On a cool September night in 2014, 18-year-old Pietro Mautino sped down a rural county road about 100 miles southwest of Chicago, his friend at the wheel of his bronze Kia sedan. The headlights were off.
Around 1:35 a.m., police pulled them over. The car reeked of cannabis, police reported.
An officer watched Mautino toss a plastic pill bottle into the back seat. Searching the car and Mautino’s black Prada bag, he inventoried a hydrocodone pill, 14 clonazepam pills, a baggie of marijuana, some hash oil, and drug paraphernalia, according to police reports.
The son of longtime state Rep. Frank Mautino and a paid campaign staffer, Pietro was charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 4 felony with a base sentencing range of one to three years in prison for each count.
Because of the elder Mautino’s connections to local prosecutors, the case was turned over to Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit, a team of state government attorneys who take charge in county courts across Illinois when local authorities are disqualified because of a potential conflict.
But Pietro Mautino’s case highlights the political ties of the Special Prosecution Unit’s leaders, who at times have their own conflicts of interest and political entanglements.
Before Pietro Mautino’s arrest, the Illinois State’s Attorney’s Association PAC, a political action committee that shared an address and leadership with the Special Prosecution Unit, made donations to Frank Mautino’s campaign. Soon after, Mautino became the state auditor general, one of the few state officials with even nominal oversight over the Special Prosecution Unit.
The state agency housing the Special Prosecution Unit has long handed out no-bid contracts to political insiders and hired well-connected local prosecutors, government records show. And the unit has shielded defendants with clout while its political allies helped protect the agency from public scrutiny by writing it out of the state’s public records law.
The charges against Pietro Mautino stalled for three years before a special prosecutor offered a plea deal that enabled Mautino to avoid prison. Under the deal, he was sentenced to 24 months of special probation before the public case file was expunged, news reports and court records show.
The special prosecutor handling the case, Dave Neal, publicly explained the trial delays by saying police drug-testing labs had a backlog of more serious cases. A Peru, Illinois, police report shows lab testing was not conducted until 2017, more than two years into the prosecution, Injustice Watch found. But the officer who handled the test told Injustice Watch he would have done so sooner if asked by the prosecutor. Neal did not respond to requests for comment.
The local prosecutor who initially fielded Pietro Mautino’s case but then referred it to the unit — LaSalle County State’s Attorney Brian Towne — joined the unit two years later, highlighting the often close relationships between the Special Prosecution Unit and the local prosecutors they’re brought in to replace. Frank Mautino had donated more than $5,500 to Towne’s campaigns in the years before his son’s prosecution, campaign finance data show, and news reports show Towne honored Mautino with an Outstanding Legislator Award in 2015.
An agency hidden from public view
The unit’s parent agency, the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor, or ILSAAP, was created in 1977 to help local prosecutors fight a flood of appeals from indigent prisoners. At the time, Illinois courts were expanding the rights of people who contested their convictions and lawmakers had created the Office of the State Appellate Defender to represent them. County state’s attorneys and their legislative allies created ILSAAP as a counterforce.
ILSAAP’s mission statement, then and now, is spelled out in its annual reports: “Keep convicted criminals behind bars.”
ILSAAP’s power has been expanded steadily over the past four decades as state lawmakers added a slew of new legal assignments to its now-$36 million annual budget: assisting state’s attorneys with property tax cases, helping distribute drug forfeiture funds, training county prosecutors on the Pretrial Fairness Act and other laws — and deploying special prosecutors when local officials have a conflict of interest.
But ILSAAP’s oversight structure creates an apparent conflict of interest that shadows the Special Prosecution Unit’s work.
The “independent” special prosecutors are governed by a board of 10 elected state’s attorneys who rely on ILSAAP to defend them on appeals and replace them with special prosecutors when they or their offices have a conflict.
The board establishes the agency’s rules, regulations and procedures, and governs all aspects of ILSAAP’s operation, agency publications say. But the public minutes from recent meetings show only the barest oversight; the March 2026 meeting lasted just seven minutes.
That’s about the only scrutiny the agency gets.
In 2010, as ILSAAP was facing public records requests about the Special Prosecution Unit, ILSAAP leaders pulled off a legislative sleight of hand to shield themselves from public view.
ILSAAP was initially formed as a commission within Illinois’ executive branch, making it subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which requires government agencies to provide documents and information to the public upon request.
But then-state Sen. William Haine, a former Madison County state’s attorney who served as ILSAAP’s point person in the General Assembly, quietly introduced a bill making ILSAAP part of the judicial branch, which is exempt from FOIA in Illinois.
On the Senate floor, when Haine introduced the bill, he did not explain to fellow lawmakers that he was doing so to make ILSAAP exempt from public records laws. He never even used words like “judicial” or “FOIA”, legislative transcripts show.
Instead, Haine told fellow lawmakers he was making an “update” that “allows for a different configuration in the board and a few other things that updates the office.”
When ILSAAP’s exemption from FOIA was later debated in court in 2013, Illinois’ Appellate Court ridiculed ILSAAP’s new designation as an arm of the state courts. Calling ILSAAP a judicial agency was like saying a dog had five legs because you counted its tail as one leg, the court wrote in Uphoff v. Grosskopf, citing a quip from Abraham Lincoln.
