Operation Greylord Read online

  “The bailiff told you that?” I asked, to clarify the reference for the tape.

  “Yeah, like it’s written down somewhere. Jesus, a third. I’m the one with the law degree, I’m the one who does all the work, but he gets a third. But you make enough if you keep at it.”

  Trying to prod him into saying more, I hopped around subjects until I got around to a prosecutor who refused to drop charges against one of Costello’s clients. “Hey, Jim,” I said, “I’m sorry he gave you a hard time about SOL-ing that case.” That meant having charges stricken with leave to reinstate.

  “It happens. You don’t always get what you pay for in this business. I’d rather deal with a judge, like those guys that keep going to Olson.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Jim, he’s just got lots of friends.” That was the sort of thing I might have said when I had started out, before my eyes were opened.

  “Oh, come on, Terry, don’t be so dumb. Olson cares for only one thing, ‘How much money have I got in my pocket today?’ That’s why those guys get all the cases from him. That’s how I get my cases out of him—I go back there and pay him practically every day.”

  Oh God, oh God, please let me be recording this. “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “I’ve never seen you in his chambers.”

  “I wait until no one’s around.” My expression must have been too eager, because he backtracked. “Hey, it wasn’t always that way. When I first started, I was starvin’ down here. I saw Olson assigning cases to everybody but me. He was sticking it up my ass, knowing I’d come around sooner or later. I bust my balls, I’m as good a lawyer as those other guys; if they have to come across to get some justice for their clients, then I got to come across. It’s only fair.”

  “Well, thanks again for the hundred.”

  “To tell you the truth, I kind of felt sorry for you,” Jim said. “You been doin’ favors for a couple of guys and they still don’t trust anybody new. Most of them, anyway. But Silverman likes taking care of people starting out.”

  “Would Bob rather give me the money than the policeman?” This was my first obvious allusion to my supposedly being corrupt.

  “Maybe, if he thinks the cop is honest. Why not? He’s got to deliver for his client, doesn’t he?”

  Then we talked about problems new defense lawyers encounter, since Costello took it for granted I would be coming over some day, as indeed I would. He mentioned that Olson told one who was having trouble lining up clients, “Come down to my courtroom and I’ll take care of you.” The judge, Costello added, “is a ballsy guy. The shit he has pulled on the fuckin’ bench!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked calmly while tingling.

  “Not now,” he told me with a knowing toss of his head. Some prosecutors happened to be walking by. Besides, we had to get back to work.

  As I was presenting cases before Olson that afternoon, my mind was going over my conversation with Costello so I could repeat the relevant parts to my contact agents if the recording didn’t turn out, and I felt used up by the end of the day.

  Once I was back in my apartment, I set my briefcase down and pulled off my shirt and perspiration-soaked undershirt, then ripped the microphone from my chest so I could feel like myself again. But I was still all tight inside, and my thoughts were still jumbled. I had betrayed a friend, I was turning my back on my profession, and I was finally on my way to doing something important. How could I get much sleep?

  The next morning I drove to the wide parking lot by the lakefront museum complex and rendezvoused with FBI agent Lamar Jordan. Hardly saying a word, I handed over the Nagra and he opened the cover. Seagulls were squealing over the water as I watched his fingers.

  “It’s threaded wrong,” Jordan said in his soft Southern accent. “The tape is supposed to be in front of this post, not behind it.”

  “It’s no good?” I thought my worst fears had come true.

  “You can’t think of everything when you start out. I’ll take it back to the office and see what we can do.”

  A few hours later Jordan cheerfully called me at home. “It’s beautiful, Terry. Costello comes off loud and clear. We lost a little but we got just what we want. Keep it up, you’re doing all right.”

  I hung up feeling as happy as when I made a perfect back flip from the parallel bars at a high school gymnastics competition. I was not giving Reidy what he wanted—Costello saying why he had given me the money—but the door to the closed world of corruption was unlocking.

