Operation Greylord Read online

  “I just wanted to have a talk with you to straighten things out,” he said from his swivel chair. He sounded like a businessman in a cold business. “From time to time a young prosecutor wants to score brownie points and hangs onto a case. That’s understandable. But this Yonan crap is small-time stuff, Terry, and you know it. I don’t see why we don’t drop it right now. It won’t be any reflection on you if you do not appeal it.”

  Never sound too eager, I reminded myself. “I can’t drop it, I’m getting pressure from the cops and my supervisor.”

  Olson’s tone hardened as he said, “Just to make sure I understood the situation perfectly, I phoned *Larry Higgins about this thing.” That was one of the most important criminal attorneys in the system. “Larry’s a friend of mine and he agrees that the search was improper. You can look it up yourself, People versus Seymour.”

  “That’s not how I see it,” I said. “The cops went over with me just what they did, and everything was legal.”

  “That’s a lot of shit,” Olson snapped. Then, apparently realizing he had been too emphatic, he tried to sound as if he were merely offering advice. “I mean, I didn’t call you back in here to relive the thing. You know how I like throwing out everything but really good cases, the jail is overcrowded as it is. You’ve put a scare into that woman [Bailey], she knows that next time she won’t be so lucky. If you decide to appeal, I really don’t give a shit. Do we understand each other?”

  “Sure. But I want some time before I make a decision.”

  “That’s fine. Whatever you say.”

  Olson had made himself clear, all right, but out of habit he did it in such a way that our conversation meant nothing on my tape.

  Later that day I agreed to drop marijuana possession charges against two of Costello’s clients. After the first, he stuffed a fifty-dollar bill in my suit jacket pocket and said, “You’re a super guy.” After the second, he playfully shoved another fifty into my empty cup as we stood in a coffee line at the cafeteria. “Jim!” I said. Dozens of people could have seen us. But to him, life in the courthouse was only a game.

  As I played along, I dropped only weak cases or ones where the defendant had played only a minor role, but I still hated seeing them walk free. Sometimes they smirked as if to say, “You and me are in the same business.” But they were not necessarily off for good. I kept the FBI informed so that the defendants could be approached later about providing evidence against their lawyers to avoid being brought up on federal counts.

  On a day I dropped charges against two more of Costello’s clients, he slid a hundred and fifty dollars into my pocket in the hallway. As we had drinks at Jeans the following day, he dropped a fifty-dollar bill into my lap for dismissing two more cases.

  In six weeks, Costello had given me five hundred dollars. And I wasn’t the only one on the payroll that he kept in his head. I saw him give a lockup keeper one hundred dollars to get into a cell and solicit clients before another lawyer could reach them. Jim handed other deputies fifty to sixty dollars for referring drug defendants to him. He dispensed money easily because he saw himself as a public benefactor and a great guy.

  Another time I was at Jeans with Costello, I mentioned that Olson had now twice called me back to his chambers to dissuade me from my plan to appeal his decision in the Celeste Bailey case.

  “You got to understand that Yonan’s a money man,” Jim said. “Tell you what, I’ll talk to him for you.”

  “Tell him I’m ‘okay.’ You know.” “Okay” meaning that I took bribes for favors.

  When the case was about to come up, Officers Stump and Opiola came looking for me. “Look,” Opiola said, “we really want this woman to do hard time, we don’t care what pressure you’re under.”

  Yonan seemed just as apprehensive about the Bailey case when he spoke to me briefly in the courtroom. He was relieved when I told him I would ask for a continuance. What they could not know was that this would give Costello time to talk to him about bribing me.

  After the continuance was granted, Costello wasted a beautiful September afternoon and evening by keeping me with him at the far end of Jeans long bar, and afterward we went to an Italian restaurant. The night seemed endless since I was only there to keep up my appearance as an ardent disciple, especially since I wasn’t picking up anything on tape that I could use. As we slowly spooled our pasta, Costello assured me that if I went into private practice I could save money by using his office and phone number until I was set up.

