Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  Since I was an FBI agent now, I couldn’t devote all my time to Greylord, and so I went on my first raid. I joined hundreds of agents from the Bureau and the IRS for a briefing downtown, then we fanned out to various strip joints where a lot more than stripping was going on. I suppose helping to make mass arrests was important, but it wasn’t what I preferred to do.

  Cathy had left private practice to work in the State’s Attorney’s Office. She enjoyed the challenge and excitement of handling prosecutions in the northern suburbs, and she had gone on maternity leave only because the August heat was swelling her ankles.

  Finally Christine arrived—blonde, blue-eyed, and the first girl born into the Hake family in sixty years. Still feeling dejected from the Laurie acquittal, I looked at the baby in my arms and thought, Don’t let the world get you down, Christine. Always do the right thing.

  After Laurie’s acquittal, court bailiff Alan Kaye came to trial. I never had dealings with Kaye and was not involved in discussions on whether the evidence was strong enough against him. Testimony showed that he alone of our list of targets was just a loud-mouthed rainmaker. No one ever accused Kaye of being an upright citizen—his own attorney called him “reprehensible”—but witnesses made it clear that none of the money he took ever reached a judge. It came as no surprise when U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur found him innocent of the specific charges but suggested that Kaye “need not go unpunished.” Less than a year later, he was sentenced to five years in prison on state charges of extorting money from lawyers in the same cases.

  But that came too late to help prosecutors in what reporters considered a period of disgrace for Operation Greylord. A few days after Kaye’s acquittal, a Chicago Tribune editorial cautioned that we should be extremely selective in future prosecutions and “nail each one down tight instead of gambling on a big score.”

  Indeed, a third acquittal would make Greylord look like a ridiculous waste of time and taxpayers’ money, so we took additional measures preparing the case against Judge John “Dollars” Devine. I was asked to transcribe every word spoken on my tapes against him, even if it concerned the weather. This way, the jurors would be able to study the conversations more easily.

  Devine had recently been voted out of office by the Cook County court system’s full circuit court judges largely because of Greylord disclosures. The alcoholic jurist also was rejected by his ex-wife, his son, and nearly all his relatives. Devine tried to open a law practice but couldn’t attract clients because of the “heat,” so he managed a small bar, selling beer a few blocks from the Traffic Court where he had once sold justice.

  Because of his combination of avarice and contempt for the lawyers who bought his decisions, “Dollars” was considered the slimiest of our targets. What he needed was the very best defense, someone who might be able to throw the jury’s attention completely away from the evidence and his abrasive personality.

  The former judge hired Edward Genson (pronounced JEN-son), known for his merciless cross-examinations. “Terry,” one of the lawyers in the prosecution office told me, “if you don’t watch out, he’ll tear you to shreds.” Watch out for what, I wondered—after all, I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Dan Reidy himself and Assistant U.S. Attorney Candace Fabri, put me through a grueling mock cross-examination in Reidy’s office to get me ready for whatever questions Genson might throw at me. But, as I was to learn, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  The trial was heard in front of U.S. District Judge Susan Getzendanner, the first woman on the federal bench in northern Illinois. Getzendanner was tall and attractive with long blonde hair, and had been first in her class at Loyola law school. She read spy novels for relaxation and would relieve proceedings with light remarks about the meandering questions of attorneys and their knee-jerk objections.

  The high-priced defense attorney appearing before her was a moderately plump man of average height with curly red hair and light skin. Genson’s medical problems had him walking with a cane but, strangely, the limp seemed more pronounced in front of the jurors. His strategy in the Devine trial was not to attack the weakest link in the chain of evidence but what the prosecution considered its strongest one, me.

  In corridor chit-chat before the trial began, Genson apologized to me for what he was about to put me through. Of course he didn’t want me to hate him personally, but I also think he wanted to psych me out by making me tighten up. I already liked him in a distant way but made sure none of the jurors saw us having a friendly conversation. Let them believe he was a monster. I could play games, too.

  One of the first prosecution witnesses was Peter Kessler, the unexpected wild card in Greylord. He told of bribing Devine in his chambers, and explained that lawyers at Auto Theft Court in police headquarters commonly carried around several hundred dollars for court workers on the take. He added that in one year, bond referrals from Devine made up eighty-five percent of his income from auto thieves. These cash bond referrals totaled twenty-six thousand dollars, minus one-third for the judge. As for why he had started handing over a cut, Peter said, “There is no doubt in my mind that I was being shaken down by Judge Devine.”

  Under Genson’s questioning, Kessler admitted violating oaths “on numerous occasions” as a fixer.

  “Sir,” Genson bit in, “so long as you testify consistent to what the government’s belief is, you won’t be indicted for perjury. Isn’t that right?”

  “No, that’s not right at all.”

  “That house you had in Highland Park, it’s up for sale for, what, for half a million dollars?”

  “No.”

  “How much?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has to do with what you would have lost in August of 1983 [when news of Greylord broke out] if you had to go to jail, sir.”

  “We could live in an apartment…. My family was my main concern.”

