Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  When the electric Tuite took over, he said that if you go to a ballgame expecting a fix, you will think that each strike, each error, and each hit is rigged. He emphasized the relative youth of the thirty-eight-year-old Laurie and said the new judge did not want to be disciplined as Judge David Cerda had been in 1975 for barring hallway hustlers on his own authority. Tuite neglected to bring up that it was only after Cerda’s reprimand that regulations outlawed hustling.

  Tuite also described Jimmy LeFevour as a drunk for twenty years who could no longer tell reality from fiction. Jimmy, he said, “must have a melon for a brain by now with all the alcohol it has absorbed.” He added that Jimmy shook down the lawyers to set up the hustlers’ bribery club “and that not one dime went to Judge Laurie.” The phrase “not one dime” came again and again, no doubt to make sure jurors kept thinking about it. As for why bagman Jimmy LeFevour would testify against Laurie, Tuite said the answer was simple: the former officer wanted to save his thirteen-hundred-dollar-a-month police pension.

  Touching on my role, he told the jurors that “Hake uniquely and very disturbingly believes that you can commit perjury if you are doing it for the government.” He claimed that the tape they would be hearing would show what could happen when a “voodoo expert” in Washington got his hands on an ordinary conversation.

  When I took the stand, I testified that Laurie had agreed to see me after getting a call and told me “I talked to Harold,” meaning Conn. My tape let the jury go back in time to when Laurie advised me how to handle a case, even telling me to “scream” when the prosecutor asked to have a charge reinstated.

  “And then we can get an NG [not guilty]?” I had asked.

  That was when, I am certain, Laurie gave me a “Sure.”

  As brought out in testimony over the next couple of days, Laurie went back in court and found my undercover FBI “client” innocent of shoplifting, completely ignoring testimony that he had been arrested with a candle snuffer and a pair of salt and pepper shakers in his pockets. Instead, Judge Laurie said the arresting guard was unreliable because he had testified that all the exits at Water Tower Place had heavy doors. What? Laurie claimed that he, himself, had recently been there and did not believe that this was true. Even if the doors were made of matchsticks or diamonds, or there were no doors at all, the issue was immaterial. It was just a tactic to obscure the facts.

  The prosecution testimony also concerned a later illegal gun case the FBI and I had concocted. So I decided to talk to Laurie about the gun case when he was alone in a hallway, when judges are more amenable to defense attorneys. Our conversation continued on the way to the elevator and then into his chambers.

  “I want to show my appreciation for my case coming up on Thursday,” I had said.

  “Just do a good job and don’t worry about it,” Laurie told me.

  But contradicting the FBI account I had written just hours after the conversation, Laurie insisted he lectured me about how I should not be engaged in bribery and then threw me out of his chambers. He testified he never reported my bribe attempt because he did not want to ruin my career. I had no proof he was lying because the tape recorder had failed to record our conversation. I conceded that when I returned to Laurie’s chambers a third time to get more evidence against him, he really did throw me out.

  Unfortunately, Lassar could not ask me to speculate on what might have been behind Laurie’s turnabout. I would have said that in the intervening time the judge might have heard the longstanding rumor about my being a mole, and that both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times were carrying rumors of an investigation.

  Throughout my direct examination, I was dreading cross-examination. Tuite always presented himself as a pleasant gentleman to the jury but could be nasty on attack. Hardened police officers who had done nothing wrong were known to bead with perspiration under his questions.

  Tuite had often seen me around the Criminal Courts Building, and for months he would have had a chance to talk to Greylord targets such as Bob Silverman to learn the best way to turn inside out everything I did. Whether Tuite actually did this, I don’t know, but he seemed determined to portray me as someone crazed with ambition. He started out by having me admit that I lied in my work for the government. “Well,” he said, “do you think that as you testify now, you are doing it for the government?”

  “I’m doing it for the people of the United States, I believe.”

  “So that if you tell an untruth, in your mind it’s not wrong, even here on the witness stand?”

