One afternoon, not long after she was sworn in as Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan disappeared for a while from her office on the 12th floor of the James R. Thompson Center.
Her chief of staff, Ann Spillane, assumed that she had gone to talk with an aide about a legal issue or had set up camp, as she had taken to doing, among the stacks of legal volumes in the library.
Then a secretary poked her head into Spillane’s office and cleared her throat. “I don’t know if you know this,” she said, “but the attorney general has been at the front desk answering the phone now for 45 minutes.”
Among those who called that day was a woman whose son had taken a job with what she suspected was a bogus firm, and she wanted to know if Madigan’s office could help her figure it out before he was to report for work in a few days. But office procedure required the woman to fill out paperwork that would take several days or even weeks before she could get the information.
It was the first time Madigan had worked the telephones, and things changed quickly. Receptionists got computers and greater access to the office database so they could answer more questions directly, says Spillane.
Staffers now have gotten used to the sight of their boss taking phone calls at the desk overlooking the cavernous rotunda of the Thompson Center, and they are not surprised to get e-mail messages or voicemail on Monday mornings that measure how long it takes them to respond.
“Hi, it’s Lisa Madigan,” said one recent voice message. “Call when you get this.”
Spillane thinks this story says something important about her boss, who has been a friend since the mid-1990s when both were attorneys at the Chicago law firm of Sachnoff & Weaver. “She’s extremely hands-on,” Spillane says. “When she was on the education committee in the Illinois Senate, she planted herself in a hotel room and read the state school code,” more than 600 pages of dense legalese. “She approaches things very methodically and very thoroughly.”
Not everybody expected Lisa Madigan to do a good job as attorney general. Some thought she’d be an outright flop.
She was the daughter of political power, after all, someone who had practiced law full-time for only four years before running for the job as the state’s top lawyer, critics noted. They said she was getting the post because her father, the powerful head of the state’s Democratic Party, wanted her to have it.
Two and a half years into her four-year term, she is changing the minds of some skeptics. She has successfully argued a case defending police powers before the U.S. Supreme Court, has taken some fairly bold stands on behalf of consumers and run an efficient staff operation. She also issued a surprisingly candid report on organized crime in Illinois that might have made another public official’s kneecaps twitch.
Meanwhile, she’s working to step out of her father’s shadow and establish her own political identity. She says her record in office already demonstrates her competence in the job and her ability to act independently. Whether she has done well enough to be re-elected is a question she faces as she gears up her campaign apparatus for next year’s election. A victory could position her for a later run to be the state’s first woman governor or even a player on the national stage, though for now she says she’s focused on running for re-election as attorney general.
With all that going on, Madigan, 39, doesn’t have a lot of time to think about her critics. Sitting in her Thompson Center office recently, she rolls her eyes at the reminder of predictions that she would fail-some of them in the pages of the Tribune.
“Yeah, I saw that somewhere,” she says dryly.
Did she ever think those critics might be right about some of it?
“Never,” is her calm answer. “No. Not at all.”
AN EPISODE FROM THE RECENT past helps explain that trademark Madigan certainty. It happened last November, when she was standing before the U.S. Supreme Court, a petite woman with serious black glasses and an eight-month pregnancy tucked neatly under her black suit coat.
She was arguing the government’s side in Illinois v. Roy I. Caballes, a case about whether the use of police dogs at a routine traffic stop was an “unreasonable search” under the Constitution’s 4th Amendment.
At one point, the justices veered into a detailed examination of how the dogs are trained to detect drugs and how, exactly, they do their jobs. The inquiry required knowledge well outside the legal issues of the case, but Madigan was unruffled.
“She had excellent composure and handled the questions in a very efficient and articulate manner,” says Charles Hervas, an Itasca attorney and lifelong Republican, who happened to be there for his yearly visit to observe Supreme Court arguments. “She was in the top 10 percent I’ve seen.”
Back home, a certain group of state police officers was not surprised at her performance. As part of her research on the case, she had spent several hours with them watching a dog unit undergo training and then work in the field.
Recalling the episode, she voiced a favorite maxim: “There’s something that I’ve seen repeatedly demonstrated by my father, who is the hardest-working man in politics: If you want to be successful, you have to prepare.”
That would be Michael J. Madigan, as in “Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan” and “Illinois Democratic Party Chairman Mike Madigan.”
