Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  Chapter 14

  The Frenchman and The Dude

  Freddie, Bernie, and Irving have a very nice fingerprint lab and database. For decades criminals and non-criminals have had their fingerprints sent to the FBI lab for classification and inclusion in their database. Anyone in the United States who has had their fingerprints taken by a law enforcement agency for any reason—arrest, job application, background investigation, whatever, those fingerprints end up at the FBI lab, where they are classified and checked to see if they are of record with a unique FBI assigned number. If not, Freddie, Bernie, and Irving will assign a new, unique FBI number to that set of prints, which of course, is tied to one individual and one individual only.

  Theoretically.

  About three or four months after President Clinton’s second inauguration, the Redhead and I sold the house, packed, up and moved west. The Seattle Field Office had an opening for a GS-13 agent and we felt it was time to leave the East Coast. Seattle seemed like a good destination for us—L.A. was too big, San Francisco was too expensive, and Vegas…as much as the Redhead hated Glitter Gulch, that wasn’t an option.

  One rainy afternoon, I was sitting at my desk in the Seattle Field Office working on a case and I received an interesting telephone call from a Tacoma, Washington, coin dealer. He was one of those guys who advertised in the back pages of a magazine selling gold and silver commemorative coin sets. “Guaranteed one troy ounce of real gold minted in a beautiful rendition of the timber wolf, polar bear or American eagle!” You know the ones.

  He told me he had recently sold six sets of gold coins to six different people all at the same address. He said he usually only sells six of these unique sets in a one-year period. He gave me the address and the six different credit card numbers. I contacted the issuing banks and found that all six were unauthorized transactions with ninety-six hundred dollars in fraud. Worth looking into…

  The address was a commercial mail drop in Bellevue, Washington, and was opened by Henri Stefano as a business mailbox. The owner told me Stefano presented an international passport as identification. An international passport? Are you kidding me?

  The owner said Stefano had received quite a few letters and packages addressed to three or four different names. He could provide no further information. I contacted a detective at the Bellevue Police Department who worked white-collar crime. The detective checked his files and told me Stefano was not of record with his department. He agreed to assist me with the investigation.

  A few days later I received a telephone call from the coin dealer, he told me they had received another order for the same gold coin set and to be shipped to the same address. The dealer told me one of his employees had shipped the package for delivery on Saturday.

  I contacted the detective at Bellevue PD and advised him of the situation. This had the potential to be a long, drawn-out surveillance of the twenty-four-hour access mail drop business. There was no guarantee the suspect would show up during normal business hours on Saturday to claim the package. I had a family commitment with the Redhead on Saturday and I didn’t want to disappoint her again, I’d done that enough in my career already. I told the detective that I would be available about four or five Saturday afternoon and I’d get out there as soon as possible.

  The Bellevue PD set up the surveillance of the commercial mail drop business and the suspect showed up and claimed the package right before closing time. Officers from the Bellevue PD made the arrest and transported him to the Bellevue PD. Perfect timing! My pager went off as I pulled into our driveway. I kissed the Redhead good-bye and told her I’d see her when I see her…she’d heard that line before.

  After his arrest Stefano refused to tell the arresting officers if he was driving a car or how he’d arrived at the commercial mail drop. The detectives found a set of car keys in his pocket and an electronic key for a hotel room. They were able to locate the car in the strip mall parking lot by using the key fob. The detective had the car towed to the PD impound lot and secured as evidence.

  The suspect claimed his name was Henri Stefano and he was from France. He refused to tell us where he lived or where he was staying or any further information. We advised him of his Miranda rights and he declined to answer questions without an attorney present. I contacted the duty AUSA in Seattle and briefed her on the investigation. She authorized me to arrest Stefano and charge him with credit card fraud.

  I wrote an affidavit for an arrest warrant and swore out a John Doe aka Henri Stefano criminal complaint against Stefano. Fortunately, the US magistrate detained him with no bail. Now all I had to do is figure out his real identity. I canvassed just about every hotel in and around Bellevue, Washington, hoping to find where he was staying, but I struck out at every hotel.

  During the administrative inventory of the seized Pontiac we found a bill of sale for the car. Stefano paid cash for the new car from a Phoenix, Arizona, car dealership.

  I had to leave town soon after that for a protection assignment with the prime minister of Canada. Prime Minister Jean Chretien was spending the Christmas holidays in the United States. He went skiing in Vail, Colorado, and then headed to Phoenix, Arizona, for a week of golf. I was with the prime minister on the links at the Boulders golf course in Scottsdale, Arizona, when my pager went off. Fortunately, we were now in the cell phone age and I just happened to have one.

  An agent in Seattle told me the Bellevue PD just called the office to report an extended stay hotel in Bellevue had called the police department to report nonpayment for a room. The manager of the hotel entered the room and saw clothes and personal belongings, but the maid reported she had not seen the guest in over three weeks. The hotel told the Bellevue PD the guest was registered under the name of Henri Stefano.

