141. Brocton Lockwood and Operation Greylord
The Harrisburg (Illinois) Daily Register ran a great story yesterday, a profile of retiring Judge Brocton Lockwood. In case the name doesn't ring a bell with you, here's a description of the judge in his salad days:
Lookwood had the Hollywood good looks of a soap opera star - thick, brushed-back wavy hair and a thick mustache - and a resonant voice laced with a southern Illinois twang, making him sound like a judicial Slim Pickens. The whole presentation was a likeable one and, using an innocent hillbilly front, he was quickly able to ingratiate himself with the lowest elements of traffic court.
That last clause gives you a hint of what's to come. As a downstate judge, Lockwood was required to spend several weeks a year working in Chicago. That's when he learned about the way things were done in Cook County in the late 1970s:
Lockwood found out who was honest and who wasn't. He learned about Presiding Judge Richard LeFevour's courtroom rental system - where dependable bribe-taking judges would be assigned to the courtrooms where they could make the most money, the ones with drunken-driving and leaving-the-scene cases. These judges would kick back to LeFevour. If they didn't, or, worse, if they were honest, they were soon transferred to courtrooms that heard minor offenses.
The quotes are from James Tuohy's and Rob Warden's classic book Greylord: Justice, Chicago Style. Lockwood thought hard about where he might find an honest law enforcement agency, and eventually went all the way to Washington, D.C. - he didn't trust anyone closer to the Daley machine than that. But the feds were initially afraid Lockwood was a spy sent by the Chicago mob to infiltrate their ranks.
Eventually they agreed to let Lockwood wear a wire - actually, something closer to the A/V equipment you remember from junior high school, with a microphone draped over his shoulder - and he succeeded in getting many of his fellow judges to speak for posterity. According to the Daily Register, Operation Greylord's final tally was "17 judges, 48 lawyers, 8 policemen, 10 deputy sheriffs, 8 court officials, and 1 state legislator" arrested, and most of them convicted. (Here's a handy chart.) Judge LeFevour was sentenced to 12 years.
Lockwood wrote an autobiography, which I haven't read. He also quit his judgeship. In 2000 he was offered an opportunity to return to the bench. He was reluctant until he received assurances he wouldn't be required to rotate through Cook County: "It wasn't really safe for me to go back up there ... I didn't think they would kill me, but I did think they would set me up."
Remember, the "they" he's talking about are judges and lawyers.
One detail I hadn't previously known:
When the state Supreme Court learned about Operation Greylord, Lockwood and two lawyers involved in the case were called on to show why they should not be disbarred for casting the state judicial system in a bad light, Lockwood said.
It's the attitude captured for all time by C.P. Snow in The Affair, a novel about an academic scandal. The head of the department tells the assembled faculty: "[A] piece of scientific fraud is of course unforgivable. And any unnecessary publicity about it, even now, is as near unforgivable as makes no matter."
It's sobering to think that if Operation Greylord hadn't produced quite so many headlines, the Illinois Supreme Court might have been quite happy to sacrifice the legal career of an honest judge to protect the the reputation of a system that didn't deserve it.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 at 07:04PM in Crimes of Judging, Individual judges
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