AT&T Illinois had tried for years to win powerful House Speaker Michael Madigan’s support for a bill ending mandated landline service, but it wasn’t until the company’s president agreed to secretly pay thousands of dollars to a Madigan associate for a do-nothing contract that the deal got done, federal prosecutors told a jury Wednesday.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a case about a corporate executive paying off the most powerful politician in Illinois to help pass his company’s prized piece of legislation,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Mower said in his opening statement in the bribery trial of former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza.

The trial is the latest chapter in the blockbuster federal investigation of Madigan and his once-vaunted 13th Ward political operation, a probe that helped put an end to Madigan’s record run as both the leader of the House and the state Democratic Party.

While Madigan was not physically in court Wednesday, prosecutors wasted no time putting his smiling driver’s license photo on display as Mower walked the jury through the vast influence the Democratic leader wielded for decades in the state legislature.

“That power was no secret — including to the defendant,” Mower said, displaying emails where La Schiazza himself referred to the speaker as “King Madigan” and told colleagues, “Everyone in the system is beholden to the Speaker … he rules the House with an iron fist.”

So when Madigan’s right-hand man, Michael McClain, came to AT&T in early 2017 and asked them to kick some money to former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a longtime Madigan acolyte, La Schiazza jumped, Mower said.

“Lets move quickly to get this done,” La Schiazza emailed to his internal lobbying team in March 2017, according to a copy shown by Mower in his opening statement. “We did get the GO order … Gotta love it! Try to get him for $2500/mon.”

La Schiazza’s attorney, however, told the jury in his opening remarks his client is an innocent man who has found himself “in the middle of a nightmare” after retiring from a successful career in corporate government relations.

“He fell into the crosshairs of the government’s investigation of Mike Madigan … publicly accused of being a criminal for simply doing his job,” attorney Jack Dodds said. He said the government’s narrative about the alleged bribe is vastly oversimplified, and that “the whole story will out the lie in that narrative.”

Dodds told the jury La Schiazza’s job was literally to build relationships and goodwill with legislators, because in the business of lobbying and government relations, “good relationships and goodwill equals access.”

“Paul and his team took the request to consider a small contract for Eddie Acevedo seriously because they wanted to be responsive, they wanted to have a good relationship with Madigan while doing the work of trying to convince him to support (landline) legislation,” Dodds said

Dodds also told the jury they will not see any proof that La Schiazza thought that he was hiring Acevedo “in exchange” for Madigan advancing AT&T’s bill, and certainly no proof that La Schiazza “understood he was doing something wrong … that he was doing something other than his job.”

Even the hiring of Acevedeo was a tiny blip in an otherwise protracted and complicated legislative battle, Dodds said, one that came down to the final vote despite years of wooing not only the speaker, but also a plethora of trade groups, unions, associations and other stakeholders.

Dodds says the jury will see texts up to the very end, wondering if Madigan was going to advance the legislation, “even though, according to the government, they fixed the whole thing months before by hiring Eddie Acevedo.”

La Schiazza, 66, was charged in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in October 2022 with conspiracy, federal program bribery and using a facility in interstate commerce to promote unlawful activity. The most serious counts carry up to 20 years in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty and been free on bond while his case is pending.

The trial, which is expected to last up to four weeks, will offer a sneak peek at some of the evidence that will be presented at the racketeering trial of Madigan and McClain, which kicks off next month.

A jury panel of nine women and six men — three of whom are alternates — was selected in La Schiazza’s case in a full day of questioning Tuesday. Before questioning began, the jury was given a lengthy list of names that may come up during the trial, including Michael J. Madigan. No one said in open court that they’d heard of Madigan in particular or had any opinions about him.

Two key witnesses for the prosecution, Tom Cullen, a lobbyist and former political operative for Madigan, and Stephen Selcke, an AT&T internal lobbyist, have been granted immunity by the U.S. attorney’s office in exchange for their testimony about how the Acevedo deal was struck.

Mower said Cullen and Selcke will tell the jury that “Acevedo was one of the last people that anyone at AT&T wanted working for their company,” largely because of his loose lips and lack of work ethic.

“Acevedo talked too much, drank too much and was generally despised by Republicans in Springfield,” Mower said. So they came up with a scheme to pay Acevedo through a third party — Cullen — and keep his name completely off AT&T’s books, Mower said.

“La Schiazza didn’t just hand Acevedo stacks of cash. He was more sophisticated than that,” Mower said.

To hide that it was a do-nothing position, Acevedo was given a bogus assignment to write a report on the Latino caucuses of the state legislature and city of Chicago, Mower said. Even then, Acevedo initially balked, saying the offer was too low and asking for $3,000 a month, Mower said.

Eventually, Acevedo came around to the $2,500-a-month offer and the payments started flowing.

After that, Mower said, not only did the report on Latinos never got done, it was never even discussed further by anyone involved.

“Even though Acevedo didn’t do any actual work, the defendant’s scheme to buy Madigan’s support did work,” Mower said. AT&T’s bill to end mandated landline service, known by the acronym COLR, passed that spring with the speaker’s help.

But Dodds said AT&T hid payments to Acevedo for purely political reasons, fearing that if word got out it would “rock the boat” and steer support away from them, particularly among Republicans.

In one email shown to the jury during Dodds’ opening statement, AT&T staffer Brian Gray warned the team that “some republican members have said they would go south on our bill if Eddie was hired as a lobbyist.”

In another email, La Schiazza, told the team they would have to make sure “we have legal approval to engage Eddie this way.”

Among the first witnesses called by prosecutors Wednesday were two former state representatives, Scott Drury and Greg Harris, both Democrats who gave the jury a 30,000-foot view of the state legislature, its rules and procedures, how bills are moved through committees, and why Madigan wielded so much power there.

Late in the day, the jury saw a series of internal AT&T emails that, according to prosecutors, demonstrate that La Schiazza and his colleagues were acutely aware of Madigan’s influence — and therefore desperate to win him over.

One email came from La Schiazza on Aug. 23, 2014, in response to a colleague sending him a Wall Street Journal article about term limits for politicians.

“Sadly the article validates everything you and I have talked about,” La Schiazza wrote. “The Speaker can not lose, the system is rigged as everyone in the system is beholden to the Speaker.”

In another email from May 2015, La Schiazza seemed more optimistic about a “major shift” for Madigan in potentially supporting their bill to move to a cell-tower-based network, referred to as IP. In fact, Madigan had agreed to a “sunset” provision that would give AT&T another chance to pass the legislation just two years later, he wrote.

“The Speaker is clearly beginning to understand that the IP transition is happening and is inevitable,” La Schiazza wrote.

But there was still plenty of snarking over how Madigan lorded over the legislature.

Before breaking for the day, the jury saw another email chain dated Jan. 11, 2017, which began when an AT&T lobbyist forwarded a news article about Madigan being reelected to lead the House for a record 17th term.

“King Madigan lives — elected to Speaker again,” La Schiazza shot back, adding later in the chain, “No surprise — not one Dem voted against him.”

“A herd of sheep” agreed April Rodewald, an assistant general counsel for AT&T.

jmeisner@chicagotribune .com