Operation Greylord

by Terrence Hake

  “No, he did not.”

  “You brought up Harold, is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “In that two years” when I was a project development specialist rather than an FBI agent “you had not put any money into any judge’s hand. Is that correct?”

  “No, I did not.”

  He tried to imply that I was setting the judge up to justify all the work we had been doing. But the questioning was punctuated by Sklarsky’s repeated objections over Genson’s repetitive and argumentative approach. The badgering returned so often that the judge sometimes acted as a referee between Genson and Sklarsky that day and the next.

  Toward the end of my third day of grilling, Genson made an unusual request, that I stand before the jury as another of our tapes was played. He asked me to recreate how I had handed Devine the one hundred dollars.

  “He kind of held his hand out,” I said. “I went like this”—showing him the fixer’s way of passing money from palm to palm so that anyone walking by would think nothing of it.

  “You didn’t offer it to him?” Genson asked with feigned surprise. I felt like saying, Well, I didn’t exactly force the money into Devine’s fist.

  Imitating my motions, Genson asked, “So you held it up like this?”

  “No, I didn’t. I said, ‘Is one enough?’ or ‘Is one okay?’”

  “Sir, sir,” the attorney said with practiced irritation, “I’m asking you a question. Was the person able to see the money in your hand the way you held it?”

  “I don’t know if he could or not.”

  “Devine didn’t reach out with his right hand, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “You can sit down,” Genson said sharply.

  “No,” I said to complete my sentence, “he used his left hand.”

  With threadbare patience, Judge Getzendanner told Genson that she would like him to conclude the cross-examination soon. She must have known that the questioning had been protracted to wear me down.

  “Well, I’ll conclude it,” he said curtly and spun around to me as I returned to the witness chair. “Now, sir, if you didn’t know whether a man was guilty or innocent, you wouldn’t lie or finagle or conjure up evidence to get that man convicted, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “But if you did believe, based on your views about a man, that someone was illegal or immoral—corrupt, whatever you would call it—would you get up in a court and conjure up evidence or get up in a court and lie?”

  “No, I would not.”

  That should have been the end of it, but Genson wanted to finish with a flourish. “Sir,” he said, “you lied here today about having given Judge Devine a hundred dollars.”

  “No.”

  “Well, sir, I submit that you did.” He turned away and added, “I have no further questions.”

  I assumed the worst was over and eased up when Chuck Sklarsky started his re-direct questioning. He had me clarify that all my actions were being supervised, and had me relate how I knew that my friend Mark had become corrupt. And so I told the jurors something he had said to me, that “in order to be successful in the court system, you have to pay the judges to get what you want. To protect your client’s interest, you have to pay the judges.”

  Part of me was back in that painful time when I tried to warn Mark. I had told him it would be better not to buy the judges, no matter what they did. But he said to me, “It doesn’t work that way.” As I had learned, there would be more honest attorneys in this world if there were more honest judges.

  Sklarsky continued asking about my personal reactions, trying to show the jurors the human cost of my work. I admitted that after the conversation with Mark “I went home and cried to my mother.” Not only had I discovered that I had lost my closest friend at the State’s Attorney’s Office to corruption, I had been forced out of the illusion of basic human goodness that had sheltered me all my life.

  “Do you want a recess?” the judge asked. I was unable to answer her, for I found myself crying and couldn’t believe I was behaving this way in front of everyone. I just couldn’t collect my feelings once the first few words tumbled out. I held up my hands in a time-out signal. “Let’s take five minutes,” Getzendanner said.

  I had steeled myself for the cross-examination but let myself be open during the re-direct. That was when the deepness of my emotions caught me by surprise, and I headed for the witness room. Sklarsky was waiting for me. He gave me a manly hug and started crying, too. “I’m sorry I got you involved in all this,” he said. “We asked too much.”

  “It’s all right, Chuck.” I was already feeling better. “I don’t regret it.” Any of it.

  An assistant prosecutor resting up in the room said that there should be a special place in hell for lawyers who defend evil judges. Just that little joke lifted my spirits. A law school professor friend of mine, Randy Barnett, came in wanting to know what had happened to me on the stand. Barnett was attending the trial as a spectator but had gone to the washroom while I was still testifying, and when he returned the trial was in recess and a former public defender was complimenting Genson for his attack on me.

  I couldn’t explain without crying again, not with someone else near us, so I took Barnett to the empty hallway and told him what I could. But some things you can’t explain. All the education you go through from kindergarten through law school doesn’t prepare you for the human heart. There aren’t any white knights. Just ordinary people. They get beaten, then they have to pick themselves up and go through it all over again.

  When the trial resumed Genson seemed pleased with himself and was ready to attack me again. During re-cross examination, he tried to suggest that the jury had seen a staged performance. “I asked you many questions about him,” he said about Mark, “and you didn’t cry then, did you, sir?”

  “No.”

