Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  “Come on,” D’Amato said.

  They followed her to a parking lot, where the woman stopped by a car. As the two men passed, she reached out and handed D’Amato an envelope, then drove off. Brennan tried to memorize the license plate. D’Amato smiled and said they were like characters in a spy movie as he opened the envelope and pulled out ten hundred-dollar bills.

  The agents strained to tease apart the layers of this kind of pulp-fiction intrigue, the shifting cast of characters. Their third morning in Miami, a knock at seven o’clock woke everyone. A diminutive Chinese man entered and laid several framed paintings on the floor. Kitzer called Wedick and Brennan, and they all stood around in their underwear and gazed blearily at the artwork. Their visitor claimed the paintings had been stolen from the People’s Museum in Beijing and were national treasures.

  “If you say so,” Kitzer replied, shrugging.

  The art thief said he also dealt weapons to various nation-states, including North Korea, with a mutual acquaintance named Jack Scharf. He wanted Seven Oak letters of credit to fuel these enterprises, but Kitzer declined. Missiles and despots were like taking a guy’s last dollar: nothing but trouble.

  —

  Jimmy Kealoha was a no-show in Florida. No one knew why, but Kitzer shrugged it off: He was juggling a dozen deals at any given moment, and inevitably some fizzled.

  When he was in Miami, Kitzer liked to punch out at five and head to the Fontainebleau. The Junior G-Men were struck by the scale and grandeur of the place. Built in 1954, the massive, sickle-shaped hotel boasted more than twelve hundred rooms, the best of which loomed over the Atlantic Ocean. Painted white and fronted with sculptures of centaurs and bathing maidens and a massive fountain, the place had been featured in a 1960s TV detective series called Surfside Six. Frank Sinatra regularly appeared onstage in the La Ronde Room, entertaining Mafia dons and cocaine traffickers. But the hotel had recently fallen on hard times, flirting with bankruptcy and sending off the kind of distressed-animal sounds that attracted predators like Andy D’Amato.

  Kitzer loved it. D’Amato had been boasting earlier about taking over the hotel when Kitzer had cut him off. “Remember, to pull that off, you need me,” he’d said. “If the bankruptcy court takes your offer, it’s going to be because of my paper.”

  That afternoon, he walked briskly into the Fontainebleau and greeted the concierge by name, calls of “Hello, Mr. Kitzer” echoing around the lobby. Passing a gift shop, Kitzer stopped at the window display.

  “Hey, Jack, J.J.,” he said. “C’mere. Watch this.”

  Kitzer entered the shop, pointed toward a teddy bear on display, and told the salesclerk he wanted every one the store had in stock. He peeled several bills off a roll he was carrying and began piling stuffed animals onto Brennan’s and Wedick’s arms. They strode out clutching more than fifty of them and wobbled to the Poodle Lounge.

  The place was easy to spot. The bar featured portraits inspired by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard in which all of the subjects had poodle faces. The room hummed with happy-hour traffic: fashionable snowbirds and young couples and people there to people-watch, men with shirt collars turned out over white sport coats and women in feathery strapless tops. There were sideburns and chest hair and flower-patterned dress shirts. Kitzer led Wedick and Brennan around, approaching each woman and offering a teddy bear with a hello and a smile. After they’d given one to every female in the room, they moved to the entrance and passed out the last of them to women walking in.

  Kitzer then headed to the bar, and Brennan and Wedick watched everyone watching him. He was five-eight and scarcely a hundred and forty pounds, but he had a Wilt Chamberlain presence. The room grew louder and more energized as people showed around the teddy bears and Kitzer announced he was buying drinks for everyone in their vicinity. For himself and his two friends, he ordered an Aggravation—a cocktail made with Scotch, Kahlúa, and cream—and he pulled out his wad of cash when he was sure people were looking.

  Brennan and Wedick figured that within fifteen minutes, Kitzer had managed to get every one of the hundred-plus patrons to notice him and puzzle over who he was—he had to be somebody. There was some Clark Gable in there, Wedick thought. Kitzer said that he loved old movies; he’d studied the way Humphrey Bogart smoked with Ingrid Bergman in To Have and Have Not. He appreciated how Cary Grant made moves on Doris Day or Grace Kelly or Eva Marie Saint.

