Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  Unlike some fixers, there was no disillusion behind Costello’s corruption. He had wanted a place at the feeding trough from the beginning. Rather than being ashamed about prostituting his law training, Jim mistook his success in getting clients off for legal skill.

  One look at Costello working the hall suggested that all he cared about was a fast buck, but there had to be more to it than that. Without realizing it, I had already taught myself the first lesson in undercover work: sizing people up and sensing what they really wanted out of life, and using that against them. What he really wanted—and never in his life would obtain—was respect. Fellow attorneys knew Jim as a loser, but I saw him as someone badly in need of a buddy.

  Jim had built a practice, such as it was, largely by reaching people before they learned that the Chicago Bar Association customarily assigned a lawyer for defendants who could not afford an attorney of their choice but could post nominal bond, disqualifying them for a public defender. From time to time a defendant slipped by these hallway hustlers and appeared in court on his own. It fell upon the judge to assign the bar association lawyer to any unrepresented defendant. When the bar association-designated lawyer wasn’t around, Judge Olson would send the accused to Costello or one of the other attorneys paying him off.

  Bonds for drug charges typically started at one hundred dollars. Costello would pick up half a dozen clients a day. The bond checks would be mailed to him by the clerk’s office. After deducting the legal ten percent for court costs and then the bailiff’s illegal cut, he could take in more than five hundred dollars a day. But his net profit depended on how much went to the judge. All this kept Costello scrambling for a quick turnover, even if it meant pleading clients guilty when elements in their case could have brought an acquittal. In fact, a successful hustler could earn more than one hundred thousand dollars a year with just “bullshit cases.”

  This was pretty much about all I had been able to turn up on my own, and I was disheartened to feel that so far I was letting down all the people counting on me.

  April 1980

  Two months earlier, I had been called at work in a police station and asked to report to the FBI offices downtown. As I walked in, wall photos of all past Chicago office special agents in charge seemed to look down at me, and I wondered how I could measure up in the eyes of the three Justice Department officials scrutinizing me at the long oval table.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Sklarsky had a friendly yet no-nonsense way about him. But doing most of the talking was another assistant U.S. Attorney, Dan Reidy, who I would learn later was the architect of Operation Greylord. He had an interesting face, with his dark brown hair and reddish mustache. Studying me but hardly saying a word was tall and thin Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Lassar. All three would be important to me over the next three years.

  My responses to their formal questions were so dry and brief that I could tell they wanted someone with more experience—and preferably someone who looked unscrupulous, rather than a young man of medium height with reddish-blond hair, unlined features, and a soft voice. Other lawyers had told me I looked like a choirboy.

  Reidy asked if I had ever been offered a bribe. No, I said. What would I do if I were offered one? I would report it to the head of my division, I answered. Did I know anyone who took bribes? No. How did I know about the bribery? It was just common talk, I replied. Scuttlebutt.

  As my scrutinizers asked about my personal goals, their eyebrows lifted when I let out that I had in law school applied for a special agent position at the FBI. From then on, the interview became more relaxed. “You will have to wear a wire” if I passed a second interview, Reidy said in his steady voice. That sounded exciting, but it hardly seemed like me.

  Eventually he got around to outlining what we were all in this room for, and my heart started beating faster. “We want you to take bribes to drop cases. You must agree to testify in court after the arrests are made, and that will mean public disclosure of your role.”

  “But what about my safety?” I asked, suddenly feeling a little weak-kneed. “I mean, after my initial complaint and the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted to do something like this, a few people tell the State’s Attorney’s Special Prosecutions Unit was talking to me.” I remembered how a fellow assistant state’s attorney—who later became a judge—saw me starting to open the door of the special prosecutions office and told me I would not want to rat on my colleagues.

  “And just how secret is all this going to be?” I asked the officials.

  “That’s nothing you have to worry about, Mr. Hake,” Reidy assured me. “We won’t allow any information about the investigation to come out until we are absolutely ready. We will even give you a code name for all the FBI files to guard against internal leaks.”

  “Suppose they find out anyway?” I wasn’t thinking about myself so much as my family and my new girlfriend, Cathy. I had every reason to believe our relationship was going to last.

  “We will do the best we can to protect you,” Reidy said. “It’s an understandable concern, but crooks generally don’t mess with federal witnesses. Besides, attorneys and judges are not the sort to go around killing people.”

  Maybe not, I thought. But some of those lawyers had crime syndicate ties from their clients or took out mob loans, and rumor had it that a few of them were heavily into cocaine. I could imagine a fixer mentioning he would like to see me dead, and one of his friends doing him a favor.

  “The best way to ensure your safety is to keep your mouth shut and not tell anybody, not even your family or your girlfriend.” It seemed that Reidy was reading my mind. “We’re going after some pretty smart guys. Just a worried remark from somebody might make them suspicious.”

  Indeed, the possible danger seemed remote at the time. But another concern was troubling me. “When someone from the State’s Attorney’s Office talked to me about going undercover, he said I wouldn’t be able to practice law for about five years.”

  “Well, he was wrong,” Reidy said. “You probably won’t ever be able to practice law in Cook County again. There is no way of getting rid of everyone who is crooked, and the ones still left would fight you all the way.”

  “So I won’t be a trial lawyer anymore,” I said, as if to hear myself say it. Here I was, in my twenties and yet seeing all my dreams of prosecuting major cases evaporate.

  “Not in Cook County,” Reidy stressed. “Do you think you can live with that?”

  This was the make-or-break moment, but I couldn’t back out now. I wasn’t raised that way. All I could think about was my mentor, Mike Ficaro, the corpulent assistant state’s attorney who swore me in as a lawyer in a rubble-strewn vacant lot on a cold, windy, rainy Halloween evening three years before.

  “How much does Ficaro know about this?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Sklarsky broke in, “and don’t tell him. You’re only going to be effective as long as you can keep quiet about this.”

  That was it. They were asking me to pose for as long as needed as someone I would have scorned, and now all we were doing was sitting around a table as if chit-chatting. We shook hands, and the three officials told me to take as long as I needed to think it over. As I got up to leave, Reidy had an afterthought. “Terry,” he said, “did you tell anyone about the undercover project the State’s Attorney asked you to participate in?”

  “Just my mother,” I replied, too ashamed to admit that I had also mentioned it to my closest friend in the prosecutor’s office. If these important men knew I had confided in someone within the court system, they might call the whole thing off. But wouldn’t there be serious consequences if they ever learned I had held something back?

  “And I told *Mark Ciavelli,” I hastily added. “He’s a friend of mine in the State’s Attorney’s Office.”

  Mark and I had gone to movies and restaurants together to ease the tension of our work in the felony review section, where we worked in police stations to inform detectives whether their arres
ts were strong enough for felony charges. As we sat in Mark’s car, I let him know that someone high up in the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted me for an internal investigation.

  Mark threw me a startled glance, but I hastily added that I had backed out. “You did the right thing, Terry. Nobody likes a squealer. Anybody who goes around spying on other lawyers can just throw their career out the window. The other guys would cut you out of everything, you wouldn’t get any cooperation.”

  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.

  2

  THE CLOSED WORLD

  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.