Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  “I’m from Connecticut,” D’Amato said. “We call it the Danbury Hilton.”

  “If I go, that’s where I want to go,” said Brennan.

  They could appeal any sentence and go free on bail while the lawyers argued. All of this was merely an “occupational hazard,” D’Amato said.

  Outside in the parking lot, agent Walter Setmeyer listened in, a Sony cassette recorder on his front seat capturing the feed from the transmitter in Brennan’s pocket.

  The promoters then began a mock trial, with Kitzer playing the judge and D’Amato the collared con man. “The judge gets up, whoever he is,” D’Amato said. The atmosphere in the room is tense, D’Amato explained, because everyone looks at the promoter and decides he’s “gotta be smarter than we [are] ’cause he just ripped off $3 billion.”

  The swindler is facing just one to three years in prison, and the judge, D’Amato said, starts asking himself, “Am I crazy? I should talk to the lawyer to see how much is in this for me for him not to do” any time behind bars.

  Kitzer interrupted: “I get up and say, ‘Good morning, Mr. D’Amato, I don’t wanna waste your time. Marshal, take him into custody, we have given [him] fifteen [years].”

  Everyone laughed at Judge Kitzer’s harsh sentence. Breaking out of character, D’Amato told the Junior G-Men, “You have to know when to keep yourself outta trouble when you’re walking the tightrope bordering the illegal.”

  He added, “There’s three principles in life. You do what you do, do what you know, but equally as important, be goddamn sure you know who you’re doing it with.”

  Kitzer chimed in: “And if you don’t know, be very careful what you do.”

  —

  Brennan’s brain ached as he sat in the Sheraton lounge. Howard had described the depth and complexity of the promoters’ schemes, but none of these accounts had prepared the agents for the experience of being embedded inside one. Kitzer wasn’t just carefully plotting out his cons. He was anticipating what the FBI might do and taking evasive steps in advance—all while blending seamlessly into crowds of businessmen in their three-piece suits and fat neckties.

  Kitzer saw his targets through different eyes. Take Jimmy Kealoha. To most people, he was an ambitious but unlucky businessman—someone who’d overreached on a project. But they would sympathize at some level: He was chasing a dream. Kitzer, by contrast, saw a man who still had money he could afford to lose: He’s still got $80,000. What do I need to say to convince him to give it to me?

  More drinks arrived, providing enough lubrication that the conversation hopped the tracks into past exploits—mostly Kitzer and D’Amato arguing about who’d taken more money in cons. The stories became increasingly outlandish. D’Amato’s Eurotrust increased in value over the course of the evening from $30 million to $50 billion. Dinner plates appeared. Kitzer had ordered hundred-dollar bottles of wine, steaks. Wedick cringed; Setmeyer was probably eating fast-food burgers in his car, if anything at all.

  Someone new appeared: a promoter from Boston named John Calandrella. Kitzer had told the others to be guarded when Calandrella arrived; he didn’t know whether he could trust the guy yet. Calandrella looked to be in his early forties, with a round face and dark hair that was far shorter than the shaggy haircuts popular in the day. He chatted briefly and scheduled a meeting with Kitzer for the morning before disappearing.

  After Mucci and Bendis headed home, Kitzer and D’Amato continued their friendly rivalry, switching to the topic of women. D’Amato bragged that he knew Shirley Eaton, the blonde who wore gold body paint in the James Bond film Goldfinger. Several key scenes in that movie, in fact, had been shot at the Fontainebleau—where, D’Amato hastened to mention again, he was chairman of the board. They talked about prostitutes, then women in the hotel bar, debating who would try to pick up whom. Scanning the room, the promoters discussed two women sitting together at the bar (whom Brennan and Wedick knew to be FBI agents conducting surveillance). Success with the opposite sex—real or imagined—seemed central to the promoters’ world, so Wedick and Brennan began to play along.

  “She’s nice,” Brennan said. He elbowed Wedick. “She wants to talk to you, Jim.”

