Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  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.”

  5

  MONEY TRAILS

  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.r />
  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.

  Two days later, Olson was reprimanding one of the sleazier-looking defendants for missing an appearance when Chicago policemen Bill Stump and Tony Opiola saw me sitting off to the side. “Excuse me, Mr. State’s Attorney, can we talk to you?” Opiola whispered.

  I knew the suited officers from their frequent appearances as arresting officers. I left my seat and followed them to the wide vacant area behind the benches. The men explained that after six years they finally had found enough heroin on *Celeste Bailey to send her to prison for six years. “We really want to nail her ass,” Stump told me, “but we think the case has been fixed.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “You know her lawyer, Cy Yonan?” Cy had gained a reputation for having cases thrown out before they could go to trial.

  “I say hello to him in the halls sometimes.”

  Actually, I knew Yonan a little better than that. Costello always called him “that motherfucking Jew,” but he was from an Assyrian Catholic family that had emigrated from Iran. Dark-featured Cy came on so strong with his courtroom aggressiveness that I was surprised to learn he could be personable when he chose to be. Earlier that month, Costello said that Cy had always paid him off when he was an assistant state’s attorney, “but now that I’m on the other side, he seems to have lost his ability to say hello.”

  Officer Stump told me, “A cop came to us and said Yonan’s ready to be nice to us if we don’t say everything that happened when we’re on the stand. First it was to be six hundred bucks and we said no, then he said a thousand.”

  As innocently as I could, I asked, “What can I do?”

  “We don’t know,” Opiola answered. “We just thought you should know that we’re c
lean. We’re going to testify to exactly what happened, and if that woman gets back on the street again you’ll know somebody got paid off.”

  When the case was called that day, Yonan presented a motion to suppress the sixty-three grams of heroin found on his client. Without changing inflection, Olson ruled that the two officers had made an illegal search and that the drugs could not be used in the trial.

  The one thousand dollars refused by the arresting officers had to have gone somewhere, and I was sure Olson was promised all of it. Some corrupt judges are as selective as sharks but others, like Wayne Olson, are more like carp with gaping mouths gulping down everything they can.

  The outraged officers looked at me for a way to save their case. From behind me, Opiola shot into my ear: “Appeal the God damn thing.” From the side, attorney Yonan was looking at me cynically. What should I do? If I overplayed my role as a prosecutor on the take, the officers or another ASA could report me.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “because the suppression of the evidence has altered the circumstances, I request a continuance to consider appealing this case.”

  Yonan winced, realizing he couldn’t read me yet.

  “Motion granted,” Judge Olson replied. He went through his desk calendar and set the case for three days later.

  As I walked out of the courtroom with the officers, Opiola asked, “Are you going to appeal?”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I knew it was time to develop my own tactics for gathering evidence against each lawyer or judge separately as the circumstances allowed, starting with Cy. But I had to handle a number of plans at the same time.

  CY YONAN

  During a recess on the day the officers asked me to appeal, Olson took the unusual step of calling me into his chambers. Up to this point, he had not said a word to me that directly implied he was corrupt. Now he felt sure enough about me to drop the pretense. I closed the door and asked, “Judge, what is it you want?”