Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  When no one picked up the call, he slammed the receiver down and shouted, “That bastard!” He then told his cousin, “I won’t be in this week. See what you can find out.”

  When the judge returned to his office seven days later, he pulled the framed photos of the smiling Daley family off the wall. One was of LeFevour swearing Daley in as State’s Attorney.

  During the week of LeFevour’s absence, Brocton Lockwood held a news conference on his own to disclose that he had been a government mole for a time. His news conference actually worked to my advantage, since this reinforced the impression some people had that the investigation had focused on the Traffic Court Building.

  There was still no more information about the unnamed attorney who had been working for the government. Since my best cover was nonchalance, I pretended to be as curious as everyone else. Then I went back to our “crime academy” warehouse in Addison for our last session and to plot our next moves with Dan Reidy, Bill Megary, Chuck Sklarsky, and the rest of the Greylord team.

  For two years we had been kicking around ideas for what our final day would be like. In one fantasy, I would storm into the chambers of the judge who had thrown me out when I offered him a bribe, then slap two hundred dollars on his desk and say, “Let’s leave the Trunzos out of this one, judge. I know you take the money, and you know it, so let’s cut the nonsense!” But now that the day was here, we had nothing to do.

  Maybe that was just as well. In me was the whimpering emptiness of a child who didn’t get a Christmas gift. Then one of the agents answered the phone and handed me the receiver, saying, “It’s Hegarty,” the man in charge of the FBI office in Chicago. I seldom had contact with him, but I assumed he was calling to congratulate us and to say that my merry band of men and women should dissolve.

  “Hello, Ed,” I said. “This is Terry.”

  “I have some news you’ve been waiting for. I have been authorized to swear you in as an FBI agent.”

  This was what I had wanted ever since I was a child, and I didn’t know what to say.

  “We’re going to keep it secret for now so you can stay undercover,” Hegarty added. “You can do your training later.”

  The agents around us could not hear what the call was about, so I turned and said with almost adolescent enthusiasm, “I’m going to be one of you guys now!” I must have been beaming.

  I would have been happy to drive an hour to the faraway tollway rest area where Hegarty wanted to meet me. But Reidy thought all the work I had put into the project deserved a little respect, so he took the receiver and persuaded Hegarty to swear me in at the warehouse. I excitedly called Cathy at her law firm, but she was busy and I couldn’t reach her.

  The festive mood in our warehouse was a little like a football team locker room after a championship victory. We celebrated by sending one of the agents out for beer and wine while I took a lot of kidding. “You’ll never be one of us dressed like that,” one of them said about my sport shirt and casual pants. “Hope you don’t mind a pay cut,” another called out. As a project development specialist for the FBI, I was receiving thirty-seven thousand dollars a year, and agents were starting at thirty-four thousand.

  I was so pleased about my new career that I wanted to kick off my shoes and lean back to enjoy the moment. But then came a call from my supposed law partner, Jim Reichardt, saying that Mark Ciavelli wanted to get in touch with me. I knew why, and dreaded phoning him. I certainly didn’t want to talk to Mark in front of all these agents. “Sorry, guys,” I told the gang, “I don’t want to tie up the line, so I’ll call from the gas station. I hope to be back before Hegarty comes.”

  I picked up my briefcase with the tape recorder and drove with an agent to a Shell station a mile away. I attached the suction cup of the recorder to the phone and dialed. The agent stood in front of the receiver to block out the whoosh of traffic so we would get a clearer recording.

  Mark picked up the phone and started talking about a client he was going to refer to me, but I could tell that this was just an excuse to talk to me. I interrupted by asking, “Did you see the Trib story about the mole?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Well, it’s not me. We just bought a house, and the last thing I need is to throw it all away by stooling for the government.”

  “I thought about you when I read it, but then I figured it couldn’t be.” There was a deadness in Mark’s voice. “I’ll have the client give you a call.”

  He hung up and I drove back to the party in our warehouse, my joy now mixed with concern for the man who had once been my closest friend in the courts.

  With the reality of the moment settling in, I started thinking that Megary and Bob Farmer must have urged my swearing-in because some of the lawyers and judges were probably becoming desperate. If they ever cornered me or started acting tough, I could now reveal myself as an FBI agent and they would think twice before turning violent.

  “Hide the beer, Hegarty’s coming!” one of the team members called out as a car pulled up, setting off a stampede to shove bottles into the refrigerator and hide wine glasses and half-empty cans in the cars we kept in the building for our contrived cases. When the head man arrived, there wasn’t one hint of our celebration. We could have posed for a photograph of FBI stereotypes from the 1950s. So could Hegarty, a middle-aged man with a manner reflecting his small-town background. He greeted me and waited for one of the agents to fetch a camera. Raising my hand and taking the oath of office, I probably was the first FBI agent ever sworn in while dressed as if for a game of golf.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hegarty,” I said. At important moments, cleverness eludes you.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. “Good work.”

  Megary clapped me on the back as everyone else swarmed around to shake my hand. I felt not only like a bona fide federal investigator but as if I had just been ordained. “Hegarty’s gone,” someone hooted. That meant open the refrigerator and bring out the beer.

