Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  “Sure,” Roth responded, “that’s the only way to do business.”

  Roth was soon walking down the courthouse steps with his newly freed client, who we would eventually learn helped him obtain drugs.

  A few months later, a guard escorted Roth down an elevated walk-way in the gray County Jail behind the courthouse. A cell door opened, and the fixer paid an unannounced visit to *Henry Sutherland, who was awaiting sentencing for a vicious rape. Without mentioning names, Roth said he had been sent by a very influential person. Sutherland understood—it was Judge Alan Lane, who was about to sentence him. Roth told Sutherland that his lawyer was ineffectual, and that the conviction could be overturned for a price.

  To avoid speaking of money, as we know from an Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission opinion, Roth held up a sheet of legal-sized paper on which he had written: $10,000 OR TEN YEARS. Later that day one of Roth’s pals called Sutherland’s girlfriend and said that if she didn’t come up with the money she would never see her boyfriend on the outside again.

  But Sutherland was panicking at the size of the extortion demand. A friend intervened and had the case assigned to another judge. Sutherland was eventually retried and acquitted. But slowly our evidence was mounting against Lane, the judge who had the audacity to put the fixer’s code PNGJW (Plea of Not Guilty Jury Waived) on his vanity license plates.

  JAMES COSTELLO

  The federal agents had to rely on my conversations with Jim Costello to fill in blanks as we gathered evidence against various targets. But now that he had served our purpose of introducing me into the underworld of bribery, we needed to document his bribes to Olson as if he were just any other fixer.

  Costello had been telling me for months about his kickbacks to the judge, but we still needed taped confirmation from Olson’s mouth. That was important for a RICO-racketeering conspiracy conviction.

  I was no longer signaling the comings and goings in Olson’s chambers with the transmitter. So much evidence was pouring in against members of the bribery club that Bill Megary and Dan Reidy told me it was clear that the lawyers seldom went in just to tell a joke. The federal court now allowed us to record all conversations. But I still had to write down the times on note cards for later identifications. I was relieved when I handed the transmitter back, since structural steel, radio traffic, concrete, and other interferences kept fouling up my signals. As an example, we may have missed some damning evidence when I pressed a Code Black as a crooked lawyer was entering that little room, but the FBI listening room received only a Code Red, stop.

  On the tenth day, the bug picked up a fee-splitting conversation between Costello and Olson.

  “What have we got in the kitty?” Olson asked Jim.

  “We got eight hundred.”

  “Huh?” Olson asked in surprise.

  “Eight.”

  “How come I wrote down twenty-three hundred?”

  “What! What are you talking about?” Costello said. “I figured seven hundred eighty-five, I counted it. I don’t know how you can have twenty-three hundred figured.”

  “You had eight or nine cases yesterday,” Olson said.

  “Let me look in my book.”

  After a pause, the two of them bickered over the appearance of a drug dealer who had posted five hundred dollars bail months before but failed to show up in court, so his bond was ordered forfeited. When the pusher was arrested again, Costello put the hustle on him and represented him for two minutes. Olson improperly reinstated the bond as if the dealer had never skipped. That meant the dealer could sign the five hundred dollars in bond money over to Costello for his fee. Jim thought the entire amount should be his since he had hustled the case on his own. But Olson felt differently.

  “I resurrected the bond,” the judge said, almost shouting.

  “What!”

  “You don’t think I resurrected that? Jeez, man, holy shit! You want to see me un-resurrect it?”

  Although I couldn’t know at the time what had just been said, I saw Jim stomping out of the chambers. I reached him in the hallway and asked what had happened.

  “I cannot understand Wayne,” Costello said. “You know what he said? He said ‘I’ll stick it in your fucking ass.’ That Olson is a greedy motherfucker. I’m scared of that man, you know what I mean?”

