Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  In less than five months of palling around with the corrupt, I probably drank more than I had in my entire life. I wondered how my contact agents could understand that moles like me lived in a world that becomes increasingly unreal because of all the mental switching back and forth we have to do. My body and brain held out on Mondays through Fridays, but they gave up on weekends, the only time I could be myself. One Friday night, Cathy and I went to her sister’s condo for dinner. We turned on the television for a movie, and five minutes later I was asleep. Another time Megary showed up at a meeting place and found me asleep behind the steering wheel.

  As for Costello, he was becoming unglued on his own. One of my most embarrassing experiences with him came that October at a fundraiser for *Judge Henry Gordon. Costello had invited me to the fundraiser only to have a friendly face around, because he hated the judge. “Gordon is a kink,” Jim told me, meaning a graft-taker. “When he was a prosecutor he tried to sell the Criminal Courts Building. You know Judge *Willis in the suburbs? Willis would sell his mother’s teeth, and Gordon is below that, because Willis is a super guy and Gordon isn’t.”

  From the suburban banquet hall we went to a Costello drinking spot that was so close to his home his car could probably take us there by itself. We sidled up to the bar, and Jim started to drink off one of his black moods. For no reason that I could tell, he turned on a nicely dressed, fairly good-looking woman in her early forties a couple of stools down. Maybe she reminded him of his wife.

  “Look at her,” Jim said to me, “a fuckin’ drunk. Hey, bitch, why don’t you go home?”

  “Not so loud, Jim,” I whispered. Being with Costello was so humiliating that I wished I could have left him there, but I never knew when he might tell me more about “kinks.” He should have been ejected, but the bartender liked big tippers. Jim signaled for more drinks and put one hundred dollars in tens on the bar. Noticing that I was scratching at a food spot on my tie, he muttered, “Quit worry’ng about that fuckin’ tie, will yuh?”

  “This is brand new, Jim,” I said. “It cost me ten dollars.”

  Costello scooped up the money he had just placed on the bar. “Buy a new tie,” he said, and dropped a ten-dollar bill into my lap. “Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie.” At each repetition, another ten dollars floated to my lap. There was now fifty dollars, Costello’s half of some dope dealer’s one-hundred-dollar bond after the rest went to Olson.

  “Go ahead, take it, take it,” Jim said. “Now take off that piece of shit.”

  I slid off my tie with a little reluctance because I rather liked it. Costello bunched the tie into a ball, tossed it to the bartender, and told him to “throw that fuckin’ thing in the garbage.” Despite Costello’s laughter at himself, he was bitter about something and I felt sorry for him.

  We had to be in court on opposite sides of the criminal justice system the next day, so at ten-thirty p.m. he paid the tab and threw me the change to complete my new-tie fund. The next day I turned over to the FBI as possible bribery evidence the entire amount, fifty-three dollars and forty-five cents.

  On the Friday before Halloween, I drove from the midtown courthouse to the lakefront museum campus near downtown. I was expecting a pep talk from Megary about getting whatever evidence I could until Olson’s chambers were bugged. Instead, all he said was that he was taking me downtown to see Dan Reidy from the federal prosecutor’s office.

  As cool winds blew from a gray sky, we were soon caught up in a traffic snarl but made it to a ramp leading down to a parking garage below the modern federal complex on South Dearborn Street. My first realization that something secret was going on came when Megary quietly told me to “get down. On the floor.”

  I couldn’t help feeling a little foolish scrunched under the dashboard as the metal door of the garage rattled up. After Megary drove past the attendant’s office, he told me, “Okay, you can get up now.”

  We entered the large, black freight elevator and slowly rose to the mysterious twenty-eighth floor. Since the public elevators go only to the twenty-seventh, even most federal workers were unaware of this place. The doors slid open and I saw a large storage area with bare light bulbs illuminating the dusty concrete floor.

