Operation Greylord (3 page)

Now, with these three important men from the Justice Department studying me, I was being given a second chance to do what was right.

“What kind of man is he?” Reidy asked of Mark, apparently mulling over something.

“He's honest, I know that. Mark used to be a cop in the suburbs. His father was a cop, too, and his brother's a lawyer. He's got a good family.”

“Well, we can talk about it later. Don't mention to Mark what you're doing. Since you live with your parents, I suppose you'll have to tell them—if you want to go ahead with this thing.”

If? I had to restrain myself from blurting out “Yes!”

Then Chuck Sklarsky had a parting thought. “There are always surprises whenever anyone goes undercover, Terry. You soon find out you don't know people as well as you think. It is even possible that some of my own friends from the State's Attorney's Office and the defense community are involved.”

Well, Chuck, maybe your friends, but not mine,
I thought, feeling great as I walked out of the office. It seemed strange that not long ago I had considered abandoning my legal career in disgust at the corruption all around me. Now I didn't want any other job in the world.

I returned to work in the police station but my mind was no longer on the job. Going home that evening, I decided to keep the plan from my father as long as possible. John Hake was a good traveling salesman
but a terrible secret-keeper. I could just hear him asking in a crowded restaurant, “Did you hear about my son, the FBI mole?”

My mother, Sarah Kearns Hake, was another matter. She had always been the moral core of our family and had reprimanded me when I stole an ear of corn from a farmer's field just because other kids were doing it. How proud of me she would be, I thought.

When I hurried inside my parents' suburban home and told my mom, I expected her to be as excited as I was. Instead, a cloud came over her broad Irish face. She seemed to look not at but into me and asked, “Are you sure this is what you really want to do?”

“It has been, all my life.” Ever since I watched
The FBI
television show.

“It sounds dangerous to me.”

“Believe me, Mom, it'll be all right. I'll be working with the FBI.”

With that expression of misgiving we Hake boys knew so well, she sighed and said, “All right, then you might as well do it.”

Over the next few days, as I thought things over, Reidy and Sklarsky looked up my old application for a job as a special agent, as I could tell from the confidence in their faces at our next meeting. The oval table, the iron-gray rug, the wall of photos—everything was the same, except the mood was more laidback.

But I was stunned when they outlined the scope of their project. “We want you to go after attorney Bob Silverman,” Sklarsky said. Until now I thought they had only wanted me to get evidence on a few minor fixers. “Silvery Bob” Silverman was one of the most visible, well-liked, and successful defense attorneys in the city. He represented several mob figures even though his brother was a judge admired for his integrity.

“We're not only after the fixers,” Sklarsky went on, dropping another bomb. “We want the judges. There's never been a judge in Cook County who's been convicted while still on the bench, and we want to show that nobody is immune. Some of them you know, like P.J. McCormick*. Others you'll have to find ways to get close to, like Wayne Olson, Jack Reynolds, and John Murphy.”

I couldn't even grasp it all, let alone fully believe they expected me to help them do all this. Because I'd spent most of my time working at police stations, I had just a few weeks of felony trial experience. What did I know about subterfuge and rigging cases, let alone laying traps?
But, then, where could I have learned it? No one had ever tried anything like this before.

“We understand it might take a few weeks before you can start getting payoffs,” Sklarsky added, “so don't get discouraged if nothing happens for a while. Hopefully, you won't be working all by yourself, but for right now you'll be alone. Do you know anyone who might come over, like your friend Mark Ciavelli?”

“I could ask. I know he'd be good.”

“You'll know when the time is right, but clear it with us first. Now, do you have any questions?”

“Yeah” came out of my dry throat. Though I felt a little ashamed for thinking of myself at a time like this, I asked, “Suppose everything turns out all right and you get what you want. What happens to me then?”

“For obvious reasons, we can't make any promises,” Reidy said in carefully measured words, “but the federal government is a pretty big place. You won't be forgotten.”

“Okay, then. How do I start?”

“We want to put you in Olson's court,” Sklarsky said. “If you get something on him, then maybe you can move up to other judges.”

“How many are there?” I asked about the suspected jurists.

“That's one of the things we're hoping you'll be able to tell us.”

That gave me something more to take home.

During the anxious weekend before I could be transferred to court work, I wondered how many other attorneys had been approached about going undercover. When Reidy finally got around to the subject some time later, he told me, “You were chosen from a list of one.” From this I inferred that no one else had complained about the corruption.

