Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  Wedick and Brennan exchanged wary looks. It was amazing how quickly things could turn in Phil’s company. Not an hour ago, they’d been singing “Oklahoma” with British aristocracy. Now they sensed an unwelcome vibe in a dive bar beyond American jurisdiction where they’d gone without the knowledge of their U.S. Department of Justice employers. With three Canadians. The situation had all the ingredients of a spectacular international incident.

  The women passed around a large, decorative ceramic Paradise Island ashtray they’d found on the table—they thought it was a cool souvenir. The six of them did their best to chat unself-consciously and sip their drinks even as a patron approached and asked what they were doing there. At that point, Brennan convinced Phil that they should leave. They were all hustling toward the exit when someone yelled, “Hey, you!”

  Everyone stopped. The group turned toward the unhappy-looking figure standing behind the bar—probably the owner. He was looking at Phil, who grinned and said, “Who, me?”

  “Yeah! Put it back.”

  Phil stood there for a moment, motionless. Everyone looked from him to the owner, confused.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Underneath your coat.”

  Phil said, “Oh, this?”

  He pulled a small plastic ashtray from his blazer and held it aloft. “Oh, I was just taking this for the girls,” he said. He placed the tray on a table, and then they turned and left.

  Outside, Wedick turned to Phil. “Are you crazy? We were gonna get killed in there.”

  The six of them circled up outside the cab. Phil grinned and reached into the other side of his jacket.

  “Fuck those guys,” he said. He produced the larger ashtray the girls had coveted. Everyone stood there, stunned, as he handed it to one of the women. They all stared at it while the girls giggled, and then everyone hurried back into the cab and the driver peeled away into the sultry night.

  —

  Becky Brennan was cold. That year’s pitiless Indiana winter was particularly punishing for a child of the Deep South.

  After returning to the Midwest, she’d rented a small apartment in Chesterton, outside Gary; she’d felt awkward about going back to Crown Point. She settled in with beanbag chairs and a card table, and took the boys sledding on a tiny hill in the middle of the apartment complex, with just enough slope to harness some gravity. “I had never experienced snow like that,” she said. “[Jack] would be gone and I would be shoveling….It becomes ice, and I didn’t know how to do it, and it was just miserable.” She watched the boys for as long as she could stand before rounding them up and retreating inside. She prayed a lot. She prayed for spring. She prayed for things to work out with Jack.

  The couple talked about reconciling, but at first Jack was immersed in a demanding trial, and after long days in court he needed to strategize with the prosecutors, so he often slept at Wedick’s or with another buddy. “He was,” Becky said, “just doing his thing still.”

  Becky had forgiven Jack, but Jack was not so clear about where they stood. The heart wants what it wants—but sometimes it takes time to figure things out. “It just took quite a while for him to trust I was really not going to walk out,” Becky said. “If I was the same person, he wasn’t really interested in trying to work it out.”

  Becky was intent on showing that she was committed. She was relieved when Jack finished his long trial, figuring they would have time to explore a détente. So she was surprised when he started in on an undercover case and couldn’t tell her what it entailed, for her own safety and his. Initially it had just been a couple of meetings, nothing more. But now the travel and duration were open-ended. This time, he left for a few days of training, then started into his case and had been gone for well over a week. “It’s just not an easy thing to repair the marriage when he’s gone all the time,” she said, “plus not knowing where he was, what he was doing.”

  She understood that this was part of the deal. That didn’t make it less hard.

  Jack had never taken on a case like this one before, nor had anyone else she knew, and Becky wondered about its dimensions, its risks. Playing with the boys, she found herself distracted by questions of where he was and whether he was safe.

  Now she prayed for him to come home soon, because even though he had to keep his work secret, she had so much to share—in particular, one piece of news that reached to the core of everything they were trying to do and figure out together. She was pregnant.

