Authors: Mark Olshaker John Douglas
Going after deserters often brought with it emotional turmoil as well as creating resentment between the military and the FBI. Sometimes we’d follow up on an arrest warrant, locate the guy, and grab him right on the street. Infuriated, he would stop us, rap with his knuckles on an artificial leg, and tell us he’d gotten a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for that in Nam. What was happening over and over was that deserters who either returned voluntarily or were picked up by the Army itself were routinely sent over to Vietnam as punishment. Many of these guys subsequently distinguished themselves in combat, but the military hadn’t told us anything. So as far as we knew, they were still AWOL. This aggra vated the hell out of us.
Worse yet was when we’d go to a deserter’s listed residence and be told by tearful and rightfully enraged wives or parents that the subject had died a hero’s death. We’d be chasing down dead men, killed in action, and the military never got around to letting us know.
Regardless of the profession you’re in, when you get out into the field, you start realizing all the big and little things they never taught you in school or training. For one, what do you do with your gun in various situations, such as while using a public men’s room stall? Do you leave it on your belt down on the floor? Do you try to hang it up on the stall door? For a while I tried holding it in my lap, but that made me very nervous. It’s the kind of thing each of us faces, but not the kind of thing you feel comfortable discussing with your more experienced colleagues. By the time I’d been on the job a month, it became a problem.
When I moved to Detroit, I’d bought another Volkswagen Beetle, the same kind of car, ironically, that was becoming the serial killer vehicle of choice. Ted Bundy had one and it was one of the ways he was ultimately identified. Anyway, I’d stopped in a local shopping center to go into a men’s store to buy a suit. Knowing I’m going to be trying on clothes, I figure I’d better leave my gun someplace safe. So I stick it in the glove compartment and head into the store.
Now, the VW Beetle had a couple of interesting characteristics. Since it was a rear-engine car, the spare tire was stored in the trunk in front. Since it was practically ubiquitous in those days—not to mention easy to break into—spare tires were an extremely common theft item. After all, just about everyone needed one. And last but not least, the trunk was opened through a switch in the glove compartment.
I’m sure you can guess the rest. I come out to the car and find the window broken. As I reconstruct this highly sophisticated crime, the tire thief breaks into the car, goes in the glove compartment to open the trunk for the tire, but sees there a much greater prize. I deduce this because my gun is gone but the tire’s still there.
"Oh, shit!" I’m saying to myself. "I’ve been on the job less than thirty days and I’m already supplying weapons to the enemy!" And I know that losing your gun or your credentials means an instant letter of censure. So I go to my squad supervisor, Bob Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s a big guy, a real father figure. He dresses dapper and is something of a living legend in the Bureau. He knows my ass is on the line and how bad I feel. The gun loss has to be reported to the Director’s Office, which is just great since that’ll be the first field entry in my personnel file. He says we’ve got to come up with something really creative, revolving around how I’m so concerned with maintaining the public peace that I didn’t want to take the chance of alarming anyone in the store if they suddenly saw a gun and thought they were being robbed. Fitzpatrick reassures me that since I’m not up for promotion for a couple of years, the letter of censure shouldn’t hurt me as long as I keep my nose clean from now on.
So that’s what I tried to do, though that gun continued to haunt me for a long time. The Smith & Wesson Model 10 I turned in to the Quantico armory almost twenty-five years later when I retired from the Bureau was actually the replacement of my original weapon. Thank God, that first gun never turned up in a crime. In fact, it essentially disappeared.
I lived with two other single agents, Bob McGonigel and Jack Kunst, in a furnished town house in Taylor, Michigan, a southern suburb of Detroit. We were great friends and Bob would later be best man at my wedding. He was also a maniac. He would wear crushed-velvet suits and lavender shirts, even during inspections. He seemed to be the only one in the entire FBI who wasn’t afraid of Hoover. Later, Bob went into undercover work where he wouldn’t have to wear a suit at all.
