Operation Greylord (19 page)

But no one will ever know how many other cases were fixed in that court. Two years after our rigged hearing, the FBI learned from a neighbor near McCollum's summer home in Wisconsin that after a federal grand jury had subpoenaed his financial records, his wife had dumped the contents of several bulging garbage bags into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and set them on fire. The FBI crime laboratory in Washington determined that ashes obtained by search warrant had been made from check paper. Under questioning, McCollum couldn't give a convincing account of why he had obliterated a trove of cancelled checks. FBI agents Jim Leu and Doug Lenhardt then began an intensive investigation of McCollom when served as chief judge of Traffic Court, which found numerous arts or bribery by him in DUI cases. He eventually pleaded guilty to bribery and tax violations, and was sentenced to eleven years in prison. This saved his wife from prison for destroying subpoenaed documents.

It was now time to go after Ray Sodini, perhaps the laziest judge in the system.

JUDGE RAY SODINI

Sodini, son of hard-working immigrants, presided over a courtroom of hobos, shoplifters, and street gamblers, and never took his responsibilities seriously. The previous year he had pulled off a stunt that remains a classic in Chicago jurisprudence. Awakening with a hangover, he knew he wouldn't get to court on time. So he called a policeman who was near retirement age, Cy Martin, and asked the officer to sit in for him.
Martin had no legal training and didn't even resemble the judge, but he enjoyed being in on a good joke.

The officer showed up at the judge's chambers, put on Sodini's robe, and found himself facing perhaps a hundred derelicts rounded up in the nightly sweep of the streets. “My object was to get them out,” he would say later, “so when other people came in, there would be a little dignity in the courtroom. I think the bailiff swore them in all at the same time, and I kept hitting the gavel over and over to clear the courtroom as fast as possible.” No one was punished for the switch.

On March 23, 1982, I met Officer Joe Trunzo at the employees' entrance of Traffic Court and talked about fixing a shoplifting case coming before Sodini. Joe left me to make a phone call. He came back and said it was done, and that I shouldn't talk to the judge or anyone else. After Sodini disposed of the case later that day, Joe led me to a stairway for the payoff.

“Okay, how much?” I asked.

“Two for the judge.”

I handed over two of my one-hundred-dollar bills, a fixer's pocket change. Then I gave him two fifties for him to split with his brother, also involved in the fix. On top of that, I offered Joe twenty dollars more for himself. “Here,” I said, “this is for being a super guy.” I was hoping he would become my pipeline to more judges.

The Center Cannot Hold

The following day I returned to our “crime academy” as usual. Since the FBI agents and I needed to set up offenses that would bring undercover agents before certain judges, we plotted a robbery outside Water Tower Place, a spotless vertical mall with an atrium and a glass elevator sliding through several levels of upscale small shops. Since I was just one of several people involved in the planning, the agents didn't need me to carry it off when it occurred, and I decided to take a little time off.

We were feeling good about ourselves. No investigation in American history had obtained evidence against so many judges on the take, and it seemed that we would be able to charge virtually all of the corrupt ones we had learned about. But Greylord was about to come to an end sooner than any of us expected.

For my vacation I accompanied Cathy, now my fiancée, on her trip to the national mock trials finals in Houston. She was proud that her team of law students represented the entire Midwest.

At around noon on Thursday of that week, a black agent going by the name of Jesse Clugman hailed a cab across from Water Tower Place and an agent posing as a thief grabbed his bag. “Clugman” ran after the “thief,” Mark Langer*, then tackled him in the crowd and they scuffled. A shopper kept whacking at the “thief” with her purse until two officers arrived and arrested him. One of the FBI agents posing as a passerby immediately slipped away and called the office to say the bogus robbery had gone as planned. But then all hell broke loose.

A routine police search at the scene turned up not only a driver's license with Langer's phony name, Mark McKee, but also his FBI badge and photo credentials, which were in his jacket pocket. “What's this?” asked the officer.