  “Here, under oath, it’s wrong,” I answered. “Yes, it is.”

  Although we had been cautioned never to mention the name of Greylord in the trial, minutes later I made a slip while explaining our precautions and said I had discussed such issues “before I ever entered into the Greylord project.”

  Judge Marshall sternly interjected, “This is the trial of John Laurie; this is not a ‘Greylord case.’” I could almost hear a whip crack over my head.

  Tuite lost no time sniping at my credibility. After referring to the oath I had taken on the stand, he asked whether indeed I had once told Bob Silverman that “there is a rumor going around I’m working for the FBI, but honest to God I’m not.”

  “I told him that, yes. Should I have told him I was working for the FBI?”

  “Well, you didn’t have to tell him anything…. Your motive was that it was not criminal, isn’t that right?”

  “We were doing it for a good ‘motive.’”

  “But motive isn’t an element of a crime. You should know that, don’t you?” he asked, no doubt hoping the jury would not realize how nonsensical his argument was.

  “Mr. Tuite, the case laws—”

  “I’m talking about testifying falsely in court under oath,” he interjected. The last thing he wanted was for me to set the jury straight. At an objection from Lassar, Judge Marshall gaveled and ordered Tuite to let me complete my answer.

  “The case laws interpreted that, at least in the federal courts, it is permissible for these men [undercover agents] to go out and break the laws of our country to get criminals off the street,” I said.

  “So now you agree that you were breaking the law?” Tuite asked.

  “We weren’t ‘breaking the law.’”

  I then went into the long-ago Mort Friedman case, which had laid the groundwork for Greylord by having Chicago police officers lie in court to help establish payoffs by defense attorneys. “There was no other way to ferret out bribery,” I pointed out. “It’s a very difficult crime to prove.”

  And so the cross-examination continued, with Tuite trying to turn each of my replies into something it wasn’t. Oh, come on now, I thought as the tiresome and distorted questions kept coming at me. To hear him, you would think judges gave just “constructive criticism” for defense lawyers on how to win acquittals, and that I had set Laurie up so I could use FBI money to buy a ten-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent paperback law book and fill my car tank with gasoline.

  From out of nowhere, Tuite threw in a line of questioning intended to have me say that it would be all right if a judge decided on a verdict for free as a personal favor. It didn’t work. But I conceded that FBI agents and I rigged cases in such a way that there would be something for a judge to base a “not guilty” verdict on. When Tuite asked if I ever heard of rainmaking, I sarcastically replied, “I’ve heard of that, and ESP and everything.”

  If Tuite and I were speaking like this in a private conversation, I could have laughed and told him he was being absurd. But because of restrictions on trial procedures, I had to hold back what would have been my human responses even while realizing how my abbreviated answers must sound to jurors who were being asked to take Tuite’s word for how courts work.

  Later in the cross-examination, I was paraphrasing a prosecutor’s speech in a case and did not include an exact word the ASA had used, “fine.” Tuite pounced on this and asked, “Is this another part of your lying on behalf of the Gover
nment because you think it’s good?”

  Although the judge ordered the remark stricken from the record, I calmly replied, “I’m not lying, Mr. Tuite.”

  The defense attorney got around to Traffic Court bagman Harold Conn, who had been convicted of accepting a bribe intended for Laurie. He asked whether Conn at the time had been “pulling a scam on Judge Laurie.”

  “No,” I said, “because Judge Laurie responded to that. He said ‘No problem’—twice.”

  “That doesn’t mean he received any money, does it?”

  “To me it did.”

  After more questioning that seemed to go nowhere, I was finally excused. I was glad Tuite had not been able to upset me, and I had no doubt the jurors saw through him.

  Once the prosecution rested, Tuite called his strongest witness—Judge Laurie himself. He took the oath looking like a minor movie actor, with a slightly rugged face and his light brown hair combed nimbly to give him a spontaneous appearance. During direct questioning, he answered softly and never acted like the chair-pounding Judge Murphy. When it came time for cross-examination, Laurie mildly denied everything attorney Peter Kessler and bagmen James Trunzo and Jimmy LeFevour had told the jury about giving him money.

