Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  Johnson settled at a table at a white-tablecloth Manhattan restaurant one night when Kitzer was particularly chatty. After working his way through a steak, then dessert, then coffee, only to glimpse Kitzer still chatting across the room, Johnson was stumped. Finally it hit him that the place had a humidor. He whiled away the rest of the dinner meeting puffing on a stogie, ignoring the unsubtle looks of displeasure from his waiter.

  Operation Fountain Pen was like that: It could be unnerving, exciting, exhausting, and befuddling—all in a single day. “No one had done this stuff before,” Johnson said, “and you’re early enough in your career that more than anything it’s a bit of a heady experience.”

  That day in suburban Cleveland, Wedick had made plans to meet Johnson during his jog. They’d picked Highland Park Cemetery, located down the street from the Shaker House, for a rendezvous. Wanting to work up a sweat, J.J. ran for a couple of miles before looping into the cemetery, looking back repeatedly to make sure no one was trailing him. Satisfied that he was alone, he started looking for Johnson, who was supposed to be pretending to be paying respects to a loved one. J.J. had told Johnson not to acknowledge him unless he approached and said it was okay. If he thought he was being followed, he would just run by.

  But he didn’t see Bowen anywhere. What the hell is this? J.J. thought. At more than six feet tall with a powerful farm-boy build and dark hair, Johnson was hard to miss. J.J. slowed to a walk, trying to figure out what to do—he had forty-five minutes, tops, before he would need to be back, and he’d already run for thirty or more. Just then, Johnson popped out from behind a tomb, startling him.

  “Jesus, Bowen!” J.J. said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  —

  That evening, as Phil, Jack, J.J., and Mucci sat in the Shaker House restaurant, a mellowness pervaded the room. But the languorous mood ended when D’Amato stalked in and began pacing around, fixated on his delinquent mortgage. He fumed about Pro, and the money he’d promised, and about why Trident’s schtick would never last: Pro always had to repay a certain number of advance fees when the heat got too high. “Rob Peter to pay Paul,” D’Amato said. “Keep the cycle going. But it won’t work, ’cause I tried the same thing.

  “I was in the same business, and what happened? You always spend the deposit money as soon as it comes in, and people get angry. They start screaming, and the deal just doesn’t work like that.”

  As he was talking, D’Amato repeatedly kicked an empty beer can against a wall.

  “Andy, I’ll explain to you what your schtick is,” Phil said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Someday,” Phil said, “when this case gets before a jury and they’re listening to the evidence, the only thing someone is going to be able to testify about…is that Andrew D’Amato was playing kick the can in the restaurant.”

  Everyone laughed.

  The next day, Phil and the agents left. The money order likely wouldn’t clear for another ten or twelve days. Before they split up at the airport, Phil offered J.J. and Jack another piece of advice: If they were ever questioned about the $110,000, they should say they were absent when the promoters discussed it and had no idea what was going on.

  —

  Dorian Mangiameli flew back to New York with a document for Pro instead of the $80,000. It was the letter D’Amato had brought home from London. It read:

  Dear Mr. D’Amato,

  We refer to the meeting we have had in London concerning a guarantee request by Iverson Inc. for an amount of up to U.S. Dollars $2.5 million in favor of Ambassador Factors Corporation.

  As we have only received the information on this company in the last two days and because of the holidays in London due to the Jubilee, it will not be possible for us to make an offer for your client until next Thursday, 9 June 1977.

  We wish to make clear that we are prepared to make such offer only on the basis of a Standby Loan commitment for 3 years for which we would establish reserves by depositing the necessary amount of money with prime international banks of our choice in London. Such deposit will constitute only the reserves of Eurotrust and would not be pledged or hypothecated in favour of Ambassador Factors Corporation. The proceeds of the deposit on the last maturity date after 3 years would be assigned to AFC.

  We look forward to seeing you next week.

  Yours faithfully, for and on behalf of Euro-Afro-Asiatic Trust,

  G. R. Lanciault, Managing Director

  Pro read the letter in shock. This was supposed to be the key that opened the vault to Iverson. Instead, the Eurotrust people were bridging him—using his own stall tactics!—and had even co-opted Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee and his use of pedantic vocabulary words like “hypothecated.”

