Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  Wedick had jumped into this figuring it was a low-stakes lark. But now the florist was asking for credit card information, and they were talking about a cab trip from one city to another. He briefly hesitated, but again, as with the suitcases, there was no way to back out. He was the head of Executive Enterprises, so he couldn’t plausibly balk at the expense—though, in his mind, he was anxiously adding up the cost of a showy bouquet and cab fare from Billings to Bozeman. He was hazy on Montana geography but felt certain that the towns were fairly far apart. He could only imagine the FBI accountants analyzing the receipt.

  Eventually they boarded the flight to Cleveland, and Kitzer turned to the topic of their forthcoming meeting with the two Cleveland-based promoters, Armand Mucci and Bob Bendis. Kitzer had met them for the first time only the previous month—or so he’d thought. As Mucci had recounted his past exploits, he and Kitzer had realized that back in the 1960s, they’d been on opposite sides of a deal involving artificially inflated stock.

  Mucci specialized in fleecing the hospitality industry. He’d recently asked for Kitzer’s help targeting the Shaker House Motor Hotel in suburban Cleveland, a 160-room edifice designed by an architect from Italy, complete with an underwater cocktail lounge, marble floors, and tiled walls. The owner had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Many people then thought of bankruptcy in Monopoly terms—you’re broke and out of the game—but Mucci knew better.

  The hotel was still open, so paying customers were still rolling in. Mucci claimed noble aspirations, trying to ensure that the Shaker House wouldn’t forever be stuck in its historical moment. But he really wanted to acquire the establishment with phony paper—a $600,000 letter of credit from Seven Oak Finance—so he could “bust it out.” He would siphon off the cash coming in, then liquidate the furniture, televisions, and other assets. Meanwhile, Seven Oak’s payment would never arrive. After Kitzer stalled for months, the promoters would blame each other for the hotel’s collapse. Mucci would proclaim mock outrage that Seven Oak had reneged on its letter of credit. And Kitzer would produce paperwork showing that the funding was contingent on the Shaker House being a viable business—now that it was closed, the bank was off the hook. Mucci would lock the doors and abandon it, or sell the hotel to another con man running a new scam.

  When they’d talked, Mucci had agreed to pay Kitzer $6,000 for the Seven Oak paper, though the fee would rise to 10 percent—$60,000—if he successfully acquired the Shaker House. Mucci had then mentioned that he had some stolen municipal bonds from Arizona: Did Kitzer have an outlet for them? They were, Mucci had said, “a little warm.”

  “How warm?” Kitzer had asked.

  “Hot.”

  “Burning,” Bendis had said.

  Kitzer had shaken his head. Too risky. But then he’d run into these two young men from Indiana looking for the very same thing.

  —

  At around three p.m., Wedick, Brennan, and Kitzer walked off the jetway into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, and the agents quickly scoped the gate area. With no time to make plans, they were left to hope that things would break right for them. They had no clue what to expect of Mucci and Bendis, and they were unarmed. Traveling undercover meant not carrying weapons.

  Still, they weren’t totally exposed. Deeghan had asked his contact in Cleveland for help with surveillance, and Wedick and Brennan knew that other agents would be mixed into the knots of tourists and businessmen, taking photographs. Deeghan had also told them that an agent would pass them recording equipment—though Brennan and Wedick had no idea how that would go down. The Cleveland agents knew what they were wearing and what flight they’d be on. Wedick expected to bump into someone—maybe literally—near the gate.

  Exiting the plane, Wedick trailed behind and scanned the passing faces, although he had no idea whom to look for. After a few minutes, a man veered toward him, looking into Wedick’s eyes. As he brushed past, the stranger pressed an object into Wedick’s hand, and Wedick, in turn, tucked it into his pocket, his eyes darting around to see if anyone had noticed.

