Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  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 stee
r 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.

  “How is your girlfriend taking things?” Jordan asked one morning. “You’re spending a lot more time in bars now. Is she complaining about it?”

  I could read a message in those rock-hard eyes: You probably told her, didn’t you? “Cathy doesn’t mind. I still take her out. She knows I haven’t changed.” Behind this seemingly offhand remark I was lobbing back: Yes, I told her, but don’t worry, no one else will know.

  Then I drove away so I could be in the courthouse to watch the action around Olson’s chambers before his call began. The same half dozen attorneys would drop by Olson’s chambers every day to check on their cases or make a payoff. Most of them were in their early middle age, well dressed, and had a professional sociability, but I got the feeling they did not like one another all that much. After all, they were competitors in a crowded field. A couple of them had already begun that day’s drinking.

  The most frequent visitor to Narcotics Court was attorney Richard Stopka, a former policeman with pale skin and a round face. Since Stopka came from a Polish family, the predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish lawyers in the fixers’ club grumbled that he had “no class.” Costello told me Stopka was receiving most of Olson’s cases because he was paying the judge a third of the bond money returned to him as the lawyer’s fee. Jim clearly thought the judge shouldn’t play favorites—unless the favorite happened to be him.

  As this was going on, the old benches in that cavernous courtroom were filling up. Narcotics Court never drew a cross-section of humanity. The more affluent dealers were usually indicted for additional crimes and appeared elsewhere, leaving the poorest ones on Olson’s call. Before the doors opened, some paced nervously in the corridor and occasionally one would burst into an erratic dance to work off tension. Once the public was let in, some would be slumped in the benches still obviously on a high. But most sat back and trusted their lawyer to get them off. Sometimes mothers diapered their babies on the benches.

  Attorneys leaving the judge’s chambers would come down the aisle between the benches with case folders and call out the names: Lewis? Vargas? Preece? A man or woman would get up with a glazed expression and stumble across the knees and feet of defendants waiting their turn.

  Handling an average of a hundred and fifty cases between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon, it was no wonder Olson enjoyed hearing a joke, even when it was in bad taste. Then at the end of his call he would walk into his chambers, put his black robe on a hanger, and talk to his bailiff or some attorney about his family. He was proud of his daughter in law school but less so of his son, a policeman. Then the judge would spend a few hours in bars with anyone who cared to join him. Whoever went along was assured of a good time but often wound up paying the entire bill.

  One story Olson loved to tell was about his days as a lawyer, when a company hired him for cases involving its illegally heavy cement trucks. At the time he was also working as a police magistrate. Olson would charge the company half the amount he had saved it, then give the judges half of what he had received. But then a new jurist demanded more.

  “So I filed a motion to transfer the case,” Olson said, “and do you know what reason I listed on the motion? That the bastard wanted more money! The judge almost shit in his pants, but he transferred the case anyway,” allowing him to pay off a less greedy judge. “Then a year later I became the chief judge of the district. That meant I was his boss, and I assigned him to nothing where he could lay his hands on dough. So the moral of the story is: Never kick your janitor in the ass because some day he might be your landlord.”

  The whole building we worked in had a things-are-not-as-they-seem character once you came to know it. A clerk in the Narcotics courtroom down the hall from Olson’s made side money by selling phonograph records from a stuffed filing cabinet that should have been used for court records. And a deputy sheriff connected with a clothing store discounted three-piece suits for new attorneys.

  Even the avarice that ran the place was deceiving. Fixers—and fixers who became judges—lived for the emotional highs that only money could bring them. “Let me tell you,” Costello once told me, “when you get on the other side, all you do is drink.” Or take drugs, as I learned about two crooked attorneys. Or gamble.

  On Friday nights, Jeans became a little Las Vegas. With the doors locked, the courthouse people—black and white, those just starting out and those near retirement—would turn a table on its side so they would have a surface to roll the dice against. “Come on, Little Joe,” a player might call out as lawyers, police officers, and judges knelt around him, some in four-hundred-dollar suits.

  After every toss, the money changing hands included bribes that had been used to send criminals back onto the streets. A few players would throw the dice while holding a lucky penny or a little toy animal, and some chanted “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” as one-hundred-dollar bills descended like autumn leaves. The city’s violence rate was soaring, and yet this was where the attorneys and judges could be found.

  That summer my friend Mark Ciavelli left the State’s Attorney’s Office for a defense practice with another competitive young lawyer, *Frank Cardoni. He came from a politically connected family, was the son of a wealthy surgeon, and was looking for a fast track to affluence. Frank wanted to keep handling cases before Judge John Reynolds’ felony preliminary hearing court in a North Side police station and needed Mark to represent clients transferred from there to other judges. I wished Mark had chosen someone else to work with. Cardoni was pleasant enough, but I heard that he was “dirty.”

  Now that Mark and I no longer worked together, we didn’t see much of each any more. In a way I was glad, because this meant that around him I didn’t have to act as if I were selling cases.
And although I had told Costello that I was not seeing Cathy much anymore, because I did not want him to intrude on my personal life, we saw each other often now. Our times together were about the only way I could untwist my two selves.

  August 1980

  Judge Olson was talking with some attorneys at an Italian restaurant on a humid August Friday when I started to leave three hours into the session to keep a date with Cathy. By then everyone else was pretty drunk. In fact, Olson was feeling so good he hurled a glass across the room and shouted, “Finito!”

  Some ideas were playing around in my head as I studied the judge, then saw Costello sitting at a table oblivious of everything. For weeks “Big Bird” had been complaining that Olson was giving other lawyers cases that should have gone to him. What if I brought the two of them a little closer? Then I could watch money-hunger lock them together.

  Sidling up to Jim, I said, “Olson’s in no condition to drive, so why don’t you give him a ride home? Maybe you can discuss some things on the way.”

  Costello wasn’t much more sober than the judge, but he nodded, pulled himself up, and walked over to Olson, and soon these two big men waddled out in mutual support. I wondered whether they would talk over percentages during the drive.

  Five days later Costello came over to me in a restaurant as pleased as a cat who has learned how to open the canary cage. “You’re looking at the new Richard Stopka,” he crowed, with a good-natured glow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember last Friday when I drove Olson home? I paid him a hundred dollars on a case and asked him how he wanted to work it from now on. He starts complaining that Stopka only kicks back thirty percent. So he says, ‘If you’re willing to give me half of any bonds or drug cash I return, we can make anywhere between five hundred and one thousand dollars a week.’ So I said screw the Pollock. And know what? Richard didn’t get a single case off Olson today!”