Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  The courtrooms were those of Arthur Zelezinski, who was honest, and Olson, now in Divorce Court. I was relieved the investigation had nothing to do with Greylord, but the snooping was bound to increase the suspicions of fixers and crooked judges.

  So I angrily called Dan Reidy, the architect of the operation, and asked how the U.S. Attorney’s Office could have issued the subpoena so soon after my leaving the state prosecutor’s office. “Wasn’t the U.S. Attorney’s Office thinking?” I asked. “This is bound to bring the heat on me and everyone else. It’s absolutely stupid.”

  “Terry, you’re right,” Reidy said, “you better be careful in the next couple of weeks. But we couldn’t just stop work at our end, either. We needed those records for the Charles Wilson case.” Wilson was accused of running a curbside drug operation with the tacit knowledge of ten Chicago policemen.

  But I didn’t give a damn. If there was a serious flaw in Greylord, this was it. Until that morning, all the corruptors had opened their doors to me. But by nature they were sharp and distrustful, and I was sure they would never treat me the same again, if only because I was the newest member of their club.

  Costello called my apartment the next day to arrange a face-to-face talk. “I think my phone is being tapped,” he explained.

  All I could do was put his fears to rest and discuss weather, sports, movies, anything that came to my head to make sure we stayed friends. As soon as I could, I notified Bill Megary of the meeting, and he told me not to wear the body recorder at the meeting because the situation might be getting dangerous.

  I was prepared for anything when I showed up at the Criminal Courts Building that Tuesday—except for what Costello had wanted me there for. He didn’t pat me down, he didn’t confront me; all he did was talk about his family problems. “We gotta go to my house,” the towering hustler said. “That asshole dating my Jackie smashed two of my windows. I wanna file a report and get the fucker arrested.”

  His daughter’s steady boyfriend had broken the windows of the house in revenge for Costello’s drunken attack on his car, in which Jim slashed tires, shattered windows, and poured a package of sugar into the gas tank. In passing, Jim mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about possible indictments against fixers. He explained that he had listed all his bond referral money on his tax returns, but I knew that wasn’t true because he had given me rundowns on how much he was keeping back. He kept a lot of that money in a basement shoebox.

  By now I was coming to understand the fixer mentality. The reason Costello wasn’t scared by the new investigation was that he refused to realize his crimes might someday catch up with him, not when there were bigger fish out there such as Olson and Silverman.

  We went to Costello’s comfortable home and a police officer filled out a vandalism report. Jim tipped him twenty dollars for his trouble. About an hour later we drove to the district station to learn whether the boyfriend had been arrested yet. As I waited by the front desk, Jim went to the tactical unit and gave four officers two hundred dollars to split as an inducement to put the boyfriend behind bars. It never occurred to Costello that some people might do their job without a payoff.

  Over the next two weeks I occasionally dropped by the courthouse to stay in touch and pretend I was busy even though I was still on what amounted to a government-imposed vacation. One day while I was waiting in a corridor to meet Costello for lunch, a half-familiar voice said something that for nearly a year I had been afraid I might hear: “Hey, Terry, I hear you’re working for the FBI.”

  I turned and saw Jim McCarron, a defense attorney I had known from my work in the chief judge’s office. What does he know, I wondered. “That’s not true,” I said. Everything around me seemed unreal.

  “You leave, and a week later the subpoenas came down,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s a coincidence?”

  “I never gave it a thought. Who were you talking to?”

  “Costello,” McCarron lied, as it turned out.

  “Don’t believe what you hear, it’s bull.”

  “Yeah,” McCarron said.

  I told myself that he must have been fishing. But not two minutes after he left, court sergeant Bob Shuksta came by and said, “I hear you’re an undercover agent.”

  He was smiling, and I forced myself to grin back. “Some joke,” I tossed at him. “Who’s been saying that?”

  “Drozd, he’s telling everybody.” The officer was referring to gang crimes investigator Robert Drozd.

  “He’s a little early for April Fool,” I said. “Tell him I don’t think it’s so funny.”

