Mindhunter (7 page)

During the fall of 1970, I met a guy at the club named Frank Haines, who turned out to be an FBI agent. He ran a one-man resident agency in Clovis. We got friendly while working out together. It turned out he had heard about me through the retired base commander and started trying to interest me in applying to the Bureau. Frankly, I’d never given a single serious thought to law enforcement. I was planning a career in industrial psychology once I finished my degree. Working for a large company, dealing with such issues as personnel matters, employee assis tance, and stress management, seemed to offer a solid, pre dictable future. The only direct contact I’d had with the FBI up until then was one time back in Montana when a trunk I’d shipped home had been stolen. One of the local field agents interviewed me, thinking I might have set up the crime to collect on the insurance. But nothing came of it, and if that was the kind of cases the FBI handled, there didn’t seem to me to be much to the job.

But Frank was persistent in thinking I would make a good special agent and kept encouraging me. He invited me to his house for dinner several times, introduced me to his wife and son, showed me both his gun and his paycheck stub, neither of which I could match. I had to admit, next to my shabby lifestyle, Frank was living like a king. So I decided to take a crack at it.

Frank stayed in New Mexico, and years later, our paths would cross when I came out to testify in the trial for a homicide he’d worked in which a woman was brutally killed and her body burned to avoid detection. But in the fall of 1970, this kind of action was far from my mind.

Frank sent my application to the field office in Albuquerque. They gave me the standard law test for nonlawyers. Despite my physical conditioning and muscular build, my 220 pounds was 25 over the FBI limit for my six-foot-two-inch height. The
only
one in the Bureau who could exceed the weight standards was the legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, himself. I spent two weeks on nothing but Knox gelatin and hard-boiled eggs to get down to the weight. It also took three haircuts before I was deemed presentable for an ID photo.

But finally, in November, I was offered a probationary appointment, at an initial salary of $10,869. Finally, I was getting out of my depressing, windowless basement room. I wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.

Betting on Raindrops

Many apply, few are chosen.

That was the message continually drummed into us as new recruits. Nearly everyone interested in a career in law enforcement aspired to become a special agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, but only the very best could hope to have that opportunity. A long, proud heritage went all the way back to 1924 when an obscure government lawyer named John Edgar Hoover took over a corrupt, underfunded, and badly managed agency. And the same Mr. Hoover—by the time I joined, seventy-five years of age—still presided over the revered organization it had become, ruling as always with a square jaw and an iron fist. So we’d better not let the Bureau down.

A telegram from the director instructed me to report to Room 625 in the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington at 9 a.m. on December 14, 1970, to begin the fourteen weeks of training that would transform me from an ordinary citizen into a special agent of the FBI. Before this I went home to Long Island, where my dad was so proud, he flew the American flag in front of the house. With what I’d been doing the last several years, I didn’t have any dress-up civilian clothes, so my dad bought me three "regulation" dark suits—a blue, a black, and a brown—white shirts, and two pairs of wing tips, one black and one brown. Then he drove me down to Washing ton to make sure I’d be on time for my first day of work.

It didn’t take long to become inculcated with FBI ritual and lore. The special agent leading our induction ceremony told us to take out our gold badges and stare at them as we recited the oath of office. We all spoke in unison, staring at the blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice while solemnly swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. "Bring it closer! Closer!" the special agent ordered, until we were all staring at these badges cross-eyed.

My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In 1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women. That wouldn’t really open up until after Hoover’s long tenure, and even from beyond the grave he continued to exert a ghostly and powerful influence. Most of the men were between twenty-nine and thirty-five, so at twenty-five, I was one of the youngest.

We were indoctrinated to be on the lookout for Soviet agents, who would try to compromise us and get our secrets. These agents could be anywhere. We were told particularly to beware of women! The brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the building who had actually asked me out to dinner. I was afraid it was a setup and I was being tested.

The FBI Academy on the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, wasn’t fully built and operational yet, so we took our firearms and physical training there and the classroom work in the Old Post Office Building in Washington.

One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, and attempting merely to stop a subject or bring him down is too risky. You do not take any unnecessary chances for yourself or a potential victim.

We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law, fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement. One of the units I remember best, though, came fairly early in the course of study. We all re ferred to it as "dirty-words training."

"Doors closed?" the instructor asked. He then handed each of us a list. "I want you to study these words." The list, as I recall, contained such gems of Anglo-Saxon usage as
shit, fuck, cunnilingus, fellatio, cunt,
and
dickhead.
What we were supposed to do was commit these words to memory so that if they ever came up in field usage—such as during the interrogation of a suspect—we’d know what to do. And what we were supposed to do was to make sure any case report containing any of these words was given to the office’s "obscene steno"—I’m not kidding!—rather than the regular secretary. The obscene steno would traditionally be an older, more mature and seasoned woman, better able to handle the shock of seeing these words and phrases. Remember, this was all men in those days, and in 1970 the nation al sensibility was somewhat different from what it is today, at least within Hoover’s FBI. We were actually given a spelling test on these words, after which the papers were collected and—I presume—graded before being burned in the metal trash can.

Despite this kind of silliness, we were all idealistic about fighting crime, and we all thought we could make a difference. About halfway through new-agent training, I was called in to the office of the assistant director for training, Joe Casper, one of Hoover’s trusted lieutenants. People in the Bureau called him the Friendly Ghost, but the nickname was definitely used ironically rather than affectionate ly. Casper told me I was doing well in most areas, but that I was way below average in "Bureau communications," the methodology and nomenclature through which the diverse elements of the organiza tion communicate with each other.

