by Scott Turow
“So, Morty or not, there’s only one answer. And it’s like tipping in Europe. How much is enough? And where do you get it? It’s comical, really. Where’s that college course in bribery when you really need it? So I go to the bank and cash a check for nine thousand, because over ten thousand they report it to the feds. And I put it in an envelope with our new brief and I take it over to the bailiff, Ray. And man, my mouth’s so dry I couldn’t lick a stamp. What the hell do I say if I’ve read this wrong? ‘Oops, that was my bank deposit’? I’ve put so much tape on this envelope he’ll have to open it with a hand grenade, and I say, ‘Please be sure Judge Guerfoyle gets this, tell him I’m sorry for the miscommunication.’
“I go to a status call in another courtroom, and as I’m coming out the bailiff, Ray Zahn, is waiting for me in the corridor, and there’s one damn serious look in his eye. He strolls me a hundred feet and, honest to God, you can hear my socks squish. Finally, he throws his arm over my shoulder and whispers, ‘Next time, don’t forget somethin for me.’ And then he hands me an order Homer’s signed, accepting the settlement and dismissing the case.” A decade later, Feaver tossed about his elaborate hairdo, which overflowed his collar in indigo waves, the relief still live in his memory.
“So that was it. I spun Morty a yarn about how Guerfoyle had seemed to realize that we’d turn him over on appeal and had backed off. Then I went and bowed down before Brendan’s honor guard, his two sidekicks, Rollo Kosic and Sig Milacki. As I’m leaving, Sig says, ‘You ever got a special case like this, gimme a call.’ So I just kind of kept on from there.”
He shrugged at the inevitability of the bad-acting that followed and looked around again to see how he’d been received. I suggested he go down for coffee. Sennett was rolling his eyes before Robbie got out the door.
“That’s a fairy tale about Mort,” he said.
I nearly batted my lashes in my efforts to feign surprise, but naturally I’d given my client a good shaking in private. Nonetheless Feaver swore that for a decade Dinnerstein had remained unknowing, which was just the way that Brendan Tuohey, as a doting uncle, liked it. Through the partnership, Mort received half the windfall derived from the corruption Tuohey engineered, but bore none of the risk. Robbie alone delivered the payoffs to the judges.
Feaver claimed Mort was even misled about the nature of the secret bank account at River National. There are people in many occupations—nurses, funeral parlor directors, cops—who often are in a position to recommend an attorney to someone who’s had a serious injury. Ethical rules forbid the attorney from sharing the legal fees he or she then earns with non-lawyers, but the nurse or the cop who’d handed out Robbie’s card might well ask anyway, and Robbie was not the first personal injury practitioner to decide it was better to pay than have anybody forget his phone number. That was where Robbie told Mort the cash they were generating from the River National account was going (as indeed some portion of it was). Bar Admissions and Discipline, the agency that licenses attorneys, might go after Mort for aiding in these shenanigans if they ever learned about them, but Robbie’s explanation protected Dinnerstein against criminal prosecution, at least in our state. Even the tax violations did not meet prosecution guidelines, since Robbie had, in his version, led Mort to believe that the income they weren’t reporting was fully offset by these unsavory business expenses. It was all too convenient for Stan.
“He’s covering his partner, George, and it’s dumb. No matter what kind of deal we cut, when I get the evidence he’s lying about this, your guy catches the express for the cooler.”
I knew Morton Dinnerstein about as well as I knew Feaver, which is to say not very well at all, only from idle meetings around the LeSueur Building. According to my limited understanding he was the scholar in the duo, the one to turn out appellate briefs and motions and manage the files, while Robbie played show dog in court. It was the kind of arrangement that succeeded in many offices. I was nowhere as certain as Stan that Feaver was risking the penitentiary for his pal. Mort was a somewhat otherworldly creature, with a kinky mass of thinning blondish hair that sprang up in small unruly patches like crabgrass. He suffered from a noticeable limp, and his soft manner was characterized by a mild stammer and persistent blinking that introduced itself in his lengthy pauses as he was searching for words. Mort’s guilelessness, and the lifelong symbiosis between the two men, made it seem possible that Feaver was telling the truth. I argued the point with Sennett at length, to little effect.
The other shortcoming in Robbie’s account from Sennett’s perspective was that Feaver had never dealt directly with Brendan Tuohey. Robbie recognized that the silent arrangements brokered for him with several judges occurred under the gravitational force of Tuohey’s influence. The story—no better than a rumor to Feaver—was that Brendan got ‘rent,’ a rake-off on what the judges received from Robbie and a few other attorneys. The money was passed to the two retainers who acted as a sterile barrier between Brendan and anything corrupt: Rollo Kosic, whom Tuohey had installed as his Chief Bailiff, and Sig Milacki, a cop who’d once been Brendan’s partner on the street. To get to Brendan, Sennett would need them, or some other witness Feaver might ensnare
“Believe me, Stan,” Feaver told him when he returned, “no matter how much you think you hate Brendan, you can get in line behind me. I’ve known Brendan my whole life and I’ve got my share of stories. I love Morty, but you think I like the way Brendan’s made me the water boy on this thing? Except for the fact that he’s got people who’d cut my tongue out and use it for a necktie, I’d love to give him to you. Only I can’t. Brendan’s twitchy as a cat and twice as careful. Catching him? Good luck.”
