Illegal bribe or legitimate ‘gratuity’: How a $13,000 payment to an Indiana mayor could alter political corruption cases in Chicago

It was Christmastime 2013, and Portage Mayor James Snyder was in trouble.

His mortgage business had tanked, the IRS was after him for a significant tax debt, and on top of that he had holiday spending to account for. His $62,000 salary as mayor of the small working-class town just wasn’t cutting it.

So Snyder showed up unannounced to Great Lakes Peterbilt, the local truck dealership he’d helped to win two lucrative city contracts.

“I need money. That’s what I’m here for,” the mayor told the owners. Days later, they cut Snyder a check for $13,000, saying it was for “consulting” that was never fully performed.

As alleged bribes go, it wasn’t exactly the crime of the century. And his lawyers argued it wasn’t a bribe at all, but a legal gratuity, a thank-you gesture to Snyder for shepherding the city contracts to their firm.

A decade later, that agreement in a small office in northwest Indiana is the focus of a legal battle that has wound its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has decided to take up Snyder’s appeal and render a decision that could change the face of public corruption prosecutions across the country, including Chicago.

At issue in Snyder’s case is a nuance in the federal bribery statute that makes it illegal to “corruptly” offer something of value to reward a public official for an official act.

Chicago-area defense attorneys have long complained that relatively vague language has been exploited by federal prosecutors to criminalize a wide range of normal political give-and-take, be it a steak dinner or the hiring of a political crony, even when there was no quid pro quo agreement.

The high court’s decision to hear Snyder’s case, which is expected to resolve an entrenched split in the federal circuit courts around the country, is already having repercussions in the blockbuster public corruption investigation involving former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Since the Supreme Court’s announcement in December, Madigan’s trial was delayed from April 1 until October to allow time for the decision to come out and be digested before going forward.

In a parallel case, a different judge is poised to decide whether to delay sentencings for the “ComEd Four,” a group of lobbyists and executives convicted of conspiring to bribe Madigan by showering his associates with do-nothing consulting jobs and other perks.

In court last month, Scott Lassar, an attorney for ex-ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, said the ComEd Four cases will likely see major upheaval, arguing that jurors were allowed to find her and her co-defendants guilty without evidence of a quid pro quo.

“It is all but certain that there is at least going to be a retrial, if not an acquittal, for the defendants,” Lassar said.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, who is spearheading the Madigan and ComEd prosecutions, suggested defense attorneys were prematurely spiking the football.

“I wish somebody would just read the language of the statute,” Bhachu told U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber last week.

In a written motion Friday, Bhachu went even further, calling the effort to delay the sentencings another signal that the defendants are “unrepentant” and trying to shift blame.

“They are not the victims. The victims are the citizens of Illinois, who were deprived of their right to honest government as a result of defendants’ efforts to rig the legislative process by bribing Madigan,” Bhachu wrote.

Either way, legal experts told the Tribune the Supreme Court weighing in on the subject has been a long time coming.

Stuart Green, a professor at Rutgers Law School who has written extensively on white-collar crime, told the Tribune the Supreme Court in recent years has “had a tendency to read a number of different important white-collar crime statutes very narrowly,” effectively raising the bar for prosecutors to bring a corruption case.

“This court might want to clip the wings of prosecutors who have been too aggressive in using these rather vaguely worded statutes,” Green said.

Green acknowledged it’s always difficult to read the tea leaves on what the Supreme Court might do. But if the court holds that gratuities do not apply, it surely would make politicians in Chicago and Springfield breathe a whole lot easier.

“It really creates this giant loophole in the law where public officials might feel free to accept all kinds of gifts that they otherwise would not,” he said.

The federal bribery statute at issue, commonly referred to as “666” after its number in federal criminal code, essentially makes it a crime for public officials to receive or accept anything of value “intending to be influenced or rewarded” in connection with any official act.

Federal prosecutors have been accused by various defendants through the years of twisting that concept in their favor to turn time-honored, albeit messy, political processes into illegal schemes.

Businesspeople, lobbyists, interest groups and everyday citizens have a First Amendment right to try to influence state and local officials to act in a certain way on matters of interest to them, the argument goes.

Whether it’s buying a public official lunch, contributing to their campaign, donating to a favored charity, or hiring people they’ve recommended for the private sector, such actions have long been considered a vital part of the democratic political process, according to many members of the defense bar.

But the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has not seen it quite that way. In a series of decisions over the years, the appeals court has repeatedly held that the law does indeed criminalize gratuities if they’re meant to reward official acts, giving the U.S. attorney’s office a consistent — and effective — arrow in its quiver when going after corrupt public officials.

