They were the unlikeliest of allies.
Rufus Sims, muscular and ruthless, was a 10th-grade dropout who elbowed his way up the ranks of a West Side street gang to become a multimillionaire drug dealer.
The 33-year-old drove a snow-white Rolls-Royce convertible, wore thick chains of gold and swung a baseball bat to discipline the teenagers and junkies who sold $10 packets of cocaine from the dope houses he controlled.
Richard Goldstein, balding and soft-spoken, plied a modest divorce practice from his cramped Dearborn Street law office. He listened to the Kingston Trio, parked a 1986 Plymouth Voyager van in the garage of his Lincoln Park brownstone and accompanied his three kids to Scout meetings.
He was the kind of lawyer other attorneys hired when they needed a divorce. “A bedrock of integrity,” said attorney David Hopkins. He taped receipts for 55-cent sweetrolls in his ledger books.
Together, Goldstein and Sims learned to launder drug money.
The story of their relationship was one of chance, deceit and, some believe, naivete. It also was one of tragic undoing.
While Sims is a fugitive who police believe is still selling drugs, Goldstein’s career has ended behind bars. In a verdict that sent shock waves through the legal community, Goldstein, 40, was convicted of federal conspiracy and money laundering in January for closing three real estate deals for Sims. The purchases, which totalled $540,000, were concealed behind a veil of aliases, cashier’s checks and secret land trusts.
Wednesday, Goldstein was sentenced to 15 years and 8 months in prison, one of the stiffest drug-related penalties ever meted out to a Chicago area attorney.
But more than Goldstein’s future is at stake, as evidenced by the dozens of letters attorneys have written the court on Goldstein’s behalf and the loans they made to help defray Goldstein’s legal expenses. Some fear that this prosecution signals a new and unfair burden on lawyers who now must investigate the source of their client’s fees.
“This should scare every attorney in the city,” said Goldstein’s former partner, Mark Boyle.
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“He got caught up in something a lot of lawyers could have gotten caught up in,” added attorney Robert Downs, a former state representative. “People in the bar say, `There but for the grace of God go I.’ “
The question of Goldstein’s culpability strikes at the heart of a debate unfolding beyond Chicago’s legal community. One case followed closely by attorneys around the country is that of a North Carolina real estate agent who sold a house for a drug dealer. In lengthy federal court battles, the government has argued that the agent was “willfully blind” to the source of the money.
Likewise, prosecutors say Goldstein clearly knew that Sims’ money came from illegal sources and intentionally hid the identity of his client.
For fees of about $41,000, prosecutors say, Goldstein became but a white-collar worker bee in the black market of cheap cocaine and violence that devastates the neighborhoods just a few miles west of his family’s three-story brownstone.
Goldstein, wearing a baggy and rumpled blue prison jumpsuit, stood Wednesday with his attorney, Thomas Royce, and begged Judge James Alesia for mercy.
“He got in bed with the devil,” Royce said, as Goldstein rubbed tears from his eyes. “I find it tragic because a good human being makes a dreadful mistake and will be punished and punished.”
“Get me back to my family as soon as possible,” Goldstein said.
Alesia, in front of a courtroom crammed with Goldstein’s wife, relatives and fellow attorneys, gave Goldstein the lightest sentence permitted under strict federal guidelines.
On a winter afternoon two weeks before his trial, prosecutors offered Goldstein a deal: He could plead to a single tax count and serve less than five years, taking as long as 18 months to turn himself in. After serving the time, he might have regained his law license.
Goldstein rejected the offer.
“I don’t believe I broke the law,” Goldstein said in an interview last week in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he awaited sentencing. “(Sims) came to me and said, `I want to buy property,’ and I represented him. My goal was not to sell drugs. My goal was to close the deal. What I did was act as his lawyer.”
He drummed his fingers uneasily. “If I pleaded, every day I was sitting in the camp I’d be eating myself up, thinking, `Why did you do this?’ I think I would have regretted everything about everything.”
Seeing him turn down the plea bargain “was like watching someone drive his car into a wall,” said prosecutor Scott Mendelhoff. “I was sickened at the end of this trial.”
It took a jury three hours to find Goldstein guilty of all charges.
The conviction followed a three-year investigation that resulted in indictments against Goldstein, Sims and 17 others, most of them dealers and drug runners.
