Operation Greylord (7 page)

“How is your girlfriend taking things?” Jordan asked one morning. “You're spending a lot more time in bars now. Is she complaining about it?”

I could read a message in those rock-hard eyes: You probably told her, didn't you? “Cathy doesn't mind. I still take her out. She knows I haven't changed.” Behind this seemingly offhand remark I was lobbing back: Yes, I told her, but don't worry, no one else will know.

Then I drove away so I could be in the courthouse to watch the action around Olson's chambers before his call began. The same half dozen attorneys would drop by Olson's chambers every day to check on their cases or make a payoff. Most of them were in their early middle age, well dressed, and had a professional sociability, but I got the feeling they did not like one another all that much. After all, they were competitors in a crowded field. A couple of them had already begun that day's drinking.

The most frequent visitor to Narcotics Court was attorney Richard Stopka, a former policeman with pale skin and a round face. Since Stopka came from a Polish family, the predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish lawyers in the fixers' club grumbled that he had “no class.” Costello told me Stopka was receiving most of Olson's cases because he was paying the judge a third of the bond money returned to him as the
lawyer's fee. Jim clearly thought the judge shouldn't play favorites—unless the favorite happened to be him.

As this was going on, the old benches in that cavernous courtroom were filling up. Narcotics Court never drew a cross-section of humanity. The more affluent dealers were usually indicted for additional crimes and appeared elsewhere, leaving the poorest ones on Olson's call. Before the doors opened, some paced nervously in the corridor and occasionally one would burst into an erratic dance to work off tension. Once the public was let in, some would be slumped in the benches still obviously on a high. But most sat back and trusted their lawyer to get them off. Sometimes mothers diapered their babies on the benches.

Attorneys leaving the judge's chambers would come down the aisle between the benches with case folders and call out the names: Lewis? Vargas? Preece? A man or woman would get up with a glazed expression and stumble across the knees and feet of defendants waiting their turn.

Handling an average of a hundred and fifty cases between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon, it was no wonder Olson enjoyed hearing a joke, even when it was in bad taste. Then at the end of his call he would walk into his chambers, put his black robe on a hanger, and talk to his bailiff or some attorney about his family. He was proud of his daughter in law school but less so of his son, a policeman. Then the judge would spend a few hours in bars with anyone who cared to join him. Whoever went along was assured of a good time but often wound up paying the entire bill.

One story Olson loved to tell was about his days as a lawyer, when a company hired him for cases involving its illegally heavy cement trucks. At the time he was also working as a police magistrate. Olson would charge the company half the amount he had saved it, then give the judges half of what he had received. But then a new jurist demanded more.

“So I filed a motion to transfer the case,” Olson said, “and do you know what reason I listed on the motion? That the bastard wanted more money! The judge almost shit in his pants, but he transferred the case anyway,” allowing him to pay off a less greedy judge. “Then a year later I became the chief judge of the district. That meant I was his boss, and I assigned him to nothing where he could lay his hands on dough. So the moral of the story is: Never kick your janitor in the ass because some day he might be your landlord.”

The whole building we worked in had a things-are-not-as-they-seem character once you came to know it. A clerk in the Narcotics courtroom down the hall from Olson's made side money by selling phonograph records from a stuffed filing cabinet that should have been used for court records. And a deputy sheriff connected with a clothing store discounted three-piece suits for new attorneys.

Even the avarice that ran the place was deceiving. Fixers—and fixers who became judges—lived for the emotional highs that only money could bring them. “Let me tell you,” Costello once told me, “when you get on the other side, all you do is drink.” Or take drugs, as I learned about two crooked attorneys. Or gamble.

On Friday nights, Jeans became a little Las Vegas. With the doors locked, the courthouse people—black and white, those just starting out and those near retirement—would turn a table on its side so they would have a surface to roll the dice against. “Come on, Little Joe,” a player might call out as lawyers, police officers, and judges knelt around him, some in four-hundred-dollar suits.

After every toss, the money changing hands included bribes that had been used to send criminals back onto the streets. A few players would throw the dice while holding a lucky penny or a little toy animal, and some chanted “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” as one-hundred-dollar bills descended like autumn leaves. The city's violence rate was soaring, and yet this was where the attorneys and judges could be found.

That summer my friend Mark Ciavelli left the State's Attorney's Office for a defense practice with another competitive young lawyer, *Frank Cardoni. He came from a politically connected family, was the son of a wealthy surgeon, and was looking for a fast track to affluence. Frank wanted to keep handling cases before Judge John Reynolds' felony preliminary hearing court in a North Side police station and needed Mark to represent clients transferred from there to other judges. I wished Mark had chosen someone else to work with. Cardoni was pleasant enough, but I heard that he was “dirty.”