  Prosecutor Scott Lassar stepped up and asked incredulously whether Jimmy LeFevour ever told him that his cousin, Judge Richard LeFevour, wanted him to split kickbacks from “club members” for their bond referrals.

  “No, he didn’t,” Laurie said, and explained that Jimmy LeFevour had merely asked him to give more business to Kessler and certain other attorneys to make up for having assigned so many cases to lawyers sent by the Chicago Bar Association.

  “Now, didn’t it seem very strange to you that Jimmy LeFevour was asking you to help these four attorneys?” Lassar asked.

  “It seemed strange, yes.”

  “And did you think that maybe they were bribing him so that he would help them? … Didn’t you suspect that there was something funny going on here, judge?”

  “If you are going to ask me to speculate, yes, I suspected there was something ‘funny.’”

  “What you suspected is that there was some type of bribery scheme here?”

  “I didn’t suspect any bribery scheme, no,” Laurie replied. He added that when he found an envelope with two hundred dollars from attorney Lee Barnett on his desk, he reprimanded the attorney (who would later plead guilty to bribery) but did not report him to the disciplinary board because “I had no specific evidence as to what his intent was.”

  “Just came right out of the blue, two hundred dollars in an envelope?”

  “That’s correct.”

  And so it went, with Laurie presenting himself as a decent man who never listened to rumors about bagmen and was always willing to hear what attorneys had to say—just a victim of his own credulity.

  In closing arguments, co-prosecutor Vincent Connolly compared Laurie and me as lawyers in our thirties, but then started contrasting us by claiming the judge virtually put a “for sale” sign on his bench. “Where Terry Hake saw wrong and tried to correct it, John Laurie saw money and was glad to take it. Where Terry Hake submerged himself into this cesspool in order to do something about it, John Laurie jumped in and helped himself.”

  During the defense’s “closing,” Tuite went to a portable blackboard he had set up next to Judge Marshall and, without explaining why, wrote INNOCENT in big letters and GUILTY just as large below that. Turning to the jurors, he said the government had arranged “deals with scum” to make a case against a good and honorable man. Then he focused on the discrepancy between the original tape and the version I had enhanced, giving jurors an issue they could think about aside from Judge Laurie’s guilt or innocence.

  “Oh, he says here, ‘I wouldn’t lie,’” Tuite insisted as he pointed to the empty witness chair. “It’s scary. We sort of joke about it. I suppose somebody ought to bring Hake along to bars on Rush Street, and when some guy says to a young lady ‘Will you go out with me?’ and she says ‘We’ll see,’ Hake would say that’s ‘Sure.’ He would be a great asset. To Hake, a lie is not a lie. Perjury is not perjury. And ‘We’ll see’ is ‘Sure.’”

  “We hear about these things happening behind the Iron Curtain,” he went on. “What was done here to change those words like that, it’s frightening. It’s an affront to the whole system. And if you can’t believe that, you can’t really believe anything Hake tells you, because he will tell you anything.”

  “Maybe they say he’s a hero,” Tuite commented, “and I’m not saying that what he had in mind was not heroic; he got his lance, and he pulled that visor down his face and he went out there charging, and he didn’t care whom he trampled—and he didn’t care if with that lance he would stab the truth a few times, or run over the oath a few times to save a fair maiden or to win the crusade. And that’s what’s wrong. Sometimes a zealot like Terry Hake will not care about the truth.”

  He went on to compare our activities with the Watergate break-in when, as he said with a biting inflection, “a group of people in Washington, D.C., … thought for the good of the country you could break into offices, break into doctors’ offices, steal documents, perjure [yourself], obstruct justice, destroy evidence—as long as you are doing it for the ‘good of the country.’”

