Operation Greylord (20 page)

“What a hell of a thing to say! You know me, Peter.”

He reached out toward my shoulder. A year ago I might have panicked, but now I didn't flinch as his hand rested right on the tiny bulge over one of the wires.

“These days, no one knows,” Peter told me with a shallow laugh. “Hogan's a very cautious man. If it's a bad case [in which there is no pretext for a dismissal], I can tell you right now, he's just not going to do it. If there was something for him to hang his hat on, then it's a different story. He'll do it for the people he trusts.”

“I heard I've got to go to Jimmy LeFevour, but he doesn't know me.”

“I'll tell him you're okay.” That is, crooked.

“You know me, I don't want to put you to any trouble, Peter, it's just that I don't want to get screwed again.”

“I know how it is, Terry. Look, we do the best for our clients. Unfortunately you and I didn't set the rules.”

From any other fixer that would have been just self-justifying nonsense, but I knew that Kessler was sincerely telling me he hated being given the choice of paying a judge or failing to deliver as a defense attorney. As we learned later, he sometimes had sleepless nights over how he made his living.

After our talk, I left the boxy gray police building and pulled out of the parking lot. When I stopped for a red light, I noticed Judge Hogan's clerk standing on the curb. “Hello, Nick,” I called out. “You know,
I really appreciate you always calling my cases right away.” I reached out the window and slid five singles into his palm. The light turned green, and I took off. For all appearances, I was now scum on the way up.

So perhaps I really would look “dirty” to Jimmy LeFevour. When the day of our encounter came, October 14, I was jumpy even before leaving my apartment. This would be my deepest undercover penetration so far, for “Dogbreath” had a way of sniffing for trouble and was even more wary than fixer Bob Silverman or Judge “Dollars” Devine.

As I rode up the elevator to the police headquarters courtrooms, I still didn't know if Peter Kessler had spoken to Jimmy about me. A few minutes later I saw Peter in the hall and secretly turned on my recorder.

“Everything is cool,” Kessler assured me. “Let me talk to Jimmy and tell him you're all right.”

He left and came back to say, “This guy's expensive. To get you some real help, he wants a nickel. I told him five hundred bucks is a lot, but that's the going rate. Between you and I, he's the most dishonest person in the world.”

“What should I do, Peter—do I talk [deliver the bribe] to him or talk to you?”

“Whatever you want, makes no difference to me.”

“I think I better do it through him, all right?”

We found James LeFevour skulking near the tenth-floor stairwell. Peter led me over there and said, “Jim, this is a friend of mine, Terry Hake.” Kessler then walked off as if washing his hands of us. He hated Jimmy and was glad not to be part of our deal.

“Dogbreath” did not smile or offer me his hand to shake. Instead he callously asked, “What've you got?”

My palms were perspiring, and Jimmy impatiently jiggled his pocket change as I outlined the auto theft case. He didn't care about the facts, all he wanted was the name of the judge and whether I was aware how much our conversation was going to cost me.

Pointing to the bond slip I was holding, he asked, “How much is that?”

“A thousand.”

Jimmy explained that even if the case was thrown out because the witness failed to appear, it would still cost me “a nickel.”

“That's okay.”

“Find Kessler after it's over,” he said and moved on to other business.

A short time later Jimmy LeFevour went into Hogan's chambers and followed the unwritten rules against mentioning a bribe when talking about one. “Dogbreath” merely commented that his cousin, presiding judge Richard LeFevour, had “an interest in this case.”

“All right.” That was all Hogan said. The case was fixed.

Judge Hogan was a trim man in his late thirties with the demeanor of an accountant, his field before switching to law. He had been appointed to the bench a year before I joined Greylord and quickly let it be known that he could be bought. Hogan lived in a dream world of spending, including a cabin cruiser, yet he let his credit card bills and parking fines go unpaid because he thought they were not worth worrying about.

Hogan was less cautious than P.J. McCormick, with his “millions” of money orders. He eventually would tell a jury that the twenty thousand dollars he had spent freely one year was a gift from a steel executive rather than bribes from lawyers, and that he had kept the cash in a drawer at home for two years.

While Jimmy was in the judge's chambers, I was asking Hogan's clerk, Nick, for the papers on the case. Then I slipped a folded five-dollar bill into the file jacket and handed the file back to make sure my case was called early. I also sent home the “complaining witness,” a Las Vegas agent posing as the owner of the Olds. I had just learned casually that he originally was from the Chicago area, and I was afraid someone might recognize him.

As soon as the case was dismissed, I went to give Kessler the money as Jimmy LeFevour had instructed. But Peter didn't want to be in the middle again, and looked scared of having further dealings with the bagman. So I left him and found Jimmy sitting in Hogan's courtroom as other cases were being heard. He agreed to meet me in the hall.

