Operation Greylord (12 page)

“Don't worry,” Megary said, “no messages just means that everything is going well.”

Then we heard: “We arrived at Mr. Chambers' residence and no one is home.”

This meant the break-in experts had entered the chambers without encountering anyone. In the unnerving quiet, I could picture the men removing a panel in the switchboard to splice wires, and then crouching at Olson's desk to install the tiny microphone. But I kept thinking of everything that could go wrong. Suppose they had forgotten to lock the door? All it would take would be for one cleaning lady, one janitor, or one fixer to happen upon them.

An hour passed as we killed time by zigzagging across streets surrounding the courthouse, then two hours, then nearly three. We didn't ease the tension with small talk. Megary was good at waiting, but I wasn't. I was so tense my muscles were aching. At last the stillness was broken by a test message—“One, two, three.”

The female agent looked at me but didn't know what to say. Provided all went well for the next few months, we were setting criminal justice history. But if for some reason the operation fell apart before we could get evidence from the chambers, all of our work would be just a stack of reports on a shelf in Washington as if nothing had happened. Unless, of course, the fixers caught on.

The black baggers, notified by agents in the radio room that their test had been received, said, “We're going to leave Mr. Chambers' residence now. Let's get the turkey ready.”

“Now what?” I asked Megary.

“You go home, and tomorrow have a nice holiday with your folks. Starting Monday, we're all going to be busy.”

My tension was replaced by exhaustion, but this time it was a good kind of exhaustion, like sinking into a cloud.

There was no holiday weekend for FBI agent Jim Hershly. Using my many hours of taped conversations, often with tediously long moments of stillness as I waited for someone to come back to me, the Texan prepared extracts so agents assigned to monitor the conversations would know the voices of Costello, Olson, Yonan, Silverman, and a few other crooked lawyers. The agents needed to listen in on recordings as they were being made so they could verify that the evidence tapes had not been tampered with in any way. Even then, it was virtually impossible to tell Silverman's voice from Olson's on the tape.

Dan Reidy, as the architect of Operation Greylord, put Megary in charge of the listening post in the downtown FBI offices and told him to turn off the equipment whenever the conversations were about official business. That would keep us from being accused of violating a person's right to privacy. Megary also instructed the monitoring agents about code phrases I had picked up, such as when Costello would say “open the drawer.”

Early on December 1st, Jordan met me at the planetarium parking lot and gave me a transmitter no larger than a pocket calculator, activated by screwing in a small rubber antenna. “Use this to signal us when someone is going into the chambers,” he said. The device was unable to send any verbal messages, but its beeps would be picked up by an agent in a car parked near the courthouse. Three beeps, Code Black, meant a target was entering the chambers. A single tap on the button, Code Red, was a Stop! because the fixer was leaving or there was trouble. Two beeps, Code Green, and the agents should resume monitoring. The agent in a car on
the street about two hundred feet from the side windows of the courtroom would radio these codes to the listening room ten miles away.

Shortly after I arrived that morning, Yonan seemed pleased with himself as he told me that he had persuaded an officer to change his testimony to make a drug arrest seem illegal. As he went into Olson's chambers, I reached into my pocket and pressed the button three times. After pretending to do a little busy work, I wrote down Cy's name and the time on a file card from my pocket so the conversation would be attributed correctly. The men spoke away from the desk, but the large reel-to-reel tape machine in the FBI offices recorded enough to be used in court.

Seeing that the door to the judge's chambers was opening, I signaled Code Red. Yonan left the chambers and went over to say a few words to his client on one of the benches. When the case was called, Olson declared the search illegal, I didn't protest, and the drug dealer was let go.

Cy later hurried up to me as I was leaving the courthouse on a break. “Hey, Terry,” he said, “aren't you forgetting something?” He pulled out his wallet.

“Forget it, I'm cooling it. Seriously.”

My pose must have increased my credibility, because Cy handed me the cash with a grin.

Instead of having lunch, I returned to the door outside the judge's chambers. Olson was talking to a lawyer whose voice I couldn't recognize. The fixer complained that he was glad Wayne was back, since the State's Attorney's Office had won every case tried before his replacement.

“I'll fix that,” Olson said.

December 1980

Jim Costello asked me about Cathy again. We were having lunch, and he was feeling good because he had persuaded a drug dealer to sign over his five-hundred-dollar bond for a legal fee while the bar association-assigned attorney was away from the courtroom for a few minutes. Whenever Jim was happy he wanted to become a part of your life.

But by now I was in so deep I needed to keep my personal life separate from my fixer pose to maintain my edge. If you let your two lives merge, your responses get confused and you find yourself being uptight when you should relax, and making slip-ups when you should be on your guard. But as I lay awake at night, I thought over all the possibilities that I had refused to consider during the day. Even if there would never be retaliation for what I was doing, I didn't want to force Cathy into pretending that she liked these sleazy lawyers, and I didn't want to ruin her future law career once my role was found out.