  The quarrel over a few hundred dollars was just what we needed to prove a conspiracy in Olson’s referring cases for kickbacks and then selling his rulings. Every word that Costello had told me over the last few months about his financial arrangement with Olson was now admissible in court because we had their confirming conversation on tape. So we at last had a RICO conspiracy case on Olson because of his greed.

  The following day, Costello and I were talking over pasta again. He had decided to compromise on what he owed the judge and ask him to accept an even one thousand dollars. He pulled a white envelope from inside his double breasted suit and waved it under my nose. “One thousand bucks right here,” he said. “I just don’t know if I’m going to pay him today or make him sweat a little and give it to him tomorrow,” Friday, Olson’s regular payoff day.

  “Tell him you can afford only one third of what you owe,” I suggested. “You know, the taxes will kill you.” Any such evidence would be great to play for a jury.

  “The way my life’s been going, taxes are the least of my worries,” he said.

  As I handed my latest private tape recordings to Bill Megary outside the planetarium that afternoon, he looked uncomfortable with what he was about to say. He started by telling me some things the hidden microphone had picked up. Then he went into the troubling subject:

  “Somebody was talking to Olson about you trying to get into the FBI a while back.”

  A chill raced through me. “Who was it, Silverman? Yonan?”

  “He was standing a little away from the desk. We couldn’t identify the voice.”

  “Mark knows I applied more than a year ago, and maybe some ASAs do, too.”

  “Are you worried about it?”

  “I don’t know. What did he say?”

  “He was talking about the possibility of a shakeup in the State’s Attorney’s Office, then he mentioned that you applied for the FBI. That’s all he said.”

  “How did Olson take it?”

  “We don’t know. There was a bunch of noise coming from the hall.”

  After a pause, I asked, “What do you think I should do?”

  Megary thought it over and said, “Watch Olson closely for the next day or so. That’s all you can do.”

  He didn’t sound worried. But, then, his life wasn’t the one on the line.

  11

  SUSPICIONS

  Late December 1980

  While most courthouse workers were in a holiday mood, I stayed tense over whether Judge Olson could detect that something was going on. Even if he did, the bribery continued as openly as before. I saw Costello drop twenty dollars in fives into the wastebasket of Olson’s clerk, and another time the judge threw out three of Roth’s cases as if the evidence didn’t exist. Since Wayne would soon be going to the Elysian Fields of Divorce Court, what did he care whether anyone complained?

  Although my friend and fellow assistant prosecutor Alice Carpenter loathed corruption, she couldn’t help liking the talkative and usually entertaining judge. When she suggested that we give Olson a tie for Christmas, I shopped around and bought him a navy blue silk one for fifteen dollars. We split the cost, and I billed the FBI for my half. At the end of the day, Alice surprised me with a fruit basket for the holidays. That made me feel bad because, with all the things that were happening, I had not thought of getting her anything. It brought home the reality of all the friendships I would be losing.

  Alice’s husband, defense attorney Barry Carpenter, was as tall and thin as Ichabod Crane, and could be funny at unexpected moments. He once walked into a restaurant where Costello was describing how he had set up a meeting with a defendant’s girlfriend to discuss a c
ase and wound up in a motel with her. When Jim suggested that Barry meet him for lunch some time, Carpenter said, “Ohhh no—I might wind up in a motel room with you.”

  Such moments were especially welcome in a somber courthouse where fates were decided behind every door, but few places showed more holiday spirit. Large wreaths were hung over jury boxes, and most guards, cafeteria workers, judges, clerks, and attorneys spent December 23 and 24 wishing everyone a merry Christmas.

  On Christmas Eve, Cathy and I exchanged gifts at my apartment after a Chinatown dinner. I gave her diamond earrings, and as a gag gift she presented me with a spy book. I actually picked up some pointers from it. One was that, when there are rumors about you, talk them over with the people who may be suspicious rather than let the gossip become entrenched.