Sennett appeared to relish the challenge. His eyes lit briefly with the remarkable energy that he inevitably deployed against any serious opponent. Then he beckoned Robbie to go on providing the details he could. Over the years Robbie had made ‘drops’ to many judges and he retained vivid recall of each occasion and of the envelopes of cash quietly passed in men’s rooms and cafeterias and taverns to assorted bagmen and, much more rarely, to the judges themselves. Despite Stan’s suspicion that Feaver was protecting Mort, or his disappointment that Robbie could not take him straight to Tuohey, it was easy to see that he was excited, even as he attempted to maintain his familiar veneer of tense restraint.
“Is there any reason you couldn’t keep making drops?” Sennett asked Feaver near the end of the session. “If we leave you out there in practice, everything looking the same as it always has, would you be willing to wear a wire against all these folks and record the payoffs?”
That was the question we’d known was coming. It was the big chip Feaver could put on the table to keep himself out of the pen. But hearing the proposition aloud, Robbie grabbed his long chin and his black eyes took on an inward look. I could sense him recycling the strong emotions of the last few evenings, which we’d spent together, when he’d vented about Sennett and his terror tactics, and anguished over the cruel dilemmas confronting him. And then, as I’d learned was his nature, he let go of all that. Instead, he hiked himself forward on the sofa to face the United States Attorney and the Supervising Special Agent dispatched from D.C. He did not bother with rancor. He simply told them the hard truth, much as they’d forced it on him.
“What other choice do I have?”
4
EVERY SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATION IS SUSCEPTIBLE to Tolstoy’s observation about unhappy families: they end up in the same place, but each one gets there its own way. For his part, Feaver set simple goals in bargaining with the government. Unlike most lawyers I’d represented, he seemed resigned about the loss of his law license. It was inevitable anyway for someone who admitted bribing judges, and by now practice had made him rich. Instead, he hoped to maintain his bundle in the face of the forfeitures and fines the government could exact. More important, he wanted no part of the penitentiary, not so much for his own sake, he said, but so he could attend to his wife during her inevitable decline.
After days of haggling, we made a deal that required Robbie to plead to one count of defrauding the public by bribing various judges. Assuming Robbie delivered on what he’d proffered, the government would depart from the federal sentencing guidelines and agree to probation with a $250,000 fine.
Everyone felt reasonably satisfied with these arrangements—except the Department of Justice, more specifically UCORC, the Undercover Operations Review Committee, which controlled all clandestine operations directed at public officials. UCORC had been established in the wake of ABSCAM, the FBI sting aimed at the Capitol, to calm Congress’s newfound agitation about the perils to innocent citizens posed by undercover operations. The innocent citizens whom UCORC was concerned about now were the people on the other side of the cases Robbie would be fixing. UCORC said flatly that the government could take no part in depriving the opposing parties and their lawyers of an honest day in court.
Sennett flew to D.C. to butt heads several times. Eventually, UCORC agreed the problem could be resolved if Feaver were to fix only sham cases. The idea was that just as FBI agents had played Arab sheikhs in ABSCAM, they could act the part of the defense lawyers and parties in fictitious lawsuits Feaver would file. All of that make-believe, however, would entail a far more elaborate and expensive operation than Sennett had envisioned. Many weeks passed while Stan did combat within the Department to wring the approvals for his budgetary and manpower requests. It was late October by then, and naturally, at that point UCORC said no again.
The difficulty, they now realized, was that Robbie Feaver was an acknowledged felon. The government could hardly allow him to keep practicing law on the honor system. If he got into any of the mischief that could be expected of a crooked P.I. lawyer, it would be blamed on them. More pertinently, Sennett’s plan offered no safeguards to keep Robbie from continuing to secretly pay off on the real cases on which he’d still be working in order to maintain his cover.
In essence, UCORC demanded that Feaver practice under police watch. Robbie chafed, but in the end he agreed that an FBI agent could be planted in his office to pose as the new paralegal Mort and he had already agreed to hire to enable Feaver to spend more time with his wife. To account for the fact that the paralegal would be virtually welded to his side, Sennett suggested that a female agent be assigned, someone who could pretend to be the latest of Robbie’s many office liaisons. Late in November the woman proposed for the role, known as Evon Miller, flew in so we could all meet face-to-face.