  He had just started to breathe again when Mucci and Bendis emerged from packs of suitcase-hefting travelers. Mucci, squat and pudgy with a prominent nose and deep-set eyes, appeared to be in his late forties. He wore a dark sport coat with an open-collared shirt. Bendis, decked out in a business suit, had a push-broom mustache and a helmet of dark hair. They all exchanged cursory introductions and walked to a lounge. As they settled in, Wedick headed to the restroom. Once locked inside a stall, he pulled out the device and examined it. It was a transmitter, slightly larger than a deck of cards, that broadcast a signal—like a miniature radio station. Wedick screwed on the antenna, a couple of inches long, topped by a diminutive bulb-shaped microphone, which automatically turned the device on. Then he tucked it into his breast pocket and headed back out. There was no way under these circumstances to test in advance whether it worked. As with just about everything else they were doing, it seemed, he would just have to hope.

  He arrived to find Mucci ticking through his past accomplishments: companies he’d busted out, stock he’d artificially inflated easier than one might blow up a child’s birthday balloon. To Wedick and Brennan, unaccustomed to their roles, this was surreal—a criminal laying out his entire rap sheet. Wedick wondered whether the surveillance team was listening in; in the space of fifteen minutes, Mucci had offered up about a dozen leads.

  Brennan and Wedick were also surprised by the reception. Mucci already knew Kitzer, so his self-congratulatory bloviating was obviously for their benefit. Wedick and Brennan had expected to have to explain who they were and justify their presence—instead, Mucci seemed to want to impress them. The reason gradually dawned on them: They were traveling with Phil Kitzer.

  If nothing else, the interlude gave the newcomers a few moments to ease into the meeting. When the conversation moved to present-tense business, Kitzer held up a hand. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we are about to enter into a conspiracy. Anyone who doesn’t want to partake, get up and leave.”

  Kitzer explained that this was his standard practice, to invoke the term conspiracy so no one could later claim to have misunderstood the situation. “It’s a pretty shocking word,” he later said. “And I find that when you point it out to people, it usually catches someone’s attention.”

  There was a pause. Wedick and Brennan avoided looking in the direction of a guy snapping photographs across the bar. Everyone agreed to partake of the conspiracy, and Mucci handed Brennan a $100,000 bond issued in Pinal County, Arizona.

  Again, it seemed easy to the point of bewildering. Brennan could imagine a jury passing around the bond, Mucci watching from a defendant’s table. He made a show of examining the ornate print. Brennan nodded at Wedick and they said they needed to call their fence in New Orleans.

  They walked to a bank of pay phones and Brennan dialed Deeghan, using an AT&T calling card whose sixteen-digit number they had committed to memory. Deeghan took down information about the bond and gave Brennan the name and number of Lynn Del Vecchio in New Orleans. Del Vecchio was an agent who could pose as their fence if Mucci wanted to check up on them. After hanging up, Brennan got an idea that his great-grandfather, the fingerprinting pioneer, seemed to beam directly into his brain. Brennan knew he didn’t need an ink pad to create a fingerprint; he could make one using his skin’s oils. He rubbed the pad of his thumb alongside his nose, then flipped the document over and pressed it into the paper. Later, if they recovered the stolen bond, Brennan could point out the print as proof that they’d met.

  Brennan returned to the table and told Mucci that his contact was concerned that the document was too exotic and preferred to invest in something more recognizable. Mucci shrugged, tucked the bond back into his briefcase, and moved on to another topic.

  —

  The meeting broke up an hour later, and before leaving, Bendis handed Kitzer $4,000, the balance of their payment for the Seven Oak letter of credit. Kitzer, Brennan, and Wedic
k, all of whom planned to fly back to their respective cities the next morning, lingered, and Kitzer told them that they were wise not to acquire the bond without knowing more.