  A day later I found Jim at Jeans engaged in his most beloved pastime, plucking an olive and tossing the rest of a martini down the hatch. Naturally he was feeling sorry for himself. Even though he was doing well enough, he still thought he was a waif abandoned in the back streets of justice.

  “I hustle and do what I can, but I’m not getting rich,” he moaned in a confidential tone that was louder than most people’s natural voice. His elbows had been on a table at Jeans for so long the sleeve of his new suit had soaked up gin and vermouth.

  The restaurant was closed except for the courthouse crowd coming in through the warped back door. I had sensed for some time that I had to stop being passive, and now seemed a good time to act. So when Costello’s self-pity got around to clients Olson was sending to him, I mentioned, “I hope there’s something in it for me.”

  “Don’t worry, Ter,” he said, making my name sound like “Tare,” “it just takes a little time.”

  At first glance Costello seemed like just a big man who took little care of himself, but once you knew him you might have noticed he was moderately nice looking. He recently had moved up a notch in his relationship with Olson, but instead of looking more secure he made himself ludicrous with his unwieldy hair and increasing lack of coordination at the bar.

  He probably wanted me to keep up with him, but I was never much of a drinker. I made two beers last as long as the Nagra reels rolled under my shirt. Jim spoke about his days as a policeman. Whenever he was about to appear in gun court, gentlemanly Bob Silverman would go up to him and ask, “You know how to testify, don’t you?” Then Bob would hand him one hundred dollars tucked in a folded newspaper.

  “Every time Bob had a case, I went out and came back with a paper,” Jim said. “The other cops must have thought I liked reading newspapers. What a character. But Bob’s very proud of himself. He’d say, ‘In my twenty-three years as a defense attorney, I never hurt anybody.’” If an officer or a prosecutor couldn’t be bribed, Bob found ways so the person would not seem to have bungled the case, and he paid off everyone who had a hand out, from witnesses to the judge. “I mean, everybody gets stroked,” Costello said, before downing another martini.

  Some courthouse people listening behind our backs chuckled with recognition at Jim’s approximation of Bob’s mellow voice. After a little more rambling, he told me, “You know, some part of police lingo has been taken over here. When a lawyer wants to make a payoff, he’ll tell the judge’s guy to ‘open the drawer.’ That’s straight cop talk, from how the district commander gets his payoffs.”

  “He doesn’t really open a drawer?”

  “Well, sometimes, but he doesn’t have to, it’s just a way of lettin’ ’im know that money is being dropped wherever the hell the judge wants it.”

  “That’s how Olson does it?”

  “That God damned Olson, yeah, that’s how he does it.”

  Before Greylord

  Because I had the backup of the Justice Department, I was on my way to go further than Mort Friedman had when he headed the criminal division of the State’s Attorney’s Office in the seventies. Friedman even looked like an aggressive idealist, with dark hair and black-frame glasses.

  Acting on his own, he saw a chance to attack the problem when a policeman told him an attorney named *Walt Fisher had offered him fifty dollars to lie on the stand in a drunken driving case. Fixers were protected by the common knowledge that prosecutors would never
be crazy enough to encourage perjury. Friedman told the cop to go along with the offer and see what happened.

  The officer gathered enough proof to put Fisher on trial, but the lawyer was acquitted and went on to be elected an associate judge by the hundred and seventy-five full judges in the system. All of them must have known of Fisher’s dishonesty, but they liked him.

  Another policeman later told Friedman that an attorney had offered him two hundred dollars if he would drop charges against a young woman who had seriously stabbed her female lover. The lawyer even climbed into the officer’s private car and threw two one-hundred-dollar bills and a fifty-dollar bonus at the policeman’s feet. The officer picked up the money and simultaneously handed him a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. But the lawyer testified that the officer had demanded the bribe, and that he had thrown the money at him to avoid being shot. The jury found him guilty and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction.