So there I was, pretty much as I had been on the first day of my undercover work, but deciding that Jim “Big Bird” Costello was my best bet for an entrance into another world. Like my father I'm naturally friendly, but until now I had always kept my distance with hallway hustlers, as if they went around with a little bell saying “unclean … unclean.” But
now every morning I said hello to Jim and patted his arm and asked how things were going.

The essence of courthouse hustling was dressing well and talking knowingly so that a defendant from a high-crime neighborhood might believe he would be in good hands. That was about Jim's only qualification. He had been in private practice for just a year, but he already seemed part of the dull-gray architecture. At least Costello kept an office, unlike those who worked out of their cars, keeping a clutter of case files on their back seats and picking up messages from an answering service.

In our exchange of small talk that first week of our friendship, I learned a few things about him. Like me, he had studied at Loyola University in Chicago and spent some time as an assistant state's attorney. But whereas I grew up in a nice suburb, Costello came from a tough South Side area, and after an army stint he was a policeman for a dozen years. That was when he learned how things were done in one of America's most corrupt cities. The City That Works. And he began taking bribes.

A little more confident now, I felt that I could play my role better if I stopped trying to look like someone I'm not, so I shaved off my mustache and acted more naturally. In my first overt move, I asked Costello if he wanted to have lunch down the street at Jeans Restaurant. “Yeah,” he said.

We crossed the railroad tracks running past the courthouse and walked half a block down California Avenue to the corner restaurant and bar. Prosecutors had their witnesses eat there because it was close, and Jeans would bill the State's Attorney's Office. Since court workers dropped by to talk shop, the jukebox was just a silent ornament.

“You're a jerk to stay in the State's Attorney's Office,” Costello said after the waitress took our order. “I was in it three years, and I just had to get out. Know what I finally did? I called in sick thirty days in a row while I was setting up my own practice. You know Mike Ficaro? He sent an investigator to follow me around and found out I was just sick of work, so he fired me.”

As always, Costello was only saying whatever came into his head, and I found myself enjoying his company even though I was looking for a way to trap him. He jerked his head toward a few prosecutors sitting around the place. “Look at those dorks. They're making, what, twenty-five, thirty thousand a year and think they're tough shit. Let me
tell you about the courts. There are certain ways of making things easier for everybody. Cops, you ASAs [assistant state's attorneys], the judge—everybody. Why clog up the calendar, know what I mean? If you go by the rules, you won't get nothing done.”

Simple as that, a few words over a beer and sandwich. Costello was not suggesting that he ever did anything illegal. He was only letting me know that he hung around fixers and that I could, too, if I stuck with him. Then we went back to our work on opposite sides of the system, only now I was delighted at having found a chink in the wall. At last I could imagine myself walking down the corridors as defense attorneys ran after me with money in their fists. Only it didn't happen that way.

A Lawyer's Education

In a way, I was out of place as an assistant prosecutor because of my assumption that law school had taught us everything we needed to know. No one told us how an arresting officer might lie in front of a judge to make a good collar seem weak, or shown us the many ways attorneys could manipulate the system. I had to figure these things out for myself, and not with any sudden realization.

My first duties had been to present cases in the misdemeanor courts, where Judge P.J. McCormick taught me Chicago style justice. P.J. McCormick was called “P.J.” by his buddies in the mob-run Rush Street nightclubs. He was a rather good-looking man in his forties who had the bull neck and forceful manners of a football coach. But he had pulled the rug out from under me in the case of two men from an apartment-finding business that cheated immigrants.

These employees had savagely beaten an Ecuadorian who demanded his money back because they had done nothing for him. Their attorney kept calling for continuances to discourage him from coming back. When the case fell to me, it had been dragging on for more than a year and P.J. apparently thought something had to be done before the victim filed a complaint against him.

McCormick found a devious way to make it appear that justice was being served. But the upside-down logic he used takes a little explanation. The worse offender had a record, so P.J. found him innocent to keep him out of jail. Then, since the less culpable man had not been in trouble before, the judge found him guilty and then called for a thirty-day pre-sentence investigation, something unheard of for just a misdemeanor. When the final hearing came around, McCormick placed him
on court supervision. This meant that if the man stayed out of trouble, a “not guilty” would be entered on his record. So in the eyes of the law, the beating never occurred.

McCormick's probably taking a bribe did not exactly shock me. A few years before he had been accused of waving a gun at a man and threatening to blow his head off over just a parking space. Although McCormick conceded he owned a gun, he insisted that his weapon had been a big black cigar, and charges were dropped.

