From the Tribune it appears one juror was the hold up on selling the Senate Seat and the effort to extort money out Rahm Emmanuel through his brother Ari.
More to the point is one juror’s desription of the case by the Prosecution:
Sarnello, a sophomore at College of DuPage studying criminal justice, said the main problem with the prosecution’s case was that it appeared scattered.
“It confused people. They didn’t follow a timeline. They jumped around,” he said.
This is a key point to the racketeering and conspiracy charges. There has to be an ongoing criminal enterprise and one thing you have to do to have an audience understand such an argument is provide a clear timeline to them, where the distinct events occur along the timeline, and how it worked. One concern I’ve had since early on is that all, but they lying charge are all relatively contemporaneous despite the investigation starting in 2003/4.. By concentrating on the later acts that have better evidence with the wiretaps the Prosecution was concentrating upon the strongest evidence, but they hurt their timeline. What is probably needed is some testimony from the earlier efforts to demonstrate the ongoing enterprise. That may require Levine or Rezko on the stand to establish the early part of the conspiracy. If they primarily concentrate upon those issues in questioning, their lack of reliability is diminished in the later specific crimes.