Operation Greylord (11 page)

As waiters bustled around us, a court clerk mentioned that he was looking over houses for sale. The judge joked with his friendly abrasiveness, “So, how much money did you pocket today? You know, you guys make more money under the table than I do.”

The silence that set in was even deeper than when Jim had made the same sort of
faux pas
moments before. We didn't know whether to laugh or be shocked.

“Well, you're the one with a Florida condo, Wayne,” one of the fixers said, to lighten the mood and redirect the conversation.

“You guys are welcome to come by any time you're over there,” Olson said, adding, “It's great fishing.”

After our plentiful and delicious dinner was over, our waiter stepped up to Olson, as the leader of the party, and handed him a brown plastic tray with a bill for more than six hundred dollars. The judge kept stalling by telling one anecdote after another, obviously waiting for someone to pay it. His bemused expression told us that this had really been our party for him, only we didn't know it until now. Glances circled the table in a six-way standoff. Somebody had to give in, and it couldn't be me because I was a lowly assistant prosecutor. And it wouldn't be one of the clerks, who were bribed only five dollars at a time. That narrowed the field down to the defense attorneys, who were uneasily wiping their hands on napkins or brushing bread crust from their silk shirts in hopes a colleague would make the grand gesture. After a ripple of nervous laughter at the awkward pause, Costello and another attorney said something to a third lawyer, and that man reluctantly drew out his American Express card.

But the day was far from over. As we were starting to leave, Olson, a little unsteady from the wine, said, “Let's go to Jeans.” He wanted to get drunk on more intimate ground on his last night before vacation. So at eight forty-five p.m. we piled into our cars and drove back to the courthouse neighborhood.

Once there, Costello had some more wine and half a dozen martinis until he was in a haze. By now I could tell his alcohol content just by the sound of his voice. When Assistant State's Attorney Mike Kress approached us on his way to say goodbye to the judge, I could feel negative energy radiating from Jim. I don't know why he hated Kress, but it was more than just dislike.

“Get out of here, you motherfucking Jew,” Costello snarled.

“The hell with you,” Kress snarled back, “I'm saying goodbye to Wayne.”

Costello pulled off his glasses and tossed them on the table as a silent threat, but Kress said, “Fuck you, Costello!”

Moving between them, I told Kress, “You have to ignore Jim, he's had a little too much. You better leave.”

As Kress walked to the shabby back door, Costello called out to his back, “You God damn cocksucker!”

Judge Olson stood up and said, “Don't you talk to my friend like that.”

“What the hell d'you have friends like that kike for?” Costello asked.

“Jim, you're an ass,” the judge said.

Costello understood that to mean he would never be anything but a hallway whore, which everyone knew, including Costello himself. I could hardly believe it when the one-time tough street kid and cop grabbed the heavyset judge by the wrist and shoved him against some chairs.

Regaining his balance, Olson said, “
Never
touch me again!”

“Screw you,” Costello said and plopped down. As Olson kept shouting and flailing his arms at him, Costello pretended to be indifferent to the tirade although his face was flushing. Then he said, “Why don't you just shut the fuck up?”

Olson seemed about to explode with the kind of rage that had already killed a man, but you could see he was holding himself back. Instead of throwing a fist at Costello, he contemptuously snatched a glass of wine and poured it down Jim's expensive white shirt.

“Big deal,” Costello said and looked around at his fellow lawyers. “Look who's the ass now.” He pinched the sodden front of his reeking shirt and flapped it a few times to dry it.

Having failed to make Costello angry, Olson grabbed Jim's expensive eyeglasses off the table and hurled them against the wall.

We all knew what Costello wanted to do, you could see it in his face. But lawyers do not manhandle judges, so Jim wrapped his large hand around a decanter and flung it all the way to the other side of the restaurant. The bottle sailed over three tables before it shattered with a spray of wine and glass.

