He told me his name was Flaherty, and he’d been one of three brothers who had gone through Colby College in Maine in the mid-1930s before heading off to Spain to fight General Franco and his fascists. I’m not sure I had ever heard of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade before then, but the Flaherty brothers had all joined up, part of an unlikely army of almost three thousand Americans drawn from all social castes and walks of life. Undertrained and facing Franco’s superior firepower, the brigade suffered terrible losses throughout 1937 and ’38 before the Spanish prime minister decreed that all foreign fighters were to leave the country.
I can remember asking why he and his brothers had gone, what was the lure that got them there. I was still trying to understand what was happening in Southeast Asia and the fracturing of my own country and campus.
“We were fighting fascism,” he answered, “and if we didn’t fight it in Spain, we knew we would have to fight it elsewhere in Europe. We were young. We were idealistic. We felt we needed to go over there and join the battle.”
For a while after he returned to the States, Flaherty claimed, he became almost famous. He wrote articles about his experiences, even a book; and Hitler proved his fears about fascism correct. But the road would soon turn rough. Among the anti-Franco forces in Spain, the brigade members remained heroes for decades to come. In the United States, though, many people regarded them as communist agitators, and in fact, many of them had belonged to the communist or socialist-aligned organizations that flourished in America during the dark days of the Great Depression.
To J. Edgar Hoover, for one, the Spanish Civil War was less about defeating fascism than about the Soviets using social upheaval to establish a foothold on the Iberian Peninsula, and as FBI director, Hoover had the wherewithal to make life difficult for those who had joined the fight. Flaherty told me that he had been investigated by the Bureau and subsequently blackballed by it. He would show up at some job he was supposed to get, he said, but FBI agents would have gotten there first and made certain the job disappeared. Before long, he was hitting the bottle, and the bottle led him to skid row. He stuck around our apartment for a day; then I gave him a few bucks and off he went, presumably back to the vagrant’s life he had been living for years.
I never saw him again, and I’ve never known exactly how much of his story to believe. But enough of it was true to give me a deep appreciation for the idealism of young men and women, however it’s expressed, and for the potential of government to abuse and misuse its awesome power. Flaherty might have been hooked on the sauce long before his career collapsed, but without lifting an official finger against him, the Bureau I was to eventually head had set out to undermine his work and ruin his life. No classroom could have taught me that lesson as well.
I had pretty much decided I wanted to be an attorney before I ever got to Rutgers, and I didn’t see any reason to change universities for my graduate education. I also knew Newark, where the law school was located, and would be able to live at home, where the price was right. Since I was an in-state student, the tuition was as right as it could get. Problem was, the war protests were still going on, and now they were interfering with my professional training, the real thing.
Early on, I made friends with Hubert Williams. Hubert would go on to become chief of police in Newark, New Jersey, and later head the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C., but back then he was just a Newark police lieutenant trying to slog his way through law school on the side and as frustrated as I was by all the class days lost to the Vietnam upheaval. Finally, the two of us made a sort of bargain. One day, he’d go to school, and if classes were being held, he’d call me and tell me to get myself over there. Another day, I’d reconnoiter and make the calls. The relay system saved us both a lot of time.
Hubert was helpful in another way, too. In that “Up the Establishment” era, he was just about the only fellow student I dared tell that I was thinking about signing on with what the Left considered one of the biggest pigs going: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, I’ll never forget Hubert’s response when I first tried the idea out on him: “That’s good, but don’t tell anyone!” I did, though.
Arthur Kinoy was still in his early fifties when I was at Rutgers, but he was already a living legend among constitutional and civil-rights lawyers. He started his career in the late 1940s as a lawyer for the United Electrical Workers Union. Soon he found himself on the wrong side of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its powerful chairman, Joe Pool. (There’s a famous photo of the diminutive Kinoy being dragged out of a HUAC hearing by three beefy federal marshals, one of whom has Arthur in a headlock.) He was part of the legal team that unsuccessfully tried to stop the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. From there, he moved on to participation in numerous landmark civil rights cases of the 1950s and ’60s. In 1966, he founded the Center for Constitutional Rights. A few years later, he wrote a famous appeal brief of more than five hundred pages in the case of the Chicago Seven, lambasting Judge Julius Hoffman for presiding over a mockery of justice. Not long before I met him, Arthur had won a landmark Supreme Court decision holding that Richard Nixon could not, in effect, suspend the Constitution in the name of “national security.”
Why did I choose Arthur Kinoy of all people to try out my career aspirations on? Probably because, whatever his politics, I admired him so much—his energy, his activism, his dynamic classroom manner, his piercing intellect. Besides all that, we had developed a good relationship. We liked each other. Nothing, though, quite prepared me for Arthur’s response when I confided in him that I was thinking of joining the FBI.
“What are you going to do,” he said, shaking his head, “go undercover and infiltrate them for us? Why would you want to do that?”
“I just think I could serve my country and do some good,” I told him.
He delivered his final verdict with another shake of the head: “You’re crazy.”
