Operation Greylord (16 page)

Richard basked in the power he derived from his feudal rearrangement of the courts. One day when Lockwood was in the outer office, a black woman stormed into the older judge's office and complained that “there's a clerk in Room 12 who is prejudiced and a bigot.”

LeFevour snarled, “And so am I. Now get the hell out!”

Yet Judge LeFevour had a gift for covering his greed, bigotry, and mean-spiritedness with an appearance of civic concern. The hoodwinked American Bar Association even presented him with an award for running the best traffic court in the country.

LeFevour, his wife Ginger, and their six sons lived in a red-shingled home in suburban Oak Park, where they often threw lavish parties. People found him charming, erudite, and witty. One of his stories was of a defendant who told a judge, “Your Honor, may the Lord strike me down if I had more than just two beers.” Suddenly there was a power failure and the man shouted, “Five beers, Your Honor. Five beers!”

In contrast, Cousin Jimmy's career was stagnating. Jimmy often exuded alcohol at work and didn't always change clothes, even though he bought new cars and kept condominiums in Chicago and Florida. His wife left him and he was hospitalized seven times over fourteen years because of alcoholism. “Dogbreath” could thank his cousin for not having to live out the rest of his life in a squad car on the midnight shift, but he still resented being nothing more than Richard's messenger boy and picking up bribes for him as if he were cleaning out a stable. Silently, day after day, Jimmy was gathering all the actual and imagined injustices against him by his high-handed cousin. The day of reckoning was coming.

Judge Richard LeFevour may have been pleased that he loomed over Jimmy in more than just physical stature. But, for all this, Jimmy the bagman had a better grip on reality. The short, stocky man never pretended to be anything more than an insignificant, crooked cop. As with his father, the money he skimmed made up for his lack of esteem.
Clever as Richard LeFevour was, the judge alternated between two illusions. At times he seemed to believe his own respectable public image, and at other times he deluded himself into thinking he was untouchable.

Another of the presiding judge's bagmen was policeman Ira Blackwood, a one-time professional boxer who stayed in shape at age fifty. Lockwood found in Ira the same kind of endearing openness that I found in Jim Costello. Ira had relatives and friends in the Mafia but said he became a cop because the opportunities for money were better. As he explained, it was costing him fifteen thousand dollars a year just to send his children to private schools. One day he and Judge Lockwood left a Cubs game at Wrigley Field during the fifth inning because Blackwood wanted to stop by a bar and “pay the rent”—that is, deliver a bribe to a judge.

Judge Lockwood helped undercover agent David Victor Ries deliver five payoffs through Blackwood, but it was telling on the downstate judge. The already slender Lockwood lost twenty pounds and his hair started turning prematurely white. Like me, he had to do a lot more drinking than he wanted just to stay friends with the fixers. He also was concerned for his personal safety. Although he didn't think fixers or mobsters would harm his three-year-old daughter, Jessica, the child's presence heightened his concern about what would happen if someone retaliated. As Lockwood reports in
Operation Greylord: Brockton Lockwood's Story
, he dreamed of himself floating dead in the river.

Some of the cases the FBI arranged to come before Lockwood were hilarious. An agent posing as a drunk was being taken to the station when the officers got another call. They simply dumped him at a dark corner and drove off. But most of the cookie-cutter agents doing undercover work at the time didn't have the freewheeling nature needed to get arrested that squad member Ken Misner showed. Misner tried to drive wildly through the Loop in December. A fellow agent called the police to report an intoxicated driver, but no one felt like arresting him. So Misner kept going down State Street lanes reserved for buses and cabs. Only when he went the wrong way down one-way streets did a policeman finally pull him over. “The party's over,” the officer said.

Misner jumped out in a pretended outburst and hopped onto the hood of the squad car. “You can't talk to me, you ignorant pig!” he slurred.

The backup agent watching from a distance was afraid Misner had gone too far, since Chicago police were known to crack heads. Instead, this officer grabbed Misner by the tie and said, “Okay, buddy, I gave you a break and wrote you for disorderly conduct. The ticket is written for December 24th in the afternoon. The judge won't show up, so they'll throw out the ticket. Now go home and sleep this off.”