Several other circuits have made similar rulings. But in 2013, the 1st Circuit strayed from the general interpretation, ruling language of the statute did not, in fact, make gratuities illegal. As a result, a Puerto Rico legislator and the businessman who gave him a trip to a Las Vegas prizefight had their convictions thrown out.

Nine years later, the 5th Circuit followed suit, ruling in a Texas case that the 666 statute requires an explicit quid pro quo.

The 5-2 split has now become “entrenched and intractable,” with courts refusing to reconsider their previous positions, Snyder’s appellate attorneys wrote in their Aug. 1 petition asking the Supreme Court to take up the case.

“The battle lines are drawn, and only this court can break the logjam and restore uniformity on the meaning of an important federal criminal statute,” the petition stated. “Officials and citizens across the country should not be left guessing when the everyday hustle and bustle of local politics becomes a federal crime.”

Snyder’s attorneys are scheduled to file their opening brief in the case in early February, followed by the government’s response and oral arguments. The court is expected to render a decision by late June.

Jackie Bennett Jr., who represented Snyder against the bribery charges in Indiana federal court, told the Tribune in a telephone interview that he was “not surprised” that the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.

“In 20 states and Puerto Rico, the law is one thing. In eight states, they adopted the position we argued in Mr. Snyder’s case. It’s an irreconcilable difference,” Bennett said. “What Snyder did in Portage should not be regarded as a crime.”

The idea of Illinois politicians being corruptly swayed by gifts and gratuities, rather than envelopes of cash passed in some room just before a vote, has been baked into many of the city’s political corruption cases over the years.

The kickbacks that Republican ex-Gov. George Ryan was convicted of illegally accepting from businessman and pal Larry Warner included payment for a $3,200 wedding band for Ryan’s daughter, investments in his son’s cigar business, and thousands of dollars in cash “loans” that Ryan never appeared worried about paying back.

More recently, Pennsylvania collection agency owner Donald Donagher was found guilty in 2021 under the gratuities theory of 666 for paying for plaques and catering for then-Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown’s 2014 Women’s History Month program as a “thank you” for the county hiring his company.

The bribery vs. gratuity issue also recently came up in the trial of former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, who was convicted of racketeering conspiracy on Dec. 21, a case that included several counts under the federal bribery statute.

After the Supreme Court’s decision to take up Snyder’s case came in on Dec. 13, one of Burke’s attorneys remarked to U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall that it would not help their client to have his case overturned five years from now, when he’d be 85. No formal motion related to Snyder has so far been filed in Burke’s case.

Meanwhile, the investigation into ComEd’s efforts to woo Madigan took the idea of “rewards” to a whole new level.

According to that indictment, the utility embarked on a nearly decadelong effort to keep Madigan in its good graces by secretly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the speakers’ friends in “consulting” fees when they did little or no actual work.

The scheme, which was allegedly orchestrated by Madigan’s longtime confidant, Michael McClain, also involved the utility giving business to a Madigan-preferred law firm, hiring summer interns sent from the 13th Ward ahead of better-qualified applicants, and putting a Madigan-approved political operative on its board of directors.

Lawyers for the ComEd Four argued throughout the case that the prosecution had improperly tried to criminalize legal lobbying and job recommendations that are at the center of the state’s legitimate political system, without a link to any official action Madigan took to help the utility.

McClain’s attorney, Patrick Cotter, told the jury in closing arguments last spring the reason ComEd’s legislation passed “was because of an incredible amount of very fine lobbying,” not a few jobs spread out over a decade.“Friendship is just friendship. Lobbying is just lobbying. And politics is just politics. And none of them is illegal,” Cotter said.

Bhachu, though, said the utility’s efforts went way beyond legal lobbying. “We’re not talking about amateurs here,” Bhachu said in his closing remarks. “They were not playing checkers, they were playing chess. And when it came to playing chess, Mr. McClain and the other defendants were grandmasters of corruption.”

The same ComEd bribery allegations make up a large part of Madigan’s racketeering indictment, which was filed in March 2022 and also charged McClain with participating in a scheme that essentially turned the speaker’s office into a criminal enterprise.

In their motion to delay the trial, Madigan’s attorneys wrote the issues the Supreme Court will be looking at in the Snyder case “unquestionably affects how the government will proceed and, of course, how the defendants will defend themselves against these allegations.”

Though prosecutors objected to the delay, U.S. District Judge Robert Blakey agreed the issues were too important to the case to move forward without more clarity.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s legal community will watch in earnest how the Snyder case unfolds before the Supreme Court.

