Free Operation Greylord by Terrence Hake Page B

as thelawyer’s fee. Jim clearly thought the judge shouldn’t play favorites—unless the favorite happened to be him.
    As this was going on, the old benches in that cavernous courtroom were filling up. Narcotics Court never drew a cross-section of humanity. The more affluent dealers were usually indicted for additional crimes and appeared elsewhere, leaving the poorest ones on Olson’s call. Before the doors opened, some paced nervously in the corridor and occasionally one would burst into an erratic dance to work off tension. Once the public was let in, some would be slumped in the benches still obviously on a high. But most sat back and trusted their lawyer to get them off. Sometimes mothers diapered their babies on the benches.
    Attorneys leaving the judge’s chambers would come down the aisle between the benches with case folders and call out the names: Lewis? Vargas? Preece? A man or woman would get up with a glazed expression and stumble across the knees and feet of defendants waiting their turn.
    Handling an average of a hundred and fifty cases between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon, it was no wonder Olson enjoyed hearing a joke, even when it was in bad taste. Then at the end of his call he would walk into his chambers, put his black robe on a hanger, and talk to his bailiff or some attorney about his family. He was proud of his daughter in law school but less so of his son, a policeman. Then the judge would spend a few hours in bars with anyone who cared to join him. Whoever went along was assured of a good time but often wound up paying the entire bill.
    One story Olson loved to tell was about his days as a lawyer, when a company hired him for cases involving its illegally heavy cement trucks. At the time he was also working as a police magistrate. Olson would charge the company half the amount he had saved it, then give the judges half of what he had received. But then a new jurist demanded more.
    â€œSo I filed a motion to transfer the case,” Olson said, “and do you know what reason I listed on the motion? That the bastard wanted more money! The judge almost shit in his pants, but he transferred the case anyway,” allowing him to pay off a less greedy judge. “Then a year later I became the chief judge of the district. That meant I was his boss, and I assigned him to nothing where he could lay his hands on dough. So the moral of the story is: Never kick your janitor in the ass because some day he might be your landlord.”
    The whole building we worked in had a things-are-not-as-they-seem character once you came to know it. A clerk in the Narcotics courtroom down the hall from Olson’s made side money by selling phonograph records from a stuffed filing cabinet that should have been used for court records. And a deputy sheriff connected with a clothing store discounted three-piece suits for new attorneys.
    Even the avarice that ran the place was deceiving. Fixers—and fixers who became judges—lived for the emotional highs that only money could bring them. “Let me tell you,” Costello once told me, “when you get on the other side, all you do is drink.” Or take drugs, as I learned about two crooked attorneys. Or gamble.
    On Friday nights, Jeans became a little Las Vegas. With the doors locked, the courthouse people—black and white, those just starting out and those near retirement—would turn a table on its side so they would have a surface to roll the dice against. “Come on, Little Joe,” a player might call out as lawyers, police officers, and judges knelt around him, some in four-hundred-dollar suits.
    After every toss, the money changing hands included bribes that had been used to send criminals back onto the streets. A few players would throw the dice while holding a lucky penny or a little toy animal, and some chanted “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” as one-hundred-dollar bills descended like