Now that Mark and I no longer worked together, we didn't see much of each any more. In a way I was glad, because this meant that around him I didn't have to act as if I were selling cases. And although I had told Costello that I was not seeing Cathy much anymore, because I did not want him to intrude on my personal life, we saw each other often now. Our times together were about the only way I could untwist my two selves.

August 1980

Judge Olson was talking with some attorneys at an Italian restaurant on a humid August Friday when I started to leave three hours into the session to keep a date with Cathy. By then everyone else was pretty drunk. In fact, Olson was feeling so good he hurled a glass across the room and shouted, “
Finito
!”

Some ideas were playing around in my head as I studied the judge, then saw Costello sitting at a table oblivious of everything. For weeks “Big Bird” had been complaining that Olson was giving other lawyers cases that should have gone to him. What if I brought the two of them a little closer? Then I could watch money-hunger lock them together.

Sidling up to Jim, I said, “Olson's in no condition to drive, so why don't you give him a ride home? Maybe you can discuss some things on the way.”

Costello wasn't much more sober than the judge, but he nodded, pulled himself up, and walked over to Olson, and soon these two big men waddled out in mutual support. I wondered whether they would talk over percentages during the drive.

Five days later Costello came over to me in a restaurant as pleased as a cat who has learned how to open the canary cage. “You're looking at the new Richard Stopka,” he crowed, with a good-natured glow.

“What do you mean?”

“Remember last Friday when I drove Olson home? I paid him a hundred dollars on a case and asked him how he wanted to work it from now on. He starts complaining that Stopka only kicks back thirty percent. So he says, ‘If you're willing to give me
half
of any bonds or drug cash I return, we can make anywhere between five hundred and one thousand dollars a week.' So I said screw the Pollock. And know what? Richard didn't get a single case off Olson today!”

Costello was only interested in becoming Olson's number one boy, regardless of how little money he might make in the partnership. I was sure the arrangement was in trouble from the start, but what I said was, “That's good, Jim, I'm happy for you.”

Late August 1980

When I told my contact agent Lamar Jordan about the new development that night, he was only mildly interested since Greylord wasn't concerned with hallway hustlers like Jim Costello. But both of us would have been jumping for joy if we had known that by establishing a steady payoff in Olson's chambers, Jim had unknowingly made possible the most dramatic element of our investigation.

Not that I realized this a few days later, when Jim and I were having beers at a restaurant and he complained about his wife. “Martha drinks like a bitch,” he said, so upset he must have been unaware he had substituted another word for “fish.”

We also talked over judges we liked and didn't like, attorneys who were often drunk in court, and a lawyer called “Trick Baby” behind his back because his mother supposedly had been a prostitute. The topics got around to a supervisor in the State's Attorney's Office who, Costello said, “should have been indicted” for all the things he was doing, but he wound up being promoted to the trial courts. This led us to two defense attorneys who had asked Costello whether they should buy Olson a set of golf balls with his name on them in appreciation for all the clients' money they were making off his rulings.

I excused myself and went to the tiny men's room. With one elbow an inch from the wall and the other elbow an inch from the flimsy black door, I removed the Nagra tape and threaded a new one over the reels. When I came back, Costello got around to talking about when he was an assistant prosecutor before the other Narcotics Court judge, Arthur Zelezinski. “Am I glad he's honest, Ter,” Jim said. I knew what he meant, but he explained anyway. “The only way attorneys could fix a case in
his court was by going through me. There was a big heroin bust I managed to get thrown out.”

How big, I asked for the wire.

“Let me put it this way, Ter, I made a down payment on my Thunderbird.”

He added that Zelezinski had outlawed hustling at his courtroom and was content with living off his judicial salary. “You can bet that when
Olson
gets his paycheck, it goes right to the bank.”

“Wayne's living off payoffs?” I asked.

“Sure he is, and it's all unreported income.”

“Wayne must be getting at least fifty thousand dollars a year on the side, huh?”

“Fifty thousand? Yeah, sure.”

“You know, that's a pretty good method you told me about ‘opening the drawer.'” My dialogue seems painfully obvious to me now, but I was new at the game and I had to keep up the momentum while simultaneously thinking of all sorts of things.

“It's common knowledge, that's the signal. Ever see the clerk with the sheet of the SOLs and wonder why so many were stricken? Now you know.”

The waitress came over, and we had a tug-of-war over the bill. “Please, Jim,” I said, “let me pay, you've been very good to me.”