  He asked whether, apart from the conversation that Sklarsky had me describe, I ever said anything to Mark about handling cases on their merits alone.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And this was your good friend, isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you continued to use him as a source of introductions to other people who you thought might help you in your investigation … and continued to be involved with him and talk to him about the fixing of judges, isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And this was the same good friend you cried about just a few minutes ago, wasn’t it, sir?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Having milked the situation as much as he dared without turning jurors against him, Genson tried to minimize everything I did by saying my appearances before Devine were for just two drunken driving cases, and judges might be expected to temper justice with mercy.

  “Mr. Genson, you were talking about judges’ findings in general, which could have been a rape or a murder,” I replied. “The judge has a sworn obligation to find that person guilty.”

  “And because you had a sworn obligation as an FBI agent-to-be, project development specialist, you felt it was more important to use Mark Ciavelli as a source than to treat him as a friend and dissuade him from what he was doing, is that right?” Genson was staying away from the fact that it was Mark who had initiated nearly all our conversations about bribes. In fact, I had never wanted to see him again after he let me know he was corrupt.

  “Objection,” said Sklarsky.

  “You may answer,” the judge ruled.

  “Is that right?” Genson badgered. “Yes or no, if you can answer.”

  “That’s not right, no,” I said. By now I was too used up to give the question an answer it deserved.

  “I have no further questions,” Genson told the judge.

  I stepped down from the witness chair and left through a side door feeling as if I had just survived a hurricane. I was not so much glad it was over as I was sad and tired, and wondering how
to get on with my life.

  Getzendanner recessed the trial for the day. When reporters later asked her about my breakdown on the stand, she replied that any man would cry after so many hours of harassment in which he was presented as “a completely insensitive person.”

  While she spoke, I went to the FBI offices downstairs. Everyone was nice to me but I felt stupid for losing control. I can see better now why it happened. The stress of undercover work builds up in the fissures of your personality, and you never know when the pressure will erupt. Genson’s questions were not devastating—after all, I was not hiding anything and I was not ashamed of what I had done—but they had dragged to the surface all the things I had been trying to keep myself from thinking over. Now that my emotions had been released I couldn’t hide them any longer.

  The “closings” were divided into three parts, with the prosecution and the defense alternating. Assistant prosecutor Sheldon Zenner began by telling the jurors that “you have heard about corruption of such magnitude that it has never been seen before in a courtroom.”

  Getzendanner sustained a defense objection.

  “The clerks were taking money, the sheriff’s deputies were taking money, lawyers were paying money to the judge,” Zenner continued. “You heard testimony from Mark Ciavelli about police officers taking money. You heard testimony from so many different people about the pockets of corruption, enormous corruption. And if you ever saw a need for an undercover project, you saw it here.”

  The judge called a break before the defense delivered its closing statement.

  During the long cross-examination, Genson had been unable to suggest I was heartless. Now he needed another concept the jurors might think over. Somehow it came to him: that I had been so idealistic I was blind to the consequences of my zeal.

  “Corruption doesn’t belong anywhere in our system,” he started off. “But the problem is, when you’re fighting for a good cause it doesn’t mean that you can forget the truth in a court of law.” Then he said, “Terry Hake is misguided and the rest of them are slime…. The man lived a lie for three years. His primary goal was to get a judge. And I submit to you, that’s what he did. And that he lied to get that judge.”

  The lawyer walked stiff-legged to the jury box and back to the defense table, where former judge Devine sat as if he didn’t care. There might have been a reason he looked drunk—a rumor going around was that he had been downing a few during the recess.

  “The end does not always justify the means,” Genson said. “I’m asking you, ladies and gentlemen, don’t make their wish come true. Don’t make the Ciavellis and the Hakes and the Trunzos and the Kesslers, don’t make their wish come true. Find him not guilty. Do John Devine justice, find him not guilty.”

  Silly as it may sound, was Genson hoping they would be thinking of “divine justice”?

  In the final part of the prosecution’s closings, Sklarsky said Devine’s court had smelled of corruption. “You don’t want to walk into a courtroom anywhere in the United States wondering, ‘Do I have to go in that back room and lay some money on the judge in order to get fair treatment?’ There was a cash station going on there, and it wasn’t justice going on there [at police headquarters], and it wasn’t going on in Traffic Court. If you don’t believe it, listen to those tapes. Because when a judge takes money in connection with his official duties, we’re all in sad shape, it goes to the very heart of our democracy. You cannot have a crime involving corruption that is any worse.”

  The jurors deliberated for four days, and we were practically biting our nails. As with the Laurie case, we were worried that, from the time they were taking, they would find Devine innocent of something. But how many charges—all of them? Then we might as well pack up and forget about all the trials still lined up. We had presented our strongest witnesses and one of our most damning tapes.

  In the twentieth hour, the jury filed in. Devine, looking distinguished with his large glasses and trapezoid mustache, had hope on his face as one of his lawyers held an arm out for him at the defense table. Then the verdicts were announced. On two counts of extortion—not guilty. But on the twenty-five other counts of extortion, the single count of racketeering, and all twenty-one counts of mail fraud, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty….

