Retired 'Operation Greylord' judge interviewed for TV segment

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Retired Judge Brocton Lockwood recently did a lengthy interview for a series of documentaries on corruption in major cities.

The Underworld Series episode in which Lockwood participated will be shown 9 p.m. Sunday on the National Geographic Channel.

"I haven't see the show, but the questions and commentary relating to current corruption were interesting," Lockwood said.

During a period on the Cook County bench in the late 1970s, Lockwood participated in Operation Greylord, a federal sting operation against corrupt judges and lawyers in the Chicago judiciary. The operation led to the arrest of more than 100 judges, police attorneys and bagmen in the judicial system, Lockwood said.

The producers of the Underworld Series were interested in the link between present-day corruption and the case-fixing Lockwood witnessed during his time on the bench 30 years ago. Lockwood only knows what he reads in newspapers about current cases, but doesn't doubt the new cases stem back to the Greylord cases, at least in some fashion.

Lockwood went into a lot of detail about Operation Greylord during the interview.

"I really didn't expect them to spend so much time with me," Lockwood said.

The interviewers were familiar with his book, "Operation Greylord," and with the cases Lockwood was involved with during his time working for the FBI.

Lockwood contended the FBI is probably more aggressive about finding the links between organized crime and case-fixing than during his time in Operation Greylord. When one of the cases started to develop links to a mob figure, it tended not to go much further, Lockwood said. The FBI was probably worried about not having enough staff or wherewithal to go after the mob in earnest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lockwood said.

"I always did think the FBI was afraid to go after the mob at that time," Lockwood said.

When Lockwood became a judge, all Illinois judges had to do a rotation in Cook County, Lockwood said during a 2006 interview. During his stint on the Chicago judiciary, Lockwood became increasingly aware of widespread case-fixing among judges, attorneys and police.

Payoffs were the way of doing business. Would-be judges paid off political sponsors to get a seat on the bench, lawyers paid off judges at fund-raisers during campaigns and attorneys and defendants were paying off judges to receive light sentences or dropped charges.

Lockwood thought about leaving the bench, but decided instead to approach someone about the corruption he was seeing. Lockwood decided on the Justice Department. Lockwood wore a wire around corrupt judges to verify what he was saying about the judicial system.

The Justice Department and Lockwood created fictitious cases that closely matched real cases that had ended in payoffs. FBI agents would be arrested for a bogus crime, then a lawyer working undercover would "fix" the case with a judge.

Operation Greylord had a positive effect on the state's judicial system, Lockwood said. Judges in Chicago now are better trained and usually come out of the State's Attorney's office or the Public Defender's office, rather than buying their way into judgeships.

Lockwood left the bench and resumed private practice in 1984. He came back to the bench in Saline County in 2000, when he didn't have to do another rotation in Chicago.