  —

  The agents didn’t know it yet, but Kitzer’s life was filled with similar complexities—with the same kind of conflicting forces and tensions. His parents had emigrated from Hungary when they were quite young; his father, Fulop, was in his teens when he arrived in Chicago and Americanized his name to Phillip. He found work as a bricklayer and married; his wife, Helen, raised their kids. Although the family grew fast, Phillip’s mind was too hungry to settle for manual labor. As they sank taproots into the city, he mined an entrepreneurial vein. The 1940 census lists him as the operator of his own real estate agency. Shortly after that, he would morph into a bail bondsman.

  Phillip Karl Kitzer, the fifth of seven children but the first son, was born on March 5, 1933. When he and his father went into business together, people called him Junior to avoid confusion. Junior was a fast learner who had little use for school, preferring to put his mind toward making money. He was only seven when he started selling magazines and working as a shoeshine boy in South Chicago—but he soon upgraded from polishing wingtips to renting out kits to others.

  He dropped out of high school after the tenth grade to join his father’s bail-bond business. One afternoon, a friend brought Kitzer along to Woolworth’s to pick up a girl he was dating who worked an after-school job there. Helen Braun had dark, wavy hair and a bright, attractive smile. A few days later, Kitzer called and asked her out. She initially said no because she was seeing their mutual friend, but Kitzer kept calling, and finally she caved. He was fun to be around and exuded an irresistible charisma, and they were seeing each other regularly in 1953 when he was drafted into the army.

  While stationed at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, Kitzer phoned Helen to pitch a crazy idea: He wanted her to quit her job and move to Georgia to get married. Again she resisted, but again she eventually caved in. During a seven-day leave that Fourth of July weekend, he flew home for a ceremony and a brief honeymoon. He was twenty; she was nineteen. “It was stupid, stupid, stupid,” Helen would say later. “But at the time it was the normal thing to do.”

  When Kitzer was discharged in March 1955, they moved back to Chicago, and Helen gave birth to their first son, Phillip Michael, later that year. Kitzer, now a father at twenty-two, became a licensed bail bondsman, following his father’s path. Then he found a book published by the state of Illinois that covered the requirements for becoming an insurance broker. “I bought the book,” he later recalled, “read it four or five times, took the test and passed it.”

  Kitzer took a job as a door-to-door salesman with State Farm Insurance in 1956, solely to find out how the agents there obtained their business. After four months, he split off on his own and became an independent agent selling casualty, life, and auto policies, among others, on behalf of various insurance companies—collecting commissions along the way. Then he became what’s known as an attorney in fact—a person authorized to perform transactions on another party’s behalf—for a handful of insurance companies. He wrote surety bonds and fidelity bonds and was eventually given power to commit the companies for expensive policies. One agency authorized him to write policies for as much as half a million.

  Soon Junior expanded his role in his father’s business, which had blossomed. From early on, the elder Kitzer knew it was possible to profit from the Chicago Police Department’s rampant corruption. A bond agency he worked for in the 1950s was one of two investigated by a grand jury for apparent monopolies in federal narcotics cases. The bail-bond agents were thought to be giving kickbacks to
the cops in exchange for business referrals.

  In 1959, a Cook County grand jury investigated Phillip Kitzer and his sons, Phil and Joe. At the time, the Kitzers were writing more than half the bonds posted in Chicago’s federal court. Jimmy Hoffa was among their clients. But the father deflected guilt by spreading the story that, to the contrary, he was the honest businessman treading water in a sea of venality. “I’ve been telling a lot of people who are now in trouble over this what would happen to them,” he told a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, “and it has happened….It has gotten to the point where a man who wants to run his business according to the law, and with a little self-respect, has got the choice of going broke or changing his morals.”

  Junior and Helen welcomed two more children into their brood. Phil Kitzer was a solid, stable husband and father. Helen sometimes suffered from debilitating migraines, so he took over the chores of cleaning the house, feeding the kids, packing them off to school.

  But on the job, Kitzer had fully grasped the nuances of the insurance game, and in the summer of 1961, a newfound ambition began to take hold. He and his father and brother sought to open an automobile-insurance firm in Chicago. They filled out a loan application at Exchange National Bank in Chicago for the $200,000 they’d need to get started. But the bank officer demanded a $25,000 kickback.