  As I finally was about to leave, Jim raised his glass of wine and slurred, “No, no, don’t go yet, I wanna propose a toast.”

  “To what?”

  “Here’s to money!” Our glasses clanked.

  While Jim might have been dreaming of pinkie rings and a Mercedes, Cy Yonan, my new target, apparently spent the following weekend anguishing over whether I was crooked or not, since he had to be careful about bribing a prosecutor. He came back that Monday willing to take a chance.

  The strikingly dark attorney was easy to spot in any crowd, with his out-of-date thick sideburns almost reaching his jaw. I saw him step into Narcotics Court during a hearing and give something to Costello. Although Cy passed me as he was entering and leaving the courtroom, he didn’t say a word. But not long afterward, Costello came over and casually remarked, “I just saw your man and he gave me a hundred to give to you, if you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll see you later about it.”

  As we rode the elevator alone to the cafeteria that afternoon, Jim explained what had happened. “I told him, ‘Cy, they’re gonna appeal that thing.’ He says, ‘I don’t think Terry’s gonna appeal it.’ I says ‘Gimme a hundred to give to Terry,’ and he did.”

  As the elevator doors slid open, he slipped me the one hundred dollars while we walked over to the cafeteria line. He liked me so much he felt he had to keep me corrupt so that we could be in the same game.

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said, “you’re a friend.”

  6

  THE BRASS KEY

  October 1980

  Silver-haired “Silvery Bob” Silverman was smooth and friendly, but the respected defense attorney could turn icy when making sure his clients stayed out of prison. Silverman had been convicted of bribery in 1963 but was acquitted after the state appeals court ordered a new trial. Like Midas, he now protected himself by contaminating with gold virtually everyone he touched.

  Bob was just the opposite of his brother, Mitchell, a circuit court judge of unquestioned principles. Mitchell was sponsored by admired U.S. Senator Adlai Stevenson and received a one hundred percent approval rating from the American Bar Association’s Judiciary Committee. Although no one would say so, the general feeling was that Mitchell would have risen higher if his brother’s shady reputation had not stood in the way.

  Bob was a man of average size who was just starting to lose his youthful handsomeness. He liked to give the appearance of being just a regular guy, going to as many Chicago Cubs games as he could and donating his services to indigent clients. He would come to court with his usual tan and wearing a plaid or ultra suede sport jacket, open shirt, and casual slacks rather than the expensive suits most lawyers wore. He was that sure of himself.

  Another thing that set him apart from most of the other criminal attorneys was that he never brought a briefcase to court. From time to time he would take an empty envelope from his pocket and make a few notes on testimony. That was because he did his best work talking to judges and bagmen outside the courtroom.

  Since fixers could not advertise in the yellow pages, they used a variety of ways to notify potential clients that they needed their services in a hurry. Such as the way Silverman came to represent Ken Eto, a Japanese-American who used mob enforcers to protect his gambling set-ups.

  A man approached “Tokyo Joe” Eto one night and said he was interested in buying seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. Eto, as he later related, beca
me suspicious and strung the man along. After meetings with the man a few times, Eto received a telephone warning from Silverman. Through contacts with “dirty” police officers, the attorney had learned that the supposed addict was an undercover drug agent trying to set him up. Eto supposedly was so grateful he gave the fixer twelve thousand dollars and retained him for future business in court.

  There was little wonder why Silverman would glide from court to court as if nothing could reach him. From time to time I wondered how many favors I would have to perform before he would steer business my way. My answer came in mid-September, when he showed up in the corridor outside Narcotics Court to express his appreciation to me for throwing out the case of a middle-class woman arrested with amphetamines. Since he didn’t bribe Olson, the best he had expected was probation.

  “Thank you for your consideration,” he told me in passing, in that low voice Costello loved to imitate.

