Operation Greylord (6 page)

The majority opinion held that he had been misguided and warned against any further presentation of false testimony without judicial approval. Although Friedman kept his law license, he was ostracized even by honest lawyers and judges. His one-man attempt at exposing bribery had only left a chill in the system. He gave up prosecutions and was hired as the chief attorney for the state police. He became not only a friend of mine but also an inspiration.

The final stage of Greylord would reach the junction of the courts, city hall, and the mob, an interrelationship that explains why corruption had become so entrenched in Chicago. An example was the shocking acquittal of mob killer Harry Aleman, the impetus for our sweeping investigation. There was as yet no proof the judge had been paid off, but the fact that criminals could fix one of the biggest local trials of the decade meant something had to be done quickly. Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey, a former FBI agent, brought his concerns about the case to U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan.

They cautiously started by approaching a couple of corrupt lawyers they had learned about from drug and syndicate gambling investigations. Both attorneys were willing to give them a few names, and one helped build a case against a policeman and a bagman. But he refused
to violate the shyster's code by going against someone in the legal profession.

Not yet envisioning a full-scale assault, Carey and Sullivan transferred to federal court all significant state narcotics cases involving attorneys suspected of being crooked. This forced Bob Silverman and our other targets to drop clients who were about to come before untainted judges. But that was as far as the authorities could go, and all they had to show for their efforts was a couple of hundred pages of notes, court transcripts, and unverified FBI reports. Everything was kept in disorder inside a plain cardboard box.

Then came the “Abscam” operation, basis for the 2013 movie
American Hustle
, in which convicted perjurer and cheat Mel Weinberg introduced to Washington, D.C., society federal agents masquerading as representatives of a wealthy Arab sheik seeking legislative favors. Eventually six Congressmen and a senator were convicted of bribery despite their cries of entrapment.

Soon afterward, Sullivan met with FBI Director William Webster, a former federal judge, to consider whether anything like that could be attempted in Chicago. After all, the unified Cook County court system was too large for anyone to keep a watch over it all. There were three hundred and thirty-four judges, nearly twice as many as any other circuit court in America, and the growing backlog was being handled by five hundred assistant state's attorneys, some barely out of law school, as I had been. It didn't take a great defense lawyer to win acquittals, just bribes that went unnoticed by underpaid, overworked, and under-prepared assistant prosecutors. And now we were seeing corruption breeding corruption.

Sullivan suggested to Webster that they use the files in that cardboard box as background for going after specific targets. The FBI director was a reserved academic and troubled by what was happening in the halls of justice. Abscam had whetted his enthusiasm for long-term stings, and he answered, “I don't see why we don't try it.” But the House of Representatives might use any serious slip-up in the Chicago project to slash the Justice Department's budget.

Not long after that meeting, Sullivan's chief of special prosecutions, Gordon Nash, knocked on Reidy's door and handed him the box with no more explanation than “Here's the beginning of an investigation into judicial corruption.” That was how Reidy came to draft our strategy.

As it turned out, I was the second mole in the operation. There were many good agents already working in Chicago, but authorities wanted someone who had never made a local court appearance. With their survival instincts, corrupt lawyers develop a memory for faces.

Abscam prosecutions were still in the news in March 1980 when attorney David Victor Ries arrived in the city's canyon-like legal district and rented space at 2 North La Salle Street, where Bob Silverman had his offices. Ries had come from Detroit, so he was a new face, and he had an Illinois law license. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as he handled cases in the Traffic Court Building in a former warehouse a few blocks away.

The Justice Department now needed a name for the investigation. “CoJud,” for “Corrupt Judges,” was too close to what it was about. “Operation Fly Catcher” had been used for another kind of probe in Delaware. Then, sitting around their office on a slow day, supervisor Bob Farmer and agent Lamar Jordan choose a name at random. Since Farmer owned a few quarter horses, he suggested looking over the race results. Jordan glanced at a horse's name in the back pages of the
Chicago Sun-Times
and said, “How about ‘Operation Greylord'?” The name had magic.