But Arthur didn’t despair for me entirely. Years later he told me that another of his students had come to him only a few months earlier and said that he was interested in becoming a federal judge. What should he do?
“I was thinking of you,” Arthur told me. “I told him to join the FBI.”
As to the “why” of the FBI, I think I had never quite gotten over that West New York policeman who showed up at our elementary school one day on community-service duty. It’s amazing how little classroom moments like that can color our whole lives. Hudson County, where I’d grown up, and the jobs I’d held along the way also had given me a pretty fair introduction to the underside of American life and particularly to organized crime. It was hard to walk around the block in places like Jersey City and Union City back then without rubbing shoulders with a bookie or minor capo or some other made guy, or so it seemed. What better place to pursue an interest in organized crime than with the FBI? Assuming, that is, I didn’t want to join the Bonanno family.
I realize now as I didn’t then the role that religion also played in pushing me toward the FBI. Anyone who has read this far knows I was raised in a seriously Catholic family and educated in Catholic schools. My parents, the nuns who taught me in elementary school, the Christian Brothers we were turned over to for high school, practiced a very activist faith. It wasn’t just what you believed and what you said; it was what you did that mattered. That’s what I learned during my summer mission work in Kentucky when I was a teenager; it’s what I felt reading to those kids at St. Joseph’s School for the Blind. To me, government service was a place where I could take my American values and put them into practice.
It wasn’t a crusade; I was and continue to be very conscious and very respectful of the primacy of law. The FBI wasn’t a platform for me. It was more like a calling. Given who I was and what I believed and practiced, the place just felt right to me.
What really cemented my determination to join the Bureau, though, was a job I took at the start of my second year at Rutgers Law. I’d seen the position posted on one
of the bulletin boards at school: the Newark office of U.S. Sen. Clifford P. Case was looking for a part-time clerk. The salary wasn’t much, but I already held down plenty of better-paying jobs. The clerk’s position, I thought, might give me some practical exposure to the law at the same time as it filled the gaps in my schedule caused by all the school closings and disruptions. So I applied, and Ruby Marshall, the lovely woman who ran Case’s Newark office, hired me on the spot.
Cliff Case was what was known as a Rockefeller Republican, after New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the more liberal wing of the party; and he proved to be a remarkable person. Case was a man of great character and rock-ribbed virtue. Whenever he took the train up from Washington, he would always insist on walking the half mile or so from the train station to his office in the Federal Building. Then, as now, downtown Newark had some tough neighborhoods, and the senator’s route took him right through one of them.
“Why don’t I just pick him up?” I once asked Ruby. “I’m not busy right now.”
“No,” she said, “the senator doesn’t like to have a fuss made.” And believe me, he didn’t.
At first, I just opened mail and wrote correspondence for Senator Case, but I kept getting more responsibilities during the two-plus years I worked in the office until finally I was representing Cliff Case at functions around the Newark area. But as impressive as the senator was and as much as I learned from him, working for Ruby Marshall was a great education, too. I can remember her telling me one day that the senator was a stickler for honesty and integrity. “Be very careful,” she said. “If someone sends a gift, return it and make a note. We report everything.” This was back in the early ’70s, before such reporting was required. A few weeks later I was having lunch in the cafeteria with a guy my age who was holding down a similar position upstairs in the local office of the state’s Democratic U.S. senator, Harrison Williams.
“Have you been going to the racetrack?” he asked me.
“The racetrack? Huh?”
“Oh,” he said, “we get free passes to it. We get free everything.”
I asked Ruby about it when I got back to the office, and she said, “They do get free everything and they take free everything. We don’t do that.”
Clifford Case would go on to complete four distinguished terms in the U.S. Senate before losing the Republican nomination in 1978 to Jeffrey Bell, who was subsequently defeated by Bill Bradley. Harrison Williams also would have served four terms in the Senate had he not resigned his seat in March of 1982 after being fingered in the Abscam sting operation in which FBI agents posing as Arab businessmen offered bribes to a number of politicians. Williams was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. Turns out, insisting on high ethical standards does make a difference.
Maybe the greatest contribution Ruby Marshall made to my legal education and future career was a simple suggestion that I take a little time to go downstairs in the Federal Building and meet the U.S. attorney and his staff, maybe even watch them in action at the courthouse across the street.
“If you’re interested in being a prosecutor or just a lawyer, this is a very historic time,” she told me. “They’re doing stuff that hasn’t been done in years.”
I took her up on that suggestion, too, and doing so clearly helped to set the curve of my life.
For most of the twentieth century, New Jersey wasn’t exactly famous for the aggressiveness of its U.S. Attorney’s Office. Political bosses ruled the state, corruption and organized crime flourished, and cronyism was the order of the day from top to bottom. Cliff Case helped to change all that. With Richard Nixon in the White House, Case finally got the chance to nominate a new U.S. attorney for the vacant office, and the fine man he chose, Fred Lacey, wanted nothing to do with old ways or old reputations. Lacey threw out of most of the career guys in the office and replaced them with young, tough, go-get-’em types. Once he had his team in place, he swept over the state like some kind of biblical avenging angel. Heads rolled. The political establishment screamed bloody murder. Even hardened Mafia types began to flinch and grouse, but it was all music to Fred Lacey’s ears, and the indictments just poured out.
