`A death wish'
Because of an ex-corrupt attorney with a near-photographic memory,
we live in a different city today. But his life, he says, ' is over.'
By David Jackson
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 20, 2004
Once he ran the streets like a dark prince -- bar-hopping with mob chieftains, betting as much as a million dollars a week and doling out bribes to fix murder trials.
But at age 37, corrupt attorney Robert J. Cooley got a second chance at life, a shot at redemption.
Sickened by the arrogance and brutality of his mob pals, Cooley became an undercover FBI operative. For 3 1/2 harrowing years starting in 1986, he wore a hidden wire, taping crime bosses and politicians as they rigged everything from felony cases to zoning decisions even a state insurance law.
Cooley's recordings and unrebutted court testimony led to the conviction of two dozen crooked judges, politicians, mobsters and lawyers, and helped smash the Chicago outfit's dominance over the courts and City Hall.
Because of one bald, streetwise bachelor with a near-photographic memory, we live in a different city today, former federal prosecutors say. The outfit is a vestige of its former strength. The average citizen can walk into a courtroom or ballot booth without presuming the fix is in. Mob hits are a rarity. "I don't think Cooley ever got the credit he deserved," said former Assistant U.S. Atty. Scott T. Mendeloff.
For years, federal agents had struggled unsuccessfully to penetrate the mob's source of clout -- the powerful but insular 1st Ward Democratic Organization, former First Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas M. Durkin said. "We couldn't even get close," Durkin said. "We needed someone who had been involved in that world for years and years."
The strange third chapter of Cooley's life opened in the mid-1990s, when the big-ticket trials ended and the TV lights snapped off. He began an unwanted exile.
Too independent to join the federal Witness Protection Program, he accepted the occasional assistance of federal authorities to maintain a shifting array of false identities. Amid death threats, he hopscotched from Colorado to Virginia, then Georgia, Texas and points west. Making small talk with strangers at upscale taverns, courting women through personal ads, lying to shield his astonishing past, Cooley became a kind of secret agent again -- but one without a mission.
In a recent interview, he described the silence that came to fill his aimless days.
"There's nothing. Just waiting to die," Cooley said. "Sitting around waiting for the day to end. Living day by day because there's nothing to live for."
Cooley's fourth chapter may yet be written.
He has just published a tell-all autobiography, "When Corruption Was King," written with former Chicago magazine editor Hillel Levin. It is an insider's tour of a mob-dominated metropolis in the 1970s and '80s -- and the high-risk, sometimes improvised federal investigation that cracked its lurid secrets.
Using some 45 hours of taped interviews with Cooley, Levin captures the wisecracking, score-settling syntax of the star witness who once dominated local headlines.
Cooley returns to Chicago periodically to visit family and to brief law enforcement officials and private investigators who are seeking information on organized crime figures. He does not get paid for that work, and lives mostly on investments.
He was in town recently to provide an affidavit for a lawsuit involving a former judge with past ties to the 1st Ward. Cooley says he does "anything I can to help, to offer some insight. From the time I left, I have always considered this to be my city."
Big-boned and fair-skinned, with limpid gray eyes, he wore a faded grayT-shirt and rumpled shorts. The 62-year-old, first-time author's left leg bobbed restlessly as he explained why the book had to be written:
"Defense lawyers made me out to be a rat, a lowlife. The Cooley name was so dragged through the mud," he said.
Living in undisclosed cities under assumed names, he gave up his law practice, income and identity. Four of his eight siblings -- three lawyers and a financial analyst, all former cops -- lost clients because of his notoriety. Chicago never acknowledged the price his family paid, Cooley said. "After I surfaced in 1989, there wasn't a single mob murder for eight or nine years," he says. "Let the people in Chicago realize what the Cooley family did."
The streets have changed, but Cooley is the same person I first encountered as a source years ago. When Cooley decided he wanted to tell his story, I put him in touch with Levin, for whom I had worked as a Chicago magazine senior editor from 1987 through 1991.
Perhaps the single most important thing to know about Cooley is that he served as a Chicago cop from 1962 through 1970 -- following the footsteps of his father, grandfathers on both sides and four of his eight siblings.
As a patrolman, Cooley acknowledged, he accepted the occasional "tip" after a traffic stop. But sacrifice and integrity were family bywords -- both Cooley's grandfathers were killed in the line of duty.
The family moved through a string of brown brick bungalows in the Englewood and Chatham neighborhoods during the 1950s and '60s. As a grade-schooler, he delivered prescriptions from a drugstore at 7851 S. Indiana Ave. in the afternoon, then raced over to a grocery store on 79th Street where he was paid 75 cents plus tips and a bottle of pop to run errands and sweep up at about 9:30 p.m.