  Kitzer laid his gold Dunhill lighter and cigarettes on the bar and grinned at his companions. The lighter, made in Geneva, was among his favorite possessions. It was his icebreaker. He scanned the room, alert for any woman—even if she was with someone—pulling out a cigarette so that he could swoop in, flame flickering. Phil explained that the lighter provided a means of instant connection, and he wielded it the way a woman might showcase a string of pearls. He kept it ready. He didn’t want to miss opportunities.

  Kitzer chatted with everyone who entered his orbit, explaining that they were financiers who had just hit on a big deal. He was a ballroom dancer, so he would sometimes, if the music was right, grab a girl and take a few steps and spin her, and he clinked glasses and reveled in the attention radiating from the room, most of all from his two new friends.

  —

  Kitzer was dressed at eight the next morning, looking casual in a short-sleeved button-down. Wedick and Brennan were exhausted. Wedick stood in the shower and tried to clear his head enough to divine what Kitzer might talk about that day. He’d resolved to spend some time each morning moving through a chess match in his head: If Kitzer says this, I should say that. Then what? How will he respond?

  Although he and Brennan were growing more relaxed in the con man’s presence, they tried to remember that every word, every conversation carried the potential to dynamite the enterprise. They had agreed on several rules: Don’t stretch the truth much. Tell stories that mirror something that actually happened so it’s possible to remember later. Don’t try too hard. Though no one had taught them how to act undercover, they instinctively grasped that they were most likely to succeed by playing versions of themselves.

  Brennan tried to do what came naturally: He listened. He’d found that informants—like many people—enjoyed an audience. They tended to fill uncomfortable silences, and when they started talking, he would nod sympathetically: I can see why you’d feel that way. His eyebrows and forehead scrunched into empathetic expressions that matched his ingratiating conversational style. He folded his hands and laughed easily and said self-deprecating things. With the promoters, in particular, his strategy was: Ask questions, be dumb. Divert attention if they’re getting personal. People with big egos always want to describe the great things they’re doing. “Oh, man,” Brennan would reply. “Wow.”

  Wedick, for all his verbal fireworks, also knew when to clam up. A prosecutor friend later described his demeanor “as father confessor…a rabbi with all the characters he deals with.”

  They had to be ready. Kitzer often tested them, probing their willingness to participate. When they checked out of the Sheraton, he playfully asked for Wedick’s American Express card. Both Wedick and Brennan had one, and Kitzer, who paid in cash, always, to avoid leaving any kind of trail, was fascinated with the concept of plastic. “You know what you guys could do with those things?” he’d say.

  He didn’t mean pay for their rooms. The idea behind a credit card—pay me now and I’ll pay you back later—was a core concept underpinning his scams. The card could serve as a portal into American Express, with its vast lines of credit, and Kitzer felt he could vacuum mountains of money through that window.

  “Phil, I know you,” Wedick replied. “I ain’t giving you my card.”

  Heading to the airport, Kitzer told his apprentices that they would meet John Packman there. “London John,” who ran Seven Oak’s daily operations, had the previous day been served an order by Scotland Yard freezing all funds and transactions. Kitzer had told Packman to empty the coffers of whatever cash was on hand a
nd fly it to Miami before the government could seize it. Packman and Kitzer had then drafted a letter dated the previous Friday, March 4, in which Kitzer ordered an $8,000 withdrawal.

  They spotted Packman in the international terminal, signaling from the customs area. He explained that he had visa problems—not to mention $8,000 cash in his bag—and couldn’t enter the country. Kitzer pondered this while gazing at the departures board. He noted that a flight to the Bahamas was leaving soon. Packman would have no trouble traveling to an island in the British Commonwealth.

  “You guys wanna go to the beach?” Kitzer asked the others, grinning. They could be there in less than an hour.

