Operation Greylord (23 page)

Peter had grown up in poverty, persecution, and horror in wartime Poland. He came to America at the age of nine and for the first time knew religious, political, and economic freedom. But he had betrayed his adoptive country and the ethics of his profession. Facing the possible destruction of his family, he began seeing himself as others might. As he would later say, “I had expected more of myself.” He was, to our knowledge, the only fixer who still had a conscience.

With Zenner's advantage of not being directly involved in the investigation, he arranged a meeting with Peter and explained that pleading guilty and testifying against others would be a way to pull himself together. Kessler left without a hint about his thoughts, and we considered the meeting just one more failed attempt.

But in October Peter and his lawyer—former U.S. Attorney Tyrone Fahner—met over coffee at the Orrington Hotel in downtown Evanston. Since federal prosecutors were desperate for someone to come over to their side, Fahner suggested this deal: Kessler would give up his law license and plead guilty to only one count of mail fraud. In return, the government would recommend probation rather than prison.

And that was how the fixers' stone wall came tumbling down.

Kessler told us of personally delivering bribes to judges Martin Hogan and John “Dollars” Devine. In fact, Kessler said Devine once yelled at him, “Whatever cases you have in this courtroom come from me. These are not your cases. I don't have to appoint you to them. One-third of your legal fees are mine. These are the rules!” Although most of this had been suspected in a general way, it was astounding to hear it first-hand.

Once word was out that Peter was talking, dozens of minor attorneys suggested to U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb's office that they might be interested in hearing a government offer. It started to look as if the fictitious ten cooperating targets might become a reality.

Still smarting from the disastrous Operation Corkscrew in Cleveland, the FBI put up photos of various judges on the wall of a back room in their downtown offices. Then for weeks agents asked potential trial witnesses, “Is this John Devine? Is this Wayne Olson? Is this …?” It was probably the only “photo lineup” ever conducted in which all the suspects were jurists.

Still making cash expenditure analyses, IRS agents Dennis Czurylo, Bill Thulen and Bill Doukas were no longer looking for big purchases. Even the smallest entries added something to the total. As Doukas said, “We get orgasmic over one hundred dollars.” Even the absence of checks for such things as doctors' appointments helped put them on a fresh cash trail. The agents weren't kidding themselves. They considered themselves lucky if they could trace a nickel out of every bribe dollar, but they knew that juries would understand nickels more than points of law.

Eventually the IRS computerized information on one thousand companies and shops patronized by our targets. The same computer printed out label forms for subpoenas and dialed the phone numbers of the businesses for interviews.

Because we still hadn't heard back from Costello since he drove away from me at the hotel, Megary and Larry Dickerson drove to Jim's home one late afternoon in October. Costello assured them he was
going to hire a lawyer and fight them. There was nothing more to be said, except one thing. “Mr. Costello,” Megary commented as he was leaving, “it might be wise to dispel any thoughts you might have about harming Mr. Hake. If something should happen to him, the full weight of the FBI will come crashing down on you. Do you understand?”

Jim didn't say a word, but I am told that as he nodded there were tears in his eyes.

Autumn 1983

Since the identity of the much-discussed mole remained a secret except for the persons we chose to tell, I still occasionally showed up at the courthouses for cases we had rigged before Greylord became public. But my main task was to get our evidence ready for the grand jury. That included making transcripts of six weeks of tapes from Judge Olson's bugged chambers and all three hundred and sixty-eight conversations that I had secretly recorded.

That autumn I ran into bagman Jimmy LeFevour near the downtown Traffic Court Building. We only exchanged hellos because he was talking to someone else, but I sensed that he was looking me over to determine whether I might be the impostor. Little did I know that his cousin, Chief Judge Richard LeFevour, had recently sent him to my dummy law office in the suburbs to see if my name was really on the door. Jimmy reported back that my practice appeared legitimate, and so virtually every one of our precautions had proved necessary.

In late November all of Ries' court files and documents on my FBI “clients” were subpoenaed from the clerk of the circuit court's office. Ries had already been identified as an undercover agent, and those files linked my name with his. Newspapers were starting to figure everything out. A reporter phoned my bogus law office but my “partner,” Jim Reichardt, refused to talk about me. Actually, there wasn't much he could say since we seldom saw one another.

December 1983

At this time I wanted the Bureau's electronics experts to remove background noises from our recordings. I was at O'Hare International
Airport heading for Washington, D.C., with a briefcase stuffed with tapes on Sunday, December 4, 1983, when I saw a
Tribune
headline about a former ASA who had been a government operative for more than three years. Since every fixer in Cook County must be figuring out who it was, that was the final moment of my undercover work. I felt relief and even a faint thrill at seeing people reading a story about me at the world's busiest airport and not knowing I was at their elbow.

