My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  It wasn’t all good times. Dad’s combat engineering unit went ashore at Normandy on June 7, 1944—day two of the invasion—and stayed in Europe through the Battle of the Bulge, Bastogne, and more, until Allied troops finally entered Germany en masse in the early spring of 1945. He was still there in August of that year, three months after the German surrender, when his unit was ordered to Hamburg, to join a force that would soon embark for the Pacific to begin preparing for the invasion of Japan. After three and a half years away, Dad was convinced he had another three or four years to go; but the ship sailed west across the Atlantic instead. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had finally sealed the war in the Pacific, and a good thing, too, because my German-Irish father had a nice Italian girl waiting back home to marry him.

  Bernice, my mother, was first-generation Italian-American all the way. Her father, Luigi Chinciola, for whom I’m named, was raised in the little hill town of Mirabella Eclano, in Avellino Province, east of Naples. He was in his teens when his family emigrated to America near the turn of the century. Josephine Murano, my maternal grandmother and another name source (I’m Louis Joseph Freeh), was born no more than fifty miles from Luigi, in Ruoti, near Potenza, but in the Italy of a century and more ago they might as well have lived on different continents. Josephine came to the U.S. at about age seven with her parents and essentially grew up in New York. Still, like Luigi, she barely spoke a word of English when the two of them met and married around 1915. Luigi Chinciola, though, was not a man to let a mysterious foreign language get in his way.

  Luigi set himself the goal of landing a job with the federal government, the steadiest employer he could think of; then he knocked on doors and stood in lines until he found one. The job wasn’t much—he was a mail sorter deep in the bowels of the cavernous General Post Office at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, near Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden—but the job was only phase one of the plan. Day after day as he was leaving the GPO, he would stop by the vast bin of undeliverable mail and pull out old magazines, comic books, anything with pictures that could be associated with words. Then in the evening, at their apartment in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx, he and Josephine would pore over the reading matter until the words started making sense and, in time, they learned enough English to get by in the New World.

  I never knew my grandfather; he died before I was born. But I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the U.S. Postal Service thanks to him. As an assistant U.S. attorney, one of the first cases I ever got handed involved some guy who had pilfered a couple of Social Security checks out of delivered mail. The U.S. Postal Service agent who handed me the case was apologetic. Rookie prosecutors like to make a mark for themselves, he knew, and this little theft charge would never be noticed. “It’s a ‘two-check case,’” he said, in that beautiful prosecutorial shorthand that I would soon come to know and love, “but we got to take it to court.” Little did the agent know that one of the worst things you could do in my book was mess with the USPS.

  Whenever I’m over in that part of Manhattan, I make it a point to stop and admire Luigi’s old workplace. The GPO was practically new when he started there. Opened in 1913, the building was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, maybe the most famous architectural firm of its day. The row of Corinthian columns that fronts the post office is a New York landmark, but what I really admire and always repeat to myself is the motto inscribed above the columns: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

  To me, those twenty-two famous words are more than a reminder of my grandfather’s perseverance and determination; they also capture eloquently what I consider to be the first principle of public service: fidelity, courage, and sacrifice. Government doesn’t always achieve those goals—and the FBI didn’t always get there under my watch—but we never stopped trying.

  To a lesser woman, being widowed in the Bronx with two daughters to raise, thousands of miles from her homeland and much of her family, might have been a crushing blow. My mother, Bernice, had just become a teenager (a term only then coming into existence); her sister, Lydia, was younger still. Together, they must have been a handful to ride herd on, but like her late husband, Josephine Chinciola was no pushover. She had worked all along as a freelance seamstress, making and selling dresses, and between that and Luigi’s pension, she made ends meet. She didn’t stint, either, in the attention she paid to the young men who came calling on her daughters.

