Operation Greylord (29 page)

Bertucci even said the mob had Maloney appointed to the bench over his protests that the job “didn't pay as well” as being a criminal attorney. The mob wasn't concerned about making him happy, it needed someone on the bench to free its robbers, thieves, and enforcers. He was far from the first or last judge to take orders from the outfit.

The shocker for the general public came when former bagman Robert Cooley testified that as an attorney, Maloney had set in motion the 1977 acquittal of reputed mob hitman Harry Aleman in the killing of Teamsters union steward William Logan. Although many years had passed, this outrage was still very real to everyone involved in Greylord because it had compelled federal prosecutors to launch our unprecedented secret investigation of the whole system.

With this testimony, Maloney emerged as the most dangerous judge ever charged as a result of Greylord. But when asked if he had any statement to make before sentencing, he delivered a two-hour oration starring himself as an innocent victim of evil men whom the U.S. Attorney's Office had set upon him. When he was finished, Maloney was sentenced to nearly sixteen years in prison and fined two hundred thousand dollars. Because he was sixty-nine years old, his lawyers said the term would, in effect, be a life sentence. He served twelve years and died in a nursing home after being the last Greylord defendant to be released from prison in 2008.

Our investigation and major prosecutions were finally over, fourteen years after the undercover work had begun, but there was
still important unfinished business. Although we had to let some of our intended targets get away, we knew that we had succeeded in reaching the heart of corruption with disclosures about the acquittal of Harry Aleman for the murder of William Logan.

Each Greylord trial had in effect been a stepping stone to the mobster, who was then living a life of leisure and occasionally painting in his cubicle at the federal prison resort in Oxford, Wisconsin, where he was serving time on an extortion case. For reasons clear only to him and his lawyers, Aleman had pleaded guilty and was looking forward to being freed in the year 2000.

Could he be prosecuted again for the Logan murder despite constitutional provisions against being tried for the same crime twice? After all, double jeopardy was one of the grievances that had led to the American Revolution.

Officials announced their intention to bring Aleman to justice again with an indictment based on fresh evidence that First Ward hoodlums had used Cooley as a bagman for two cash payments to trial judge Frank Wilson. The defense community mockingly called the bold tactic headline grabbing. But on October 13, 1994, a circuit court judge made legal history by approving the re-indictment. Members of Logan's family embraced one another in court. One of Logan's sisters, Betty Romo, called the decision “a big step toward final justice.”

Mob-connected defense attorneys must have nervously assured their clients that the ruling would be overthrown, as a number of other attempts had been over the years. But ultimately the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that double jeopardy clause of the constitution did not apply in the Aleman case because he had committed a fraud upon the trial court by paying the bribe. That meant Aleman had never been in jeopardy of being convicted.

From what we had learned, Judge Wilson never wanted to acquit Aleman and ruin his career. But the crime syndicate needed Aleman to continue killing, and it relentlessly put unknown pressure on Wilson until he gave in. There is an unsubstantiated rumor that the mobsters succeeded only when they threatened to kill his son.

Judge Wilson—described by no less than Judge Maloney as “drunk, reckless, degenerate”—retired from the bench shortly afterward and was obscurely living in Sun City, Arizona. One day in 1989, Cooley made what must have seemed like a social call to Wilson's home. During
their seemingly casual discussion, the visitor steered the conversation to the Aleman case. Wilson did not know that the mob lawyer was wearing a wire, just as I had in the criminal courthouse.

About eight weeks after the meeting, police officers and FBI agents talked to Wilson in person about the supposed bribe. Then they played Cooley's tape for him and he heard exactly what a jury would hear. Two months later, Wilson shot himself to death in his back yard—the third suicide stemming from Greylord disclosures.

January-September 1997

In January 1997, as outfit hit man Harry Aleman was awaiting his unprecedented retrial, former Judge Richard LeFevour died of natural causes, dishonored from Greylord disclosures of how he had systematized bribery throughout the municipal courts. He had left prison after six years, and his last job was as an insurance claims adjuster. At his family's request, there was no death notice.