  Genson tried to press the point but the prosecution objected. Even so, he had Peter admit that Devine stopped him from hustling outside Auto Theft Court. The questioning never made clear that this was done to make him more dependent on referrals from the crooked judge. Kessler also admitted that Devine was an abrupt, stubborn, and hot-tempered man in a courtroom, a strange line of questioning until you heard what came next.

  Pressuring Peter on bribes he was handing to other judges, Genson said, “Sir, you had a gold mine down on the eighth floor [of police headquarters]…. Of all the judges that you named [as being on the take], sir, you got Devine who extorted you, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Because you didn’t like him, right?”

  “Not because I don’t like him.”

  Genson noted that Devine was indicted on forty-nine counts, including “for each and every one” of the bond referral checks the government contended Peter had split with him, yet Peter was indicted for just one of those transactions. Genson quickly moved on to the practice of hallway hustling and suggested that such lawyers won acquittals not from bribes but by knowing the “idiosyncrasies” of the judges.

  Closing in for the kill, Genson tried to use our witness against us by referring to the period after Kessler came over to our side but when I was still representing undercover FBI agents. “There was nothing wrong with Hake putting on this man to tell a lie under oath, is that right, sir, as an experienced lawyer in the criminal court system?” Genson asked sarcastically.

  “There definitely is a lot wrong with that.”

  “But he told you he was going to do it,” Genson continued. “He told you it wasn’t the truth, and you said to him, ‘The truth doesn’t matter.’”

  “Because I told him, based on what the system is like, the truth doesn’t matter … as far as the outcome of the case is concerned.”

  “Sir, if the truth doesn’t matter, telling a man to lie under oath in a courtroom, sir, is certainly less important to you than your family and your ability to get out of jail by telling a story, isn’t tha
t right?”

  “I never told him to have anybody lie in court under oath…. The truth is very important today, the truth is very important yesterday, the truth is always important, Mr. Genson.”

  When the defense attorney had no further questions, Chuck Sklarsky called Mark Ciavelli to the stand.

  Mark told of bribing Devine personally and seeing him put the money in his pocket. Mark also said he had never taken a bribe as a prosecutor, but he began handing money out soon after he became a defense attorney and had cases before Devine. Genson’s assistant, Alan Blumenthal, asked, “Is it fair to say to you that when you left the State’s Attorney’s Office, you knew you were going into a corrupt practice?”

  After a hesitation, Mark sadly answered, “I guess I will say yes to that.”

  He admitted bribing prosecutors, police officers, and deputy sheriffs but not necessarily for specific cases. He made clear that he would do that so they would be receptive to him in the future.

  Such practices were new to the jurors, but it was a pattern we all had seen repeatedly in the courts: the judge mistreats a young prosecutor or defense attorney to set himself up for cash, and in time the lawyer learns to pass money around to corrupt everyone else, even before any services are needed. Then many of those corrupted lawyers become judges, and the carousel of greed continues uninterrupted and everybody has a good time. Until the reckoning.

  Payoffs and kickbacks were so pervasive that Mark said that it wasn’t until “the heat came on” with an article about hallway hustlers in 1981 that he fully realized the illegality of what he had been doing. “I looked at myself in the mirror one day and said, ‘Hey, I have to get out of this activity,’ and I took steps to get out of the activity. I knew it was morally wrong.”

  Mark couldn’t force himself to use the word “bribery” or admit that the government had pressured him to flip.

  The balding defense attorney asked Mark what he had thought about me while I was still an assistant prosecutor and he was a defense attorney. “Hake was a kind of boyish-looking young man, is that correct?”

  “Boyish, yes, yes.”

  “You perceived him as being somewhat naive?” Blumenthal asked.

  “I did.”

  “You know now that he wasn’t naive, don’t you, sir?”

  “I know now that he is an FBI agent,” Mark said.

  “Your good friend Terry Hake, that slept over at your house, he was recording you, wasn’t he?”

  “That he was.”

  “And he was reporting on paper [in FBI reports] everything that happened, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes, he was. Yes, sir.”

  Blumenthal asked whether he had suspected I was working for the government when the Greylord disclosures were made. Mark had never been at a loss for words, but now Genson’s assistant and the jurors were staring at him, waiting for an answer.

  “I suspected that he was the agent [mole] and I probably knew in my heart that he was the agent, and I tried to deny the fact that he was an agent, hoping that that would—he was not the agent…. I tried to live on with my life thinking that: Hope to God that the thing would go away and that I would not have these problems and he would not be an agent and everything would turn up [all right].”

  Mark admitted that some of our recorded conversations concerned his wedding plans and buying gifts for his bridal party. None of this had anything to do with Judge Devine, but the defense wanted the jury to picture me as cold-hearted even before I took the stand.

  Court rules had kept me from sitting in on Mark’s testimony, and I know it now only from transcripts. Yet as I sat in the witness room, I could imagine what sort of questions would be facing me. A bailiff opened the door, and then I walked out and took the oath.

