Operation Greylord

  But there was another side to Maloney. His political sponsor had been a powerful alderman, and he had friends among the snide, cynical political set, the sort of people in power who take the rest of us for suckers. Maloney’s hard line against defendants who could not bribe him only increased his price for those who could.

  Like Judge Pompey, Maloney used Lucius Robinson as his personal bagman. Maloney had won a boxing scholarship to college, and Lucius had been a bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, so this connection made him as close to a friend as anyone Maloney had in the courts. But the friendship ended when Lucius decided to cut a deal with prosecutors.

  Under the broad outlines of the RICO Act, all of Maloney’s crimes on the bench were fair game. Young Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur rose from her chair and told the jury that Maloney “conspired to change the course of justice, turning a courtroom into a pit of corruption and greed.”

  Greylord had laid the foundation for the trial, but this went beyond our work. Expanding the methods used to gather information on previous judges, the FBI in Operation Gambat, probing into bribery in the downtown First Ward, installed a spy camera in the law office of lawyer/businessman/bagman and now mole Robert Cooley. They learned that an influential alderman other than Maloney’s political sponsor had acted as a go-between in some of the bribes to him. Three months before Maloney’s trial, that alderman was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy, and extortion. But the jury acquitted him of fixing a trial before Maloney, because the tape was not clear enough.

  In Maloney’s trial, I testified about how I had changed from a trusting assistant prosecutor into a government mole, and how later, as a defense attorney with a mock practice, I delivered bribes to Robinson. He followed me to the stand. Breaking his years of silence and denials, he told of passing bribes to judges.

  “How many times did you carry bribes to your boss, Judge Pompey?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Mendeloff.

  “Hundreds,” Robinson said.

  “Whose choice was it for the lawyers to pay you for the judges, yours or the judges’?”

  “The judges,” he replied.

  Robinson also told of passing him twenty-three hundred dollars from attorney William Swano in the upscale McCormick Inn near downtown, and said that Maloney once called him into the judges’ private elevator at the back of the court building so he could start his day with the exhilaration of a three-hundred-dollar bribe.

  Next taking the stand was Swano, who had been a 1960s idealist and once felt the government could reform society. His harsh awakening came when Robinson demanded money to assure an acquittal in a date-rape case. Swano went on to represent some members of the notorious drug and robbery gang called the El Rukns. But now he was nearly bankrupt and facing prison as a co-conspirator. The U.S. Attorney’s Office offered him one way out: tell all he knew about Judge Maloney in return for a lighter sentence on racketeering charges.

  Swano testified that he had lost only one case before the judge, that of an innocent man charged with armed robbery. The judge found the hapless man guilty and sent him to prison just to teach Swano a lesson—move to another city, get out of law, or start paying up.

  After a while, Swano even made a game of the secret arrangement. After furtively delivering a five-thousand-dollar bribe to Maloney’s bagman to have a murderer convicted of only involuntary manslaughter, he bet the prosecutor five dollars how the judge would decide. When the verdict was handed down, the prosecutor was amazed at Swano’s grasp of the vagaries of justice.

  But one of the El Rukns cases was more complicated than most of the others. Two gang “generals” were arrested for murdering a rival drug dealer and his wife. The gang thought there was no way to fix a case before law-and-order Judge Maloney, but Swano knew better. He put ten thousand dollars in a file folder for one of Maloney’s other bagman, attorney Robert McGee, at a restaurant on the first day of the trial. Since people who crossed the El Rukns had a high mortality rate, Swano wanted to make sure the judge understood what he was to do. During the trial, Swano reminded Maloney in a low voice, “We’ve got an agreement on this. You’ve got to live up to your end of the bargain.”

  But as the El Rukns trial wore on, Maloney started having second thoughts. There was a lot of publicity on this case. The back of the gang had been broken by an FBI raid on its South Side headquarters, some of the leaders were starting to listen to prosecutors, and Maloney thought the FBI was following him, which it was. An acquittal now would be the same as shouting “Bribe!” So McGee called Swano at home and said the judge had decided to return the money.

