Operation Greylord (5 page)

In the 1980s, Jeans was the hub of the criminal court subculture. No one taking a peek inside the pale-yellow brick building would believe all the deals made there, or imagine the anguishing moments as defendants and relatives of victims sat at the tables waiting out deliberations.

The restaurant was larger than it seemed from the front window because the inside took a partial turn, like a lazy “L.” The tables in the front third were covered with checkered oilcloth and the rest were bare, since the clientele liked things simple. Along the back wall were three tiers of liquor bottles kept only for decoration because the patrons seldom ordered anything more exotic than a martini. The bottles followed the long bar this way and that from the front counter to a tiny back passage where a warped back door needed a shoulder-push to close.

Jeans never encouraged off-the-street customers. On weekdays, the front door was locked at three p.m. and regulars came in through the back, near the kitchen. White-haired lawyers often played cards at the front table, where the natural light was best. Waitresses addressed the police officers, court clerks, and bailiffs by their first name.

Jeans was still open for street customers when we arrived, but it was already looking like a seedy private club. Some patrons were drinking beer straight from the bottle because they thought only sissies used glasses. As conversations floated around me, I kept feeling that these insiders could tell from my face or voice that I had just accepted dirty money.

After ordering a beer and grilled cheese sandwich, the least greasy thing on the menu, I wondered how I could even think of turning Costello in. He was real to me and would help me with problems, while the agents at the Chicago FBI office were only telephone voices I heard once or twice a week. They were so morally strict they could not comprehend that people in any courthouse moved about in a world of gray.

I kept trying to convince myself that since the hundred dollars I had taken wasn't payment for a specific favor, it wasn't really a bribe and so I would have nothing to report. As I dithered I kept glancing at the old-fashioned wooden phone booth just inside Jeans' front door. It was the sort of place you would expect a Capone mobster to be shot in. After a few minutes, I told myself that Costello had stepped over the
line without any encouragement from me, and this made it my duty to set the law in motion against him. If I couldn't turn in a cheap hallway hustler, how could I think of going after Olson, Roth, Silverman, and others?

Stepping into the booth, I pulled the hinged door shut so no one could overhear. An FBI switchboard operator told me that my contact agents, Lamar Jordan and Bob Farmer, weren't around. So I dialed the U.S. Attorney's Office, but Sklarsky wasn't in, either. Maybe they were all busy in the field, or maybe they had come down with the disappearing itch known to afflict government employees on summertime “federal Fridays.” For a moment I thought no one really cared what was happening in the courts. But with my next quarter I reached Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Reidy.

“Costello just gave me a hundred dollars,” I told him. “He said it was for past favors, but I haven't done any for him yet. It's my first bribe, if you can call it that.”

“That's great,” Reidy said, and set up a meeting for that afternoon across from the old Chicago Stadium, home of the Blackhawks and Bulls. I slipped out of the phone booth feeling excited for the first time since agreeing to go undercover.

Waiting for me in a white Chevrolet outside the parking lot where the United Center now stands were Reidy, federal prosecutor Scott Lassar, and an FBI agent originally from Texas, James Hershly. I climbed in and slammed the door. Costello's money had been in my pocket for nearly two hours, and I was eager to get rid of it.

Hershly told me to date the two bills and mark them with “TH” for Terry Hake, then he jotted his own initials and recorded the serial numbers. Those bills and all the other bribes I eventually would receive went into a vault at FBI headquarters as evidence in future trials.

With that out of the way, Reidy turned to me with an adrenaline gleam and said, “Let's hear it, Terry, I want everything that happened between you and Costello, word for word.”

“When he gave me the money, I told him I didn't want it.”

“Please repeat that,” Hershly murmured, while taking notes for the team.

“I told Costello, ‘Jim, it's not necessary, you're a friend.'”

They had an “is that all?” stare when I didn't add anything. So for nearly an hour I went over with them everything that had happened and didn't happen.

“Well,” Reidy said finally, “at least they can never say you tried to entrap the guy. But in the future, Terry, just take what they give you. You have to go back and get him to acknowledge on tape that he gave you the money and that it was for something you did in court. Those favors he mentioned when he gave you the money could mean anything, you could have mowed his lawn or something. Take him to lunch on Monday and firm it up.”

