Experts flipping over this ‘flipper’
In Chicago history, Solis’ deal stands out among FBI cooperators
In the long history of federal political corruption investigations in Illinois, the road to the penitentiary has often been paved by the government cooperator.
Through the years, dozens of political fixers, campaign staffers, fundraisers, lobbyists and occasionally even elected officials have “flipped” and agreed to help the FBI and federal prosecutors go after bigger fish. After all the chips fall, the vast majority of them are tagged with felonies of their own and offered a break at sentencing.
And then there’s Daniel Solis.
In an extraordinary twist, Solis, the former alderman and onetime powerful head of the City Council’s Zoning Committee, apparently has cut a deal with prosecutors that many in Chicago’s legal community say is unprecedented for an elected official, especially one allegedly caught betraying the public trust.
In exchange for going undercover and helping the U.S. attorney’s office prosecute 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke, who spent decades near the top of the city’s political food chain, Solis was offered what’s known as a deferred prosecution agreement, lawyers for Burke revealed in a court filing last August.
As part of the deal, Solis has allegedly admitted to taking campaign cash from a real estate developer in exchange for official action as Zoning Committee chair — a blatant case of public corruption that federal prosecutors would typically argue deserves a
stiff punishment.
But Solis’ agreement means he will not only escape any jail time — he’s likely not going to be prosecuted for the crime at all. What’s more, the deal could allow the 71-year-old Solis to keep collecting his nearly $100,000 annual city pension, which could easily bring in a sizable sum from the taxpayer-funded system over the remainder of his lifetime.
Now, with Burke’s case heating up in court, Solis’ astonishing turn as a government mole is getting renewed attention. It’s the focus of an effort by Burke’s lawyers to get wiretapped evidence thrown out of the case, which U.S. District Judge Robert Dow is expected to set for a court hearing this summer.
The Tribune interviewed nearly a dozen longtime members of the city’s legal community, including several who worked on public corruption cases for the U.S. attorney’s office, and none could remember such an arrangement being made for a public official caught abusing their office.
Many of the same experts also pointed out that Solis’ undercover work — including recording dozens of conversations with Burke on a secret FBI wire — was in itself extraordinary.
It not only helped prosecutors gather the evidence they needed to tap Burke’s phones, but likely opened up new avenues of investigation that have yet to come to light, those experts said.
Others wondered whether the deal was an indication that the evidence against Solis was weak.
“He got a great deal, no question,” said Robert Loeb, a veteran defense attorney and former Cook County prosecutor. “But you have to look at what he gave them in return. He put himself out there in the real world. ... I think (the U.S. attorney’s office) must have decided it’s commensurate with what his value was to them.”
Joel Bertocchi, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Silver Shovel probe of City Hall corruption in the 1990s, said a deferred prosecution for a onetime public official like Solis is “unusual,” but that much is still unknown about the strength of the evidence that got him to cooperate in the first place.
“You can’t just consider his cooperation. You also have to factor in what he allegedly did,” said Bertocchi, now a partner at Akerman LLP. “Was the case against him solid? Did they have him taking one bribe, or a hundred?”
Solis announced his retirement in late 2018 and then abruptly left the council weeks later after his cooperation went public. Reached by telephone Thursday, he declined to comment on his case.
His lawyer, Lisa Noller, declined to comment as well.
The U.S. attorney’s office, meanwhile, has not confirmed or denied the existence of Solis’ deferred prosecution deal. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Lausch also declined to comment for this story.
Quick move to cooperate
Solis’ work as an FBI mole began in mid-2016, when he was confronted by investigators who had secretly listened in on hundreds of his phone calls over the course of nearly a year, including conversations where the alderman solicited everything from campaign donations to sexual services at a massage parlor, court records show.
“Almost immediately, Ald. Solis agreed to cooperate with the government and consensually record conversations,” Burke’s attorneys wrote in their motion to suppress the wiretaps.
