During the 1970s and 1980s, Cooley bribed judges, court clerks, and cops to keep his Mob clients, including hit men, bookies, racketeers, and crooked politicians, out of jail.

Through the 1990s, Cooley became the star witness in a series of trials that took down the Chicago Outfit, arguably the most powerful Mafia family in the history of organized crime.

[1] Cooley's account tells how he chased crooked acquittals for the likes of Pat Marcy, originally an Al Capone protégé who had become the Mob's key political operative; Mafia Capo and gambling czar Marco D'Amico; and notorious hit man Harry Aleman.

Cooley's tapes and testimony would be at the center of nine landmark trials that together exposed and then broke the Mob's unprecedented stranglehold on Chicago's government and court system.

[7][8][9] Variety reported that Frank Baldwin is adapting the script based on Robert Cooley's memoirs "about a southside Chicago lawyer who becomes the mob's most trusted attorney until, as a state witness, he brings the organization down.