  But Brennan himself stood and walked over to them—using the moment to check in with the agents instead of flirting. The promoters loved it, and praised the gameness of the Junior G-Men, and ordered another round. Wedick and Brennan saw that the pace of the drinking was a problem. Kitzer and D’Amato seemed to possess a Herculean tolerance for liquor, while Wedick—at six-two but barely a hundred and sixty pounds—had gotten buzzed fast. He headed to the men’s room, leaving his drink on the bar, and on the way back ordered a club soda. Brennan deposited his drink across the room and pretended he’d misplaced it—but Kitzer, hearing this, ordered him another.

  Wedick and Brennan also faced a more immediate problem. Kitzer was now also buying drinks for the female agents and trying to draw them into conversation. Brennan and Wedick attempted to deflect his attention, but it was as if a periscope had risen from his head and zeroed in on the women, and he seemed oblivious to the possibility that someone might reject his overtures. They smiled and waved but declined to come over. Two male Cleveland agents hovered nearby, seeming uncertain, and Kitzer noticed them looking over. Wedick shifted uncomfortably as Kitzer asked D’Amato whether he thought the guys across the room were watching them. Every operation possesses a surface tension for the undercover agents involved. Puncture it, and disaster can follow: Assumed identities begin to feel flimsy; scripts become hard to follow.

  Seeing the way things were trending, Wedick felt a jolt of unease. He wrestled with a sense that he should do something, only he had no idea what. They might have anticipated that bringing female agents in was unwise with such a libido-driven, relentlessly social target. Too late. Wedick was at once deep inside the moment and floating above it, aware that the evening was on the verge of detonation but unsure how to defuse it. He couldn’t tell Kitzer that the women weren’t interested, nor could they ditch him and leave; they were on duty. Kitzer seemed determined to either win them over or drive them, exasperated, out of the bar. Time began to slow down for Wedick as his mind raced. He and Brennan worked furiously to change the subject, but Kitzer waved them off.

  Around midnight, everything finally unspooled. Brennan headed to the men’s room, and Setmeyer, having left the parking lot, followed him in. “Hey, you gotta get out of here,” Setmeyer said. “Break off the meeting. We’re going home.”

  Brennan paused. Break off the meeting? How were they supposed to do that? It was Kitzer’s show. Setmeyer told him that was their problem.

  Brennan saw no way to move the whole group, so he decided to splinter it. He would pretend to leave with the female agent he’d chatted up, which, hopefully, would discourage Kitzer’s advances. He came out and waved good night, grinning triumphantly at the others. The rest of the surveillance team departed immediately after, as if the two groups were not quite together but also not not together.

  Kitzer watched with dismay. “Did you see that? Those people weren’t part of a group, and they suddenly leave together?” he said. “And those guys kept looking over here? Don’t you think that was strange?”

  Confused about what was happening with Brennan and the Cleveland agents, Wedick tried to pivot the conversation back to Kealoha, and D’Amato, for one, played along. He beckoned Wedick to follow him to his room—leaving Kitzer sitting in the saloon—then took the rented CDs from his briefcase and asked whether Kitzer had ever showed him anything like that.

  Eventually Wedick excused himself and found Brennan in the parking lot with the Cleveland agents. Everyone was tired. Brennan and Wedick were distraught about Kitzer, angry about the way the surveillance team had bailed out, their whole facade nearly crumbling in front of their target. Wedick had sensed all along that attending the meeting was a bad idea, and now he cursed himself for going along with it. But he was also disturbed by the Cleveland agents’ lack of prof
essionalism, which might have compromised the investigation.

  “How screwed up can you guys be?” Wedick barked. “We’re undercover agents. We’re still collecting information. How is it that you can decide we’re done?”

  Wedick said they had just come from headquarters and were heading up a new undercover initiative that the local agents had nearly blown up. “Hey, guys, if you didn’t think this was big, it is big, okay?” he said. “You guys are in trouble.”

  The Cleveland agents were disinterested in any sort of postmortem analysis. Minutes later, Wedick and Brennan were standing alone outside the Sheraton Beachwood, wondering how things had fallen apart so fast, and whether it was going to be possible to pick up the pieces.

