Politically connected businessman James T. Weiss was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison Wednesday for bribing two Illinois lawmakers in a corrupt attempt to change the state’s laws in his favor and then trying to lie his way out of it when the FBI confronted him.
“Mr. Weiss, you added another star to Chicago’s walk of shame on the sidewalk of corruption,” U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger said before handing down the sentence. “Chicago has a hard-earned, but well-earned, well-deserved reputation for public corruption.”
A jury convicted Weiss in June of honest services wire and mail fraud, bribery, and lying to the FBI. His trial stretched over seven days and featured 15 witnesses, including four who have held elected office.
The bribery scheme involved former state Rep. Luis Arroyo, who is now in prison, and former state Sen. Terry Link, who cooperated with the FBI but still faces sentencing for his own tax crimes.
Seeger told Weiss was scheme was “just gross. Honestly, it’s just gross. We, the people, deserve better. ... You tried to corrupt the state of Illinois and its legal system so you could profit, personally, at the expense of everybody else.
“Some of the arguments that I have heard have suggested to me that you just don’t get it,” the judge said. “In your bones, you don’t get it.”
Weiss’ sentencing comes roughly a week after the feds unveiled details of a recorded conversation that allegedly tied Weiss to the late Chicago mobster Frank “The German” Schweihs. Weiss’ brother, Joseph Weiss, has been separately indicted for lying to the feds about his brother’s alleged ties to the mobster, who died in 2008.
“Jimmy and Frank were good friends,” Joseph Weiss was secretly recorded as saying, according to prosecutors.
James Weiss hails from a politically connected family. He is the husband of former state Rep. Toni Berrios and son-in-law of former Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios. He is also one of seven people who have been convicted at trial this year as a result of the feds’ public corruption investigations here. He is the second of that group to face sentencing.
Alex Acevedo, a son of former state Rep. Edward “Eddie” Acevedo, was sentenced in July to two months in prison for filing false tax returns. He is already in custody and due to be released next month, records show.
Seeger also last year handed a nearly five-year prison sentence to Arroyo. The judge called the once senior member of the Illinois House of Representatives a “dirty politician who was on the take” and a “corruption super-spreader.”
The prosecution of Weiss and Arroyo revolved around unregulated gambling devices known as sweepstakes machines, which can look like video slot machines but offer “free play” options and coupons to users.
An October 2020 indictment against Arroyo and Weiss first alleged that Arroyo served as Weiss’ bought-and-paid for member of the Illinois House of Representatives. In exchange for $32,500 in bribes from Weiss, Arroyo agreed to vote for and promote sweepstakes legislation in Springfield.
But the Illinois General Assembly passed landmark gambling legislation in 2019 without sweepstakes language, despite the efforts of Arroyo and Weiss. So the men turned to Link, a key lawmaker on gaming issues, for help. But he was secretly cooperating with the feds and recorded the pair.
Prosecutors aired Link’s recordings for the first time during Weiss’ trial. One captured an Aug. 2, 2019, meeting between Weiss, Arroyo and Link at a Highland Park Wendy’s. At one point, Link asked Arroyo, “Can I talk to you alone one second?”
Outside the Wendy’s — and away from Weiss — Link asked Arroyo, “What’s in it for me?” Arroyo explained that he was a “paid consultant for him” making $2,500 a month, that the same could be arranged for Link, and that payments could be made to a third party.
Link testified that he understood Arroyo’s reference to “him” to mean Weiss.
Arroyo and Link met a second time at Sander’s restaurant in Skokie on Aug. 22, 2019. Shortly before they did, FBI agents gave Link the name of a fictional third party to be paid — ”Katherine Hunter.” Jurors heard a recording of the meeting that then followed, in which Arroyo gave Link a $2,500 check from Weiss’ business and said “this is the jackpot.”
Link told Arroyo to make that check out to Hunter. And two months later, the FBI found a second $2,500 check from Weiss’ business, Collage LLC, made out to Hunter in Link’s post-office box in Lincolnshire.
Then, when FBI agents confronted Weiss in October 2019, he actually told them Arroyo had once put him on the phone with Hunter.
“I talked to Katherine over the phone about engaging in the relationship and helping me,” Weiss told the FBI about the fictional consultant.