  We only had about two days left until the prime minister returned to Canada, so I told the agent in Seattle to secure and lock the door to the hotel room and as soon as I got back to Seattle I would get a search warrant. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. The agent contacted the duty AUSA and was told all he needed was a grand jury subpoena for the hotel manager to turn over the defendant’s property.

  And that’s what they did…they got a grand jury subpoena and served it on the hotel manager. The agents then cleaned up the room and took all the personal items including clothes, shoes and toiletries, boxed them up and put them in my office. I’d be stuck with that shit for long time.

  Back in the early eighties in L.A. when the Secret Service jurisdiction over credit card fraud was in its infancy, we learned that you don’t need to seize the refrigerator that was bought with a stolen credit card to make the case. You don’t need the ill-gotten goods, you need the actual plastic or the account number and the paper trail of the transaction, and witnesses that saw the suspect use the card or account number. Good old investigative techniques. No AUSA in his or her right mind will wheel a Frigidaire into the courtroom to introduce as evidence. They’re going to introduce the paper trail of the purchase.

  A defendant’s personal property can be a real pain in the ass. It has to be inventoried on a personal property form and signed by the inventorying agent, the defendant and a witness. That’s his shit and you have to give it back to him. I learned early on in my investigative career to just seize the evidence and leave his dirty socks on the bedroom floor. But now I was stuck with boxes upon boxes of frickin’ clothes—socks, skivvies and dirty blue jeans, smelly tennis shoes and toothpaste. I was standing in my office, the first day after returning from a ten-day protection assignment—I’ve got a travel voucher to turn in, weekly activity reports that are late, and God only knows what else to get done, but I now had a higher priority task. I had to inventory this shit and get the evidence separated from the personal property, fill out and secure the evidence in the evidence vault, inventory his personal property on the correct form, and secure it in the evidence vault.

  The seizing of evidence has to be legal, if
is not seized legally a sharp defense attorney—shit, even an attorney fresh out of law school, will file motions to suppress the evidence. This evidence had been seized with a grand jury subpoena and I was very worried we would lose it at a suppression hearing.

  Tucked away in those boxes and intermingled with the all clothes was the evidence we needed to prove he’d bought the seven sets of gold coins. But no gold coins. I found MasterCards and Visas, tons of opened and unopened mail—monthly credit card statements from banks. Mr. Stefano was stealing mail right out of your mailbox. Specifically, he was stealing your payment coupon and your check. This guy was trolling through the Seattle suburbs at probably two in the morning, cruising the neighborhood mailboxes looking for the red flag in the up position—your outgoing mail. He was stealing your monthly payment.

  The scam was simple. Once he had your payment coupon, he had your address and your account number; your balance and your credit limit. He would open the payment envelope, pull out the payment coupon and fill in the change of address on the coupon, reseal the envelope and mail your payment to the bank. He’d change the address to one of his mail drops, wait a few days for the change of address to be processed by the bank, then call the bank, report the card lost and the bank would be more than happy to FedEx him a replacement card to his new address. Bingo! He’s in business.

  He’d bought that brand-new Pontiac Grand Am in Phoenix with cash. He was making a pretty good living off of your good credit.

  I found mail from Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Las Vegas (they always go to Vegas), Sacramento, Portland and the Seattle suburbs. South on Interstate 25 to Interstate 10, a side trip to Las Vegas, Interstate 15 probably to Interstate 5 and north to the Pacific Northwest.

  Before I was done contacting banks, I would document tens of thousands of dollars in credit card fraud and a laundry list of innocent victims with their credit rating ruined. But who was this guy? Henri Stefano from France? No way.

  The FBI’s fingerprint lab could positively identify this guy; he had to have a record. So I shipped his fingerprints off to Freddie, Bernie and Irving with an urgent request to expedite this fingerprint examination.

  * * *

  All Secret Service agents have to find that delicate balance between working criminal cases and protection assignments. Vice President Gore was scheduled to visit Glacier National Park in Montana and I was assigned to help the Vice President’s detail with the security advance. Identifying Stefano would have to wait a week or so.

  That was going to be a busy week for us in the Seattle Field Office district. President Clinton was scheduled to make a stop in the city of Seattle, then Portland, Oregon and finally a stop in Springfield, Oregon, before flying on the Los Angeles, California. Virtually, every agent in Seattle, Spokane and Portland were involved in some way, shape, or form.

  The Vice President’s stop in Glacier was a quick one; he was scheduled to make a speech on global warming and was only going to be on the ground for six or seven hours before he was wheels up from the Kalispell, Montana, airport in Air Force Two. He arrived at the Many Glacier Hotel by motorcade from the airport, had a short meeting with some environmental folks and then the group hiked from the Many Glacier Hotel about three miles up the steep valley to the base of the Many Glacier.

  The press corps covering the Vice President and some local journalists hiked up the side of the mountain with us. As we walked up the trail, I noticed wooden National Park signs spaced out every so often: 1832, 1865, 1888, 1896, 1900, 1923, etc.; obviously these wooden signs were marking the leading edge of the retreating glacier. When we got to the speech site at the base of the glacier, the press set up their cameras and Mr. Gore commenced his speech.