  Swano arrived late the next morning and apparently missed the bagman. When he happened to see Maloney, the judge told him that “a lawyer left a file folder for you and said you should come and get it from the sheriff’s deputy.” But Swano and the deputy couldn’t find it. They knocked on the door of the judge’s chambers and he told them to come in. “Here it is,” Maloney said, and handed over the file. Inside was the ten thousand dollars. Then the judge sentenced the two El Rukns to death, but later problems in their case meant they served time in prison instead.

  Ex-bagman Robert Cooley told the jury that the price for fixing a case in front of Maloney was sometimes even higher. One defendant before Maloney was a hit man for the Ghost Shadows, a violent New York-based Asian gang. The evidence was pretty strong that he had committed a murder during a gambling war in Chicago’s Chinatown. Cooley said the total bribe amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, including fees for go-betweens.

  Maloney had thought he was invincible because of his years of laundering payoffs through money orders. But the precaution worked no better for him than it had for Judge P.J. McCormick. On April 16, 1993, after deliberating over three days, the jury convicted Maloney on every count of racketeering, conspiracy, and obstructing justice. He was the eighteenth current or former judge we had exposed as a thief of justice, in addition to more than fifty attorneys, policemen, and court clerks. The excitement over his sentence overshadowed a six-year term given to bagman McGee.

  Maloney’s sentencing in July 1994, allowed prosecutors to spread out his sordid life, even crimes for which there was no evidence to charge him. Admitted counterfeiter and killer Michael Bertucci testified that he and other crooks years before would hire Maloney as their lawyer because he knew how to rig a verdict. Bertucci added that in the early 1970s he saw Maloney pass money to Judge Pompey in a courthouse washroom just before Pompey dismissed an attempted-theft charge.

  Bertucci even said the mob had Maloney appointed to the bench over his protests that the job “didn’t pay as well” as being a criminal attorney. The mob wasn’t concerned about making him happy, it needed someone on the bench to free its robbers, thieves, and enforcers. He was far from the first or last judge to take orders from the outfit.

  The shocker for the general public came when former bagman Robert Cooley testified that as an attorney, Maloney had set in motion the 1977 acquittal of reputed mob hitman Harry Aleman in the killing of Teamsters union steward William Logan. Although many years had passed, this outrage was still very real to everyone involved in Greylord because it had compelled federal prosecutors to launch our unprecedented secret investigation of the whole system.

  With this testimony, Maloney emerged as the most dangerous judge ever charged as a result of Greylord. But when asked if he had any statement to make before sentencing, he delivered a two-hour oration starring himself as an innocent victim of evil men whom the U.S. Attorney’s Office had set upon him. When he was finished, Maloney was sentenced to nearly sixteen years in prison and fined two hundred thousand dollars. Because he was sixty-nine years old, his lawyers said the term would, in effect, be a life sentence. He served twelve years and died in a nursing home after being the last Greylord defendant to be released from prison in 2008.

  Our investigation and major prosecutions were finally over, fourteen years after the undercover work had begun, but there was still important unfinishe
d business. Although we had to let some of our intended targets get away, we knew that we had succeeded in reaching the heart of corruption with disclosures about the acquittal of Harry Aleman for the murder of William Logan.

  Each Greylord trial had in effect been a stepping stone to the mobster, who was then living a life of leisure and occasionally painting in his cubicle at the federal prison resort in Oxford, Wisconsin, where he was serving time on an extortion case. For reasons clear only to him and his lawyers, Aleman had pleaded guilty and was looking forward to being freed in the year 2000.

  Could he be prosecuted again for the Logan murder despite constitutional provisions against being tried for the same crime twice? After all, double jeopardy was one of the grievances that had led to the American Revolution.