  “So I said, ‘That’s all right,’ ” Junior later recounted. “So I gave him $25,000. He gave me two hundred [thousand]. Then I wanted to borrow more money from him. It became a steady thing. Every time I borrowed money I had to pay him. At that point I didn’t know how to reverse it any longer.” In total, he said, he kicked back around $70,000.

  “From then,” he said, “I learned how bankers think.”

  Phil Kitzer was then asked: Did those events force him into a life of crime?

  “I won’t say I was forced into it,” he replied. “I’ll just say that it happened.”

  —

  Down in the Bahamas, Kitzer greeted his protégés on March 11 with some welcome news. Captain Jack Elliott had called from Los Angeles reporting that the Jimmy Kealoha deal was back on, and they needed to hop on a flight to California. Brennan and Wedick, enormously relieved, quickly packed their bags.

  But when they climbed into a cab, Phil pointed out that they had some time to burn before the flight and suggested they stop for a last Yellow Bird. This had become a running joke. Everyone in Nassau seemed to be drinking the orange-juice-and-rum drinks named after the Harry Belafonte song. “Let’s have a Yellow Bird” was their shorthand for going out, even if they never ordered one. Brennan and Wedick didn’t care to go partying—it was barely past noon—but there was no talking Kitzer out of it.

  Kitzer ordered the cabbie to stop as they reached a large resort. Climbing out of the cab, they could hear music shuddering and saw tourists carrying towels through the lobby. Kitzer nodded to Wedick and Brennan to follow the crowd, and rounding a corner, he stopped and smiled. A band was playing, and besotted patrons were lunging into the pool and sitting under umbrella-shaded tables, clutching drinks from the poolside bar.

  Kitzer viewed his first moments walking into scenes like this one as critical. His primary objective was to find an open seat next to a table full of women. That wasn’t an option here—the room was packed—so he settled on a barstool and laid out his lighter. Then he began his routine of buying drinks, lighting cigarettes, pulling two strangers together to dance, or escorting someone onto the floor. Recently he had started incorporating Wedick into his act. Kitzer would approach a woman and say, “My friend likes you.” Or he would tug Wedick into a crowd and say something outrageous or provocative. Wedick disliked this, but he found it challenging to escape.

  Now Kitzer leaned toward the others. “You know, we don’t have to catch this flight,” he said. It was Friday afternoon, so they could stay at the beach until Sunday, then fly to Los Angeles in time for work on Monday. Wedick smiled tightly. Two more days AWOL would be slow torture. But it wasn’t so easy to come up with a compelling reason why they needed to leave: He and Brennan had no families or jobs to get back to, as far as Phil knew.

  Wedick blurted out the only thing he could think of: “This scene is over, Phil. Southern California has even more women and places to party.”

  Kitzer conceded that they could use a change of venue. Seizing the moment, the Junior G-Men hauled him to the taxi he’d kept waiting, saying they could still catch the flight if they hustled.

  When they reached Miami, Wedick slipped off the plane ahead of the others and sprinted to call the office. Brennan, tasked with the role of distracting Kitzer, would have no chance to call Becky. By then she was getting used to his enigmatic travel schedule, but he still would’ve embraced the chance to let her know that they were okay. He reminded himself to focus on the next task. That was all he could do.

  Wedick reached Bowen Johnson, who’d recently replaced him as Operation Fountain Pen’s case agent. After the Cleveland debacle, Wedick had asked out of the administrative work, saying it was too much to juggle with the undercover role. His bosses had chosen Johnson, an unflappable southerner who had recently transferred to Indianapolis after several years as the senior resident agent in Terre Haute.

  Johnson sounded both apoplectic and sick with worry. Wedick had expected this, of course, but he and Brennan were lucky: It was late Friday afternoon, which meant that even though Indianapolis was furious, Johnson and the others would be ready to start their weekend.

