1627229191 (N) by Terrence Hake

Author:Terrence Hake
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2015-04-17T21:00:00+00:00

So the judge boarded a train with his little daughter and took an apartment near the Traffic Court Building for an indefinite stay. Although the FBI would use several other moles in Operation Greylord, Lockwood and I were the only ones who gave up our careers for the investigation and remained in the trenches month after month.

By then, FBI agent Lamar Jordan had been transferred from the Chicago office and Bill Megary took over for him. He helped the lean young judge through his early undercover work much as he and Jordan had guided me, including frequent meetings in a parking lot at the lakeshore museum campus. They never told Lockwood about me, but I knew about him. We never met until after the Greylord disclosures made national headlines.

Even though Lockwood raised racehorses back home, he was not the adventure-seeker I was at heart. He was more laidback and admitted that he just might be a century behind the times, which was a good thing for us. Most of Lockwood’s family were preachers or teachers. Despite his education, Lockwood was regarded in court circles as a hick because of his Southern Illinois lilt, but he was smarter than most of the shady lawyers appearing before him.

Even so, as an outsider he was unable to record conversations with many of the crooked lawyers and judges. At least he was successful in introducing Ries to a major bagman, gruff policeman Ira Blackwood, and to assistant city attorney Thomas Kangalos, in charge of prosecuting traffic violators. Blackwood had mob friends, and Kangalos was a hyperactive gin drinker who always packed a gun.

Lockwood had to force himself to lie, and he even read spy novels to get in the proper frame of mind. His high school acting training helped him pose as a sometimes boozy womanizer who needed a lot of cash to keep up with his newly single lifestyle. Kangalos, like the devil on a mountaintop, showed the judge all the corruption he could share in. When Kangalos gave him his first bribe, the judge was still afraid that Greylord might backfire and he would wind up in prison, or worse.

Much of what Lockwood, Ries, and I picked up separately had to be painfully pieced together for patterns to emerge. Among the things this showed was that under LeFevour’s judge rotation system, corruption could mask as reform because violators were assigned to courtrooms rather than to judges. This is how it worked: Mel Kanter, a miracle worker nicknamed “Candyman” for always carrying hard candy in his pocket, would hand bagman James LeFevour a list of pending cases when they met in the building at eight o’clock each morning. Jimmy then brought the names to his cousin, and Judge LeFevour would assign to those courtrooms one of the jurists who had passed the corruption test. At the end of the day, Kanter thankfully gave Jimmy an envelope containing one hundred and twenty dollars for each case: one hundred for Judge LeFevour and twenty dollars for Jimmy.

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