Ries continued strapping on a wire every morning before going to Traffic Court, but he just wasn't picking up any evidence because the lawyers were cool to every outsider. That was when Dan Reidy and the others realized they needed someone already working in the Criminal Courts Building halfway across the city, and drew up their long list of one.

June 1980

Judge Wayne Olson would rush through his call by dismissing the majority of cases so he could finish before two p.m. The frequent dismissals and suppression of evidence in his court were helping violent street gangs extend drug distribution by murder and intimidation through low-income neighborhoods, but he had his afternoons off.

A judge's chambers should be a sanctum of quiet dignity, but Olson's were more like an airport terminal with traffic when seen on fast-forward. Because he usually left the door open when he withdrew between his morning and afternoon calls, the people who might be traipsing through at any moment included clerks in shirtsleeves, attorneys in suits, police officers in blue, and bailiffs in black. Other court workers breezed in to find files they had misplaced or to use the private washroom rather than one marred by graffiti down the hall, which served as a pre-trial meeting place for defense lawyers and their lowlife clients.

Occasionally a defendant taking a shortcut to the clerk's office behind the chambers walked in and wondered why a judge was there in a swivel chair. Comfortable amid the chaos, and looking and sounding like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Olson would ignore everything not directly concerning him, even quarrels among attorneys or staff members.

Why did he want to leave early every day? Like a coach more interested in popularity than winning, he would take his staff and some fawning lawyers to Jeans or another restaurant with a bar. When they entered, the attorneys flanking him were like scavenger birds encircling a rhinoceros for the privilege of plucking food from between his teeth.

Despite Olson's show of good humor, he could be rude, sarcastic, and ill tempered. If the state judicial disciplinary commission had been
effective, he would be a bartender instead of wearing a robe. The former train conductor and polka band drummer would boast that as a private attorney he had paid off every judge he ever appeared before. At the age of thirty he lost a run for the state senate, and his unfulfilled heart remained in politics rather than the law. But after he was elected to the bench, something happened in 1964 that ended his hopes of going any further than a preliminary hearing court.

He and his drinking buddies had landed in a place named the Alibi Inn. At closing time the Democratic Olson and one of his friends started squabbling outside with a sixty-year-old man who said he was going to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. Olson claimed later that he saw a pistol in the man's hand and pushed him in self-defense. Whatever the truth, the older man fell back and cracked his head on the pavement. Prosecutors called it involuntary manslaughter. A court reporter once told me that a colleague had to take a witness's statement eight times before the witness got his story straight. “Straight” meant in Olson's favor. And so the county grand jury declined to return an indictment.

Why were such judges kept on the bench? In Chicago, politicians decide the candidates, and the people are asked to vote from long lists of names meaning nothing to them. Many voters just choose names reflecting a certain nationality or that “sound nice.”

In an ideal world, judges wouldn't even have to run for election, but Chicago has never been accused of being an ideal world. Judgeships were awarded to people who could deliver the most votes for the Party slate—Democratic in the city, and Republican in the outer suburbs. There also was a rumor that judgeships could be bought for thirty thousand dollars or more. Not all the judges who were given their robes by the machines were looking for payoffs, but many of the honest ones were naive or gratefully blind to what was going on, which is a kind of corruption in itself.

My introduction into the fixer's milieu had taken longer than we expected, but at last I was able to start directing events my way. From my conversations with Costello, I picked up that of all the judges in the system he hated Wayne Olson most. Jim maintained a hazy fantasy in which he would have been a man of integrity if it hadn't been for “that Swede son of a bitch,” forgetting that there isn't much of a step down from being a crooked policeman to becoming a crooked lawyer.

Until recently Costello would place Olson's bribe with a clerk. But because Mike Ficaro, head of the state's attorney's criminal division, had some fun shuffling the clerks around in June to encourage lawyers to take their bribes to me, Jim decided to make his payoffs to Olson in person. The transactions were not always simple. Such as when Olson was on the phone in his chambers and Jim found a young lawyer was waiting at the door to talk to the judge.