  Mom and Dad were both fond of ballroom dancing. They’d met at Roseland, the famous dance floor on West Fifty-second Street. Back in the Roaring Twenties, ballroom dancing was king and Roseland was the place to be. The hall made a comeback in the 1940s when it was a must-stop for Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and many other of the biggest bands of the day. In between, in the cash-strapped ’30s, Roseland hung on as a dime-a-dance joint, but for poor people like my parents-to-be, it was affordable entertainment, a place to meet someone new.

  It wasn’t long before Dad was interested in seeing Bernice Chinciola off the dance floor, but before a date could commence, he had to pass muster with my grandmother Josephine. Dad recalls the moment vividly. He drove the family car practically the length of the city, from Red Hook in Brooklyn all the way up to the Bronx, a measure of how different New York City was in those days. He was just parking out front of Bernice’s apartment building when his future mother-in-law exited the front door, heading in his direction. They met halfway, exchanged brief greetings, and then as Dad watched in wonder, Josephine marched down to the curb, notepad in hand, and proceeded to copy down his license plate number. A mother of such attractive daughters could not be too careful.

  My father survived the inspection, but the war came along before they were ready to marry. Mom wrote him every single day he was in the army. He wrote her almost as often, and she kept every one of his letters. He was barely off the ship back from Europe before they were married. Financially strapped, they moved in with grandmother Josephine, where they would stay for the next four years under her close inspection.

  Dad kicked around a number of jobs after the war. The best one might have been as a dispatcher for a Brooklyn trucking company—the business he’d been in before Pearl Harbor—but that job came to an abrupt close when he got involved in trying to organize a union. Turns out, the wise guys who controlled that part of Brooklyn wanted nothing to do with unions in general, and with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters least of all, which meant they wanted nothing to do with my dad either. A dozen years later, when I was a kid and Dad would tell the story of his brief career as a labor agitator, I would always be amazed. Why wouldn’t workers want a union to represent them and fight for better pay and conditions? But that was before my work as an FBI agent and as an assistant U.S. attorney had given me a Ph.D.-level education in wise guys and the Teamsters.

  Maybe it was his experience with the trucking company or the fact that my older brother, Bill, had just been born the year before. Maybe he was just sick of being cooped up in a small apartment with his mother-in-law. Whatever the reason (and it was probably some combination of all three factors), Dad announced one day in 1949 that it was time to move to New Jersey so the one kid already born and the others sure to come could grow up in the “country.”

  Only people used to Brooklyn and the Bronx would ever consider the part of New Jersey my parents settled on—North Bergen, in Hudson County—“country.” North Bergen did have trees, there was even some undeveloped land back then more than half a century ago, but Seventy-fourth Street was more city than suburb. Our new home was surrounded by two-and three-family houses: horizontally divided duplexes and triplexes. Our tiny frame place had been a boardinghouse, and it stayed that way. The boarders got the bedrooms on the second and third floors. The four of us—once I had come along—crowded into four or five rooms on the first floor (it depended on what you counted as a room),
and we all slept in the same bedroom. My grandmother Josephine had been left behind in the Bronx, but it didn’t take long for her to join us. As the matriarch, she got her own “bedroom,” not a whole lot bigger than a closet.

  Maybe most important, moving to New Jersey gave my dad a lifetime career. A natural salesman, he opened up a small real-estate office not far from our house, and he stayed at the business for the next forty-six years, until he finally retired just about the time of his eightieth birthday. Mom worked beside him for most of those years as his secretary. My brother Bill and I used to marvel that two people could spend so much time together and still love each other. Bill and I joined the act, too. Both of us got real-estate licenses as soon as we were out of high school so we could help Dad with the business during the summers.

  In their own very different ways, my brothers provided me with valuable lessons. Bill, older than me by a year, not only got us out of the Bronx by agreeing to be born, he also set a standard of academic and behavioral excellence for me to follow. He was the first in the family ever to go to college—the University of Detroit Mercy, founded by the Jesuits in 1877—and he didn’t stop there. His senior year in high school, Bill landed a job as a page at the NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. At college, he majored in communications, but he kept up his NBC job, mostly leading tour groups through the studios, during summer vacations. When he graduated, he put the two experiences together, became a soundman with one of the NBC News camera crews, and kept at it for more than three decades, traveling the globe, wherever news was being made.

