Operation Greylord (17 page)

The next step was finding a cover for what I would be doing. Reidy and others came up with the idea of establishing a company called, for reasons unknown, Independent Material Systems, Inc. The FBI rented a South Loop office and had incorporation papers list me as the corporate counsel. But the company existed only on a run of stationery and business cards, and no one bothered to figure out what kind of firm it was.

Perhaps this put Mark's mind a little more at ease. He invited me to his wedding the next month. During the sermon, the priest spoke about the promising future for the young couple. It was eerie knowing that I could tell what the future would likely hold for Mark: the end of his career, selling off everything to pay his fines, probably prison, and then—what? What happens to lawyers who have disgraced their profession? They just go off and disappear.

In December 1981 I was rigging a fake shoplifting case through bagman Harold Conn when I noticed Bob Silverman in the hallway. I had not seen him for months and felt I needed to renew our acquaintance. In a sudden decision, I was determined to bury that rumor about me.

“Hi, Bob, how are you?” I began.

“Fine. How are you feeling? All right, I hope.”

“Good, real good.”

“Glad to hear that, Terry.” Silverman's mind seemed elsewhere, or maybe he really didn't want to talk to me. Did he suspect I was wired?

“If you got a moment,” I said, “I want to tell you up front that what you might have heard isn't true—me being a mole for the FBI. Isn't that stupid?”

“I knew it wasn't true when I heard it,” Silverman said, not convincingly. What choice did he have? It was too late for him and his mob connections to change. He had to believe that I was slime so that he could rest at night.

“I just wanted you to hear it from my own mouth,” I said.

“I couldn't fuckin' believe it,” he told me. “I had a long talk with Frankie Cardoni and decided it was absolutely impossible. I wouldn't be here talking to you if I thought different.”

“Okay, Bob. I just wanted to get it straight. Have a good holiday.”

“Same to you,” he said as I turned away.

Winter 1981–1982

Jim Costello was watching his life fall apart. All our conversations that fall had included discussions about his daughter's boyfriend and his wife's drinking, as if Jim were a teetotaler. Jim wanted me to hang around with him so he could feel like a wise and kindly mentor again. We had gone to the track for thoroughbred racing in August and October, then to the enclosed stands for harness racing in mid-December. Costello fancied himself a gambler and didn't like seeing me in the two-dollar line. “You're a lawyer, for Christ's sake,” he said, “go to the ten-dollar window. Here's something to get you started.” Jim handed me a fifty-dollar bill.

I would study the racing form for information on the horses and jockeys, but Costello relied on divine inspiration. At the sound of “Here they come spilling out of the turn,” he would jump in excitement, yet he never expected to do better than break even.

Between races Jim reeled off more corruption stories, such as the bribes Jimmy LeFevour delivered to Judge Allen Rosin, “the biggest kink [greediest judge] in the system.” Rosin was an arrogant man given to depression and sometimes bizarre behavior. The Korean War veteran and former policeman once bolted from the bench, spread out his arms in his black robe, and proclaimed “I am God!” Then he looked at the shocked court reporter, asked “Did I say that?,” and had the remark stricken from the record.

Costello also named half a dozen other judges on the take, and said bribes could be in almost any form. He explained that when Silverman was representing three prostitutes, he offered an ASA a date with one if he would throw out the case. The prosecutor said no, but the women
were acquitted anyway. Maybe the judge was given a sample of their innocence.

Actually, bribes in the form of services rendered were more common than I had imagined early in my double role. A veteran officer claimed that once when the elevator doors opened in police headquarters, where “whore court” was located, he saw a woman performing a sex act on a judge. It was also said that judges sometimes demanded sex from the female junkies haled into the court bullpen to await a hearing.

Because Costello was forcing me to go to the ten-dollar window at the racetrack and I personally was only a two-dollar bettor, I believed the FBI should pay the eight dollars remaining. I had used this system on a couple of other outings and, in all, the Bureau lost about sixty dollars.

