Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (27 page)

Chapter 40

The first thing that John did when Michael arrived in Norfolk was give him a $100 bill. “This is your allowance,” John said. “One hundred bucks a week.” Then John took Michael outside and pointed to a small truck. “This is my truck, but it’s also yours. You can use it any time you want.”

There were few rules in John’s house. Michael was responsible for keeping the house dean. That was all. Anything else was okay. Within a few days, Michael had located a marijuana connection and fallen back into the habit of being stoned constantly. At first, his father didn’t mind.

“My dad was a moderate to high pot smoker back then, and he’d tell me, ‘Hey Michael, here’s a couple hundred bucks. Go buy me a quarter pound of Hawaiian’ and I’d go do it and I’d break it up and take the seeds out of it, so he wouldn’t have to, and I’d put it in this little stash box that he had on his desk. He’d dip his pipe in there and he really liked that. We had a unique relationship for a father and son.”

But as the summer continued, John tired of Michael’s constant smoking. He had plans for his son, and Michael couldn’t do the things that John wanted if he were stoned all the time.

“When Michael joined me in Norfolk, he was addicted to marijuana,” John recalled, “and the beautiful thing about pot, of course, is that it makes you not care about anything. I knew that his mother had sent him to a work farm of some sort in Maine where he had to shovel cow shit, and that was exactly what I’d expected from her. Barbara was always trying to get someone else to solve her problems. It might have worked for a while, but I knew the kid wasn’t going to stop until he wanted to. So I didn’t badger him or hassle him about it at first. I let him get stoned all the time. And then one day, I went up to his bedroom because I wanted him to do some painting on the boat, and he is zoned out, totally zoned out. His eyes were red and it looked like he was ready to pass out, and I said to him, ‘Fuck Michael, why am I even talking to you? You ain’t even here! I don’t need this,’ and I left the room.

“Later, he told me that my reaction had really scared him because I hadn’t been beating him to death with lectures. He knew that he had really disappointed me and pissed me off, and that upset him. He told me that he was going to stop smoking pot, which, of course, was just a ridiculous statement.

“I told him, ‘Look, Michael, there is nothing wrong with smoking marijuana. Nothing. There is nothing wrong with alcohol There is nothing wrong with riding a Ferris wheel, but goddamn it, if you do it twenty-four hours a day, you are fucked up! If you go overboard and get addicted to something, anything, then it stops being fun and takes control of your life. What you kids don’t understand is the joy of moderation. ‘

“I explained to him that something is only fun if you do it in moderation, and it seemed to make sense to him.”

John suggested that Michael cut down on his marijuana use gradually. If he did, Michael could begin helping John on various insurance investigations at Wackenhut.

Michael got excited. Working with his dad as a private eye was something that he really wanted to do. He promised to try, and John sent him to take the same private investigator courses that Philip Prince had sent John to.

A number of changes occurred at Wackenhut that fall before Michael finished his training and turned eighteen, the minimum age required by Virginia to obtain a private investigator’s license. Prince had built up an impressive investigative unit by then and successfully weaned the office from the nickel-and-dime divorce cases. But Prince was dissatisfied with his salary. It hadn’t grown as fast as the office’s case load, nor had he received a promotion. He resigned to start his own private detective agency, which he called Confidential Reports.

John figured Wackenhut would tap him for Prince’s job, but instead the company transferred Michael Bell from its Richmond office and put him in charge of investigations. John was outraged, with good reason. Michael Bell did not bend his ethics to meet John Walker’s standards.

“I didn’t care for his methods,” Bell recalled. “I told him, ‘John, not everyone is guilty. When an insurance company hires us, it wants us to find out the truth,’ but John thought everyone was guilty and he kept dreaming up all these scams to prove it.”

John suddenly found himself being constantly reeled in and second-guessed on the few cases that Bell assigned to him. Even when John pulled off a good scam, his new boss was critical.