“Hopefully the Supreme Court will make evidence of a quid pro quo a legal requirement, because as things stand right now, people who deal with public officials really don’t know where the line is,” one veteran Chicago criminal defense attorney told the Tribune.

Green, the Rutgers law professor, told the Tribune the “bombshell” decision by the high court would be to gut the 666 statute. Or, the justices could take a more nuanced approach by offering guidance on what constitutes a “reward” as written in the plain language of the law.

“I think it’s a hard case,” Green said. “I think the courts have long struggled with a certain central vagueness that surrounds the whole concept of what is a gratuity. … It’s conceivable that the court could finally says, ‘Look, gratuities is just too vague and we’re just going to read it out of 666.’ But I’d be very surprised if it’s a unanimous decision.”

The investigation into Snyder’s tenure as Portage mayor may have far lower stakes than the Madigan case, but it has many of the same hallmarks, including lucrative government contracts, wire-wearing informants, and businesspeople who felt pressure to make an elected official happy.

Modernizing Portage’s garbage pickup was a big part of Snyder’s first mayoral campaign in 2011. But when it came time to get new garbage trucks, Snyder, a Republican, put a longtime friend in charge of administering the bidding process, even though the friend had no experience doing so, according to the court record.

That friend, Randy Reeder, took great pains to tailor the contracts to favor Great Lakes Peterbilt, Reeder later testified. And around the time of bidding for a second contract in late 2013, Snyder was in frequent contact with Robert and Stephen Buha, the brothers who owned the truck dealership, evidence showed. Altogether, the two contracts were worth more than a million dollars.

Not long after Great Lakes Peterbilt won the second bid, Snyder paid the Buha brothers a visit at their dealership and asked for a $15,000 loan, Robert Buha testified.

The brothers declined, but agreed to Snyder’s next suggestion: that they advance him some money in exchange for work yet to be done. The $13,000 check was issued in January 2014. While Snyder helped a little, he did not do work worth that much money, Buha testified.

Buha described Snyder as “a pest” but, given Snyder’s status as mayor, Buha said he felt pressured to give him money when asked, because Snyder was “a man of influence.”

In one of the many twists of the case, Snyder’s older brother Jon, then the Porter County assessor, wore a wire and cooperated with the FBI. During his brother’s first trial, Jon Snyder testified that tow truck operator John Cortina, who he described as a longtime friend, began talking to him about getting on the city towing list.

“I just didn’t like it,” Snyder said in court. “I tried to tell him to stop talking about it.”

Snyder, who was already under federal investigation related to his personal business, said he didn’t want to get involved in any towing business and went to the FBI.

As a result of his cooperation, Snyder wound up pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor tax count related to his private business and was sentenced to probation.

James Snyder, meanwhile, was reelected as mayor of Portage in 2015 even though the FBI investigation had already been made public.

The last year of his second term was cut short when a federal jury convicted him in February 2019 of taking the bribe from the garbage truck contractors, and for using a shell company to hide income from the IRS when he owed personal and business taxes from his private business.

The same jury acquitted him on a charge for receiving a bribe from Cortina, even though Cortina had admitted in a plea agreement to paying the mayor $12,000 to get his company back on Portage’s list of approved tow truck companies. Cortina was sentenced in 2019 to home detention.

Snyder appealed and was granted a new trial, but was convicted again in March 2021. He was sentenced that October to 21 months in prison, though he has been allowed to remain free on bond pending the outcome of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Almost three years later, Bennett, his local criminal defense attorney, is impassioned as ever that what his client did should not be considered a crime. “You’re talking about a guy who we believe acted in utter innocence,” he said, adding that the new trucks Snyder got for the city were a benefit to both workers and residents.

Snyder, 45, declined to comment given the pending review of his case.

Snyder’s former fellow elected officials remain astonished that the case has gone on this long, and wonder at the possible implications. If Snyder’s case is overturned, for example, the city could be on the hook for years and years of legal fees.

After Snyder’s first conviction and before his second trial, city officials wanted nothing more than for the case to come to a conclusion, with then-Mayor Sue Lynch calling it “a dark cloud over the city.”

Collin Czilli, a Democrat on the Portage City Council, was 11 months into his first term when Snyder was originally indicted in November 2016. He said he never expected Snyder’s case to be the one to go all the way to Washington, and he doesn’t agree with Snyder’s interpretation of the law.

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If an elected official orchestrates a bidding process to a preferred recipient and the official gets a reward for it, he asked, it’s “a stretch” to interpret that as anything but a bribe, Czilli said.

“The evidence was there,” he said. “They showed that happened.”

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com

alavalley@chicagotribune.com