We were feeling good about ourselves. No investigation in American history had obtained evidence against so many judges on the take, and it seemed that we would be able to charge virtually all of the corrupt ones we had learned about. But Greylord was about to come to an end sooner than any of us expected.
For my vacation I accompanied Cathy, now my fiancée, on her trip to the national mock trials finals in Houston. She was proud that her team of law students represented the entire Midwest.
At around noon on Thursday of that week, a black agent going by the name of Jesse Clugman hailed a cab across from Water Tower Place and an agent posing as a thief grabbed his bag. “Clugman” ran after the “thief,” Mark Langer*, then tackled him in the crowd and they scuffled. A shopper kept whacking at the “thief” with her purse until two officers arrived and arrested him. One of the FBI agents posing as a passerby immediately slipped away and called the office to say the bogus robbery had gone as planned. But then all hell broke loose.
A routine police search at the scene turned up not only a driver’s license with Langer’s phony name, Mark McKee, but also his FBI badge and photo credentials, which were in his jacket pocket. “What’s this?” asked the officer.
Instead of answering, Langer, who was white, made racial threats at “Clugman” while putting on a distracting show of strange faces and puckering his lips almost like a chimpanzee. The distraction worked, and the police didn’t know what kind of madman they had on their hands. They conducted the two agents to a police station in separate squad cars.
Langer continued his wildman act until another undercover agent showed up with bond money, but police thought it was strange that “Clugman” had declined to press charges against his attacker. Police later called the agent’s phony apartment and received no answer. They went through their thick book of Chicago phone numbers listed by address rather than by name and called people at the building. No one knew of a “Clugman” or any other black man living there.
There was never any love lost between the FBI and the Chicago police, and the officers were happy to see that one and possibly two FBI agents had been brought in for what appeared to be a botched undercover case. Acting on their own, individual officers apparently began making anonymous calls to newspapers and TV stations, and the FBI office responded by issuing statements designed to cloud the situation.
While this was going on in Chicago, Cathy and I drove to Galveston to visit the sandy beaches and fishing piers along the Gulf of Mexico. We were in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop when I read the Saturday edition of the Houston Chronicle. A brief story told of a Water Tower Place robbery in which both victim and offender turned out to be FBI agents. My heart felt as if it had stopped. It’s finished, I thought, and handed the paper over to Cathy. “Look at this,” I said.
“They can’t call it off, can they?”
“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” I answered.
I should have lamented that the bungled set-up would mean that perhaps dozens of rotten police officers, court clerks, lawyers, and judges might never be brought to justice, since our evidence against them was still preliminary. But, being human, my first worry was that I would have to turn in my new Pontiac 6000.
I went back to my motel and kept calling the FBI office in Chicago. Finally I reached Megary and asked what the plans were now.
“We’re going to have to shut down for a while,” he answered quietly.
“How could they do something like that, after all we’ve gone over with these guys, over and over!”
“It was the weather.”
“What?” I thought I had misunderstood.
“It got cold just before our guy went out, so he took a heavier jacket. He forgot that’s the one with his credentials. That’s not going to happen again, Terry. I want your people to start keeping their revolvers and credentials locked in a safe before they go out. I’m also going to see that everyone gets searched for anything that can be traced to us, including government pencils. Don’t worry, the cops still don’t know anything about us. We’ll redirect this thing somehow.”
“Don’t worry”—the words were as wasted as telling a jury to disregard what they had just heard.
I don’t think any of us could sleep for some time. Then one of the Greylord supervisors decided to create a false news leak. Certain reporters who commonly received tips from federal sources were told that the agent arrested had been involved in an undercover probe of possible police corruption, a situation that was entirely plausible since a commander in the district had already been convicted of taking payoffs from bar owners. The ruse made what the press called an “Abscam-like operation” seem localized, diverting attention away from the courts.
Greylord gained steam again, but the organizers decided after the Water Tower Place fiasco that as soon as any undercover agent was sentenced to jail they would shut down the entire operation and seek indictments against everyone we had solid evidence against.
Summer 1982
We still had to stay cautious to see if the misinformation campaign had worked. But we were not idle, we just kept our eyes and ears open as we went on with our work. Only when no one behaved differently toward Ries and me by mid-summer did we feel it was safe to go ahead.
Cathy by now had graduated from law school, and we were planning an August wedding. I had already called Mark Ciavelli and brought up as if in passing that I couldn’t invite him because we were having only a small reception. I knew I couldn’t send an invitation to any of my friends from the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the only one I really wanted to ask from the bribery underworld was Costello.
Cathy was always pleasant and understanding, but now she became insistent. “There’s no way I’m going to have that man at my wedding.”
“I sincerely like Jim,” I said, “and he’s going through a bad time.”
“I don’t care.”
“He’s expecting an invitation—it would be good for my cover.”
“I don’t want him to ruin my day, Terry. He’s a criminal.”
While I was wondering how to tell Costello, he brought the subject up on his own. As we were talking over the phone two weeks before the wedding, he said, “Well, I checked the mail today and it wasn’t there.”
“What wasn’t?” I asked.
