Some say that if you dim the lights, light a solitary candle, and whisper his name three times in a mirror…“Madigan…Madigan…Madigan…” you can almost hear the ghostly hum of a once-mighty machine stir in the shadows.[^1] But tonight, that eerie incantation is replaced by the resounding crack of a gavel, the final note in a symphony of corruption, patronage, and unchecked power that spanned more than half a century. And while some may relish this moment as justice (that bright, sweet green pickle relish of justice), it echoes not only the downfall of a man but also the bitter, ironic laughter of a people who, for far too long, allowed themselves to be ruled by a phantom.[^2] And anything resembling justice for Illinoisans will only come from a long, hard look in that mirror.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
From “Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot

I began writing a different piece months ago, when Madigan was convicted, but put it away. It dove deep into the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention,[^3] was peppered with moments from Madigan’s career,[^4] and revisited some additional comments about him I’ve written elsewhere.

Now that he’s been sentenced, I deleted most of it.[^5]

Enough has been written about Madigan’s past. He’s been in the public sphere for nearly 60 years and countless reporters and writers have done more than enough to highlight the living history. There are mountains of television news segments, editorials, and futile opposition campaigns to fill in any gaps. Hell, I’d guess that his name has come up in conversation and been commended or cursed in pizza parlors and private law practices and pubs in this town more than any other with the exception of our Chicago sports teams over the same timeframe. You don’t need more history from me.

And in fairness to his story and to the capital ‘S’ noun definition of “Story” itself, Madigan’s career was nothing short of epic. At least, in the local sense. It’s a sprawling narrative of power, ruthlessness, unsettling endurance, and otherworldly persistence. He had an almost supernatural ability to adapt, survive, and flourish in an environment where reform was continually promised but never delivered.

One could imagine the 25-year-old delegate from the 27th District answering the constitutional convention call from Springfield in 1969 with all the earnest naïveté and zeal that all young people called to politics or to the church or to the dying art of literature are possessed with. One could imagine that, as his car cut through the seemingly endless miles of Illinois’ prairie seas, his head was filled with a dream that his mark on the Illinois Constitution could be the start of something greater than himself. That he could further empower the people, embody the hopes and aspirations of its citizens, safeguard the public interest, and that he could herald a new era of transparency and accountability.

One could imagine…but I’m being deliberately gracious in the hope that posterity will be more kind to us…

That 25-year-old Mike Madigan would go on to make himself into the spectral puppeteer of Illinois politics. As the longest-serving leader of any state or federal legislative body in the history of the United States,[^6] his tenure was more than just an enduring presence in the halls of power, it was a masterclass in the art of political domination. With every passing year, Madigan consolidated his grip on the state, turning the Illinois House into a stage for his elaborate performances of backroom deals, whispered favors, and strategic maneuvering that might almost make you wonder if he didn’t deserve all he took. He’d earn a nickname that any 1960s or 1970s anti-establishment aging boomer frontman in a prog-rock band would have killed for its symbolism but would later, ironically, become synonymous with absolute control. And those idealistic dreams of fixing a system with a soft touch, if they were once there at all, eventually gave way to the quiet tyranny of the nickname itself. The velvet was the whispered promise in a corner and the patronage that secured loyalty and the hammer was the legislative agenda that died on his desk and the career that ended when you defied it. The velvet was the art, the hammer was the brutal reality. He was not merely a politician; he was the architect of a regime where loyalty was bought, dissent was quietly silenced, and the very rules of governance bent to his will.

Consider the sheer audacity of a man in his late 70’s who, with more than 50 years in office during an era of unparalleled political control, with the state’s financials that he presided over on the precipice of collapse and its national reputation in the political arena seen as a punchline, still clung to power to secure his legacy. It is a record that defies conventional wisdom. A record that, in its own way, mocks the very idea of accountability. How many politicians have had or would have had the guts to outlast their peers by decades, even as the world around them changed in fundamental ways? Madigan did. And he did so with a mix of discipline, cunning, and a deep understanding of the levers of power.

His power over the state was so pervasive and his influence so profound, that the mechanisms of Illinois politics seemed to pivot around him, ensuring every major decision, every redistricting plan, every legislative maneuver bore his indelible signature. In his time, political opposition was not so much vanquished as it was rendered irrelevant.

There is an undeniable, almost gloating satisfaction in witnessing the collapse of an empire built on deceit. It can be cathartic. A long-overdue reckoning that signals even the mightiest of political titans are not beyond reach.

But the day his conviction came down, prominent local social media account @chicagobars,[^7] observed that many of the news affiliates didn’t even bother to break into regular coverage.

The way I saw it, it marked the true end of an era. For my age, it was something that always was that is no longer. And I felt…kinda…sorta…sad?

I wish I could say it was a sign of our times and the utterly awesome speed at which money, information, and technology bends and shakes and twists its influence in our daily lives but the truth is the same truth lifelong Illinoisans have always known: Mike Madigan was not the first corrupt Illinois politician. Mike Madigan will not be the last.

