My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  When as director of the FBI I was asked to recommend someone to head up the independent review board that was eventually appointed to operate the union, I knew exactly who I wanted—the guy I’d spent so many days watching from the back of the courtroom when he was the U.S. attorney in Newark and later a great federal judge there: Fred Lacey. And, of course, just to complete the circle all the way, the president of the Teamsters’ Union today is the son of the man Tony Pro probably helped encase in cement: Jimmy Hoffa Jr.

  The FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia, shares a large swath of federal land with the U.S. Marine Corps base of the same name, but the academy is far closer to being like a college campus than a boot camp. The sixteen-week program was divided into three parts. The academic instruction focused on how the Bureau does its communicating (back then, almost entirely by teletype and memo), how to write a report and conduct an interview, and a lot of instruction on the legal elements of investigations and prosecutions. (In those days, only about 5 to 10 percent of recruits had law degrees, so I had a leg up on the legal side.) The physical training included distance running, a gym program that featured rope climbing and shuttle runs, and general fitness. Firearms required us to qualify with a .38-caliber revolver from fifty yards away, no small feat.

  The biggest issue for a lot of us, though, wasn’t making it through the training program but where we were going to be assigned once we completed it. For me, there was no question. I wanted to go to New York City. My family would be nearby, and I had grown up on the outskirts of the city. Thanks to my Newark experiences and my days as a member in good standing of Local 560, I’d gotten the organized-crime bug, and if you wanted to bring down the wise guys, you had to go where they were most likely to gather. That was New York and environs, for sure.

  In theory, bucking for the New York office should have given me a high chance of success. As exciting as the city is, most new agents would rather have gone anywhere else. In any other American city, the FBI is the law-enforcement kingpin, but in the Big Apple, the Bureau has to compete with a local police department of over forty thousand people—including its own organized-crime unit—plus two U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the offices of five different district attorneys. Unless you really know what you’re doing or, like me, had a free place to stay just across the river, New York is also the most expensive assignment going, and the FBI office there is so large that you can end up in some very specialized niche out of which you can never move.

  In practice, landing a New York assignment had been brutally tough for a number of years, not because anyone wanted the jobs but because no one in New York wanted to take on first-year guys. The office had become packed with careerists who didn’t want the apple cart upset. But attrition had begun to take a heavy toll, and all of a sudden space had opened up. Nine of the twenty-four of us in my class at the academy were assigned to New York, an almost unheard-of number. One of them was a young lawyer from New York, Lew Schiliro, who would later become the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of our New York office and one of the best agents ever in the FBI. Twenty-six years later we would work together at MBNA.

  We graduated in August 1975, were handed our badges, then went to the gun vault, where we were issued our .38s and six rounds of ammunition sealed in a plastic envelope, at which my mother almost fainted dead away for fear that her Louie was about to become a gunfighter. And with that, most of the nine piled in one old car with our small arsenal of unloaded Smith & Wesson 2.5-inch .38 revolvers—we weren’t allowed to put the bullets in until we got to our assignment—and set off up Interstate 95 for the big city and our first brush with the bad guys and the real world. Except that it didn’t quite work that way.

  In New York, we were entrusted to the care of Bob Sweeney, a wonderful agent who opened the first meeting with the news that no one in the office wanted to work with us.

  “You need experience,” he said. “You can’t just hit the street coming out of Quantico.”

  Then Sweeney asked us all for our guns.

  “What?” we said, shocked. We’d just gotten them.

  “Your guns—give them to me. I don’t want you to shoot anyone by mistake.”

  “Uh, Mr. Sweeney?” one of my fellow graduates asked as our new supervisor was locking our guns in the office safe.

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like the bullets, too?”

  “Geez,” he said, “you’re walking around New York with unloaded guns? That’s nuts!”

  I’d made no bones about my desire to work in the organized-crime section. I wanted to be out hitting the pavement, doing the things I had been dreaming about doing all through the academy. Someone must have been listening because before long one of the senior agents grabbed a handful of us new guys and asked if we wanted to work the “street.”

  “The street? Yeah! Sure!” I said. And thus I got the first assignment I was ever to get in the Bureau I would come to lead eighteen years later: parking cars.

  The office in those days was located at a fashionable Upper East Side address—201 East Sixty-ninth Street—in a building shared with Hunter College. For subway riders, it was terrific. We were practically on top of the E train. But driving to work was another matter. No one wanted to pay to park, but finding legal spots on the nearby streets could take up hours each week. For long periods, the New York police were happy to accommodate us: the office would bundle up its parking tickets, take them to some precinct house, and the violations would disappear. Sometimes, though, the NYPD got tired of playing footsie, or was mad at us for something, or just wanted the revenue. We were in one of those down periods when I arrived, which is why I was called into action.

  I’d wait downstairs behind this little desk. The guys would come in and throw their keys on it, and I’d have to race off and find their cars—some couldn’t be bothered to tell me where they’d left them—then circle block after block until I found a legal space. For excitement, I’d listen to the bank robbery squad’s channel on the police radio while I worked. My law-school classmates would call and ask how things were going, and I’d say, “Gee, it’s really interesting work. I’m out on the street all day, but you know how it is, I can’t really talk about it.” And I really couldn’t. I was too embarrassed to tell them that after three years of law school and sixteen weeks of specialized training, I was a parking valet with no gun.

