Operation Greylord (9 page)

“Who was it, do you know?”

“Just some guys bein' where they shouldn't,” he said with a shrug.

So that was how we learned that the courthouse after dark is like a small town in which any event leads to gossip and speculation. The eventual break-in would have to be made earlier to avoid alarm, even at the risk of increasing the number of people who might see it.

Since everyone obviously would have to do more homework, I kept trying to pin Costello down on just where the payoffs were being made in Olson's chambers. But drunk or sober, he was never explicit. His opinion of the judge was also unclear, since it was more variable than the weather. “Wayne's a funny guy,” he told me over drinks. “He's like Jonah and the whale. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said, not having the slightest idea what he meant.

“He'll take your money one day, and he'll kill you the next. He's always telling you, ‘You ain't got me sewed up.' I never want to lose my fuckin' grip on him. Half what I make off him I give back—that's
half!
But if I don't, I lose him to those other guys. Know what I mean?”

“Sorry, Jim, I better go.”

“Say, Ter,” Costello rasped, “if you see Olson, tell him I'll have an envelope for him on Friday.”

“Friday? Yeah, sure, I'll tell him.”

By then, my records showed that Costello claimed he had paid Olson more than fifty-four hundred dollars in the three months since he had started talking to me in late June. That didn't include all the money Olson was getting from the other attorneys who regularly appeared before him. According to Costello, Olson boasted that he was worth a million dollars, with most of his money put into investments.

Yet by now he was tired of the relatively small bribes he was getting from drug dealers. Olson wanted to grab the big money being passed around in Divorce Court in the downtown Richard J. Daley Center. But he wanted to leave Narcotics Court with an appearance of dignity. So he wrote to the chief judge that he was shocked—shocked!—to discover that certain lawyers were soliciting clients in courtrooms and the hallway. He added that such conditions were “terrible” and he therefore wanted a transfer. Of course, Olson was the one allowing it to happen and filling his pockets. As Costello said, that guy was “ballsy.”

I was further alarmed that Olson was planning to take November off to bask in the Florida warmth at his Marco Island condominium. This meant he might be transferred out of the criminal courts before Washington could get around to authorizing the electronic surveillance. And we couldn't just switch the judges' names on our application, since no one else was flagrant enough to take bribes in his chambers without using a bagman. Could it be that Operation Greylord, so long in the planning, might miss its biggest opportunity by only a month?

Until the listening device could be planted, I would have to continue going wherever Costello went, like a puppy at his heels. To him, my presence must have seemed like proof that he was magnetic. He also was bribing me so much he couldn't keep track of it all. Once, for example, he told me he was putting fifty dollars in my pocket for dismissing a case, yet when I pulled out the bills I counted sixty. When I asked him the next day about the extra ten, his eyes lifted from their drowsy look and he asked, “Was I that drunk?”

The bribery between us now took on a casual air. One time we were standing idly in the courthouse concourse, a part of the annex corridor set aside for any TV crew covering a major trial, as we waited for a policeman to pick us up for lunch. One of Jim's clients, who should have been in court on a narcotics charge that morning, showed up half an hour late with his wife, a toddler, and a baby. Jim hollered out that
a bond forfeiture warrant had been issued for him, but that I had informally agreed to set up another hearing for that afternoon.

“See, I told you that you can trust me,” Costello reminded his client. “Have lunch, then go to the room at the end of the hall at one-fifteen. Be there early, make an impression. Okay?”

The client nodded appreciatively and left with his family.

The tardy defendant passed from my mind, but Costello was still thinking about him as we drove to a restaurant. “Tell you what,” he said, “why work on the son of a bitch's case, Ter? Just pitch the fuckin' thing and I'll give yuh something. Is fifty bucks all right?”

“You got it,” I said.

At the restaurant, Costello waited for an officer we knew to use the men's room, and then tugged a fifty out of a wad of bills. “Thanks,” I said, and took the money.

When I dropped the case in court, the defendant's wife hopped around the bench in happiness and Costello seemed invigorated.

