Operation Greylord (28 page)

In Seattle we could have lived on my salary alone. But in Philadelphia Cathy would have to take a bar examination for a position with the prosecutor's office and wait her turn. And I would be just another FBI agent tracking down forgers and hijackers. That would have been fine a few years ago. But my undercover life had brought me such highs and lows that I didn't think I could settle down so soon to life in the mainstream.

Yet I realized that nothing I had done entitled me to special treatment. So we put our nice house up for sale and prepared to move. But some part of me knew I still needed a period of emotional recovery, and that I was not yet strong enough to start another kind of life elsewhere. Having given up my friends, I did not want to give up my sense of self.

When I had agreed to go undercover—for what I assumed would be a few months rather than the three and a half years—I had expected to make a great difference in the court system. I had no idea that lawyers who I thought were honest would turn on me, and that at times it would seem as if the legal system had more of an effect on me than I did on the corruption. Now even the FBI seemed to be deserting me.

Having trouble sleeping again, I called the FBI psychiatrist who had helped me while I was working undercover. He told me to seek outside help. This led to a long talk with a private psychiatrist, Jacob Moskovic, in which I mentioned the other periods when I had felt down because of the corruption and the frustrations of my clandestine work.

Dr. Moskovic told me I was suffering from clinical depression and explained that anyone could get it, like a cold. He mentioned that I should have been receiving psychological help throughout my double life and was amazed that I had not been. The essential cause might not even have been my work as a mole, but guilt over my betrayals. He said I would need a brief period of rest and treatment.

Even during the two and a half weeks I was hospitalized, I still didn't realize how much the proposed uprooting was affecting me. I was seeding grass at the house Cathy and I were about to sell when I set the bag down and told myself that I did not have to take this.

We talked it over, but there wasn't much to say. Only my leftover dreams wanted me to remain an FBI agent even if it meant moving; my body and mind told me to stay where I was. Sadly, I drove downtown that week and handed in my resignation, effective January 31, 1988. That meant I would still be with the Bureau for other Greylord trials.

When fixer Bruce Roth was prosecuted in August 1987, I faced attorney Patrick Tuite for the fifth time. He was one of the patron saints of defendants facing long prison terms if convicted. Being Tuite, he naturally had a fresh trick. To use me to his advantage, he put my name down on his list of defense witnesses.

I wasn't asked much on the stand, just about the few weak spots in the government's case, such as every prosecution is bound to have. The federal case was so strong that the well-groomed, money-oriented Roth was convicted and given a ten-year sentence for racketeering, bribery, and conspiracy.

Lee Barnett, Peter Kessler, and I returned as government witnesses in the trial of former judge Martin Hogan. At his sentencing, Hogan said he was guilty not of greed but of stupidity. Claiming he had been corrupted by Judge LeFevour, the trim former Marine said, “I did not know the depths of his personality would lead me to hell.” Not exactly hell, but to a ten-year prison term.

A month after Hogan's trial, I was back on the stand in the trial of Judge Daniel Glecier. I never had much contact with the white-haired jurist. But the prosecution's star witness against him was Jim Costello—whose term was recently reduced to six years in a Texas federal prison because of his decision to cooperate.

While I was in the witness room waiting to be called, I peeked into the courtroom to see Jim sitting in the witness chair. He looked like his old, defiant self. His bushy brown hair was showing a little gray but was as beyond a comb as ever, and he was in a prison uniform instead an expensive Capper and Capper business suit.

Costello rattled off cases in which he had bribed Glecier. Then under cross-examination, he admitted selling his badge as a policeman
and told the jury that once when he and I were drinking together, he toasted: “Here's to money.”

A witness against one of Glecier's co-defendants was former judge Roger Seaman, the first judge ever to be called as a government witness in northern Illinois. Seaman said he had refused to take bribes when he worked as a prosecutor and in the city law office. But soon after he was elected to the bench, a judge now dead told him that the “regular attorneys” would show their appreciation if he gave them defendants who came in without a lawyer. Now Seaman was serving four years for his mistakes. When questioned about why he had taken bribes, he answered, “Greed, ego; I wanted to be accepted by the lawyers.”

