Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America’s Biggest Corruption Bust

In 1980, Terrence Hake was a young assistant prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago, . In April of that year, he agreed to assist the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office in an investigation of the county court system, known nationwide to be a hotbed of bribery, corruption, and mob ties. For three and a half years, untrained and with ever-diminishing naivete, Hake worked undercover posing as a corrupt prosecutor by accepting bribes from attorneys to fix cases for the criminals they were defending. Later, as an attorney in private practice, he made payoffs to judges and court personnel to arrange the dismissal of cases. Throughout the investigation, Hake had to befriend people he knew he would betray, wear a wire in bars and to racetracks, and help with many of the FBI’s unprecedented actions, such as bugging a judge’s chambers. The investigation, known as Greylord, became the longest and most successful undercover investigation in FBI history, and the largest corruption bust ever in the U.S. It resulted in bribery and tax charges being filed against 103 judges, lawyers, and other court personnel, and, eventually, three suicides and more than seventy indictments.