To make it look more as if Lockwood were making money “hand over fix,” the Bureau moved him into a Gold Coast apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Then his contact agent brought him a confiscated but unclaimed television set for his sparse rented furnishings. The Bureau went so far as to supply him with a “girlfriend,” attractive FBI agent Marie Dyson, who at times would also work with me in fabricated crimes.

The FBI even wired Lockwood's car in hopes of catching incriminating conversations with fixers he sometimes drove around. But Lockwood's position as a judge limited what he could do, and he was unable to get much information on anyone beyond Kangalos, Blackwood, and Judge LeFevour. Even so, the conversations he recorded contributed to our knowledge of all our other targets. They also helped us form a ring around lesser crooks who might be persuaded to “flip” and take the stand for the government.

In time Lockwood retired as a judge and set up a private practice, but Ries and I were still in place in separate courthouses, waking up every morning—and sometimes in the middle of the night—dreading what the next day would bring. No one was exactly saying so, but we were aware that from now on, every step we took would make the entire investigation that much more unstable.

Summer 1981

JUDGE JOHN DEVINE

One of the hardest aspects of my undercover work was timing. I had to find a spot in the Traffic Court Building where I could see witnesses, defendants, and lawyers coming and going without appearing to be watching, and then pretend to come across a target coincidentally. When I “bumped” into bagman Harold Conn, I was representing an undercover FBI agent who had posed as a drunken driver named James Cramer. He had made sure there would be no way of getting off lightly before a judge with integrity. During his arrest, he dropped his wallet, almost staggered over an expressway guardrail to grab it, and then refused to take a Breathalyzer test.

Conn told me I was lucky because a certain judge would be handling my case. “He's a nice young fellah,” Conn said, “I'll speak to him.” That meant he was offering to pass on a bribe. But the person who should have been handling the case didn't return after the lunch recess. Instead, Judge John “Dollars” Devine came over from another courtroom. I wasn't disappointed, since taking a second bribe after another drunken driving case the month before, involving an undercover agent going by the name of Benson, would qualify as racketeering.

Devine should have sentenced “Cramer” to a year in jail and revoked his license. But the fix was in, and “Dollars” just fined him one hundred dollars and placed him on court supervision. This meant I needed to confirm that Conn had informed him I needed a lenient ruling.

I found the judge having a cigarette in the hallway behind the courtroom. He didn't say a word when I thanked him, so I had to do something every mole dreads: asking blatantly stupid questions in hopes
the response would be incriminating. I started by inquiring whether I should see Conn to express my gratitude.

“Yeah,” the judge muttered and walked away from me, as if saying that he had already shown me how the system works.

A few minutes later I gave the bagman two hundred dollars for the judge and sixty for himself. “That was beautiful,” I told Conn about the way Devine had swooped into the other judge's courtroom to set up the fix. Conn just shrugged me off. Things like that happened all the time in that building.

But, I wondered, when would I ever get to record Devine taking a bribe from my hand? The answer turned out to be in seventeen months! So, jumping ahead, the “James Cramer” case came up again in February 1983. This time my “client” was appearing for the termination of his court supervision, which he had intentionally violated by speeding. Since Devine was not around for a hearing, I had to tell two other judges offering to lift the supervision that there were special circumstances requiring that Devine hear the case personally.

So much time had elapsed that we could no longer use the original undercover agent because he had been appearing in federal court under his real name to testify against a policeman. A substitute agent brought in from Los Angeles perfectly matched the first “Cramer,” from age and hair color down to his weight. Our source with the Illinois Secretary of State's Office then supplied us with a driver's license using a photo of the Los Angeles agent.

Not noticing the switch, Devine granted my request to vacate the supervision despite the speeding violation. Something in the judge's tone and expression told me
This is it
, the one time he was going to overlook his caution and deal with me directly.

Unable to follow Devine out of court because of a bailiff sitting on a rail, I went out a door used by the general public and hurried through the corridor to catch him before he could leave for lunch. I found Devine lighting a cigarette, as he often did to stave off his need for a drink.

Trying to sound casual, I said, “Well, judge, I did okay on this case. I made two fees on it. Listen, I can be fair with you, too. I'm willing to—”

“Whatever you want.”

“Good,” I said as my Nagra reels turned. “Is one [one hundred dollars] okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

With a one-hundred-dollar bill in my palm, we shook hands and he shoved the bribe into his pants pocket under his black robe.