As in “The Velvet Hammer” Mike Madigan, who made it clear that he would not look kindly upon anyone who didn’t help his daughter win election to the Illinois Senate in 1998 and to the attorney general’s office in 2002.
Of course, the veteran ward politician from the Southwest Side didn’t have to say that in so many words. He simply asked for help from the many people who owe him their careers. “Can you help Lisa?” is reportedly how he ended many conversations during that time.
Lisa didn’t become Madigan’s daughter until she was in elementary school, when he married her mother. But anyone who might have questioned the strength of their familial bond was disabused of all doubts during the campaign.
He recruited help from Democratic lawmakers and special-interest groups that rely on his support in the Statehouse. He even called some well-connected friends and asked for copies of their wedding guest lists to use for his daughter’s political mailings.
In a quip now well-known in political circles, one political activist told the Tribune, “We’re biting our tongue, swallowing the blood and endorsing Daddy’s little girl.”
Even her fans acknowledge that Madigan got a giant boost in politics far earlier than if she had been running with a different last name.
“Initially, it’s obviously an advantage, having name recognition. In politics, it’s like a brand,” says State Sen. John Cullerton (D-Chicago), who followed his cousins-two former aldermen and a county assessor-into politics. “When people go in to vote, that name sticks in their mind. That’s a positive thing.”
But entering politics with a strong family name also has a downside. Some voters may hold a political legacy against a candidate, especially in an environment like, for instance, Chicago’s, where people suspect collusion and favoritism in politics as a matter of course.
And there are always political enemies for an officeholder’s offspring to inherit. “There are going to be a lot of people who like your father and a lot of people who don’t,” says former Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Aurelia Pucinski, whose late father, Roman, was a congressman, alderman and fixture in Chicago politics. “There are some people who are automatically going to be more closed to you.”
Pucinski, now a circuit court judge, says, “You have to reach across those lines. You have to say, ‘Deal with me based on my own credibility.’ “
By some lights, Lisa Madigan has endured more criticism for her family ties than have other political scions. “If you compare [it] to George W. Bush or [Comptroller] Dan Hynes or [Rep.] Jesse Jackson Jr., I think the bar was set a lot higher for her,” says Eric Adelstein, a Chicago Democratic political consultant. “I remember during the campaign watching and thinking, ‘There’s a lot of politicians who would have been in the fetal position under the desk given the incoming that she was subjected to.’ “
In fairness to Madigan’s critics, her father’s intensive efforts on her behalf were an invitation for heightened scrutiny, as was the fact that the attorney general is more powerful than, say, the comptroller or a state legislator, with the authority to put people behind bars.
But especially among women, there was resentment of the negative “Daddy’s girl” commentary. “Men have worked to create political legacies for their sons for hundreds of years,” says Karen White, national political director of EMILY’S List, an organization dedicated to electing women candidates. “It should be considered a good thing that daughters are filling the political shoes of their mothers and fathers.”
In Madigan’s case, the criticism may actually have worked in her favor, some suggest. “The expectations of her going in were so low an ant could have stepped over them,” says Dan Curry, a Republican political consultant who worked for former Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan. Curry says he likes Madigan and thinks she’s “earnest, hard-working and sincere.” But, he says, “Some people are confusing ‘exceeding low expectations’ with ‘doing a good job.'”
Eventually, veterans say, political offspring have to earn their stripes. “To keep getting elected,” says Cullerton, “you have to stand on your own.”
While Madigan tends to take after her father, that serious-minded personality also comes mixed with a healthy dose of milk and sugar, courtesy of the gregarious member of the family, her mother, Shirley.
The difference between the parents is obvious when they are in public. Mike Madigan governs his Statehouse domain in a trim dark suit and with a visage that gives nothing away. Shirley Madigan, a former flight attendant, wears vibrant colors and bright highlights in her hair and, when she visits the House chamber, often embraces elected officials-Democrats and Republicans alike-and throws kisses to lawmakers and to visitors seated in the balcony.
“She’s not like her father,” Mike Madigan once said jokingly of his daughter. “She’s got a very nice personality.”
Actually, Lisa Madigan falls somewhere between her parents on the personality continuum and has edged back and forth along it over time, family friends say. “If you look at Lisa, you will see an assimilation of those two personalities,” says John Fritchey, who has known her since high school and college and who is now one of Mike Madigan’s House Democrats. “Shirley’s more open and casual. She has a real joie de vivre,” and when Lisa was a laid-back teenager, she was more like her mother, he recalls. Today, her exactitude and thoroughness makes her more like her father.