By mid-October, Jim had given me nine hundred and fifty dollars in ten transactions, along with a gift of a new coffeepot “for being such a nice guy.” Even the coffeepot went into the FBI's evidence vault.

Since Jim had given me so much money, I had to lie about where it was going. From time to time I would tell him I had bought such things for my small apartment as a sofa and a television set. If he ever visited my place, he would have thought everything had been repossessed.

“You also need a new car,” he would say about my eight-year-old Plymouth Fury. “You got to look sharp in this business.”

Of course, Costello wasn't the only one I had drinks, lunches, and dinners with. Once around this time I was alone with Judge Olson at Jeans. He abruptly told me, “This really isn't any place to talk. I think there's a federal investigation going on.”

This doubly startled me: first that Olson suspected something was up, and that he now considered me one of the good ol' boys he could talk to about corruption.

“There's nothing you can put your finger on,” Wayne said. “Play it safe, Terry, don't talk to anybody in the halls. I heard that some black FBI agents are posing as defendants in the bullpen. Costello hustles back there, so you might warn him to stay out if he doesn't know it already.”

“I haven't heard anything.”

“You probably wouldn't. The feds are supposed to be doing a mail fraud investigation on checks sent to hustlers from bond slips.”

“So it doesn't affect you?” I asked.

“Naw,” Olson said, “but we have to be careful, just the same.”

The next time I got back to my FBI handlers, I asked them whether the rumor was true. It was and it wasn't. An investigation into lawyers who illegally solicited clients in the courthouse corridors had been authorized but it hadn't started yet. I was glad of that, because I didn't need a parallel effort to undermine what I was doing. But how could Olson have known about a probe even before it even began? Even now, I can't answer that.

Although I still kept pretty close to Costello, I avoided sounding pushy by working questions into our general conversations. That meant I sometimes went to his home far from the courthouse just to talk to him and his wife and, once, to help him rake leaves.

I kept trying to pick up what the fixers might be thinking of me. I had been assigned exclusively to Narcotics Court for four and a half months, twice as long as usual for an assistant state's attorney (ASA), and I could feel a mild paranoia setting in. I could almost hear lawyers wondering whether I might be a plant, but evidently no one gave me a second thought.

One of the newly assigned ASAs was a friend from my early days in the building, the former Alice Stein. We had met when she was in special prosecutions and I was a law clerk for Mike Ficaro. She was attractive and friendly, someone to banter with in the corridors or the court library. Alice was just as pleasant now that she was married to defense attorney Barry Carpenter, who worked in the misdemeanor courts at police headquarters, then at 13th and State Streets.

The narrow office we shared off Olson's courtroom had a comfortable informality to it, with empty pop cans here and there, and the back wall taken up with memos and reminders. We worked at a small table and a couple of desks, sometimes carrying the phone around with us as we talked, so it might be found on a desk, a filing cabinet, or the sill of our opened window.

Since Alice would never have anything to do with someone corrupt, she must have considered her husband's hallway solicitations a permitted area of toleration. But one day she leaned over in a chair and let me know what must have been on her mind for days. “Do you know your
friend Costello is a hustler?” she asked. Since that was obvious, she must have been trying to hint that he was a fixer as well.

“He's all right.”

“Why do you hang around that slimebag?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don't mean anything. I'm just saying he's a slimebag.”

I could see in Alice's eyes what she really wanted to say, that slime has a habit of spreading. I quickly changed the subject, but our conversation bothered me for the rest of the day. How many honest lawyers and judges were having doubts about me? That was one part of my undercover role that troubled me. I could be losing more than just friends. I might be saying goodbye to something in myself that might never come back.

The next day was routine. I worked as usual out of the long closet-like prosecutors' office, presented several cases before Olson and, during breaks, joked around with fixers in the courthouse snack shop. But all during that time, I was darting my eyes and straining my ears for something that could go into my FBI reports or might advance me in the underworld of graft.

When I got back to court, Yonan nudged me and said, “You know the young lady you're working with?”

“Alice?”

“Her husband called me about my office. He wants to rent space.”

“Well, if he's married to her, he must be a pretty good guy,” I said.