  I told the jurors how Devine advised me to see his bagman, Harold Conn, when I tried to make a direct bribe. Next I explained how a year and a half later the judge personally accepted a one-hundred-dollar payoff from me in a corridor of the Traffic Court Building. The prosecution played a tape in which I asked, over background conversations and the sounds of shuffling feet, “Is one okay?” and Devine answered “Yeah, sure.”

  After Chuck Sklarsky as one of the prosecutors questioned me for two days, Genson took over for what would be my three days on the hot seat. He began by asking whether I knew when I taped a conversation that it would be played before my supervisors, a judge, and a jury. “You were in effect on stage at that point, weren’t you, sir?”

  “I don’t think I was ‘on stage.’”

  “Well, sir, you were making those recordings for the purpose of memorializing what you hoped to be an illegal transaction on that day?”

  “Not for what I hoped to be illegal transactions.”

  Regarding the time I gave Conn a bribe to pass on, Genson asked, “Did you go back to Judge Devine and say, ‘Did you get the hundred and fifty dollars I gave you?’”

  “No, I didn’t feel it was necessary.”

  Genson went on to ask about favors I did by dropping charges against a few narcotics defendants early in Greylord. “And the dope peddler, he would go free, right?”

  “That wasn’t my purpose.”

  “But he would, just as a side issue.”

  “Yes, he would go free. Yes.”

  “You did … on numerous occasions instruct agents to lie under oath at various of these FBI-created cases, is that correct, sir?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. But I quickly explained that this did not constitute subordination of perjury because it was part of my undercover role.

  As he had me describe summer working conditions at Devine’s stuffy Auto Theft Court, I admitted telling a lawyer that the judge was “scum.”

  “So we didn’t have the most impartial of FBI agents going in on July 6, 1981, to Traffic Court with Mr. Benson [the name used by an undercover agent], did we?”

  Having made his point, Genson said to an objection from Sklarsky, “I’ll withdraw the question. It’s easier than arguing.”

  Instead he went into my friendship with Mark. As he spoke, I separated a little from myself and could almost see how Genson wanted to portray me. This helped me couch my answers, but I could feel the energy I needed flow out of me.

  “He confided in you?” Genson asked.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Even though you had the FBI money when you went into practice, you took some of his office furnishings?” Genson’s eyes twinkled with mischief.

  “He lent me two chairs.”

  “Did you ever give them back?”

  “No, I haven’t given them back yet.”

  Taking another tack, he asked, “Didn’t you encourage him to go bribe Judge Olson?”

  “I don’t think [I did] outright, but I suggested it, yes.” Since I could reply only to what had been asked, I could not explain that it was Mark who said I should introduce him to Judge Olson so they could work out an arrangement on a PCP case.

  “Basically what you did say to him was … that he should bribe Judge Olson, didn’t you, sir? … Didn’t you say, ‘What are you going to do if his eyes are going to bulge?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you suggested that maybe you shouldn’t introduce him, he should go through Costello.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he says he doesn’t want to do that, and you said, ‘Well, he’s back there now, do you want me to introduce you to him’ or anything like that? Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your conversation, you make no attempt to discourage your good friend, the one who talks to you about his wedding and baby, from bribing or attempting to bribe the judge, did you, sir?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “And would that have influenced or hurt your role as a law enforcement officer of the FBI if you had told your friend, ‘Look, just stop all this and start practicing law the right way’? You wouldn’t have had to uncover your identity by doing that, would you, sir?”

 
“No. But it would have been wrong for me to let it go by my eyes, too, Mr. Genson, as a law enforcement officer.”

  Judge Getzendanner apparently noticed from my slowing responses that I was wearing down and called for a fifteen-minute recess. We all could have used some water and a chance to walk around. When we returned to our places, Genson picked up a new thread by portraying Judge Devine as an innocent man in a corrupt world.

  Referring to the “catch phrases” that fixers used, such as “see you later” as meaning I’ll pay you a bribe, he asked, “Doesn’t that assume that the person you’re talking to knows the code?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you end a conversation with Ciavelli saying, ‘Talk to you later’; Hake saying, ‘See you later’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you mean you were going to pay him any money?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Genson apparently was disappointed that I wasn’t unnerved when he had practically accused me of stabbing Mark in the back. He kept asking rambling questions as if trying to find a foothold until Judge Getzendanner recessed the trial for the day.

  I felt as little relieved as a boxer sitting on his stool between rounds, knowing that he has to go back and get slugged some more. I couldn’t enjoy looking at the changing fall colors as I drove home or even spending the evening with my family.

  When I took the stand the next morning, I was fresher but so was Genson. He played tapes of conversations over again and hammered away at minor points until all of us were uneasy.

  Admonished for his hostile tone, Genson promised the judge that henceforth he would “unantagonize” his voice. But he became abruptly accusatory when it came to the second time I tried to bribe Devine. “The fact of the matter is, at that time you were an agent trying to make a case, is that right?” he asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “You were trying to inculpate Judge Devine in a crime, is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did Judge Devine say, ‘Go give Harold [Conn] some money?’”