"Well, sir, I want to be the best," I responded. Guys this eager were described as having blue flames coming out of their asses. This could help you get ahead, but also made you a marked man. If a blue-flamer succeeded, he was headed for the top of the world. But if he screwed up, the crash and burn would be very long and very public.

Casper may have been tough but he was nobody’s fool, and he’d seen many a blue-flamer in his time. "You want to be the best? Here!" whereupon he threw the entire manual of terms at me and told me to have them all memorized by the time I got back from the Christmas break.

Chuck Lundsford, one of our class’s two Academy counselors, got the word on what had happened and came over to me. "What did you say when you went in there?" he asked me. I told him. Chuck just rolled his eyes. We both knew I had my work cut out for me.

I went home to my parents’ house for the holidays. While the rest of the family was making merry, I had my nose buried deep in the manual of communications. It wasn’t much of a vacation.

When I got back to Washington in early January, still sweating out the consequences of my blue-flame performance, I had to take a written test of what I’d learned. I can’t express how relieved I was when our other counselor, Charlie Price, told me I’d scored a 99 percent. "You actually scored a hundred," Charlie confided to me, "but Mr. Hoover says no one’s perfect."

About halfway through the fourteen-week program we were each asked our preference for a first field-office assignment. Most of the FBI was dispersed among fifty-nine field offices around the country. I sensed there must be some games manship in the choosing—a giant chess match between the new recruits and headquar ters—and as always, I tried to think like the other side. I was from New York and had no particular interest in going back there. I figured L.A., San Francisco, Miami, possibly Seattle and San Diego, would be the most sought-after postings. So if I selected a second-tier city, I’d be much more likely to get my first choice.

I chose Atlanta. I got Detroit.

Upon graduation, we were all given permanent credentials, a Smith & Wesson Model 10 six-shot .38 revolver, six bullets, and instructions to get out of town as fast as possible. Headquarters was always terrified that the raw new agents would get in trouble in Washington, right under Mr. Hoover’s nose, which would reflect badly on everyone.

The other item I was given was a booklet entitled "Survival Guide to Detroit." The city was among the most racially polarized in the country, still reeling from the repercus sions of the 1967 riots, and could claim the title of the nation’s crime capital, with more than eight hundred murders a year. In fact, we had a gruesome pool in the office, betting on exactly how many homicides would be chalked up by year’s end. Like most new agents, I started out idealistic and energetic, but soon realized what we were up against. I had spent four years in the Air Force, but the closest to combat I’d been was in a bed in the base hospital next to wounded Vietnam vets when I had my nose operated on for football and boxing injuries. So until I got to Detroit, I’d never been in the position of being the enemy. The FBI was hated in many quarters; they’d infiltrat ed college campuses and had set up networks of urban informers. With our somber black cars, we were marked men. In many neighbor hoods, people threw rocks at us. Their German shepherds and Dobermans didn’t like us much, either. We were told not to find ourselves in some sections of the city without extremely heavy backup and firepow er.

Local police were angry at us, too. They accused the Bureau of "scooping" cases, putting out press releases before a case was complete, then adding police-solved crimes to the FBI’s own clearance-rate stats. Ironically, around the time of my rookie year, 1971, about a thousand new agents were hired, and the bulk of our practical street training came not from the Bureau but from local cops who took us under their protec tive wings. Much of the success of my generation of special agents unquestionably is attributable to the professionalism and generosity of police officers all over the United States.

Bank robberies were particularly prevalent. On Fridays, when the banks stocked up with cash to handle paydays, we averaged two or three armed robberies, sometimes as many as five. Until bullet-resistant glass became commonplace in Detroit banks, the murder and wounding of tellers was appalling. We had a case captured on a bank surveillance camera in which a manager was shot and killed at his desk, execution style, while a terrified couple sitting across from him, applying for a loan, looked on helplessly. The robber was unhappy that the manager couldn’t open the timed vault. And it wasn’t just bank officials with access to tens of thousands of dollars in cash. In certain neighborhoods, workers at places like McDonald’s were equally at risk.

I was assigned to the Reactive Crimes Unit, which meant, in effect, reacting to crimes that had already happened, bank robbery or extortion, for example. Within that unit, I worked with the UFAP Squad: Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution. This turned out to be excellent experience because this squad always saw a lot of action. In addition to the office-wide yearly homicide pool, we ran a contest in the unit to see who could make the most arrests in a single day. It was just like the competitions car dealers run for who can make the most sales in a given time.

One of our busiest lines of work in those days was what was referred to as the 42 Classification: military deserters. Vietnam had ripped the country in two, and once most of these guys went absent from the service, they did not want in the worst way to go back. We had more assaults against law officers registered with 42 Classifications than with any other type of fugitive.

My first encounter with a UFAP came when I’d tracked an Army deserter to the service garage where he worked. I identify myself and think he’s going to come along quietly. Then suddenly, he pulls this filed-down, makeshift knife with a black-tape handle on me. I pull back, just narrowly avoiding getting stabbed. I lunge at him, throw him up against the glass garage door, then force him down on the ground with a knee on his back and my gun up to his head. Meanwhile, the manager is raising hell with me for taking away a good worker.
What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Was this really the career I’d envisioned? Was it worth continually risking my hide to bring in this kind of lowlife? Industrial psychology was looking awfully good.