That meant wearing a wire for the first time, something I had been dreading.

Reidy must have sensed I was feeling a little guilty about firming up evidence against a friend, and assured me before I left the car, “By the time we're done, Terry, you'll be glad we're kicking them all out.”

June 1980

By now I had an apartment in Evanston, a generally nice suburb adjacent to Chicago. Living by myself gave me a little more freedom for my undercover role. Three months earlier, Jordan had shown me in his light Southern drawl how to thread a tape through the Swiss-made Nagra, a commonly used body recorder for federal investigations at the time. Forget high-tech spymaster images. Anyone could rent a Nagra from an electronics shop, and who knows how often this one had been used and abused?

The Nagra's advantages were that the tape ran for two and a half hours of reasonably good sound, even when the recording was made under clothes. The device was four inches wide, five and three-quarters inches long, and one inch thick. The microphone was no larger than a pencil eraser, but the wire was long enough to tape it practically anywhere.

Standing in my flat at seven in the morning, I used a few strips of surgical tape to secure the mike vertically on my chest so my tie would cover the bump. Then there was the problem of hiding the three-thousand-dollar Nagra, which went into the pocket of an elastic band. No matter where you placed the Nagra it was too tight. Many undercover operatives kept it in the small of their back, but to me it seemed too easy for someone to put a hand on it.

After a little experimenting, I decided to wear the recorder under my left arm. But checking the contours of my shirt in the bathroom mirror, I thought I might as well be wearing a sign reading “Watch out, mole!” Off went the shirt and I tried again, this time with a T-shirt underneath. I felt a little silly as I moved this way and that in front of the mirror, but
at last I became convinced the bulge would go unnoticed—as long as no one suspected me.

My next worry was about the machine itself. I had installed two new AA batteries, drawn the recording tape along its path, and turned the reel until the tape was taut. But there was no way to test whether I had threaded it correctly because the device had no playback. As I started my car, I thought about the way the tape had kept sliding under my nervous fingers and wondered what would happen if I gave the FBI more than two hours of blank tape? Well, it was too late now.

Thirty-five minutes later I was entering the courthouse with the peculiar feeling that everyone was staring at my armpit. Finding Jim Costello hustling clients in the stubby first-floor corridor as usual, and hoping I sounded like a prosecutor cooperating with fixers, I suggested, “How about we meet at the cafeteria for lunch?”

Costello might have talked like a high school dropout, but he was sharp in the cynical way ex-policemen often are. Suppose his delay in answering meant he could recognize my pose for what it was? Even if nothing happened to me or my family, that might turn Operation Greylord into a fiasco.

“Yeah, Terry,” Costello said. “I'd like that. I'll see you up there.”

After a court recess, I went through the annex corridor and rode up an elevator to the second-floor cafeteria. The large room resembled a glass and stainless steel waiting area, with just a soft background of voices even at busy times and its wide windows overlooking the gloomy Cook County Jail complex.

Costello and I moved from the stack of plastic trays over to the grill line. We both ordered cheeseburgers and fries. I switched on the Nagra as sweat crawled down my back. We took a seat and the always-talkative Costello hardly said a word. Since I had invited him, he must have been waiting for me to explain why.

“Hey, Jim,” I said, “thanks for the hundred. Really, it came in handy over the weekend.”

“Did you take your girlfriend out?”

“We had a nice dinner and went to a movie,” I lied. “Thanks again.”

“Don't mention it,” Costello said.

“And for the lunches you buy me.”

He made an “it's nothing” gesture, and the conversation died.

Hoping he could not sense my apprehension, I hinted that I was curious about the mechanics of payoffs. Since this was Costello's favorite subject, he soon recalled his first days in the building, when he learned he could buy clients by getting their names from court clerks and deputy sheriffs.

“Know how I found out? I went back and gave the guy ten bucks, like a tip. ‘What's this?' he said, like I insulted him. ‘Come on, come on,' he said, ‘it's a third of the bond around here.'”