Once we were in the corridor, Jimmy had me follow him to the washroom. The sticky floor tiles were littered with crumpled paper towels. The window had been painted shut, and the sink was cracked from some defendant's tantrum. Jimmy walked over to a stall where he wouldn't be seen by anyone coming in and wordlessly held out his hand.

“Sorry about the twenties,” I said as I gave him two one-hundreds and fifteen twenties. Whenever I could, I used small bills to stall for time and create conversation for the recorder. Just handing him money
without saying anything for the recorder would have meant nothing. I stiffened as the money left my hands.

“Have a nice day,” Jimmy said in a monotone as he pocketed the cash and brushed past me as if I were contemptible. Well, that wasn't any less than what my role deserved.

Then a cold thrill of intuition went through me: perhaps we could use Jimmy's antagonism toward his cousin to bring down one of the most important judges in the huge Cook County court system. I hurriedly caught up with the bagman in the hallway and said, “Thanks, Jim.”

“Any time.”

“Are you available for anywhere in the First Municipal District?” This covered all the municipal courts in Chicago.

He nodded and walked on without a word. Too bad, because the nod was just silence on the tape.

Then I saw defense attorney Barry Carpenter watching me. Barry, husband of my friend Alice, was a scrawny six foot two or three. His receding black hair seemed to make his dark eyes more piercing, and I could tell he knew what had just gone down.

“Hey,” Barry called out to me, “come here.”

God, no
, I thought. I had known early on that Barry was a hallway hustler, but out of respect for Alice I didn't want to learn anything more about him.

“I'll be right back,” I said, “I got to get a bond slip.” I could have returned to Hogan's court for the slip at any time, but this way I could pretend to myself that Barry wasn't trying to use me. Unfortunately Barry was still waiting for me when I came out of the courtroom.

“What were you doing there with Jimmy?” he asked with a knowing grin.

“I don't do all my cases this way,” I answered as if ashamed.

“It doesn't matter. I don't tell Alice about anything
I
do. How much did you have to pay ‘Dogbreath'?” Making a game of it, he guessed by holding up five fingers.

I nodded, but my mind was whirling. Do I tape Barry and start an investigation that would possibly destroy his marriage and my friendship with Alice? Or do I let him go as someone not worth bothering with now that we were going after both LeFevours? I switched on the recorder and began hating myself all over again. “Five is standard?” I asked. “I thought they were taking advantage of me because this is my first time.”

“You could have come to me,” Barry said.

“Oh, really?”

“You definitely could have come to me. If you do that, the judge gets all the money” that he is supposed to.

“Okay, Barry.”

A few minutes earlier I had been jubilant at bribing Jimmy LeFevour, but now I left the police headquarters feeling polluted.

Winter 1982–1983

LUCIUS ROBINSON

From the beginning I had wanted to bring down Lucius Robinson, a bagman responsible for throwing out rape, child molesting, and murder cases I'd seen early in my career. But his street smarts would make him difficult to catch. While I was working undercover as a prosecutor in Judge Wayne Olson's court, Lucius had asked me why I wasn't moving forward in my assignments. He had picked up on something no one else had. He also conducted phone conversations with fixers in such a way that his words could never be used against him, something some of them never even thought about.

Robinson was the driver and bagman for Maurice Pompey, the judge who would find his bribes when he opened his briefcase at home. But all we could show so far was that his rulings nearly always went against assistant public defenders. This was because poor defendants and their public defenders were not paying bribes.

Here's an example. Even though state law permitted hearsay evidence at preliminary hearings, Pompey would not. This meant that when victims were still hospitalized, the state's case collapsed because it was not allowed to present what the person had told arresting officers.

As a fledgling prosecutor I had watched helplessly as the judge once threw out a charge of child molesting because the twelve-year-old victim couldn't pronounce “vagina,” even though she gave a graphic description of her attack. Another time, Pompey set free a killer who was being represented by the judge's former campaign manager. Yet he could believe himself absolved from all consequences because Lucius Robinson was doing his dirty work.

Lucius kept all his contact numbers in a tin file-card container and handed out business cards featuring a snake coiled around a cane. This muscular former bodyguard for Muhammad Ali sauntered down the halls like an intimidating bully, knowing that well-educated defense attorneys in their tailored suits would be nothing without him.

Even if we couldn't gather sufficient evidence against Judge Pompey, we might put a scare into the system by recording the bagman. After all, we already had evidence against most of the people he worked with. For a while I considered taking my time because he was naturally suspicious, but then it hit me: if we were ever going to snare him, it would have to be now, before the fixers could talk over their doubts about me.

Lucius was probably the most aggressive bagman in the system, as fixer Bill Swano would later explain to authorities. Swano said he was just starting out when a LaSalle Street stockbroker paid him a large fee of four thousand dollars to get him off on a charge of sexually assaulting a young woman. Lucius went up to Swano and asked, “Do you want help on that date-rape case?”