“You don't talk much about her anymore,” Costello said over pasta. “You bust up or something?”

“Cathy's a nice girl but I'm not ready for anything serious, you know what I mean?” I was lying, of course. The truth was that in the nine months I had known Cathy, I felt more comfortable with her than with anyone else in my life. Even more than that, I needed her as a way of keeping myself together. “I go out with her now and then, but that's it. I'm trying to find a way to break it off nicely.”

“Did you know I had a few cases before Cathy's dad when I was a cop?” Costello said about her father, Judge Will Crowley. “He was a good man, not like Olson. Too bad he died. He had a good family, I bet. I'd really like to meet her.”

“Maybe sometime,” I said, meaning never.

“She sounds like a nice girl. I'd be on my best behavior. We could go to a nice restaurant or something and have a few drinks.” I especially didn't want Cathy to see Jim when he was drunk.

As for why Costello was so insistent, I think he misinterpreted the distance I kept between us and thought I was ashamed of him. That must have cut deep since of all the lawyers and judges he moved around with, I was his only friend. Even in my crooked pose, I was the only one not out for whatever he could grab, and he was continually seeking assurances that I at least accepted him.

Seeing he was getting nowhere with his hints about meeting Cathy, Jim forked up more spaghetti and changed the subject. “Hey, Ter, what are your plans when you go into practice?”

“I'm looking for an office, maybe like yours but on the North Side.”

“Make some money first, Ter. Come down and work the hallways until you get started. You can keep everything you need in your car. You hustle for little bonds at first, and then you develop a line and can really plant the fear of God into the bastards.” He meant defendants.

Judge Olson came by and cheerfully signaled for a glass of wine. “First drink in six weeks,” he boasted as he lowered his bulk next to me. He had sworn off alcohol the night of the party when he and Costello were nearly at each other's throats. Now they were closer than ever because the money was good for them both.

I put down my share of the tab and gave Jim a parting slap on the shoulder. Whatever the judge and the fixer had to say to each other, I knew they wouldn't say it while I was around.

While I was tied up monitoring the comings and goings at the bugged chambers, Alice Carpenter was handling the prosecution of what we were calling the park bench case. Attorney Jay Messinger was representing a man arrested when police found eleven packets of heroin in foil at his feet. The man claimed that as he had been sitting on the bench someone dropped the package on the ground as a squad car pulled up.

Messinger breezed into Olson's chambers on the morning of December 5, the only time I ever saw him go in there. Thanks to the tiny microphone under the desk, it was as if he and the judge were talking right in the FBI offices. What you are about to read is the conversation
just as a jury eventually heard it, leading to Messinger's two-year prison sentence:

With the mention of money, Olson's voice became more personal. “Well, put it on. Sometimes you can't tell. We'll see how things develop. It might turn out to be an easy throw.”

Messinger left the chambers and the case was called minutes later. Olson threw the evidence out according to the script the two of them had worked out, although none of us knew then what had gone on in the chambers. Seeing me coming back from the grand jury room, Alice Carpenter told me she was certain the park bench case had been fixed.

When I asked with a pretended innocence how she knew, she said that Messinger had been in Olson's chambers and “that preliminary hearing was an act.”

“Forget it,” I advised. “There were a lot of people around when the cops found the drugs, Alice. The case isn't all that cut and dried.”

She scowled at me, and I could tell she was wondering if the plague had spread to me, too.

By now I had helped gather evidence against Costello, Olson, Mark Ciavelli, Cy Yonan, and Jay Messinger. I felt probably as ready as I ever would be to go after the biggest and potentially the most dangerous fixer in the system, “Silvery Bob” Silverman.

BOB SILVERMAN

Agent Lamar Jordan had told me not to accept bribes while Olson's chambers were being bugged because the FBI wanted to drive as many fixers as they could into that small room to make payoffs. In just four days, Megary's team had recorded seventy-five separate conversations. Some of the phrases were couched so well they seemed like repartee until added to other conversations. Because the agents had to turn off the recorder whenever the discussions concerned legitimate business, in time there were three hundred thirty-seven starts and stops.

On December 8, while the world was stunned by the murder of John Lennon in New York City, my former friend Mark Ciavelli poked his head into the prosecutors' office in Narcotics Court and asked me, “Mind if we step outside for a minute?”

Even though I had made the decision to not give Mark a free pass after he tried to bribe me, I still needed to force my hand to reach under my suit jacket and push the switch on the tape recorder. My only consolation was that Mark had already given the government evidence against himself by talking about the upcoming PCP case to Olson in the judge's chambers.