Judge Glecier was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. He also was fined sixty thousand dollars.

Next on trial was Judge “P.J.” McCormick who, despite his silver hair, still looked like a football player. One reason he had not been tried earlier was that the IRS team had to be meticulous in tracing his paper trail through hundreds of money orders purchased with bribe cash. A prosecutor said that every time McCormick opened his desk drawer, there should have been a cash register bell ringing. After a jury convicted him of income tax evasion, P.J. secretly pleaded guilty to extortion. In 1989, McCormick was ordered to serve six years in prison.

The year before, sheriff's deputy Lucius Robinson had pleaded guilty to accepting a thirteen-hundred-dollar bribe from me and was sentenced to three years. That would seem to be the end of it. But in late 1991, the bagman who had once been Muhammad Ali's bodyguard was put on trial again on charges of lying to a special grand jury to protect five judges and nine lawyers who were never charged. Lucius claimed in the grand jury I was the only one who ever gave him bribes and that he had never handed the money over to Judge Maurice Pompey.

Since we never had enough evidence to charge the other jurists we were sure Lucius had passed money to, they were identified in court as Judges A, B, C, D, and E. I described for Judge Norgle in the bench trial—conducted without a jury—how I gave the money to Robinson and he checked off the names of three Judges that he told me were crooked. I left the stand with a mixture of sorrow for the system and relief that I had got my revenge on the man who early in my career helped set rapists free.

Judge Norgle found Robinson guilty of two counts of perjury. The judge held that the taped conversations and evidence showed that he indeed had bribed all five of the judges who were identified only by code, including Pompey and Thomas Maloney.

Pompey had retired, and the government could not prosecute him because the statute of limitations had run out. But the former judge's name would come up in court again, along with a case that prosecutors never let die.

March 1993

A light snow was swirling on the day in March 1993 when opening arguments began in the trial of retired judge Thomas Maloney, the only jurist in America ever charged with taking bribes in murder cases. Like Pompey, Maloney had been one of the sternest and most respected judges in the system. For thirteen years the rectangular-faced, curly-haired judge sat under a portrait of U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall and presided over a court with strict rules against whispering and gum-chewing. Only one other judge in the Criminal Courts Building may have sent more defendants to death row.

But there was another side to Maloney. His political sponsor had been a powerful alderman, and he had friends among the snide, cynical political set, the sort of people in power who take the rest of us for suckers. Maloney's hard line against defendants who could not bribe him only increased his price for those who could.

Like Judge Pompey, Maloney used Lucius Robinson as his personal bagman. Maloney had won a boxing scholarship to college, and Lucius had been a bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, so this connection made him as close to a friend as anyone Maloney had in the courts. But the friendship ended when Lucius decided to cut a deal with prosecutors.

Under the broad outlines of the RICO Act, all of Maloney's crimes on the bench were fair game. Young Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur rose from her chair and told the jury that Maloney “conspired to change the course of justice, turning a courtroom into a pit of corruption and greed.”

Greylord had laid the foundation for the trial, but this went beyond our work. Expanding the methods used to gather information on
previous judges, the FBI in Operation Gambat, probing into bribery in the downtown First Ward, installed a spy camera in the law office of lawyer/businessman/bagman and now mole Robert Cooley. They learned that an influential alderman other than Maloney's political sponsor had acted as a go-between in some of the bribes to him. Three months before Maloney's trial, that alderman was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy, and extortion. But the jury acquitted him of fixing a trial before Maloney, because the tape was not clear enough.

In Maloney's trial, I testified about how I had changed from a trusting assistant prosecutor into a government mole, and how later, as a defense attorney with a mock practice, I delivered bribes to Robinson. He followed me to the stand. Breaking his years of silence and denials, he told of passing bribes to judges.

“How many times did you carry bribes to your boss, Judge Pompey?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Mendeloff.

“Hundreds,” Robinson said.