LeFevour's influence went far beyond the four hundred thousand dollars in bribes he had taken from drunken drivers and parking violators over fourteen years. His career was bitter proof that when politics place a criminal at the top, corruption becomes a way of life for the whole system.

Yet the highest prize of the Greylord years would be Aleman, and the Chicago style of doing things was about to be tried along with him. This time, no one was coming to Aleman's aid with veiled threats to the judge and envelopes stuffed with cash. Times had changed.

Aleman showed an arctic haughtiness when his retrial began in late September 1997. His I'm-tougher-than-the-world pose gave no indication whether he was in suspense about the outcome, but I doubt that he was. As witnesses described that long-ago night of the Logan murder, jurors kept darting their eyes to the defendant, probably to imagine whether Aleman could have done it. Aleman ignored them and slouched at the defense table like a bored schoolboy.

Once more taking the stand, Robert Cooley said the fix had originated with two behind-the-scenes political bosses of the First Ward, John D'Arco and Patrick Marcy, both deceased. D'Arco formerly was an alderman, and Marcy was a Democratic Party puppet master. Their ward
controlled the Loop and Little Italy on the Near West Side. Through the early 1980s, those two men kept the secrets and called the shots as First Ward police officers, politicians, and crime syndicate figures formed an impenetrable network of cross-interests.

Judge Wilson had not been known to be corrupt, and that worked to the defendant's advantage. If a judge with a bad reputation were to set Aleman free, there would be an outcry. Cooley testified that he told D'Arco and Marcy that as a personal friend of his Judge Wilson might be talked into taking the money.

At first Cooley assured Wilson that the evidence was weak—the killing was committed at eleven o'clock at night—and that agreeing to an acquittal would be a personal favor. But as Wilson heard the incriminating evidence day after day, he began to realize the political consequences of what he had agreed to do. Whether he ever had any moral concerns died with him.

I wish I could have been at the trial, but I recently had been hired as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice's Inspector General's Office, and that meant I was often out of town. Even so, I kept up with the daily unfolding. I learned that Cooley wept on the stand as he detailed that the judge took the ten thousand dollars in installments. “He was a broken man,” Cooley said in describing the final payment, made in a restaurant washroom just hours after Aleman's acquittal. “He told me, ‘You've destroyed me, you've killed me' and walked out.”

In later testimony Bobby Lowe, the neighbor who had seen the murder of William Logan while walking his dog twenty-five years before, was called to the stand and asked if he could still recognize the killer in court. Walking toward the defense table, the bearded auto mechanic pointed at Aleman and said, “This man, right here.” He went to identify Aleman five times more in testimony. When asked if he was sure, he replied, “I'll never forget that face!”

The man who admitted driving the getaway car, Louis Almeida, testified—just as he had before Judge Wilson—that the killing had been set up weeks in advance, when Aleman wrote out for him Logan's address, license plate number, and the time the man usually left for work. With a flourish, Aleman jotted down “Death to Billy,” the mob wheelman told the jurors.

To offset such vivid testimony, the defense tried an unusual tactic and called the respected retired chief judge of the Criminal Court Building,
Richard Fitzgerald, commonly called “Fitz.” He testified that he knew of no improprieties in the Aleman trial before Wilson.

When the final arguments concluded, Aleman was brought back to his maximum security cell in the downtown federal jail, where he was temporarily being kept as part of his unrelated twelve-year sentence for extortion.

Jury deliberation began on the pleasant fall evening of September 13, 1997. Four hours later the jurors came out with a verdict of guilty. Aleman rested his expressionless face on his raised forearm, but his family wept and Logan's relatives appeared emotionally exhausted. Their long wait was over, and justice had come full circle for all of us.

There was no celebration. Assistant State's Attorney Scott Cassidy told reporters, “This will close the books on an ugly era in Cook County.” A too-large judicial system that had broken down well before any of us had been born had been stitched back together for now, and we could go on with our lives.

There was little excitement when Aleman was sentenced to serve one hundred to three hundred years in prison, where he died of natural causes in 2010.