From August 2016 to May 2017, Solis wore a hidden wire and secretly recorded meetings with Burke. Many of the early conversations had to do with the massive renovation of the Old Main Post Office in Solis’ 25th Ward, which had also been a focus of the investigation of Solis, according to court records.
Those conversations, in which Burke allegedly talked about how he could use his position as Finance Committee chairman to push the developer to hire Burke’s private real estate tax firm, formed the backbone of prosecutors’ first application to begin tapping Burke’s City Hall telephone lines on May 1, 2017, according to court records.
Some of the conversations Solis allegedly recorded with Burke have already entered the city’s political corruption lexicon, including one on May 26, 2017, when Solis told Burke he’d recently spoken with the post office project’s developer.
“So, did we land the, uh, the tuna?” Burke asked, according to the indictment.
Later in the conversation, Burke said he wanted to meet with the developer himself, and promised Solis there would be a “day of accounting” for him if Burke’s law firm wound up getting the developer’s business.
Burke was charged in a criminal complaint on Jan. 2, 2019. The next day, Solis entered into his deferred prosecution agreement with the government “related to his illegal solicitation and receipt of campaign contributions,” according to Burke’s motion to suppress.
“(Solis) admitted that he solicited campaign contributions from a real estate developer in exchange for taking official actions as Zoning Committee chairman,” the motion stated.
Burke was indicted in May 2019 on racketeering conspiracy and other charges alleging a host of corrupt schemes, including the allegations involving the Old Main Post Office deal. He has pleaded not guilty.
Meanwhile, in going undercover, Solis had become only the second sitting alderman believed to have worn a wire for prosecutors in a corruption investigation.
The first, Ald. Allan Streeter, was the dean of the council’s Black Caucus when he agreed to wear a wire for the FBI as part of the Silver Shovel probe in the 1990s.
Streeter, as in Solis’ case, flipped only after he was confronted by federal investigators with damning tape recordings. In addition to wearing a wire, Streeter also provided authorities with details of questionable activities of other public officials and valuable insight into the workings of the City Council, prosecutors said at the time.
When Streeter’s cooperation was revealed on the day the Silver Shovel probe went public in 1996, his colleagues in the City Council denounced him as a “Judas” and a “rat,” prompting federal prosecutors to publicly come to Streeter’s defense.
More than 20 years later, some aldermen had a similar reaction when the Chicago Sun-Times first reported in January 2019 that Solis had worn a wire. Solis, whose term didn’t expire for another two months, was never seen at the council again.
“Where I come from, if you wear a wire someone’s going to kick your ass,” Far Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea, 19th, said at the time.
Ald. Carrie Austin, 34th, who served on the council with Solis for more than two decades, said she didn’t want to talk about Solis “because I might cry.” Asked why, Austin responded, “You don’t do that, you just don’t.”
‘I made a serious mistake’
Once a fixture on Chicago’s political scene, Solis has vanished from the public eye, surfacing only occasionally in social media posts by family members, including one from the extravagant 2019 wedding of his friend Brian Hynes in Puerto Rico.
But the shunning by colleagues appears to be the only similarity in what happened to Streeter and Solis after they cooperated.
Streeter, the 17th Ward alderman from 1981 to 1996, wound up pleading guilty to pocketing more than $37,000 in bribes over 2½ years from crooked trucking contractor and government mole John Christopher and an undercover FBI agent posing as a Christopher associate.
When Streeter was sentenced in 1998 to eight months in prison, his lawyer said Streeter had been left financially and emotionally ruined by the case.
When it came time to speak, Streeter wept in court and had to stop several times to regain his composure.
“I made a serious mistake,” he said. “It doesn’t depict what my life is all about. I did my best to serve the people.”
Bertocchi, the former federal prosecutor who helped lead the Silver Shovel probe, said Streeter’s cooperation had come very late in the game and didn’t feature the kind of monthslong undercover recording that Solis allegedly supplied.