Costello wondered how he could deliver the money before his case came up. As he told me at a restaurant that summer, a deputy sheriff walked in, momentarily blocking the young lawyer's line of vision. “I just fuckin' whipped out that money and Olson grabbed it, and I was out of there like lightning.” And so Costello put another drug dealer back on the street.

I forced a laugh in pretended admiration and asked, “How do I start selling cases down there? Or is it worth getting involved in something like that while I'm still an ASA?”

“Don't do it, Ter. Don't take money from anybody you don't know. Believe me, they'll hurtcha. You're too nice a guy for that. Get to know them good first.”

“How can they hurt me?”

“Just take my word for it.”

As he went on, I wondered why he was spending so much time trying to help me. Although I kept suggesting that I might be “dirty,” I couldn't change my Boy Scout appearance and soft voice. I seldom speak coarsely, and I rarely used profanity while undercover because I didn't want to put off any jurors listening to my tapes. Who knows, maybe my drawbacks as a mole were an advantage in the long run. Perhaps in some corner of Jim's mind he thought he could relive his long-ago innocence through me.

In that rambling conversation with me, he got around to saying that the deputy sheriff who ran the Narcotics Court lockup had sent him the case of a prisoner found with seven hundred dollars. “I charged the client six hundred and eighty-one dollars for my fee, and I gave one hundred of that to the lockup keeper.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, “you charged him exactly six hundred and eighty-one dollars? Isn't that a little strange? Why didn't you round it off?”

“The theory behind that is leave 'em with a few bucks. Remember that when you go private. Don't empty their pockets. That's not class.”

A passing waitress refused to give Costello any more martinis. Jim shrugged it off and made a mock pass at her. Then he wiggled some money at me from under our table. “Hey, Ter, take this and have a nice dinner with your girlfriend.”

I glanced at the denomination as I put it in my pocket. “You don't have to give me a hundred,” I said for the tape.

“Don't gimme that, you been a super guy. Believe me. I made six hundred today, you know what I mean? This hundred—that's bullshit. Terry, either I take care of you or it goes to somebody else's pocket. Don't worry about it.”

He was so tipsy it was a struggle for him to get up, so I asked if he wanted me to drive him home. Costello made a dismissal gesture that so upset his balance he dropped back into his chair. “I gotta take a piss,” he groaned.

“Can you go through the kitchen?”

Unable to get up by himself, he sat back and looked down at his clothes. “I got my best suit on,” he said. “I paid a lot of money for this suit. It's from Capper & Capper.” Not even bladder strain could stop Jim from looking at me with soulful eyes and sounding like a commercial.

He towered over me as I helped him to his feet, and he reached the tiny washroom in time. Soon we were walking across the parking lot in an afternoon breeze. I talked him into giving me the keys of his newly waxed Ford Thunderbird. “Always buy black cars,” Jim would tell me from time to time, “they're classier.”

A few blocks away, Jim slumped again into his guilty phase. “Look at you,” he mumbled as I drove, “comin' to work every God damned day in a six-year-old piece of junk.” Actually, my Plymouth was eight years old. “Why don't you get yourself a real car? Uncle Sam don't know it, but I make more than two thousan' a week. I mean, I'm making so much money it's ridiculous.”

I still couldn't believe he was earning that much regularly, but I turned the radio down for the benefit of the tape. Costello didn't use the word “bribe”—speaking directly was practically blasphemy among fixers—but he told me he had to pay off the cops. Still slurring and making aimless gestures, he reached under the center armrest and startled me with a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. “What do you think of this?” he asked, while waving it in my face.

I nearly lost control of the wheel, that's what I thought of it. A gun in the car I could take, but a gun in the hands of a drunk was something else again. This also was my first visual reminder that crooked attorneys could be dangerous.

“Whoa, Jim,” I said, steering through Western Avenue traffic while keeping the corner of my eye on the revolver, “don't you think you should put that thing away?”

“I keep this here for protection 'cause my clients live in some pretty bum neighborhoods. If I ever get stopped and the cops find this, all it takes is a hun'red bucks and I'm on my fuckin' way. The point is, Ter, money can do anything.” The revolver kept wobbling in front of my face.