  I was standing behind the press pool on a small ledge with a Glacier National Park Ranger. He was a young fellow and looked like he was just out of college. I was listening to the Vice President’s speech and he’s droning on and on about the threat of global warming and how the glaciers are melting. I gazed down this beautiful U-shaped valley, mountain peaks on the left, mountain peaks on the right. A small creek meandered through the valley, occasionally emptying into a small, crystal clear mountain lake and then on the downhill side of the small lakes the creek would continue through the beautiful green meadows and coniferous forest; eventually emptying into the very large Many Glacier Lake. We could just see the old wooden Many Glacier Lodge at the edge of the big lake. It was an absolutely beautiful scene, a gorgeous U-shaped, glacier-carved valley.

  I looked at the ranger and said, “So, this glacier once filled this entire valley?”

  “Yes,” he said to me in his best matter-of-fact ranger voice. “Thousands of years ago this entire valley was filled by that glacier. If you look high up on the ridgeline to the east, you can see the variation of color in the rock. That’s where we estimate the top of the ice reached.”

  “Wow, that’s awesome,” I said. Then I couldn’t leave the conversation there, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. “Gee, so the glacier started melting. And melting and melting. And eventually, it melted and retreated and exposed this beautiful glacial carved valley?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  I gave him a quizzical look and asked, “So, what’s the problem?” He just looked at me with his eyes growing wider and wider and his lower jaw slowly dropping open. I could tell I was about to get an environmental lesson on the dangers of rising sea levels. Luckily, my pager went off. I excused myself to find a strong cell signal. The page was from the boss in Seattle.

  The SAIC told me that as soon as we had a wheels-up of Air Force Two, I should get my ass to Springfield, Oregon, as quickly and safely as humanly possible. “Sure, boss, I can do that. What’s up?”

  The SAIC told me that a pipe bomb had been found in a drainage culvert under the driveway from the private operator side of the Springfield-Eugene Airport on the exit to the main road out of the airport area. Air Force One was scheduled to use that airport for a landing during President Clinton’s visit to Springfield, Oregon, three days from now.

  “All of my Portland agents are tied up with the security advances and the FBI is running wild on this one. All available Seattle agents are working with the PPD advance team here in Seattle; I have no agents available to work the investigation with them. As soon as you get to Springfield, report to the FBI resident agent in charge. You will be the Secret Service lead on this investigation until the Portland agents can take over.”

  When I arrived at the FBI office the next morning I went in to the boss’s office and introduced myself. He was wound pretty tight. I’d say he was at about fifty thousand feet and climbing. The first thing he said to me was, “This was an assassination attempt…Wouldn’t you agree this was an assassination attempt?” He was panting.

  “Fill me in on what the investigation as found so far,” I said, explaining that I’d been at Glacier National Park with the Vice President, and I had only sketchy information on what we had here.

  I knew I was going to have to choose my words very carefully with this guy. The law is very clear on assassination attempts—the FBI has investigative jurisdiction of presidential assassination attempts; however, the Secret Service has investigative jurisdiction of threats to assassinate the President. Bottom line: jurisdictional turf war.

  After he briefed me on the details, I told him, “I don’t think we can make the leap, at this early stage of the investigation, that it was definitely an attempt on the life of President Clinton. We still don’t know if the target of the pipe bomb was the President or if it was someone pissed off at the fixed base operator at the airport. I mean we just don’t know at this point.” I said, “Plus, there have been no news reports on which airport Air Force One will land. There are numerous exit points at the Eugene airport the motorcade could use. No other pipe bombs were found at the other exits from the ramp to the road. I just don’t think we can say for certain i
t was an assassination attempt…yet.”

  I love to give my buddies at Freddie, Bernie, and Irving a hard time, but to be honest, the FBI is a fine organization, with some really good investigators. I was impressed with how the agents attacked this investigation. The FBI office in Springfield is small and I don’t remember how many permanently assigned agents were there, but by the end of the day, they must have had close to fifty agents working this case. They had evidence technicians, surveillance technicians, criminal investigators, the whole frickin’ nine yards. They scoured that town, following every lead to its end. I was impressed.

  However, Freddie, Bernie and Irving just don’t get it. Two days later, President Clinton stopped for his short, three-hour visit to Springfield—I don’t even remember why he was there or what event or events were scheduled. I was holed up in the FBI office trying to keep the FBI boss at a breathable altitude. He was really, really nervous while President Clinton was on the ground. As we sat in the FBI office and monitored the President’s motorcade from the airport, the event and motorcade back to Air Force One, the FBI agents were still out chasing down leads, and we were still trying to identify a suspect. There is one thing that has stuck with me all these years about that FBI that I learned that day: the FBI doesn’t work weekends.

  Once Air Force One had a wheels-up from the Springfield-Eugene airport at around four-thirty or five that Friday afternoon, the FBI boss put his feet up on his desk and for the first time in days he seemed to relax. He let out a deep breath and looked at me, “Well, what do you guys do now?” he asked me.

  “What do you mean, what do we do now?” I asked him.