Several lawyers had to rush in and separate the two men. As Olson was being yanked back, he sputtered at Costello, “I'm calling Chief Judge Fitzgerald tomorrow. You'll be thrown out of the courthouse and I'll make sure you never come back!”

“What the fuck do I care,” Costello muttered.

“Come on, Jim,” I said and took his arm. “Everything'll be all right. Hey, I'll drive you home.”

My immediate thought was that I didn't want Jim to kill himself driving recklessly halfway across the city. But I also thought I was seeing the end of Operation Greylord, because Costello had been my only link to Olson. But the judge put his hand on my shoulder, and I had to make a decision—whom should I give up? Should it be Costello, who was my closest friend in everyday life at court, or Olson, the most important target so far in my undercover work?

With the short rasps of a heavy man who has overexerted himself, the judge told me, “Don't bother to drive that bastard home, Terry.”

“But he's too drunk—”

“Serves him right,” Olson said. “You have to work in my courtroom, I don't want you to be with him. I've already told Costello, ‘I like this kid so much that I don't want you to corrupt him. If you do, I'll kill you.'”

That caught me by surprise. How could I do anything else but stay inside the restaurant and let Costello drift from my undercover life? But I kept the back door open and watched Costello pathetically stagger alone toward his prized black Thunderbird. His marriage was falling apart, Olson had renounced him, and now I was turning my back on him. As I let the thin black rear door close, I knew Jim would soon be leaning on his car and fumbling through his mass of keys.

“Christ, look at the place,” said Carl, the bartender. “What the fuck's the matter with you people? Terry, you're the sensible one, can't you keep them settled down?”

“It's all right,” Olson said beside me. “We always hated that son of a bitch Costello. I don't know why in the hell we let him hang around with us. Don't worry, you're like a son to me. I'll take care of you.”

My God, I wondered, what had happened? Instead of witnessing the demise of Greylord, I had just been dragged by the collar to the next level.

The next morning was Halloween, and the third anniversary of my being sworn in as an attorney. I awoke with a terrible hangover, and my apartment seemed to be rocking. I had a headache, and I didn't want to finish dressing or shaving. But I forced myself to drive to a meeting near North Avenue and Wells Street to give FBI contact agent Bill Megary my latest tape. Since it had run out before the drinking session at Jeans ended, I filled him in on the split between Costello and the judge.

“The whole point of bugging Olson's chambers is to prove the steady payoffs,” I said, “but Olson claims he's getting Jim banned from 26th Street.”

Megary didn't even blink. “Things like this don't last long,” he said.

“But they hate each other.”

“Yes, but they need each other. You'll see.”

He was right. When I saw Costello less than an hour later, he was squinting to see without his glasses, his bustling spirit was gone, and his hangover was worse than mine. I thought he would ignore me for forsaking him, but he actually was glad to see me in the hallway. He clamped his hands on me with an expression of bewilderment and panic, then pulled me closer to his bloodshot eyes.

“I gotta talk to you,” he growled. “What the fuck happened last night?”

“You don't remember?”

“Would I ask you if the fuck I did?”

“You and Wayne almost got into a fistfight. Don't you even remember him throwing your glasses against the wall?”

“Jesus, so that's what happened to them. I hate it when I'm like that. This is Friday, isn't it? That means I owe Wayne a thousand bucks from bonds he assigned me. What the hell am I gonna do?”

Maybe there was a way to salvage the situation, after all. “You know, Jim, he's going on vacation today,” I said. “You better get in there and pay him. Otherwise he'll brood about it for a whole month and wish he had the money.”

“Yeah, you're right,” Costello said after a little reflection. “I owe you one, kid.” He straightened his suit. “Do you think I look all right?”

“Not really.”

“So what the hell.”

Then he walked into the courtroom.

In just ten minutes he was seeking me out. “Thanks, Terry,” he said. “I went in there and said, ‘I guess I fucked up last night.' That was when I handed him the money. And Wayne says, ‘Yeah, but you were cute.'”

“Right then and there?”

“Right then and there. So we're okay again. Christ, I was worried.”

