Operation Greylord (27 page)

The judge called a break before the defense delivered its closing statement.

During the long cross-examination, Genson had been unable to suggest I was heartless. Now he needed another concept the jurors might think over. Somehow it came to him: that I had been so idealistic I was blind to the consequences of my zeal.

“Corruption doesn't belong anywhere in our system,” he started off. “But the problem is, when you're fighting for a good cause it doesn't mean that you can forget the truth in a court of law.” Then he said, “Terry Hake is misguided and the rest of them are slime…. The man
lived a lie for three years. His primary goal was to get a judge. And I submit to you, that's what he did. And that he lied to get that judge.”

The lawyer walked stiff-legged to the jury box and back to the defense table, where former judge Devine sat as if he didn't care. There might have been a reason he looked drunk—a rumor going around was that he had been downing a few during the recess.

“The end does not always justify the means,” Genson said. “I'm asking you, ladies and gentlemen, don't make their wish come true. Don't make the Ciavellis and the Hakes and the Trunzos and the Kesslers, don't make their wish come true. Find him not guilty. Do John Devine justice, find him not guilty.”

Silly as it may sound, was Genson hoping they would be thinking of “divine justice”?

In the final part of the prosecution's closings, Sklarsky said Devine's court had smelled of corruption. “You don't want to walk into a courtroom anywhere in the United States wondering, ‘Do I have to go in that back room and lay some money on the judge in order to get fair treatment?' There was a cash station going on there, and it wasn't justice going on there [at police headquarters], and it wasn't going on in Traffic Court. If you don't believe it, listen to those tapes. Because when a judge takes money in connection with his official duties, we're all in sad shape, it goes to the very heart of our democracy. You cannot have a crime involving corruption that is any worse.”

The jurors deliberated for four days, and we were practically biting our nails. As with the Laurie case, we were worried that, from the time they were taking, they would find Devine innocent of something. But how many charges—all of them? Then we might as well pack up and forget about all the trials still lined up. We had presented our strongest witnesses and one of our most damning tapes.

In the twentieth hour, the jury filed in. Devine, looking distinguished with his large glasses and trapezoid mustache, had hope on his face as one of his lawyers held an arm out for him at the defense table. Then the verdicts were announced. On two counts of extortion—not guilty. But on the twenty-five other counts of extortion, the single count of racketeering, and all twenty-one counts of mail fraud, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty….

I am told Devine held back tears from his glassy eyes as he rose and walked out of the courthouse with his arm around attorney Blumenthal
for support. I wasn't there to see it because this was Columbus Day and I didn't have to be at work. And so I was home playing with my baby when my office called about the verdicts, and I felt like leaping around the room.

U.S. Attorney Dan Webb faced the inevitable microphones outside the courtroom and called the convictions “a resounding verdict on the entire Greylord project.” Justice had been put on trial, and won.

The guilty verdicts were like cannon shots fired through the defense fortifications for all the men awaiting trial. For weeks afterward there were informal conferences in restaurants, bars, and law offices about what they should do next. A number of fixers decided to change their pleas to guilty rather than take their chances with a jury.

In December 1984, Devine returned to court for his sentence. His lawyers told Getzendanner about the downward helix of his life. “Judge Devine suffers from guilt; he suffers from shame and embarrassment,” Defense Attorney Jeffrey Steinback told the judge. “His intellect and body literally have been decimated by alcohol. He lives a chronically lonely life…. He drinks himself to sleep every night. He is stripped of his robes and he has no prospect for a real future.”

Devine removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with crumpled tissue.

Judge Getzendanner looked down from the bench and told the defendant, “I'm not going to make any speeches, but your crime was despicable.” She then handed down a term of fifteen years in prison, the longest sentence that had ever been imposed on a public official in Illinois.

Devine took his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but by then the justices had ruled in the Judge Murphy case:

The FBI and prosecutors had acted honorably, the ruling stated, and Devine was convicted of “conduct so despicable we will not engage in a
battle of adjectives in an attempt to describe it.” The ruling added that “Greylord harmed only the corrupt.”

The decision not only determined the fate of future Greylord defendants, it gave the Justice Department a green light for similar investigations anywhere in America.

