Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  The IRS would analyze all expenditures a judge made and might discover that he was spending one hundred thousand dollars a year above his judicial income. At trial, the Assistant U.S. Attorney would point out that all such unexplained cash showed that the source had to be bribes.

  Slowly the government learned how P.J. could avoid leaving a trace. He used his payoffs to purchase money orders at two Loop banks. Sometimes he would wait in separate lines to buy them from three different tellers to avoid suspicion over the amounts. Czurylo’s people studied hundreds of these money orders or, as prosecutors would tell a jury in typical opening-argument rhetoric, “millions” of them. They learned that in three years P.J. spent nearly forty thousand dollars for which there was no legal source, and that he had bought one hundred and forty thousand dollars in relatively small money orders over two and a half years. The judge was eventually convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on tax fraud and extortion charges.

  16

  ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

  January-March 1982

  JUDGE JOHN MURPHY and THE TRUNZO BROTHERS

  For some time we had felt secure enough to choose our targets rather than relying on contacts and circumstances. In early 1982 undercover agent David Victor Ries and I decided that it was time to begin moving in on Judge John Murphy, and that meant bagging his bagmen, the Trunzo brothers.

  The portly judge, with thinning white hair and a ruddy face, lived at the exclusive Illinois Athletic Club downtown and loved the convenience of walking just a mile and a half to work in the Traffic Court Building, which has since been converted into commercial ventures. He became unhappy the year before, when Judge Richard LeFevour assigned him to Branch 29 in the mid-North Side Belmont Avenue police station. Each morning Murphy would grumpily look out over a court call of short-tempered people who had been involved tavern brawls or back-fence disputes. Legal skills were not required, because it was often impossible to determine who was at fault. Not only that, pickings were slim since most defendants were too poor to post bond.

  Murphy’s bagmen were policeman Ira Blackwood, the would-be mentor of Judge Lockwood, and identical-twin police officers Joe and James Trunzo. The two six-foot brothers were equally crooked and looked so much alike that even their gray toupees matched. Once after I left Murphy’s courtroom I realized that I wasn’t sure whether I had spoken to Joe or Jim. Not wanting to blow our case against them, I went back and asked the officer again about the time we should meet, giving me a chance to check his star number and learn he was Joe. In time I noticed that Jim’s paunch hung over his belt a trifle more than Joe’s, so I didn’t need to read their stars any more.

  In late January 1982, Ries had been handling the case of two undercover agents who had staged a fight in Lincoln Park over a dropped wallet. This time my contact agent Bill Megary played the villain. At the same time, I was representing another undercover agent in a manufactured case involving a scuffle between supposed business partners. Meeting Mark in the hallway outside the courtrooms of Reynolds and Murphy, I offhandedly mentioned that I had just settled the arrest with Joe Trunzo.

  “You should have used me instead, then you would know where the money went.” Mark meant that he would be sure to pass the bribe on to the judge, for a share, rather than pocketing all of it.

  As usual, he was right. The Trunzos seemed to enjoy working little scams among the fixers. I walked into Murphy’s small chambers and found him reading a newspaper. “What can I do for you?” the relaxed judge asked as he motioned to a chair near his desk.

  Nervous as always at the first meeting with a targeted judge, I said that I believed the Trunzos “talked to you about a battery case I’m handling.”

  “They didn’t, but it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I sure could use a not-guilty. These guys owned a business, and three of them met to divide the assets. They got into an argument and my guy allegedly slammed the car door on the victim. It’s nothing. The summons was filed two months later.”

  “Two months later?” That made Murphy’s eyes light up. Now he had a peg to hang an acquittal on. “That means the victim filed against your guy out of spite. I’ll throw the fucking case out the window.”

  “Okay. I’ll go see Joe, then,” I said, meaning that I would hand the bribe over to the slightly less heavy brother.

  Murphy remarked that this would be fine, bringing himself into the bribery circle. Not only that, by talking to Joe Trunzo about the judge, and to the judge about Joe, I was establishing for our evidence that both men were involved in the fix.

