Operation Greylord (25 page)

Judge Marshall sternly interjected, “This is the trial of John Laurie; this is not a ‘Greylord case.'” I could almost hear a whip crack over my head.

Tuite lost no time sniping at my credibility. After referring to the oath I had taken on the stand, he asked whether indeed I had once told Bob Silverman that “there is a rumor going around I'm working for the FBI, but honest to God I'm not.”

“I told him that, yes. Should I have told him I
was
working for the FBI?”

“Well, you didn't have to tell him anything…. Your motive was that it was not criminal, isn't that right?”

“We were doing it for a good ‘motive.'”

“But motive isn't an element of a crime. You should know that, don't you?” he asked, no doubt hoping the jury would not realize how nonsensical his argument was.

“Mr. Tuite, the case laws—”

“I'm talking about testifying falsely in court under oath,” he interjected. The last thing he wanted was for me to set the jury straight. At an objection from Lassar, Judge Marshall gaveled and ordered Tuite to let me complete my answer.

“The case laws interpreted that, at least in the federal courts, it is permissible for these men [undercover agents] to go out and break the laws of our country to get criminals off the street,” I said.

“So now you agree that you were breaking the law?” Tuite asked.

“We weren't ‘breaking the law.'”

I then went into the long-ago Mort Friedman case, which had laid the groundwork for Greylord by having Chicago police officers lie in court to help establish payoffs by defense attorneys. “There was no other way to ferret out bribery,” I pointed out. “It's a very difficult crime to prove.”

And so the cross-examination continued, with Tuite trying to turn each of my replies into something it wasn't.
Oh, come on now
, I thought as the tiresome and distorted questions kept coming at me. To hear him, you would think judges gave just “constructive criticism” for defense lawyers on how to win acquittals, and that I had set Laurie up so I could use FBI money to buy a ten-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent paperback law book and fill my car tank with gasoline.

From out of nowhere, Tuite threw in a line of questioning intended to have me say that it would be all right if a judge decided on a verdict for free as a personal favor. It didn't work. But I conceded that FBI agents and I rigged cases in such a way that there would be something for a judge to base a “not guilty” verdict on. When Tuite asked if I ever heard of rainmaking, I sarcastically replied, “I've heard of that, and ESP and everything.”

If Tuite and I were speaking like this in a private conversation, I could have laughed and told him he was being absurd. But because of restrictions on trial procedures, I had to hold back what would have been my human responses even while realizing how my abbreviated answers must sound to jurors who were being asked to take Tuite's word for how courts work.

Later in the cross-examination, I was paraphrasing a prosecutor's speech in a case and did not include an exact word the ASA had used, “fine.” Tuite pounced on this and asked, “Is this another part of your lying on behalf of the Government because you think it's good?”

Although the judge ordered the remark stricken from the record, I calmly replied, “I'm not lying, Mr. Tuite.”

The defense attorney got around to Traffic Court bagman Harold Conn, who had been convicted of accepting a bribe intended for Laurie. He asked whether Conn at the time had been “pulling a scam on Judge Laurie.”

“No,” I said, “because Judge Laurie responded to that. He said ‘No problem'—twice.”

“That doesn't mean he received any money, does it?”

“To me it did.”

After more questioning that seemed to go nowhere, I was finally excused. I was glad Tuite had not been able to upset me, and I had no doubt the jurors saw through him.

Once the prosecution rested, Tuite called his strongest witness—Judge Laurie himself. He took the oath looking like a minor movie actor, with a slightly rugged face and his light brown hair combed nimbly to give him a spontaneous appearance. During direct questioning, he answered softly and never acted like the chair-pounding Judge Murphy. When it came time for cross-examination, Laurie mildly denied everything attorney Peter Kessler and bagmen James Trunzo and Jimmy LeFevour had told the jury about giving him money.

Prosecutor Scott Lassar stepped up and asked incredulously whether Jimmy LeFevour ever told him that his cousin, Judge Richard LeFevour, wanted him to split kickbacks from “club members” for their bond referrals.

“No, he didn't,” Laurie said, and explained that Jimmy LeFevour had merely asked him to give more business to Kessler and certain other attorneys to make up for having assigned so many cases to lawyers sent by the Chicago Bar Association.

“Now, didn't it seem very strange to you that Jimmy LeFevour was asking you to help these four attorneys?” Lassar asked.

“It seemed strange, yes.”

“And did you think that maybe they were bribing him so that he would help them? … Didn't you suspect that there was something funny going on here, judge?”

“If you are going to ask me to speculate, yes, I suspected there was something ‘funny.'”

“What you suspected is that there was some type of bribery scheme here?”

“I didn't suspect any bribery scheme, no,” Laurie replied. He added that when he found an envelope with two hundred dollars from attorney Lee Barnett on his desk, he reprimanded the attorney (who would later plead guilty to bribery) but did not report him to the disciplinary board because “I had no specific evidence as to what his intent was.”

“Just came right out of the blue, two hundred dollars in an envelope?”

“That's correct.”

And so it went, with Laurie presenting himself as a decent man who never listened to rumors about bagmen and was always willing to hear what attorneys had to say—just a victim of his own credulity.

In closing arguments, co-prosecutor Vincent Connolly compared Laurie and me as lawyers in our thirties, but then started contrasting us by claiming the judge virtually put a “for sale” sign on his bench. “Where Terry Hake saw wrong and tried to correct it, John Laurie saw money and was glad to take it. Where Terry Hake submerged himself into this cesspool in order to do something about it, John Laurie jumped in and helped himself.”