  I wanted to run out of the courthouse, afraid I might have to act like a human pinball by bouncing from accuser to accuser to deny everything. But I had to dawdle in the hallway until Costello finished his cases. As usual, we headed for an Italian restaurant.

  “You know, Jim, there’s been some talk about my working for the G,” I said as he drove.

  “That’s just crazy talk,” he said. “We all know you.”

  There was some advantage to my boyish appearance. Just as I didn’t look like a fixer, I certainly didn’t look or sound like an undercover agent. “Drozd has been mouthing off. Know anything about it?”

  “Nah. I heard McCarron went to see Fitz [Chief Judge Richard Fitzgerald] to find out if hustlers were going to get tossed out of the building. That’s all.”

  “Some things aren’t funny, you know.” Since there is no FBI manual for moles, you’ve got to wrestle by yourself with each situation. I was shivering in the winter cold, and yet if I had been carrying a recorder under my armpit it would have been wet with perspiration by now.

  “McCarron was just testing you, Ter. Hell, you know how it is. At 26th and Cal, you can start a rumor about anybody and it’s all over the building before the day is out.”

  “Maybe we should start a rumor about Drozd and see how he likes it.”

  I kept telling myself the gossip would die on its own. But by now I knew a real fixer would never wait it out—such suspicion would put him out of business. So I called Drozd at home and told him as nicely as I could that he was being unfair to me as a young lawyer just starting on his own.

  “I’m sorry, Terry,” he said, “it was a joke. I didn’t think people would really believe it.”

  “Lies are the only thing that people believe around here.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t a lie, I didn’t mean it.”

  I couldn’t come down too hard because Drozd was a good cop. He and his partner, Mike Cronin, had made more arrests than anyone else in the gangs unit. Drozd was always joking around in his nonstop talking, even while making arrests, and he often said things just to be amusing without thinking about them.

  When I called Megary about the rumor, I said, “You’ve got to do something right away to make it seem like I’m actively in private practice.” It wasn’t a request. I was so concerned about what the fixers and the honest court workers were thinking that I was losing touch myself. They’re going to see through it, I thought.

  Just then Alice Carpenter told me by phone that she had been talking to a public defender recently transferred from Traffic Court. Her voice changed when she added that there was a new rumor going around, this one about an FBI investigation in the municipal courts downtown. That could have referred to undercover agent David Victor Ries’ work for Greylord. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “How would I know anything like that?” I said, and changed the subject.

  I couldn’t tell whether Alice suspected I might be involved in the investigation, or was trying to warn me that the feds could be looking over my shoulder.

  13

  WEB OF CORRUPTION

  Early Spring 1981

  The courtrooms for traffic offenses and city code violations had kept their jerry-rigged look in an aging former warehouse for generations. Here was where most new judges were assigned, their robes and gavels just out of the box. Outside every room was a long line of middle-class and blue-collar
workers impatiently waiting for an adjudication.

  This was the domain of Chief Traffic Court Judge Richard LeFevour, who had turned many of the courts into schools for corruption and used his policeman cousin as a bagman. How Judge LeFevour accomplished this can be seen in the case of Judge Brian Crowe, a former U.S. Marine hearing drunken driving cases eight months after being sworn in. Officer James LeFevour stopped him as he was carrying his robe, name plate, and law books down the hall. James—called “Jingles” because of all the change he rattled as a nervous habit, and called “Dogbreath” out of earshot—slipped a piece of paper into the reassigned judge’s pocket. Crowe thought it might be a phone message, but it turned out to be a one-hundred-dollar bill. “You son of a bitch,” Crowe fumed, “don’t you ever do that again!”

  Crowe had just flunked Judge LeFevour’s corruption test. From then on, despite all his intelligence and legal acumen, he was assigned to preside only over minor cases. But at the same time, Judge LeFevour was boasting at speaking engagements that his daily rotation of judicial assignments had ended an era of bribery. In reality, the courts were filling up with greedy judges until the high-towered red brick building mirrored LeFevour’s contemptuous philosophy that justice was another name for plunder.