  Chuck Sklarsky was waiting for me, along with Dan Reidy, with his brown hair and contrasting red mustache, and Scott Lassar, who greeted me in a gravely monotone. “What’s this all about?” I asked them.

  As I took a plastic chair amid the clutter of the concrete storage floor, Reidy told me that all the preliminary work for installing an electronic listening device in Olson’s chambers had been cleared, and now the Chicago office was ready to apply for permission from a federal judge.

  “Just apply?” I gasped. From all this furtiveness, I had assumed the equipment was already in someone’s black bag.

  “Apparently you don’t know how things work,” Reidy said. “Nobody’s said ‘No,’ they’re saying ‘Let’s look at it.’ That’s practically a ‘Yes.’ Don’t worry, we’re making this a priority.”

  He handed me an inch-thick copy of the reports detailing information from my phone calls and the tapes I had been handing over. “We want you to go over this carefully,” Reidy said. “Make sure it’s accurate and see if you can add anything.”

  I went through the loose photocopied pages and found myself mumbling, “Wait … What’s all this about Traffic Court?”

  “You’re not the only one working undercover,” Reidy explained. The other work was being done by David Victor Ries, the FBI agent who had set up a phony Loop law office before I came on.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I’m not alone?”

  “Terry, we’ve never done anything this secret before,” said Reidy. “From the beginning, we decided not to treat it like just another sting. Information is being given out only on a need-to-know basis, and you had no reason to know about Ries.”

  He then let me in on some of the behind-the-scenes action. For months after receiving the box of unrelated files that had formed the starting point for Operation Greylord, Reidy and Lassar considered—and rejected—nearly forty variations of a written proposal needed for the undercover operation. The first sixteen pages were always the same—they outlined what was then known about bribery throughout the court system.

  “Those first sixteen pages were designed so the Justice Department would look at them and get as sick as we were,” Reidy said. Initially the Justice Department approved only a restricted effort to target fixers/lawyers in the municipal courts built into the Traffic Court Building.

  Agents were allowed to rig only drunken driving cases because the police department was in such a sorry state that Superintendent Richard Brzeczek said he could spare only one trustworthy officer to work with federal investigators to arrest undercover FBI agents, and that man refused to turn on his fellow officers. Taking other officers of proven integrity away from their assignments would have drawn too much attention.

  Without police cooperation, undercover FBI agents tried getting arrested for drunken driving early in the morning, when traffic was light and there was little danger of harming anyone. But they discovered that officers didn’t want to make arrests just before the end of their shifts, because of the paperwork they would have to fill out.

  This led to a brainstorm. Since many FBI agents were attorneys, why not have one pose as a corrupt lawyer in Traffic Court? That was why David Ries was brought in from Detroit. So that was how the initial phase of Greylord evolved, by a series of false steps pointing to the right direction.

  “What if Olson moves out of Narcotics Court?” I asked the case supervisors. “I worked like hell to make my contacts there. I can’t go through all that again somewhere else without someone catching on.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re making this a priority,” Dan said. Well, that phrase was getting to sound familiar.

  Going over more of the reports they handed me, I stared at one showing that an FBI agent who had been conducti
ng a preliminary surveillance inside the Traffic Court Building had noticed Deputy Clerk Harold Conn strolling arm in arm with Chief Traffic Court Judge Richard LeFevour and slipping money into the judge’s pocket. This was before LeFevour headed all the municipal courts in the city, the largest division in the circuit court of Cook County.

  Seeing my surprise at the LeFevour report, Dan said, “Now you know how high we want you to go.”

  So they expected me, someone untrained and still with little experience, to help them bring down the judge in charge of all the city courts! I had never even worked in his building.

  “We haven’t found anyone else in the criminal courts to help you,” Reidy continued. “It looks like you’re going to have to do this by yourself. If it’s going to be too much of a strain, or there are personal considerations, just tell us. You’re not in so deep now that you can’t pull out. No one would be the wiser.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m doing all right.” The words must have sounded tired and maybe a little uncertain.