  Murphy tossed the case out as he said he would, but as yet no money had changed hands. I drove a few miles to Traffic Court and met Joe Trunzo on the second floor. He brought me to an empty stairwell and asked what was up.

  “I talked to the judge and got an N.G. [not guilty], so I’d like to settle up with you.”

  Joe was silent at first but I could see he was upset because, as I had suspected, he had not called the judge at all. He had been hoping to keep all the money. “He don’t wanna know nothing,” Trunzo said. “He’s a cool guy. He don’t wanna know shit from shit. Don’t bother him.” In other words, don’t fix a case directly, always go through a bagman.

  “Okay, I screwed up, then.” I always hated acting as if I were groveling before people I loathed. “I got another case Monday but my guy hasn’t paid me yet, so I might just get a continuance. Hey, what do I owe you for Murphy?”

  “You owe him a deuce [two hundred dollars]. Me, we’ll see.” He was still sizing me up.

  I counted the cash on the stairs to make the bills rustle on the tape. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty; there’s one. Okay, there’s two [hundred] for Murphy. Now, is a hundred fair for you and Jim?” It was, in fact, more than the going rate.

  “Good enough,” Joe replied, almost salivating, “good enough.”

  Rather than waste an opportunity for branching out, I said casually, “Say, Joe, do you have any connections down at 11th and State?” That was police headquarters. “I got a case in front of Sodini.”

  “Fuckin’ yes,” Joe said, “he’s my buddy. I was with him the other day. We were at a funeral together.”

  “Can you talk to him about me?”

  “No problem.”

  Translation: tell Judge Ray Sodini that I bribe well.

  I still had to firm up that bribe to Judge Murphy. So on Monday, three days after meeting with him, I visited his chambers about another case we had rigged and said I “kind of screwed up” in going to him directly rather than letting one of the Trunzo bagmen handle it. Murphy told me not to worry.

  “Am I all set with you, then?” I asked.

  “As far as I know. I haven’t been back to Traffic Court in a while. I’m due over there Wednesday for something, so I’ll probably see him.”

  As testimony would show, Officer Joe Trunzo caught up with the judge and slipped him the two hundred dollars in a handshake at a revolving door. Passersby apparently never noticed.

  By now the FBI had authorized a lease on a brand new, white Pontiac 6000 so I could start looking more like a fixer. I felt a little sad at selling my old car, but the new comfort was worth it. Undercover agent Ries, who was already leasing a new Toronado to look crooked, was so envious he switched to a Pontiac Firebird with all the extras.

  Things were going so well that I became a little too self-assured. Unconsciously I was assuming that everyone in the courts would discuss fixing cases even without an introduction by a bagman. So on a snowy morning in March, I appeared in Judge Arthur Ellis’ chambers after Jim Trunzo assured me that he had made arrangements to rig the verdict. I told the judge my client was coming before him and mentioned our mutual friends, the identical cops.

  Then the judge’s private line rang, and the clerk called out that Joe Trunzo was on the line. The judge picked up the phone and said, “Yes, Joe. Right, Joe. Good to hear from you. Say hello to your twin.”

  When the judge hung up, I
told him that “if an N.G. costs more, I’m willing to pay.”

  “What do you mean,” Ellis erupted. “I ain’t—don’t go giving anybody any money up here! Are you nuts?”

  “I’m a friend of Joe and Jim’s,” I said in a faltering tone while wishing I could crawl out of the chambers. “They said to maybe say hi to you this morning and see how you’re doing.”

  “I don’t take a quarter,” the judge said. “When I was practicing law, that was something else. Up here, I’m as clean as can be. All these guys coming in and offering me money … Man, for what? You want me to go to prison? I’m telling you, Mr. Hake, ’cause I don’t want you to get in bad with any other judges. If you want to buy those Trunzo guys supper for doing you a favor, fine, but don’t go giving nobody money.”

  How could this be happening? Everything I knew from Ries and what I had been able to pick up was that this judge had at least three bagmen working for him. Was my information wrong—or was there some reason he could not trust me? At the end of his fifteen-minute tirade I thanked him and left his chambers both embarrassed and angry.