“Whose choice was it for the lawyers to pay you for the judges, yours or the judges'?”

“The judges,” he replied.

Robinson also told of passing him twenty-three hundred dollars from attorney William Swano in the upscale McCormick Inn near downtown, and said that Maloney once called him into the judges' private elevator at the back of the court building so he could start his day with the exhilaration of a three-hundred-dollar bribe.

Next taking the stand was Swano, who had been a 1960s idealist and once felt the government could reform society. His harsh awakening came when Robinson demanded money to assure an acquittal in a date-rape case. Swano went on to represent some members of the notorious drug and robbery gang called the El Rukns. But now he was nearly bankrupt and facing prison as a co-conspirator. The U.S. Attorney's Office offered him one way out: tell all he knew about Judge Maloney in return for a lighter sentence on racketeering charges.

Swano testified that he had lost only one case before the judge, that of an innocent man charged with armed robbery. The judge found the hapless man guilty and sent him to prison just to teach Swano a lesson—move to another city, get out of law, or start paying up.

After a while, Swano even made a game of the secret arrangement. After furtively delivering a five-thousand-dollar bribe to Maloney's
bagman to have a murderer convicted of only involuntary manslaughter, he bet the prosecutor five dollars how the judge would decide. When the verdict was handed down, the prosecutor was amazed at Swano's grasp of the vagaries of justice.

But one of the El Rukns cases was more complicated than most of the others. Two gang “generals” were arrested for murdering a rival drug dealer and his wife. The gang thought there was no way to fix a case before law-and-order Judge Maloney, but Swano knew better. He put ten thousand dollars in a file folder for one of Maloney's other bagman, attorney Robert McGee, at a restaurant on the first day of the trial. Since people who crossed the El Rukns had a high mortality rate, Swano wanted to make sure the judge understood what he was to do. During the trial, Swano reminded Maloney in a low voice, “We've got an agreement on this. You've got to live up to your end of the bargain.”

But as the El Rukns trial wore on, Maloney started having second thoughts. There was a lot of publicity on this case. The back of the gang had been broken by an FBI raid on its South Side headquarters, some of the leaders were starting to listen to prosecutors, and Maloney thought the FBI was following him, which it was. An acquittal now would be the same as shouting “Bribe!” So McGee called Swano at home and said the judge had decided to return the money.

Swano arrived late the next morning and apparently missed the bagman. When he happened to see Maloney, the judge told him that “a lawyer left a file folder for you and said you should come and get it from the sheriff's deputy.” But Swano and the deputy couldn't find it. They knocked on the door of the judge's chambers and he told them to come in. “Here it is,” Maloney said, and handed over the file. Inside was the ten thousand dollars. Then the judge sentenced the two El Rukns to death, but later problems in their case meant they served time in prison instead.

Ex-bagman Robert Cooley told the jury that the price for fixing a case in front of Maloney was sometimes even higher. One defendant before Maloney was a hit man for the Ghost Shadows, a violent New York-based Asian gang. The evidence was pretty strong that he had committed a murder during a gambling war in Chicago's Chinatown. Cooley said the total bribe amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, including fees for go-betweens.

Maloney had thought he was invincible because of his years of laundering payoffs through money orders. But the precaution worked no
better for him than it had for Judge P.J. McCormick. On April 16, 1993, after deliberating over three days, the jury convicted Maloney on every count of racketeering, conspiracy, and obstructing justice. He was the eighteenth current or former judge we had exposed as a thief of justice, in addition to more than fifty attorneys, policemen, and court clerks. The excitement over his sentence overshadowed a six-year term given to bagman McGee.

Maloney's sentencing in July 1994, allowed prosecutors to spread out his sordid life, even crimes for which there was no evidence to charge him. Admitted counterfeiter and killer Michael Bertucci testified that he and other crooks years before would hire Maloney as their lawyer because he knew how to rig a verdict. Bertucci added that in the early 1970s he saw Maloney pass money to Judge Pompey in a courthouse washroom just before Pompey dismissed an attempted-theft charge.