"I was a hustling little son-of-a-gun," he says.
And quick with a punch. Joining the police force after graduating from Mt. Carmel High School in 1960, the twentysomething officer reveled in banging heads during the 1968 riots. He fell in with a streetwise, fast-action squad car partner named Ricky Borelli, whose cousin was Marco D'Amico, an up-and-coming mob street crew boss. Shrewd, antic and ruthless, D'Amico introduced Cooley to the world of bookmaking. Cooley won big at gambling and split his takings with D'Amico. "Anything I would play," he says today, "he'd get half of the action."
While getting to know D'Amico, Cooley went to college then law school at night. He quit the police force after he passed the bar exam. The nattily dressed defense attorney routinely gave judges and court personnel bribes and gratuities -- usually ranging from $100 to $1,000 -- to ensure the freedom of the mob grifters he represented.
He bought a share in the popular Evergreen Park restaurant Greco's, and became a fixture at Faces discotheque on Rush Street.
After a morning appearance in criminal court, Cooley typically took a steam and massage, then joined the 1st Ward power brokers at "Booth One" in the rear of Counsellors Row restaurant, across the street from City Hall. There, he played court jester to some of Chicago's most crooked kingmakers. Ald. Fred Roti (whom Cooley writes was "very short, with the face and body of a toad") recounted to him how the 1st Ward engineered Mayor Jane Byrne's abrupt ouster of reform-minded police Supt. Joe DiLeonardi in 1979.
Pat Marcy -- the slinky, septuagenarian secretary of the 1st Ward Democratic Organization and the outfit's link to Chicago politicians and judges -- became a surrogate father who helped fledgling attorney Cooley procure police reports and orchestrate bribes.
To help Marcy fix the 1977 murder trial of mob assassin Harry Aleman, Cooley took Judge Frank Wilson to the men's room of Greco's.
"It was a big place, with plenty of marble for an echo, so I first checked under all the stalls to make sure no one else was using a toilet. Then I said, `Judge, are you still interested in taking the case?'" Cooley writes.
Aleman was thought to be responsible for at least 18 contract murders -- he often slaughtered his victims in broad daylight, confident that his mob overseers could remove the heat. In this case, Aleman was charged with gunning down a Cicero dockworker embroiled in a bitter child-custody dispute with one of Aleman's cousins.
Wilson was a law-and-order judge who, as far as Cooley knew, had never before taken a bribe. But when Cooley handed him the last portion of his $10,000 payment, Cooley writes, Wilson peered inside the envelope and asked, "That's all I'm going to get?"
Judge Wilson retired in 1980 and moved to Arizona. A decade later, after Cooley became a state's witness, he committed suicide on the eve of a scheduled interview with FBI agents about the Aleman fix.
In a legal landmark, state prosecutors would overturn the double jeopardy provision of the 5th Amendment and convict Aleman for the case Cooley had fixed. Taking the witness stand in Aleman's retrial in 1997, Cooley's usually cool facade crumbled and he broke into tears as he described delivering the final payment of $7,500 to Wilson 20 years before. This is how Tribune reporter Maurice Possley described Cooley's courtroom testimony in a news story that day:
"I gave him the money," Cooley began. "The $7,500."
He paused.
Silence fell over the courtroom of Judge Michael Toomin as Cooley struggled to keep his composure. Aleman sat calmly at the defense table, staring at Cooley, sitting 50 feet away.
"He was a broken man," Cooley finally uttered, his voice cracking. "He said, `That's all I'm going to get?'"
Cooley pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. "I started to tell him -- he turned his back on me -- that I would give him more. He said, `You destroyed me.'"
At its heart, Cooley's story hinges on a crisis of conscience.
His grandfather on his father's side had been killed by a Capone thug in 1927 while trying to break up a street robbery. In 1983, Cooley's father revealed on his deathbed that the murderer walked away after the case was fixed by a crooked attorney. "Get away from those people," Cooley's dying father begged.
Not long after that, Cooley was instructed by Marcy to represent a weight lifter named Michael Colella who was charged with brutally beating a policewoman following a traffic stop. Marcy told Cooley that he had fixed the case. Colella's acquittal shattered the career of Judge Lawrence Passarella, who was not charged but was subsequently voted off the bench after columnist Mike Royko and others raised a stink about the verdict.