No, this isn’t about the speed of modern life. This is the calculus of complicity in Illinois. It’s a brand of civic Stockholm Syndrome, where we’ve made a tacit bargain to expect so little from our government in exchange for the freedom to not have to pay attention to it. The corruption is simply the cost of doing business, a line item in the budget of our collective consciousness. We shrug because getting angry would require the energy to demand change, and demanding change would require believing it’s possible. The shrug is not an action, it’s a surrender. And we’ve surrendered generations.

There will be no lessons learned. There will be no past resonating with urgent clarity. There will be no calls to action, no summons to reject apathy, no demands for more transparency, and no insistence on accountability. There will be no reminders that the power of the people is not an abstract concept but a tangible force that can reshape the future if only we choose to wield it. There will be no new narratives of missed opportunities and no new chronicles of an electorate once seduced by the familiar, refusing to let it go unchallenged. There will be no rallying cries to reclaim the promise of a local government that serves the public rather than one that exploits its power for personal gain.

Even Madigan…even Madigan…even MADIGAN…will be shrugged off with yet another, “Well, that’s just the way things are around here…”

I can see it play out before me like the final scenes from the type of movie Hollywood used to make. The climax of a decades-long drama arrives with Madigan’s conviction on charges of conspiracy and for using his official position to enrich himself and his cronies. An 82-year-old titan, who had long seemed untouchable, a man who spent half a century orchestrating a symphony of corruption, faces a punishment that barely registers. After a short stint behind bars, he returns to his cushioned confines, enjoying a taxpayer-funded pension and the wealth amassed over decades of political maneuvering. And you, the suckers and the dupes, between caricatured bites of hot dogs and deep-dish pizza and sweet corn, are still busy grumbling about potholes and sluggish public transportation and the regulatory environment and the fees and the property taxes and the pensions and the list goes on and on and on while another corrupt group of wannabe puppeteers and political paper pushers swoops in to fill the void left in his absence and continue the new grift, same as the old one.

“Well, that’s just the way things are around here…”

Cut to black.

Comedy.

Here we are again. Right back at the beginning. The end is where we start from once more.

How many times? How many times will we shrug off yet another scandal? We cast our ballots year after year, often knowing the game was rigged long before we even stepped up to the plate. And yet, we continue to play along. Our acceptance of this endless farce is as much a part of the smell in this state’s political drapes as the lingering cigarette smoke from the crooked backroom deals.

The fall of Madigan is not Just judgment on a single man. It’s a mirror held up to our collective failures. Our indifference. Our inability to demand better because we’ve accepted a broken system as our inheritance. For many, it’s all we’ve ever known.

For decades (and really, much longer than that), the voters of Chicago and the state of Illinois have sat in the grandstands of a circus, willing spectators clapping politely at a political carnival that grows more absurd with every passing year. In many ways, collective apathy and resignation were as integral to Madigan’s success as his own machinations. There is a special kind of humor in recognizing that we, the people, were not merely passive observers but willing participants. Each time a ballot was cast without protest, each time an opportunity to demand accountability was missed, the foundations of his regime were further cemented.

The headlines should read, “EXTRA! EXTRA! MADIGAN SENTENCED! Voters of Illinois complicit in the rise and maintenance of one of the most dominant political machines in American history!”

Most will continue to allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security, trusting that the familiar, even when flawed, is preferable to uncertainty. Each election cycle rhymes in refrain: promises of change and hints at reform only to ultimately lead to life under the same worn-out script of patronage and power that’s always been. Ours is an electorate resigned to a life where real change is not only improbable but downright unthinkable.

See, we have this strange habit of treating our own political rot as if it were a foreign war. We watch the headlines from Springfield flicker across the screen like dispatches from some distant, intractable conflict. There are enough real life situations occurring at this exact moment I type this that I don’t need to pick one as an example and, though I don’t intend to minimize the very real death and destruction that is happening right now in faraway lands, I’m just trying to highlight how we shake our heads at the tragedy of it all and then change the channel, secure in the belief that it’s happening over there, to someone else.

But it’s not over there. It’s here. It’s in the crumbling asphalt of our roads and the byzantine code of our property tax bills. It’s in the schools that close and the public services that wither. It’s in the businesses that give up and leave. This isn’t a geopolitical struggle we can afford to compartmentalize. It is our own intimate civil conflict, a quiet, century long siege on our own treasury and our own future, waged by those we put in power.

And for the most exquisite, almost comical proof, look no further than this weekend. As the news of Madigan’s sentencing finally broke, what were we seeing on the streets of Chicago? Passionate protests under the banner “No Kings.”

No Kings. The irony is so thick you could choke on it. Spare me.

Our rulers hold no throne, but make no mistake, this is a kingdom. A regime that has perfected the art of ruling without the messy spectacle of crowns and thrones. Its power isn’t decreed from a balcony, its whipped in a party-line vote. Its taxes aren’t collected by sheriffs, but levied through unbalanced budgets and last-minute deals that benefit insiders. Its method of succession isn’t bloodline, but the anointing of loyalists who promise to perpetuate. A political machine that decides who will rise and who will fall with the subtle efficiency of a royal decree.

