Operation Greylord by Terrence Hake

Author:Terrence Hake
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2015-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

14

BRANCHING OUT

Summer 1981

JUDGE JOHN DEVINE

One of the hardest aspects of my undercover work was timing. I had to find a spot in the Traffic Court Building where I could see witnesses, defendants, and lawyers coming and going without appearing to be watching, and then pretend to come across a target coincidentally. When I “bumped” into bagman Harold Conn, I was representing an undercover FBI agent who had posed as a drunken driver named James Cramer. He had made sure there would be no way of getting off lightly before a judge with integrity. During his arrest, he dropped his wallet, almost staggered over an expressway guardrail to grab it, and then refused to take a Breathalyzer test.

Conn told me I was lucky because a certain judge would be handling my case. “He’s a nice young fellah,” Conn said, “I’ll speak to him.” That meant he was offering to pass on a bribe. But the person who should have been handling the case didn’t return after the lunch recess. Instead, Judge John “Dollars” Devine came over from another courtroom. I wasn’t disappointed, since taking a second bribe after another drunken driving case the month before, involving an undercover agent going by the name of Benson, would qualify as racketeering.

Devine should have sentenced “Cramer” to a year in jail and revoked his license. But the fix was in, and “Dollars” just fined him one hundred dollars and placed him on court supervision. This meant I needed to confirm that Conn had informed him I needed a lenient ruling.

I found the judge having a cigarette in the hallway behind the courtroom. He didn’t say a word when I thanked him, so I had to do something every mole dreads: asking blatantly stupid questions in hopes the response would be incriminating. I started by inquiring whether I should see Conn to express my gratitude.

“Yeah,” the judge muttered and walked away from me, as if saying that he had already shown me how the system works.

A few minutes later I gave the bagman two hundred dollars for the judge and sixty for himself. “That was beautiful,” I told Conn about the way Devine had swooped into the other judge’s courtroom to set up the fix. Conn just shrugged me off. Things like that happened all the time in that building.

But, I wondered, when would I ever get to record Devine taking a bribe from my hand? The answer turned out to be in seventeen months! So, jumping ahead, the “James Cramer” case came up again in February 1983. This time my “client” was appearing for the termination of his court supervision, which he had intentionally violated by speeding. Since Devine was not around for a hearing, I had to tell two other judges offering to lift the supervision that there were special circumstances requiring that Devine hear the case personally.

So much time had elapsed that we could no longer use the original undercover agent because he had been appearing in federal court under his real name to testify against a policeman.

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