  With any stolen security, he said, they should know whether it had “hit the sheet”—the listings of the National Crime Information Center (the FBI’s clearinghouse of information about crimes). The agents knew about the NCIC, of course—they sometimes posted information from their own cases on it—but now they learned about its value from an entirely new perspective. A stolen bond that hadn’t hit the sheet was worth more to the promoters—typically 10 percent of face value, Kitzer explained. Once it was listed, its value tumbled by half. Another factor to consider: How had the bond been stolen? Was it quietly snatched from a safe-deposit box and unlikely to be missed anytime soon? If armed robbers had taken the bond at gunpoint, its underworld value would be diminished because law enforcement would be looking for it.

  Then there was the issue of denomination: Although it sounded counterintuitive, a stolen $50,000 bond was worth more to a con man than a $100,000 or $1 million note. The higher amounts triggered more scrutiny. A bank might wonder why a person with a $500,000 bond needed a loan. But a person with a $50,000 bond and a plausible story could walk into a bank and flash it as collateral to borrow $30,000. You would leave the bond with the bank, take the thirty, and vanish.

  Kitzer’s impromptu colloquium stretched deep into their second evening together. Wedick and Brennan listened raptly as Kitzer puffed a Pall Mall tucked into his plastic filter—he’d read you could get cancer from holding cigarettes on your lips. Then he described where he was going with all this.

  He explained that he ran vehicles—insolvent “briefcase banks” from which he sold worthless certificates of deposit, letters of credit, and other “paper.” He peddled these phony securities to desperate businessmen and guileless entrepreneurs through a network of brokers. He detailed several recent deals involving his current vehicle, Seven Oak, including a $50,000 letter of credit he’d sold to a “dumb Dago” from South Bend. Wedick felt the hair on the back of his neck levitate at the oblique mention of Nick Carbone.

  Kitzer was concerned that the banking industry was becoming familiar with his name, especially because the Wall Street Journal had recently published its Mercantile Bank story. He had no interest in taking a pseudonym, so he wanted to recruit front men: young promoters who could front his banks, serve as officers. He’d traveled for a couple of years with a guy named Chovanec, but they’d recently had a falling-out. From what Kitzer could see, Brennan and Wedick were smart and ambitious young guys, and he’d enjoyed the past couple of days.

  He had a proposition: If they accompanied him in his travels, he would teach them the game. They had to pay their own way, but if they helped with his cons, they would get a cut of the take.

  Were they interested?

  Brennan and Wedick looked at each other. The questions they would have to answer before replying—with the FBI and, for Brennan, with his wife—were too numerous to even guess at.

  But were they interested? They were.

  “All right,” Kitzer said, smiling and raising a glass of Scotch. “Let’s try it.”

  His idea was to start a new vehicle later that year, after Seven Oak flamed out, with Brennan and Wedick. In the meantime, they would have to learn the business and meet and get to know the players—the other promoters he worked with. From time to time, they will be calling and wanting certain things done, he explained. And it’s necessary you know them. It has to be a personal relationship.

  There was no way, at that point, for the agents to imagine what that meant—the far reaches of the darkest corners of the labyrinthine world into which he would lead them. They had no clue that this would cause them to furrow new fields for the FBI, or that their newfound access to this stratospherically successful confidence man could alter the trajectory of their careers. In the months to come, Brennan and Wedick would come to understand the implications of what they were doing. But for now, they were just trying to understand how this new development might play out. Kitzer told them to go home and read a book, published a few years earlier, called The Fountain Pen Conspiracy, by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny.

  They had just signed up for a graduate-level course in high-finance confidence games. That was their first assignment.

  —

  The agents spent the flight back trying to process what had just happened. Wedick’s thinking flip-flopped between the evidence they’d gathered and the new opportunity in front of them. Brennan’s mind reeled. For him, Kitzer’s offer created an even more complex algorithm for how to manage this life. After they landed in South Bend, he called his wife, Becky.

  She was wrestling with their younger son, Chris, then just shy of two, when the phone rang. She wasn’t surprised Jack had been gone a day or two longer than expected. She was now well versed in the mercurial elements of FBI life, though nothing about her childhood in Eufaula, Alabama, had prepared her for it. Tall and slender, with light brown hair and a quick smile, she spoke energetically but with a sumptuously thick accent that tacked extra syllables onto words like on and there. She hadn’t traveled north of Atlanta until adulthood—and might never have if not for Jack.