Instead of answering, Langer, who was white, made racial threats at “Clugman” while putting on a distracting show of strange faces and puckering his lips almost like a chimpanzee. The distraction worked, and the police didn't know what kind of madman they had on their hands. They conducted the two agents to a police station in separate squad cars.

Langer continued his wildman act until another undercover agent showed up with bond money, but police thought it was strange that “Clugman” had declined to press charges against his attacker. Police later called the agent's phony apartment and received no answer. They went through their thick book of Chicago phone numbers listed by address rather than by name and called people at the building. No one knew of a “Clugman” or any other black man living there.

There was never any love lost between the FBI and the Chicago police, and the officers were happy to see that one and possibly two FBI agents had been brought in for what appeared to be a botched undercover case. Acting on their own, individual officers apparently began making anonymous calls to newspapers and TV stations, and the FBI office responded by issuing statements designed to cloud the situation.

While this was going on in Chicago, Cathy and I drove to Galveston to visit the sandy beaches and fishing piers along the Gulf of Mexico. We were in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop when I read the Saturday edition of the
Houston Chronicle
. A brief story told of a Water Tower Place robbery in which both victim and offender turned out to be FBI agents. My heart felt as if it had stopped.
It's finished
, I thought, and handed the paper over to Cathy. “Look at this,” I said.

“They can't call it off, can they?”

“I don't know what they're going to do,” I answered.

I should have lamented that the bungled set-up would mean that perhaps dozens of rotten police officers, court clerks, lawyers, and judges might never be brought to justice, since our evidence against them was still preliminary. But, being human, my first worry was that I would have to turn in my new Pontiac 6000.

I went back to my motel and kept calling the FBI office in Chicago. Finally I reached Megary and asked what the plans were now.

“We're going to have to shut down for a while,” he answered quietly.

“How could they do something like that, after all we've gone over with these guys, over and over!”

“It was the weather.”

“What?” I thought I had misunderstood.

“It got cold just before our guy went out, so he took a heavier jacket. He forgot that's the one with his credentials. That's not going to happen again, Terry. I want your people to start keeping their revolvers and credentials locked in a safe before they go out. I'm also going to see that everyone gets searched for anything that can be traced to us, including government pencils. Don't worry, the cops still don't know anything about us. We'll redirect this thing somehow.”

“Don't worry”—the words were as wasted as telling a jury to disregard what they had just heard.

I don't think any of us could sleep for some time. Then one of the Greylord supervisors decided to create a false news leak. Certain reporters who commonly received tips from federal sources were told that the agent arrested had been involved in an undercover probe of possible police corruption, a situation that was entirely plausible since a commander in the district had already been convicted of taking payoffs from bar owners. The ruse made what the press called an “Abscam-like operation” seem localized, diverting attention away from the courts.

Greylord gained steam again, but the organizers decided after the Water Tower Place fiasco that as soon as any undercover agent was sentenced to jail they would shut down the entire operation and seek indictments against everyone we had solid evidence against.

Summer 1982

We still had to stay cautious to see if the misinformation campaign had worked. But we were not idle, we just kept our eyes and ears open as we
went on with our work. Only when no one behaved differently toward Ries and me by mid-summer did we feel it was safe to go ahead.

Cathy by now had graduated from law school, and we were planning an August wedding. I had already called Mark Ciavelli and brought up as if in passing that I couldn't invite him because we were having only a small reception. I knew I couldn't send an invitation to any of my friends from the FBI or the U.S. Attorney's Office, and the only one I really wanted to ask from the bribery underworld was Costello.

Cathy was always pleasant and understanding, but now she became insistent. “There's no way I'm going to have that man at my wedding.”

“I sincerely like Jim,” I said, “and he's going through a bad time.”

“I don't care.”

“He's expecting an invitation—it would be good for my cover.”

“I don't want him to ruin my day, Terry. He's a
criminal
.”