  There it was, a complete misrepresentation not only of all my efforts but of the sacrifices of people like Judge Brocton Lockwood, who had resigned from the bench after being disgusted by the corruption that had surrounded him in Chicago.

  “Maybe as Judge Laurie sits there now, he says ‘I should have gotten involved’ in ridding the halls of fixers,” Tuite told the jurors. “He didn’t. That’s not a crime. Sometimes it’s an act of compassion as well.” Now the large, smiling attorney erased certain letters from the word INNOCENT on the blackboard, above GUILTY.

  “Give everybody the benefit of the doubt,” he implored. “Don’t ruin their lives.”

  The letters remaining on the blackboard read NO T GUILTY.

  Our case was so strong we expected a quick verdict. But the jury spent day after day going over the evidence and playing the tapes. The strain was crushing for Laurie’s sixty-two-year-old father, the owner of a pizza restaurant. All during the trial, his face had seemed bleached.

  By the third day of deliberations, we suspected that Laurie might be acquitted on some of the lesser charges but convicted of racketeering, extortion, and mail fraud. How could any jury ignore first-hand accounts of bribery from Jimmy LeFevour and Peter Kessler and hearing a tape of the judge coaching me about presenting a case to him for acquittal?

  On the fourth day, after a total of more than twenty-two hours of deliberations, the foreman notified the bailiff that the verdicts had been reached. At the time, I was at the FBI office in the same building interviewing a policeman about Auto Theft Court corruption, in preparation for another trial. Judge Marshall summoned attorneys for both sides and waited for them to come through the doors. Judge Laurie returned to the defense table looking drawn. He must have feared the worst for months. Only now, when his real feelings could not affect the verdict, did he allow the struggle to show.

  The jurors stood with stone faces as the judge read off that the defendant had been found not guilty on all fourteen counts. Tuite triumphantly crossed the courtroom and shook Lassar’s hand, but the prosecutor only glared at him. The rejuvenated Judge Laurie walked silently out of the courthouse with his beaming girlfriend. U.S. Attorney Webb hid his reaction in a courthouse corridor and said into half a dozen microphones shoved at him, “Now that the jury has ruled, I wish Judge Laurie and his family the best of luck as he resumes his career.”

  When I heard of the acquittal in the FBI offices I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I took a phone call from Cathy at my desk. She said just “I love you,” and I started to cry. After setting the receiver down, I went into the evidence room and locked the door to be alone. I felt personally rejected. Five men and seven women had as
much as called me a fraud. And why? Because I had to tape a conversation in a noisy chambers. Because the on/off switch of my recorder wasn’t working one day. Because of a dispute over “we’ll see” and “sure.” Because of a clever and relentless defense attorney. I could imagine all defense attorneys across the city, whether crooked or honest, applauding the rapidly spreading news. The verdict gave about twenty Greylord defendants awaiting trial their first reason for hope. As one lawyer said, “A rising tide helps all ships.”

  When someone called Laurie’s father to tell him the verdict, the man gasped, “Thank God!” Later that day he suffered a heart attack while driving. He died in a hospital a week later.

  During that week I had been having neck and back problems so I took two days off and went to see a doctor. I explained that I hadn’t twisted anything and didn’t know what the matter was. “Could be stress,” the doctor said. I didn’t tell him what kind of stress I was under. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that I was entering a depression. I didn’t know yet that this was a common aftermath among undercover agents. All sorts of feelings you have to keep back come flooding through you all mixed up. I was losing interest in outside activities as if they were from someone else’s life, and I found it so hard to concentrate that people had to repeat things for them to register in my mind. I was trying to survive in a world that had fallen out of its orbit. I thought the doctor hated me, and my neighbors hated me, that they were all yelling behind my back, “Liar, liar!”

  21

  REBOUND

  Summer 1984

  All the federal agents I met that summer were so supportive that they helped me get over my ill feelings from the Laurie trial, but I remained a little on edge because my first child was overdue. Every time a Bureau office phone rang, I thought it might be Cathy telling me to rush to the hospital.