Greed had saved Greylord, and not for the only time.

November 1980

The bugging authorization was finally signed. So while Judge Olson was vacationing in early November, FBI contact agent Bill Megary sent me to spy upon the movement of courthouse employees no one paid much attention to: the court clerks, janitors, and women working at the switchboard directly behind Narcotics Court. “We want a profile of when they arrive and when they leave, how they get to work and how they get home,” he said. That way we could find an opening within their intersecting routines to plant the bug.

Megary could stay relaxed and think clearly no matter how confused or uncertain I was, but I wondered how I would be able to keep tabs on everyone since I didn't want to be caught loitering as I took notes, and I still had a full roster of defendants to prosecute. I kept wondering how often I could excuse myself for the washroom or claim I wanted to talk to one attorney or another before someone caught on.

I went outside the courthouse and stood out of the way in the parking lot to memorize the license plate numbers of the cars that two of the switchboard operators drove. On the day of the bugging, an FBI surveillance squad would follow the autos, and the bus that the other switchboard operator took, to see if any of them turned back because they had forgotten something. The agents would also trail the conscientious judge filling in for Olson, Phillip Sheridan, when he left for home. The judges' parking lot could be seen from a window in Olson's court, and Sheridan would be the easiest to shadow since he drove a station wagon rather than a fancy car.

During these preparations, I took Megary on two tours of the building to draw up a basic floor plan. On one of those days, a Saturday, we
stumbled around the dank basement for hours while straining to hear if any custodian came down. But there wasn't much evidence that janitors ever went in the basement. We had to walk through a puddle of water from a burst pipe, brush past cobwebs, and watch out for rats. When we left the basement, fellow prosecutor Linda Woloshin came out of weekend bond court and looked at me peculiarly because I was there on my day off.

Act casual
, I told myself. “Hi, Linda, meet Brian McFall,” I said, using Megary's cover name. “He's a lawyer from Maryland and wanted to see what the courthouse is like while he's in town.”

“Hi, Linda,” Megary said with his light East Coast accent, and shook her hand.

“See you,” she said to me, without wasting a second thought on us.

Lying was easier for me now than it had been just a month before, but I was apprehensive about eventually taking on major corruptor Bob Silverman. After a couple of weeks of doing unasked favors like a would-be protégé, I was still unable to guess what the fixer might be thinking about me. I always felt safe around Costello, Olson, and Cy Yonan. But with Silverman, I sensed actual physical danger. From his contacts with the mob and crooked cops, he had influence at every level of the justice system.

One morning I saw Bob getting out of the one-seat shoeshine stand in the concourse. Having your shoes shined by an old black man everyone called J.C. was considered good luck just before opening and closing arguments. But I had never had my shoes shined there, partly to save money and also because I didn't want to be thought of as ambitious. But as Bob stepped down, he motioned to me and said, “Why don't you get up here, Terry.”

My shoes didn't need polishing that badly, but this was no time to jeopardize a potential friendship. Self-consciously, I climbed into the chair with a pretended carefree attitude. Bob talked to me all the time J.C. brushed and buffed, then handed him five dollars with a lordly gesture, no doubt confident that he now controlled one more prosecutor.

Eagerly I phoned FBI agent Lamar Jordan with the news. “I finally got into Bob Silverman's pocket!” I said.

“Fantastic!” he replied. “How much did he give you?”

“He bought me a shoe shine.”

A protracted stillness ended with a “Shit!” Only then did I realize how silly I had sounded. “If Silverman ever does pay you money,” Jordan said, “I'll take you to lunch.”

Washington, D.C.

Although my progress with Silverman was slower than the FBI would have liked, things were finally moving quickly against Olson and his entourage of fixers. Chief Criminal Court Judge Richard Fitzgerald, one of the few people who had been notified about Operation Greylord, stayed late in his office one evening to sign an authorization for me to tape conversations with Costello and Cy Yonan for ten days. This formality would let us use those tapes in state court if something went wrong and the federal prosecution had to be abandoned.