What Costello was outlining for me was only a sliver of what was happening every day. With the insight of what took me months to develop, let me walk you through a typical day in the giant Criminal Courts Building as it was in the early 1980s. For Judge Maurice Pompey, the day would begin when Deputy Sheriff Lucius Robinson—his driver and bagman—picked him up at his home in a large red Lincoln with a white vinyl top. On the way, the two would chat about anything other than work. Then they would park in the judges' lot adjacent to the courthouse and enter the somber seven-story gray building.

They would say a few cheerful words to the guards and go into a small, lever-operated judges' elevator in the back. Pompey would go to his chambers and put on a black robe from the closet. He would sit behind the bench in front of defendants, their friends, and witnesses to dispense prepaid justice.

While this was going on, lawyers would go to Robinson in the back of the courtroom and slip him envelopes stuffed with cash or hand him
a newspaper and say something like, “You might like the article on page five.” There would be several hundred dollars for a favorable ruling on a case coming up in a few days. Robinson would put the envelopes and the entire newspaper into Pompey's briefcase when the chambers were empty. Robinson would not mention details of the payoffs until he and Pompey were on their way home.

Now let's suppose you were a visitor to the courthouse. You would wait in a long line at the metal detectors just behind the revolving doors in the modern annex, then cross over to the concourse at your right and be in the main building, constructed during the Capone era. The first thing you would see would be the shoeshine stand that lawyers patronized for good luck before their opening and closing arguments. Next you would walk by a wall covered with call sheets listing the day's courtroom assignments. Turning left, you would pass through large interior black columns of neo-Babylonian design and serving no imaginable purpose. Beyond these were the wide brass doors of elevators to take you upstairs to the felony courtrooms.

Once there, you might come across a pair of attorneys speaking casually in the corridor. Suppose one pats the other on the back and shakes his hand. That could be a parting gesture or a bribe to be passed on to a judge. Or a lawyer drops by in a judge's chambers and talks with the bailiff while His Honor is away. The lawyer might be there to tell a joke, or he could be dropping money into an open drawer. Some judge's clerks made sure they knew exactly how much was put in because they would be getting a percentage. But fixes were never definite. Judges gave money back in “heater cases,” ones receiving so much public attention the jurist feels pressured to decide according to the evidence.

As part of the bribery ritual, judges seldom took money directly. Thomas Maloney—who would become the first American judge ever convicted of taking bribes in murder cases—stood by on the sixth floor one day while an attorney handed bagman Lucius Robinson an envelope containing two thousand dollars, with the understanding that Robinson would pass the money on to him. This way, the lawyer could truthfully say he never gave Maloney a bribe. The bagman could lie and say he kept the money for himself, and so he never took part in actual bribery. And Maloney could say he was never bribed.

Robinson, a tough black man with street smarts and incisive movements, kept his share in a tin file-card container he called his “goody
box.” Some court clerks stashed their bribes in cans under their desk just a few feet from the witness benches. Anyone could see the cash there, if they thought of looking.

Now that I was gradually moving into the inner circle, the argot I had overheard for months began to make sense. Bribing a prosecutor was “saying hello,” and if someone wanted to know whether a case was fixed he would ask the defense attorney, “Have you seen the judge?” Most of the defense attorneys now thought I was “okay,” meaning I could be approached.

But how smoothly the bribery went on depended on the personalities involved. For example, I could feel the electricity each time Olson and Costello were together. There was something that made them regard each other with a reined-in hatred, a combination of opposites and similarities. Something explosive was bound to happen between them. Although I didn't know when or where it would be, I hoped to be there when it did.

Just then a friend from Loyola University's Rome campus asked me to attend his mid-week wedding near San Francisco. There was no way for me to back out without making him wonder why, so I agreed to go. But I prayed that nothing would happen between Olson and Costello while I was gone. Once again, I asked Cathy to come along.

The bridegroom picked us up at the airport and drove us to a friend's home in one of the ornate Victorian “painted ladies” on a hill. I fell in love with San Francisco even though my luggage was lost at the airport, the August weather was cool and damp, and I put my back out lying all night in a sleeping bag on the floor.

When I returned I learned that contact agent Lamar Jordan had been trying to reach me for days. Federal prosecutor Dan Reidy, the stocky keeper of the box, had come up with an idea so daring that it could transform the entire Greylord operation. Jordan didn't offer any hints over the phone, but he urgently asked me to meet him in a place where neither of us would be recognized.

The next day, Friday, August 22, 1980, I drove to the YMCA in suburban Glen Ellyn and met him on the racquetball court. I was eager to learn why I had been called, but Jordan said, “Let's play.” We slipped on plastic goggles and padded gloves, then bounced the ball off the walls as if trying to kill it. During a break, the powerfully built Mormon FBI agent told me the government wanted to listen in as payoffs were being made.