“My invitation to your wedding. You’re gonna invite me, aren’t you?” There was hurt in his voice.
“Jim, I’m sorry, but Cathy’s mother is paying for it, and she’s keeping it to the family only.”
“Okay. What the hell, I’ll send you a present.”
In a way, I was glad he forgot to. The present would only have been a reminder of the friendships I had to break. Besides, it would only have gone in the FBI evidence vault.
We held the nuptials on a surprisingly cool day for a Chicago summer. Both Cathy and I came from large, close families and we couldn’t force ourselves to cut the guest list shorter than one hundred and fifty. The ceremony was performed at Faith, Hope and Charity Church, the Winnetka parish where Cathy had been raised. She sweet-talked the priest into holding a small champagne pre-reception in the church garden, where our guests grouped for pictures.
After the ceremony everyone drove to a country club for dinner. I tried not to be self-conscious about dancing with Cathy although I felt the pressure of all those eyes on the back of my neck. Undercover work was easier.
For our honeymoon we drove to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, where we stayed at the historic Chateau Frontenac, then headed back through Maine. The land of rugged pines and clear streams had given me a sense of freedom. But once we returned to the urban sprawls, I could feel myself tensing up. I was never a machine manufactured to FBI specifications, and my brain and my body were threatening to shut down.
After a few days back in Chicago, I realized from a fresh viewpoint how unsettled our investigation had become. Two news reports of an investigation in as many years meant that anything could give us away.
While we still could, we had to start going after a few corruptors within our reach.
October 1982
OFFICER JAMES LEFEVOUR and JUDGE MARTIN HOGAN
In Officer Jimmy LeFevour’s capacity as chief bagman in the First Municipal District—Chicago—he kept himself busy delivering bribes to judges in the Gun, Auto Theft, Women’s, and Gambling Courts. We put him at the top of our list of new targets. But “Dogbreath” wasn’t as easy to fool as the Trunzo brothers, or as obvious as fellow bagman Harold Conn. Unless I had an introduction to him, he would never trust me. This set me on a long, roundabout route in which I had to work with past targets and bribe another judge just to reach him.
We started by plotting a car theft that would let us trace a bribe from my hand to Jimmy LeFevour and then to Judge Martin Hogan. This meant buying a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra. Not only did we pull the ignition to make the auto appear hot-wired, we left pliers clamped in place to make it harder for Hogan to find an excuse for dismissing the case.
An undercover agent then called the police to say he had overhead someone in a pancake house at Diversey and Western attempting to sell a classy stolen auto parked outside. Police set up a surveillance at the busy North Side intersection until an undercover agent in street clothes climbed in the car and sped off. In a minute, the officers curbed him and asked for identification. The agent, posing as a Californian named Richard Duran, said he couldn’t account for the car or the pliers hanging on the ignition. They put him under arrest, and I came in as his shady lawyer.
Then I found attorney Peter Kessler prowling the aisles looking for clients during a recess of sleazy Gambling Court in police headquarters. “Can I ask you something?” I spoke quietly, in my shady tone. He waved me to an empty courtroom. “I got this auto theft case,” I began, “and I don’t know anybody else real well in the building. My client—let’s face it, the case is a dead bang loser.”
“Plea for probation,” Peter said with a shrug.
“My client’s a car thief, probation would kill him. The case is up before Hogan. I had another case with him I handled through the Trunzos. They screwed me around so much, I don’t want that to happen again. So I was thinking—is Jimmy LeFevour more reliable?”
“Yeah,” Kessler answered, “but he’s a fucking hog.”
Good, I thought, Peter’s going to give me something on tape about Jimmy. I was wearing a new recorder, this one in stereo to pick up more sounds. But having a mike taped against each shoulder meant I was doubling my risk of discovery. Kessler startled me by saying, “I presume you’re not wired.”
“What a hell of a thing to say! You know me, Peter.”
He reached out toward my shoulder. A year ago I might have panicked, but now I didn’t flinch as his hand rested right on the tiny bulge over one of the wires.
“These days, no one knows,” Peter told me with a shallow laugh. “Hogan’s a very cautious man. If it’s a bad case [in which there is no pretext for a dismissal], I can tell you right now, he’s just not going to do it. If there was something for him to hang his hat on, then it’s a different story. He’ll do it for the people he trusts.”
“I heard I’ve got to go to Jimmy LeFevour, but he doesn’t know me.”
“I’ll tell him you’re okay.” That is, crooked.
“You know me, I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Peter, it’s just that I don’t want to get screwed again.”
“I know how it is, Terry. Look, we do the best for our clients. Unfortunately you and I didn’t set the rules.”
From any other fixer that would have been just self-justifying nonsense, but I knew that Kessler was sincerely telling me he hated being given the choice of paying a judge or failing to deliver as a defense attorney. As we learned later, he sometimes had sleepless nights over how he made his living.
After our talk, I left the boxy gray police building and pulled out of the parking lot. When I stopped for a red light, I noticed Judge Hogan’s clerk standing on the curb. “Hello, Nick,” I called out. “You know, I really appreciate you always calling my cases right away.” I reached out the window and slid five singles into his palm. The light turned green, and I took off. For all appearances, I was now scum on the way up.