Instead of reporting for work at the courthouse the next morning—a cool, windy day a little before Thanksgiving—I drove to O'Hare International Airport on as close to a cloak-and-dagger assignment as I have ever gone through. A ticket to Washington, D.C., had been purchased in my name even before Megary notified me that FBI Director William Webster wanted to talk to me. Making my flight more mysterious was that Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Reidy was sitting directly in front of me, but I was under orders not to acknowledge him in any way. Even when we landed at National Airport, I was not allowed to look for him.

As I opened the cab door I was thrilled to say something I had wanted to say ever since I was a boy: “Take me to the Justice Department, Tenth and Pennsylvania.”

As we neared the steps I could see Dan waiting for me. FBI supervisor Robert Walsh shook our hands just inside the lobby and drove us around the Capital. Seeing the white monuments for the first time, I indulged in a fantasy in which the FBI director would swear me in as an agent right there in his office.

In the Justice Department cafeteria, Dan and U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan, who had flown in the day before, briefed me on what to say and, mainly, what not to say. I was to answer as succinctly as in court. Then I was ushered into a conference room and was face to face with Webster. The square-jawed man motioned to a chair and began with, “What's going on in Judge Olson's chambers, Leo?”

It felt odd to be addressed by my FBI code name, Leo Murphy.

I told Webster that Costello had given me eleven hundred dollars in various payoffs. “Costello, by my calculation, has said he has passed about seven thousand dollars to Judge Olson since late summer. Another attorney, Cy Yonan, so far has given me six hundred and fifty dollars for fixes.”

“Your understanding is that there are other lawyers making payoffs to Olson?”

“Yes, but I don't know how much Olson is receiving from them.”

“Do you think Costello is telling you the truth?” Webster asked.

“Yes, sir. I think so. Everything I have seen and heard backs up what he has told me.”

I could see the caution in Webster's face. This investigation was bound to make national headlines, and Congress no doubt would accuse him of trampling on the separation of powers even if things went well. He could put up with all that, but I'm sure he did not want the Bureau to be embarrassed by a failure.

There also was another reason for his pondering. Webster had been a federal judge in St. Louis, and the hesitancy in his voice told me he had reservations about violating the sanctity of a judge's chambers. He needed to share our certainty that the unprecedented bugging was absolutely necessary.

When I finished, all he said was, “Thank you, Leo. You're doing a good job. We'll be in touch.”

For the moment, I did not care that the subject of my becoming an FBI agent never came up. I was elated at just meeting the director. But flying back to Chicago, I thought over “We'll be in touch” and wondered whether that meant his support or not.

The day after my return, my ASA friend Alice Carpenter agreed to have lunch with me and Costello, although she never liked him. Jim called out a few words in Italian to the waiter and spoke to us about the days when he was an ASA in a suburban court. He said there was a regular schedule for bribes then: four hundred dollars for dismissing felony cases, one hundred for dismissing battery charges, and seventy-five for dismissing shoplifting. Caught unprepared, I flipped on the recorder just below table level and asked a few questions for future jurors.

“Say, Jim,” I said, “what was the price for UUW (unlawful use of a weapon)?”

“Hundred and fifty. Me, I like gun cases. Know why? Guys with guns always come up with the money.”

Alice was glowering at him, but Costello seemed incapable of understanding that anyone would get upset about something that had been going on for generations. I sat back and wondered when the bugging authorization would come down.

Infiltration Day

I received my answer on the morning of November 26, the day before Thanksgiving. Agent Lamar Jordan gave me a call at home and drawled, “We're going into Olson's chambers this afternoon.”

“What?” After weeks of impatience, I could not believe the moment had arrived.

“Justice [Department] says go. You know what to do.”

I was so excited it took me two tries to hang up the phone. What a great time to eavesdrop. When Olson returned from vacation on Monday, attorneys would be banging on his door to fix a month of cases they had not dared to try rigging with no-nonsense Judge Sheridan.