  Wedick’s time working as a clerk in New York had taught him a few administrative tricks. He knew that Hoover-era supervisors told their wives never to answer the phone on a Friday night, in case it was the office—whoever was calling would just find a different supervisor. Orville Watts would be unreachable by now. Wedick just had to let everyone know they were okay and ward off any kind of communication to headquarters indicating they were missing.

  Johnson started shouting questions and orders: Where the hell had they been? What did they think they were doing? They better get their asses back to the office immediately.

  “Look, Bowen,” Wedick said, cutting him off, “it’s almost five o’clock on Friday, and nobody gives a shit until Monday morning.”

  “You have to come back now!” Johnson bellowed.

  “Listen. Former case agent to present case agent: We’ll be there at eight o’clock Monday morning, guaranteed, but it ain’t happening right now. We can’t.”

  “I’m ordering you!”

  Wedick glanced at the gate. Brennan and Kitzer had emerged from the tunnel and were looking around.

  “Bowen, I’m hanging up the phone, but we’ll be there,” Wedick said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  Johnson was still shouting as Wedick plunked the receiver down and walked over to join the others. Sure, everyone would still be apoplectic on Monday morning, but that was a problem for Monday—for now, they had plenty to worry about with Kitzer. And anyway, Brennan and Wedick and some of their colleagues had a running joke. Whenever they pushed up against the rules, they would shrug and say, “What are they gonna do, send me to Gary?”

  Kitzer went to the counter to get their tickets for their next leg. In 1977, air travel was a more casual undertaking than it would become in the era of Homeland Security. All you needed was a valid ticket for whatever flight you were taking.

  When Kitzer returned, Brennan and Wedick looked at their National Airlines tickets and chuckled. According to their boarding passes, they would be flying to Los Angeles as Mr. Mutt and Mr. Jeff.

  11

  Rip Off Hawaii

  MARCH 22, 1977

  The elderly couple murmured appreciatively as they toured the penthouse suite in the Fontainebleau Hotel. Andy D’Amato made sure they saw every square foot; the foyer alone was nearly as big as many hotel rooms, he pointed out. There was a kitchen and a dining room with a chandelier and a living room with couches, and there were several bedrooms. The terrace overlooked Miami Be
ach and the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually Jimmy Kealoha and his wife, Miulan, who insisted that everyone call her Mama, settled on a set of circular couches across from D’Amato and Kitzer.

  The Hawaii scam had come back together with a thunderclap abruptness. About a week after Wedick and Brennan had finally flown home from their zigzag journey through the Bahamas and on to Los Angeles, Kitzer had received a call from the Kealohas. The couple, who also ran a papaya farm, apologized for having missed their earlier meeting in Miami and said they still wanted to get together. They were still seeking financing for the Waikiki Beach development. Kitzer called around, located D’Amato in Miami and the Junior G-Men in Indiana, and suggested they again try to meet in Florida.

  Once they arrived, Kitzer kept Brennan and Wedick downstairs, out of concern that the Hawaiians would be overwhelmed by too many new faces. But after asking about the Kealohas’ flights and the weather in Hawaii, D’Amato introduced someone Kitzer had never seen before. Mark Iuteri was brawny, in his late thirties, with a thick head of puffy dark hair and a mustache. D’Amato said he was an appraiser, but he didn’t look the part.

  The Hawaiians began to detail the project, handing out a bound proposal that included an appraisal from John Child & Company, a large and reputable firm. Kitzer had warned D’Amato that this presentation was interminable. D’Amato held up a hand. “Listen, Jimmy,” he said. “I know all about your project. I’ve checked it out….We’re late into this thing already two weeks.”

  D’Amato said there was one issue: He first needed to do an on-site inspection. The Kealohas would have to pay his travel expenses to Honolulu, plus $1,500 a day regardless of whether the takeout came through. Also, the appraisal the Kealohas had acquired was inadequate. Fortunately, he said, Mark Iuteri was certified by the Master Appraisers Institute and the Eurotrust would readily accept his work—which would cost the Kealohas $25,000 plus travel and expenses.