over the decades to predominantly Latino, the speaker and his allies sought help from Latino leaders like Gutierrez and Garcia in order to survive the challenge from a candidate with a Hispanic last name.
Prosecutors framed Ochoa’s appointment to the ComEd board as Madigan’s reward to Gutierrez and Garcia. Ochoa co-founded a nonprofit called the Latino Leadership Council with the pair in 2018, in the middle of his wait on news about the ComEd board appointment.
Defense lawyers, however, sought to undercut any possible perception by the jury that Ochoa was just some political goon.
Madigan attorney Todd Pugh began his cross-examination of Ochoa by asking him to describe his resume. Ochoa testified it includes founding a multi-state facilities management company where he’s still CEO and spending a decade heading the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which grew to 1,200 members under his leadership.
And while ComEd would be the first corporate board Ochoa served on, he’d served on five nonprofit boards in the past, Pugh pointed out. Additionally, Madigan wasn’t the only powerful elected official whose support Ochoa sought for the ComEd board appointment; he and Gutierrez also had a similar meeting with then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel the same week they’d met with the speaker.
Under questioning from McClain attorney Patrick Cotter, Ochoa sheepishly acknowledged that he’d dealt with political leaders “all the way from the president on down,” leading with the qualifier that he’d been “taught to be humble.”
“Not bragging if it’s true,” Cotter said.
But executives inside ComEd and Exelon weren’t so sure about Ochoa in the winter of 2018 when Tom O’Neill, a top lawyer for the utility, was overseeing the candidate’s vetting. Earlier in trial, O’Neill testified that after Pramaggiore told him the issues unearthed by Ochoa’s background check “weren’t disqualifying,” O’Neill told her that he believed it was “bad optics” for the company to appoint someone “directly referred from the speaker.”
“I felt that having someone recommended by or close to the speaker would sort of feed the narrative that we were too close,” O’Neill told the jury last month.
Pramaggiore, however, disagreed. Months later, O’Neill said he brought up the “optics” issue again in a meeting with Exelon CEO Chris Crane and other executives from ComEd and its parent company. But Pramaggiore defended the recommendation, according to O’Neill’s testimony, stressing her colleagues that ComEd needed “to maintain good relations” with Madigan.
Months before that meeting, however, ComEd executive Fidel Marquez began to receive negative feedback about Ochoa’s appointment despite Pramaggiore having asked Ochoa to keep the news to himself.
In a pair of wiretapped phone calls in August 2018, Marquez told Pramaggiore that then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval, D-Chicago, asked him about Ochoa’s appointment at an event the previous day.
“Why has he heard that?” Pramaggiore said. “That bothers me. We have not made it official … There are, like, legal issues associated with this.”
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Last week, Marquez told the jury that when FBI agents approached him in January 2019 and asked him to become a cooperating witness in their investigation, they first played him three intercepted calls – including one in which he and Pramaggiore discussed Ochoa.
Marquez told his colleague that he feigned ignorance as Sandoval disparaged Ochoa as being part of a “cabal” with Gutierrez and Garcia. The next fall, FBI agents raided Sandoval’s home and offices looking for items that related to, among other subjects, Madigan and ComEd. He was subsequently charged with corruption but died from complications of COVID-19 in late 2020.
In a second call between the colleagues that evening, Marquez told Pramaggiore about a dinner he’d just had with then-state Sen. Iris Martinez, D-Chicago. According to Marquez, Martinez painted Ochoa with the same broad brush as others she perceived as being “Blagojevich cronies” who were “coming back out of the woodwork” to get in the good graces of JB Pritzker, who was in the final months of his first campaign for governor.
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“And she says, ‘Like that motherf—– Juan Ochoa,” Marquez said.
“Oh no,” Pramaggiore replied with a laugh.
The two also discussed Exelon executive Bill Von Hoene’s opposition to Ochoa, apparently misunderstanding Ochoa to have “a criminal record,” Pramaggiore told Marquez.
The next month, Pramaggiore provided McClain with an update on Ochoa: In a few days, he was scheduled to have dinner with Marquez and newly appointed ComEd CEO Joe Dominguez, her successor after she was promoted within Exelon earlier that year.
McClain thanked her, to which Pramaggiore replied, “of course.”
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“You take good care of me, and so does our friend, and so I will do the best I can to take care of you,” she said, employing a euphemism McClain often used to refer to Madigan. “You’re a good man.”
“Don’t let that out,” McClain joked.
In the courtroom Tuesday afternoon, McClain smiled to himself while listening to that portion of the call at his defense table.
At the dinner with Marquez and Dominguez, Ochoa testified that Dominguez told him the appointment was on ice due to corporate restructuring and the November election, but indicated it would still be moving forward.
Ochoa waited another two months before emailing Dominguez for an update post-Election Day, around the same time as the meeting in which the highest-ranking officials at ComEd and Exelon debated his appointment.
Also while Ochoa waited, McClain included his name and resume along with ones for Marquez, Dominguez and other prominent Latino political leaders in an email to a Pritzker campaign staffer who was working on hiring for the governor-elect’s new administration.
Ochoa wouldn’t hear anything definitive about the board appointment until McClain called him in February 2019, which Ochoa testified on Tuesday was a surprise, as he’d never spoken with McClain before.
They spoke once more a couple months later once Ochoa had finally been appointed to the board, asking McClain to pass along his thanks to Madigan. McClain told Ochoa that there was a “bigger team” behind him all along, including Pramaggiore, whom McClain encouraged Ochoa to thank separately.
Late in the afternoon on May 14, 2019 – two weeks after Ochoa’s first ComEd board meeting – Ochoa did just that, emailing Pramaggiore and asking if he could take her to breakfast or lunch that summer.
Unbeknownst to Ochoa, a few hours before he sent his message, FBI agents conducted a coordinated series of searches at the homes of Madigan allies, including McClain. Agents also showed up to Pramaggiore’s door with a subpoena to seize her cell phone, according to her testimony in last year’s “ComEd Four” trial.
Did Ochoa ever end up sharing a meal with Pramaggiore that summer, Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur asked as she wrapped up her direct examination on Tuesday.
“I did not,” Ochoa replied.
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.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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