  Wedick and Brennan hesitated, their brains straining to calculate the cost of this snap-of-the-fingers plan change. They’d originally expected to be in Quantico for a few days, and they’d already been gone for a week. Jack thought about Becky, his kids. And they’d need to contact Deeghan, obviously. This was a new complication—another test of the tensile strength of their tethers to their everyday lives. The agents didn’t know it yet, but this was only the first of many.

  They couldn’t equivocate for long. They had no plausible excuse for passing up the offer, and they wanted Kitzer to believe he could count on them. Maybe this was a test, his way of gauging their level of commitment.

  Minutes later, Brennan and Wedick were buckling their seat belts for a flight to the Caribbean with no idea how long they’d be gone.

  10

  Mr. Mutt and Mr. Jeff

  MARCH 9, 1977

  Wedick stared at his watch, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and cursed. The line he was standing in snaked around the corner and out of sight. Every few minutes he shuffled forward a few steps, but it seemed to him that the ocean’s tides might rise and recede again before he reached the front.

  It was their second day in Nassau, in the Bahamas, which they’d found to be a prototypical Caribbean backwater. Everything happened on island time, including, apparently, the installation of the kinds of utilities folks back home took for granted. Such as telephones. When Wedick and Brennan had arrived at the Sheraton British Colonial the previous day, they’d been eager to report that their trip had lurched off course unexpectedly. But the room phone was a relic: It lacked any way to dial a number. To make a call, a guest lifted the receiver and told the hotel switchboard operator the name and number of the party he wanted to reach. To call the States, the operator then had to reach another operator, one capable of accessing an international line—which might take ten minutes or more. The Bahamas was ideal for honeymooners, but not for marooned undercover agents.

  Brennan and Wedick quickly dismissed the hotel phone option. Phil might wander into the room before the operator reached Deeghan, or he might be friendly with a hotel employee who might note an incoming call from the FBI. The agents figured the only way to reach Indianapolis safely was via Nassau’s public phone bank. Wedick told Kitzer he was heading out for some sightseeing.

  “Sightseeing?” Kitzer said, grinning incredulously. His idea of relaxation was sitting at a bar on a beach, chatting with everyone in the vicinity. Wedick, feeling like a high school senior sneaking out his bedroom window, figured he had two hours to take care of business before Kitzer wondered where he was. But he’d burned through that time without coming close to reaching a phone. Apparently, half of the island’s population needed to make a call.

  Wedick pondered his options. If he left without calling, Deeghan and Lowie would probably begin to wonder whether their bodies were floating somewhere in the Everglades. The FBI was a highly regimented organization. Under Hoover, agents had been expected to be at their desks every morning at eight. The boss would leave you alone if you were established and productive, but otherwise he’d sit on you. For Wedick and Brennan to be not only out of the office for so long but also incommunicado was an affront to bureau culture.

  They would undoubtedly be censured for this later, but they were at a loss for what else to do.

  Wedick shuffled a few more steps forward, then looked at his watch again and started back toward the Sheraton.

  —

  A group of three women were talking to the concierge in the Sheraton lobby, asking about dining options, when Kitzer overheard them. He stopped and bantered with them in a way that Brennan and Wedick recognized as being as effortless as breathing for him. Where are you from? Canada, really? Why don’t you join us for dinner? We’re just on our way out!

  The Junior G-Men exchanged looks: Here we go. It was their third day there; Packman had returned to London. Brennan and Wedick had both checked the phone bank again, but the line only seemed to lengthen. Their anxiety about their situation was gradually intensifying, and, vexingly, Kitzer wouldn’t say how long he wanted to stay. Maybe he didn’t know yet himself. He was too busy digging a hotel sewing kit out of a drawer and running a thread through a Bahamian hundred-dollar bill, then dangling it off the balcony of his second-floor room. Phil would let it sit on the ground or appear to flutter in the breeze and watch passersby lunge or jump for it before yanking it away. Part of the fun was predicting who would go after the money—and he was uncannily accurate.