  I’d like to write that what I learned from Bill was academic diligence and impeccable deportment. Certainly, those were the expectations he passed down to me, and in my own way, I tried to live up to them, but “try” is the key word there. At the start of every school year in our rigorously Catholic educations, some nun or brother would say to me, “I hope you’re like Bill.” But alas, at the end of the year, the same nun or brother would usually amend that to: “I wish you had been like Bill.”

  Strangely, maybe, what Bill really taught me was fearlessness. News crews go where the news is, and the news is often blood soaked. It’s the soundman who makes sure you hear the shells exploding in the background, the roar of the rioting crowd, the hurricane-force winds bearing in on some terrified coastal hamlet. Bill ended up in a lot of places most of us would pay money to avoid, but he never complained, and maybe because he didn’t, my mother never quite understood just what her oldest offspring was up to. Mom was a little naive about some things. She needed hands-on physical evidence of danger, and she thought she’d had her fill of that at my graduation in 1975 from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia.

  In what was then not much of a ceremony, new agents were handed their badges, then headed straight for the gun vault, where they were issued a revolver—in my class’s case, a Smith & Wesson 2.5-inch .38—and six rounds in a plastic envelope. (The thrill of the moment is such that I never stopped to wonder what would happen if and when the six bullets ran out.) Mom watched this ritual in utter confusion as long as she could, then asked the parents of one of my roommates, Dan Jablonski, what was happening.

  “They’re getting guns,” Mrs. Jablonski explained matter-of-factly. The Jablonskis were from rural Nebraska. Guns were part of their everyday lives.

  “They have guns?” Mom replied in horror.

  For her, that was all the evidence needed that I, not Bill, was the one in mortal peril. No matter where Bill happened to be—in Nicaragua, in the middle of a civil war; or in some hotel in Beirut with rocket-propelled grenades whizzing through his windows—Mom would always tell her friends: “My poor Louie is out there in great danger!”

  Like Bill, my younger brother, John, shook the family up just by coming into existence. For seven years, my parents had somehow made do in the same bedroom with their two sons, but the thought of adding a third child to the mix was apparently just too much for Dad. Out went the boarders, including the mysterious “Mr. Nickel,” so named because every now and again, without ever saying a word, he would press a nickel into Bill’s hand or mine. Once Mr. Nickel and the rest were gone, Dad and his brother, Ed, took sledgehammers and knocked down the long wall that separated our living quarters from the stairwell used by the boarders, and suddenly all of us boys had bedrooms of our own with space to spare.

  A year or two after that, once John was old enough to be looked after by someone else, Mom went to work permanently as Dad’s secretary, and Grandmother Josephine became our permanent baby-sitter. It wasn’t as if our parents were far away: we could easily bicycle to the real-estate office, and Dad was often in the neighborhood, selling houses. Still, in Grandma’s hands, our lives took on a slightly eccentric quality. Good Italian that she was, Josephine loved opera. Other kids in the early 1960s would come home, flip on their radios, and lose themselves in Elvis, the Drifters, or the Shirelles. We would come home to hear Enrico Caruso singing “La donna è mobile,” on Grandma’s scratchy recording of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The experience never quite left me. Later, when I was in college or law school, I would hear some aria drifting out a window, and off I’d go—as powerless to resist as the Manchurian Candidate—to the old Met to purchase standing-room tickets for whatever opera was on the bill that evening.

  Maybe because he was so much younger than the rest of us, John became the family rebel. Bill and I attended parochial schools. John wouldn’t hear of it, especially when Robert Fulton Elementary was right across the street from our home. Neither Bill nor I would have dared play hooky. John barely went to school at all. At North Bergen High School, he used his considerable intellect to figure out the absolute minimum number of days he needed to attend in order to pass up to the next grade. Then he spent every unneeded day in the park or at the local public library. We older brothers had been trustworthy altar boys. In grammar school, I must have served at least twice a week. John practically had to be dragged inside the church door.