“The bailiff told you that?” I asked, to clarify the reference for the tape.

“Yeah, like it's written down somewhere. Jesus, a third. I'm the one with the law degree, I'm the one who does all the work, but he gets a third. But you make enough if you keep at it.”

Trying to prod him into saying more, I hopped around subjects until I got around to a prosecutor who refused to drop charges against one of Costello's clients. “Hey, Jim,” I said, “I'm sorry he gave you a hard time about SOL-ing that case.” That meant having charges stricken with leave to reinstate.

“It happens. You don't always get what you pay for in this business. I'd rather deal with a judge, like those guys that keep going to Olson.”

“That doesn't mean anything, Jim, he's just got lots of friends.” That was the sort of thing I might have said when I had started out, before my eyes were opened.

“Oh, come on, Terry, don't be so dumb. Olson cares for only one thing, ‘How much money have I got in my pocket today?' That's why those guys get all the cases from him. That's how I get my cases out of him—I go back there and pay him practically every day.”

Oh God, oh God, please let me be recording this
. “You're kidding,” I said.

“I thought you knew.”

“I've never seen you in his chambers.”

“I wait until no one's around.” My expression must have been too eager, because he backtracked. “Hey, it wasn't always that way. When I first started, I was starvin' down here. I saw Olson assigning cases to everybody but me. He was sticking it up my ass, knowing I'd come around sooner or later. I bust my balls, I'm as good a lawyer as those other guys; if they have to come across to get some justice for their clients, then I got to come across. It's only fair.”

“Well, thanks again for the hundred.”

“To tell you the truth, I kind of felt sorry for you,” Jim said. “You been doin' favors for a couple of guys and they still don't trust anybody new. Most of them, anyway. But Silverman likes taking care of people starting out.”

“Would Bob rather give me the money than the policeman?” This was my first obvious allusion to my supposedly being corrupt.

“Maybe, if he thinks the cop is honest. Why not? He's got to deliver for his client, doesn't he?”

Then we talked about problems new defense lawyers encounter, since Costello took it for granted I would be coming over some day, as indeed I would. He mentioned that Olson told one who was having trouble lining up clients, “Come down to my courtroom and I'll take care of you.” The judge, Costello added, “is a ballsy guy. The shit he has pulled on the fuckin' bench!”

“What do you mean?” I asked calmly while tingling.

“Not now,” he told me with a knowing toss of his head. Some prosecutors happened to be walking by. Besides, we had to get back to work.

As I was presenting cases before Olson that afternoon, my mind was going over my conversation with Costello so I could repeat the relevant parts to my contact agents if the recording didn't turn out, and I felt used up by the end of the day.

Once I was back in my apartment, I set my briefcase down and pulled off my shirt and perspiration-soaked undershirt, then ripped the microphone from my chest so I could feel like myself again. But I was still all tight inside, and my thoughts were still jumbled. I had betrayed a friend, I was turning my back on my profession, and I was finally on my way to doing something important. How could I get much sleep?

The next morning I drove to the wide parking lot by the lakefront museum complex and rendezvoused with FBI agent Lamar Jordan. Hardly saying a word, I handed over the Nagra and he opened the cover. Seagulls were squealing over the water as I watched his fingers.

“It's threaded wrong,” Jordan said in his soft Southern accent. “The tape is supposed to be in front of this post, not behind it.”

“It's no good?” I thought my worst fears had come true.

“You can't think of everything when you start out. I'll take it back to the office and see what we can do.”

A few hours later Jordan cheerfully called me at home. “It's beautiful, Terry. Costello comes off loud and clear. We lost a little but we got just what we want. Keep it up, you're doing all right.”

I hung up feeling as happy as when I made a perfect back flip from the parallel bars at a high school gymnastics competition. I was not giving Reidy what he wanted—Costello saying why he had given me the money—but the door to the closed world of corruption was unlocking.

A day later I found Jim at Jeans engaged in his most beloved pastime, plucking an olive and tossing the rest of a martini down the hatch. Naturally he was feeling sorry for himself. Even though he was doing well enough, he still thought he was a waif abandoned in the back streets of justice.