  Then, a Sports Illustrated ad salesman named Samuel Bronfman II got himself kidnapped, and the tabloids went nuts. Despite his relatively lowly job, Bronfman was an heir to the Seagram’s fortune and lived in a mansion in Purchase, New York, from which he was presumably snatched. That was enough to drive the New York Post and Daily News into a front-page frenzy, and to drive us into a frenzy, too. For nine days, until Bronfman was released unharmed and his father’s $2.3-million ransom payment recovered, the office did almost nothing else. There wasn’t a clue to go on, no leads. But that didn’t stop us from having twenty guys stationed in cars at the Holland Tunnel just in case something broke. The national security and counterintelligence sections were called to duty. Shifts stretched out to twelve hours at a time. Backup was nonexistent. Everyone was exhausted, which makes it even stranger that none of us new agents were included in the search party. But we weren’t. They didn’t want us screwing it up. Still, the Bronfman case did create a serious manpower shortage back in the office, and ongoing investigations had to be tended to. Finally, the office got so desperate that Lew Schiliro and I were assigned to a Title 3: a court-authorized wiretap. Action, at last!

  First, though, since wiretaps hadn’t been a part of our training, we had to learn how to do one. The two of us ran all over the place, grabbing guys who were bleary-eyed over Sam Bronfman and asking them how to work a Title 3. Then we settled down to the particular case at hand. Our subject was a bookie who lived down on Mulberry Street, a part of Little Italy much favored by the mob. (John Gotti, for one, loved to stroll down Mulberry Street like some lord of crime.) As with
a lot of bookies, you could set your watch by this guy’s schedule. Every Monday through Saturday night at precisely 10:30, he left his apartment, got in his car, and went from wire room to wire room to collect his take. Following him couldn’t have been easier, but the equipment we had to work with was another matter.

  Someone had hidden a microphone in the guy’s glove compartment, but it was a radio-frequency broadcast. To hear what was going on in the car, you practically had to stick on his bumper. Worse, you needed big aerials on your own car to pick up the signal.

  “The guy’s going to know we’re following him,” we screamed at our boss once we’d doped out the situation.

  “No,” he said, “he’s old. He’s stupid.”

  “But isn’t he organized crime?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “he’s a made guy, but gamblers don’t hurt anyone.” This was good news since we still didn’t have our guns back.

  “And no one’s going to notice us on Mulberry Street, of all places?”

  Apparently not, the silence seemed to say.

  So, sure enough, we set out our first night in a government-issue black Ford sedan with huge aerials waving off the back, parked ourselves right in the middle of Gangland Central, and waited for our gambler subject to exit his apartment at precisely 10:30 P.M., which he did. Then we followed him in our anything-but-undercover car as he went from wire room to wire room, sticking hard on his bumper, ready to record any little tidbits, and picking up not a single word of anything. An hour into this, the gambler came out of yet another wire room, waved to us, said, “Hi, guys, how ya doing?” and set off for his next stop. Then it dawned on us. There was no one in the car with him, and this was before cell phones, almost before car phones. Of course, we weren’t picking up anything to record. There was nothing! Nor would there be anything for the two weeks or so that we followed our gambler friend. He couldn’t have been that stupid and still manage to get out of bed in the morning.

  It was pure Keystone Kops, to be sure, but it was all experience, all on-the-job training, and far more serious work waited just ahead.

  CHAPTER 5

  “The Kid’s Got Nothing to Do with It”

  If you went solely by the numbers, the FBI I joined in the summer of 1975 had been fighting organized crime to a standstill. Gambling cases, loan sharking, extortion—we were all over them, opening up investigation after investigation, securing wiretaps (a lot of them more effective than the one I had cut my teeth on), filling up the jails with wise guys and assorted thugs. To a congressional oversight committee, the results must have looked very impressive. Arrests were up X percent for the fiscal year; convictions up Y percent. Clearly, the Bureau was giving American taxpayers their money’s worth.

  In truth, though, the numbers were a lot of sound and fury signifying very little. The cases were overwhelmingly penny ante, the guys we collared nobodies. The bulk of the arrests involved gambling because they were the easiest ones to make and thus the surest way to inflate our numbers, but the people we pulled in on them were almost always associates, guys waiting to be made. They’d be out on bail almost before we got them behind bars. They’d keep their mouths shut because the punishment for ratting was far more swift and certain on the other side of the law than on ours and because they knew that, even without talking, their sentences were going to be next to nothing. Meanwhile, the enterprise behind the gambling or loan sharking or extortion—the five New York families of La Cosa Nostra, or the other mob families around the nation—were supremely unfazed. So what if some punk takes a fall? Punks are never in short supply.