  The seemingly outraged judge continued my case, and I drove to Traffic Court to cover myself with the Trunzos. I wanted them to hear my version of what happened first. But the judge, who had yelled about his honesty, had beat me to it by alerting Joe with a call as soon as I left his office. I know this because when I arrived, Joe told me that the judge was “fuckin’ mad.”

  “Don’t ever approach that judge, Hake. If someone spots you talkin’ to him, it’s all over. You don’t know who’s around.”

  The judge was never charged and has since died. As for whether what he had told me about his integrity was true, why didn’t he report my flagrant attempt to bribe him? When authorities asked him about it later, he said it was because he didn’t know my full name. What a lie. Years after Greylord was disclosed, the conversation I had in that judge’s courtroom was entered into the evidence in the trial of former Traffic Court policeman Ira Blackwood. But for once, the tape was submitted by the defense rather than the prosecution. Blackwood’s attorney wanted to prove that court workers who received bribes did not always pass the money on to judges. But the jury was unimpressed, and Blackwood was sentenced to seven years for racketeering, bribery, and extortion.

  Spring 1982

  The intricate Greylord tax investigations would have made our part seem simple, but we never knew what was going to happen. For example, while undercover agent Brett Fox was kept in a cell for twenty-six hours for a staged crime, another prisoner described to him how he had tried to kill a man. And an agent who spent a night in a lockup saw officers brutalize one of his two dozen cellmates for refusing to budge when the police van arrived to take him to court.

  One of the federal agents I was representing forgot his fake address under questioning by a probation officer at a pre-trial interview conducted in an otherwise empty courtroom before Judge Maurice Pompey. Having a better memory, I was able to correct his mistake before the probation officer caught on. Something like that might have panicked me at the beginning, but now it was part of the adventure.

  Expanding Greylord like this required a lot of money. In just the seven months from late 1981 to the next spring, the project cost the taxpayers more than one hundred thousand dollars, largely for apartments, bonds, leasing cars, and payoffs. When our wish for more funding came through, we were allowed to rent a warehouse in west suburban Addison as our permanent headquarters. But we needed the name of a dummy corporation for the lease.

  Although the Bureau was always careful not to choose names that sounded too much like what an operation was designed for, one of our agents with a sense of humor called the bogus business Rico Enterprises. RICO also stands for the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the 1970 law that is one of the most effective federal prosecution weapons. All that is needed for a RICO conviction is to show that two or more violations were committed in a pattern, and the sentence could include substantial fines, asset forfeiture, and up to twenty years in prison. By raising the stakes, RICO induced more attorneys to cooperate with the government than would have been possible in the fifties and sixties.

  When the cautious Dan Reidy heard the name Rico Enterprises he became furious, but it was too late. As it turned out, no one made the connection because the building was in DuPage County and all the fixers and judges we were targeting worked in Cook County. We never figured out what Rico Enterprises was supposed to do, except that it somehow involved auto repossessing to explain why the lot was full of cars that we used in our undercover work.

  The unremarkable building was lost in a labyrinth of single-story factories in an industrial complex nearly an hour from the Loop. At the front was a carpeted office with a small reception room. Behind that was a large empty area of beige walls about a hundred feet long and forty feet wide. The rear parking area had a large door for delivery trucks. This was where we kept autos we had bought for our phony car-theft cases. But most of our work was done in the small office, outfitted with several gray desks and generic furnishings.

  Because events were happening quickly now, let me jump ahead again. When we had moved into the building in the fall, we relieved the sparseness by adopting a mascot, a toy penguin Judge Lockwood’s little daughter had left behind. The nameless plaything was black and gray, only about two inches tall, and made of felt over hard rubber. We kept it in the freezer compartment of our refrigerator and brought it out for all our meetings as—one of the agents said—“a reminder to cool down.”