Maybe Lacey’s most spectacular catch was the one closest at hand to the Federal Building he worked out of: Newark mayor Hugh Addonizio. A seven-term congressmen from New Jersey’s Eleventh District, Addonizio bailed out of the House in 1962 to run for mayor of the state’s largest city. In 1970, he was gearing up for a third term in office and a possible future race for governor when Lacey’s team came crashing down on him. By the time the dust had cleared, Addonizio and fourteen others had been indicted by a federal grand jury on extortion and conspiracy charges. Even more spectacular, the case tied Addonizio to one Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo, an alleged Mafia boss and the son of the infamous gang head “Richie the Boot.”
Addonizio subsequently did ten years in a federal prison, but he was far from alone among the New Jersey political elite. Under Fred Lacey and his dedicated successors, Herb Stern and Jonathan Goldstein, the convictions hit record levels, and I got to watch an amazing number of those trials. Sometimes I simply ran over to the courthouse when the Rutgers campus was in turmoil. Other times, I showed up for work across the street, and Ruby would send me straight to the courthouse so I could sit in the back and absorb it all. She knew where the great lessons were being taught.
The local FBI office was in the same federal courthouse where I watched all those trials, and it was there that I finally applied to join the Bureau. I didn’t have much choice in the matter: Bureau regulations required applicants to go through the office closest to where they lived. But over the course of the two-plus years I worked for Cliff Case and monitored Fred Lacey’s courtroom dramatics, I’d also gotten to know a number of the agents, including the impressive guy in charge of applications, Joe DiLeo, and a good thing it was because I was going to need a big helping hand.
The problem arose maybe halfway through a huge form I was required to fill out. The question looked innocent enough—“Have you ever been a member of a labor organization?”—but to me it sat there on the page like a live grenade. I remember saying to myself, What am I going to do about this?
I did, in fact, once belong to a labor organization: Local 560 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. I wasn’t ashamed of it at all. I’d had to join up provisionally so I could work on the dock, loading and unloading those eighteen-wheelers, and I’d made a lot of money over the years doing that. But Local 560 was the private fiefdom of Tony Provenzano, and Tony, better known as Tony Pro, had a reputation less than savory. He was, for starters, a blood member of the Genovese mob family. Within a year of my applying to the Bureau, Tony Pro would almost certainly play a part in—and perhaps engineer—the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, then the head of the Teamsters’ Union. Very credible evidence puts him in the car with Hoffa as it took off for the cement factory. Eventually, Tony Pro would be convicted on racketeering and murder charges, though not for the murder of Hoffa.
True to what were then the best Teamster traditions, some of Tony Pro’s protégés also shook down their own local members. Every week the shop steward would come strolling along the dock, collecting $25 from each of us for the “lottery.”
I was working with another college guy the first time it happened.
“What lottery?” he asked.
I let him know with my eyes that he should pay the money and shut up, but the lesson didn’t take well. When the shop steward came back the next week for another lottery contribution, my friend asked who had won last week’s lottery. Happily, the steward just kept walking, shaking his head at the ignorance of the educated.
“You got to understand,” I told my workmate once we were out of earshot. “There is no lottery.”
“Well, then I want my fifty bucks back.”
“Oh, no,” I told him. “You definitely do not want your money back.”
Inspired by their boss’s example, some of
the senior guys on the dock doubled as loan sharks and the like, but no one who worked there could ever forget who sat at the top of the food chain. Along this filthy, barely ventilated, hundred-yard stretch of ugly loading dock hung an oil portrait of Tony Pro all dolled up in a zoot suit. Once or twice a day, some guy would come along with a stepladder, climb up to Tony’s image, and give it a good dusting off.
Had the Newark FBI office known before this moment that I labored regularly on Tony Pro’s loading dock, they probably would have tried to work me as a 137—FBI-speak for turning me into an informant. Now, though, I was sitting in Joe DiLeo’s office, filling out an application so I could join the Bureau’s ranks. What to say? And how much? Finally, I couldn’t stand the tension.
“Mr. DiLeo,” I said, “I did belong to a labor organization that might be some trouble. Teamsters Local Five-sixty.”
“Five-sixty?” he said incredulously, peering over his glasses.
That’s it, I figured. Game’s over, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up.
“All I ever did was buy a lottery ticket,” I told him. There was no need for further explanation.
“Are you a member of organized crime?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, strictly speaking, we don’t keep track of the lottery tickets, so I wouldn’t mention it.”
I didn’t, and I got the job, and in the circular way of so many things in life, I ended up fifteen years later being the deputy in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York when the Department of Justice basically handed the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to us, not to control it but to clean it up, make it at long last a democratic institution, and assure that all those guys on the loading docks who spent so many years terrified of Tony Pro and his kind didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
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