The records of the drug organization were kept in tiny, dime store notebooks, where Sims, in crude scrawl, recorded every sale his workers made. During one 16-week period in 1986, they sold 32,272 $10-bags of brown heroin and 20,239 $25-bags, as well as 10,368 $20-bags of cocaine and 9,351 $20-bags of more potent white heroin.
Federal drug enforcement agents, in detailed court documents, estimate that Sims grossed more than $3 million a year.
His organization was a masterpiece of muscle and paranoia.
Those who disobeyed Sims were “violated,” or beaten with a baseball bat. Drughouse worker Jimmy Hudson was hospitalized for two weeks after allowing a young lookout to snort two packets of dope. The bat blow that struck him across his head was “a full windup and swing,” Hudson said.
“People feared him,” said drughouse worker Maurice Harmon, now serving a 30-year sentence in the case. “He never tell you to take a gun and go kill somebody. He take a gun and do it himself.”
In Sims’ bedroom, his photograph was mounted above the words “Rich and Famous.” But neither his wealth nor fame came legally. All told, in his 33 years, Sims reported legitimate earnings of $558 for laboring briefly in a bicycle shop and printing plant.
Family members say they never asked him where his money came from.
“You don’t want to seem like you’re prying,” said his sister, Violet Wilson.
“I don’t see Rufus telling certain things,” said Linda McGrone, a longtime family friend. “If I see Rufus, he don’t say, `I just shot John around the corner, I just sold two (kilos).’ We don’t live like that. It was an average American family.”
Around the time of his 1985 marriage to Ruby Chambers, Sims began trafficking in large quantities of cocaine and heroin, according to police. By 1989, some two dozen workers labored seven days a week and sometimes 12 hours a day for him, their wages starting at $300 a week.
Sims’ massive, dope-tainted profits flowed from the impoverished West Side to the Loop and suburbs, lining the pockets of a suburban luxury car dealer, an Oak Park construction firm, downtown jewelers and real estate brokers, investigators’ records show. None of them were charged by prosecutors because their transactions were made in amounts of less than $10,000, or reported in accordance with federal guidelines.
At La-Ron Jewelers, 5 S. Wabash Ave., Sims bought a massive 14-karat gold pendant shaped like the grille of a Rolls-Royce.
“He presented himself very well,” said owner Larry Shtulman. “He spoke cultured.”
“We really can’t afford to be suspicious,” said Vernon Smith, sales executive at Northbrook’s Steve Foley Rolls-Royce, where Sims bought a customized Rolls-Royce Corniche. “We can’t make judgments as to where the money came from. I was grateful for the sale of a new Rolls-Royce.”
Sims kept the Rolls in a bunker-like La Grange garage. And it was only behind locked doors that he adorned himself in his jewelry.
He slipped on a $50,000, diamond-encrusted ring that was nearly as big as a doorknob, and draped himself in braids of gold. He adjusted his $10,000 gold and diamond-studded sunglasses. Thrusting out his chest and setting his face in a menacing stare, he posed for his wife while she took snapshots.
But the Rufus Sims who walked into Goldstein’s office for the first time in March of 1987 wore only sweatpants, gym shoes and a T-shirt. He said he wanted to buy a house. He had been referred to Goldstein by a neighborhood friend whose wife had recently purchased a home.
According to Goldstein, Sims said that his father was a wealthy contractor and his family owned farmland in the south. “He told me, in essence, he was a businessman on the West Side-a carwash, a nightclub, a music store. He said, `Between me and my family, we have half a million dollars to invest.’ “
Goldstein said he never suspected Sims of drug dealing, nor did he hesitate when Sims, who is black, said the home he wanted to buy was in Lisle, a predominantly white Du Page County suburb. The property abutted a forest preserve and boasted a backyard pool, workout room and spa.
“I suppose I’m what you’d call a liberal,” Goldstein said.
From the time he began practicing law in 1977, opening a storefront office at 2463 N. Lincoln Ave. with two pals from IIT’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, the Skokie-born attorney displayed a commitment to public service.
“We were very idealistic in trying to bring law to poor and middle-class people,” said former partner Gary Benson.