ILSAAP “is, in fact, in no sense a judicial agency of state government,” the Appellate Court wrote. The legislative intent of Haine’s bill was simple: “to provide a FOIA exemption for that agency.”
Yet because of Haine’s change in the law, the court wrote, it had no choice but to uphold ILSAAP’s exemption from public records laws.
“SAAP is, in fact, in no sense a judicial agency of state government”
Illinois Appellate Court
The maneuver deprives Illinois citizens of their basic right to be informed about the workings of a critical government agency, said Steve Helle, a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“It is, of course, common for our representatives to prefer secrecy, but they disdain the public they profess to serve if they do not resist the temptation,” Helle said.
Haine retired from the legislature in 2019 and died two years later. Today, ILSAAP is still part of the judiciary on paper, but the state Supreme Court provides no oversight or even interaction with ILSAAP or the Special Prosecution Unit.
“There’s nothing in the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutors Act that requires the [Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts] or Supreme Court to provide oversight,” Illinois courts spokesperson Christopher Bonjean said.
ILSAAP Director Patrick Delfino and Board Chair Ben Goetten did not respond to requests for comment.
Political contributions and no-bid contracts
ILSAAP has had just two directors in the past 35 years.
Former Greene County State’s Attorney Norbert Goetten took over the agency in 1991. He was succeeded in 2008 by his top aide, Patrick Delfino, a former director of planning and special projects for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office who helped write the legislation that created ILSAAP.
Both were accused of misconduct in the 1990s, when then-state Auditor General William Holland scrutinized ILSAAP’s use of contracts and state phones. Holland reported in a public audit that ILSAAP no-bid contractors were being paid with little evidence they did any actual work, and ILSAAP staffers were using their state phones to make personal long-distance calls.
Delfino agreed to give up an accumulated 55 vacation days to pay for private calls allegedly made on a state phone, including calls to a girlfriend, the State Journal-Register reported in 1995. Goetten said at the time that the 55 days amounted to “way more” than the cost of Delfino’s personal phone calls.
ILSAAP contract records were subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, with the FBI interviewing Goetten, the State Journal-Register reported, but no charges were filed.
Goetten survived the scrutiny by the auditor general and the FBI, and he and his family deepened their ties to ILSAAP.
His son, Jersey County State’s Attorney Ben Goetten, has served as chairman of ILSAAP’s Board of Governors since 2020. Another son, Matthew Goetten, is an ILSAAP special prosecutor, while Goetten’s grandson, Connor Goetten, is an ILSAAP staff attorney.
Norbert Goetten ran a private Jersey County law practice while running ILSAAP. He was chair of ILSAAP’s political action committee and contributed more than $10,000 of his own money to Illinois politicians.
His son Ben was later treasurer of the PAC, which began making political donations to legislative allies while Goetten was in charge of ILSAAP. From 2006 to 2015, the PAC donated $6,200 to Haine, who sponsored the legislation exempting ILSAAP from FOIA.
ILSAAP continues to award no-bid consulting and legal services contracts to political insiders and lawyers with spotty records. ILSAAP and the contractors declined to comment.
In the most recent fiscal year, the agency awarded no-bid contracts to Lisa Duarte, a former top aide to Gov. JB Pritzker, and her firm worth up to $146,000. Former 5th Ward Chicago Ald. Leslie Hairston was awarded a contract worth $81,000 and former Ald. Roderick Sawyer, the son of a onetime Chicago mayor, was awarded a contract for $60,000.
Also holding no-bid ILSAAP contracts: former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan spokesman Steve Brown, former Illinois House Assistant Majority Leader John Bradley, and William Mudge, a retired Third Judicial Circuit chief judge whose wife, Jennifer, is a special prosecutor.
Borges and Wu, a high-volume bankruptcy firm also known as Billbusters, had an ILSAAP legal services contract even though the firm’s senior partner, Ernesto D. Borges Jr., has twice been censured by the Illinois Supreme Court, once for failing to pay income taxes and once for failure to diligently represent two clients.
Former Lake County Chief Deputy State’s Attorney Jeffrey Pavletic also holds a no-bid legal consulting contract. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2012 on Pavletic’s “spate of collapsing prosecutions in Lake County, including high-profile cases that disintegrated in the face of contradictory evidence.”
One such case was that of Juan Rivera, whom Pavletic prosecuted for the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan. Rivera, who was 19 at the time, was found guilty in three separate trials on the basis of a confession that followed a four-day interrogation. DNA evidence tying another man to the crime helped clear Rivera in 2011, after he had spent 20 years in prison. He later received a certificate of innocence and won a $20 million settlement.
Other states have found ways to protect against some of the controversies surrounding Illinois’ special prosecutors, Injustice Watch found in an analysis of statutes and court decisions, law review articles, and news reports from all 50 states.
In Maryland, for example, the governor must appoint a new state prosecutor every six years, or reappoint the current one. Applicants are vetted by a seven-member commission of judges, lawyers, and former lawmakers, said Maryland Deputy State Prosecutor Sarah David.
“I think that is really important, because there’s more community buy-in on the front end,” she said.
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