“Thank you very much,” I said, while thinking,
You greedy bastard
. I felt great.

Autumn 1981

While Ries and I were wearing wires in Traffic Court, the FBI had put a tap on phones in the warrant section of the building. The Bureau then began making a list of what eventually amounted to more than one hundred officers who would be subpoenaed for information about rigged cases. But the “Title III” (wiretapping) authorization didn't provide much we could use. Unknown to us, a phone company friend of bagman Ira Blackwood had alerted him about the tap. This might have given everything away, except that Traffic Court workers were so used to occasional investigations that they did not take it seriously.

The last thing we needed was a news leak. In early September, investigative TV reporter Peter Karl on his own began looking into corruption that was almost inevitable in a system that handled three-and-a-half-million parking tickets and eight hundred and fifty thousand moving violation citations a year. Almost immediately, Judge LeFevour called a meeting with his former deputy, John McCollum, now chief judge of Traffic Court; bagman Officer Ira Blackwood; and the city lawyer supervising Traffic Court prosecutors, *Carmine Lino, identified in later testimony as downtown politicians' facilitator in the building. “Flatten the building for sixty days,” Judge LeFevour commanded. That meant shut the bribe factory down until this blew over. It worked.

Peter Karl's report showed court inefficiency and some suspicious transactions, but he could not pinpoint any criminal conduct. That is, until a physical therapist named Lauren Sacks called him to complain that she had paid two hundred and twenty dollars to police warrant officer Art McCauslin to have eleven parking tickets dismissed, yet she was still served with a warrant.

Usually motorists hid the bribe money in a magazine when handing it to McCauslin or his partner, Officer Robinson McClain, but this time McCauslin neglected to give Sacks any instructions. Sacks thought the arrangement of settling tickets by paying half the amount was legal, so she wrote out a check. Because McCauslin received the
check as he was going on vacation, he cashed it at a bar and forgot to dismiss her tickets.

This sent Peter Karl digging deeper. For several days, Judge McCollum and the city attorney at Traffic Court discussed how to stop the TV reporter from getting too close. McCollum, a judge for ten years, was no mere underling. He had once yelled at an attorney, “I don't give a fuck about you, I don't give a fuck if you're in the middle. I want the fucking money, and you're going to give it to me!”

Karl was told the records were protected by privacy laws, but he knew better. He uncovered the paperwork showing how the Sacks check was cashed by Officer McCauslin rather than by the city. But paper records of all “non-suited” (dismissed) tickets under presiding Judge LeFevour had been carried out of the courthouse and destroyed. Although the television station hired a prestigious law firm to go after microfilmed copies in the county clerk's office, Richard LeFevour and the others weren't afraid. As Blackwood told Judge Lockwood about the firm chosen, “We get along good with those guys. They won't push too hard.”

Karl and his two-man crew were able to get Officer McCauslin making damaging statements on camera, and he became so scared he was no longer sleeping. The FBI decided to take advantage of this and move in even though Greylord was still running. Federal agents, working with the police internal affairs division, persuaded McCauslin to wear a hidden microphone before talking to Judge LeFevour about his suspicions, making the officer the government's first target to switch sides in a deal with prosecutors.

But before long, bagman Jimmy LeFevour went to his cousin and said, “The rumor is that McCauslin is wired.”

“Kill him,” the judge said, according to later testimony.

“Not me,” Jimmy replied.

“Get somebody to do it.”

“You're crazy, I'm not going to do something like that,” he told the judge. “We ought to shut down again.”

“It's just a witch hunt,” Judge LeFevour said. “It doesn't concern the club.” He meant the hustlers' bribery club. Brilliant as he may have been, the judge couldn't resolve his dual thinking—that McCauslin should be stopped, and that the probe was unimportant.

The “Citizen Moles”

In addition to the day-in, day-out work Agent Ries and I were doing, the Justice Department in 1981 and 1982 was able to have several ordinary citizens gather information for Greylord, for one reason or another.

Wealthy lamp manufacturer Leo Zutler was persuaded to wear a recorder against Deputy Sheriff Alan Kaye, who had been demanding payments for favors in arranging the businessman's divorce. Kaye, who usually carried a gun, even threatened to burn Zutler's factory down unless he came up with the cash. While wearing a body mike, Zutler handed over payment in installments totaling ten thousand dollars.