So perhaps I really would look “dirty” to Jimmy LeFevour. When the day of our encounter came, October 14, I was jumpy even before leaving my apartment. This would be my deepest undercover penetration so far, for “Dogbreath” had a way of sniffing for trouble and was even more wary than fixer Bob Silverman or Judge “Dollars” Devine.
As I rode up the elevator to the police headquarters courtrooms, I still didn’t know if Peter Kessler had spoken to Jimmy about me. A few minutes later I saw Peter in the hall and secretly turned on my recorder.
“Everything is cool,” Kessler assured me. “Let me talk to Jimmy and tell him you’re all right.”
He left and came back to say, “This guy’s expensive. To get you some real help, he wants a nickel. I told him five hundred bucks is a lot, but that’s the going rate. Between you and I, he’s the most dishonest person in the world.”
“What should I do, Peter—do I talk [deliver the bribe] to him or talk to you?”
“Whatever you want, makes no difference to me.”
“I think I better do it through him, all right?”
We found James LeFevour skulking near the tenth-floor stairwell. Peter led me over there and said, “Jim, this is a friend of mine, Terry Hake.” Kessler then walked off as if washing his hands of us. He hated Jimmy and was glad not to be part of our deal.
“Dogbreath” did not smile or offer me his hand to shake. Instead he callously asked, “What’ve you got?”
My palms were perspiring, and Jimmy impatiently jiggled his pocket change as I outlined the auto theft case. He didn’t care about the facts, all he wanted was the name of the judge and whether I was aware how much our conversation was going to cost me.
Pointing to the bond slip I was holding, he asked, “How much is that?”
“A thousand.”
Jimmy explained that even if the case was thrown out because the witness failed to appear, it would still cost me “a nickel.”
“That’s okay.”
“Find Kessler after it’s over,” he said and moved on to other business.
A short time later Jimmy LeFevour went into Hogan’s chambers and followed the unwritten rules against mentioning a bribe when talking about one. “Dogbreath” merely commented that his cousin, presiding judge Richard LeFevour, had “an interest in this case.”
“All right.” That was all Hogan said. The case was fixed.
Judge Hogan was a trim man in his late thirties with the demeanor of an accountant, his field before switching to law. He had been appointed to the bench a year before I joined Greylord and quickly let it be known that he could be bought. Hogan lived in a dream world of spending, including a cabin cruiser, yet he let his credit card bills and parking fines go unpaid because he thought they were not worth worrying about.
Hogan was less cautious than P.J. McCormick, with his “millions” of money orders. He eventually would tell a jury that the twenty thousand dollars he had spent freely one year was a gift from a steel executive rather than bribes from lawyers, and that he had kept the cash in a drawer at home for two years.
While Jimmy was in the judge’s chambers, I was asking Hogan’s clerk, Nick, for the papers on the case. Then I slipped a folded five-dollar bill into the file jacket and handed the file back to make sure my case was called early. I also sent home the “complaining witness,” a Las Vegas agent posing as the owner of the Olds. I had just learned casually that he originally was from the Chicago area, and I was afraid someone might recognize him.
As soon as the case was dismissed, I went to give Kessler the money as Jimmy LeFevour had instructed. But Peter didn’t want to be in the middle again, and looked scared of having further dealings with the bagman. So I left him and found Jimmy sitting in Hogan’s courtro
om as other cases were being heard. He agreed to meet me in the hall.
Once we were in the corridor, Jimmy had me follow him to the washroom. The sticky floor tiles were littered with crumpled paper towels. The window had been painted shut, and the sink was cracked from some defendant’s tantrum. Jimmy walked over to a stall where he wouldn’t be seen by anyone coming in and wordlessly held out his hand.
“Sorry about the twenties,” I said as I gave him two one-hundreds and fifteen twenties. Whenever I could, I used small bills to stall for time and create conversation for the recorder. Just handing him money without saying anything for the recorder would have meant nothing. I stiffened as the money left my hands.
“Have a nice day,” Jimmy said in a monotone as he pocketed the cash and brushed past me as if I were contemptible. Well, that wasn’t any less than what my role deserved.
Then a cold thrill of intuition went through me: perhaps we could use Jimmy’s antagonism toward his cousin to bring down one of the most important judges in the huge Cook County court system. I hurriedly caught up with the bagman in the hallway and said, “Thanks, Jim.”
“Any time.”
“Are you available for anywhere in the First Municipal District?” This covered all the municipal courts in Chicago.
He nodded and walked on without a word. Too bad, because the nod was just silence on the tape.
Then I saw defense attorney Barry Carpenter watching me. Barry, husband of my friend Alice, was a scrawny six foot two or three. His receding black hair seemed to make his dark eyes more piercing, and I could tell he knew what had just gone down.
“Hey,” Barry called out to me, “come here.”
God, no, I thought. I had known early on that Barry was a hallway hustler, but out of respect for Alice I didn’t want to learn anything more about him.
Operation Greylord Page 20