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.
Nothing happened for three days, but on Thursday of that first week a black policeman serving in an elite suburban undercover narcotics unit testified against a white dealer who had sold him narcotics. At our recommendation, the judge conducted the hearing in his chambers to keep the officer from being seen by drug pushers waiting for their cases.
Testimony established that the defendant had approached the officer and asked if he wanted some heroin, so there was no entrapment. Olson occasionally fingered his lip and then ruled that the officer had violated the rules against entrapment and therefore there was no probable cause for an arrest. Even though the Justice Department was sure Olson was crooked, the decision upset me. Undercover drug cases are the most dangerous of all police assignments, yet he might as well have slapped this officer in the face.
But Olson on the bench was nothing like Olson at leisure. I was one of three assistant state’s attorneys (ASAs) assigned to a long, narrow office built into the side of his courtroom. The office—more like a hut—was not much more than an elongated closet, but dirtier. On the day after the entrapment ruling Olson took us to an Italian restaurant, and in his gritty baritone told us one delightful story after another. To him there was no such thing as justice; everything was just absurdity on both sides. I found myself almost forgiving him for ruling against the evidence. I’m sure that’s what he had in mind by inviting me. Not that he paid the bill.
The undercover policeman’s case was the first evidently rigged verdict I’d seen since my transfer from felony review, but my contact FBI agent, Lamar Jordan, told me we had no way of proving it. Even so, he asked me to copy the police report as the initial solid evidence against the judge.
Sometime later a fellow prosecutor, Brian Scanlon, told me that one day “Silvery Bob” Silverman and another defense attorney went up to him at different times while Olson was away and offered to split their fees with him if he would drop their cases.
“Did you do it?” I asked.
“Hell no,” Scanlon said, “but it’s funny. Those guys wouldn’t have done that if Olson was in to take care of them. When another judge fills in for Olson, the shysters come out of the woodwork.”
I had been trying to avoid my mentor, Mike Ficaro, even though he was so easy to get along with that his employees pulled pranks on him. I’ve heard they put fish in his water cooler and hid the chalkboard he used to keep score for convictions and acquittals. But that was before drug proliferation skyrocketed crime in the late 1970s and everyone was overworked.
As head of the criminal division of the State’s Attorney’s Office, Ficaro had a hand in most transfers within the State’s Attorney’s Office. Since he kept his eye on everyone working under him, I was afraid he might wonder why I had been taken from felony review without somebody clearing it with him. Catching up with me in a hallway that Friday afternoon, he asked, “So, Terry, what are you doing in Narcotics Court these days?”
The remark seemed offhanded, but Mike’s girth was blocking my path and he gave me the same penetrating look that struck terror in defendants on the stand.
“I just decided it was time to move up,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me, you said you never wanted to go back to trial work.” He kept standing in my way and waiting for an answer.
I had been specifically ordered not to mention my new role to Ficaro, but I was sure Reidy and Sklarsky didn’t realize that Mike could see through me. I looked around to make sure no one could hear us and whispered, “You won’t tell anybody?”
He shook his head, and as we walked a few feet dow
n the corridor I told him what I was trying to do. Mike listened with his hands behind his back. When I finished, he asked if he could help.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“All right, Terry. But remember, my office will be open any time you need it.”
Knowing that Ficaro was supporting me boosted my confidence. I would soon learn that he was helping me behind the scenes even though as part of the county system he would play no role in the federal investigation. In early June, just as I was becoming friendly with most of the court personnel, every court clerk and Narcotics Court bailiff was transferred to other assignments.
Although no money had been given to me, every day I expected to be found out. I was like someone who plugs in a lamp the moment a city has a blackout and thinks it is his fault. It turned out that Ficaro knew that the arrival of all these new clerks and bailiffs might induce fixers to take their money to me as Costello’s friend rather than risk testing them.
I didn’t appreciate Mike’s interference at the time, since bribery was so persuasive anything could set off rumors of an investigation. But I learned that greed was so addictive that not even this could stop the bribery, and that Mike’s transfer orders had given the stalled investigation just the push it needed.
Olson certainly didn’t change his ways. An assistant prosecutor can expect to win at least three-quarters of preliminary hearings before an honest judge. But with Wayne Olson I lost eighteen of my first twenty. It took me several weeks to catch on that he was wordlessly urging me to start taking money from his lawyer friends if I wanted to get anywhere in my career.
But apart from developing an acquaintance with Costello and going to Jeans so that I might be accepted as one of the boys, there still was no change in my relationship with anyone in the building. But then as Costello and I were having lunch one hot July day, he ruminated about his time as a Chicago policeman.
“That’s when I started taking dough,” he said, as I tried not to seem especially interested. He added that he and his partner would share ten or twenty dollars from motorists who ran a red light. “At first you say it’s not right, and what happens if you get caught, but people don’t care. The money wasn’t all that much, but it was something. It makes being a cop okay, after all you got to put up with.” The money helped him attend John Marshall Law School at night. “I even took money from Silverman once.”
Operation Greylord Page 3