  Later that week, top county and federal law enforcement officials held a news conference to disclose that our evidence would be presented to a special federal grand jury and that the first wave of indictments should be returned in about two months. The name “Greylord” was mentioned for the first time but not explained, leading reporters to assume the code word somehow referred to the British legal system rather than an American racehorse.

  The announcement created what some called a “climate of fear” in the marble halls of the criminal courthouse. Attorneys refused to talk to one another. Some of them patted each other down for a recorder, and not as a gag. A friendly judge who was known for his honesty became so afraid lawyers would suspect him of being a stool pigeon that he began eating lunch in his chambers rather than mingle with them at the cafeteria or nearby restaurants. The FBI intentionally increased the tension by leaking false information suggesting that ten lawyers were expected to cooperate with the investigation under immunity from prosecution, contributing to the gallows humor throughout the courthouses that late summer.

  Still in my undercover role, I joined Costello for coffee one day at the first-floor snack shop at the Criminal Courts Building. He whipped out his black beeper, shoved it at me as if it were a microphone, and asked, “Can you say a few words?” I pretended he was funny.

  Costello then talked about how nervous Judge Olson had become. “His chambers could have been wired,” Costello said. “Fuck it, we were just doing a few bonds.”

  “They’d never bug a chambers,” I said. “One branch of the government can’t intrude on another, we’ve got separation of powers.”

  “But so what,” Jim said dismissingly, “they’ll never be able to tell who was talking there.”

  “Hey, you’re right—they’d need a video camera.”

  Of course he didn’t know that I had used a transmitter to notify agents when dirty lawyers were going into the chambers, or that I kept a log of each person going in so we could match a name with the incriminating words pi
cked up by the microphone. And he could not have known how I had gone over those tapes repeatedly with the agents to identify each voice.

  At the time of our conversation, some of the fixers were holding private meetings over the situation. They threw out a number of conjectures about who the “rat” might be but my name, we learned, never came up. If I had known how fully the fixers had believed my role, I would have had a lot more sleep in the last three years. Next they settled down to discuss how deep the probe could possibly be. Since no federal investigation had ever been as penetrating and extensive as Greylord had been, none of them even came close.

  The crooked attorneys felt protected by two aspects unique to criminal trial work. One was that they could use rainmaking as their defense, saying that the bribes never reached the judges and that they were just tricking their clients into thinking the result had been paid for. The fixers also hoped that juries might believe they were victims of entrapment, that the bribes never would have been made if someone working for the FBI had not arranged everything. Greylord organizers had known of these problems from the start, and there was some nail-biting about whether all our unprecedented effort would hold up.

  The only way to get around such defense tactics would be if one of the fixers—not just a bagman—turned against his friends to testify how bribery had been going on for decades. What chance was there of that happening? As one of the shysters put it, “If you stonewall the government, this thing is going to fizzle out.”

  Each fixer spent these apprehensive weeks according to his own personality: covering up, denying, or using alcohol or drugs.

  I was talking to Costello in a courthouse lobby when Peter Kessler came by nervously and bluntly said, “Terry, I hear you’re the mole.” Looking back now, maybe he wanted me to help him, but I froze and kept quiet.

  “Bullshit,” Costello exploded for me, “I been hearing that for three years. Maybe you’re right, Peter”—Jim’s tone was mocking now—“maybe Terry has been working for the G and he got me to join him and now I’m recording every fucking word you’re saying.” No laugh was louder than Costello’s when he was making people feel uncomfortable.

  Later that day, I drew Peter aside to tell him how the rumor had started. Trying to sound as terrified as the fixers had become, I mentioned seeing Jimmy LeFevour’s name in the papers as being under scrutiny. “Is everything shut down?” I asked.

  Peter Kessler said with a nod, “I think there are some lawyers who are spilling their guts already.” He probably was thinking of the fictitious ten.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. God, I hate the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They offer immunity to some people and tell the others to forget it.” He had the desperate expression of someone whose foot is caught in the tracks and can hear a train coming.

  “Maybe it’s first come, first served,” I suggested and let my hint go at that.

  At the time I was appearing in court for all my remaining cases, but for a couple of weeks I dared not risk trying to pass another bribe. But if there was one last thing I wished I could do, it was to hand a second payoff to Lucius Robinson. That way we could charge him with racketeering and pressure him into giving up judges we didn’t have enough on, including Pompey.

  Autumn 1983

  FBI agent Bill Megary advised me against packing my Nagra because the recorder was too bulky to be overlooked by Lucius Robinson’s searching eyes, so I was equipped with a small radio transmitter instead. With two agents parked outside the criminal courthouse to record us on tape, I met him in Pompey’s empty chambers about a cocaine possession case that might involve a lot of money.

  “Too much heat,” Lucius said with a jiggle of his head. “They’re still following me around with the television cameras. Just present your case. That’s all you can do, isn’t it?”

  And so, with great reluctance, I had to let him and Pompey go and accept that my undercover role was over.