She didn’t even know Mike Madigan until she was 8 years old. Her biological father left when she was 2, and she lived alone with her mother on the Near North Side until Shirley met Mike at the Chicago law firm where she worked as a receptionist.
Lisa continued to go by the surname Murray until she was 18, when she could legally change it without involving any of the adults in her life in the decision. Not long after that, Mike Madigan officially adopted her, though those close to the family say he clearly had made her his daughter many years before.
In fact, the elder Madigan bristles at the phrase “adoptive father,” once calling a Tribune reporter to say he wished to be referred to without the qualifier.
Lisa was in 5th grade when Shirley and Mike married, and her father began taking her to Springfield for legislative sessions as soon as school was out. She usually worked on the floor as a page, did clerical tasks in his office or sat at his desk on the House floor. In the evening, she was back in his office when he called home to run spelling drills over the telephone with her younger siblings.
Even then, people noticed that she was taking on some of her father’s characteristics. “It was incredible to watch her develop his mannerisms,” says Jackie Gallagher, who worked on the speaker’s staff at the time. “Her hand gestures, her deliberate manner of speaking, her short one-liners or asides-she picked that up from him.”
She did something else that young pages on the House floor, intent on earning tips from lawmakers for fetching soda and other snacks, did not.
“She was watching the votes,” says Gallagher. “She was listening to the debate.”
At the private Latin School on the North Side, Lisa was a student government leader and athlete. In high school, she was especially interested in classwork that involved issues of justice, say those who knew her then. During a class reenactment of the Nuremberg trials, for instance, she threw herself into her role as the high-ranking Nazi Rudolph Hess. She not only read the assigned works but also wolfed down several additional biographies.
“Very early on, Lisa had a keen sense of social justice,” says Ingrid Dorer-Fitzpatrick, her teacher at the time.
One of Madigan’s lingering memories from high school is the time she showed up for a debate unprepared and got smoked by the competition. She still recalls how she hated the feeling. “I failed the debate because I didn’t prepare,” she says, shaking her head at the memory. “I just hadn’t taken it seriously.”
Later, as a law school student at Loyola, she was known for her meticulous preparation and tied for the top ranking in her class at the end of her first semester.
Law school, she says, wasn’t the torturous experience for her that it is for some students. “Read your cases. Brief your cases. And be able to apply [them] to a different set of facts. Once you figure that out, law school is enjoyable.”
She also served as executive editor of what is now called the Consumer Law Review at Loyola, where her father also got his law degree.
Her mother’s influence was evident in Madigan’s social-service activities. A lifelong Roman Catholic educated at a Jesuit college, Shirley Madigan taught her daughter that religious faith means service to others. As a young adult, Lisa helped a friend start a homeless shelter on the North Side called Inspiration Cafe, which initially was a little red wagon filled with bagels and juice that the pair wheeled around Uptown to feed hungry people.
More difficult was a project she undertook after getting her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in 1988, when apartheid was at its height in South Africa. At a mission in a remote part of the KwaZulu-Natal province, she lived in a convent and taught algebra, English and other subjects to Zulu girls. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I felt like the imposter algebra teacher,” she says, recalling that each night she had to brush up on the subject so she could teach it to her students the next day.
Her decision to postpone a graduate degree and go on the Africa mission did not sit well with her father, and the two didn’t speak for several months.
Likewise, his ambitions for his daughter didn’t include her foray into politics in 1998, when she ran for the state Senate against the 20-year incumbent, Sen. Bruce Farley, who was under indictment on federal corruption charges. Mike Madigan wanted Lisa to continue on her track as a lawyer at Sachnoff & Weaver, where she had worked full-time for four years.
Mimicking her father’s elongated way of speaking, she repeats what he said when she told him she wanted to run for the Senate. “What is wrong,” he asked soberly, “with the private practice of law?”
He sent her around to several political veterans to ask their advice, probably hoping she would get discouraged. Friends say he worried that his daughter would suffer attacks from enemies who couldn’t get at him directly.
But she came back from her round of interviews even more determined to run for the North Side seat. “You’ve shown me you can make a difference,” Madigan recalls telling her father. This time, he agreed to help her unseat Farley and launched his 32-year-old daughter into politics.