We have lived under this flag of this one-party state for generations, subjects of a dynasty of our own making and our own perpetual tolerance. Yet we save our revolutionary fervor for blowhards in Washington. It is a perfect, tragic portrait of an electorate that would rather fight imaginary dragons than dismantle the castle that has stood in its own backyard for a century.

John Donne, in his “Meditation XVII,” wrote that “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.” He argued that when a piece of that continent is washed away, the whole is diminished. The corruption of our state is not a distant shoreline eroding; it is the ground beneath our own feet. Madigan’s conviction is not the death of a faraway tyrant, but a signal of the deep sickness within the body politic of which we are all members. Ernest Hemingway, one of Illinois’ most famous sons, heard Donne’s words not just a reflection on shared humanity, but a summons to action. For too long, the citizens of Illinois have treated the goings-on in Springfield and Chicago as if they were a foreign conflict, a spectator sport rather than an intimate struggle for our own collective future. And as Donne so powerfully concluded, we should “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” It is a recognition of our shared fate, a sound that calls out our own complicity.

The bell that tolls tonight isn’t just for Madigan. It’s for thee. It’s for me. It’s for the sweet old lady down the street who’s still paying insane property taxes, for the young family that are tapped out by the next round of increases, for the small business owner who can barely get anything done let alone grow, and even for the large megacorp that either can’t make the investment work or quite simply has better options elsewhere.

But let not the bell that tolls for Madigan be a call for a funeral. It’d be easy to pretend it’s the sound of one man’s empire collapsing, but if that’s all we let it be, we’ve learned nothing.

I cling to a sliver of belief that we’ll someday be jolted awake out of the deep sleep to where we can wipe our eyes of the crust of comfortable cynicism. That it’s not the next Madigan who steps into his place and we don’t have to grease the same tired cogs in the same old gearworks. That we’ll wake up to the simple idea that there are no Ghosts in the Machine. The conviction of one man, even this man, is not an absolution for the rest of us. It is, instead, the mirror we have spent a lifetime avoiding, now held inches from our faces. It reveals the uncomfortable truth that the longest-running show in Illinois was not one man’s reign, but our collective resignation. It shows us that the ghost haunting this state was never just the figure in the back room; it was the ghost of our own civic duty, long since given up. The bell does not toll to celebrate the end of the king; it tolls to announce the debt of the kingdom.

I know the pull of our own lives is relentless. The daily pressures are immense. The mortgage is due, the car makes a sound we can’t afford, our families need us, and our own private worlds demand every ounce of our energy. In the face of that, the slow rot of the state can feel like a distant abstraction. But our civic duty does not pause for our personal sorrows. We can continue to treat our state’s governance as background noise, another show to stream as we collapse on the couch, or we can finally do the messy, foundational work of actual change.

I’m not promising a happy ending, I just want to watch something different. I’m tired of this show.

We can, if we choose. We can demand a future built on more. We can ignore the chorus that shrugs and says, “that’s just how it is here,” and “that’s Illinois politics, baby,” and instead raise a different call. We can insist on accountability, refuse to reward deceit, and build systems that demand transparency.

It is possible.

And, you know, call me naive, call me idealistic, call me soft, I just don’t believe that 25-year-old Mike Madigan, in his car way back in 1969 on the way to Springfield for the constitutional convention, who would go on to become Democratic party kingmaker, who would set United States records for tenured service, and who would become the Velvet Hammer, ever dreamed it would end in federal prison. But in the stark theater of a federal courtroom more than half a century later, that softness is torn away. This hammer falls hard and loud and public, and its wood-on-wood crack reverberates through time and seals reputations forever.

Ours, too.

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Notes & References


[^1]: Walker, Craig. “Opinion: Madigan’s Magical Mystery Machine.” Chicago Journal, August 13, 2020. https://www.chicagojournal.com/madigans-magical-mystery-machine/. [^2]: Chicago Journal. “The Definitive Chicago Style Hot Dog Recipe.” Chicago Journal, August 1, 2021. https://www.chicagojournal.com/the-definitive-chicago-style-hot-dog-recipe/. [^3]: “Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention.” Wikiwand. Accessed February 14, 2025. [^4]: My favorite incident came when his own adopted daughter, Lisa Madigan, herself an Illinois State Senator of the 17th District from 1998-2003 and Illinois Attorney General from 2003 to 2019, expressed an interest in running for Governor, and he told her “No.” Weiner, Rachel. “Lisa Madigan Not Running for Illinois Governor.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/07/15/lisa-madigan-not-running-for-governor-of-illinois/, July 15, 2013. [^5]: Meisner, Jason, and Ray Long. “Ex-House Speaker Michael Madigan Sentenced to 7 1/2 Years in Prison after Judge Excoriates Him for Lying on Witness Stand.” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 2025. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/06/13/michael-madigan-sentencing-corruption-case/. [^6]: “Mike Madigan.” Wikiwand. Accessed February 14, 2025. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Mike_Madigan. [^7]: Chicago Bars (@chicagobars) / X