He had started out in the Bureau as a clerk, taking the "inside route" to become a special agent. Some of the best people in the FBI began as clerks, including several I selected for the Investigative Support Unit. But in certain circles, former clerks were resented, as if they’d had special preference to become agents.
Bob was the greatest I have ever known at "pretext calls." This was a proactive technique we developed to catch offenders, partic ularly useful when the element of surprise was paramount.
Bob was an artist with accents. If the suspect was in the mob, he’d do an Italian accent. For the Black Pan thers, he could pass as a street dude. He also had a Nation of Islam persona, an Irish brogue, immigrant Jew, Grosse Point WASP. Not only did he have the voices down cold, he would alter the vocabu lary and diction to suit the character. Bob was so good at this that he once called Joe Del Campo—another agent you’ll read about in the next chapter—and convinced Joe he was a black militant who wanted to turn FBI informant. In those days, there was a lot of pressure to develop inner-city sources. Bob sets up a meeting with Joe, who thinks he’s onto something big. No one shows up for Joe’s meeting, and the next day in the office he’s really pissed off when Bob greets him with the pretext voice!
Arresting the bad guys was one thing, but soon I found myself becoming interested in the thought processes that went into the crime. Whenever I would arrest someone, I’d ask him ques tions, such as why he chose one bank over another or what made him select this particular victim. We all knew that robbers preferred to hit banks on Friday after noons because that was when the most money would be on the premises. But beyond that, I wanted to know what decisions went into the planning and execution of the hit?
I must not have seemed very intimidating. Just as they had in school, people felt comfortable opening up to me. The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to under stand that the successful criminals were good profilers. They each had a carefully thought through and well-researched profile of the type of bank they preferred. Some liked banks near major thoroughfares or interstates so that getaways would be easier and they could be many miles away before a pursuit could be orga nized. Some liked small, isolated branches, such as the tempo rary ones set up in trailers. Many would case a bank ahead of time to get the layout down, to find out how many people worked there and how many customers could be expected in the lobby at any given time. Sometimes they would keep visiting bank branches until they found one where no males worked, and that would become the target. Buildings with no windows out to the street were best, since no one on the outside could witness the robbery in progress and witnesses on the inside would be unable to identify the getaway car. The best practitioners had come to the conclu sion that a holdup note was better than a public announcement, waving a gun, and they’d always remember to take the note back before they left so as not to leave evidence. The best getaway car was a stolen one, and the best scenario of all was to have the car parked ahead of time so that it isn’t noticed pulling up. You walk up to the bank, then drive away after the job. A robber who’d been particularly successful at a particular bank might watch it for a while, and if conditions remained the same, he’d hit the same one again within a couple of months.
Of all public facilities, banks are about the best set up to deal with robbery. Yet I was continually amazed when I did follow-up investigations at how many would have neglected to load film in the surveillance cameras, how many had set off a silent alarm accidentally and then forgotten to reset it, or tripped it so often that the police would respond slowly because they figured it was just another accident. This was like hanging out a Rob Me! sign to a sophisticated criminal.
But if you started profiling the cases—I hadn’t attached this term to the process yet—you could begin seeing patterns. And once you began seeing patterns, you could start taking proactive measures to catch the bad guys. For example, if you started to see that a rash of bank robberies all seemed to fit together, and if you’d talked to enough perpetrators to understand what it was in each of these jobs that appealed to them, you could obviously and heavily fortify all the bank offices that met the criteria except for one. This one, of course, would be under constant police and/or FBI surveillance with plainclothes details inside. In effect, you could force the robber to select the bank of your choosing and be ready for him when he did. When this kind of proactive tactic was employed, bank- robbery clearance rates went way up.