“What if a person with a legitimate injury gets hurt during one of your scams?” Bell asked. “You know someone might try to pick up groceries from a cart and actually hurt themselves. You’re going to open us up to a lawsuit!”

John ignored Bell as much as possible, but Bell didn’t let up. One afternoon, Bell called John into his office. An attorney had called and complained that John had offered to lie on the witness stand in order to win an insurance case. John denied the charge, but Bell didn’t believe him. John left Wackenhut that afternoon and drove to Phil Prince’s house.

“How about a job?” John asked.

Philip Prince knew that no one in Norfolk had as good equipment as John did. They quickly struck a deal and became partners in October 1980.

The two men opened an office in the Kempsville Professional Building, only a few miles from where Art and Rita lived and where Walker
Enterprise
s had been located.

Because John owned most of the physical assets – guns, video equipment, electronic bugging devices, and his surveillance van – he was named corporate president. Confidential Reports had a meager beginning. During the first two months of 1981, it handled only fifteen cases, the biggest one paying $348. In all, Prince and John billed $1,341.95.

Even though both men received military pensions, their case load was barely enough to pay office expenses, so John agreed not to draw a salary. Instead, Prince would just keep tabs on how much John was owed, and when the company got into better financial shape, John could collect his back pay.

There was only one problem with the arrangement.

John needed some way to account for the extra money that he made as a spy. So he told Prince that he was forming his own company on the side for tax reasons. It was incorporated January 30, 1981, with John listed as president and Arthur as secretary-treasurer.

Technically, the company specialized in helping companies guard against industrial espionage, but it was really set up as a way for John to conceal his spy money. His cockiness was reflected in the company’s name: Counter-Spy.

“I didn’t feel the FBI was ever going to catch me at this point. That’s why I called the company Counter-Spy, rather than making it one word. I thought it was rather funny,” John told me. “Here I was advertising the fact that I was a spy, and that is what I was using this business for – laundering my spy money.”

Invoices from Counter-Spy show that John billed a number of fictional and actual persons for “technical countermeasures.” Nearly all of the billings were fake.

Meanwhile, business at Confidential Reports picked up.

Prince, refined and smooth, spent his time sweet-talking clients and charming local attorneys and insurance company representatives. John stayed behind the scenes and did most of the actual investigations.

In May, Prince was able to convince three national insurance companies to hire Confidential Reports to perform investigations of suspected fraud. None of the cases amounted to much individually, but in June, one of these insurance companies hired Prince and John to investigate ten suspected cases of insurance fraud, and in July, Confidential Reports collected $5,390.68 from its clients.

Soon another major insurance company began sending Confidential Reports work.

Word was getting around the insurance industry – Confidential Reports got results. John and his roughshod tactics were the reason. And, as he had promised, John always included Michael as his willing apprentice.

Michael had always been small for his age, and when he filed an application with the Virginia Department of Commerce for a private investigator’s license, he could easily have passed for a boy much younger than eighteen. He had a baby face, weighed only 120 pounds, and stood only five feet, five inches tall.

But Michael was a tremendous private investigator because he wasn’t afraid of anything.

Because of his size, Michael could perform surveillance jobs that his father couldn’t. Once Confidential Reports was hired to watch a suspect, but each time John drove to the man’s neighborhood, he had to abort the surveillance because the suspect lived in an area with a neighborhood watch program, and whenever John parked near the suspect’s house, a concerned neighbor called the police.

Frustrated, John put Michael on the job. The next morning, Michael donned a pair of short pants and a tee-shirt and rode his bike into the neighborhood. He stopped near the suspect’s house and sat on the curb “fixing” his bike. No one paid any attention.

The next day, Michael tried a bolder approach by knocking on the door of the suspect’s house and offering to mow his lawn for a ridiculously low price. While Michael was mowing the grass, the suspect came outside with two glasses of lemonade. He and Michael began talking, and the novice investigator soon discovered enough for his father to set up a successful scam.