Devine began serving his sentence at the federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin, in July 1985 but doctors discovered he had terminal cancer. He lapsed into a coma and died in April 1987 at a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. I felt sorry for him because he was so smart, he had such potential, and he threw it all away.

May 1984–August 1991

As the Greylord steamroller continued, the judge who took over the First Municipal District from Richard LeFevour, Donald O'Connell, immediately banned all hallway hustling and ordered that lawyers stop holding informal discussions with judges in corridors and cloakrooms. Chief Circuit Court Judge Harry Comerford imposed a badly needed system of assigning cases to judges by lottery, and a commission was set up to look into ways of improving the judiciary and reducing the political influence. But as we had learned, fixers can get around any new procedures.

The gentlemanly Bob Silverman did not want to go through the indignity of a trial. He pleaded guilty to racketeering, bribery, and mail fraud, but refused to cooperate with the government. He was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison and fined three thousand dollars.

From people who had flipped and witnesses called so far, most of the crooked judges knew whether they were marked. One of the men finding himself living in a troubled limbo was fifty-six-year-old former judge Allen Rosin, a decorated Marine from the Korean War. He was the one who once bolted from his chair, spread out his black-robed arms, and declared, “I am God!” U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas contended that the judge would buy and sell children's futures in child-custody cases. A group of outraged litigants banded together in a group called “Victims of Al,” and Rosin lost his bid for retention in November.

Rosin did not want his daughters and elderly mother to be subpoenaed. In June 1987, the night before he was to be indicted for taking bribes in Divorce Court, the trim and good-looking judge walked into a health club on Chicago's Near North Side. He took with him things with
deep personal meaning: his Marine Corps medals, a Father's Day card, and photos of his two adult daughters. Rosin laid these memories on the floor of a tanning booth and shot himself in the head with a snub-nosed revolver. A headline the next day read: FINAL VERDICT—SUICIDE.

Next on the government's list was our main target, Judge Richard LeFevour. The incredibly boyish-looking Dan Webb, who had entered private practice after the first Greylord trials, took over as a special Assistant U.S. Attorney just to make sure LeFevour did not slip away. Webb admitted that this would be “the big one” because of the judge's political influence. Reidy and Candace Fabri were also part of the prosecution team.

It was no secret that LeFevour—like Judges John Devine and Allen Rosin—owed his position to friends in the Democratic Party, and now those friends were being called upon for one last favor. Legal expenses were projected at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and an anonymous committee of lawyers and politicians felt that LeFevour would need no less than the attorney who had been successful with Judge Laurie, Patrick Tuite. His strategy was to conceal LeFevour's arrogance and encourage the jury to pity him.

LeFevour was only fifty-three, but by now he looked like he was pulled from a grave. The Greylord depression was upon him and he was suffering from a liver ailment. Instead of presenting himself as an upstanding citizen, as many defendants do, each morning Richard came to his trial with scuffed shoes and unruly gray hair lying like thatch across his rutted forehead. It was as if he were saying how dare we persecute such an unfortunate, ordinary man.

This was the first major case to come before U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle since being sworn into the federal bench six months before. The trial was such a showcase that among the spectators crowding into the benches for every session were members of the Courtwatchers Club, about thirty retired men and women who found trials more interesting than daytime television. They would issue newsletters analyzing defense and prosecution strategy in major cases.

I wasn't allowed to sit in at the trial because of the possibility that I could be called as a witness, so I kept up with developments from what people in the U.S. Attorney's Office told me and running newspaper accounts. Little by little, testimony showed that LeFevour had been able to set up a secret organization of corruption within a reformed Traffic
Court that at the time was being cited as a model for the rest of the country. He had looted the justice system like Long John Silver, installing pirates as crew members on a ship bound for Treasure Island.

Circuit Court Judge Brian Crowe testified that he was reassigned as soon as LeFevour discovered he was honest. Former policeman Robinson McLain—who had been sentenced to fifteen months on his plea of guilty to tax cheating—told of delivering forty to fifty bribes to LeFevour for dismissing the parking tickets of others. The judge, he added, called the payoffs “just a ripple in the pond.” A parking ticket supervisor told jurors that after a 1981 television disclosure of wide-scale bribery in the building, computer printouts of thousands of tickets initialed by the judge as being “non-suited” (dismissed) disappeared.

