Free Operation Greylord by Terrence Hake

“comin’ to work every God damned day in a six-year-old piece of junk.” Actually, my Plymouth was eight years old. “Why don’t you get yourself a real car? Uncle Sam don’t know it, but I make more than two thousan’ a week. I mean, I’m making so much money it’s ridiculous.”
    I still couldn’t believe he was earning that much regularly, but I turned the radio down for the benefit of the tape. Costello didn’t use the word “bribe”—speaking directly was practically blasphemy among fixers—but he told me he had to pay off the cops. Still slurring and making aimless gestures, he reached under the center armrest and startled me with a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. “What do you think of this?” he asked, while waving it in my face.
    I nearly lost control of the wheel, that’s what I thought of it. A gun in the car I could take, but a gun in the hands of a drunk was something else again. This also was my first visual reminder that crooked attorneys could be dangerous.
    â€œWhoa, Jim,” I said, steering through Western Avenue traffic while keeping the corner of my eye on the revolver, “don’t you think you should put that thing away?”
    â€œI keep this here for protection ’cause my clients live in some pretty bum neighborhoods. If I ever get stopped and the cops find this, all it takes is a hun’red bucks and I’m on my fuckin’ way. The point is, Ter, money can do anything.” The revolver kept wobbling in front of my face.
    â€œJim, I get nervous around guns.”
    â€œI jus’ wan’ed to show it to you.”
    â€œYou did, and I’m impressed, now would you please put that thing away?”
    He clumsily shoved the gun back and said, “A lawyer’s always gotta be prepared. Remember that.”
    Half an hour later we were in his far South Side home, where the basement had been remodeled into a bar and party room. While still describing life in Traffic Court, Jim opened a beer for each of us, as if he needed another drink. He said that whenever a client gave him fifteen hundred dollars to secure an “NG” (not guilty), fifty dollars went to the “copper” bagman who worked in the courtroom, two hundred to the judge, and fifty to the perjuring officer. That left the prosecutors “all Morky-dorky. They don’t know what the hell is goin’ on.” Indeed, I knew the feeling.
    Costello assured me that many of the judges had their price, but you had to know how to reach them. For example, he gave the police officer assigned to the courtroom of Judge Al Rosen one hundred dollars from a client charged with drunken driving, but Rosen found him guilty anyway. “That Rosen, know what he says to me afterward? ‘Motherfucker, if you want your “not guilty,” you come to me.’” Costello guffawed at the memory.
    I never learned whether that particular officer was a bagman for the judge or just a rainmaker. Rainmakers are officers, court clerks, and lawyers who ask for money to fix a case but don’t inform the judge,who may be upstanding. If the client is found guilty, the rainmaker says that for some reason he couldn’t deliver the bribe and hands the money back. Rainmaking is unethical, but the law at the time was not all that clear about whether it was criminal. This ambiguity would haunt us years later.
    Relaxing in his recreation room, Costello said that when he wanted to fix a verdict in Traffic Court he didn’t need to go through Joe McDermott, the lawyer who “wires up [rigs] the cases.” I asked if McDermott was one of the “miracle workers,” the nickname for certain Traffic Court lawyers who seldom lost a case. Rumor had it that all were fixers.
    â€œLet me tell you,” Costello responded with a tap on my arm, “a miracle worker is just anyone that comes up with the bread.”
    As our conversation