  Friedman’s third case involved the victim of a police shakedown. The man had been in an apartment when officers confiscated ten pounds of marijuana and nearly forty thousand dollars. Three detectives told him that if he shut up they would make the search appear shaky, but that if he told the truth they would “trunk” him.

  Friedman persuaded the man to go into court wearing a tiny radio transmitter. Unaware the officers had lied, the judge dismissed the case. There is nothing a reputable person hates more than being considered dishonest. When the judge learned about the wire, he called Friedman a publicity hound and threatened to find him in contempt. His outrage forced an Illinois Supreme Court review of Friedman’s conduct.

  The majority opinion held that he had been misguided and warned against any further presentation of false testimony without judicial approval. Although Friedman kept his law license, he was ostracized even by honest lawyers and judges. His one-man attempt at exposing bribery had only left a chill in the system. He gave up prosecutions and was hired as the chief attorney for the state police. He became not only a friend of mine but also an inspiration.

  The final stage of Greylord would reach the junction of the courts, city hall, and the mob, an interrelationship that explains why corruption had become so entrenched in Chicago. An example was the shocking acquittal of mob killer Harry Aleman, the impetus for our sweeping investigation. There was as yet no proof the judge had been paid off, but the fact that criminals could fix one of the biggest local trials of the decade meant something had to be done quickly. Cook County State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, a former FBI agent, brought his concerns about the case to U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan.

  They cautiously started by approaching a couple of corrupt lawyers they had learned about from drug and syndicate gambling investigations. Both attorneys were willing to give them a few names, and one helped build a case against a policeman and a bagman. But he refused to violate the shyster’s code by going against someone in the legal profession.

  Not yet envisioning a full-scale assault, Carey and Sullivan transferred to federal court all significant state narcotics cases involving attorneys suspected of being crooked. This forced Bob Silverman and our other targets to drop clients who were about to come before untainted judges. But that was as far as the authorities could go, and all they had to show for their efforts was a couple of hundred pages of notes, court transcripts, and unverified FBI reports. Everything was kept in disorder inside a plain cardboard box.

  Then came the “Abscam” operation, basis for the 2013 movie American Hustle, in which convicted perjurer and cheat Mel Weinberg introduced to Washington, D.C., society federal agents masquerading as representatives of a wealthy Arab sheik seeking legislative favors. Eventually six Congressmen and a senator were convicted of bribery despite their cries of entrapment.

  Soon afterward, Sullivan met with FBI Director William Webster, a former federal judge, to consider whether anything like that could be attempted in Chicago. After all, the unified Cook County court system was too large for anyone to keep a watch over it all. There were three hundred and thirty-four judges, nearly twice as many as any other circuit court in America, and the growing backlog was being handled by five hundred assistant state’s attorneys, some barely out of law school, as I had been. It didn’t take a great defense lawyer to win acquittals, just bribes that went unnoticed by underpaid, overworked, and under-prepared assistant prosecutors. And now we were seeing corruption breeding corruption.

  Sullivan suggested to Webster that they use the files in that cardboard box as background for going after specific targets. The FBI director was a reserved academic and troubled by what was happening in the halls of justice. Abscam had whetted his enthusiasm for long-term stings, and he answered, “I don’t see why we don’t try it.” But the House of Representatives might use any serious slip-up in the Chicago project to slash the Justice Department’s budget.

  Not long after that meeting, Sullivan’s chief of special prosecutions, Gordon Nash, knocked on Reidy’s door and handed him the box with no more explanation than “Here’s the beginning of an investigation into judicial corruption.” That was how Reidy came to draft our strategy.

  As it turned out, I was the second mole in the operation. There were many good agents already working in Chicago, but authorities wanted someone who had never made a local court appearance. With their survival instincts, corrupt lawyers develop a memory for faces.

  Abscam prosecutions were still in the news in March 1980 when attorney David Victor Ries arrived in the city’s canyon-like legal district and rented space at 2 North La Salle Street, where Bob Silverman had his offices. Ries had come from Detroit, so he was a new face, and he had an Illinois law license. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as he handled cases in the Traffic Court Building in a former warehouse a few blocks away.