  Officials announced their intention to bring Aleman to justice again with an indictment based on fresh evidence that First Ward hoodlums had used Cooley as a bagman for two cash payments to trial judge Frank Wilson. The defense community mockingly called the bold tactic headline grabbing. But on October 13, 1994, a circuit court judge made legal history by approving the re-indictment. Members of Logan’s family embraced one another in court. One of Logan’s sisters, Betty Romo, called the decision “a big step toward final justice.”

  Mob-connected defense attorneys must have nervously assured their clients that the ruling would be overthrown, as a number of other attempts had been over the years. But ultimately the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that double jeopardy clause of the constitution did not apply in the Aleman case because he had committed a fraud upon the trial court by paying the bribe. That meant Aleman had never been in jeopardy of being convicted.

  From what we had learned, Judge Wilson never wanted to acquit Aleman and ruin his career. But the crime syndicate needed Aleman to continue killing, and it relentlessly put unknown pressure on Wilson until he gave in. There is an unsubstantiated rumor that the mobsters succeeded only when they threatened to kill his son.

  Judge Wilson—described by no less than Judge Maloney as “drunk, reckless, degenerate”—retired from the bench shortly afterward and was obscurely living in Sun City, Arizona. One day in 1989, Cooley made what must have seemed like a social call to Wilson’s home. During their seemingly casual discussion, the visitor steered the conversation to the Aleman case. Wilson did not know that the mob lawyer was wearing a wire, just as I had in the criminal courthouse.

  About eight weeks after the meeting, police officers and FBI agents talked to Wilson in person about the supposed bribe. Then they played Cooley’s tape for him and he heard exactly what a jury would hear. Two months later, Wilson shot himself to death in his back yard—the third suicide stemming from Greylord disclosures.

  23

  FULL CIRCLE

  January-September 1997

  In January 1997, as outfit hit man Harry Aleman was awaiting his unprecedented retrial, former Judge Richard LeFevour died of natural causes, dishonored from Greylord disclosures of how he had systematized bribery throughout the municipal courts. He had left prison after six years, and his last job was as an insurance claims adjuster. At his family’s request, there was no death notice.

  LeFevour’s influence went far beyond the four hundred thousand dollars in bribes he had taken from drunken drivers and parking violators over fourteen years. His career was bitter proof that when politics place a criminal at the top, corruption becomes a way of life for the whole system.

  Yet the highest prize of the Greylord years would be Aleman, and the Chicago style of doing things was about to be tried along with him. This time, no one was coming to Aleman’s aid with veiled threats to the judge and envelopes stuffed with cash. Times had changed.

  Aleman showed an arctic haughtiness when his retrial began in late September 1997. His I’m-tougher-than-the-world pose gave no indication whether he was in suspense about the outcome, but I doubt that he was. As witnesses described that long-ago night of the Logan murder, jurors kept darting their eyes to the defendant, probably to imagine whether Aleman could have done it. Aleman ignored them and slouched at the defense table like a bored schoolboy.

  Once more taking the stand, Robert Cooley said the fix had originated with two behind-the-scenes political bosses of the First Ward, John D’Arco and Patrick Marcy, both deceased. D’Arco formerly was an alderman, and Marcy was a Democratic Party puppet master. Their ward controlled the Loop and Little Italy on the Near West Side. Through the early 1980s, those two men kept the secrets and called the shots as First Ward police officers, politicians, and crime syndicate figures formed an impenetrable network of cross-interests.

  Judge Wilson had not been known to be corrupt, and that worked to the defendant’s advantage. If a judge with a bad reputation were to set Aleman free, there would be an outcry. Cooley testified that he told D’Arco and Marcy that as a personal friend of his Judge Wilson might be talked into taking the money.

  At first Cooley assured Wilson that the evidence was weak—the killing was committed at eleven o’clock at night—and that agreeing to an acquittal would be a personal favor. But as Wilson heard the incriminating evidence day after day, he began to realize the political consequences of what he had agreed to do. Whether he ever had any moral concerns died with him.