LeFevour's cousin, Jimmy “Dogbreath” LeFevour, testified that he had delivered hundreds of payments of one hundred dollars each to his cousin and other judges. Jimmy then explained the workings of the hustler's bribery club, five lawyers who gave Judge LeFevour two thousand dollars a month. Jimmy also told of his cousin's terrible temper. He claimed that when he had mentioned rumors that bagman Arthur McCauslin was wired, the judge said, “Kill him.”

So that the jury might understand the magnitude of the bribery, IRS agent Bill Thulen testified that over five years, Richard LeFevour spent or deposited nearly one hundred and forty-four thousand dollars for which the government could find no source.

Tuite did his best, but the evidence was overwhelming. On Saturday, July 14, 1985, the man who was once one of the most esteemed and powerful judges in the huge Cook County court system sat with a bloodless face as the jury returned from four and a half hours of deliberations. He was convicted on all fifty-nine counts of racketeering, mail fraud, and tax violations. A month later, Judge Norgle sentenced him to serve twelve years in prison.

Judge LeFevour was the twenty-first person to be convicted or plead guilty as a result of Greylord. Later, Mark Ciavelli and his partner, Frank Cardoni, testified at the trial of retired Judge John Reynolds that they had kicked back a portion of their bond referrals to him. Reynolds' lawyer mentioned me in arguments as having been a human microphone, arguing that I taped everyone in the world but Judge Reynolds and therefore Reynolds must be innocent. (We had wanted to bug Reynolds' chambers but he was transferred too soon.) The jury didn't
buy the absurd contention, and Reynolds was sentenced to ten years in prison. Later he also received a two-year term for perjury.

Among the others convicted or pleading guilty were high-living Judge Reginald Holzer, sentenced to thirteen years; Judge John McCollum, eleven years; former Judge Roger Seaman, four years; and former Judge Michael McNulty, three years.

LeFevour was sent to the same prison in Wisconsin as Devine. Although the U.S. Appellate Court ruled against his fight for a new trial, Richard's health improved markedly in confinement to a facility set up like a dormitory. The inmates lived in three-man cubicles, not cells, and took their meals in a cafeteria line. There were so many judges and lawyers serving out their sentences in the facility that they named their softball team “the Bagmen.”

In October 1985, the U.S. Attorney's Office turned over to the state's Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission thousands of pages of Greylord testimony and documents for possible action against lawyers who evidently were involved in bribery but were not named on criminal charges. As a result, the Illinois Supreme Court issued sanctions against a record one hundred and thirty-two lawyers in single year.

As another result of Greylord, the Illinois Supreme Court broadened the financial disclosures judges must make and ordered that the documents be readily available to the public.

With such reforms underway, both attorney James Costello and former judge Wayne Olson came up for sentencing in March 1986 following their failed effort to have the bugging of Olson's chambers declared unconstitutional. Wayne and Jim were the people I had been closest to in my undercover work and, corrupt as they were, I still had fond memories of them. These men, with their lives interlocked by money, often hated one another and yet in some ways were similar. They were loud and coarse but had teddy-bear moments, both liked to drink, and both had gone through their careers with blinders on about the consequences.

Assistant prosecutor Chuck Sklarsky told the sentencing judge how Olson had corrupted young attorneys and quoted him as saying on our tapes, “I love people that take dough. You know exactly where they stand.”

“Time and again we find that if there's a judge who has a relationship with a hustler like Mr. Costello, clearly sharing money with him,
it's like open season in the courtroom,” Sklarsky said. “The bailiff, the clerk, the policeman, the court sergeant who sits there [say] ‘Where is mine?'”

Olson's attorney, Jeffrey Steinback, blamed the system. He said that in the political process of becoming a judge, “even the most stalwart can become warped.” Costello's lawyer told the judge that his client was a broken man and didn't even have a final friend to stand in support for him.