  “[W]hen Dorian gave me this,” he said, “…I really figured I got stuck. I checked with Mr. Guthrie and he told me I could wipe my ass with it. It was the most ridiculous thing he ever seen in his life, and I got took.”

  He chafed for years afterward. “They really ripped me off,” Pro said later. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I rip off other people, but I thought there was some standard of honor among con men.”

  —

  Phil and the Junior G-Men returned to Cleveland a few days later, on June 18. Mucci had sent word that the bank in Tribune, Kansas, had wired the $110,000 to his account. Kitzer told him to have $5,000 ready when he arrived—a quarter of his cut.

  The next day, Phil and the agents met Bendis with his wife and two kids at the Shaker House bar. Mucci was out of town at a funeral but had left Phil’s money. Bendis gestured toward an adjoining ballroom, and he and his wife and Phil walked in, leaving Jack and J.J. behind. Bendis’s two kids played a game by the revolving door. After a minute, the agents crept up to the window in the doorway and watched the threesome in the center of the ballroom.

  Bendis asked his wife to hand Phil a brown Central National Bank envelope. “I’m glad to get rid of that,” Bendis said. “That is a hot item to handle.”

  Phil removed several hundred-dollar bills and tucked them into his pocket.

  Mrs. Bendis murmured, “Oh, so much money.”

  “Well, for all the grief and aggravation we gave you sending Bob away to London, here, get yourself a dress,” Phil said. He handed her two hundred dollars.

  The three of them rejoined Jack and J.J. “Gee, that was a good deal,” Bendis said. “We should get one like that once a week. It came just in time. I was almost at the end of my rope.”

  J.J. smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “You don’t know how bad we needed it.”

  —

  On Monday, Kitzer, Bendis, and Mucci climbed into Bendis’s car to head for Mucci’s bank. They stopped at a diner en route, and at a table inside, Mucci said, “Okay, Phil, how are we going to cut this up, the $110,000?”

  “Are you bound and determined to take the whole $110,000?”

  “Absolutely,” Mucci said. “I’ll not return one dime to Fred Pro.”

  “Armand, this is going to bring heat,” Phil said. “You’re not going to jerk that $80,000 away from Fred just that easy.”

  Mucci nodded. “I can handle any heat that Fred puts out.”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “I don’t care about the FBI.”

  Phil suggested that they leave $60,000 in the bank until they had a chance to see how Pro reacted.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Bendis said.

  “Okay, I’ll go along with that program,” Mucci said. “But I don’t care what happens. I won’t return the money.”

  At the bank, Phil took the balance of his $20,000. Mucci cleared up his overdraft and picked up $17,000 for D’Amato’s house, then withdrew some for himself and Bendis.

  Four more days passed before Pro realized that the money order had been cashed. On June 24, Bernard Baker called to ask about his loan. Pro had started explaining that he was having trouble clearing the money order—Mucci had told him as much earlier that day—when Baker informed him tha
t, in fact, it had been cashed in Cleveland, and the money was now sitting in an account at Central National in the name of Armand Mucci.

  Fuming, Pro called Mucci and demanded that he send back the balance of $80,000. They began shouting at each other. Mucci told Pro, “You ripped off somebody, so how do you like it when we rip you off for a change?”

  As Pro bellowed a reply, Mucci said, “Fuck you,” and hung up.

  Pro called back repeatedly, but Mucci wouldn’t answer. Fred seethed. His coveted Iverson deal had fallen through, and now he’d lost the $110,000.

  He picked up the receiver again. This time Pro dialed Joe Trocchio, his sometime mob muscle. He would not let this thievery stand.

  —

  Brennan and Wedick headed home to Indiana on June 20, but they had barely returned to their lives when Phil called again. He wanted them to accompany him to Haiti to work on starting up First National City Bank. They’d been expecting this: With Seven Oak on the verge of burning out, Phil was hungry to get the new vehicle running, but they needed a break. The travel was murderous: two weeks, then ten days, then nearly three weeks, during which Jack slipped off his wedding ring and had little contact with Becky, and J.J. abandoned a romantic interest in his apartment building.