  9

  The Poodle Lounge

  MARCH 4, 1977

  Wedick and Brennan rose at six, before the first slate-gray light of the late-winter Ohio morning could slither around their blackout shades. They showered and dressed and tried to feel good about Operation Fountain Pen, but the previous night had rattled them. They’d gone to bed buzzing from bourbon and stress, unsure whether Kitzer’s suspicions had mushroomed into something worse. They were also worried about the ramifications within the FBI. Lowie and Cleveland’s SAC would have to try to iron out the events of the previous night. FBI politics were such that if the Cleveland boss was exceedingly bent out of shape—about the last-minute incursion or the way things went down—Brennan and Wedick would have to deal with the fallout. He could go to Washington with his beef. Worst case, they could get pulled back home. Later, the FBI would require agents to submit proposals for undercover work and create a committee to scrutinize them before anyone went out in the field. But that process didn’t yet exist.

  Wedick was still furious with Brennan and the Cleveland team, and livid that the operation had nearly collapsed for no good reason. His name was attached to the case, so he was risking more than anyone else. If this went badly, it was his career dangling over the precipice. The previous night’s debacle validated his more deliberate, calculated approach. He didn’t want bureaucracy holding him up—but they had to be sure, now more than ever, that they did this right.

  Everything about their undercover operation seemed like a minefield. By some hideous luck, their flight to Miami that day included a two-hour layover in Washington—at almost exactly the time their FBI colleagues would be heading home from their training in Quantico. Brennan and Wedick feared that someone wearing a .357 Magnum would tap them on the shoulder while they were sitting with Kitzer and say, “Hey, Jim and Jack!” Even their airline tickets were wrong. Wedick gazed in frustration at the letters GTR stamped on his. Kitzer was probably savvy enough to decode the acronym—for “Government Transportation Request”—so the Junior G-Men would have to try to hide them.

  They had to make changes. The first one they instantly agreed on: no more surveillance. The promoters posed no obvious physical threat, and Brennan and Wedick didn’t want to have to worry about more disruptions. They would still, however, meet field agents wherever they traveled, to hand off leads. As for their dynamic? Wedick told Brennan that he had to stop pushing too fast. Later that morning, Bendis asked for Brennan’s and Wedick’s Social Security numbers and birth dates so he could run a credit check. They handed over their information—but as soon as everyone split up to head for the airport, the agents dialed Deeghan to ask whether he’d been able to erase important information in their credit history. Deeghan said he was working on it, and that they should head for Miami and hope for the best.

  —

  Much of the country was grinding through the last of a brutal winter. In the weeks leading up to president-elect Carter’s inauguration, the nation had endured a cold snap so severe that it had snowed in Miami Beach. But now spring loomed, and for Brennan, the return to southern latitudes improved his mind-set. He and Wedick joined Kitzer and D’Amato in a three-room suite on an upper floor of Kitzer’s favorite Miami hotel, the Sheraton Four Ambassadors. For the agents, this represented a significant upgrade from the usual government-budget rooms—not that they expected to enjoy it. In fact, they felt anxious about the arrangement, all of them packed inside the same walls.

  Kitzer turned in early the first night, leaving the others lounging in the suite’s living room. D’Amato declared that he was happy that Brennan and Wedick were “paying their dues” to the Fraternity, which he described as a loosely connected group of fifty-plus promoters spread across four continents. The idea behind their schemes was to create a mutually reinforcing illusion. A mark might not believe one con man—but if he hears the same story repeated by three others, all of whom appear to be connected to legitimate banks on different continents? The scheme sounds far more plausible.

  D’Amato never tired of recounting his exploits, but he eventually conceded that he wasn’t actually the chairman of the Fontainebleau. He had been—for about three days. The previous November, he’d been introduced as the new owner—the Associated Press even published a story about it. But the Hartford Courant followed up with a story about D’Amato’s central role in the largest bank scandal in Connecticut history. That investigation was still pending when the Fontainebleau deal was announced. Hotel owner Ben Novack flinched after the Courant exposé came out, declaring that D’Amato was “not involved anymore.” But D’Amato didn’t give up, securing the legal services of Carl Ajello, Connecticut’s sitting attorney general.