  January 1981

  When court ended one day, Bill Megary let me watch the action, if you can call it action, on another wire in the ten-by-twenty-foot listening room at the rear of the FBI offices downtown. I went past a door marked RESTRICTED and saw that there really wasn’t much to look at, just thousands of dollars in recording equipment on shelves, a gray metal table, and a couple of chairs. An agent with earphones was keeping a log at the table and making notes on the conversation. I couldn’t hear anything and just saw the large reels slowly turning.

  One thing becoming clear from my work and the bugging was that anyone in the system could be a bagman—not only judges’ clerks and fixers like Costello but sometimes the judges themselves. When FBI agents and I went over the tapes in preparation for court, we heard Judge Olson telling an attorney that another judge might acquit two men on battery charges but that he “will bitch at me for [conveying] less than a grand.” When the lawyer apparently handed over additional money, Olson did not see any cash for himself. “What am I,” he complained, “chopped liver?”

  The day of that conversation, January 5, 1981, Bob Silverman asked me to look over one of his cases because “I haven’t had time to study it.” That meant he had not put the fix in with Olson yet. As he was using the phone in the Olson’s chambers while the judge was on the bench, I told him that this would be no problem. “Okay, Terry,” Bob said with a knowing smile.

  As I left the room my walking slowed because of a nagging thought. Silverman had been so grateful that he might be willing to hand me money then and there. Why not let the agents at the listening post hear me accepting a bribe right in the chambers? As I went back in, Silverman was going through a wad of money. Surprised to see me again, he said, “Terry boy, what’s up?”

  “We’re going to dismiss it, Bob.”

  “I know, I already talked to the copper.” He slipped a fifty-dollar bill between the pages of a memo pad from Olson’s desk and handed it to me.

  “I think I’ll go put this down on a new car,” I said, imagining Megary’s thrill as he listened in with his headphones that very moment.

  One week later, while I was still having doubts about whether the fixers fully trusted me because of someone’s remark about my FBI application, another assistant prosecutor caught up with me in the rear of the Narcotics Court. “Terry,” he said in a hushed tone, “there’s something I think you ought to know.”

  My insides churned. They’ve found out, I thought.

  “I just thought you’d want to know that they’re calling you ‘Terry Take’ behind your back.”

  “Who!”

  “Just people. What you do is your own business, but you might want to watch yourself.”

  I was glowing inside but pretended to be so angry that I swore.

  Over the next few days I asked around and learned that felony review supervisor Sandy Klapman, who knew nothing of my undercover work, had smugly given me that label after I asked him to change a one-hundred-dollar bill. Only fixers and courthouse bribe-takers carried multiple one-hundred-dollar bills.

  So through an oversight I had joined the list of people with courthouse monikers, along with “Silvery Bob” Silverman and Judge John “Dollars” Devine. But the nickname was also further proof that honest people like Alice Carpenter and now Klapman were distancing themselves from me. For months I had been adding fixers to my friends in the building, and now I saw that only a fixer would be my friend.

  At the time, I was still keeping close to Costello and letting him think I might open up shop with him someday. One reason I had grown fond of him was that his bad habits were so predictable, like a pet dog’s. One early-January Friday, Jim dragged himself into court in a slept-in suit and with a hangover that wouldn’t go away. I had seen that shabby look before, but this time he was panicking because he had only pocket change and couldn’t meet Olson’s weekly payoff.

  “WhadamIgoingtodo?” he slurred into one word.

  “Just keep hustling,” I said.

  He worked the hall with more urgency than usual and managed to pick up five hundred dollars in twenties from a client. Within the hour, the FBI’s reel-to-reel was recording the judge’s drawer opening and closing.

  New Ground

  The assistant state’s attorney’s aspect of my undercover career was ending and I was facing life as a sham defense lawyer so that I could start handing out bribes rather than waiting for them to come to me. No one talked about it, but I knew this meant the operation might take another year to run, or even more.

