Over a decade ago, Richard “Mick” Connors was stopped crossing the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit. After confiscating the few thousand cigars on his person, U.S. Customs assumed they had seen the last of him. They were wrong. At last, Connors breaks his silence.

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1997

“Don’t look up!” the cop yelled. Hands cuffed behind him, a handgun pointed squarely at his head, Mick Connors was only happy to oblige. If nothing else, it would give the Chicago lawyer some time to process what was taking place that night in his Skokie, Illinois home. Everything had happened so fast: The officers rapping at his front door, flashing a piece of paper in his face — saying it was a warrant — before barging in. And now the gun.

Connors served 25 months in the federal penitentiary in Oxford, Wisconsin, a medium-security prison known primarily for housing corporate crooks.

“Where are the drugs?” the officer yelled, as one or two other men began to ransack the house.

“Drugs?” Connors thought. “These guys must be kidding.” A public defender in Chicago for 30 years, Connors may have been brash and boisterous, but he was no drug dealer or user. “These guys weren’t there for drugs. They knew it, and I knew it. I didn’t have any drugs, and no one who knows me would have thought that I did.”

Then Connors noticed the other police spiriting items out his front door and into a waiting SUV — maybe the boxes of cigars he had been keeping upstairs.

It wasn’t the first time stogies had gotten him in trouble. A few months earlier, a tip from his ex-wife had inspired U.S. Customs to pull over Connors and his son, Christopher, as they entered the United States along the Ambassador Bridge into Detroit. They seized Connors’ passport, 1,150 Cuban cigars, and four bottles of Cuban rum. In his luggage, they found ticket receipts for travel on Cubana Airlines from Toronto to Havana, a Canadian customs receipt showing duty paid on 13.15kg of cigars, and a receipt from Casa Partages in Havana.

Now, lying facedown on his floor, Connors made the connection: Someone had been reading notes from his trash, discarded papers telling fictional tales of smuggled Cuban cigars and $750,000 in cash stashed in the attic — parts of a novel that hadn’t even been published yet. “Where’s the money?” the officer barked.

The Dragnet > For ten years, from 1976 to 1986, Richard “Mick” Connors established himself as a public defender in Chicago, where he grew up in an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. “My early cigar memories go back to when I was growing up in the mid-50’s,” he says. “I lived on the Irish south side of Chicago and there was a prominent cigar store in the area. I remember seeing guys smoking cigars just about everywhere.”

In between smoking cigars, his public-defender skills soon led to his being assigned to the narcotics division of Operation Greylord, a joint FBI-IRS investigation into corruption at the Cook County courthouse. The investigation eventually indicted 1 state legislator, 8 court officials, 8 policemen, 10 deputy sheriffs, 48 lawyers and 17 judges, including Judge Wayne Olson, in whose courtroom Connors had worked as a public defender for one year.

“Fixing cases in that courtroom was a daily occurrence,” Connors remembers. “I got to watch them fix hundreds of cases a month, and after a year of that it got to the point where I could spot a fixed trial just like a jeweler can spot a fake diamond.”

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