“What do you mean?” Swano asked.

“You know—do you want to win this case? It's going to cost you two hundred dollars.”

After Swano paid, Judge Pompey found no probable cause to hold the prosperous client for trial. Swano claimed that this single act of extortion is what drove him to becoming a fixer. He wound up a few years later bribing Judge Thomas Maloney to throw out a murder case, and the eventual disclosure would make national news.

In January 1983 I rapped on the rear door of Pompey's courtroom. Lucius opened it and went back to his desk with the rapid movements of a blunt businessman. I sat across from him and brought up my case of a young Hispanic man (an FBI agent) who had pushed down a beautiful young woman (a fellow undercover agent) and stole her purse.

“What are we talking about?” Robinson asked. “First, what do you want? You don't want no probation on this guy, right?”

“I'll take probation. Just no jail time.”

“We had one that was similar the other day, and Pompey gave him a couple of weekends in jail to make everybody happy.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though a real fixer would likely not agree to that, “my guy could take a couple of weekends if he has to.”

“Okay, so what are you talking about in dollars and cents?” His words always carried a threat. Robinson kept a gun with him at all times and loved being pushy, even extorting further money from the fixers in the form of contributions to Judge Pompey's retention campaigns.

“If I can get straight probation, I can go to a G [one thousand dollars],” I said, holding up my index finger. “My client would be real happy that I kept him out of jail, but that's as much as I can pay.”

My tone suggested that I might be a sucker, but I was on a personal vendetta against Robinson because his corruption and arrogance had caused so much misery. Even though this was a routine case, I was determined to make this my biggest bribe so far, a payoff so large there could be no mistake about the covetousness of these people.

The next day I called Lucius about the purse-snatching robbery case and he said that some people he had spoken with thought a new law would bar probation for my client. I double-checked the statute and called back to say he was wrong. He agreed, glossed over his bluff, and suggested that I see him the following day. As I set the phone down, I wondered whether I had pushed too hard, considering how shrewd Lucius could be.

When I met Lucius in the courthouse on Wednesday, he invited me for coffee in his office. His friendly act always meant he was about to put on the bite. He explained that he had mistakenly thought my purse-snatching case had involved a gun or drugs. In other words, he wanted more money because he mistook me for a patsy.

As if trusting him, I pressed for straight probation.

“Put on your strongest case,” Lucius told me, “and we'll just sit back and give him [Pompey] something to hang his hat on. He will give you what you want.”

“He can give me what I want?” I asked.

“He
may
give you what you want.”

“Great. So you have talked to him?”

“Yeah, yeah, I talked to him.”

“Thoroughly?” I asked, overstepping the boundaries I had set for caution, in hopes of getting him to say something more definite on the tape. Of all my lying to fixers, bagmen, and judges, this was the one time I felt something might backfire.

“We don't need to talk no more,” Lucius answered gruffly. He seemed to be searching for something in my face.

“You're a good man,” I said, keeping myself from showing alarm, “I trust you.”

“See you.”

Now I had to follow through with the situation I had created or arouse concern. For some reason, I had a feeling that Lucius suspected me when he had asked for another meeting, so I arranged for backup. As I waited for Robinson by the snacking area vending machine in the courthouse, one of our all-purpose agents, Marie Dyson, moved about the hall as a spectator waiting out a court recess. Relaxed though she appeared, she was prepared to rush in and force the bagman's hands behind his back if he became physical or accused me of anything.

Robinson said hello and bought a cup of hot chocolate. I was glad he didn't seem suspicious. My surge of adrenaline from too little sleep had made me jumpy and irritable, but I had to appear trusting and grateful. I told Lucius that my client was picked out only because he was Latino, that he had not been caught with anything stolen, and that he did not match the description given by the victim.

“Just hang around and we'll work something out,” Lucius said. “Things like this [bribes] go on every day.”

“Are you included in the figure?”

“No. You have to include me in. Whatever you feel like.”

I took a stab. “I'd like to give you three [three hundred dollars], if that's fair.”

“Okay, you got no argument. None whatsoever.”

When the case went to trial, I cross-examined the FBI agent posing as the victim, and she gave a great performance of someone unsure of what really happened. I destroyed her identification of my client and asked Pompey for a directed verdict of acquittal on the grounds that the prosecutor had not proved his case.

“I find the defendant not guilty,” Pompey ruled.

We had pulled it off.

The judge then said that my client's fifteen-hundred-dollar bond would be given to me as my fee. Lucius stepped over and said I should hurry because he was going to close up the courtroom even though the prosecutor was still inside.