  Over a lunch of chicken and tortillas, Costello mused that I had finally learned enough to set up practice on my own. “Remember,” he told me, “if the cops ever stop you for speeding—”

  “I know, say I’m a lawyer, throw twenty bucks at them, and take off.”

  Looking me in the eye, he asked, “Did you learn anything else from me?”

  “You taught me how the system works.”

  “It’s goofy,” he said. “It’s all money.”

  Yet everything was in question now because Cook County State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, a Republican who had helped create Operation Greylord, had been replaced by Richard M. Daley, a Democrat whose late father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, probably had a hand in placing half the current judges on the bench.

  The son was an unknown entity to us, and he was given to consulting advisors about everything with a political tinge. In addition, the younger Daley and his brothers moved in the social circle of numerous judges, including Judge Richard LeFevour, the prime target of the municipal courts branch of Greylord. Daley even went to White Sox games with him. Suppose Daley considered the bugging illegal or unethical, a very real possibility. Suppose he thought the investigation would be politically damaging? Suppose he meant well but accidentally dropped a hint to the wrong friend?

  So Dan Reidy held a strategy session with the U.S. attorney. They decided not to let Daley know what was going on until he seemed ready. We were later pleased to discover that the state’s attorney gave us his full support and always kept the information confidential. He even continued social contacts with targeted judges so that they would not become suspicious. That let us continue gathering evidence against ever more targets.

  PETER KESSLER

  One of them, Peter Kessler, was friendly enough but often represented prostitutes and pleaded a lot of clients guilty just to increase his turnover. The only things he seemed to care about were his family and money. Who would have imagined that of all the attorneys, clerks, and judges being snared by Greylord, he would prove in time to be our wild card?

  Consider his background. Kessler was born just outside Warsaw during World War II. When he was a year old his father was killed in a German ambush. Peter, his sister, and their mother lived in hiding wherever they could as impoverished Jews in a country overrun by Nazi soldiers. When the war ended, they moved about with hundreds of other displaced persons until they could board a ship bound for America in 1949.

  The family settled in Chicago’s large Polish community. Peter’s mother worked in a factory during the day, and at night she prepared dinners in her home for about a dozen fellow immigrants. In time, Golda Kessler opened a re
staurant to make money to send Peter to college. He stayed honest as one of the attorneys the Chicago Bar Association sent to court, but in 1978 he felt that he wasn’t receiving enough cases to support his wife and four children. So Kessler began hustling clients among shoplifters in Women’s Court, commonly called whore court because prostitution cases were heard on the first call. From there, it was easy to build a practice by keeping judges friendly.

  That started with Judge John “Dollars” Devine’s disguised hints that his pockets were open. The dark-haired, disagreeable judge hurled insults at Peter in court and ruled against him every time until he wised up. Peter went along with the shakedown and kicked back the usual one-third of his bond referrals. Buying judgments was the next logical step. In time, he became as avaricious as the others, but he was no longer proud of himself.

  Kessler usually worked out of the small courts in the old police headquarters but would go halfway across the city to the Criminal Courts Building when the price was right. One day a policeman called the prosecutors’ office and asked me to reinstate one of Kessler’s cocaine possession cases before Olson.

  Since the officer worked on the Far North Side, near my Evanston apartment, I had him bring me copies of the reports that night. As he reenacted the arrest in my living room, I could tell the case should not have been dismissed. When I refiled the case, Kessler told me his client would plead guilty if I dismissed the gun charge and sought probation for cocaine possession. Instead, I offered special probation for the cocaine charge, and two days in jail for gun possession. As for my reason, I mentioned that I hated guns and lied by saying the arresting officer was pressuring me for jail time.

  Kessler refused my offer and presented a motion to suppress the evidence, instead.

  Since Olson felt that he should have “paid his respects,” the judge thought his ruling would teach him a lesson. Hardly letting Peter speak, Olson rejected the motion and left the outcome to me. Kessler decided to bribe me by sending Costello as his bagman.