Operation Greylord Read Online Free Page B

assumption that law school had taught us everything we needed to know. No one told us how an arresting officer might lie in front of a judge to make a good collar seem weak, or shown us the many ways attorneys could manipulate the system. I had to figure these things out for myself, and not with any sudden realization.
    My first duties had been to present cases in the misdemeanor courts, where Judge P.J. McCormick taught me Chicago style justice. P.J. McCormick was called “P.J.” by his buddies in the mob-run Rush Street nightclubs. He was a rather good-looking man in his forties who had the bull neck and forceful manners of a football coach. But he had pulled the rug out from under me in the case of two men from an apartment-finding business that cheated immigrants.
    These employees had savagely beaten an Ecuadorian who demanded his money back because they had done nothing for him. Their attorney kept calling for continuances to discourage him from coming back. When the case fell to me, it had been dragging on for more than a year and P.J. apparently thought something had to be done before the victim filed a complaint against him.
    McCormick found a devious way to make it appear that justice was being served. But the upside-down logic he used takes a little explanation. The worse offender had a record, so P.J. found him innocent to keep him out of jail. Then, since the less culpable man had not been in trouble before, the judge found him guilty and then called for a thirty-day pre-sentence investigation, something unheard of for just a misdemeanor. When the final hearing came around, McCormick placed himon court supervision. This meant that if the man stayed out of trouble, a “not guilty” would be entered on his record. So in the eyes of the law, the beating never occurred.
    McCormick’s probably taking a bribe did not exactly shock me. A few years before he had been accused of waving a gun at a man and threatening to blow his head off over just a parking space. Although McCormick conceded he owned a gun, he insisted that his weapon had been a big black cigar, and charges were dropped.
    This led the newly formed Illinois Courts Commission to conduct a hearing on whether any action should be taken against him for putting the judiciary in a bad light. The commission had been founded with the best intentions, but its members did not want to cast a shadow on the system. So after a review of evidence in the thirty-two-caliber cigar case, P.J. McCormick was merely suspended for four months.
    When hit man Harry Aleman was acquitted in the William Logan shooting, I assumed Judge Frank Wilson’s verdict had been based on a peculiar assessment of the evidence. But once I was assigned to trial courts, I began seeing all too many apparently wrongheaded decisions being handed down, as if certain judges were operating on an entirely different set of laws from the ones we had been taught. Yet I never took that extra step of realizing that many of the judges were actually worse than the criminals before them. I needed to hold on to my illusion rather than gradually accepting things as they were.
    My innocence ended when an Egyptian grocer was tried for raping a shy and pretty black employee. The man had viciously bitten the teenager on the neck and chased her around the store with a gun, threatening to kill her if she told the police. He was even overbearing in court. I put the girl on the stand and had her go over the attack. The defense attorney dispensed with the usual cross-examination and the judge dismissed the charges, freeing the defendant to do the same thing with some other girl.
    I could tell the girl’s parents thought that perhaps there was something in the law they did not understand. I led them to a hallway and told them that since there were no witnesses, the judge must have felt the case wasn’t strong enough. Why add to their pain by explaining that I thought he had been paid off? Then the