While I was wondering how to tell Costello, he brought the subject up on his own. As we were talking over the phone two weeks before the wedding, he said, “Well, I checked the mail today and it wasn't there.”

“What wasn't?” I asked.

“My invitation to your wedding. You're gonna invite me, aren't you?” There was hurt in his voice.

“Jim, I'm sorry, but Cathy's mother is paying for it, and she's keeping it to the family only.”

“Okay. What the hell, I'll send you a present.”

In a way, I was glad he forgot to. The present would only have been a reminder of the friendships I had to break. Besides, it would only have gone in the FBI evidence vault.

We held the nuptials on a surprisingly cool day for a Chicago summer. Both Cathy and I came from large, close families and we couldn't force ourselves to cut the guest list shorter than one hundred and fifty. The ceremony was performed at Faith, Hope and Charity Church, the Winnetka parish where Cathy had been raised. She sweet-talked the priest into holding a small champagne pre-reception in the church garden, where our guests grouped for pictures.

After the ceremony everyone drove to a country club for dinner. I tried not to be self-conscious about dancing with Cathy although I felt the pressure of all those eyes on the back of my neck. Undercover work was easier.

For our honeymoon we drove to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, where we stayed at the historic Chateau Frontenac, then headed back
through Maine. The land of rugged pines and clear streams had given me a sense of freedom. But once we returned to the urban sprawls, I could feel myself tensing up. I was never a machine manufactured to FBI specifications, and my brain and my body were threatening to shut down.

After a few days back in Chicago, I realized from a fresh viewpoint how unsettled our investigation had become. Two news reports of an investigation in as many years meant that anything could give us away. While we still could, we had to start going after a few corruptors within our reach.

October 1982

OFFICER JAMES LEFEVOUR and JUDGE MARTIN HOGAN

In Officer Jimmy LeFevour's capacity as chief bagman in the First Municipal District—Chicago—he kept himself busy delivering bribes to judges in the Gun, Auto Theft, Women's, and Gambling Courts. We put him at the top of our list of new targets. But “Dogbreath” wasn't as easy to fool as the Trunzo brothers, or as obvious as fellow bagman Harold Conn. Unless I had an introduction to him, he would never trust me. This set me on a long, roundabout route in which I had to work with past targets and bribe another judge just to reach him.

We started by plotting a car theft that would let us trace a bribe from my hand to Jimmy LeFevour and then to Judge Martin Hogan. This meant buying a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra. Not only did we pull the ignition to make the auto appear hot-wired, we left pliers clamped in place to make it harder for Hogan to find an excuse for dismissing the case.

An undercover agent then called the police to say he had overhead someone in a pancake house at Diversey and Western attempting to sell a classy stolen auto parked outside. Police set up a surveillance at the busy North Side intersection until an undercover agent in street clothes climbed in the car and sped off. In a minute, the officers curbed him and asked for identification. The agent, posing as a Californian named Richard Duran, said he couldn't account for the car or the pliers hanging on the ignition. They put him under arrest, and I came in as his shady lawyer.

Then I found attorney Peter Kessler prowling the aisles looking for clients during a recess of sleazy Gambling Court in police headquarters.
“Can I ask you something?” I spoke quietly, in my shady tone. He waved me to an empty courtroom. “I got this auto theft case,” I began, “and I don't know anybody else real well in the building. My client—let's face it, the case is a dead bang loser.”

“Plea for probation,” Peter said with a shrug.

“My client's a car thief, probation would kill him. The case is up before Hogan. I had another case with him I handled through the Trunzos. They screwed me around so much, I don't want that to happen again. So I was thinking—is Jimmy LeFevour more reliable?”

“Yeah,” Kessler answered, “but he's a fucking hog.”

Good, I thought, Peter's going to give me something on tape about Jimmy. I was wearing a new recorder, this one in stereo to pick up more sounds. But having a mike taped against each shoulder meant I was doubling my risk of discovery. Kessler startled me by saying, “I presume you're not wired.”