  “It’s nothing, Bob, your client has no record, and she’s got a good family,” I tossed off. “It’s just possession, anyway. Why hold onto these small-time cases, that’s what I feel.”

  “Costello says you’re a good man.”

  “I try to be fair.” My tone was intended to mean one thing to him, and another to anyone nearby.

  I kept thinking Silverman might be circling around me before making up his mind about me. He approached me a few days later before the court clerk called out the case of a low-level syndicate member. “You know, Terry,” he began in his lullaby voice, “this isn’t a great case you have.” Indeed, there seldom is a drug arrest in which a top defense attorney can’t find something wrong. “I’m not going to embarrass you by asking you to let it go. Why don’t you look it over? I just want you to know I’m going to file a motion to suppress. If Olson rules against me, that’s all right.”

  He left with a faint, classy smile and I knew I would be wasting my time opposing the motion: the fix was in.

  Now that Silverman had made the first move, I made the second. A few days afterward, I started working toward his trust by dropping all four of his cases in Narcotics Court. He was bound to know that I expected something in return.

  As much as I wanted to get something on Bob Silverman, I had to develop new schemes while still doing favors for Costello and dismissing a few cases for Cy Yonan. As with a circus act, I was spinning plates on sticks and seeing how many I could keep in the air. That included getting Yonan to confirm his bribe to me, since Costello had only acted as a bagman for him. With my tape running under my clothes in the rear of the courtroom, I thanked him for the “gift” and asked whether the money was just for the appeal or for two cases coming up.

  “Just the appeal,” he said.

  I tried to keep my expression blank, but running through my mind was Cy, you idiot, I’ve got you now. Although I hadn’t been competitive in high school, I was now developing a killer instinct.

  Yonan gave us more evidence to use against him with the case of *Lou Bickford, a street corner pusher stupid enough to enter the courthouse with marijuana in one pocket and a tin foil of cocaine in the other. Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Metavilas found the drugs while routinely searching people when they came through the metal detector. Metavilas’ Greek family had provided him with a strong sense of right and wrong. Since there was no way to bribe him, the money had to go to the person at the next step in the process, me.

  Yonan entered the prosecutors’ small office along the side of Olson’s Narcotics Court and was blunt, since I was alone. “I want you to find some legal reasons for dropping the case,” he said.

  “It was a perfectly legal search,” I parried.

  “There are always legal precedents, Terry, do you want me to look them up for you?” This came almost as a threat, as if he were saying: If you don’t play ball, you won’t get any more money from me.

  “Okay, I’ll tell Metavilas that we don’t have a good case,” I said.

  “You better.”

  I should have been glad Yonan was trying to pressure me, but I was afraid that Metavilas, unaware of the undercover investigation, would suspect a fix and report me to authorities. Then the microphone might never be planted in Olson’s chambers. But since so much of what was going on in the building went unreported, I decided to see if I could make Metavilas overlook what he would sense was a bribe.

  At a break, I went over to him near the revolving doors in the annex corridor and asked if he could spare a minute. As we walked toward the elevators, I let him know that “we’re going to have some trouble with that arrest you made.” One of the hardest parts of volunteering as a mole is playing bastard to good people.

  “Nobody had trouble before,” Metavilas said defensively.

  “We just don’t win many cases against Yonan.”

  “Cy’s a real trip, that guy.”

  “You know how Olson is. He doesn’t go by the law. The rulings depend on which defense lawyer is on the case. He gives his friends the benefit of the doubt, and Yonan is one of his friends. Do you see what I mean?”

  “If you think the case won’t fly, fine, that’s your job,” the deputy said. “Did you see Bickford’s rap sheet?”

  “Then I’ll dismiss the case, it’ll save us all some time,” I said, as if not listening to him.

  As I started to walk away, I heard Metavilas mutter, “They all do it,” meaning crooked prosecutors. Then he gave me his own kind of warning. “One of these days it’s going to go the wrong way with all these dismissals, and somebody’s going to wind up bitching.”