  I am told Devine held back tears from his glassy eyes as he rose and walked out of the courthouse with his arm around attorney Blumenthal for support. I wasn’t there to see it because this was Columbus Day and I didn’t have to be at work. And so I was home playing with my baby when my office called about the verdicts, and I felt like leaping around the room.

  U.S. Attorney Dan Webb faced the inevitable microphones outside the courtroom and called the convictions “a resounding verdict on the entire Greylord project.” Justice had been put on trial, and won.

  The guilty verdicts were like cannon shots fired through the defense fortifications for all the men awaiting trial. For weeks afterward there were informal conferences in restaurants, bars, and law offices about what they should do next. A number of fixers decided to change their pleas to guilty rather than take their chances with a jury.

  In December 1984, Devine returned to court for his sentence. His lawyers told Getzendanner about the downward helix of his life. “Judge Devine suffers from guilt; he suffers from shame and embarrassment,” Defense Attorney Jeffrey Steinback told the judge. “His intellect and body literally have been decimated by alcohol. He lives a chronically lonely life…. He drinks himself to sleep every night. He is stripped of his robes and he has no prospect for a real future.”

  Devine removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with crumpled tissue.

  Judge Getzendanner looked down from the bench and told the defendant, “I’m not going to make any speeches, but your crime was despicable.” She then handed down a term of fifteen years in prison, the longest sentence that had ever been imposed on a public official in Illinois.

  Devine took his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but by then the justices had ruled in the Judge Murphy case:

  Bribery, like a wholesale transaction in drugs, is a secret act…. Because the crime leaves no complaining witness, active participation by the [undercover] agents may be necessary to establish an effective case. The agents’ acts merely appear criminal; they are not, because they are performed without the state of mind necessary to support a conviction. The agents who made up and testified about the Greylord “cases” did so without criminal intent.

  The FBI and prosecutors had acted honorably, the ruling stated, and Devine was convicted of “conduct so despicable we will not engage in a battle of adjectives in an attempt to describe it.” The ruling added that “Greylord harmed only the corrupt.”

  The decision not only determined the fate of future Greylord defendants, it gave the Justice Department a green light for similar investigations anywhere in America.

  Devine began serving his sentence at the federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin, in July 1985 but doctors discovered he had terminal cancer. He lapsed into a coma and died in April 1987 at a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. I felt sorry for him because he was so smart, he had such potential, and he threw it all away.

  22

  FINAL JUSTICE

  May 1984–August 1991

  As the Greylord steamroller continued, the judge who took over the First Municipal District from Richard LeFevour, Donald O’Connell, immediately banned all hallway hustling and ordered that lawyers stop holding informal discussions with judges in corridors and cloakrooms. Chief Circuit Court Judge Harry Comerford imposed a badly needed system of assigning cases to judges by lottery, and a commission was set up to look into ways of improving the judiciary and reducing the political influence. But as we had learned, fixers can get around any new procedures.

  The gentlemanly Bob Silverman did not want to go through the indignity of a trial. He pleaded guilty to racketeering, bribery, and mail fraud, but refused to cooperate with the government. He was sentenced to seven and a
half years in prison and fined three thousand dollars.

  From people who had flipped and witnesses called so far, most of the crooked judges knew whether they were marked. One of the men finding himself living in a troubled limbo was fifty-six-year-old former judge Allen Rosin, a decorated Marine from the Korean War. He was the one who once bolted from his chair, spread out his black-robed arms, and declared, “I am God!” U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas contended that the judge would buy and sell children’s futures in child-custody cases. A group of outraged litigants banded together in a group called “Victims of Al,” and Rosin lost his bid for retention in November.

  Rosin did not want his daughters and elderly mother to be subpoenaed. In June 1987, the night before he was to be indicted for taking bribes in Divorce Court, the trim and good-looking judge walked into a health club on Chicago’s Near North Side. He took with him things with deep personal meaning: his Marine Corps medals, a Father’s Day card, and photos of his two adult daughters. Rosin laid these memories on the floor of a tanning booth and shot himself in the head with a snub-nosed revolver. A headline the next day read: FINAL VERDICT—SUICIDE.

  Next on the government’s list was our main target, Judge Richard LeFevour. The incredibly boyish-looking Dan Webb, who had entered private practice after the first Greylord trials, took over as a special Assistant U.S. Attorney just to make sure LeFevour did not slip away. Webb admitted that this would be “the big one” because of the judge’s political influence. Reidy and Candace Fabri were also part of the prosecution team.

  It was no secret that LeFevour—like Judges John Devine and Allen Rosin—owed his position to friends in the Democratic Party, and now those friends were being called upon for one last favor. Legal expenses were projected at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and an anonymous committee of lawyers and politicians felt that LeFevour would need no less than the attorney who had been successful with Judge Laurie, Patrick Tuite. His strategy was to conceal LeFevour’s arrogance and encourage the jury to pity him.