But behind my words was the thought that if Barry Carpenter wanted to rent space from a fixer, he might not be as “clean” as Alice thought he was.

Mid-October 1980

Maybe it's because court behavior is so confining that judges and lawyers often use their automobiles to express themselves. Or maybe it's because they want everyone to know they have moved up. Take Costello and his beloved black Thunderbird. Or corrupt Judge Alan Lane, whose car bore the vanity license plates PNGJW, representing the fixers' code for “Plea of Not Guilty, Jury Waived,” which would let a corrupt judge hear a case and not a jury.

Then there was *Gary Walter Street. Sunlight bounced off all the gold that the athletic-looking attorney wore around his wrist and neck, he wore European-style suits, and he cruised around in an aqua Mercedes-Benz. Rather than pull into the employee lot across from the courthouse, he preferred one north of there so his car and its GWS license plates would cry out: Look everybody, Gary Street is here!

Gary was one of the lawyers I had been keeping track of because he frequently went into Olson's office, but for all I knew everything was legitimate. And yet on the autumn afternoon that Alice Carpenter had cautioned me about Costello, Street gave me the first scare of my undercover career.

Instead of a suit, I was now wearing a sport jacket in the style of fixer Bob Silverman. Judge Olson had just denied a motion to suppress the felony drug evidence against a pusher, giving Gary the option of working out a plea agreement with me. Since his client had an arrest record, a trial would mean prison. Gary was hoping I would agree to probation.

As he sat at my desk looking like a magazine ad, I wondered whether to act normally or use a knowing tone. Acting tough had worked with
Yonan. So I secretly turned on the tape recorder and indifferently said, “I'm going to see that your guy gets what he deserves.”

“Come on, Terry, it won't kill you to ask for probation.”

“He's got to take some pen time.”

“Prison, is that all you know?”

“That's it, Gary. Now, if you don't mind, I have other things to do.”

While I headed for the doorway, trying to scare Gary, he reached for my arm and missed. Instead of grabbing my bicep to spin me around, he inadvertently latched onto the tape recorder just under my armpit. Horrified, I wished I could disappear. He jerked his hand back as if he had been hit by static electricity and asked, “What do you got under there, Terry, a gun?”

“Oh, no,” I said, relieved that he hadn't guessed, “it's a back brace. Last August I was at a friend's in San Francisco and had to sleep on the floor, you know? It was cold and I got this terrible backache.” My story sounded so phony that I kept adding to it. “So I've been wearing this brace during the day, and it helps, but my back still gives me problems.”

Gary nodded politely.
He bought it
, I thought with a rush.

As I returned to my desk, with my hands cold and sweaty at the same time, Gary seemed as relaxed as ever. He began telling me about his own physical problems as if I were hanging on his every word. Then before leaving, he wrote down for me the name and number of his masseuse.

I was so shaken that when Judge Olson asked me to join him for drinks at Jeans that afternoon, I locked the tape recorder in the trunk of my Plymouth and swore to myself that nothing like that would ever happen again. But of course it did.

In the hallway outside Olson's courtroom the following day, Costello wanted to stress a point in our conversation. As he poked my chest, his hand brushed against the recorder under my shirt. His expression didn't change, but a
My God!
exploded in my mind. An ordinary attorney might not have suspected anything from the bulge, but Costello had been a policeman.

“See yuh later, Ter,” he said as I fought to keep my expression from betraying me.

“Yeah, nice talking to you.” The perspiration was falling drop by drop onto the small of my back. Where was he going, to tell everyone the heat's on? There had to be something I could do, and it had to be done now.

Since painters were working on our office alongside Olson's courtroom, the ASAs assigned to narcotics cases were temporarily using an even smaller office. So I went into its cramped washroom and kept the door shut with my foot. I threw off my sport coat, my tie, my shirt, and my undershirt. With trembling fingers I wrenched off the tape holding the microphone wire and yanked the Velcro fasteners from their elastic wrap. I was sure the rip could be heard down the corridor.