  “Well, they don’t.”

  “Maybe someone should tell TV reporters what’s going on in Olson’s court.”

  “What would be the point, Jim? Things just go better this way. You’ll see.”

  He must have felt terrible, but how else could I convince Yonan that my office was for sale?

  Nothing happened until mid-October, when Yonan gestured for me to step into an empty office. My heart was thumping in expectation. We had barely cleared the doorway when Cy turned to me with three hundred dollars in his fist.

  “Thanks, Terry,” he said. “You’re doing a good job.”

  “It’s nice to know I’m appreciated.”

  “See you next time,” he said as he left.

  Next time!

  As soon as I could, I phoned my contact agent Lamar Jordan. But this was seldom simple. Jordan never let me call him or Dan Reidy from my office because there would be no way of knowing who might overhear me. The few times I had used the courthouse phones, I had to be sure no one was around. Occasionally I would grab Olson’s phone when his chambers were empty.

  But most of the time I walked down the concrete front steps, crossed the boulevard that runs down South California Avenue, climbed into my car in the large lot, and phoned from a gas station a few blocks away, then hurried back to be in time for my next case. The first few times I did this, the inconvenience was part of the excitement, but now it was wearing me down.

  “I got Yonan in the bag,” I told Jordan from the gas station. “He gave me three hundred for dropping Bickford.”

  “Good work, Terry, you’re getting to be an old hand at this,” he said. That was as much of a joke as you would get from the dour Jordan.

  “Is this the hard evidence you wanted?”

  “We’ll see.”

  The agent helping him, Bill Megary, soon called me to a Mc Donald’s a mile from the courthouse. In his car were two other men in white shirts, gray suits, and with short haircuts. Their assembly-line appearance might as well have been a billboard proclaiming “FBI!” I learned that one of them, tall and slender Ed Tickel, went around the country doing court-approved bugging.

  We went to the Criminal Courts Building when all the jurors were gone and there were just the black-uniformed guards at the revolving doors, a lone reporter calling in a story from the large first-floor press room, and the gossiping cleanup crew. We looked over Olson’s court, Branch 57, to make sure no one was still around, then
Tickel stopped at a door to a courtroom undergoing renovation. He drew a tool that looked like a small screwdriver from his pocket and in seconds the entire lock assembly fell into his hand.

  Tickel dropped the metal into his coat pocket and said, “That’s all I need.” You could see that he loved his work. I stood there not realizing it was all over until the FBI agents headed for the doors. Once we were outside, Tickel handed me a plastic case no larger than an audiocassette. Inside was a wax wedge. “If you can borrow a key to one of the locks in Branch 57, you can press it in this and make an impression,” he said.

  “That’s all you need?” I asked in disbelief.

  “With that and this lock assembly I can make a master key for the entire courthouse.”

  During a recess two days later, I told a Narcotics Court deputy on Costello’s payroll that I had locked myself out of my office. “Okay if I borrow your keys?” I asked. The deputy handed them over without question.

  Feeling like a spy, I went to my office, locked the door, and nervously sat at my desk. But I couldn’t get the plastic case open. Hurry up, I told myself. The keys dropped to the floor, and when I picked them up I realized I didn’t know which one opened Olson’s chambers. That meant copying all three.

  “Hake, you in there?” the deputy asked as he banged on the door. To avoid his seeing me from the little window, I bent over to the side of the desk as he said, “Hey, I want my keys back, I gotta go to the lockup!”

  I was afraid the deputy was going to break the door down. But I was able to make my final impressions in the wax, shove the kit into my drawer, and unlock the door. “Sorry,” I said, “but I was on the phone.”

  “Jesus Christ, Hake,” the deputy grumbled and grabbed his keys back, “have some consideration for others.”

  The following day I turned the wax over to Megary, and he sent it to Tickel at FBI headquarters. A week later, Megary handed me a master key at our regular morning meeting near the planetarium.