Foxgrover, Judge Paul-Profile-Who is (IPSN 97-9-22)

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Who is Judge Paul Foxgrover

IPSN Sept. 22, 1997

For years Associate Judge Paul Foxgrover of the Markham Courthouse was a heavyweight in the 19th Ward Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan and Assessor Thomas Hynes.
He was a “go along” guy who figured that his powerhouse political connections placed him so far above the petty criminals that appeared before him in his courtroom, that nothing, short of an act of God, could touch him.
That is, until the July 1991 grand jury was presented with evidence that the good judge scammed an estimated $50,000 in court-imposed fines which he deposited in two separate accounts for himself and a niece at the Mount Greenwood Bank. Foxgrover, who was appointed to the bench in 1984, was charged with 107 separate counts of theft, perjury, forgery, official misconduct, and obstruction of justice.

Foxgrover’s crime was the typical kind of nickel-and-dime infamy that sent away so many Cook County Circuit Court judges during the Operation Greylord corruptions scandals of the mid-1980s. In one of many instances that underscored the nature of the kind of petty but insidious graft that nearly toppled the justice system in Cook County during those troubling years, Judge Foxgrover obtained for his own use, a $250 money order paid as restitution to the Circuit Court by a criminal defendant, to cover fines and court costs. He always demanded from the defendants that they pay their fines with money orders. He endorsed 35 checks from defendants covering an 18-month period from January 1990 until July 1991, shortly before his arrest.

The amount of the individual money orders seem trifling by anyone’s standards of what constitutes a criminal fraud, but Foxgrover must have thought himself to be above the law, or at the very least just smart enough to think he could get away with it.

“Corruption in Chicago is a mindset,” author Rob Warden told the Illinois Police & Sheriff’s News when this story first broke in 1991. “You have guys who spend thousands of dollars on their formal educations, then devote years of legal work to becoming judges, then risk it all by accepting bribes that are sometimes so petty that the typical traffic cop would be insulted if it was offered to him.”

In May 1991, Foxgrover, perhaps sensing that the game was finally up, attempted to cover his paper trail - and the missing monies - by planting a $2,000 money order in the file of the office of the Clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court as a substitute for a money order he had pilfered in the same amount three months earlier. His slippery attempt to substitute money orders led to an indictment charging him with obstruction of justice.
The judge was suspended from his post but he continued to draw his $75,000-a-year salary while the case threaded through the Circuit Court. He did not submit his resignation until June 17, 1992. Less than a month later, on July 14, 1992, Foxgrover was sentenced to six years in a state prison and assessed a $25,934 fine after pleading guilty to theft, official misconduct, and forgery. The remaining charges against Foxgrover were dropped by the State’s Attorney’s office.

(See the Larry Foley story.)

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