Operation Greylord Read Online Free PDF

exuberance must have made me sound juvenile.
    â€œMy father was absolutely honest,” Cathy assured me.
    â€œEverybody knows that.” Judge Wilbert Crowley had died with a spotless record about four years before.
    There were a lot of things I hadn’t told her about the investigation yet, and no wonder she couldn’t understand why I was doing this. “You can’t imagine how bad it is,” I said, “you have to be in the courts all the time to see it. It’s got to be stopped.”
    â€œAnd you ’re going to do it? You’re just starting out.”
    â€œIt’s practically as if I’m an FBI agent.” That was my way of looking at it, even though at this stage no one else would have. “They’ve had me transferred to Olson’s court. You don’t mind that I’m going over? I mean, people will start thinking I’m a crook.”
    â€œNo.” Cathy tossed this off with a lilt. “I think it’s neat.”
    â€œYou can’t tell anyone, all right?”
    â€œDon’t worry,” she said. “Who would believe me?”

    That Monday I walked up the concrete steps of the Criminal Courts Building with the start of a mustache, prepared to act like I was on the take at the first chance.
    And so ended the period of my life when I could say and do pretty much anything I wanted to. From now on any spontaneity had to be held in check until it was safe to be myself, and even then I felt uneasy about it. Since I now had to work the corridors and the cafeteria as well as attend to my official duties, the Criminal Courts Building was becoming my real home.
    The busy courthouse, described by the Chicago Tribune as a “columned, neoclassical hulk,” sits off a short boulevard in a residential neighborhood at 26th Street and California Avenue, at nearly the geographic center of the city and a half-hour drive from downtown. As a reporter said when the place opened in 1929, it “is five miles this side of Keokuk, Iowa.”
    Maybe its remoteness had something to do with the way bribery took root. Without the distractions of large law offices, trendy shops, theaters, or major restaurants, the judges and lawyers formed an odd little society of their own, even shooting dice together in the back of Jeans Restaurant once a week. Some of those cozy relationships tightened a bit when a towering office annex was built next to the courthouse for judicial and state’s attorney personnel, but many judges still counted defense attorneys among their friends. This closed society, in which trial judges often favored their lawyer friends, was something most new prosecutors felt alien toward.
    Part of my undercover role was to avoid looking uneasy as I summarized the arrests of drug dealers at preliminary hearings before Wayne Olson, one of the loudest judges in the system. He was a large man who at forty-nine easily seemed ten years older. On the bench he had a tired but kindly expression, with such bags under his eyes that in public appearances he kept his lids raised, giving him a startled look. His permanent assignment, Branch 57, was one of the two Narcotics Courts in the building. The other judge was honest. The decisions coming simultaneously out of those two courts at each end of a short hallway were like noon and midnight.
    Olson’s courtroom must have been built in anticipation of some Trial of the Century, since the preliminary hearings occupied less thana third of the space. His bench was kept diagonally in a corner to catch the natural light from the tall, narrow windows. The two waist-high lecterns for the attorneys and witnesses were set at conflicting angles, so the total arrangement created a small maze. As a result, the empty jury box did not directly face the witness stand, and neither did the two rows of spectator benches. This made huge Room 100 look tipped toward one corner, with everything at an angle from something