  Piecing together reports from my work in the criminal courts on the city’s West Side and FBI agent David Victor Ries’ posing as a fixer in the municipal courts in the large Near North Side Traffic Court Building, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was learning that Olson’s greed was paltry compared to LeFevour’s. The judge, in charge of all city courts, lacked Olson’s congeniality and sense of humor but had a genius for administration.

  The glacial, gaunt jurist was so pumped up with self-importance that he held a private screening of the 1981 film Prince of the City for fellow judges, lawyers, and State’s Attorney Daley. At the end of the movie about New York police bribery and corrupt attorneys, LeFevour gave a sanctimonious speech about how dishonesty must be rooted out if it was ever found in Chicago.

  One of the more chilling aspects of Operation Greylord arose from speculation about LeFevour’s political connections from the days of the late mayor Richard J. Daley and Chicago labor leader William Lee. At Lee’s insistence, LeFevour was considered a possible candidate for a federal judgeship but Mayor Daley, who wielded national influence, died before an opening became available. If the mayor had lived a little longer, or the opening came a little sooner, LeFevour would have been presiding over the eventual trials of lawyers he now had in his pocket.

  Agent Ries by then was calling himself by his middle name, Victor, because of gossip that a “Dave” was trying to collect evidence in the Traffic Court Building, where he was learning that some judges were taking up to two hundred dollars to dismiss cases.

  The corrosion didn’t stop at bribes. Presiding judge LeFevour found a way to steal from the city as well. Warrant unit policemen Robinson McLain and Art McCauslin helped him pocket thousands of dollars in parking ticket fees that never reached the city revenue department. But McCauslin was upset that LeFevour never cut him in on the cash. “Whatever comes in this office stays in this office,” the jurist insisted. “You make yours out there.”

  In the past, there were occasional ripples of reform. But no more. When magistrates Harry Kleper and Mel Kanter were dismissed for taking money to discharge defendants, they set up lucrative defense practices and made steady payoffs to judges. Then other lawyers wanted to follow their example, including Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph McDermott, who crossed over to begin defending drunken drivers. Kleper, Kanter, and McDermott became known throughout the court system as the “miracle workers” for seldom losing a case in Traffic Court. Traffic Court bribery became so pervasive that one bagman told a new judge, “If you’re out there, you’re going to make money, especially when we get control of the whole building.”

  That goal had been reached in January 1981, when Richard LeFevour was named chief judge for the entire First Municipal District, giving him control over more than seventy courtrooms in the misdemeanor branches of the city in addition to civil courts where the damages sought were under fifteen thousand dollars. He now controlled the largest division in the circuit court of Cook County, and this made him possibly the most important corrupt judge in the entire United States.

  With his new position, LeFevour moved a few blocks across the river to an office in the modern glass and steel Richard J. Daley Center near city hall. He appointed his first cousin Jimmy as the “court liaison” in charge of misdemeanor courts. In their expanded roles, the two men even found a way to turn a momentary crackdown to their advantage.

  A monthly newspaper called the Chicago Lawyer featured a lengthy article about hustlers like Kessler and Costello. The information had been gathered by defense attorney Keith Davis, a Lutheran clergyman who had embarked on a private moral crusade. Working with the Better Government Association, Davis showed how certain judges steered clients to fixers in minor branches such as Shoplifting Court. The chief judge of the entire circuit court system, Harry Comerford, told Richard LeFevour that the article was an embarrassment. Judge LeFevour promised to deal with the hustlers. But he did it in his own way by calling in “Dogbreath” and saying, “Jimmy, there is a lot of money out there.”

  Whether they then worked out strategy together or Jimmy just had an instinct for this sort of thing, the bagman rid all the hallways of hustlers to keep Comerford happy—and to show them what would happen in the future if they didn’t start paying off the new head of the First Municipal District. Next Jimmy took a month-long vacation, leaving the attorneys with no conduit for passing bribes to Judge LeFevour. Their law practices suffered from so many guilty verdicts that they had wads of bills for Jimmy when he returned.

