The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust
Starred review from April 13, 2015
True crime narratives don’t get much more suspenseful than Hake’s account of his covert work to expose the endemic corruption in the Chicago court system. While Hake was a junior prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in 1979, he was appalled by the graft he witnessed; it ranged from attorneys paying off court clerks to get the names of defendants without lawyers, to judges taking bribes to dismiss drug cases. Hake’s complaints attracted the interest of the Justice Department, as none of his colleagues, who must have been aware of the same unethical behavior, had spoken up. The young prosecutor went undercover to gather evidence. The personal cost was high—his own reputation was tainted when Hake became known as someone who was on the take, and he had to balance loyalty and integrity after learning that a close friend accepted bribes. Despite the operation’s successes, Hake places the inquiry in context, noting that not every crooked judge was nailed, and that his work was only making up for the “failure of our law schools and attorney disciplinary boards.”