“Jim, I get nervous around guns.”

“I jus' wan'ed to show it to you.”

“You did, and I'm impressed, now would you please put that thing away?”

He clumsily shoved the gun back and said, “A lawyer's always gotta be prepared. Remember that.”

Half an hour later we were in his far South Side home, where the basement had been remodeled into a bar and party room. While still describing life in Traffic Court, Jim opened a beer for each of us, as if he needed another drink. He said that whenever a client gave him fifteen hundred dollars to secure an “NG” (not guilty), fifty dollars went to the “copper” bagman who worked in the courtroom, two hundred to the judge, and fifty to the perjuring officer. That left the prosecutors “all Morky-dorky. They don't know what the hell is goin' on.” Indeed, I knew the feeling.

Costello assured me that many of the judges had their price, but you had to know how to reach them. For example, he gave the police officer assigned to the courtroom of Judge Al Rosen one hundred dollars from a client charged with drunken driving, but Rosen found him guilty anyway. “That Rosen, know what he says to me afterward? ‘Motherfucker, if you want your “not guilty,” you come to me.'” Costello guffawed at the memory.

I never learned whether that particular officer was a bagman for the judge or just a rainmaker. Rainmakers are officers, court clerks, and lawyers who ask for money to fix a case but don't inform the judge,
who may be upstanding. If the client is found guilty, the rainmaker says that for some reason he couldn't deliver the bribe and hands the money back. Rainmaking is unethical, but the law at the time was not all that clear about whether it was criminal. This ambiguity would haunt us years later.

Relaxing in his recreation room, Costello said that when he wanted to fix a verdict in Traffic Court he didn't need to go through Joe McDermott, the lawyer who “wires up [rigs] the cases.” I asked if McDermott was one of the “miracle workers,” the nickname for certain Traffic Court lawyers who seldom lost a case. Rumor had it that all were fixers.

“Let me tell you,” Costello responded with a tap on my arm, “a miracle worker is just anyone that comes up with the bread.”

As our conversation was winding down, I looked for a way to pull out. “Say, Jim,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you? You know, help steer cases—”

“Naw, I don't wan'cha go out on a limb.”

“Well, it's getting late. I have to go all the way to Evanston.”

Having passed through self-pity and guilt in his intoxication, Costello dipped into the maudlin level as I reached for the door knob. “Ter, you been super to me. I don't forget guys like that.”

His wife, Martha, agreed to drive me ten miles back to my car in the courthouse parking lot. Martha wasn't a bad-looking woman in her mid-thirties, but there was something cloying about her as if she imagined that by a lot of drinking and a little flirting she could be eighteen again. During the ride, I also received the impression from what little she said that her marriage was falling apart. I didn't know if Jim's drinking was the cause or the effect.

July 1980

By the end of July I had grown tired of waiting for “Silvery” Bob Silverman to make the first move. With my new confidence I told the officer working in Narcotics Court, “Hey, listen. Bob's case—we're not going anywhere with it. I'm going to SOL it [dismiss on leave to reinstate]. He's a pretty sharp guy—you know his methods. It'll just wind up getting thrown out anyway.”

No doubt suspecting I had been reached, the policeman gave me a weary “Do what you want.”

Word got around to Silverman and, judging from later events, he must have felt that now he owed me one.

Costello came to me a little later and spoke about a client whose auto was about to be sold at a police auction because of drugs found inside. Jim handed me fifty dollars—my first official bribe—and I appeared before Judge Olson to say the state would not oppose a request that the car be returned to its owner. Like so many cases in that building, the hearing had been a sham. In the hallway, Costello let me know that “Wayne got his.”

Eventually things were happening so fast that my FBI control agent, Lamar Jordan, was having me meet him in his car almost every morning to pick up my tapes and any money I had taken the day before. Our usual location was a parking lot where the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Field Museum of Natural History share a little greenery at the lakefront. There we would discuss what I had done the day before, what I had tried to do, and what I hoped to accomplish in the next few days.