  The Justice Department now needed a name for the investigation. “CoJud,” for “Corrupt Judges,” was too close to what it was about. “Operation Fly Catcher” had been used for another kind of probe in Delaware. Then, sitting around their office on a slow day, supervisor Bob Farmer and agent Lamar Jordan choose a name at random. Since Farmer owned a few quarter horses, he suggested looking over the race results. Jordan glanced at a horse’s name in the back pages of the Chicago Sun-Times and said, “How about ‘Operation Greylord’?” The name had magic.

  Ries continued strapping on a wire every morning before going to Traffic Court, but he just wasn’t picking up any evidence because the lawyers were cool to every outsider. That was when Dan Reidy and the others realized they needed someone already working in the Criminal Courts Building halfway across the city, and drew up their long list of one.

  4

  THE FIXERS

  June 1980

  Judge Wayne Olson would rush through his call by dismissing the majority of cases so he could finish before two p.m. The frequent dismissals and suppression of evidence in his court were helping violent street gangs extend drug distribution by murder and intimidation through low-income neighborhoods, but he had his afternoons off.

  A judge’s chambers should be a sanctum of quiet dignity, but Olson’s were more like an airport terminal with traffic when seen on fast-forward. Because he usually left the door open when he withdrew between his morning and afternoon calls, the people who might be traipsing through at any moment included clerks in shirtsleeves, attorneys in suits, police officers in blue, and bailiffs in black. Other court workers breezed in to find files they had misplaced or to use the private washroom rather than one marred by graffiti down the hall, which served as a pre-trial meeting place for defense lawyers and their lowlife clients.

  Occasionally a defendant taking a shortcut to the clerk’s office behind the chambers walked in and wondered why a judge was there in a swivel chair. Comfortable amid the chaos, and looking and sounding like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Olson would ignore everything not directly concerning him, even quarrels among attorneys or staff members.

  Why did he want to leave early every day? Like a
coach more interested in popularity than winning, he would take his staff and some fawning lawyers to Jeans or another restaurant with a bar. When they entered, the attorneys flanking him were like scavenger birds encircling a rhinoceros for the privilege of plucking food from between his teeth.

  Despite Olson’s show of good humor, he could be rude, sarcastic, and ill tempered. If the state judicial disciplinary commission had been effective, he would be a bartender instead of wearing a robe. The former train conductor and polka band drummer would boast that as a private attorney he had paid off every judge he ever appeared before. At the age of thirty he lost a run for the state senate, and his unfulfilled heart remained in politics rather than the law. But after he was elected to the bench, something happened in 1964 that ended his hopes of going any further than a preliminary hearing court.

  He and his drinking buddies had landed in a place named the Alibi Inn. At closing time the Democratic Olson and one of his friends started squabbling outside with a sixty-year-old man who said he was going to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. Olson claimed later that he saw a pistol in the man’s hand and pushed him in self-defense. Whatever the truth, the older man fell back and cracked his head on the pavement. Prosecutors called it involuntary manslaughter. A court reporter once told me that a colleague had to take a witness’s statement eight times before the witness got his story straight. “Straight” meant in Olson’s favor. And so the county grand jury declined to return an indictment.

  Why were such judges kept on the bench? In Chicago, politicians decide the candidates, and the people are asked to vote from long lists of names meaning nothing to them. Many voters just choose names reflecting a certain nationality or that “sound nice.”

  In an ideal world, judges wouldn’t even have to run for election, but Chicago has never been accused of being an ideal world. Judgeships were awarded to people who could deliver the most votes for the Party slate—Democratic in the city, and Republican in the outer suburbs. There also was a rumor that judgeships could be bought for thirty thousand dollars or more. Not all the judges who were given their robes by the machines were looking for payoffs, but many of the honest ones were naive or gratefully blind to what was going on, which is a kind of corruption in itself.