One evening I was really lucky, picking five out of the six races we stayed for. Since I was no longer handing over all my Greylord-related cash directly to my contact agent, I called the FBI the next day and deposited the winnings in a bank account. With these and some side bets I had made, I calculated that I had won a hundred and fifty dollars for myself and two hundred and thirty-seven dollars for the U.S. Treasury. A couple of days later, the assistant special agent in charge of the Chicago office told me, “What the hell did you tell anybody about it for, you could have kept all the winnings!”

Also in mid-December, Costello told Martha their marriage was through, which was no surprise. By waiting until his daughter turned eighteen before filing for divorce, he didn't have to pay child support. He packed all of Martha's clothes into his new Oldsmobile and drove her to a Sheraton Hotel in the suburbs, then he asked me to represent him in his divorce. He was all set to hand five hundred dollars to a courthouse bagman so he could keep the house and pay minimal alimony. When the bagman informed him that the judge assigned never took bribes, Costello exclaimed, “What the hell! The judge hears cases worth millions and he don't take advantage of it? That guy is stupid.”

The case might have dragged on for years except for Costello's crudeness. To make sure he kept the house, he stormed into Martha's hotel room and shoved an agreement in her face. She put her name to it, in what he told me was an alcoholic stupor, in return for seven hundred dollars a month alimony for three years. Thinking over what he had done, he went back and gave a court secretary two dollars to change the figure to six hundred dollars.

At the time, I was conducting a sort of crime academy for FBI agents, which I had begun in my first couple of months as a defense attorney. After months of waiting, we had been denied permission to pass around bribes in real cases, since that might bring criticism of the Justice Department. So we decided to fabricate crimes, and at last I was having a little fun out of being undercover.

We had started out small because we didn't have much of a budget, and because breaking the law was still something new to all of us. At first some Chicago agents were involved, but we stopped this when one of them was recognized by a policeman walking out of the Auto Theft Court bullpen. Fortunately, the officer didn't realize the agent was now working undercover.

The risk of that happening again was just too great, so we had the Bureau send us agents from all over the country. This meant renting five apartments in the Chicago area to provide them with local addresses for receiving bond papers and notices for court appearances. We also had to be ready if the police went to the homes for any reason, but that never happened. The plushest apartment we used was in the Gold Coast. But the agents never actually lived in any of these residences, and the cast of characters kept changing because some of our men and women were needed in other cities.

The agents and I would meet at the offices of the fictional Independent Material Systems Company at 410 South Michigan Avenue, across from Grant Park, or in the apartment the FBI had leased for Judge Lockwood before he returned to southern Illinois. Originally we would have up to fifteen agents per meeting, making planning virtually impossible because they kept offering ideas or opinions. Even a simple set-up such as imagining two guys in a traffic dispute seemed to take forever to work out between the “Suppose …” and the “Okay, let's do it.”

Everything went faster when we decided to reduce the number of agents at tactical sessions to four. Every Friday we would have a pop and beer informal meeting largely to boost the morale of the agents working undercover. Any plan for a contrived case was submitted for approval to one of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys working with us. In all, each crime we put together took about fifty man-hours to prepare. This included arranging identification, setting up phones in the apartments, and making sure the out-of-town agent who would be playing the criminal was familiar with his assumed identity, so the Chicago officers wouldn't be dubious.

As the supervisor of the entire project, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Reidy set ground rules for the agents to stay out of Cook County Jail. Not only were conditions there wretched, any FBI agent locked up would be in physical danger. For that reason we had to stage crimes so that the arrested agents would be able to make bond and avoid being sent to the jail. We also did not want the police arriving with guns drawn, and that meant no burglaries.

JUDGE P.J. MCCORMICK

The first of the nearly one hundred cases we concocted was designed to bring us before “P.J.” McCormick, the self-glorifying judge who reportedly had threatened a motorist with a gun he later said was a cigar. I had been apprehensive about bribing him because I had prosecuted cases before him for four months before joining Greylord, and he knew the idealistic way I had been.