“I hustle and do what I can, but I'm not getting rich,” he moaned in a confidential tone that was louder than most people's natural voice. His elbows had been on a table at Jeans for so long the sleeve of his new suit had soaked up gin and vermouth.

The restaurant was closed except for the courthouse crowd coming in through the warped back door. I had sensed for some time that I had to stop being passive, and now seemed a good time to act. So when Costello's self-pity got around to clients Olson was sending to him, I mentioned, “I hope there's something in it for me.”

“Don't worry, Ter,” he said, making my name sound like “Tare,” “it just takes a little time.”

At first glance Costello seemed like just a big man who took little care of himself, but once you knew him you might have noticed he was moderately nice looking. He recently had moved up a notch in his relationship with Olson, but instead of looking more secure he made himself ludicrous with his unwieldy hair and increasing lack of coordination at the bar.

He probably wanted me to keep up with him, but I was never much of a drinker. I made two beers last as long as the Nagra reels rolled under my shirt. Jim spoke about his days as a policeman. Whenever he was about to appear in gun court, gentlemanly Bob Silverman would go up to him and ask, “You know how to testify, don't you?” Then Bob would hand him one hundred dollars tucked in a folded newspaper.

“Every time Bob had a case, I went out and came back with a paper,” Jim said. “The other cops must have thought I liked reading
newspapers. What a character. But Bob's very proud of himself. He'd say, ‘In my twenty-three years as a defense attorney, I never hurt anybody.'” If an officer or a prosecutor couldn't be bribed, Bob found ways so the person would not seem to have bungled the case, and he paid off everyone who had a hand out, from witnesses to the judge. “I mean, everybody gets stroked,” Costello said, before downing another martini.

Some courthouse people listening behind our backs chuckled with recognition at Jim's approximation of Bob's mellow voice. After a little more rambling, he told me, “You know, some part of police lingo has been taken over here. When a lawyer wants to make a payoff, he'll tell the judge's guy to ‘open the drawer.' That's straight cop talk, from how the district commander gets his payoffs.”

“He doesn't really open a drawer?”

“Well, sometimes, but he doesn't have to, it's just a way of lettin' 'im know that money is being dropped wherever the hell the judge wants it.”

“That's how Olson does it?”

“That God damned Olson, yeah, that's how he does it.”

Before Greylord

Because I had the backup of the Justice Department, I was on my way to go further than Mort Friedman had when he headed the criminal division of the State's Attorney's Office in the seventies. Friedman even looked like an aggressive idealist, with dark hair and black-frame glasses.

Acting on his own, he saw a chance to attack the problem when a policeman told him an attorney named *Walt Fisher had offered him fifty dollars to lie on the stand in a drunken driving case. Fixers were protected by the common knowledge that prosecutors would never be crazy enough to encourage perjury. Friedman told the cop to go along with the offer and see what happened.

The officer gathered enough proof to put Fisher on trial, but the lawyer was acquitted and went on to be elected an associate judge by the hundred and seventy-five full judges in the system. All of them must have known of Fisher's dishonesty, but they liked him.

Another policeman later told Friedman that an attorney had offered him two hundred dollars if he would drop charges against a young woman who had seriously stabbed her female lover. The lawyer even
climbed into the officer's private car and threw two one-hundred-dollar bills and a fifty-dollar bonus at the policeman's feet. The officer picked up the money and simultaneously handed him a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. But the lawyer testified that the officer had demanded the bribe, and that he had thrown the money at him to avoid being shot. The jury found him guilty and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction.

Friedman's third case involved the victim of a police shakedown. The man had been in an apartment when officers confiscated ten pounds of marijuana and nearly forty thousand dollars. Three detectives told him that if he shut up they would make the search appear shaky, but that if he told the truth they would “trunk” him.

Friedman persuaded the man to go into court wearing a tiny radio transmitter. Unaware the officers had lied, the judge dismissed the case. There is nothing a reputable person hates more than being considered dishonest. When the judge learned about the wire, he called Friedman a publicity hound and threatened to find him in contempt. His outrage forced an Illinois Supreme Court review of Friedman's conduct.