I was still in Washington on Wednesday when my name was at last disclosed to reporters. Cathy answered the phone at our home and told news people only that I was out of town. My mother joked with them by saying that “mothers are always the last to know.” That sent the reporters scrambling for anyone who knew what one embarrassingly called “the white knight.” The papers even resorted to using a picture of me from a high school yearbook.

When I returned to Chicago the next day, two agents met me at O'Hare and drove me to Chicago FBI chief Ed Hegarty's office. Cathy met me there and we went to a hotel upon instructions from the FBI for our own protection, as if Silverman, Yonan, the Trunzos, Olson, and Devine wanted to use me for target practice.

The courts were in such turmoil that when Judge Maurice Pompey found a construction worker guilty of cocaine possession, the man filed a motion demanding to know “whether or not the court was to some degree influenced by the abusive and uncontrolled power of the press.” That is, he was claiming Pompey might be intimidated into finding innocent defendants guilty just to avert suspicion that he took bribes. There had been unconfirmed rumors for years that such things went on.

The judge's response was totally unexpected. He paused to announce from the bench that he was retiring from his judicial career—all the while denying that his decision had anything to do with criticism that he had been excessively lenient in drug cases or that he was under possible federal investigation.

He threw in that he knew of two contracts to kill him in the twenty years he had been a judge and that four men he had sent to prison
surrounded him on the street just a few weeks before, and he had to do some “fast talking” to escape them. For all to see, Pompey held up three casings of bullets he said had been fired at him in his career: one dug out of the back seat of his car, another that cracked a window of his home, and a third taken from the roof of the house.

Without mentioning race, the African-American judge also implied that the FBI was using Greylord to persecute him. His statement over, Pompey sentenced the construction worker to ten years in prison, stepped down, retired to his chambers, and slammed the door on clamoring reporters.

Wages of Corruption

The end of the undercover investigation allowed the IRS to call in some of our targets for meetings in the federal building about their spending beyond their salaries. If they were to be believed, people who were then dead had always lent them more money than people still living. Czurylo and Doukas spent months going through boxes of Judge Richard LeFevour's original records in the basement of an Oak Park bank. When the accountant federal agents were ready, they met with the judge in his chambers. Fifteen minutes later he ended the conversation and refused to answer any more questions without legal counsel.

Exactly one week from the day my name was revealed and Judge Pompey announced his resignation, Chicago police sergeant Roger Murphy was scheduled to appear before the first Greylord grand jury. Murphy was an avuncular sort of man in his mid-fifties who had always been helpful to rookie officers and attorneys, including me. He had been looking forward to retiring in a few months and moving to Galena, Illinois. And why not, since we had absolutely no evidence against him. All we wanted to learn was whether, as the court sergeant for judges including John Murphy—no relation to him—he had seen bribes coming from fixers. But, like Ira Blackwood, Sergeant Murphy was bound by the corruptors' honor system.

He spent the night with his lawyer at home. The attorney told him that if he refused to testify in the morning, he could be jailed for the entire grand jury session, perhaps a year and a half. When the attorney left, Murphy went out drinking. The lawyer was so bothered by the officer's hints of despair that he made a couple of calls to the police about whether
there had been any suicides on the Northwest Side. The officers didn't know what he was talking about.

Sergeant Murphy awoke as usual the next morning and had a breakfast conversation with his daughter. Like many officers, he never showed his feelings, especially now in dishonor. His daughter asked if he was worried about an indictment, and he told her that one thing was for sure: he wasn't going to jail. Then he said he wanted to go outside for some fresh air.

Instead, Murphy walked into the vestibule of his condominium building. He placed the muzzle of his thirty-eight-caliber service revolver to his right temple and put a bullet through his brain. His daughter heard the shot and rushed downstairs only to find him sprawled on the cold floor.

Just a few hours later, Hegarty and U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb stood before an American flag and announced in a room packed with reporters the first round of charges in the most sweeping undercover investigation in the history of American courts. The news was so big that the press conference preempted soap operas in Chicago. The indictments were returned against Judge Olson, Judge Murphy, Judge Devine, Jim Costello, Bob Silverman, former assistant city attorney Thomas Kangalos (who had fled to Greece), and three people snared by FBI agent lawyer Ries and Judge Lockwood in the Traffic Court Building. They were police officer Ira Blackwood, Deputy Sheriff Alan Kaye, and court clerk Harold Conn.