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“I could have got a job with a big firm, but I decided that’s not what I wanted to do,” Goldstein said. “I wanted to have more of an impact and spend more time with my kids. There was more to life than just a career.”
Serving as a pro bono attorney for a number of community groups, Goldstein made the newspaper in 1981 for successfully fighting the retaliatory eviction of two Rogers Park apartment dwellers who had complained to city inspectors about their building. He waged that three-year-long legal battle for free.
Goldstein’s law partnership broke up over disputes about whether the three young lawyers were pulling equal weight financially. Some of Goldstein’s associates say he was a poor businessman who sometimes drove away wealthy clients by billing aggressively, while pouring hours into the cases of poor and blue-collar clients whose bills he couldn’t collect.
In 1984, Goldstein rented an office downtown, hoping to attract more affluent clients, and eventually joined two other partners. He began volunteering for the Illinois State Bar Association and quickly worked his way up the ranks. In 1991, he served as legislative chief of the association’s matrimonial law section and lobbied legislators and testified in Springfield before the General Assembly.
As he achieved a higher profile, his circle of acquaintances grew to include some of the city’s top attorneys, including corporate lawyer John Schmidt, a top fundraiser for Mayor Richard Daley.
“My first thought was it was a case of mistaken identity,” said Schmidt, whom Goldstein phoned when he learned he was going to be indicted. “When it turned out they had the right Rich Goldstein, I thought it had to be a matter of time before they get a sense of him and come to understand him and he is cleared.”
Goldstein said it was not his business to ask for details on Sims’ finances: “You come to me for a divorce and we have a 20-page questionnaire. I want to know where you work and how much money you have in what accounts . . . But in a real estate deal, if I find out those kinds of things from a client, it’s by small talk.”
Goldstein said he and Sims didn’t share much small talk.
“Rufus had a way of coming into my office whenever he wanted to. He’d make an appointment and not show up and then two hours later he’d be there and frankly that drove me crazy,” Goldstein said. “He was a difficult client.”
But others did raise questions about Goldstein’s new client.
Once, when Sims dropped off $10,000 in small bills, secretary Susan Golab asked Goldstein what Sims did for a living.
“Rich told me that Rufus was a waiter,” Golab testified to the grand jury.
When real estate agent Ted Wordlaw asked the same question, Goldstein said, “Sometimes you don’t discuss things over the phone.”
Because he couldn’t close real estate deals with gym bags full of cash, Sims was forced to “smurf”-to get friends and relatives to take his drug-derived money to banks and currency exchanges, where they would purchase cashier’s checks and money orders in amounts under $10,000, thus avoiding federal currency reporting requirements.
For the Lisle home transaction, Sims’ mother and a dozen smurfs obtained 29 cashier’s checks totalling $195,000 from 15 banks or exchanges. Goldstein deposited all the checks into an escrow account, misstating his Social Security number on bank records, then cut four new checks for the closing.
At the closing, Goldstein titled the property to a secret land trust, but contrary to normal practice, never filed records assigning a beneficiary to the trust. The result was a paper trail that never led to the actual property buyer. There were no links to Sims.
In addition, prosecutors say, Goldstein deliberately camouflaged his dealings with Sims. Goldstein, a copious notetaker, produced notes of only several of the many meetings he had with Sims and Sims’ family members, prosecutors say. He testified that he couldn’t locate time slips that document the work he’d done for Sims.
And during the trial, Judge Alesia found, Goldstein perjured himself.
“There’s really two Richard Goldsteins,” Alesia concluded Wednesday. “A public Richard Goldstein everybody respected and everybody loved and a private Richard Goldstein who got involved in the drug conspiracy.”
From his prison cell, Goldstein writes long daily letters to his wife and reads tales of false accusation by Kafka and Scott Turow.
On a recent visiting day, he stood out uncomfortably among the throng of hardened convicts. He sometimes eats specially prepared kosher meals with three other Jewish inmates.
His fellow convicts call him “G.”
“G. looks so square,” said Shawn Baker, a Sims aide who was sentenced to 15 years. “When he first came in here, I couldn’t even believe it. But now we talk every day. We play cards together. He’s shattered. He’s like a lot of us that got caught up in this here. They just scooped up everybody who had any dealings with the man.”
Said Maurice Harmon, a Sims aide who is serving a 30-year term: “He in the same predicament we in now.”