  After absorbing D’Amato’s verbal stylings for several hours, Brennan and Wedick said good night. In the quiet of their room, they contemplated what to do. They had no surveillance equipment, so they scribbled some notes to drop into the mail. Although this way of conducting their business had its limitations, the agents were relieved to be untethered from a surveillance team.

  The events of the next day only reinforced their thinking. Wedick and Brennan slipped away to meet Miami-based agent Mike Douglas, who seemed confused by the case and annoyed that he’d had the unfortunate luck to have picked up the phone when Wedick called the local office.

  “I’ll do what I can, but…,” he said, looking around for the nearest exit.

  A jangle of phone calls and revolving-door meetings filled the next day, March 5. Kitzer and D’Amato met with the contractor for Kealoha’s project, and squeezed in another Hawaiian developer trying to build a hotel addition. Kitzer was a blur. When he traveled, he said, he always had one headliner deal involving a client who paid the expenses for his trip. He usually had a couple of other, smaller propositions under way, and after the word had spread that he was in town, local brokers—lower-tier con men selling Kitzer’s paper, like Arthur Murley in Charlotte—emerged with proposals. His phone service in Minnesota included a forwarding mechanism, so people could always reach him. By the second morning in Miami, Kitzer had a stack of messages waiting, and his phone rang incessantly.

  Brennan and Wedick did their best to keep track of the various threads, hoping to generate leads they could report back to the bureau, but Kitzer didn’t include them in every conversation, and he went alone to meetings where he was collecting money. Several times he emerged from his room or a corner of the lobby tucking away a roll of cash.

  Kitzer clearly relished the role of the sage. Going into one meeting with a binder two inches thick, he said, “Hey, Jack, this is how this is done.” He flipped to a random page and pointed out a paragraph about the liability rate for a proposed loan, telling Brennan to pay attention. Five minutes into the meeting, he interrupted: “You know, I was wondering about the liability rate.” The mark was now thinking: He’s really scrutinized the details.

  Kitzer used these methods to confuse victims or coax them into handing over money. Alpha-dog businessmen in high-stakes negotiations generally avoid appearing not to understand something. It weakens their position. And if someone tried to put Kitzer on the spot—say, about whether he had enough assets on hand to write a performance bond—he might reply, “The performance bond and such-type instruments, they
are related to the capital surplus of the company, and $1.1 million in cash does not mean you will have it in policyholders’ surplus, and the ratio is ten percent to policyholders’ surplus. And even if the $1.1 was in policyholders’, ten percent would give them the authority to write a $110,000 bond on any one obligation. That’s by federal law.”

  The guy would think, Did he answer that? He must have. Or he’d forget the point of the question.

  Amid the hive of activity, Bendis called Kitzer from Cleveland to say that Wedick and Brennan were clear: Their credit scores were excellent. (Deeghan had succeeded in altering their personal information.) Kitzer put down the phone and turned to his two protégés. This was such good news that he decided they should change their Hawaii plans. He didn’t want to risk exposing the Junior G-Men on a midlevel deal like Kealoha’s. To have two pristine, unknown young promoters like them? They were a precious resource that had to be spent wisely.

  —

  The next day, after their meetings, Brennan and Wedick ran into Kitzer with a slight, attractive blonde. He shocked them by introducing her as his wife. Audrey Kitzer was in South Florida taking a break from the rugged Minnesota winter. They flitted off, leaving Wedick and Brennan exchanging looks of surprise. Kitzer was married? They had avoided conversations about their personal lives. Kitzer knew only that Wedick was single and that Brennan had some sort of situation but was coy with the details.

  Otherwise, the Junior G-Men focused on fitting in. Brennan listened generously and laughed at everyone’s jokes, and Wedick played the chatterbox New Yorker, telling animated stories in which he acted out different characters, some with cartoonish Bronx accents. They were relieved to find that they didn’t need to adopt entirely new personas. D’Amato kept pulling them into side conversations about his schemes, unsubtly trying to recruit them away from Kitzer. That afternoon, he asked Brennan to accompany him to the Fort Lauderdale airport. He explained on the drive north that he’d called a contact in Connecticut about advancing some money, and in the airport lounge, D’Amato told Brennan to watch carefully. Soon a woman entered, looked in their direction, and exited.