At a bench trial in misdemeanor court, many shysters would demand a jury trial for their guilty clients, just to remove them from honest judges. When the cases came up before McCormick, who sat in the misdemeanor jury courtroom for the entire city of Chicago, the lawyers would drop their demand for a jury trial and let P.J. decide the case. The beautiful system ran smoothly. Fixers routinely dropped money into his desk drawer, handed over cash in a Traffic Court hallway, and one once made a payoff in the steam room of the posh Illinois Athletic Club.

In one of our devised cases FBI agent Timothy Murphy, carrying identification giving his name as “Timothy Best,” walked into a hardware store and stuffed tools into his pockets and under his belt. Agent Jack Thorpe, posing as a customer, reported this outrage to a security guard as “Best” tried to waddle out with a retractable measuring tape, wire cutters, long-nose pliers, and electric staple gun. The guard pounced on him outside and led him to the security office.

It took an hour before two officers arrived to bring “Mr. Best” to a police station in a dilapidated former Boys Club. Murphy managed to fall asleep in the lockup that evening but awoke half an hour later as a roach crawled across his face. The FBI headquarters in Quantico had trained agents for handling terrorists but not for spending a day behind bars. After seven hours in the cell, Murphy was released on a one-hundred-dollar cash bond. He then wrote a memo recommending that
in the future all agents be sent only to sanitary, modern jails and that part of their standard equipment be a candy bar to relieve the hunger and chewing gum to ease the boredom.

I went to Judge P.J. McCormick in his chambers and pretended to be worried about him. “My client's giving me a good fee,” I said, “but I don't have much of a case.”

“I don't know,” P.J. told me. I could almost see his mind working. “I'm thinking your man just put the tools in his pockets and forgot to pay for them.”

The store guard never showed up in court, freeing the judge's hand. Even though the case had never been continued, McCormick pretended that this was the third time it had come before him. Faking impatience, P.J. dismissed the case and entered his private room without a hint that he wanted to be paid off. This left Murphy confused, and I myself didn't know what to make of it.

I entered McCormick's chambers and said, “Thank you very much, Judge.”

“Okay, Terry.”

“If there's anything I can ever do for you, let me know.”

“Yes, you can,” he said. “When I run for retention, I want you to take a one-hundred-dollar bill and buy stamps and postcards, and write to all your personal friends in the suburbs, telling them to vote for me. With your personal signature. A letter, that's all.”

This wasn't anything that could be used as evidence against P.J. But as I talked it over with Costello a few days later, “Big Bird” sat there admiring what may have been the judge's shrewdness. “Know what he really said to you, Terry? He's telling you the first one is free, but the next one will cost you a hundred.”

But there was to be no next time. Corrupt as McCormick was, I received the impression that he had heard the rumor about my being a mole and still believed it, and decided to stay clear of me. Although we did not capture him taking bribes on tape, the Internal Revenue Service was gathering evidence against him.

This was a new phase of the operation, which had been authorized when the interconnected evidence from various aspects of Greylord started showing that we were really onto something. Top IRS agent Dennis Czurylo worked closely with the FBI in tracing the sometimes
tangled avenues of bribe money. It was only fitting that the expenditure tactic the federal government had developed to bring down the Capone gang in the 1930s was now being used half a century later in the same city to attack black-robed racketeers.

The IRS would analyze all expenditures a judge made and might discover that he was spending one hundred thousand dollars a year above his judicial income. At trial, the Assistant U.S. Attorney would point out that all such unexplained cash showed that the source had to be bribes.

Slowly the government learned how P.J. could avoid leaving a trace. He used his payoffs to purchase money orders at two Loop banks. Sometimes he would wait in separate lines to buy them from three different tellers to avoid suspicion over the amounts. Czurylo's people studied hundreds of these money orders or, as prosecutors would tell a jury in typical opening-argument rhetoric, “millions” of them. They learned that in three years P.J. spent nearly forty thousand dollars for which there was no legal source, and that he had bought one hundred and forty thousand dollars in relatively small money orders over two and a half years. The judge was eventually convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on tax fraud and extortion charges.