Free Operation Greylord by Terrence Hake Page A

was winding down, I looked for a way to pull out. “Say, Jim,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you? You know, help steer cases—”
    â€œNaw, I don’t wan’cha go out on a limb.”
    â€œWell, it’s getting late. I have to go all the way to Evanston.”
    Having passed through self-pity and guilt in his intoxication, Costello dipped into the maudlin level as I reached for the door knob. “Ter, you been super to me. I don’t forget guys like that.”
    His wife, Martha, agreed to drive me ten miles back to my car in the courthouse parking lot. Martha wasn’t a bad-looking woman in her mid-thirties, but there was something cloying about her as if she imagined that by a lot of drinking and a little flirting she could be eighteen again. During the ride, I also received the impression from what little she said that her marriage was falling apart. I didn’t know if Jim’s drinking was the cause or the effect.
    July 1980
    By the end of July I had grown tired of waiting for “Silvery” Bob Silverman to make the first move. With my new confidence I told the officer working in Narcotics Court, “Hey, listen. Bob’s case—we’re not going anywhere with it. I’m going to SOL it [dismiss on leave to reinstate]. He’s a pretty sharp guy—you know his methods. It’ll just wind up getting thrown out anyway.”
    No doubt suspecting I had been reached, the policeman gave me a weary “Do what you want.”
    Word got around to Silverman and, judging from later events, he must have felt that now he owed me one.
    Costello came to me a little later and spoke about a client whose auto was about to be sold at a police auction because of drugs found inside. Jim handed me fifty dollars—my first official bribe—and I appeared before Judge Olson to say the state would not oppose a request that the car be returned to its owner. Like so many cases in that building, the hearing had been a sham. In the hallway, Costello let me know that “Wayne got his.”
    Eventually things were happening so fast that my FBI control agent, Lamar Jordan, was having me meet him in his car almost every morning to pick up my tapes and any money I had taken the day before. Our usual location was a parking lot where the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Field Museum of Natural History share a little greenery at the lakefront. There we would discuss what I had done the day before, what I had tried to do, and what I hoped to accomplish in the next few days.
    â€œHow is your girlfriend taking things?” Jordan asked one morning. “You’re spending a lot more time in bars now. Is she complaining about it?”
    I could read a message in those rock-hard eyes: You probably told her, didn’t you? “Cathy doesn’t mind. I still take her out. She knows I haven’t changed.” Behind this seemingly offhand remark I was lobbing back: Yes, I told her, but don’t worry, no one else will know.
    Then I drove away so I could be in the courthouse to watch the action around Olson’s chambers before his call began. The same half dozen attorneys would drop by Olson’s chambers every day to check on their cases or make a payoff. Most of them were in their early middle age, well dressed, and had a professional sociability, but I got the feeling they did not like one another all that much. After all, they were competitors in a crowded field. A couple of them had already begun that day’s drinking.
    The most frequent visitor to Narcotics Court was attorney Richard Stopka, a former policeman with pale skin and a round face. Since Stopka came from a Polish family, the predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish lawyers in the fixers’ club grumbled that he had “no class.” Costello told me Stopka was receiving most of Olson’s cases because he was paying the judge a third of the bond money returned to him