I put my papers in my briefcase and we walked into the main hallway. I put an eye against the crack between the doors to make sure the ASA wasn't listening. Without turning his head, Robinson asked,
“Got it in an envelope?” I reached inside my suit coat and came up with thirteen hundred dollars in cash, the largest bribe that would ever be made in Greylord. “No,” I said for the tape recorder, “I just got it in my hand here.”

Lucius snatched the money and said, “Here comes Paula,” referring to the prosecutor.

Rain was bouncing off cars and the sidewalk as I left the courthouse, but I was feeling so good that I didn't even realize that I had left my raincoat inside. I drove a mile and stopped to call our warehouse headquarters, where Greylord architect Dan Reidy was having a strategy meeting with our team. When Reidy turned away from the phone to announce that Lucius had taken the bait, I could hear the agents cheering.

Now that we had hard evidence against Robinson, I was sure we were well on our way to netting Judge Pompey.

Playing Troubleshooter

Cathy's friends helped us move into our first home, an apartment in a Far North Side building that we later learned was owned by a veteran policeman related to a well-known defense attorney. So well known, in fact, that the chances were good he would be defending some of the crooked lawyers and judges we would be putting on trial.

The FBI was so concerned about this that it sent someone in to install extra locks on the front and back doors, just in case. Our landlord naturally asked why we did that, so I said Cathy was afraid of a break-in. He wanted an extra set of keys, but I kept telling him I forgot to bring them. He must have wondered how I could make a living as a lawyer with a memory like mine.

Although the Chicago office of the FBI was quick to act on my safety, the bureaucratic wheels of Washington were hardly moving. Nearly three years into Greylord, the agency became afraid we were being duped by all the lawyers and judges who had been taking money from us. In mid 1983, I had to interrupt our regular “crime session” in the Addison warehouse to show our agents the tape of a recent
60 Minutes
segment on the failed Operation Corkscrew, in which a man and woman confidence team in Cleveland had set the FBI up with thieves identifying themselves as disreputable judges to collect one hundred
thousand dollars in taxpayers' money as payoffs. At least the show gave us all a good laugh before we went back to work as usual.

I kept waiting to become sworn in as a federal agent. The previous November I had been flown to Indianapolis for my FBI interview, then drove to the Milwaukee office for my physical. The Bureau notified me in March 1983 that I was cleared to be hired as a special agent. But no one in authority seemed to know what to do with me for the present, since there had never been a situation in which an applicant was already working undercover with no end in sight.

FBI agents Bill Megary and Bob Farmer were urging officials to make an exception to the requirement that new agents undergo four months of training, since I could not be spared for that long. Until approval came down, I would have to continue as an untrained, unprepared undercover operative in charge of specially chosen skilled agents. The arrangement made no sense, and yet it was working.

But unaware how soon the operation was about to unravel, I saw myself hopelessly caught in something that was grinding me down in body and spirit, and was losing my sense of self. It's hard to explain why. I was at the center of Greylord and yet was made to feel like an outsider, a pawn. I was not even allowed to have a life of my own. Cathy and I had wanted to buy a house, but the FBI didn't want me to fill out a mortgage application, since that would mean either lying or disclosing the Federal Bureau of Investigation as my employer.

After the
60 Minutes
show on Operation Corkscrew, FBI Director William Webster had members of the Bureau's undercover school in Quantico fly out to give all agents in Greylord an abbreviated course. Doctor Soskiss, a short psychiatrist from the specialized training team, told me I was holding up well, considering that moles in some other investigations were easing their stress by excessive drinking or promiscuous sex.

He advised me to seek professional counseling and flew away, leaving me with feelings of uncertainty and abandonment. In my growing cynicism, I thought that perhaps the word “mole” was appropriate. A mole is a creature that must keep digging and yet remains in the dark.

But the FBI came through on the house, as it eventually did with everything else. Cathy and I were directed to a downstate bank run by an ex-FBI agent. We filled out the forms truthfully and had to wait for several agonizing weeks before the application was approved. When we
barely made the deadline to arrange financing, I felt rejuvenated and was looking forward to some real training. As it turned out, it would be a long wait.

Behind my back the Bureau was conducting other faked cases, unaware that this would be putting me in even greater jeopardy. It's just as well that I also didn't know that Silverman had already told Mark, concerning the rumor about me, “If I ever find out that he is the mole, I'll kill him.”

While I was branching out into Costello's territory of the southwestern suburbs, an undercover FBI agent using the name John Miller was being held in the men's lockup at police headquarters for auto theft. A sheriff's deputy notified fixer Barry Carpenter of a potential client.

Barry spoke to “Miller” and a second agent, let's call him X, who bailed “Miller” out. Agent X had no knowledge of the fixer mentality. For one thing, everything they say is roundabout, although bagmen are sometimes direct. And fixers never discuss bribes on the phone. One of the reasons they trusted me was that when they called, I cautioned them with such phrases as “Let's not talk about it now” as if I were really trying to protect them.