The authorities also announced that forty more people were under investigation. The reason for the delay in those charges was not discussed, but it was mainly because the IRS was still working on the financial evidence. Former first ASA William Kunkle, reached a short time afterward, called the investigation “the system cleansing itself.”

So where was the “white knight” who had been at the center of all this? I was napping in the FBI medical office on a lower floor of the building. That was because I had accidentally scratched my left eye while reading in bed at the hotel where the FBI was hiding me until new locks and an alarm system could be installed in our home. I visited the emergency room at three a.m. and was put on prescription painkillers that knocked me out. This was the only harm to me resulting from my more than three years in domestic espionage.

Someone awakened me and said Webb wanted to see me in his office now that the reporters were gone. The private meeting was a little like a sedate victory celebration as I was congratulated by Webb, Dan Reidy, and State's Attorney Richard M. Daley, who in five years would be elected mayor. I came out still groggy but feeling really good. The downside would come later.

I hoped I would never again hear from my friend Mark Ciavelli. As a mole, I had changed the type of people I went around with but could never alter my feelings. I had done what I had to in gathering evidence against him, and I didn't want to know any more about him. In fact, only now, reading the court transcripts years after my undercover work, have I learned the full extent of his corruption.

The professionals involved knew that even a dead friendship would get in the way of my trying to “flip” Mark, and no one asked me to make the first step. In November, just before my name was disclosed, Ries and Megary drove alongside his BMW as he was heading for his home in the suburb of Park Ridge. Mark sensed that they were from the government and pulled over a block away.

Without easing into the subject, the men announced themselves as agents, told Mark he was the subject of an investigation, and handed him a letter requesting that he go immediately to the federal prosecutor's office. Mark's answer was just as brief—he wasn't going anywhere until he consulted his lawyer.

Over the next few days, an attorney negotiated an arrangement in which Mark would testify in as many trials as needed but no charges would be brought against him. With this agreement he joined the walking dead, those lawyers whose careers are finished because of corruption and, in their mid-thirties, saw the life they had imagined slip away from them. Mark stopped seeing some of his friends, and eventually his marriage ended as well. He became just another reluctant government witness, taking the stand occasionally and then disappearing.

Altogether, the Justice Department had thousands of pages of reports and tape transcripts on perhaps sixty lawyers, police officers, court clerks, and judges. Webb assigned to the case several assistants who had not been involved in Greylord until now. One of them was Scott Turow, who already had written a well-reviewed account of his law school experiences,
One-L.
He would be writing his blockbuster first novel,
Presumed Innocent
, on commuter trains to work on Greylord prosecutions.

On an early December night, federal prosecutor Sheldon Zenner and two FBI agents went to Barry Carpenter's expensive condominium overlooking Lake Michigan. Barry and his wife, my friend Alice, heard them out but had nothing to say.

Afterward, Zenner mentioned that Alice wanted to speak to me. I was hesitant to call her, but I felt that she would understand because she had been just as much against corruption as I was. Instead, she asked me, “Why did you do this?”

“You know why, Alice. Did you talk to Barry about what he did?”

“No, I haven't,” she answered as I heard Barry speaking to her in the background.

“I don't think we should talk like this over the phone,” I said. “How about if we get together this evening? I'll have to have someone with us, you understand.”

“Yes, I understand. I'll call you back in fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later my answering machine picked up a call, but the person didn't give a name or leave a message. Maybe it was Alice. This fine, reputable prosecutor with a promising career soon resigned from the State's Attorney's Office, and I never heard from her again.

I might as well have become a leper. The fixer reaction toward me was expected, but even honest attorneys turned on me as a traitor, a violator of professional sanctity. People I hardly knew became rude to me, and to this day, I'm told, lawyers who have never met me hate what I did.

We had no control over which trial came first. Chance fell on Traffic Court bagman Harold Conn, who had been seen passing a bribe in public. Our evidence showed that he had accepted sixteen hundred and forty dollars to fix cases, including two hundred dollars intended for Judge John Laurie in a Christmastime shoplifting case involving a store in Water Tower Place.

In effect, there would be two trials going on at the same time—of Conn, and of the entire Operation Greylord. The jury would have to decide whether we were guilty of entrapping him or violating regulations against presenting manufactured evidence. An acquittal in this first trial would jeopardize all the other prosecutions.

I managed to work in part of my Quantico training before testimony began. I was at class or on the firing range from eight-thirty a.m. to five p.m. every day, then spent hours going over copies of the Conn
tapes again before going to sleep. We already had transcripts for the jury but wanted them to be as close to perfect as possible.