This led the newly formed Illinois Courts Commission to conduct a hearing on whether any action should be taken against him for putting the judiciary in a bad light. The commission had been founded with the best intentions, but its members did not want to cast a shadow on the system. So after a review of evidence in the thirty-two-caliber cigar case, P.J. McCormick was merely suspended for four months.

When hit man Harry Aleman was acquitted in the William Logan shooting, I assumed Judge Frank Wilson's verdict had been based on a peculiar assessment of the evidence. But once I was assigned to trial courts, I began seeing all too many apparently wrongheaded decisions being handed down, as if certain judges were operating on an entirely different set of laws from the ones we had been taught. Yet I never took that extra step of realizing that many of the judges were actually worse than the criminals before them. I needed to hold on to my illusion rather than gradually accepting things as they were.

My innocence ended when an Egyptian grocer was tried for raping a shy and pretty black employee. The man had viciously bitten the teenager on the neck and chased her around the store with a gun, threatening to kill her if she told the police. He was even overbearing in court. I put the girl on the stand and had her go over the attack. The defense attorney dispensed with the usual cross-examination and the judge dismissed the charges, freeing the defendant to do the same thing with some other girl.

I could tell the girl's parents thought that perhaps there was something in the law they did not understand. I led them to a hallway and told them that since there were no witnesses, the judge must have felt the case wasn't strong enough. Why add to their pain by explaining that I thought he had been paid off? Then the sheriff's deputy assigned to the courtroom, an African-American woman, drew me aside and berated me. “How could you have lost this case! Look at what you did to that poor girl and her family.”

Disgusted at my helplessness, I drove that evening to my parents' red colonial-style home in suburban Palatine, where I had been staying until I could get an apartment. I ate without tasting the food and tried to get to sleep, but I kept hearing the sheriff's deputy saying “How could you have lost this case?” so often that her voice seemed like my own.

Turning points are strange. You don't know what is happening to you right away—a notion just grips you and won't let go. And then, somehow, you're not the same any more. By the next afternoon, I was fed up with the legal profession and made my complaint to Mike Ficaro in November or December 1979. Now, just a few months later, I could see that Dan Reidy and Chuck Sklarsky had come up with the best chance the state and federal governments ever had for throwing fixers and grasping judges into prison. But without an insider at the criminal courts the plan would die. And so I agreed to join, with all the enthusiasm of someone unaware of what was in store for him.

I had been told not to confide in anyone outside my immediate family about my new role, but I couldn't keep my excitement from my girlfriend, Cathy Crowley. A few days after agreeing to work undercover, I felt comfortable enough with Cathy to take her to a wedding reception for a high school friend, even though I had known her for less than two months.

Cathy was a little taller than some girls I'd dated, slender and pretty with reddish-brown hair. We had met through my friend Mark Ciavelli, who sometimes worked with me in the police stations. Since I still lived in the suburbs, I was not part of the singles scene, so Mark had taken me to a St. Patrick's Day party on the North Side. There I noticed Cathy in a green plaid dress and asked if she would dance with me.

You can be with some people for years and never really know them. But with others you quickly find yourself talking to them as if they'd always been a part of your life. That was how I felt with Cathy. She was bright and fun to be with, and I found myself going from subject to subject as we kept up with the music. That was how I learned she was in her first year at Loyola law school, from where I had graduated in 1977.

Seeing that I was already acting as if I wanted to be with Cathy forever, Mark waited until she was out of earshot and then suggested that I offer her a ride home. Among the things we three laughed over were the latest antics of Judge P.J. McCormick. He had been stopped for driving too slowly on a highway. He alledgedly was so drunk that he tried to escape by taking the state trooper's car.

June 1980

At a red light on the way back from the wedding reception, I turned down the radio in my eight-year-old Plymouth Fury and said, “I'm transferring to Narcotics Court on Monday.”

“But I thought you liked felony review,” Cathy said.

What would Dan Reidy and Chuck Sklarsky think if they knew I was about to divulge my decision to the daughter of a judge, who was studying to be a trial lawyer and whose family moved in legal circles? I just couldn't help myself.

“Well, I'm going to be working undercover for the FBI.” There, it was out and I didn't care.

“Yeah, right,” Cathy said. She turned up the radio and took another look at me. “You're pulling my leg, aren't you?”

I had thought I would become something of a hero in her eyes, but now I felt a little silly. “It's the truth,” I assured her. “We had a couple of meetings downtown, and they told me the names of maybe half a dozen lawyers and judges they're looking at. Can you believe it, taking down
judges
?” My exuberance must have made me sound juvenile.