  I wish I could have been at the trial, but I recently had been hired as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office, and that meant I was often out of town. Even so, I kept up with the daily unfolding. I learned that Cooley wept on the stand as he detailed that the judge took the ten thousand dollars in installments. “He was a broken man,” Cooley said in describing the final payment, made in a restaurant washroom just hours after Aleman’s acquittal. “He told me, ‘You’ve destroyed me, you’ve killed me’ and walked out.”

  In later testimony Bobby Lowe, the neighbor who had seen the murder of William Logan while walking his dog twenty-five years before, was called to the stand and asked if he could still recognize the killer in court. Walking toward the defense table, the bearded auto mechanic pointed at Aleman and said, “This man, right here.” He went to identify Aleman five times more in testimony. When asked if he was sure, he replied, “I’ll never forget that face!”

  The man who admitted driving the getaway car, Louis Almeida, testified—just as he had before Judge Wilson—that the killing had been set up weeks in advance, when Aleman wrote out for him Logan’s address, license plate number, and the time the man usually left for work. With a flourish, Aleman jotted down “Death to Billy,” the mob wheelman told the jurors.

  To offset such vivid testimony, the defense tried an unusual tactic and called the respected retired chief judge of the Criminal Court Building, Richard Fitzgerald, commonly called “Fitz.” He testified that he knew of no improprieties in the Aleman trial before Wilson.

  When the final arguments concluded, Aleman was brought back to his maximum security cell in the downtown federal jail, where he was temporarily being kept as part of his unrelated twelve-year sentence for extortion.

  Jury deliberation began on the pleasant fall evening of September 13, 1997. Four hours later the jurors came out with a verdict of guilty. Aleman rested his expressionless face on his raised forearm, but his family wept and Logan’s relatives appeared emotionally exhausted. Their long wait was over, and justice had come full circle for all of us.

  There was no celebration. Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Cassidy told reporters, “This will close the books on an ugly era in Cook County.” A too-large judicial system that had broken down well before any of us had been born had been stitched back together for now, and we could go on with our lives.

  There was little excitement when Aleman was sentenced to serve one hundred to three hundred years in prison, where he died of natural causes in 2010.

  When I was sworn in as an attorney amid the ruins of a riot-scarred West Side neighborhood on a cold, wet, and windy Halloween evening, there had seemed no way to reach judges who were protected b
y their robes, their political party, their bagmen, and the lawyers’ code of silence. When Mort Friedman made an attempt, he was ostracized and threatened with contempt of court and loss of his law license. Now we had brought down crooks ranging from hallway hustlers like Costello to some of the best-known judges in the country’s largest court system.

  Serving as a reminder of what happens to fixers and crooked judges when they are caught, no one trapped by the Greylord net emerged with a life intact. After ex-judge Glecier served his term, he worked for Catholic Charities Institute of Addiction. Following Costello’s testimony in the Glecier trial, he returned to prison to complete his sentence. He gave every indication that when he came out he would be a better man. The last I heard of him, he and his second wife were living quietly somewhere in Colorado.

  Returning from prison, former Judge P.J. McCormick was employed as a route salesman for a dairy company. An award-winning feature in the Chicago Lawyer magazine described how Mark and several other lawyers wound up selling real estate. Bruce Roth went into construction work but said, “I hope to get my license back some day, I think of it all the time.”

  Bob Silverman—admired by so many in the courthouse, and the role model for all young fixers—could not get a job after prison and was living on social security. If there is a moral to all this, it’s that if you are crooked, the first person you destroy is yourself.

  There is no way of telling how our investigation affected the families of our targets. But we know that the son of bagman Ira Blackwood refused to speak to him after Ira was convicted and sentenced to seven years. Peter Kessler’s mother, who had survived the Holocaust, died soon after he pleaded guilty to bribing Judge Devine. Fixer Neal Birnbaum’s father died soon after his son’s indictment, and Neal blamed us for his death.