Another single-target mole was attractive *Lucy Durkin, who at sixteen began a relationship in 1982 with the fifty-year-old Judge Frank Salerno. Salerno, it must be said, was a square-jawed, forceful-looking man who could pass for forty. Lucy met him while working as a cocktail waitress in a suburban strip joint. The judge soon used his influence to get a driver's license showing her age as twenty-one so she could work as a waitress and be his “bagman” at a downtown restaurant where he lunched daily.

Strangers sometimes gave her envelopes of cash for the judge. In telephone calls, some fixers used the code of “G for God” in referring to Salerno. Over the next three years, Lucy also passed on money to the judge's regular bagman, Victor Albanese. She hardly realized how criminal her acts were until the FBI showed her surveillance photos. In one snapshot, Lucy, Salerno, and Albanese are sitting at a restaurant table with a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills before them.

Some of the conversations the teenage waitress recorded for the FBI were embarrassingly personal, such as when the judge begged her to sleep with him. After all, he had showered thousands of dollars on her and gave her a fur coat every Christmas, even if he had bought it at a thieves' discount. But Lucy vowed not to have sex with him, and for a good reason—she was wearing a tape recorder.

Salerno eventually pleaded guilty to extortion and was sentenced to nine years in prison, and Albanese received eight years. As for Lucy, she is now living somewhere under another identity for her own safety.

Early Winter 1981

The rumor about my being a mole refused to go away even though I seldom showed up at the courts and supposedly had been in private practice for three months. I was eager to get back into action, but red tape blocked the way. There I was, with no office and no clients. At least some money was coming in. When I left the State's Attorney's Office, the FBI arranged to hire me as a “project development specialist.” I've been told I was the only such person in the history of the Bureau.

During my period in limbo, Mark phoned me at home and said, “We haven't seen you around, where have you been? Have you been to Quantico?”

Was he testing me, or was it a joke? “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Silverman heard a rumor that you're working for the FBI, and he's paranoid.”

“Hey, that's not true. I've been doing work for my uncle's business.”

I reminded him that the policeman who had started that talk was only trying to be funny, and that I wished everyone would just lay it to rest. “Let's meet in person,” I said, “and if you want we can discuss it some more.” We then set up a meeting at a restaurant.

As a way of making it appear as if everything were normal, I brought Cathy with me, since Mark was bringing his fiancée, a cute brunette also named Cathy. Although she intended to work in the prosecutor's office and never wanted to become part of my undercover work, Cathy behaved that night as if she enjoyed Mark's company. I also had invited someone from my college days at the Rome campus of Loyola University, Peggy O'Hara, a nurse living in Los Angeles who happened to be in town. I hoped that having someone unconnected to the courts would reduce the shoptalk.

We should have been carefree, but both Mark and I were decidedly uncomfortable behind our facades. He was trying to appear honest, and I was trying to appear like someone who is dishonest but is attempting to appear straight.

To make sure I understood the undercurrent in his side of the conversation, Mark mentioned the hit film
Prince of the City
, from the book about New York City policeman Robert Leuci. Looking directly at me, and with our girlfriends beside us, he said, “Know what I think, Terry? I think that policeman who turned on his friends to become a stoolie was a rat. What do you think?”

How could I back out of this? Mark had known me when I was a guileless idealist, and I had to suggest that some trace of that lingered in me, such as I had found in some real fixers. “Sure, Mark,” I said, “but don't you have to respect the guy for doing what he thought was right?”

“No, Terry, turning on your friends is never right.” His eyes were cold.

Having made his point, Mark went on to other subjects as if nothing had happened.

I talked to my supervisors about how close I was coming to being found out. As Mark said, Bob Silverman was getting “paranoid,” and Mark had practically accused me of being a mole.

Since I needed a law office as a business address, Far West Side suburban attorney Jim Reichardt agreed to list me as a partner, although the government did not explain why I needed a fake business address. At least I now had a dummy office to cover for my real work of organizing undercover agents to pose as crooks and victims so that I might fix cases. When I told Mark about my new office, he lent me two chairs.