  They met playing bridge with mutual friends when they were both dating other people and going to different schools—she attended Birmingham-Southern. When they ran into each other a second time, on spring break in Panama City, Florida, during Jack’s senior year at Auburn, they were both single and played cards for hours while their mutual friends went carousing. “There was,” Becky said, “a little something there.”

  After returning to classes, Jack asked Becky out. She transferred to Auburn, and the swelling romance crested with a marriage proposal during her senior year, when Jack was in Ohio. They relocated to the South, and their first few years of marriage were breezy. When the FBI offer came, she signed on willingly, wanting Jack to be happy in his work. “I thought it was kind of exciting,” she said. “I just had no idea what it would be.”

  His first assignment, in New Orleans, was mostly effortless. They were not far from where Becky had grown up, and they’d rented a comfortable apartment. She had a good laugh telling folks back home about Jack’s first case, which involved a shipment of stolen bowling balls. They ate their way around the city, checking off page after page in their copy of The New Orleans Underground Gourmet. Becky’s first taste of life as an FBI spouse came when an armed man took hostages in a hotel. She watched as the TV showed FBI agents and the abductors exchanging gunfire from rooftops. She didn’t know if Jack was shooting, but he didn’t call, and she lay in bed wondering, for the first of many times, exactly what she’d gotten herself into.

  Then Jack came home one night in 1972 and announced that he’d been transferred to Indianapolis. She thought that city was near Idaho: He showed her on a map that it was more than 650 miles north of Eufaula, but a straight shot up Interstate 65. That’ll be okay, she thought—not so far from home. Then, a few days later, the bureau revised his orders to Gary.

  During their first trip there, in January 1973, the clerk at a downtown Holiday Inn told them, “You don’t want to stay here.” Too many murders and muggings. The Brennans ended up at the suburban Crown Point Hotel, a converted farmhouse. They rented a room that had two twin beds and a sheet mounted to a ceiling track, hospital-style—the only room with its own bathroom. Which was a good thing, because Becky was pregnant.

  They eventually bought a house in Crown Point, and their first son, John, was born in July. Life had infinitely more complexities now. That Christmas, they loaded the baby, their luggage, and Bernie, their 190-pound Saint Bernard, onto an overnight train to Alabama. When they reached Montgomery, Becky’s mother met them and said, “I hate to tell you this, Jack, but your office called.” She drove him straight to the airport for a flight back to Indiana.

  A second baby, Chris, arrived in 1975. They slogged through the winters
, and Becky tried hard to fit in. “I worked on my accent a lot when we got there, trying to sound not so southern,” she said. But the neighborhood kids rang their doorbell just to hear her talk.

  Life in Indiana never quite took. Becky loved her boys, but she’d grown up as a tomboy and wasn’t fulfilled by spending her days alone with a toddler and an infant, and she felt far removed from home. “The people were really nice, and we had good friends, but it just wasn’t the same somehow,” she said.

  At the same time, Jack’s immersion in increasingly complex cases pulled him away for long days. Becky grew isolated and alone. “It was,” she recalled, “very overwhelming.”

  By the summer of 1976, they had arrived at a crossroads. One of Jack’s childhood friends, an executive at Waffle House, had opened a new franchise in the Florida Panhandle and invited him to become a partner. It sounded ideal; the Brennans owned a cabin near Panama City. They decided to go for it, and Becky was euphoric through the going-away parties and the U-Haul odyssey home.

  But the plan imploded almost instantly. Jack, required to learn the business from the ground level, hated flipping hash browns and dealing with truant waitresses. He was at home in the South, but his soul belonged to the FBI. After a week, he revealed to Becky that he’d only taken a leave of absence. And he was going back. Blindsided and furious, Becky replied that she was staying. “At that point,” she said, “we weren’t sure we loved each other anymore.”