  It took me half an hour to ink in adjustments here and there in the reports, which would be part of the package seeking authorization for the bugging. As I handed the pages back, I felt a little apprehensive. These allegations were against perhaps twenty policemen, lawyers, judges, and even an assistant prosecutor I had thought was honest. How many others were out there? “Suppose the judge who authorizes the bugging tells someone?” I asked. My throat had dried up.

  “Don’t worry,” Dan replied. “This will need the approval of the chief judge of the federal courts for northern Illinois. He doesn’t have any contact with anyone named in here. This investigation is going to be airtight. We have no choice but to assume he will keep the secret.”

  When I went home that evening, I had to keep reminding myself that the majority of officers, lawyers, and judges were honest—they had to be—and yet I could no longer be sure about anyone.

  On Monday, I was sitting on a bench during a break in Olson’s court when a familiar voice asked, “Hey, Terry, how about lunch?”

  Standing in a doorway was my good friend Mark Ciavelli. The young defense attorney looked great in a tailored suit, a luxury he could never have afforded when he was an assistant prosecutor. Last May, I had hoped Mark would be interested in joining me in my undercover work, but I soon learned he was becoming too successful on the defense side to give everything up.

  We agreed to meet at a nearby Mexican restaurant after my last case. Mark now drove a BMW—just like his new law partner, suspected fixer Frank Cardoni, and also like the judge they often appeared before, John Reynolds. The two of us sat at a small booth with piped-in mariachi music.

  Before long I realized that Mark didn’t just want to fill me in on a couple of weeks’ worth of courthouse gossip. With his rapid-fire delivery, he was dropping hints that he wanted me to resign from the State’s Attorney’s Office and join his law firm.

  “It’ll take a while to get used to the change of defending people instead of throwing them into prison,” he said, as if I had been successful in doing that before Olson. “Another change, of course, is working with the judges. You know what I mean. I just gave two hundred to Judge *Jelnik on a criminal damage to property. It wasn’t easy, you got to go through channels.”

  He continued speaking without a pause that would have let his words sink in. The shock drove everything else from my mind for a few seconds. Slowly the sounds around me came back, but there was no feeling in me as I heard them.

  “He had five witnesses and the state had only the victim,” Mark continued with whatever anecdote he had started. “Now, remember that I had a real good case, but Jelnik finds my guy guilty. I couldn’t figure out what went wrong. So I asked around and someone told me Jelnik could be approached.”

  Please don’t tell me this, I thought.

  “So I file for a new trial and bring two hundred to Jelnik in his chambers. He takes the money and he vacates his guilty verdict. But I still got to get my guy off. Jelnik’s been transferred to another court, and P.J. McCormick’s going to hear it, and that’s going to cost me at least another hundred.”

  It was an effort for me to speak after our orders arrived. Not so long ago Mark and I had started out pretty much alike, or so it had seemed to me. I must have been living in a dream world. When I blurted out my question at the table, I was no longer an undercover operative. I was back to being still too innocent to accept what I had just heard.

  “Don’t you think it would be better if you didn’t pay the judges?” I asked.

  “Come on, Terry, it doesn’t work that way, you should know that by now. Sometimes my clients really are innocent and the cops run over their rights. You have to look out for them. There’s only one way to get a fair shake, and that’s not to leave anything up to chance.” Chance, that’s what fixers think of justice? “It’s been going on so long, it’s never going to change.”

  “Well, I suppose …” My voice had trailed off because I didn’t have anything to say.

  Mark later said Judge Reynolds would steer clients to him for a rakeoff, but not all that money stayed with the judge. Mark had seen court workers steal cash from Reynolds’ desk, while clerks were stealing what they called their “lunch money” from cans that other clerks kept under their desks. Virtually everyone who had anything to do with the administration of Reynolds’ courtroom had found some way of getting money from anyone who walked in, even a prosecutor who had taken bribes from Mark.