Whatever we did in those days, we did under the looming presence of J. Edgar Hoover, just as our predecessors had since 1924. In this age of musical-chairs appointments and trial by public opinion, it’s difficult to convey the degree of power and control Hoover exercised, not only over the FBI, but government leaders, the media, and the public at large. If you wanted to write a book or a script about the Bureau, such as Don Whitehead’s huge 1950s best-seller
The FBI Story,
or the popular James Stewart movie based on it, or produce a TV series, such as Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s
The FBI
of the 1960s, you had to have Mr. Hoover’s personal approval and blessing. Likewise, if you were a high government official, you would always have that nagging fear that the director "had something" on you, particularly if he called in friendly tones to let you know the FBI had "uncovered" a nasty rumor that he would do everything he could to make sure never became damagingly public.
Nowhere was Mr. Hoover’s personal mystique stronger than in the FBI branch offices and among the Bureau’s management. It was an accepted fact that the FBI held the prestige and admiration it did because of him. He had almost single-handedly built the agency into what it was, and he was tireless in his fights for budget increases and pay raises. He was both revered and feared, and if you didn’t think much of him, you kept it to yourself. Discipline was fierce, and branch inspections were bloodbaths. If the inspectors didn’t find enough things that needed improvement, Hoover might suspect they weren’t doing their jobs exhaustively enough, which meant they would require a certain number of letters of censure from each inspection, whether the conditions warranted them or not. It was like a quota for issuing traffic tickets. It got so bad that special agents in charge, known as SACs, would find sacrificial lambs who weren’t immediately up for promotion so that letters of censure wouldn’t hurt their careers.
One time, in a story that no longer has a very humorous ring after the horrific 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, a bomb threat to the FBI office was called in after an inspection. The call was traced to a phone booth just outside the federal building downtown where the field office was located. Authorities from headquarters came in and removed the entire phone booth and wanted to compare the fingerprints on the coins in the phone box with those of all 350 individuals in the office. Fortunately for all of us, reason prevailed and the examination never took place. But that was an example of the tension Mr. Hoover’s policies could cause.
There were standard operating procedures for everything. Though I never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Hoover in a one-on-one setting, I did (and still do) have a personally autographed photo of him in my office. There was even a stan dard procedure for getting such a photo as a young agent. The SAC would tell you to have his secretary write a kiss-ass letter for you, elaborating on how proud you were to be an FBI special agent and how much you admired Mr. Hoover. If you’d written your letter properly, you’d receive a photo with best wishes to you as a sign for all to see of your personal connection to the leader.
Certain other procedures, we never knew for sure where they came from, whether they were Hoover’s personal directives or merely an overzealous interpretation of the director’s wishes. Everyone in the office was expected to put in overtime, and everyone was supposed to be above the office average. I’m sure you see the dilemma. Month by month, like some crazy pyramid scheme, the hours would keep growing. Agents who came into the Bureau with the highest morals and character would be forced to learn to inflate their time sheets. There was to be no smoking or coffee drinking in the office. And like a force of door-to-door salesmen, agents were discouraged from hanging around the office at all, even to use the telephone. Therefore, each man developed his own work habits to get around this. I spent a lot of time going over my cases at a carrel at the public library.
One of the greatest adherents to the Gospel According to Saint Edgar was our SAC, Neil Welch, nicknamed the Grape. Welch was a big guy, about six four, with heavy horn-rim glasses. He was stern and stoic, not at all warm and fuzzy. He enjoyed a distinguished career in the Bureau, going on to head field offices in Philadelphia and New York, among others. There was some talk he would take Hoover’s place when (or should I say, if) the inevitable day finally arrived. In New York, Welch formed a group that was the first to effec tively use the federal RICO conspiracy statutes (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) against organized crime. But back in Detroit, he went by the book.
Naturally and inevitably, Welch and Bob McGonigel would clash, and it happened one Saturday when we were at home. Bob got a call that the Grape wanted to see him immediately, along with our squad supervisor, Bob Fitzpatrick. So McGonigel goes in, and Welch tells him someone’s been using the phone to call New Jersey. It’s against the rules to use the phone for personal business. Actually, what he’d been doing could have been interpreted either way, but in the FBI, you erred on the side of caution.