Before passing sentence, Judge Stanley Roszkowski asked if the defendants wished to make any remarks. Costello said little except that he was grateful his new wife, Susan, had stood by him. But Olson, the man who had reminded everyone of Rodney Dangerfield, looked crushed standing before the bench. He told of the “eight hundred sleepless nights” since his indictment and said of his judicial position, “I didn't know how much I loved it until I lost it.”

Olson then offered one last thought: “If any other lawyer wants to go through what I've gone through in the last two and a half years, then there's nothing that you can do here today that's going to change it because he's got to be nuts.”

Calling the defendants separately to the bench, Roszkowski sentenced Olson to twelve years in prison and fined him thirty-five thousand dollars. Costello received a term of eight years.
Jim, Jim
, I thought when I heard the sentence,
you should have listened to us.

The following month I was called to the stand in the trial of Raymond Sodini, the easy-going judge who once had police sergeant Cy Martin sit in for him on the bench while he recovered from a hangover. This case was put together by a new group of Greylord FBI Agents, David Benscoter, Phil Page, Malcolm Bales, and Dan Lee, all of whom worked endless hours to put together the case on Sodini and 21 codefendents. This was the biggest Greylord indictment. As we would learn later, the frantic Sodini persuaded a man who had lent him money in the 1970s to sign papers indicating the loan was made in 1982, which would cover some bribes the judge took that year.

Being tried with Sodini were defense attorneys Lee Barnett, Neal Birnbaum, Vincent Davino, Harry Jaffe, and Barry Carpenter, and again I was called to the stand and faced tricky defense attorney Patrick Tuite. He smiled as he resurrected my changing the Laurie transcript from “we'll see” to “sure.”

Tired of being hauled over his by-now lukewarm coals, I assured him that I had been “trying to make my testimony as accurate as possible.” Another round of questioning went nowhere, and I was excused.

But Tuite's strategy to keep Laurie's acquittal in the minds of the Sodini jurors made the entire defense case collapse. During the cross-examination of admitted bagman Patrick Ryan, a former sheriff's deputy, Tuite asked if he recalled that Judge Laurie had been acquitted. Since Tuite had just violated a pre-trial rule of Judge James Holderman against mentioning the outcome of any previous Greylord trial, the U.S. Attorney's Office leaped at the opportunity and received permission to call Laurie as a witness.

A jolt must have gone through the team of lawyers at the defense table. Since Laurie had testified in his own trial that Barnett had tried to bribe him, he would have to do the same if called now. The defense asked for a recess because of the new development, and the court was adjourned for the day.

Outside of court, Barnett's attorney Alan Blumenthal yelled at Tuite for “scuttling my defense!” Deciding to minimize the damage, Blumenthal notified prosecutors that his client was willing to change his plea to guilty.

This turnabout emboldened Valukas and Assistant U.S. Attorney James Schweitzer to persuade some of the other co-defendants to plead guilty for reduced sentences rather than keep up a charade of innocence. And so, after weeks of trial, spectators from reporters to courtwatch hobbyists were startled when Birnbaum, Davino, and Judge Sodini separately admitted their guilt.

The trial continued and Barry Carpenter, the lanky husband of my friend Alice Carpenter, was convicted in the fourteen-week trial along with Harry Jaffe and another fixer who had bribed Judge Sodini, Robert Daniels. Carpenter was sentenced to serve four years. The elderly Jaffe was sentenced to a year in prison but died before he could begin serving his time. Daniels was sentenced to six years for tax evasion and bribery.

Barnett received six months and bagman Ryan was placed on sixty days' work release. Judge Sodini was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

Now that my involvement in the Greylord prosecutions was winding down, the FBI notified me in 1987 that because of a policy then in effect, I should report to the Philadelphia office.

This was shattering. More than disappointed, I was angry. If transplanted, all of my contacts and knowledge of Chicago through its underside would be lost. On the other hand, I could see where I was too well known in the city to be useful in some assignments.

When I requested Seattle, a nice city with a lower cost of living and where Cathy had a friend, I was told that headquarters had decided Philadelphia would be better for me. This was despite the fact that if I was to be transferred, according to policy, it was to be to a medium sized city, such as Seattle. It was almost as if I were being punished. Others involved in Greylord were given what they had requested.