I shoved the recorder, the holder, and the wire into my charcoal gray briefcase and quickly redressed. Next I went over to the sergeant's desk in Narcotics Court and asked him to lock my heavy briefcase in his file cabinet, freeing me to go looking for Costello with empty hands.

Jim was easy to find as he recruited clients, with his Brillo hair like an island above everyone else. As usual, the humanity in the hallway between the two Narcotics Courts smelled of alcohol breath, sweat, hair spray, lawyer cologne, and processed hair.

“Hey, Jim, I'm a little disappointed in you,” I said in what I hoped was an ambitious, materialistic voice. “You didn't say what you thought of my new sport jacket. I bought it at the Hart Schaffner & Marx warehouse sale. Looks nice, doesn't it? What do you think?”

I held the sides of the jacket out as if he might be interested in checking the label. In doing so, my shirt stretched across my chest without a telltale bulge.

“Yeah, it's nice, Terry,” Costello said without a glance

At the end of the day, I called FBI agent Bill Megary, who was slowly taking over for Jordan as my go-to person. He knew what he wanted because, as a lawyer, he got all of the legal background of the fixes without needing explanations. I told him that I needed to stop wearing the recorder for a while. Two near-misses in as many days were too much for me, and I was exhausted. But Bill psyched me up to wear a wire again, reminding me how incriminating things were happening every day.

FBI agents are specially chosen and trained for undercover work and the double life it requires. But I was being depleted by all those secret meetings with federal agents, slipping away to make phone calls, putting in full days at court, watching a dozen suspected fixers throughout the day, and then going around with them until nearly midnight, only to do it all again the next day.

In less than five months of palling around with the corrupt, I probably drank more than I had in my entire life. I wondered how my contact
agents could understand that moles like me lived in a world that becomes increasingly unreal because of all the mental switching back and forth we have to do. My body and brain held out on Mondays through Fridays, but they gave up on weekends, the only time I could be myself. One Friday night, Cathy and I went to her sister's condo for dinner. We turned on the television for a movie, and five minutes later I was asleep. Another time Megary showed up at a meeting place and found me asleep behind the steering wheel.

As for Costello, he was becoming unglued on his own. One of my most embarrassing experiences with him came that October at a fundraiser for *Judge Henry Gordon. Costello had invited me to the fundraiser only to have a friendly face around, because he hated the judge. “Gordon is a kink,” Jim told me, meaning a graft-taker. “When he was a prosecutor he tried to sell the Criminal Courts Building. You know Judge *Willis in the suburbs? Willis would sell his mother's teeth, and Gordon is below that, because Willis is a super guy and Gordon isn't.”

From the suburban banquet hall we went to a Costello drinking spot that was so close to his home his car could probably take us there by itself. We sidled up to the bar, and Jim started to drink off one of his black moods. For no reason that I could tell, he turned on a nicely dressed, fairly good-looking woman in her early forties a couple of stools down. Maybe she reminded him of his wife.

“Look at her,” Jim said to me, “a fuckin' drunk. Hey, bitch, why don't you go home?”

“Not so loud, Jim,” I whispered. Being with Costello was so humiliating that I wished I could have left him there, but I never knew when he might tell me more about “kinks.” He should have been ejected, but the bartender liked big tippers. Jim signaled for more drinks and put one hundred dollars in tens on the bar. Noticing that I was scratching at a food spot on my tie, he muttered, “Quit worry'ng about that fuckin' tie, will yuh?”

“This is brand new, Jim,” I said. “It cost me ten dollars.”

Costello scooped up the money he had just placed on the bar. “Buy a new tie,” he said, and dropped a ten-dollar bill into my lap. “Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie … Buy a new tie.” At each repetition, another ten dollars floated to my lap. There was now fifty
dollars, Costello's half of some dope dealer's one-hundred-dollar bond after the rest went to Olson.

“Go ahead, take it, take it,” Jim said. “Now take off that piece of shit.”

I slid off my tie with a little reluctance because I rather liked it. Costello bunched the tie into a ball, tossed it to the bartender, and told him to “throw that fuckin' thing in the garbage.” Despite Costello's laughter at himself, he was bitter about something and I felt sorry for him.

We had to be in court on opposite sides of the criminal justice system the next day, so at ten-thirty p.m. he paid the tab and threw me the change to complete my new-tie fund. The next day I turned over to the FBI as possible bribery evidence the entire amount, fifty-three dollars and forty-five cents.

On the Friday before Halloween, I drove from the midtown courthouse to the lakefront museum campus near downtown. I was expecting a pep talk from Megary about getting whatever evidence I could until Olson's chambers were bugged. Instead, all he said was that he was taking me downtown to see Dan Reidy from the federal prosecutor's office.

As cool winds blew from a gray sky, we were soon caught up in a traffic snarl but made it to a ramp leading down to a parking garage below the modern federal complex on South Dearborn Street. My first realization that something secret was going on came when Megary quietly told me to “get down. On the floor.”

I couldn't help feeling a little foolish scrunched under the dashboard as the metal door of the garage rattled up. After Megary drove past the attendant's office, he told me, “Okay, you can get up now.”

We entered the large, black freight elevator and slowly rose to the mysterious twenty-eighth floor. Since the public elevators go only to the twenty-seventh, even most federal workers were unaware of this place. The doors slid open and I saw a large storage area with bare light bulbs illuminating the dusty concrete floor.

Chuck Sklarsky was waiting for me, along with Dan Reidy, with his brown hair and contrasting red mustache, and Scott Lassar, who greeted me in a gravely monotone. “What's this all about?” I asked them.

As I took a plastic chair amid the clutter of the concrete storage floor, Reidy told me that all the preliminary work for installing an electronic listening device in Olson's chambers had been cleared, and now the Chicago office was ready to apply for permission from a federal judge.

“Just apply?” I gasped. From all this furtiveness, I had assumed the equipment was already in someone's black bag.

“Apparently you don't know how things work,” Reidy said. “Nobody's said ‘No,' they're saying ‘Let's look at it.' That's practically a ‘Yes.' Don't worry, we're making this a priority.”

He handed me an inch-thick copy of the reports detailing information from my phone calls and the tapes I had been handing over. “We want you to go over this carefully,” Reidy said. “Make sure it's accurate and see if you can add anything.”

I went through the loose photocopied pages and found myself mumbling, “Wait … What's all this about Traffic Court?”

“You're not the only one working undercover,” Reidy explained. The other work was being done by David Victor Ries, the FBI agent who had set up a phony Loop law office before I came on.

“Why didn't you tell me I'm not alone?”

“Terry, we've never done anything this secret before,” said Reidy. “From the beginning, we decided not to treat it like just another sting. Information is being given out only on a need-to-know basis, and you had no reason to know about Ries.”

He then let me in on some of the behind-the-scenes action. For months after receiving the box of unrelated files that had formed the starting point for Operation Greylord, Reidy and Lassar considered—and rejected—nearly forty variations of a written proposal needed for the undercover operation. The first sixteen pages were always the same—they outlined what was then known about bribery throughout the court system.

“Those first sixteen pages were designed so the Justice Department would look at them and get as sick as we were,” Reidy said. Initially the Justice Department approved only a restricted effort to target fixers/lawyers in the municipal courts built into the Traffic Court Building.

Agents were allowed to rig only drunken driving cases because the police department was in such a sorry state that Superintendent Richard Brzeczek said he could spare only one trustworthy officer to work with federal investigators to arrest undercover FBI agents, and that man refused to turn on his fellow officers. Taking other officers of proven integrity away from their assignments would have drawn too much attention.

Without police cooperation, undercover FBI agents tried getting arrested for drunken driving early in the morning, when traffic was light and there was little danger of harming anyone. But they discovered that officers didn't want to make arrests just before the end of their shifts, because of the paperwork they would have to fill out.

This led to a brainstorm. Since many FBI agents were attorneys, why not have one pose as a corrupt lawyer in Traffic Court? That was why David Ries was brought in from Detroit. So that was how the initial phase of Greylord evolved, by a series of false steps pointing to the right direction.