Books: Personal Injuries

I have continued to practice law while writing novels, but I have not maintained this dual career, as people sometimes suspect, in order to develop new material for my books. The truth is that practice has already given me stories enough for a lifetime. Personal Injuries is one of them.

From 1978 to 1986 I was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago. I thought then — and still do — that it was the greatest job a young lawyer could have. I was surrounded by talented colleagues; I had the chance to try criminal cases regularly in federal court; and the Office was electric with the commitment to do good for our community.

In the Chicago in which I came of age, corruption was so endemic that virtually any government decision was up for sale. Parents who wanted to arrange for their son or daughter to transfer schools would send the pupil, carrying an envelope containing $25, to see the Alderman, who'd happily accept a bribe, even from a child. Beginning in the early 1970's and continuing to the present, the United States Attorney's Office in Chicago has mounted a relentless series of prosecutions aimed at reducing the venality which many Chicagoans had come to accept as a way of life.

For whatever reason, my specialty over my years as an Assistant seemed to be corruption in the legal profession. My first major assignment, in 1979, was as the junior prosecutor on the team that tried — and convicted — Illinois's sitting Attorney General for income tax fraud. After that, I became one the project leaders on related prosecutions of dozens of lawyers and hearing officers for bribes exchanged in connection with the decisions of a local real estate taxing body.

But I had come to the U.S. Attorney's office with what seemed to me an even more ambitious goal: to do something about the corruption in the Cook County judiciary that was so notorious that I'd even heard about it in childhood. Early in Personal Injuries, Stan Sennett, the U.S. Attorney, tells the story of his Uncle Petros, who was swindled in a land deal. When asked by young Stan why he didn't sue, Petros supposedly responded, 'A poor man like me? I can't afford to buy a judge.'

The anecdote is lifted from life. Petros was my grandfather, whom I adored, and Stan's role was, of course, mine. My grandfather's message that the well-to-do and politically connected were beyond the restraint of the justice system in Cook county always haunted me. And when I became a young prosecutor, I dreamed of exposing the ugly facts so that a serious price could finally be put on a form of corruption that seemed to me intolerable.

My thoughts were hardly unique. Unbeknownst to me, during my early years in the Office, the FBI had developed an informant who had provided information about corrupt doings in the Cook County criminal courts. Based on his information, the United States Attorney, Thomas P. Sullivan, my mentor and friend, had gone to the Department of Justice for permission to start an undercover project in which the FBI agents would pretend to be corrupt lawyers who would bribe judges — on tape. Sullivan and Dan Reidy, the Assistant United States Attorney who ran the project with him, were tempting the fates, because years before the Chief of the Criminal Division in the Cook County State's Attorney Office had attempted to so the same thing. Not only did the judge and the lawyer he'd targeted smell out and foil his plan, but the Illinois Supreme Court disciplined the prosecutor severely for propagating a fraud on the courts. If this new federal undercover project, called Greylord, failed like its predecessor, the prosecutors involved might jeopardize their right to practice law.

The perils were greatest for Sullivan and the U.S. Attorney who succeeded him, Dan Webb, as well as for Reidy. But whatever risks there were for lesser lights, I happily took them on when I was invited onto the Greylord team mid-way through the Project in 1982. My role was to try to unearth evidence of corruption in the civil courts, a job which consumed my last four years as Assistant U.S. Attorney. Greylord ultimately led to the convictions of 15 judges and 49 lawyers, as well as dozens of court personnel. I've had exciting times practicing law, but those were among the most exhilarating, and I'd long recognized that the courage, the dangers, the manic secrecy, and the intricate orchestration required to maintain an undercover project presented the gist of a classic adventure, the kind of story on which I've attempted to do new variations in my novels.

On the other hand, I've always been careful about any kiss-and-tell concerning my practice. It's unethical to exploit a client's secrets for personal gain. I knew Personal Injuries couldn't be a memoir in disguise. Both the characters and the settings are completely invented, the fermented brew that imagination distills from grains of truth over time. Greylord had no Robbie Fever — indeed, we often bemoaned the fact that we never succeeded in turning a true insider who could go around wired. Instead the novel is a working through of many of the most vexing issues of my years as a prosecutor, especially the way my somewhat categorical opinions about evil and good yielded in confronting the mysterious tangle of particular cases, of my own difficulty in assessing misbehavior that often revealed not only greed, and ambition, but also the benign and potent forces of loyalty, love and friendship.