Michael began dreaming up his own schemes, following his dad’s guidance.

“I was patterning my life after his,” Michael recalled. “I wanted to be just as good as he was.”

John wanted Michael to finish high school and had intended to enroll him in Frederick Military Academy in Norfolk when he first arrived, but after John read his son’s high school transcript, he knew the military academy wouldn’t accept the teenager. He telephoned officials at Ryan Upper School, one of the better nonmilitary private schools in Norfolk, and convinced them to give Michael a chance despite his dismal performance in the Skowhegan school system.

Classes were difficult for Michael. He wasn’t as well prepared academically as most students. But he was smart enough to get a passing grade, and what he lacked in academic skills, he made up for socially.

By the end of his first year, the class voted Michael “Mr. Personality.” Like his father, Michael seemed to have a talent for getting people to do what he wanted. The fact that he was almost two years older than most of his classmates helped. Michael was the only person in the junior class old enough to purchase beer legally, and that won him friends.

Michael’s home life also impressed his classmates because he seemed to be able to do what he wanted and could throw a party whenever he wished.

Michael’s parties soon became legendary at school. No one wanted to miss the free food, beer, and bedrooms that Michael made available. The parties also were “safe,” because Michael always hired bouncers. He also bragged that because his father was a private eye with contacts at the police department, no one had to worry about being busted.

The marijuana growing in ceramic pots in Michael’s room only added to his classmates’ awe.

An incident during the summer of 1981 showed how carefree life with Father could be. Michael was cleaning his dad’s houseboat (he had traded in
The Dirty Old Man
for a houseboat after the divorce) when John arrived home with two women he had met at a local bar. Both women were in their thirties, and John had promised them a cruise.

Once underway, the two women paired off with John and Michael. Everyone began drinking heavily and after an hour of drifting under the hot sun, one woman announced she was going swimming. She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.

John stripped and jumped in too, carefully holding his can of beer up over his head in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it from going under water. The woman with Michael giggled and began peeling off her clothing.

Everyone was naked and in the water except for Michael, and when they yelled at him to join them, he refused.

“I had a hard-on and didn’t want them to see me,” Michael recalled. “I was only eighteen and I was embarrassed. Of course, they all knew what was going on. I was standing on the boat like an idiot and everyone was laughing at me, so I thought. ‘What the hell?’ and I went to the other side of the boat and pulled down my pants and lowered myself off the side into the water. But then I thought, ‘Hey, this really sucks,’ so I climbed out of the water really quick, and I was drying off with this towel when the woman I’d been talking to climbs into the boat and comes up to me and rips off my towel.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ because I was standing there naked, and she grabbed me and starts to kiss me and I pushed her away. ‘I can’t fuck you in front of my dad,’ I said, and everyone, including my father, just started roaring.”

The woman persisted, but Michael just couldn’t do it with his father watching.

Despite their closeness, Michael still knew that his father was keeping a secret from him. John made sure of it. He would drop hints periodically, usually when they were in some bar – Bob’s Runway, for instance.

“Michael, you’re getting pretty old,” John said once.

“Yeah, so what?”

“You’re almost old enough for me to tell you how I make my extra money.”

“Okay, how?”

“Later. Maybe in a little while I’ll tell you.” John was dearer when he spoke to Michael about what he had planned for his son.

From the moment Michael moved in, John began pestering him about the Navy, constantly talking about how great the service was. In the summer of 1981, before Michael’s final year in high school, John pushed even harder. He brought Michael brochures about various Navy programs and even had recruiters telephone Michael at home and chat with him.

“Michael, you’ve got to do something with your life after school,” John said one evening while they were grilling hamburgers in the backyard.

“I’m going to be a private investigator with you,” Michael replied.

“No way,” John answered. “Look, Michael, there is no retirement program for PIs, no nothing. Being a PI is a career that someone starts after they retire.”