“But they don't trust me enough yet to let me get close,” I said.

“You won't be there. We want to plant a hidden microphone in Olson's desk.”

I was astonished. “My God, can you do that?” The entire justice system rested on the assumption that there must be no interference with a judge except for flagrant misconduct.

“We don't know yet,” Jordan said. “Dan's idea came from the regular payoffs you helped set up between Olson and Costello. There is nothing in Illinois or federal law that exempts judges from electronic surveillance. The problem is that it will make us look like bad guys unless we can show there is no other way of obtaining the evidence. We also have to make a case for whether what we hope to accomplish is worth setting a precedent that no one is going to like. Congress will probably think it violates the separation of powers. But the way we see it, we're just doing our job of going after extortionists. It'll be more than just a legal decision, you understand.”

Translation: there were politics to consider.

“So we need hard evidence,” Jordan added. “Each case Olson refers to your friend Costello should be documented. You also will have to get the facts on every case you think has been fixed by any lawyer.” Was I hearing right? “We'll try going after them all.”

That surely slowed my game. “But that could be fifty of them, and I'm only close to Costello.”

“We're counting on you to get what we need, Terry. We've got to have the strongest case we possibly can, and we know you can do it.”

But Jordan didn't know how I would gather that evidence, and neither did I. Even so, I felt great as I drove back to my apartment. This wasn't just an FBI sting operation anymore, it was an assault on an entire court system that had become infected. The government had finally found a viable approach by defining a new criminal class: judges who could be pinned down on racketeering charges.

Yet when I arrived for work Monday I discovered that Narcotics Court prosecution supervisor Ed Hansen had routinely transferred me across the hall to Judge Zelezinski's court. Hansen said this might be only for a week, but I had seen temporary assignments last months. What could I possibly pick up in the courtroom of an honest judge? On the other hand, how could I protest without letting on that the FBI was planning to turn Olson's desk into a giant mousetrap?

In a panic, I called Dan Reidy between hearings in Zelezinski's court. When I told him about the transfer, he said, “You've
got
to get back in with Olson. Don't say anything to Hansen; see if you can go over his head.”

So I went back to Mike Ficaro. But this time I wasn't like a beginner asking for a favor. Rather than sit down as he suggested, I remained standing and demanded that he transfer me back. “I can't say more than that,” I added.

Mike caught the hint but knew better than to ask anything. “Just do your work with Zelezinski and I'll see what I can do,” my roly-poly mentor said.

“You've got half a dozen other ASAs you can put in there.”

“I've been helping you all along, Terry, maybe in some ways you don't know about. There is only so much I can do. Besides, if I even tried to step in, someone might get suspicious. Just accept the assignment and wait it out.”

The very next day my fears were confirmed. Over a beer, Costello bragged about making more than thirteen hundred dollars in referrals from Olson that day. He had reached the level he had dreamed about and was planning to buy a twelve-thousand-dollar Oldsmobile right off the assembly line. Jim also dropped a mention that attorney Peter Kessler* “owned” the Auto Theft Court of Judge John “Dollars” Devine. This was the sort of thing I should be working toward developing further, but I felt banished from all the action just when I was on the brink of giving the FBI what it needed for clearance to bug Olson's chambers.

September 1980

Ficaro kept his promise and I returned to Olson's court in early September, relieved to learn that my anxiety had been unfounded. Nothing had changed except that some new people were visiting the judge's well-worn chambers to fix cases, including bagman Lucius Robinson. Now that I knew about them, each had to become a target for us. But I would shake their hands, pretend I was enjoying their small talk, and casually ask if I could do anything for them.

As I was having coffee with Costello in the cafeteria of the courthouse office annex, he said he had just tried to give money to Olson but
the judge refused to accept it. “He wants to bag me,” Jim added as if anyone could understand slang he made up on the spot.

“What do you mean?”

“We had it all arranged, I'd give him his money every Friday in his chambers for the cases he referred. But now he says, ‘Why don't we just do this at Jeans?' That motherfucker. Wayne's hoping I lose track so only he knows how much I owe him.”

Damn! Damn!
I kept thinking. Bugging Jeans would be out of the question, if only for the noise, yet without recorded conversations it would be impossible to prove that Olson was part of the defendant referral bribe scheme.

But Olson was such a volatile character he changed his mind sooner than I had imagined. That Friday afternoon, September 12, I saw Costello walking out of the judge's chambers with some papers in hand from unrepresented clients Olson had just assigned to him. “How much?” I half-whispered although no one was around. With a smile, Jim held up the five fingers of his free hand and said “Plus.” During the break, he celebrated by sending out for pizzas for the twenty people who worked in the two Narcotics courtrooms.