During the defense's “closing,” Tuite went to a portable blackboard he had set up next to Judge Marshall and, without explaining why, wrote INNOCENT in big letters and GUILTY just as large below that.
Turning to the jurors, he said the government had arranged “deals with scum” to make a case against a good and honorable man. Then he focused on the discrepancy between the original tape and the version I had enhanced, giving jurors an issue they could think about aside from Judge Laurie's guilt or innocence.

“Oh, he says here, ‘I wouldn't lie,'” Tuite insisted as he pointed to the empty witness chair. “It's scary. We sort of joke about it. I suppose somebody ought to bring Hake along to bars on Rush Street, and when some guy says to a young lady ‘Will you go out with me?' and she says ‘We'll see,' Hake would say that's ‘Sure.' He would be a great asset. To Hake, a lie is not a lie. Perjury is not perjury. And ‘We'll see' is ‘Sure.'”

“We hear about these things happening behind the Iron Curtain,” he went on. “What was done here to change those words like that, it's frightening. It's an affront to the whole system. And if you can't believe that, you can't really believe anything Hake tells you, because he will tell you anything.”

“Maybe they say he's a hero,” Tuite commented, “and I'm not saying that what he had in mind was not heroic; he got his lance, and he pulled that visor down his face and he went out there charging, and he didn't care whom he trampled—and he didn't care if with that lance he would stab the truth a few times, or run over the oath a few times to save a fair maiden or to win the crusade. And that's what's wrong. Sometimes a zealot like Terry Hake will not care about the truth.”

He went on to compare our activities with the Watergate break-in when, as he said with a biting inflection, “a group of people in Washington, D.C., … thought for the good of the country you could break into offices, break into doctors' offices, steal documents, perjure [yourself], obstruct justice, destroy evidence—as long as you are doing it for the ‘good of the country.'”

There it was, a complete misrepresentation not only of all my efforts but of the sacrifices of people like Judge Brocton Lockwood, who had resigned from the bench after being disgusted by the corruption that had surrounded him in Chicago.

“Maybe as Judge Laurie sits there now, he says ‘I should have gotten involved' in ridding the halls of fixers,” Tuite told the jurors. “He didn't. That's not a crime. Sometimes it's an act of compassion as well.” Now the large, smiling attorney erased certain letters from the word INNOCENT on the blackboard, above GUILTY.

“Give everybody the benefit of the doubt,” he implored. “Don't ruin their lives.”

The letters remaining on the blackboard read NO T GUILTY.

Our case was so strong we expected a quick verdict. But the jury spent day after day going over the evidence and playing the tapes. The strain was crushing for Laurie's sixty-two-year-old father, the owner of a pizza restaurant. All during the trial, his face had seemed bleached.

By the third day of deliberations, we suspected that Laurie might be acquitted on some of the lesser charges but convicted of racketeering, extortion, and mail fraud. How could any jury ignore first-hand accounts of bribery from Jimmy LeFevour and Peter Kessler and hearing a tape of the judge coaching me about presenting a case to him for acquittal?

On the fourth day, after a total of more than twenty-two hours of deliberations, the foreman notified the bailiff that the verdicts had been reached. At the time, I was at the FBI office in the same building interviewing a policeman about Auto Theft Court corruption, in preparation for another trial. Judge Marshall summoned attorneys for both sides and waited for them to come through the doors. Judge Laurie returned to the defense table looking drawn. He must have feared the worst for months. Only now, when his real feelings could not affect the verdict, did he allow the struggle to show.

The jurors stood with stone faces as the judge read off that the defendant had been found not guilty on all fourteen counts. Tuite triumphantly crossed the courtroom and shook Lassar's hand, but the prosecutor only glared at him. The rejuvenated Judge Laurie walked silently out of the courthouse with his beaming girlfriend. U.S. Attorney Webb hid his reaction in a courthouse corridor and said into half a dozen microphones shoved at him, “Now that the jury has ruled, I wish Judge Laurie and his family the best of luck as he resumes his career.”

When I heard of the acquittal in the FBI offices I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I took a phone call from Cathy at my desk. She said just “I love you,” and I started to cry. After setting the receiver down, I went into the evidence room and locked the door to be alone. I felt personally rejected. Five men and seven women had as much as called me a fraud. And why? Because I had to tape a conversation in a noisy chambers. Because the on/off switch of my recorder wasn't working one day. Because of a dispute over “we'll see” and “sure.” Because of a clever and relentless defense attorney. I could imagine all
defense attorneys across the city, whether crooked or honest, applauding the rapidly spreading news. The verdict gave about twenty Greylord defendants awaiting trial their first reason for hope. As one lawyer said, “A rising tide helps all ships.”

When someone called Laurie's father to tell him the verdict, the man gasped, “Thank God!” Later that day he suffered a heart attack while driving. He died in a hospital a week later.

During that week I had been having neck and back problems so I took two days off and went to see a doctor. I explained that I hadn't twisted anything and didn't know what the matter was. “Could be stress,” the doctor said. I didn't tell him what kind of stress I was under. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that I was entering a depression. I didn't know yet that this was a common aftermath among undercover agents. All sorts of feelings you have to keep back come flooding through you all mixed up. I was losing interest in outside activities as if they were from someone else's life, and I found it so hard to concentrate that people had to repeat things for them to register in my mind. I was trying to survive in a world that had fallen out of its orbit. I thought the doctor hated me, and my neighbors hated me, that they were all yelling behind my back, “Liar, liar!”

Summer 1984

All the federal agents I met that summer were so supportive that they helped me get over my ill feelings from the Laurie trial, but I remained a little on edge because my first child was overdue. Every time a Bureau office phone rang, I thought it might be Cathy telling me to rush to the hospital.

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 that 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.