“My father was absolutely honest,” Cathy assured me.

“Everybody knows that.” Judge Wilbert Crowley had died with a spotless record about four years before.

There were a lot of things I hadn't told her about the investigation yet, and no wonder she couldn't understand why I was doing this. “You can't imagine how bad it is,” I said, “you have to be in the courts all the time to see it. It's got to be stopped.”

“And
you
're going to do it? You're just starting out.”

“It's practically as if I'm an FBI agent.” That was my way of looking at it, even though at this stage no one else would have. “They've had me transferred to Olson's court. You don't mind that I'm going over? I mean, people will start thinking I'm a crook.”

“No.” Cathy tossed this off with a lilt. “I think it's neat.”

“You can't tell anyone, all right?”

“Don't worry,” she said. “Who would believe me?”

That Monday I walked up the concrete steps of the Criminal Courts Building with the start of a mustache, prepared to act like I was on the take at the first chance.

And so ended the period of my life when I could say and do pretty much anything I wanted to. From now on any spontaneity had to be held in check until it was safe to be myself, and even then I felt uneasy about it. Since I now had to work the corridors and the cafeteria as well as attend to my official duties, the Criminal Courts Building was becoming my real home.

The busy courthouse, described by the
Chicago Tribune
as a “columned, neoclassical hulk,” sits off a short boulevard in a residential neighborhood at 26th Street and California Avenue, at nearly the geographic center of the city and a half-hour drive from downtown. As a reporter said when the place opened in 1929, it “is five miles this side of Keokuk, Iowa.”

Maybe its remoteness had something to do with the way bribery took root. Without the distractions of large law offices, trendy shops, theaters, or major restaurants, the judges and lawyers formed an odd little society of their own, even shooting dice together in the back of Jeans Restaurant once a week. Some of those cozy relationships tightened a bit when a towering office annex was built next to the courthouse for judicial and state's attorney personnel, but many judges still counted defense attorneys among their friends. This closed society, in which trial judges often favored their lawyer friends, was something most new prosecutors felt alien toward.

Part of my undercover role was to avoid looking uneasy as I summarized the arrests of drug dealers at preliminary hearings before Wayne Olson, one of the loudest judges in the system. He was a large man who at forty-nine easily seemed ten years older. On the bench he had a tired but kindly expression, with such bags under his eyes that in public appearances he kept his lids raised, giving him a startled look. His permanent assignment, Branch 57, was one of the two Narcotics Courts in the building. The other judge was honest. The decisions coming simultaneously out of those two courts at each end of a short hallway were like noon and midnight.

Olson's courtroom must have been built in anticipation of some Trial of the Century, since the preliminary hearings occupied less than
a third of the space. His bench was kept diagonally in a corner to catch the natural light from the tall, narrow windows. The two waist-high lecterns for the attorneys and witnesses were set at conflicting angles, so the total arrangement created a small maze. As a result, the empty jury box did not directly face the witness stand, and neither did the two rows of spectator benches. This made huge Room 100 look tipped toward one corner, with everything at an angle from something else.

Every few minutes someone was called before the judge, and another man or woman was led away. The hearings were just a drone barely audible in the front bench. There was no gaveling, no voices raised. Assistant prosecutors were continually referring to their case files from a stack on a gray metal cart, and assembly-line defendants were not even faces after a judge's first few months.

You could tell when Olson was feeling good because he eased the monotony of an overloaded court call with a stream of banter. When well-known defense attorney Sam Adam arrived in a red and white checked sport coat instead of his usual suit, Judge Olson said, “You know, Mr. Adam, there's an Italian restaurant somewhere in this city that's missing a tablecloth.”

Another time a confessed burglar appeared before the saggy, baggy white-haired judge. Before sending the thief to the Vandalia prison farm, he asked the defendant if he had anything to say.

“It's my birthday, Your Honor,” the burglar answered, hoping for a lighter sentence.

Olson stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, and sang, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. One year in Vandalia, happy birthday to you!” He then sat down and told the bailiff, “Get him out of here.”

I arrived early on my first day at Olson's court so I could strike up a conversation with his clerk and occasional driver, *Charlie Squeteri. Even before the bailiff could say “All rise, the court is now in session,” I saw an attorney approach Squeteri with money in hand to have his client called first. That would slash the lawyer's wait time so he could handle an additional client and make more money. Noticing my gawking, the attorney slid the cash back into his pocket. I obviously would have to stop showing such scruples if I was to be taken for corrupt.