SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Former Illinois lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate William “Sam” McCann abruptly pleaded guilty Thursday to nine felony counts of bank fraud, money laundering and tax evasion, halting his federal corruption trial for misusing up to $550,000 in campaign contributions.
McCann, who ended negotiations on a plea deal last fall when he fired his court-appointed attorneys, made the U-turn on the third day of a trial before U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Lawless. His last attorney, Jason Vincent, of Springfield, asked for his release as part of the deal, but Lawless rejected this idea and told McCann his only option was to offer a no-obligation plea deal.
The seven charges of bank fraud and the single charges of money laundering each carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years. For tax evasion there are three. But a complex set of advisory guidelines for Lawless, who set sentencing for June 20, is likely to yield a much shorter deadline.
“Are you pleading guilty because you are actually guilty?” Lawless asked. McCann, 54, dressed in the gray-and-black striped jumpsuit of the nearby prison where he was being held, replied: “Yes, your honor.”
Lawless set a hearing Friday on McCann’s release request, but that is sure to draw opposition from the government, and not just because McCann violated probation last week when he left the state to check himself into a hospital with chest pains. Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Bass told Lawless that as further evidence of McCann’s unreliability, he would introduce a bizarre social media video posted this week in which McCann alleges a government conspiracy involving a “wicked package of lies” against him .
McCann served as a senator from 2011 to 2019 and formed the Conservative Party of Illinois to campaign for governor in 2018. A 2021 criminal indictment outlined numerous schemes McCann used to divert contributions from his campaign committees into purchasing vehicles, paying a delinquent loan and two mortgages. , credit card bills and financing a family vacation, entertainment and other purchases.
For his failed bid to become governor, he collected more than $3 million dollars from Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers alone. Despite being questioned four times by FBI and IRS agents about alleged improper spending in the summer of 2018, he squirreled away $340,000 in leftover campaign funds for personal expenses in the year after the election.
McCann’s trial was repeatedly postponed. On the day it was set to begin last November, McCann announced he had fired his court-appointed attorneys and would represent himself. Then he told reporters, “God has this.” The procedure was reset for Feb. 5, but McCann was a no-show, sending a weekend email saying he was in a St. Louis-area hospital.
Back in court on February 12, an attentive Lawless questioned McCann closely as he told her he was “medically and psychologically” unfit to stand trial and was handing over control of his defense to Vincent.
At that time, McCann told the judge he remembered very little of what happened after his Feb. 7 release from the hospital, including a 55-mile drive last Friday from his home to Springfield to surrender for probation. guidelines. He was driving a pickup matching the description of the person the indictment said used $60,000 in campaign funds to partially purchase.
On Tuesday, while McCann was in jail, the video appeared on Instagram. McCann drove what appeared to be a truck and told his viewers he was innocent of the charges. He claimed an ‘Orwellian’ government had tried to get at him for failing to help with other investigations, offering an extravagant story about an investigation into McCann’s ‘unholy alliance’ with the then Speaker of the House of Representatives Michael Madigan to ‘rig elections’.
“I wouldn’t play with the ball. They came back to me and said, ‘Well, we got you involved in this,'” McCann says in the video. “And if you just tell us what we want to hear, we’ll stop digging. And I said, ‘No, I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. I will speak the truth. ”
So federal agents continued digging and, McCann said, managed to turn “everything I’ve ever touched” into “these machinations of misconduct.”