  “You can’t stay out there forever,” said one of the FBI agents from our crime school. We still had to shore up my side of the operation, and that meant getting someone to testify for the government. We talked over who might be the most vulnerable of all the disreputable people I had come to know so well. I sat back, tired, and said, “Costello.” Why not? Jim’s life was a mess, and leniency might help him put the pieces back together. Besides, no one respected him, so there would be no old boys’ network to break through. And, in the back of my mind, I wanted to protect him for the hundreds of hours we had shared as friends.

  But no one was enthused because Costello was only a hallway hustler. “Jimmy LeFevour’s running scared, and Kessler would be easier,” they said. Perhaps. But I felt no loyalty to them.

  “No, Costello,” I insisted. “We got him talking about everything from when he took bribes as a cop to cheating on last year’s taxes. Besides, if we get him we can nail a lot of people.”

  “It’s Costello, then,” Dan Reidy said without enthusiasm. “We’ll send a couple of agents over and bring him down here.”

  “I want to do the flip,” I said.

  “These things are tricky, Terry. You don’t have the training.”

  “He won’t open up to people he doesn’t know. I know how he thinks. I can talk him into it, I know I can.”

  “Okay,” Reidy said. “But remember he keeps a gun and sometimes gets violent. Pick a public place so you can have some backup.”

  I spent half a day driving around looking for a location before settling on the lounge of the Sheraton Hotel in suburban Oak Lawn, where Jim had dumped Martha when he started divorce proceedings. I called him that evening and said, “I want to talk to you about something, Jim. I spoke to a federal prosecutor about Greylord and your name came up.”

  I must have sounded like the voice of doom to him.

  “What did you hear?” Costello asked.

  “This one’s too hot for the line, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “I’m just curious, you understand,” he said. “I got nothing to worry about.”

  I mentioned the hotel and said, “So you’ll be there?”

  “Yeah, Terry,” he said, “I’ll be there.”

  I arrived alone but nearly half a dozen male and female agents were already in casual poses around the bar, along with Chuck Sklarsky, my friend from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. If Jim raised his voice or moved back his arm to strike me, these agents would grab him in a blink. And if Costello stayed peaceful but balked at what I was about to tell him as a friend, I was to signal for Sklarsky to come over and speak with the authority of the Justice Department.

  Jim arrived looking none too happy to be there. After we ordered drinks, I tried to make light conversation but he impatiently asked what was so “hot” we couldn’t discuss it over the phone. I reached inside my suit jacket and set an envelope between us either like a threat or a way out, depending on how Costello regarded it.

  “First, I have to tell you something,” I said. “Jim, those rumors you’d always been hearing, they’re true. I was working for the FBI since before I met you, and in August I was sworn in. I’m an FBI agent now.” His face turned ashen. “You paid me bribes on nineteen occasions. I wore a tape recorder on all those conversations. In addition to bribes you gave me, I gave you one hundred dollars on one occasion in which you said you would give it to the judge who replaced Olson. You also committed tax violations. It’s all on tape. What happens with those tapes is out of my hands.”

  If Jim had only said something, I would have known how to continue. But he just stared at me as if wishing I would take my words back.

  “A couple of times you told me the government isn’t after people like you, and you’re right, we want people like Wayne Olson,” I continued, now knowing that Dan Reidy had been right about my being the wrong person for this. “Judges like Olson put you and other lawyers into positions where you were forced to pay bribes or practically starve. We’ll take what we can get, but we’re after the judges.�
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  He downed his martini and gave me a broken smile. “You got to be kidding. Aren’t you?” I could almost sense his heart sinking.

  “No, Jim, I’m not. See those men and women at the bar? They’re FBI agents. Now I want you to read this letter.”

  I opened the envelope and handed him the folded page. The message was from U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb, inviting Jim to his office for a talk. The paper shook in Jim’s hands and his shoulders drooped. This was the first time I had watched someone realize his life was over, and I never want to see it again. I grabbed the letter back to avoid drawing attention.

  Costello rose to his feet and told me, “I’m not going downtown. No fucking way.” He turned his back to me and started out. As I went after him, he pivoted near the door and asked for the letter, which was still in my hand.

  “I can’t do that, Jim.”

  “Just give me the fucking letter.”

  “Come downtown.”

  “No.”

  He hurried to his black Oldsmobile 98—the car he had proudly said Olson “bought” for him by referring cases for an even split in bond money. With Sklarsky and the FBI agents trying to keep up with me, I sprinted across the parking lot in the bright September sunshine.

  “Jim, listen to me,” I said, “we aren’t interested in going after people like you!”

  “I don’t believe in cooperating.” He moved away from his car door and towered over me, this man capable of threatening people with a gun and smashing windshields with a baseball bat. “You are a sick young man,” came that rough voice of his. He made a sudden motion but abruptly stopped himself. “I took you under my wing, Terry. I tried to show you how to be a lawyer in the real world. I had you in my home, introduced you to my family.” He threw open the car door. “Someday you are going to regret what you have done.”

  Costello started the engine, but I couldn’t give up. Over the years he had said he loved me like a brother, and now I found that the feeling was mutual.

  “Are you going to talk to Webb?” I asked through the open car window. “Jim, it’s really in your best interest.”