  But the meetings themselves were serious. Rigging crimes had to be calculated geographically. Chicago was then divided into twenty-five police districts. We arranged for the acts to be committed in the districts where the agents arrested would be brought before a targeted judge. In one case, a New York City agent tore a gold chain off the neck of one of our female agents near a Walgreen’s at Howard Street and Western Avenue. As usual whenever a woman was playing a victim, the always-reliable FBI special agent Marie Dyson stayed nearby to step forward if there was any trouble. Marie was very good but she came from the Chicago office, so we did not use her in an active role in any of the bogus crimes.

  The chain snatching was aimed at Judge John McCollum, who was now sitting in Felony Preliminary Hearing Court at the police station at Belmont and Western. Unfortunately the crime coincided with a pattern of similar thefts and our agent vaguely resembled the suspect. Detectives held him for thirty-six hours of repeated questioning. All that time we were nervous because we didn’t want him taken to jail if one of the real victims mistakenly identified him.

  FBI contact agent Bill Megary sent over undercover agent David Victor Ries from the Traffic Court part of Greylord as the man’s lawyer, but even Ries couldn’t get him out of the lockup. In time, the prisoner was charged with only one theft and released. The white-haired Judge McCollum took our money and seemed eager for more.

  But no one will ever know how many other cases were fixed in that court. Two years after our rigged hearing, the FBI learned from a neighbor near McCollum’s summer home in Wisconsin that after a federal grand jury had subpoenaed his financial records, his wife had dumped the contents of several bulging garbage bags into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and set them on fire. The FBI crime laboratory in Washington determined that ashes obtained by search warrant had been made from check paper. Under questioning, McCollum couldn’t give a convincing account of why he had obliterated a trove of cancelled checks. FBI agents Jim Leu and Doug Lenhardt then began an intensive investigation of McCollom when served as chief judge of Traffic Court, which found numerous arts or bribery by him in DUI cases. He eventually pleaded guilty to bribery and tax violations, and was sentenced to eleven years in prison. This saved his wife from prison for destroying subpoenaed documents.

  It was now time to go after Ray Sodini, perhaps the laziest judge in the system.

  JUDGE RAY SODINI

  Sodini, son of hard-working immigrants, pr
esided over a courtroom of hobos, shoplifters, and street gamblers, and never took his responsibilities seriously. The previous year he had pulled off a stunt that remains a classic in Chicago jurisprudence. Awakening with a hangover, he knew he wouldn’t get to court on time. So he called a policeman who was near retirement age, Cy Martin, and asked the officer to sit in for him. Martin had no legal training and didn’t even resemble the judge, but he enjoyed being in on a good joke.

  The officer showed up at the judge’s chambers, put on Sodini’s robe, and found himself facing perhaps a hundred derelicts rounded up in the nightly sweep of the streets. “My object was to get them out,” he would say later, “so when other people came in, there would be a little dignity in the courtroom. I think the bailiff swore them in all at the same time, and I kept hitting the gavel over and over to clear the courtroom as fast as possible.” No one was punished for the switch.

  On March 23, 1982, I met Officer Joe Trunzo at the employees’ entrance of Traffic Court and talked about fixing a shoplifting case coming before Sodini. Joe left me to make a phone call. He came back and said it was done, and that I shouldn’t talk to the judge or anyone else. After Sodini disposed of the case later that day, Joe led me to a stairway for the payoff.

  “Okay, how much?” I asked.

  “Two for the judge.”

  I handed over two of my one-hundred-dollar bills, a fixer’s pocket change. Then I gave him two fifties for him to split with his brother, also involved in the fix. On top of that, I offered Joe twenty dollars more for himself. “Here,” I said, “this is for being a super guy.” I was hoping he would become my pipeline to more judges.

  The Center Cannot Hold

  The following day I returned to our “crime academy” as usual. Since the FBI agents and I needed to set up offenses that would bring undercover agents before certain judges, we plotted a robbery outside Water Tower Place, a spotless vertical mall with an atrium and a glass elevator sliding through several levels of upscale small shops. Since I was just one of several people involved in the planning, the agents didn’t need me to carry it off when it occurred, and I decided to take a little time off.