  Not only in Reynolds’ court but in courtrooms throughout the building a clerk who sized up lawyers well and knew what favors to perform might make ten thousand dollars a year in undeclared tips.

  “You still haven’t answered me,” my friend said. “What about joining Frankie and me?”

  As I poked at my food, I really couldn’t think about anything. I had just discovered that I had lost my closest friend in the system to corruption, and I would never again be naive about anyone in this investigation. Something in me had been crushed.

  PART 2

  ONE OF THE BOYS

  8

  THE NEXT LEVEL

  Late October 1980

  I was so upset after talking to Mark that I headed for my parents’ home in suburban Palatine rather than spend one more afternoon slugging beers with Olson or Costello. When I arrived, I didn’t know what made me go there; I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone about what was on my mind. Maybe I should have made the FBI happy by informing them about one more crooked lawyer. But I didn’t care about Greylord at the moment, and I didn’t give a damn about all the bribing lawyers and the judges with blood on their hands.

  Just a few months before, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Sklarsky had told me I might learn that some of my friends were among the scum. “Maybe your friends, Chuck,” I had thought smugly then, “but not mine.” How innocent I had been.

  My mother knew something was wrong the moment I walked into the house and slumped into a living room chair. “It’s all right,” she said, without asking why I was so morose. She continued fixing dinner as if this were just another evening, but I knew she was waiting for me to let my feelings out.

  “Mark’s corrupt, Mom,” I murmured from the chair. I started crying because I had lost a friend to the poison in the court system. “He’s in it, too. Just like the rest.”

  “Did you hear that from someone else?” She always distrusted rumors.

  “No, from him. Right from his own mouth.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Because I hadn’t worn a wire since my recent two close calls, there was no recorded evidence against Mark. But if I had had a microphone strapped to my chest, would I have turned it on as soon as he mentioned bribing a judge, and would I have handed the tape in? I still don’t know.

  I had trouble eating and sleeping for the next couple of days. I was about to make the hardest decision in my entire Greylord role, and I needed more time to
think it over. Actually, I was imagining that I could postpone a decision indefinitely.

  On Friday, three days after my Mexican lunch with Mark, I went to a Near North Side athletic club to play racquetball with agent Lamar Jordan again. I would have preferred an isolated location, but Jordan didn’t mind. He was a fair player and was close to catching up to me in a hard game that left us both a little exhausted. When we went to his car for privacy, I finally told him what I had been reluctant to disclose all week, that my close friend Mark Ciavelli was now bribing judges so he could join the BMW set.

  “You know,” Jordan said, “this conversation could be just between us. It doesn’t have to get written down.”

  “No, put him in the report.”

  “That means you’ll have to go after him.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “If I have to, then I have to.”

  I was naive enough to think the worst was over.

  Then about 5 weeks after his revelation in the Mexican restaurant, Mark asked me to go with him to see the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight on closed circuit television at a movie theater. Although I had resolved to stay away from him, I thought why not, this would have nothing to do with my investigation. But I was wrong.

  As soon as I climbed into Mark’s BMW outside his Near North Side apartment, he told me about a suburban felony case where he and Bob Silverman, as co-counsel, had put in the fix. Then he brought up a case that would be coming to Olson’s court. The police had seized about three thousand dollars and some PCP from his two clients. Mark mentioned that the officers were willing to lie down on the case in return for half the money they had confiscated. He and his law partner, Frank Cardoni, were willing to let the officers have some of the dealers’ money, but not half.

  To make them grumble less, Mark lied to them by saying a fixer friend needed to be cut in, but he really hoped to work out an arrangement with Olson. I knew where this conversation was going, and I wished I could stop it, but he kept on. Mark had never appeared before the judge before, and he was afraid Olson might not return most of the confiscated money to him as his fee. Taking his eyes off traffic for a moment to study my expression, he said, “If you dismiss this thing, Terry, it will solve the problem and we’ll all make money.”