She turned out to be an effective campaigner, abandoning her reserve and diving into crowds to shake hands. She is quick with a laugh, which is much more booming than one might expect from a person not quite 5 feet 3 inches tall.
She won the election, and the political savvy she developed as a child in Springfield served her well in the Senate. She cultivated allies across party lines and in one instance befriended a conservative Republican by driving out to his farm field and climbing aboard his combine to talk about agriculture issues.
“She asks you about your kids. She remembers past conversations you have had,” says State Sen. Jeff Schoenberg (D-Evanston), who served in the Senate with her. “The security guard at the Capitol entrance, the person who cleans her office, people in restaurants on the campaign trail-she likes to talk to all of them.”
Still, Madigan recalls that being in the minority party in the Senate was frustrating for “a person of action.”
“To me, one of the great reasons to be the attorney general is that you get to . . . have an impact. You have an ability every day to help people.”
IT’S A SCORCHING SUMMER DAY and Madigan, wearing a pair of low heels and a modest suit, is tearing down the street like a speed-walker on race day. Two steps behind is her chief of staff, muttering something under her breath about the breakneck pace.
The two are on their way to meet with the office’s newest crop of interns, law students who will work for free in exchange for the chance to learn about public-interest law. The group includes students from Illinois’ top schools and a few from the Ivy League. Their pizza lunch grows cold as Madigan welcomes them, describes what they’ll be doing and then makes a pitch she hopes will inspire them to come back after graduation and work full-time.
How many places are there, she asks them, where a lawyer can work the system to protect the environment? Help domestic violence victims? Fight consumer fraud? And exercise subpoena power to collect evidence?
“I don’t blame any of you for going into private practice and making money, for a little bit of time,” she tells them, slender fingers splayed out and hands working in a Ferris wheel motion. “But then come back and work in the public interest.”
Madigan’s aides say one of her great strengths is her ability to attract and recruit good people, and not just from the intern class. Several of her staffers are attorneys from the city’s biggest firms, people who could be making twice their government salaries in the jobs they left. Some see their career moves as a long-term investment in a rising political figure. Others say they like the public-interest legal work they can do.
Besides, whether or not it is true of Madigan herself, there is a widely held belief that an offer from any member of the Madigan family is something no ambitious young professional can refuse.
OVER THE 30 MONTHS Madigan has been in office, her staff has handled the usual conveyor belt of cases that come to an attorney general. Besides the 4th Amendment issue she argued, her office has won two other cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, one defending police investigative practices and another cracking down on deceptive telemarketers. She also sued the Dave Matthews Band tour bus driver who dumped a tank of human waste on a group of sightseers cruising down the Chicago River.
One of her own initiatives is an investigation into reports that Peoples Energy Corp. improperly influenced state regulators in a case about whether the utility overcharged its customers. She also scrutinized the deal to open a casino in Rosemont and issued a report that tied political figures in the suburban community to organized crime.
Some think that was a breakout moment for her. “She seemed to be making independent decisions and gave no sense she was taking orders from anybody,” says John Schmidt, a former Justice Department official who ran against Madigan in the primary race for attorney general. “There was also no sense that she was deferring to a variety of powerful interests that would have liked to have seen that casino go forward.”
Madigan also oversaw a review of the case of a Downstate man who served 17 years, 12 of them on Death Row, for the murders of a newlywed couple. She said prosecutors did not disclose evidence that would have tended to prove his innocence and dropped her office’s opposition to a new trial, a decision that led to the man’s freedom.
She has teamed up with New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer on several projects, pushing for stricter controls on air and water pollution and suing Aon Corp. on behalf of Illinois customers allegedly injured by its financial practices. Madigan’s job description doesn’t give her the authority to prosecute securities violations, the source of many of Spitzer’s high-profile legal victories, but she shares his interest in consumer advocacy.
Her record adds up to a refutation of critics who said she couldn’t handle the job, says Fritchey, the Democratic state representative. “Whether or not they will admit it, there are people out there who would have liked to have seen her fail. But you would be hard-pressed to find someone who could lodge legitimate complaints about how that office is being run.”
There are complaints, of course. For example, Madigan’s former Republican opponent, Joe Birkett, says he thinks she could have acted more quickly on some things, particularly the casino issue. Others point out that while she has passed more than 30 legislative initiatives as attorney general, she has done so with a Democratic majority in a Statehouse whose members might reasonably assume their own bills have a better chance of passing if they work with the speaker’s daughter on hers. In other words, they say, she rode her father’s influence.