Then D'Amico told Cooley about the planned hit of a mob associate -- practically making Cooley an accomplice.
The son of a cop had finally had enough.
On March 13, 1986, Cooley walked into the office of Gary Shapiro, then chief of the Justice Department's Strike Force Against Organized Crime in Chicago, and said he wanted to help the government bring down the mob.
In the nearly two decades since, the odds often have gone against the gambling attorney. The streets he once ran became dangerous for him to walk. Federal agents had to whisk him in and out of courtrooms where defense attorneys raked at his character. Speculation about his motives would fill newspaper columns. A character based on him would appear in the Scott Turow novel "Personal Injuries" as well as the TV movie "The Fixer" starring Jon Voight. He would play a villainous, real-life role in "Everybody Pays," the book exploring the Aleman trial by Tribune reporters Possley and Rick Kogan.
But for the fugitive Cooley, a legacy went unrecognized and a story has gone, until now, untold.
As we toured his childhood homes on the South Side, the former outfit insider tried to measure the legacy of Operation Gambat -- the federal investigation named for him, the gambling attorney.
The 1st Ward Organization, which represented Chicago's bustling downtown and financial district, had by the 1980s solidified its position as the outfit's conduit to legitimate government. "The mob's power began with control of the judges and top police personnel -- they knew they could kill and get away with it," Cooley says. "They controlled elections by stealing and manipulating votes, so anybody who ran for office had to get their OK. They controlled government unions and had people in every agency in City Hall -- they could put you in or take you out."
The Gambat investigation and trials "completely destroyed the 1st Ward," Cooley says, imprisoning the powerful political organization's top officials. "That totally decimated the mob as we knew it," Cooley says.
When Gambat began, Cooley learned to strap on an FBI-issued Nagra tape recorder. He started carrying two guns -- usually a five-shot Airweight and a .45 with nine rounds.
But he didn't seem to sweat the danger.
"I wasn't so concerned about the risks," Cooley writes. "The whole investigation had been a death wish."
- - -
Courting favors for the mob
In this excerpt from "When Corruption Was King," by Robert Cooley and Hillel Levin, Cooley describes how his law practice flourished as he paid bribes to win court cases in the 1970s and '80s. A steady stream of cases was referred to Cooley by mob street crew chief Marco D'Amico:
Of course, Marco was a major source of my business. Whenever any of his bookies would get arrested, he would contact Marco, and Marco would get him a lawyer, namely me. I could have six of these cases a week. I'd drop by to see Marco at the Survivor's Club [the West Side social club where D'Amico hung out] and he'd pay me $1,000 for each one. Later I discovered he was charging the bookies as much as $4,000 for my services.
Even if I had known about Marco's "mark-up," I wouldn't have cared. I was more than happy with what I was making from him. Working for the Mob was like any other business. You had to be productive -- churn through as many cases as possible -- yet make your customers feel like they were getting better service than they could get anywhere else.
In those days, most of my cases were in Guns and Gambling, a classic "money court." You rarely had trials, just transactions. One of the senior judges in the court was Ray Sodini -- a happy-go-lucky guy with a drooping bloodhound face. I didn't deal with his bagman and we hardly ever spoke before a case. Instead, I would go back into his chambers and the little closet where he hung his suit jacket. I put a hundred dollars in the inside pocket for every case I had in his court. If it was a tough case, and he had to go out on a limb for me, I put a couple of hundred dollars in there. Once in a while, I'd have a real difficult case -- what we called "an ink case," because it got a lot of press. Only then would I have to talk to him first. I knew where he had lunch, and I could approach him there and let him decide whether he wanted to throw it out in the Preliminary Hearing or let it go directly to the Grand Jury. If he threw it out too quickly, a reporter might notice. I never wanted to put him in a position where the press could embarrass him, and he trusted my instincts. That was the key to my success in working the system. Early on, people realized I wouldn't take advantage of their trust.
For the first eleven years of my legal career, almost every day I gave out bribes -- and not just to judges. The other court personnel were equally important, if not more so. On my way into the courthouse, I sometimes stopped to pick up a big bag of donuts or some fried chicken. While the other lawyers lined up to go through the metal detector, I walked past it, and made my rounds before court was in session, dropping off food in this office or that chambers. Along the way, I might shake hands with certain sheriffs or bailiffs. Inside my palm, I folded up a five or ten -- sometimes a fifty. We would shake, they would come away with the money and no one else would be the wiser. It's not like I paid them for anything special. It was more like an investment -- for a favor they might perform in the future.
Reprinted with permission from Carroll & Graf publishers.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