As soon as we hit the corridor, Mark shoved cash into my hand. I stared at him, not knowing what was going on.

“Compliments of Bob,” he said, as if I should be pleased.

“This is from Silverman? Through you?” I asked for the tape as I put the bill in my pocket without looking at it.

“I told Bob you're really our kind of guy,” Mark said. “He goes, ‘For God's sake, why didn't he say something before?' I says, ‘Well, you know Terry, he's quiet.'” Silverman then told him to give me the hundred for the case I had dismissed for him on the nine-thirty a.m. call.

“Thanks,” I told Mark. “Say, how much is it?”

“An ace.” One hundred dollars.

Well, well
, I thought,
Jordan owes me a lunch!

Although I was dismayed that Mark played bagman as well as being a fixer, putting him in as deep as anyone else, I was elated at the bribe. Even if we snared no one else but “Silvery Bob” in all of Operation Greylord, my undercover work would have been worth it. Silverman's shadow fell on every court in the system, and if left alone he could easily corrupt five judges for every one we threw in prison.

Silverman could also be the most sinister of our targets because of his contacts among crooked cops and drug-ring enforcers. This bribe meant I was no longer a kid just snooping around. From now on, there would be a danger that I might get too close to that potentially violent vortex of Chicago corruption, where judges, the mob, and city hall insiders merged into a single force powerful enough to set hit men free. It was a world where strange things can happen and witnesses sometimes disappeared.

That all-important payoff had taken just two minutes, but for the rest of that day it dominated my thinking and I could hardly pay attention to my busy load of preliminary hearings. I also had to confirm the bribe on tape as soon as I could. After thinking over what to say so that I wouldn't seem to be trying too hard, I turned the Nagra on and caught up with Silverman gabbing cheerfully with the lawyers waiting at the elevators. With fake nonchalance I quietly said, “Bob, I got that C-note from Mark. Thanks, thank you very much.”

Would he say anything to acknowledge it? Instead, he said something even better.

“I'll match that right now. As soon as we're alone, because I have another case coming up on the eleven-thirty call, which you can dismiss.”

“Mark's a super guy,” I said to keep the conversation going despite my bewilderment at how easy this had been.

“Your friend's a gentleman,” remarked Bob, the gentleman of fixers. “Thinking of going into private practice with him and Cardoni? Why don't you stick around where you are until Olson is reassigned” to Divorce Court, at his request. “The working conditions are so beautiful. I mean, you've got a judge who's the sweetest guy in the world. Do you know he's going to be my partner when he leaves the bench?”

“Some people mentioned it, but I thought it was a joke.”

“No, we really've been talking about it,” came his creamy deep voice as we stepped into an elevator. “But he's more interested in fucking around in Florida. I figure he's good for six months a year here. He'll move into my office downtown, but he's got five years before he can retire with a pension.”

“I thought he was older.”

“Wayne was born old.”

We left the elevator, and Silverman took me down an empty corridor. Without specifically mentioning the one-hundred-dollar bribe, he said, “That thing is going to be lonesome.” He handed me another hundred dollars just to make sure I stayed conveniently corrupt. “Take care of yourself,” he added in farewell.

My heart was pitter-pattering as I watched him walk away.
My God
, I thought,
I did it, I did it!
We now had him on racketeering conspiracy.

Contact agent Lamar Jordan was so excited when I called him about the bribe that he drove to my apartment that afternoon with a Nagra device that had playback capability so I could listen to the tape with him. “This is enough, isn't it?” I asked when I turned the Nagra off.

“Maybe,” he said in his Southern drawl. Maybe? “You weren't supposed to take any bribes until we remove Olson's bug.”

“Mark shoved the hundred in my hand. What was I supposed to do, shove it back? How in the hell would that look? And didn't I need something from Bob's own mouth? You heard him, he's the one who suggested matching the first hundred.”

“You really should play things like you're told.”

“Lamar, you have to trust my instincts.”

“You know what we told you.”

I was fed up with this damned if you do/damned if you don't situation. Since I wasn't a sworn member of the FBI, the agents were refusing to trust my judgments. These agents, who had never served in corrupt criminal courts, wanted me to be just a walking listening device, a robot.

“You know, Lamar,” I said, “I'm the undercover agent out there. It's taken us seven months to get this far, and we just can't count on Silverman talking money in Olson's chambers. You have to give me a little leeway in making decisions on my own. There are all sorts of cues I've got to pay attention to, and they don't come off on tape. Sometimes I have to take calculated risks.”

“Just so you know where we stand,” he said. “I don't want you to take any more money from Bob unless he hands it to you, like today.”

Yet in spite of Jordan's dour expression, he seemed to be agreeing with me. He just didn't want to make a formal departure from the company line. If contact agents did that, all untrained moles would be going off on tangents.