“Allan Streeter took a lot of money over a long period of time, and he said some very damaging things on tape,” Bertocchi said. “He didn’t have a lot of bargaining chips.”
A rare position
When it comes to big-time political corruption probes, the cooperators who help make cases tend to be key insiders and friends, not other elected officials.
One recent exception was former state Sen. Terry Link, the Vernon Hills Democrat who agreed to wear a wire for the FBI in a bribery investigation of his colleague, then-state Rep. Luis Arroyo.
At the time he flipped, Link knew he was under investigation for tax evasion and hoped he could avoid prison time by cooperating, court records show. As part of his agreement, Link pleaded guilty to a felony and could have faced up to 16 months in prison under preliminary sentencing calculations. But prosecutors have said they intend to recommend a term of probation if he cooperates fully with the government.
Some legal observers say Link’s situation, more so than Solis’, illustrates how the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has traditionally handled what break to offer such cooperators.
Under the office’s usual guidelines, a person who cooperates in their own prosecution typically receives a promise for a recommendation for a sentence that is one-third below the bottom of the calculated guideline range. If the cooperation helped in the prosecution of others, that recommendation could move to one-half off the low end of the guidelines.
In extraordinary circumstances, such as a defendant who helped build cases against other people or blew the whistle on a scheme prosecutors were previously unaware of, the U.S. attorney’s office would offer what is called “free fall,” or an agreement to facilitate a sentence of probation.
Christopher Grohman, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked major gang and drug cases, said those kinds of deals are the bread and butter for prosecutors building complex criminal cases.
Deferred prosecution agreements, he said, were very rare in his time in the office, and usually reserved for people who had “barely committed a crime,” or those who helped make so many cases it was decided they’d earned a pass.
“We had this guy in a stolen goods case who was just the informant of the century,” Grohman said. “He wired up on everyone, people in his case, guys he knew that he’d reach out to on his own.”
Even some of the most productive cooperators of all time didn’t receive offers of deferred prosecution. That includes Stuart Levine, the influence peddler whose testimony about pay-to-play in Illinois politics assisted in securing convictions for what prosecutors characterized as “a hall of fame of public corruption.”
Among the big fish Levine helped reel in: Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a fundraiser and political fixer for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich; longtime Sangamon County Republican boss William Cellini, former Chicago Ald. Edward Vrdolyak; and of course Blagojevich himself.
Levine agreed to plead guilty in 2006 to one count each of mail fraud and money laundering involving a number of schemes, in exchange for prosecutors recommending a 5½year prison term. He was sentenced to that exact term in 2012.
A reluctant ‘spy’
Not everyone who’s been asked to wear a wire for the feds has agreed to do it, even when the pressure has been on.
John Wyma, Blagojevich’s longtime friend and lobbyist, testified in the ex-governor’s 2010 corruption trial that after he was subpoenaed by investigators in mid-2008, he agreed to tell what he knew about Blagojevich’s fundraising efforts, which had made him “increasingly alarmed.”
The FBI also asked him to wear a wire to an upcoming fundraising meeting, but Wyma balked, saying he found it to be “personally distasteful” and beyond his comfort level, according to court testimony.
Instead, Wyma agreed to attend the fundraiser and report back to investigators what happened. That assistance gave prosecutors what they needed to win a judge’s permission to bug the governor’s campaign office and later tap his phones and those of his closest confidants, breaking the case wide open.
During cross-examination at trial, Blagojevich’s lawyer Sheldon Sorosky asked Wyma if he’d found it distasteful “to report back as a spy.”
“Why don’t you not use the word ‘spy’?” U.S. District Judge James Zagel told Sorosky after prosecutors objected to the question.
“I felt like I should be truthful in my testimony when I gave it,” Wyma testified after Sorosky asked the question again. “I didn’t feel that I had to go out and proactively record conversations.”
Wyma was granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony.