Operation Greylord (10 page)

“What if Olson moves out of Narcotics Court?” I asked the case supervisors. “I worked like hell to make my contacts there. I can't go through all that again somewhere else without someone catching on.”

“Don't worry, we're making this a priority,” Dan said. Well, that phrase was getting to sound familiar.

Going over more of the reports they handed me, I stared at one showing that an FBI agent who had been conducting a preliminary surveillance inside the Traffic Court Building had noticed Deputy Clerk Harold Conn strolling arm in arm with Chief Traffic Court Judge Richard LeFevour and slipping money into the judge's pocket. This was before LeFevour headed all the municipal courts in the city, the largest division in the circuit court of Cook County.

Seeing my surprise at the LeFevour report, Dan said, “Now you know how high we want you to go.”

So they expected me, someone untrained and still with little experience, to help them bring down the judge in charge of all the city courts! I had never even worked in his building.

“We haven't found anyone else in the criminal courts to help you,” Reidy continued. “It looks like you're going to have to do this by yourself. If it's going to be too much of a strain, or there are personal considerations, just tell us. You're not in so deep now that you can't pull out. No one would be the wiser.”

“No,” I said. “I'm doing all right.” The words must have sounded tired and maybe a little uncertain.

It took me half an hour to ink in adjustments here and there in the reports, which would be part of the package seeking authorization for the bugging. As I handed the pages back, I felt a little apprehensive.
These allegations were against perhaps twenty policemen, lawyers, judges, and even an assistant prosecutor I had thought was honest. How many others were out there? “Suppose the judge who authorizes the bugging tells someone?” I asked. My throat had dried up.

“Don't worry,” Dan replied. “This will need the approval of the chief judge of the federal courts for northern Illinois. He doesn't have any contact with anyone named in here. This investigation is going to be airtight. We have no choice but to assume he will keep the secret.”

When I went home that evening, I had to keep reminding myself that the majority of officers, lawyers, and judges were honest—they had to be—and yet I could no longer be sure about anyone.

On Monday, I was sitting on a bench during a break in Olson's court when a familiar voice asked, “Hey, Terry, how about lunch?”

Standing in a doorway was my good friend Mark Ciavelli. The young defense attorney looked great in a tailored suit, a luxury he could never have afforded when he was an assistant prosecutor. Last May, I had hoped Mark would be interested in joining me in my undercover work, but I soon learned he was becoming too successful on the defense side to give everything up.

We agreed to meet at a nearby Mexican restaurant after my last case. Mark now drove a BMW—just like his new law partner, suspected fixer Frank Cardoni, and also like the judge they often appeared before, John Reynolds. The two of us sat at a small booth with piped-in mariachi music.

Before long I realized that Mark didn't just want to fill me in on a couple of weeks' worth of courthouse gossip. With his rapid-fire delivery, he was dropping hints that he wanted me to resign from the State's Attorney's Office and join his law firm.

“It'll take a while to get used to the change of defending people instead of throwing them into prison,” he said, as if I had been successful in doing that before Olson. “Another change, of course, is working with the judges. You know what I mean. I just gave two hundred to Judge *Jelnik on a criminal damage to property. It wasn't easy, you got to go through channels.”

He continued speaking without a pause that would have let his words sink in. The shock drove everything else from my mind for a few
seconds. Slowly the sounds around me came back, but there was no feeling in me as I heard them.

“He had five witnesses and the state had only the victim,” Mark continued with whatever anecdote he had started. “Now, remember that I had a real good case, but Jelnik finds my guy guilty. I couldn't figure out what went wrong. So I asked around and someone told me Jelnik could be approached.”

Please don't tell me this
, I thought.

“So I file for a new trial and bring two hundred to Jelnik in his chambers. He takes the money and he vacates his guilty verdict. But I still got to get my guy off. Jelnik's been transferred to another court, and P.J. McCormick's going to hear it, and that's going to cost me at least another hundred.”

It was an effort for me to speak after our orders arrived. Not so long ago Mark and I had started out pretty much alike, or so it had seemed to me. I must have been living in a dream world. When I blurted out my question at the table, I was no longer an undercover operative. I was back to being still too innocent to accept what I had just heard.

“Don't you think it would be better if you didn't pay the judges?” I asked.

“Come on, Terry, it doesn't work that way, you should know that by now. Sometimes my clients really are innocent and the cops run over their rights. You have to look out for them. There's only one way to get a fair shake, and that's not to leave anything up to chance.” Chance, that's what fixers think of justice? “It's been going on so long, it's never going to change.”

“Well, I suppose …” My voice had trailed off because I didn't have anything to say.

Mark later said Judge Reynolds would steer clients to him for a rakeoff, but not all that money stayed with the judge. Mark had seen court workers steal cash from Reynolds' desk, while clerks were stealing what they called their “lunch money” from cans that other clerks kept under their desks. Virtually everyone who had anything to do with the administration of Reynolds' courtroom had found some way of getting money from anyone who walked in, even a prosecutor who had taken bribes from Mark.

Not only in Reynolds' court but in courtrooms throughout the building a clerk who sized up lawyers well and knew what favors to perform might make ten thousand dollars a year in undeclared tips.

“You still haven't answered me,” my friend said. “What about joining Frankie and me?”

As I poked at my food, I really couldn't think about anything. I had just discovered that I had lost my closest friend in the system to corruption, and I would never again be naive about anyone in this investigation. Something in me had been crushed.

Late October 1980

I was so upset after talking to Mark that I headed for my parents' home in suburban Palatine rather than spend one more afternoon slugging beers with Olson or Costello. When I arrived, I didn't know what made me go there; I certainly didn't want to talk to anyone about what was on my mind. Maybe I should have made the FBI happy by informing them about one more crooked lawyer. But I didn't care about Greylord at the moment, and I didn't give a damn about all the bribing lawyers and the judges with blood on their hands.

Just a few months before, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Sklarsky had told me I might learn that some of my friends were among the scum. “Maybe your friends, Chuck,” I had thought smugly then, “but not mine.” How innocent I had been.

My mother knew something was wrong the moment I walked into the house and slumped into a living room chair. “It's all right,” she said, without asking why I was so morose. She continued fixing dinner as if this were just another evening, but I knew she was waiting for me to let my feelings out.

“Mark's corrupt, Mom,” I murmured from the chair. I started crying because I had lost a friend to the poison in the court system. “He's in it, too. Just like the rest.”

“Did you hear that from someone else?” She always distrusted rumors.

“No, from him. Right from his own mouth.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

Because I hadn't worn a wire since my recent two close calls, there was no recorded evidence against Mark. But if I had had a microphone strapped to my chest, would I have turned it on as soon as he mentioned bribing a judge, and would I have handed the tape in? I still don't know.

I had trouble eating and sleeping for the next couple of days. I was about to make the hardest decision in my entire Greylord role, and I needed more time to think it over. Actually, I was imagining that I could postpone a decision indefinitely.

On Friday, three days after my Mexican lunch with Mark, I went to a Near North Side athletic club to play racquetball with agent Lamar Jordan again. I would have preferred an isolated location, but Jordan didn't mind. He was a fair player and was close to catching up to me in a hard game that left us both a little exhausted. When we went to his car for privacy, I finally told him what I had been reluctant to disclose all week, that my close friend Mark Ciavelli was now bribing judges so he could join the BMW set.

“You know,” Jordan said, “this conversation could be just between us. It doesn't have to get written down.”

“No, put him in the report.”

“That means you'll have to go after him.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “If I have to, then I have to.”

I was naive enough to think the worst was over.

Then about 5 weeks after his revelation in the Mexican restaurant, Mark asked me to go with him to see the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight on closed circuit television at a movie theater. Although I had resolved to stay away from him, I thought why not, this would have nothing to do with my investigation. But I was wrong.

As soon as I climbed into Mark's BMW outside his Near North Side apartment, he told me about a suburban felony case where he and Bob Silverman, as co-counsel, had put in the fix. Then he brought up a case that would be coming to Olson's court. The police had seized about three thousand dollars and some PCP from his two clients. Mark mentioned that the officers were willing to lie down on the case in return for half the money they had confiscated. He and his law partner, Frank Cardoni, were willing to let the officers have some of the dealers' money, but not half.

To make them grumble less, Mark lied to them by saying a fixer friend needed to be cut in, but he really hoped to work out an arrangement with Olson. I knew where this conversation was going, and I  wished
I could stop it, but he kept on. Mark had never appeared before the judge before, and he was afraid Olson might not return most of the confiscated money to him as his fee. Taking his eyes off traffic for a moment to study my expression, he said, “If you dismiss this thing, Terry, it will solve the problem and we'll all make money.”

His words were no longer troubling me because I had unconsciously been distancing myself from him. We had once been friends, but Mark was now trying to make me a criminal. That made it easier for me to regard him as nothing more than just another crooked lawyer who was about to get what he deserved. So I said, “I don't want any money, I'll take care of the case for you because you're my friend.”

“You're doing us a favor, you should get something.”

“It's not necessary to pay me, all right?” I said with surliness.

“Why are you so sore?”

“I'm not sore, I just had a rough day.”

We arrived at the theater late and the packed audience was hooting with every punch on the screen. I discovered that Mark and Cardoni had bought nearly a dozen tickets at seventy-five dollars each and passed them out to court clerks and bailiffs who might be useful someday. In the mood I was in, I wouldn't have enjoyed the fight even if it had ended in a fifteenth-round knockout. As it was, we headed for the doors when Duran refused to come out for the eighth round, saying “
No mas, no mas
”—no more, no more. Maybe he was just a quitter, but I left the theater thinking the whole world was phony.

Frankie Cardoni, looking as always like a ladies' man, was waiting for us at a pricey restaurant. He immediately asked if Mark had talked to me about the PCP case. I nodded, and he looked pleased. So they had it planned all along that they were going to bribe me. We left the place close to midnight, but Mark brought the case up again in his car. It was as though the only way he could trust me was by making sure I was corrupt, and not merely dropping the case out of friendship.

“Don't worry,” Mark assured me. “The sun is gonna shine for all of us on this one.”

“I still don't want any of the money,” I said. “Just tell Bob Silverman I'm okay.”

Mark had been using me, and now I was using him.

The very next morning I told Megary about the bribe offer. Then it was back to work presenting cases to Olson and watching fixers going
in and out of his chambers. Sometimes they stood in line. They always exchanged pleasantries with one another, and often they went to dinner and out drinking together. But generally they distrusted and disliked each other because they were rivals for the same money and favors, and perhaps because they didn't care for reminders of what they had become.

This was made clear to me in the last days of October when dope peddler *Leon Hester had a problem with representation after missing a court date. His bond was raised to twelve hundred and fifty dollars to keep him from skipping the next one. When Hester appeared, I wanted to see if Olson would transfer this honey pot of a case to the bar association attorney as he was supposed to, and therefore receive nothing in return. But there was no doubt. Olson was not dealing with anyone for just one-third anymore. He was smelling six hundred and twenty-five dollars as his share if he gave the case to Costello for an even split.

I stepped over to the diagonal bench to announce that the state was ready to proceed, and Costello asked for a time out. While Olson called another case, Jim led Hester to the hallway to explain his services and fee—that is, to shake him down. After a few minutes, Jim complained to me in his megaphone whisper that he wasn't able to sign up Hester, and so he needed me to request a continuance that would give him time to pressure the drug dealer into coming up with more money.

“The cop has the lab report on the drugs in his hands,” I told him. “What excuse can I give without being obvious?”

“It's okay, Ter. We'll think of something.”

When Olson called the case again, Hester said, “Your Honor, you gave me to Mr. Costello here, but do I have to take him?”

“What do you mean?” Olson asked, annoyed that someone should question one of his arbitrary decisions.

“Mr. Costello wants too much money.” That is, for the more than twelve-hundred-dollar bond money, Jim was proposing to do the same things he would have done for the usual one-hundred-dollars bond.

“Obviously you are not properly communicating with counsel,” the judge burst out. “I'm going to continue this case for one month.”

The policeman in the case was glad to go home because he had worked the midnight shift and needed sleep, and Hester went off to find the bar association attorney for that day, Jay Messinger. I could tell this because Costello was walking toward me with a steady step instead of his usual lope. This showed that “Big Bird” had some plan in mind.

By now I had recovered enough from my two close calls to be wearing a recorder again, but no longer near my armpit. And I didn't trust it in the curve of my back, where the bulge would show when I bent down. I was keeping the pouch where I had more control, right behind my belt buckle. That hide-in-plain-sight location was safe under most circumstances, since men stay clear of the groin.

“Terry,” Jim said, “go tell Messinger you're going to take this fucker's case to the grand jury so I can keep him. Can you do that for me?” Costello felt that Messinger was unlikely to follow Hester's case through an indictment and a trial. Bar association attorneys worked for the cash bonds and, like hustlers, made more money from dismissals or knocking out cases on motions to suppress the evidence.

“No problem, Jim.” I did not tell Jim, but my supervisor had already told me to indicate Hester.

I found Messinger conferring with Hester in the back of the courtroom and told them of my intention to seek an indictment. “If you want to talk about this anymore, see me in my office,” I added.

After a few minutes, Hester entered the long, narrow office I shared with two other ASAs, something unusual for a defendant. “Man, why you jackin' me around?” he complained. “Why you callin' a grand jury, I don't even have a record.”

“You weren't ready for the hearing,” I said. “You refused to hire the lawyer the judge recommended to you.”

“Mr. Costello?”

“This is a serious felony charge, and you've already forfeited your bond once. There will be no more delays. We are not playing a game here, Mr. Hester.”

“I'm tellin' you, all that guy care about is money. He don't give a shit about me.”

“That's your problem,” I said. “Now, please excuse me, I have to leave.”

Hester followed me into the hallway, then exchanged grimaces with Costello. A moment later they walked away together with their heads lowered as they discussed finances. In a few minutes Jim almost pranced over to me and said, “I signed him up! This is going to be the easiest six hundred I ever made. I'm getting the case called again this afternoon. Get this—since the arresting officer is gone for the day, I'll demand a trial. With no witness, you'll have to drop the case!”

I had to admire the quick flexibility that fixers developed to stay in competition. Before I could reply, Costello clapped a hand on my
shoulder and added, “Don't worry, Ter, we're all going to make money on this one.”

Another ASA working in Narcotics Court that day was Frank Speh, a quiet man who would stay home on weekends to watch television, and in court he was incorruptible. Not that this stopped him from becoming friends with Costello, who managed to have him go to places with other lawyers and look as if he were having a good time. Jim once explained the difference between Speh and me. “I taught
Frank
how to be a man,” he said, “and I taught
you
how to steal.”

So when Hester's case was called for trial that afternoon, Speh raised his head like a deer whiffing a scent. “This case was continued just this morning,” he whispered to me. “Something's wrong here.”

Since I had to appear honest for my colleague and yet dishonest for Costello, I told Olson, “Your Honor, I would request a continuance in the matter. The arresting officer has left for the day.”

Everyone but Speh was in on the game, and Olson played it well. He looked over the file, frowned in concentration, then responded with the illusion of fairness, “Motion to continue denied.”

“Then Your Honor,” I capitulated, “in the absence of my witness, I respectfully dismiss the charges against Mr. Hester.”

“All right, case is dismissed. You're free to go, Mr. Hester.”

There was no surprise on the defendant's face. He got what he had paid for, several times over.

Two days later Olson was practically singing on the bench in anticipation of his month-long vacation in Florida. All week he had been inviting court workers and lawyers to the party he was planning for Thursday.

Nearly two dozen clerks, sheriff's deputies, lawyers, and friends crowded into the booths and around the tables at Febo's, at 25th and Western. The Chianti and the cheerful prattle were getting to Costello. He foghorned to Olson's clerk, “Hey, Frankie, what the hell does Terry have to come over to my house for? I paid you so much money
you
ought to be the one raking my leaves!”

Frankie turned red. They were surrounded by fellow thieves, but Costello had violated the one taboo by openly mentioning bribes. Laughing at his own joke, Costello told us he had dropped twenty dollars on a clerk in the court of honest Judge Zelezinski that morning to get a file on a defendant, then discovered that the man had a bond of
only thirty-five dollars. With the other fixers glaring at him with tightened jaws, Costello slapped the table and chortled at himself.

Judge Olson was also drinking more than usual. Actually, the word going around the courthouse was that Olson could have been one of the great drinkers of the criminal courts but held himself back because of his family, and maybe because of the memory of that fatal bar quarrel he had years ago.