I drove to the courthouse that crisp morning with a sense of purpose. By now I knew all the rhythms of the court world and could use them to steer more payoffs to the judge's chambers. I spoke first to Costello and then to Yonan, offhandedly telling them I had decided not to take any more cash because I wanted to look clean when I left the State's Attorney's Office for private practice, which was part of the FBI's plans for me. The reason for telling them this now was that it would force them to pay the judge in his bugged chambers and not me.

As a pretext, I pinned my decision on the recent election of popular Mayor Richard J. Daley's son Richard M. Daley as Cook County State's Attorney, and said it would take time before I could trust the new administration. Yonan wished me luck and added, “If you want, you can use my phone until you're set up, and I'll give you all my misdemeanor work until you can get started.” Then he shoved one hundred dollars into my hand anyway. “Don't worry about it,” he added, “I'm making money.”

Yonan's gesture went unnoticed by people walking by, but not by the police sergeant assigned to Olson's court. From thirty feet away, John Janusz had sensed that I was being bribed and he wanted a cut even if it meant hinting at blackmail. When I went to the cafeteria upstairs, the
tall, middle-aged officer with wire-rimmed glasses moved in line next to me, and I felt as if I were being watched by a vulture. “What's that guy's name you were talking to?” he asked, knowing full well it was Yonan.

I answered as I paid for a Coke and turned away. Janusz followed me and said I should buy him a cup of coffee.

“Are you out of change?” I asked, meaning: why should I buy you coffee?

“Do you know in three weeks it's going to be my fucking birthday?” he asked. “I sure hope everybody remembers it. Cy Yonan, boy, that fucker's doing all right. He has another case coming up. You'll be handling it, won't you? You know, my sight's pretty good now that I have new glasses. Hake, where are you going after work, to the bank?”

Compared to Janusz, Costello was suave, and I was glad when I was finally able to shake off the greedy boor.

That afternoon most of the courts closed early so everyone could get a head start on the holiday weekend. By four p.m. only Olson's replacement, Judge Sheridan, and the three switchboard operators remained around Branch 57. As I loitered in the concourse just off the hall, I knew that the “black bag” people were standing by impatiently.

Just as the three women left the room housing all the courthouse telephone wires, two agents dressed as repairmen entered the building. No one questioned them even as they opened the unlocked door to the switchboard room. Everything was going well, but no one could do anything further as long as the judge remained at work.

Come on, come on
, I thought. Sheridan took his duties seriously and stayed in his chambers to finish all the details. At last the door opened and I could hear his footsteps on the marble. I went to the nearby phone bank and dialed the FBI radio room. Using the code name for Sheridan, I said, “Phillips just left.”

My message was radioed to the surveillance team assigned to follow the judge to ensure that he was not coming back to work. Then I walked to the parking lot across the boulevard on California Avenue and climbed into my car. Following instructions, I drove to a supermarket a mile away to meet Megary and phone the FBI again. That's when things stopped going as planned.

While I waited for the dispatcher to get back to me, I could hear exasperation as he spoke to agents on another line. The team that was supposed to follow the judge could no longer see his station wagon.
I returned to the store parking lot and told Megary, “They lost him. What are we going to do now?”

“That depends,” he said. “Do you think Sheridan will come back?”

“Probably not.”

“Let's go ahead, then.”

Megary went inside the store and made the call to start planting the bug. Minutes later the two bogus workmen brought their tool kits into Olson's chambers. By then I had switched to Megary's car. Inside was an attractive female FBI agent ready to pose as my girlfriend. Our plan was that if anything went wrong, I would rush in with her and claim I had forgotten something. The two of us would then somehow create enough confusion for the two black bag experts to slip away.

But as Bill drove us down the working-class side streets around the courthouse, there was an unsettling quiet on the FBI radio. Not total silence—every now and then a click or a bit of static told us the radio was working—but I edgily thumped my fingers on the armrest.