At Sennett’s direction, we each arrived separately at a room in the Dulcimer House. Jim, the agent who’d attended Robbie’s proffer, was sitting with Stan when I got there. Jim had become a fixture and I’d realized by now that UCORC had designated him to run the operation. The new agent came up last. She spoke the code word ‘Petros’ and the door parted to reveal a woman in her thirties of medium height with a sturdy athletic build and agreeable looks. The first impression was of a pert, pug-nosed girl-next-door with a sincere, unassuming style. She wore jeans and a polo shirt, and a trace of eye makeup beneath her narrow wire-framed glasses; her brass-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Yet even there on the threshold, she was noticeably ill at ease. Her brow was pinched and she advanced flat-footed into the room, shaking hands without meeting anyone’s eye. Attempting his usual gallantry, Feaver fetched her a juice from the minibar, which she accepted with a polite smile.
“So, Evon—” Robbie pronounced the name as we all had, as if it was a variant on ‘Yvonne,’ but she shook her head.
“Evon,” she said. “Like ‘I’ll get even.’ My mom meant it to be said the other way, but no one ever did.”
I caught Sennett’s quick grin, a fox in the brush. ‘Evon Miller’ was a nom de guerre, invented for her, along with her driver’s license and social security card, at FBI headquarters in D.C. Robbie did not realize that she was, in the parlance, ‘telling her myth.’
“That’s just like me,” Robbie told her eagerly, “my last name. People get confused all the time. Mine’s like ‘Do me a favor.’”
She managed a lukewarm grin, but did not seem fully persuaded they had much in common. Feaver plowed on, intent on winning her over.
“Which reminds me,” he said. “I ask people all the time when I meet them: Which do you like better? Even numbers or odd?” From her narrow look, I could see she recognized it as a bar line. Clearly, she’d been warned about Robbie and had no use for his flirting. “I like even numbers,” he added, with a futile little smile at his pun. She nodded rather than say anything else and moved to the other side of the room, before Sennett hailed us to our seats so we could talk over the necessary arrangements to be sure no one in Feaver’s office questioned Evon or the fictitious cases.
“Did you say she was a Bureau agent or a prison guard?” Feaver asked afterwards. To my eye, she’d been no worse than correct. Robbie, I suspected, was upset by the reality of being watched twelve hours a day in his own office. The truth, though, was that none of us—Robbie, me, even Stan—knew anything about Evon Miller’s true identity, any more than we did about Jim or the other undercover agents, the so-called UCAs, who eventually came to work on the case. Project Petros, as the operation was now labeled, ran strictly on the rule of need-to-know, meaning that all players, whether the agents or Robbie or Sennett, were supposed to receive only the limited information required to act their parts. That would minimize the chance that critical secrets would slip out and bring down the entire façade.
The only facts we eventually gleaned about Evon Miller’s true background came to us in a roundabout way, largely because Stan had initial reservations about her. He’d found her more tentative than he’d hoped, and was also afraid her low-key style might give her away, since she appeared an unlikely match for someone as flashy as Robbie. Privately, Feaver found that concern entertaining; he said he was not known as ‘especially picky.’ In any event, Jim, who’d been given control over the agents by UCORC, stuck by his choice. He was impressed by her personal history, which made him believe she had the resilience to handle the rigors of life undercover.
“Apparently, she competed in the Olympics,” Sennett explained to me one morning. He tipped a shoulder, knowing no more than that. We were in Warz Park, where Stan ran several miles at 6 a.m. Stan’s mania for secrecy was so intense that he had not yet even informed anybody in his office about Feaver. Thus, to avoid questions, we often met here. I’d bought a snappy running suit and followed him once or twice around the tarred oval before we would appear to happen upon one another on a bench. We had gotten together today so that I could hand over documents—the final, signed copy of Robbie’s plea agreement and his acknowledgment that he’d reviewed the lengthy written protocol for the undercover operation UCORC had generated—both of which were hidden in the folds of the morning’s newspaper. By now it was past Thanksgiving, and winter, like an infection, was beginning to breed in the wind.
As Stan casually picked up the paper, he told me the little about Evon Miller he’d learned. In confidence, Jim had let loose this lone detail about the Olympics in order to reassure Stan. Sennett’s motives for telling me, again as a supposed secret, were more pointed.
“Make sure your guy knows she’s tougher than she looks,” he said. “Don’t let him think he can roll over her or outfox her. He plays games, we’ll know.” A smile tempted me, as it often did confronting Stan’s prosecutorial macho, but that riled him. I was jogging in place to keep warm, and Stan stood up from the bench and showed me the newspaper where the signed documents were concealed.
I assured him Robbie recognized that if Stan caught him lying he was certain to end up in prison. But Stan laid a finger on my chest for emphasis.
“I’m telling you this as a friend,” he said and repeated himself once more before he took off again down the path in the lifting darkness: “We’ll know.”
AS I SAID, THIS IS A LAWYER’S STORY. I mean that not only because it is an account of the law’s fateful impact but also in the sense that I tell it, as attorneys often do, for those who cannot speak for themselves. I witnessed many of the events of Project Petros firsthand, inasmuch as Robbie always insisted, as he had from the moment Sennett appeared on his doorstep, that I be present whenever Stan was. My memories are enhanced by the hundreds of hours of conversations I have had over the years with the participants, and also by the kind of historical detritus the law often leaves behind: tapes and transcripts and volumes of FBI case reports, called 302s.