  Phil’s neediness was easier for J.J. to handle. He now saw that he could build his future around this case, and he burrowed so deeply into the work that he scarcely noticed the absence of any personal life. After they returned home and caught a breath, he collared Jack to go to Indianapolis for meetings, and to finish reports and catch up on paperwork. They often returned home so late that Jack flopped on J.J.’s couch for the night.

  Even still, they both struggled to fulfill their basic obligations—especially the routine paperwork. Jack found this aspect of the job particularly problematic. He had a tendency to start things and not finish them, and the scrap heap on his desk now resembled the aftermath of a rockslide.

  At one point Jack submitted a reimbursement voucher for more than $7,000 that he’d charged on his personal American Express. Each expense was supposed to be assigned to an open case. “Jack would just say, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, just put ‘Miami, $4,000,’ ” J.J. recalled. Then he would send the invoice to the FBI’s accounting office (run by the infamous Cox brothers, widely referred to as “the Cox-suckers,” who were notorious for bouncing expense vouchers that had a single out-of-place number).

  Inevitably, the form soon reappeared in Jack’s box stamped with the word DISALLOWED. He regarded the paper as if it carried news of an office smallpox outbreak. Although J.J. also went months without submitting travel vouchers, he laughed at Jack’s palpable allergy to the bureau’s box-checking ways. The only letter of censure Jack ever received was for not submitting paperwork in a timely manner.

  “Nobody’s caring about your AmEx bill, okay, Jack?” J.J. said, laughing. “It’s the harsh truth, get over it.”

  Sometimes the demands, the stress, and the pull of different worlds created friction. J.J. wanted to work long days, even when they had time away from Phil—they had prosecutors to meet with, strategies to discuss. There was always another task. At some level he knew the case was consuming him, but he didn’t care. Work, he later acknowledged, was “almost like an addiction.”

  Jack, meanwhile, wanted to go home and relax and see Becky and his sons after spending so much time on the road. He was acutely aware that his boys went without seeing his face for long stretches. He also enjoyed meals on a conventional three-a-day schedule, while J.J., who now ate only dinner, chafed at his partner’s food breaks.

  One day, everything boiled over. The agents retreated to a conference room in a far corner of the office and began screaming at each other. Even from behind the closed door, the shouting was so loud that everyone sitting nearby stopped working and looked at one another in alarm. No one had seen Jack get angry before. Eventually someone went to find Frank Lowie, who tentatively knocked on the door: “Are you guys all right in there?”

  Lowie opened it halfway. J.J. and Jack looked over, flushed and startled. They said yes, sure, they were fine. They just needed to blow some lava out of the cone.

  18

  The Hit Man

  JULY 1, 1977

  J.J. Wedick pulled his car into the parking lot at Patoka Lake, opened his door, and breathed in the humid night air. Even he needed a break now and then, and he’d been looking forward to the long Independence Day weekend for weeks. His friend and roommate Kim Jordan had rented a houseboat to take out onto the eighty-eight-hundred-acre lake in southern Indiana. It was around ten when J.J. arrived, and the two men decided to crash on the boat and pick up supplies in the morning while they awaited their other friends’ arrival. J.J.’s only ambition for the weekend was to sip a beer and catch the Fourth of July fireworks from the deck. Jack was with his family, and Phil was home in Minnesota.

  J.J. woke to a warm, muggy morning, eager to push out onto the water. While waiting for the others to show, he walked to the park’s pay phone to call his answering service. There was a message from Dorian Mangiameli, at the end of which he said, “Oh, and stay out of Cleveland this weekend.”

  Hanging up the phone, J.J. pondered what that was about. He sighed and decided he’d better find out. When Dorian answered in New York, he was circumspect: There was some trouble in Cleveland, but he couldn’t elaborate. J.J. peppered him with questions until Mangiameli blurted the news: Pro had put out a contract on Armand Mucci’s life. He was going to have Mucci whacked.

