His ridiculous longevity was the product of equally ridiculous entrepreneurial sleaze.

I t’s February 12, 2025, which means it’s once again time to reset the number on this giant “[X] MANY DAYS SINCE AN ILLINOIS POLITICIAN WAS CONVICTED OF A FELONY” counter I keep posted here on my wall back to zero again. Because Mike Madigan — legendarily grimy Illinois House speaker and all-powerful master of Democratic state politics until his 2021 resignation from office — has finally been convicted by a federal jury of ten felonies: bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud, among other matters. He was found not guilty on seven other charges as well, but the jury has not finished adjudicating the case fully and has failed to rule on the biggest count of them all, racketeering.

I presume that Michael Madigan is guilty of all of these things and much more besides, regardless of whatever verdicts the jury decides to return. That they have already found him guilty enough for one lifetime is sufficient consolation to me for now. It’s finally over, the Velvet Hammer has been denuded and shattered — and quite conveniently, long after it was far too late for the people of Illinois who suffered under him for 40 years.

Who is Michael Madigan, you out-of-staters may be asking? The easy line you’ll read in all the write-ups is that he was the “longest-serving state legislative leader in U.S. history” as speaker of the Illinois House from 1983 to 2021. (He actually entered the legislature in 1971, a year and a half before Joe Biden began his own career.) But of course that is merely a euphemism for “the most infamously corrupt state-level politician in modern American history”: His ridiculous longevity was the product of equally ridiculous entrepreneurial sleaze. Madigan is no less than the living embodiment of everything that has made Illinois politics famous for all the wrong reasons — and mind you, I write from a state that sent two consecutive governors from opposing parties to prison during the Aughts.

When people invoke the criminality and “who sent you?” machine politics forever associated with Illinois, they are thinking of precisely two families who have ruled over it until recently: the Daleys of Chicago, and the Madigans . . . also of Chicago. Richards senior and junior ran the city itself as their own semi-private father/son mayoral fiefdom from the mid-Fifties all the way until 2011, but they have not tasted power since then. (Absence makes the heart grow fonder; it amuses me to no end that the once-hated Daleys are dearly missed nowadays, even by us few remaining Republicans.) The Madigans, meanwhile — both Michael as speaker and his daughter Lisa as attorney general — chose to run the rest of the state instead, and their foul legacy (primarily his) will remain with us for decades to come.

Yes, the reality is that all state-level politics here is actually run out of the City by the Lake, by Chicago-area pols, regardless of our nominal capital’s existence downstate in Springfield. Once it was different, perhaps, when this place could authentically claim to be the Land of Lincoln Republicanism. But nowadays all Midwesterners instinctively understand that Illinois, much like Gaul, can be divided into three unequal parts: Chicago, the collar county suburbs that surround it, and “the cornfields” — a desolately flat wasteland populated mostly by Archer-Daniels-Midland and the sorts of fools who gave Darren Bailey the 2022 GOP nomination for governor. (Our — once-jailed, recently pardoned, and forever oleaginous — jackleg former Governor Rod Blagojevich infamously refused to move from Chicago to the governor’s mansion while serving his term, and for once I don’t blame him.)

Madigan’s original power base came out of what was once a white, working-class, Democratic stronghold on the southwestern side of the city. But his eyes were always drawn to the Democrats’ statewide power, and as chief mapmaker for the statewide party, he became famous for a series of the most aggressive gerrymanders ever seen by what was (at the time) very much an evenly divided state electorally. By carving up and sapping Republican power systematically, he helped turn Illinois decade over decade into the ironclad “blue state” it is, hoovering all political power away from the state’s hinterlands into the Chicagoland area and leaving downstate as a sandbox for impotent and unelectable hard-right cranks.

But I don’t hate Madigan for that, not really; that’s all in the game, after all, and political power has its unfortunate prerogatives. No, the reason to hate Madigan is that he accomplished these nakedly partisan goals via thoroughly spectacular personal corruption. Madigan famously mastered the “inside/outside” game of politics: He was nominally just a humble legislator on a pittance of an official salary, a “servant of the people” for anyone willing to buy such codswallop; but he was also the name partner at his own private law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which just so happened to offer expensive tax-policy advice and “lobbying” to clients. Without having to spell out the details — they are the subject of the trial that just returned a partial conviction — the nexus for bribery, fraud, and extortion is obvious. Needless to say, this was only the last of Madigan’s various money-laundering schemes. Madigan isn’t the man who turned the state of Illinois into one enormous pay-to-play Democratic governance scheme, but he is the one who brought it to its apotheosis.

Until it all came crashing down. Madigan had long been thought to be grooming his daughter Lisa to take his place in Illinois power politics — he got her elected to both the state legislature and (more narrowly) to statewide attorney general through his arm-twisting efforts — but she surprisingly retired from politics rather than run for reelection in 2018. In retrospect, everyone in Chicago at least suspects why: Even though Illinois isn’t “MAGA country,” with the feds closing in on her father, she figured it was better to call it a day politically than run the risk of making Jussie Smollett’s vision come true. (She now works as a horse-whisperer “attorney” for Kirkland & Ellis — a nominal job given to her out of respect for her father’s power — but we shall see how long that lasts.)

And now the Madigan era is definitively over. Again, for those living in coastal regions, far away from “flyover country” here, you must understand: For 40 years, Mike Madigan practically was Illinois politics — the man everything had to be run through — right up until the moment he officially resigned. For better or worse, we have had no identity since. The Daleys are gone, and the Madigans are gone; now we are led by the Pritzkers and the Johnsons. Whatever good they did for our state is long dead, interred with their political bones. The evil they did lives on long after them.