When I was sworn in as an attorney amid the ruins of a riot-scarred West Side neighborhood on a cold, wet, and windy Halloween evening, there had seemed no way to reach judges who were protected by their robes, their political party, their bagmen, and the lawyers' code of silence. When Mort Friedman made an attempt, he was ostracized and threatened with contempt of court and loss of his law license. Now we had brought down crooks ranging from hallway hustlers like Costello to some of the best-known judges in the country's largest court system.

Serving as a reminder of what happens to fixers and crooked judges when they are caught, no one trapped by the Greylord net emerged with a life intact. After ex-judge Glecier served his term, he worked for Catholic Charities Institute of Addiction. Following Costello's testimony in the Glecier trial, he returned to prison to complete his sentence.
He gave every indication that when he came out he would be a better man. The last I heard of him, he and his second wife were living quietly somewhere in Colorado.

Returning from prison, former Judge P.J. McCormick was employed as a route salesman for a dairy company. An award-winning feature in the
Chicago Lawyer
magazine described how Mark and several other lawyers wound up selling real estate. Bruce Roth went into construction work but said, “I hope to get my license back some day, I think of it all the time.”

Bob Silverman—admired by so many in the courthouse, and the role model for all young fixers—could not get a job after prison and was living on social security. If there is a moral to all this, it's that if you are crooked, the first person you destroy is yourself.

There is no way of telling how our investigation affected the families of our targets. But we know that the son of bagman Ira Blackwood refused to speak to him after Ira was convicted and sentenced to seven years. Peter Kessler's mother, who had survived the Holocaust, died soon after he pleaded guilty to bribing Judge Devine. Fixer Neal Birnbaum's father died soon after his son's indictment, and Neal blamed us for his death.

This was the most extensive undercover campaign in American history, but that was only because we were making up for the failure of our law schools and attorney disciplinary boards to deal with realities. Removing the malignancy should not start with recruiting moles. It needs to begin with realizing the special stresses and drives of attorneys engaged in criminal law. It comes as no surprise that several studies have shown that lawyers have the highest depression rate in the country.

Judges should be allowed to be judges and not politicians, who run for election on a party ticket and whose campaigns are run by the attorneys who appear before them. And monitoring agencies should act more quickly on reports of court improprieties.

Shortly before the Maloney conviction, I appeared before an Illinois Supreme Court commission on the Cook County court system. No one was fooling himself that Greylord had turned Chicago honest. I said that of the three hundred and twenty-five judges in the system, insiders such as bagman Harold Conn and others identified eighty-five as being corrupt, but there had to be more. I was then asked by a central illinois appellate justice what percentage of the judges in Cook County of thought were corrupt. I testified that perhaps fifty percent of judges
at the time were on the take. Maybe not continually, as Olson had been, but they grabbed cash whenever the amount and the circumstances were right. A judge panelist whispered to someone that she had heard the number was only forty percent. Only!

A lot of this book has been about the downside of our work, but it had some rewards. The Loyola University Chicago School of Law honored me for contributions to the community. The Chicago Council of Lawyers gave former judge Lockwood and me awards, and well-known defense attorney David Schippers, who had represented a lawyer convicted of bribing Judge Sodini, sent me a letter of praise for my contributions to the profession. Former U.S. Attorney Webb, a leader in the Cook County Republican Party, even asked me to run for State's Attorney. But I felt incumbent Democrat Richard M. Daley was doing a good job and chose not to accept.

One year after Aleman's sentencing, Scott Lassar—the tall, slender, and determined prosecutor who had seen Greylord's creation—was sworn in as U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois. He told reporters he must have won the appointment by “dumb luck,” typical Lassar humor.

Operation Greylord may have been just the start of a new era in monitoring the judiciary. In Chicago alone, its methods were expanded for staggering sweeps against bribery in several city departments as well as ghost payrolling and insider trading. But the struggle should never let up. Let us not say, as nineteenth-century English poet Josiah Holland did, that “Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps.”