Even after he’d sentenced Michael Madigan’s longtime chief of staff Monday to 2.5 years in prison for lying to a grand jury as the federal noose tightened around his former boss, a frustrated judge told Tim Mapes, “I don’t know why you did what you did.”
It’s a question U.S. District Judge John Kness raised repeatedly as he considered what punishment to hand down to Mapes, the man who’d famously spent two decades keeping the “trains running on time” for Madigan, Illinois’ once-powerful former House speaker. Mapes had been granted immunity but still tried to thwart the feds’ aggressive investigation of Madigan with his grand jury testimony.
“Perhaps this was out of some sense of loyalty,” Kness said Monday. “But if that’s the case, your loyalty was gravely misguided. Whatever compulsion you felt to protect Michael McClain and the former speaker of the House, Mr. Madigan, as far as I can tell, it was not reciprocated in any way.”
Mapes stood between his defense attorneys, Andrew Porter and Katie Hill, as the judge handed down the sentence at the end of a three-hour hearing Monday. When it ended, Mapes looked around the courtroom stone-faced. He and his defense attorneys later left the Dirksen Federal Courthouse without commenting to reporters.
But before he learned his fate, Mapes told the judge that he “never intended to be anything but a public servant and have tried, in ways big and small, to live my life as a good man.” He said he tried to help make Illinoisans’ lives better through his work in Springfield. He also recognized that “many people in the state of Illinois have lost faith in their government.”
“And that breaks my heart,” Mapes said. “It is contrary to everything I’ve tried to do in my career and it brings me great sorrow.”
Nevertheless, Mapes found himself in the middle of a drumbeat of federal corruption cases that largely go to the core of state government — and the resulting distrust. Nine people were convicted amid five trials in 2023 that resulted from federal corruption investigations in Chicago. Another former state lawmaker, Annazette Collins, was convicted later Monday of cheating on her taxes.
Mapes is the most notable of that group to be sentenced so far. Businessman James Weiss, convicted of bribing two state lawmakers, is serving a 5 1/2-year prison sentence. Alex Acevedo, a son of former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo, served a two-month sentence for cheating on his taxes.
And on Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia Schwartz insisted that Mapes faced a choice when he found himself inside a grand jury room in March 2021. She said Mapes “chose loyalty to his two friends” — Madigan and McClain — “over telling the truth.”
“The jury saw that testimony for what it was,” Schwartz said. “Those were lies.”
Schwartz also said Mapes’ sentence should send a message to “those individuals down in Springfield who may be interviewed in the context of investigations going forward.” She said they should understand they must tell the truth, “not some hazy version” of it.
When it was his turn, Kness simply called Mapes’ case “sad.” That’s in part because he couldn’t understand Mapes’ motivations. The judge even speculated about the Law of Omerta — or code of silence — in organized crime that he said has “no place in that federal grand jury room.”
Not only that, but Kness said he’d watched Mapes closely throughout his trial last summer. The judge read reports by court personnel and reviewed hundreds of pages written in support of Mapes.
“I have zero hesitation in agreeing, wholeheartedly, that you are a good man,” Kness told him.
But Kness said he can’t ignore the “well-documented” history of public corruption in Illinois. He said “the people of this state cry out for accountability.” However, he also said there is a temptation to put all of that on one defendant — a temptation he said he’d do his “best to resist.”
A jury in August found Mapes guilty of perjury and attempted obstruction of justice. It also found that Mapes had lied on seven specific occasions before the grand jury, regarding 14 different topics.
It was only six years ago that Mapes played the role of gatekeeper to Madigan in Springfield. Then the #MeToo movement threatened Madigan’s grip on power. Madigan forced Mapes to resign in 2018 amid bullying and harassment allegations. Mapes wound up with a part-time job servicing trucks for UPS, according to his wife’s trial testimony.
But a long-running federal investigation into Madigan and his organization became public early in 2019. Prosecutors leveled criminal charges in 2020 against ComEd, McClain and others over a nearly decade-long scheme to bribe Madigan. And early in 2021, Mapes was summoned in front of the grand jury.
Mapes went into that grand jury room with an immunity order, meaning he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he said there as long as he told the truth. Instead, he lied repeatedly about work done for Madigan by McClain, a close ally.
Porter argued to Kness on Monday that the transcript of Mapes’ grand jury testimony reveals “a man trying to do as best he can to tell the government what he knows.” He also insisted that Mapes’ perjury revolved around the relationship between Madigan and McClain.
Kness pushed back on that argument, asking, “who cares about that?”
“Why would anybody care about that, other than the fact that it might involve some other broader scheme?” Kness said.
Indeed, Madigan and McClain were charged together in 2022 in a racketeering indictment that alleged the two men — along with Madigan’s public office, law firm and the 13th Ward Democratic Organization — constituted the so-called “Madigan Enterprise.”
Madigan and McClain face trial in October.
Schwartz insisted to the judge Mapes’ grand jury testimony “was unquestionably related to a criminal investigation concerning bribery.”
And, she noted, “he wasn’t brought in to testify to talk about the weather, or old friends, for no reason.”