  Now that bribery controlled the system, three lawyers working in the First Municipal District mapped out their territories. Attorney Edward Nydam, struggling against alcohol and drug problems, would work at Branch 29 in the police station at Belmont and Western. Fixers Vincent Davino and Lee Barnett would hustle in the Women’s, Auto Theft, and Gambling Courts at police headquarters. In return for these franchises, each man paid Judge LeFevour five hundred dollars a month.

  Two other hustlers at police headquarters, Peter Kessler and Neal Birnbaum, then notified judges on the take that they should start delivering monthly kickbacks to the chief judge through his bagman cousin, Officer Jimmy “Dogbreath” LeFevour. Since Judge Thaddeus Kowalski was honest, he was booted out of Branch 29 and replaced with one of LeFevour’s corrupt judges from Traffic Court, John Murphy. In April, Judge LeFevour collected his first twenty-five-hundred-dollar monthly payment from what was being called “the hustlers’ bribery club,” and he left six hundred dollars for “Dogbreath” as if throwing him a bone.

  And so it was that in just four months, Judge LeFevour had transformed the haphazard bribery of various branches into a systematized network with a portion of every transaction going to him. No wonder Nydam, Davino, Barnett, Birnbaum, and Kessler became the new “miracle workers.” Virtually all their cases were decided before trial.

  Such was the situation when an outside judge, young Brocton Lockwood, agreed to wear a wire—in one of his cowboy boots. Lockwood was a muscular outdoorsman from Marion County, three hundred and fifty miles to the south. He had first come to the big city because downstate judges must do stretches in Chicago’s Traffic Court every few years to ease the backlog. At the time, he didn’t even know what a bagman was. Shocked by what he saw on his return visit in 1981, Lockwood called the Justice Department in Washington because he felt he could not trust anyone in Chicago. The FBI saw this as a great opportunity to gather evidence augmenting the limited work their agent David Victor Ries had been able to do as a crooked defense attorney in the same building.

  After Lockwood’s stint he returned home, but agreed to come back if he could be of any help. Ries flew down to Marion County and they worked out a cover story. The judge, who was in his mid-thirt
ies, would introduce Ries to fixers as a former student at Southern Illinois University. Since setting everything up would take a while, Lockwood volunteered to take the Chicago time owed by all his fellow downstate judges in the district. Since he was recently divorced, he claimed he just liked the singles action in the toddlin’ town.

  So the judge boarded a train with his little daughter and took an apartment near the Traffic Court Building for an indefinite stay. Although the FBI would use several other moles in Operation Greylord, Lockwood and I were the only ones who gave up our careers for the investigation and remained in the trenches month after month.

  By then, FBI agent Lamar Jordan had been transferred from the Chicago office and Bill Megary took over for him. He helped the lean young judge through his early undercover work much as he and Jordan had guided me, including frequent meetings in a parking lot at the lakeshore museum campus. They never told Lockwood about me, but I knew about him. We never met until after the Greylord disclosures made national headlines.

  Even though Lockwood raised racehorses back home, he was not the adventure-seeker I was at heart. He was more laidback and admitted that he just might be a century behind the times, which was a good thing for us. Most of Lockwood’s family were preachers or teachers. Despite his education, Lockwood was regarded in court circles as a hick because of his Southern Illinois lilt, but he was smarter than most of the shady lawyers appearing before him.

  Even so, as an outsider he was unable to record conversations with many of the crooked lawyers and judges. At least he was successful in introducing Ries to a major bagman, gruff policeman Ira Blackwood, and to assistant city attorney Thomas Kangalos, in charge of prosecuting traffic violators. Blackwood had mob friends, and Kangalos was a hyperactive gin drinker who always packed a gun.

  Lockwood had to force himself to lie, and he even read spy novels to get in the proper frame of mind. His high school acting training helped him pose as a sometimes boozy womanizer who needed a lot of cash to keep up with his newly single lifestyle. Kangalos, like the devil on a mountaintop, showed the judge all the corruption he could share in. When Kangalos gave him his first bribe, the judge was still afraid that Greylord might backfire and he would wind up in prison, or worse.