  He harbored no grand ambition otherwise. Jimmy Buffett’s hit “Margaritaville” had been released as a single a few weeks earlier, and Kitzer was happy to join the throngs of tourists eager to waste away now that they’d finally tunneled out of winter. That year’s deep freeze had overlapped with another paralyzing natural-gas shortage, which, after years of inflation and a wallowing economy, had left Americans feeling cynical and frustrated. All in the Family was among the most popular shows on TV, and later that year Carroll O’Connor would win an Emmy for his role. Archie Bunker was alive and well.

  Kitzer was intent on spending the Seven Oak windfall, and he’d told Wedick and Brennan to get ready for a big dinner. At his behest, the three of them squeezed into a cab, their new acquaintances from Canada sitting on their laps, giggling. Kitzer directed the cabbie downtown to the historic Graycliff Hotel. The property, according to legend, had been built by a pirate in the 1700s, only to be captured, along with the rest of Nassau, by the American navy in 1776. It later became an exclusive private club—Al Capone visited during Prohibition—before being purchased by British royalty in the 1960s. The new owners jammed the place with antiques and high-end decor for visits from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Then, in 1973, the property was turned into a hotel with a five-star restaurant, complete with a humidor, overlooking downtown and the Caribbean beyond.

  The Graycliff was the kind of place where Kitzer’s proclivity for flashing rolls of hundreds would not go unappreciated. When they arrived, he instructed the cabbie to keep the meter running and wait outside: He didn’t want to have to hail another one when they were finished. Inside, a crowd redolent of old money packed the room, forming a sea of white hair and starchy dinner jackets. Brennan and Wedick felt underdressed in their blazers and slacks, but Kitzer headed straight for the maître d’ and pointed toward a corner table with expansive ocean views.

  The maître d’ shook his head: That table was permanently reserved for a regular. Kitzer waved a hundred-dollar bill. The maître d’ smiled in a pained way and shook his head and instead settled them near another table of six—all of them older, highborn Brits, whom Kitzer greeted like childhood friends. As the courses rolled in over the next two hours, he led a conversation across both tables, his stories triggering cascades of laughter. As the meal wound down, he waved the maître d’ over and pointed toward the still empty corner table.

  “Hundred bucks,” Kitzer said, smiling. “You missed out.”

  The three men fired up enormous Cuban cigars from the humidor and ordered Drambuie. A pianist began to play. Kitzer perked up and signaled again to the maître d’. This time he requested Tony Bennett’s signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  The pianist knew that one, and also the Sinatra song Kitzer asked for next, and the show-tune requests that followe
d. Kitzer smiled when he heard the first notes of “Hello, Dolly!,” then rose to his feet and burst into song, signaling for everyone at the table to join him. Brennan and Wedick and the Canadian girls began to sing; then the neighboring table chimed in. The crooning spread like a torch passed from hand to hand, lighting up their surroundings, until the entire place was belting out lyrics and clinking glasses. Brennan gazed across at a septuagenarian British matron wearing a string of pearls, her face beatific and lifted skyward as she sang. Amid it all stood Kitzer, a huge grin creasing his face, the maestro at the height of his powers, fully in control of the room.

  —

  Between songs, the maître d’ approached with a familiar-looking figure hovering behind him. It was the cabbie. His meter had been running for more than two hours; anxious about the ballooning fare, he was asking for partial payment.

  Kitzer was irked by the interruption, as well as the implication that he might welsh on the fare. Nearby diners watched as the cabbie haltingly explained that he’d been victimized before, but Kitzer held up a hand, dug into a pocket for his gangster roll, and peeled off enough bills to pay the fare, then dismissed the driver. The wide-eyed cabbie quickly backpedaled: He was happy to wait. He’d just gotten nervous.

  Kitzer waved him away. The spell was broken. He asked the maître d’ to call another cab.

  Once they were rolling again, Kitzer told the new driver to take them to an after-hours bar. The overstuffed cab sped out of town, eventually stopping at what seemed like a distant fishing port. The six of them emerged from the car and looked around. The only place in sight was a dingy lounge that was clearly a world away from the tourist schlock of Paradise Island. The bar’s entire clientele turned to stare as they walked in. The Junior G-Men nonchalantly led the way into a billiards room, settled around a table in the corner, and ordered drinks.