  My parents, needless to say, were apoplectic. I can hear Dad to this day: “This is terrible. All John’s doing is cutting school. He’s an agnostic. He’ll never get into college, never amount to anything, never get a government job!” (Note the last item: Having seen his own father out of work in the Depression, Dad also considered a stable government job the highest aspiration of a working man. Even after I had become FBI director, he would go into a panic whenever I mentioned that I might take a post in the private sector.)

  None of it swayed John. He hated school; it didn’t challenge him. He saw no point in going to church if he wasn’t a believer. After squeaking his way through twelfth grade, John left home and traveled around Europe for six months. My parents figured they might not ever see or hear from him again. But John was listening to his own drum beat. He came back from Europe on time, enrolled the following fall in Fairleigh Dickinson University just up the road in Teaneck, New Jersey, and did well enough there to transfer to Georgetown University the next fall. Three years later, John graduated from Georgetown with highest honors, and then he really hit his stride. Not only did this high school rebel go on to earn his doctorate in Shakespeare and Milton from Oxford University, he also became a teacher, first at the Franciscan-run University, of Steubenville in Ohio; then at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, where he ran the campus ministry; and at Seton Hall University, back in New Jersey.

  As that lineup of colleges and universities suggests, John long ago got over his discomfort with the Catholic Church. Far from the agnostic our dad feared he was becoming, my younger brother for a time joined Opus Dei, the devout conservative lay group that Dan Brown managed to paint as some demonic fifth column of Catholicism in his best-seller, The Da Vinci Code. When it emerged that Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent who pled guilty to spying for the Soviets, was also a member of Opus Dei, a number of fringe news organizations and crackpot Internet sites speculated that my own supposed membership in the group had blinded me to Hanssen’s malfeasance or,
worse, led me to fly cover for him. Sorry, I’m not the family member who belonged to Opus Dei. That’s not what Opus Dei is about. And even if it was and I was, it wouldn’t have changed my opinion about Robert Hanssen or my approach to his case, but more about that later.

  In some ways, John has become a priest without a portfolio. Because of John, I’m less quick to judge people, more inclined to wait for the potential in them to surface.

  Other lessons and influences on my life I had to pick up on my own, sometimes the hard way. I remember to this day the officer from the West New York police force who showed up at our grammar school as part of some community relations program. (Despite its name, West New York is in New Jersey, just across from Midtown Manhattan and right next door to North Bergen.) Standing in front of the class in his uniform and badge, he told us that his job was to protect us. I was impressed by both things—the uniform and the job description—and I could see his face clear as a bell years later when word passed up to me in the FBI director’s office that eleven West New York policemen were about to be indicted on corruption charges. But I suspect I’ll remember to my dying day my first encounter with a policeman whose job was to protect the community from me.

  Our house was five blocks from Braddock Park, named for James J. Braddock, a local luminary and the heavyweight champion of the world in the mid-1930s. My good friend and schoolmate John and I went up there all the time after school, to hike or walk around, or sometimes just to throw rocks from the palisades, the steep cliffs cut eons ago by the Hudson River. We were practicing our rock hurling one afternoon when this guy came charging at us, yelling that we’d broken his window. (There were some houses down below the cliffs, but like most eight-year-olds, we weren’t too concerned with where our rocks landed.) The guy grabbed John, but I managed to elude him and take off for home. I did double back by John’s house, a block from my own, to see if somehow, magically, he had been released and gotten there ahead of me. He hadn’t, of course, and since in our house we weren’t allowed to use the phone to call other kids, all I could do was sit quietly and wait to see if the other shoe would drop. It did, right in the middle of dinner. The state trooper who rang our doorbell looked to be about eight feet tall, and as I rose from my chair and walked forward to meet him, I knew I was as finished as finished could be. My specific sin, the trooper let me know, was leaving the scene of a crime, but it was the punishment my dad dealt out after he was gone that left the greater impression.