But there are no clear-cut instances in which Madigan has acted as a political pawn of her father while in office. Her fellow Democrat, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, once tried to suggest that family loyalty led her to side with her father in declaring unconstitutional the governor’s plan to raise revenue by mortgaging the Thompson Center.
“It’s her father, you know. I can’t fault her,” Blagojevich said at the time. “I’ve got two daughters. I hope they back me on stuff that I do.”
Lawmakers who aren’t usually on Madigan’s side rushed to her defense. Many thought the idea of renting out the state’s showcase downtown headquarters was a ridiculous idea and that the governor’s critique was laughable.
State Sen. Christine Radogno, a Republican from Lemont, called the governor a “Neanderthal” for assuming Madigan would follow her dad’s marching orders. “There are a lot of professional women,” she said, “and we don’t necessarily do what our fathers and husbands say.”
Even Birkett gives her credit for getting beyond politics while in office. As the DuPage County state’s attorney, he says, he has been able to forge a “partnership” with Madigan’s office despite their bitter campaign. “The public business comes first, and all of us in public service have to remember that,” he says. “Atty. Gen. Madigan gets it.”
It’s lunchtime and Madigan is in an Evanston restaurant talking about politics and her future while a bowl of noodles sits in front of her, uneaten. She’ll end up having it boxed to take home.
Her hands are working in that round-and-round motion as she speaks, except when she pauses to wave to people passing by the giant picture window.
At one point, a woman walking outside trips and falls, landing hard on the brick sidewalk. Madigan is out of her seat immediately, ready to head for the door. But as the woman gets up, looking around to see who saw her fall, it’s clear that she is more embarrassed than hurt. Madigan decides to return to her seat and goes back to her conversation as if nothing happened.
To her husband, Pat Byrnes, the episode demonstrates Madigan’s “mother instinct,” which he says he means in “the noblest, protective sense.” The two met in a North Side sandwich shop four years ago and were married shortly after her inauguration as attorney general.
One of his favorite stories from his courtship is the time she insisted that the two of them try to help a woman caught in a domestic altercation on a city street.
On another occasion, he says, one of his neighbors was having a hard time as she struggled to care for an ailing husband and her own aging mother while holding a job and trying to organize a household move.
One day, while Madigan and he were outside his house, the woman pulled up to unload some boxes. “Lisa looked at me and said, ‘Come on,’ ” he recalls. “It wasn’t exactly an order, but it wasn’t exactly a suggestion. She piled a stack of boxes in my arms, loaded up her own and marched up to the second floor flat before [the neighbor] could even figure out what was happening.
“Funny thing,” he adds, “now that she is actually a mother, that instinct is even stronger. Not to sound too much like Mr. T, but I pity the fool who tries to mess with her these days.” Madigan gave birth eight months ago to Rebecca Grace Madigan Byrnes, the first grandchild in the family.
Byrnes, a cartoonist, has a basement office in the couple’s home in the 47th Ward. His work frequently appears in The New Yorker, and he is preparing to release a collection of his works entitled, “What Would Satan Do?”
His influences on his wife include the recent gift of an iPod, which she has loaded with jazz, Motown, world music and, she says without shame, disco.
Her influences on her husband sometimes show up in print. One of the framed Byrnes cartoons in Madigan’s office depicts one lawyer saying to another, “Remember, we can only afford to do all this pro bono because of how much the anti bono pays.”
On weekends, the family attends mass at St. Clement Catholic Church, where they are members, or at St. Benedict Parish, which has services that often coincide better with the baby’s nap schedule.
A POPULAR PARLOR GAME in political circles is to try to figure out Madigan’s long-term political ambitions, but she says only that she likes her present job and wants to run for it again next year.
Former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, for whom Madigan worked while in college, used to say that the sky was the limit where she was concerned. And U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, who served in the Illinois Senate with her, says, “She can go as far as her ambitions take her.”
But Madigan just laughs when asked about her plans, poking fun at “all the reporters who ask me this question over and over as if I am secretly withholding my 2006 intentions.
“Why won’t you guys believe me?” she asks, knowing full well that most of the political world thinks she could make a credible run for governor sooner or later. “I’m running for attorney general.”
On her way out of the restaurant, she stops to thank the owner for letting her camp out at the table for two hours. Then she heads for the door with her noodles, tucking them under her left arm so she can shake hands with her right.