  After saying good-bye, J.J. groaned, leaned his forehead against the phone, and absorbed the bombshell. He was astonished. He’d known Pro would be furious about losing $80,000, but this?

  Walking back to his car, J.J. thought through the dynamics of the situation. He needed to pass the news to the bureau. If Mucci turned up dead in the middle of the undercover operation, OpFoPen would be finished, and the FBI administrators and the media would go crazy. The spotlight would hit J.J. and Jack: How did these agents allow this to happen?

  So J.J. had to send word to Indianapolis. But when he did, he wanted to be able to say that he was on top of the situation and had a solution. He figured he had twelve hours. He told Jordan he was sorry, then jumped into his car and drove the three hours to Indianapolis. After checking into the Hyatt Regency, he started working the phones. He called Mangiameli back to see what else he could learn, then made calls throughout the day, contacting every promoter he could think of to find out what people had heard.

  No one was saying much, but J.J. extracted enough to confirm the rumor. He called Jack and Phil and suggested that Kitzer call Mucci and Pro and have them get together to resolve it. Then J.J. called all the promoters again, this time not as inquisitor but as confidant: “Hey, did you hear about what Fred’s doing?”

  The more people knew what was going on and, in turn, asked Pro whether it was true, the less likely Pro would be to go through with it. The next step was to have someone in the FBI office in Cleveland warn Mucci about the contract—J.J. figured that enough people knew at that point that they wouldn’t suspect that he was the source.

  —

  The next day, J.J. drove his bureau-issued blue Thunderbird to the arrival gate at O’Hare International Airport to pick up Jack. Phil had come up with a last-minute plan to fly to New York so they could try to make sure Pro had reined in his murderous impulses. J.J. kept hearing that the hit was off, then that it was on again. Phil didn’t want to be associated with any violence, and he wanted Pro to stay out of trouble for selfish reasons: Pro was going to buy Seven Oak.

  They’d been discussing this for a few weeks. Fred had agreed to the asking price of $200,000, with a down payment of $20,000.

  Phil wasn’t due to arrive from Minnesota for a few hours, so the agents anticipated having some time to catch up privately. They drove to where Phil’s connecting flight would arrive, and Jack hopped out to unload their bags. J.J. figured he’d stash the car in a remote lot while Jack bought the tick
ets.

  J.J. had just dropped his suitcase on the sidewalk when Jack hissed, “Jim!”

  He looked up, startled. Jack was facing the opposite direction, toward the airport exit. His eyes widened, and he whispered, “Kitzer!”

  Phil had changed his plans. Again. They would soon learn that John Packman, who ran Seven Oak, had managed to clear up his visa issues and had prevailed on Phil to meet to straighten out the bank’s books ahead of its sale. Phil had canceled the New York trip and instead flown to Chicago early to meet Packman and a British accountant they could trust. They would all work in an airport hotel for a couple of days.

  J.J. slammed the trunk shut and hustled into the driver’s seat, trying not to look hurried. He called out the window, “Okay, I’ll return the car, Jack!”

  As he started the engine, J.J. could hear Phil calling out, “Hey, J.J., wait!”

  Without looking back, he stomped on the gas pedal. From a certain distance, it was obvious the Thunderbird was a law enforcement vehicle—the elaborate dashboard radio system alone gave it away. But he wasn’t sure how close Phil had come. J.J. glimpsed him as a shrinking figure in his rearview mirror, waving, as he rounded a corner and disappeared out of sight. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

  Jack would have to think fast on his end, too, to explain why J.J. had taken off.

  J.J. parked and sat for a moment in a far corner of O’Hare’s long-term lot, taking a couple of deep breaths. That was probably their closest call yet. After he’d settled down, he walked to the shelter where a shuttle would pick him up and deliver him back to the gate. When he found the others, he acted surprised. “Phil! I didn’t know you were here!” he said, grinning. “You came early?”

  “I was yelling for you!” Phil said. “We could’ve used that car.”

  Jack stepped in. He said he’d just told Phil that J.J. had returned their rental car because they still thought they were flying to New York. It was all a misunderstanding.