  The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 began, slowly, to change all that. Organized-crime strike forces, set up under the bill, brought together the FBI, local law enforcement officials, and strike-force leaders from the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and set them loose on targets that would shake the mob families at their roots, not just out at the extremities. To make it all work, though, the Bureau had to lose its old show-me-the-numbers mentality, and for that Tom Emery gets huge credit.

  Tom was running the organized-crime division at the FBI’s New York office when I first got there. A brilliant and iconoclastic guy, he was near the end of a long career with the Bureau, and perhaps because he wasn’t worried by then about incurring the wrath of anyone at headquarters—or maybe simply because he had seen how much wasted motion and energy went into hauling in small-time hoods—Tom set off on a crusade.

  Unlike the average gambling collar, the International Longshoremen’s Association was a worthy target. The union was monstrously corrupt, and the corruption spread into the shipping industry itself. What’s more, what with hijacking, cargo theft, insurance fraud, and extortion fattening the kitty, controlling the docks was so profitable that, at least in the New York area, all five families had a piece of the action. Bring the mobbed-up union leadership down, go after the rotten managers in the shipping industry, and you’d hit the Mafia where it counts, but you couldn’t do that on the cheap, Tom argued, and you couldn’t do it if you were looking over your shoulder at statistics the whole time. Running the ILA to ground would take time, and it would take resources. At the end of the day there was also no guarantee you would net a single conviction, but the convictions you did get would count. We wouldn’t just be treading water against the mob any longer.

  For a conservative bureaucracy like the FBI, it was a radical proposition, but Tom found a champion at headquarters in the person of Sean McWeeney, who had once worked Organized Crime in New York and was now section chief of Organized Crime down in Washington. And in Bob Fiske, of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the UNIRAC case, as it became known—for Union Racketeering—found a leader worthy of the challenge. Among the young strike-force attorneys assigned to the case was Barbara Jones, a brilliant lawyer and now federal judge who continues to add to her impressive résumé. (Barbara presided with distinction over the trial of former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers.)

  I was still learning my way around the New York office when I was added to the strike force, along with Bob Cassidy, a former CIA officer and a terrific investigator. Part of my job, going back to my legal training, was to put together a memo of all the various violations and federal statutes that might apply both to labor racketeering and management corruption—a handbook of sorts for the agents involved in the UNIRAC case. Many of the violations were obvious; any second-year law student or even talented paralegal could have done the work. But I found myself thinking as I pored over the possibly relevant statutes that with racketeering small can be beautiful. Take the Taft-Hartley Act, for example. It makes it a misdemeanor for a labor official to take a gift. The Labor Department maintains a small office to enforce the provision, but the misdemeanor is so commonplace and the penalty so minimal—a maximum one year in prison—that no one worries much about it. I discovered, though, that that little, puny misdemeanor had hidden strengths. For one thing, it was what’s known as a “predicate offense” for a racketeering case: you could use this relatively tiny infraction to build something far larger. Even more important, taking a gift in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act gave us standing to pursue a federal wiretap on the individual involved. And the gift misdemeanor wasn’t flying solo. Plenty of other small statutes gave us entry through the back door to big-time malfeasance.

  At first, FBI headquarters was a little dumbstruck by what we were proposing. We’ve never really done anything like this, I can remember Barbara Jones saying; we’ve never used misdemeanors to build a racketeering case. But it didn’t take her long to see the advantages and to begin to apply them. When I’d started on UNIRAC, Bob Cassidy and I accounted for at least 20 percent of all the New York “OC” (organized crime) agents assigned to the case. Soon, we had thirty or forty agents—at least a third of the Organized Crime Division—working full-time on it, maybe the most intense and sustained street work the division had ever known. Wiretaps were everywhere: in cars; in phones; in offices;
hidden on bodies, some of them suspects we had managed to flip, some of them our own people.

  Given the relatively primitive technology of a quarter century and more ago, any wiretap was a constant source of tension. Would it work? Would it be discovered? If it was on some informant, would we ever see him again? Inevitably, a few wiretaps also provided us with some of the greatest comic relief of the whole investigation. Thank God wise guys aren’t necessarily the smartest people in the world.

  Take George Barone. George was a member of the Genovese family and an ILA official, but he lived and worked out of a Florida address so that’s where we went to run the wiretap. We once equipped our witness with a simple pocket transmitter and sent him off to a “meet” with George and the results were great. George knew and trusted our guy, and he talked his head off. After the meet, they were both in the bathroom when somehow, in the process of pulling his trousers up, our informant managed to let the transmitter slip out of his pocket. When we heard it go clang on the tile floor, we were ready to race in and rescue our guy, but he calmly says to George, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s just my pacemaker.” And George, bless him, says, “Gee, I’m sorry,” and keeps right on yakking away.

  Then there was the case of the two supposedly very smart street guys who were always extremely careful about where and how they communicated. We got a wiretap order, at any rate, figuring they had to talk to each other over the phone now and again, but we didn’t have much hope for it, especially after the informant we had working on them assured us that if they said anything at all, it would be very cryptic. No sooner do we turn the wiretap on than they’re on the phone to each other, talking not in code but in whispers, as if the bug were somewhere else in the room, not in the phone wires themselves.