Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  “Well,” he said, “President Clinton is flying to Los Angeles…so this is their problem now, right?” I could not believe what I just heard him say. Are you kidding me? Their problem? I looked at my watch and noted it was after five o’clock on a Friday—his weekend was just getting started. “No,” I said very seriously, “We have to find this guy. We have to conduct a through Protective Intelligence investigation on this guy or guys. We have a lot of work to do. The Secret Service will not rest until we figure out if that pipe bomb was placed in that culvert to target the life of the President. Who he is, where he is, and whether he will try it again.”

  About this time the Portland Secret Service boss and his three agents walked into the FBI office. The Portland boss wanted (and needed) a through briefing on the status of the investigation, five o’clock Friday or not. The FBI boss got a little defensive. “Well, all my out-of-town folks are flying back to their respective field offices tonight.”

  “That’s no problem,” said the Portland Secret Service boss. “I’ve got three agents, you’ve probably got three agents, let’s get to work.”

  You could tell the FBI had no inclination to work on this case tonight or Saturday or God forbid, Sunday. I stepped out of the room and let the two bosses discuss this and I gave a briefing to the Portland Secret Service agent who would be handling the case. Finally, the two bosses walked out into the main office area. The Secret Service boss was visibly upset, but he had acquiesced to the FBI boss in the spirit of “let’s all get along.” We paused at the door to the hallway and shook hands with the FBI boss.

  “Okay, as agreed,” said the Secret Service boss, directing his comments to the FBI boss and the other Portland Secret Service agents, “We’ll be here Monday morning at eight to continue this investigation. Have a nice weekend.” I headed back to Seattle and you can bet the Portland Secret Service office worked all weekend on that case…that’s just the way we are.

  * * *

  In Seattle, I was the Donnie. I was the senior agent who’d done a big ugly FO and a permanent protection assignment. And yes, I too was filling my “brag sheet” with a lot of “I did this” and “I did that” bullshit, looking for a promotion to GS-14, just like my old buddy Donnie. We had some young agents right out of training and the boss had me mentoring a couple of them. One late rainy Seattle night one of the young guys calls, and wakes the Redhead and the dog…some things never change.

  He’d gotten a duty call from the Blaine, Washington, Police Department and they had one in custody for passing one counterfeit twenty. Awesome! Let’s roll! Working in a field office like Seattle was a pretty docile place after Vegas. We rarely got after-hours telephone calls.

  I picked up the agent and we made the long drive north on Interstate 5 to the small border town of Blaine. The cops had a thirty-year-old known drug dealer in custody for passing a counterfeit twenty at a “stop and rob.” This guy could have been the poster child for First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. His brain was completely fried, dude. Completely…fried.

  The cops said he was well known up on the border as a suspected smuggler of BC Bud, a variety of marijuana grown in western Canada that was very popular in Seattle in those days. It might still be, for all I know. The cops had him primed and ready for our arrival. “The feds are coming to arrest you on a big-time counterfeiting charge. You are sunk now!”

  It didn’t take long to roll him…he was extremely anxious to cooperate with the Secret Service; he swore he didn’t know the note was counterfeit. Dude. He didn’t know. Some customer must have passed it to him when he sold the guy some dope. “Dude, I didn’t have any idea it was counterfeit.” And we believed him completely. That guy was so out of it, that twenty could have been Chinese and he wouldn’t have known the difference. But we figured we might as well take advantage of the situation and see if we could get inside his house for a look around. The local narcs were salivating at this prospect. He was willing to execute a written consent to search. “Dude, I want to cooperate with you guys. Dude…I can’t do federal time!” Really? Awesome, let’s go home, buddy.

  We conducted a search of his house and recovered so many bags of dope we were going to need a moving van to get them to the PD station. We were in the basement finishing up the consent search when the handcuffed Mr. Dude says, “Hey, man, get a screwdriver. See that third step up from the bottom? Take out the screws.” Inside we found over $280,000 in US currency. The young agent and I examined every note. Every one of them. They were all genuine and they now all belonged to the Blaine PD. The duty AUSA declined to prosecute Mr. Dude for passing counterfeit and we turned him over to the Blaine PD, who were very happy to take custody of him, his dope, and his cash, and I’m sure they ended up owning the house, too.

  * * *

  I finally got a telephone call from the FBI technician concerning the fingerprint examination on the “Frenchman.” No record. None. His fingerprints were not on file with the FBI. They assigned a new unique FBI number to Mr. Stefano. I stared at the telephone in disbelief. I could see Donnie standing at my office doorway, silently mouthing the words, “They are not who they say they are, and this isn’t the first time they’ve done it.”

  This can’t be right…can it? No record? None? Donnie’s first rule of thumb when working a fraudster is an undeniable fact. This guy is not Henri Stefano, no way. I jumped on the NCIC computer—the National Crime Information Center is an outstanding computer database run by my buddies…Freddie, Bernie, and Irving. To “run” a suspect the investigator enters all the personal identifying information available on the guy, including his birthday. One unique feature is an investigator can use a range for a DOB. I figured this guy’s age and started submitting requests entering different DOBs. I got pages and pages of possible hits and pored over them. One name kept coming up. Thomas Charles Edwards. Convicted of theft of mail and credit card fraud by the Postal Inspection Service in Denver, Colorado. Sentenced to three years in federal prison. There was an outstanding warrant for Edwards’s arrest for escape. He’d escaped from the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, about nine months prior. He obviously was not at the supermax prison in Florence, and after a little checking with Bureau of Prisons I found that there was also a minimum-security prison in Florence. I made a telephone call to the US Marshals office; they confirmed that Edwards had been incarcerated at the minimum-security prison, and one day…he just walked away.

  But I still had a big problem to solve…the FBI said he was not Thomas Charles Edwards. He was Henri Stefano from frickin’ France. I got on the telephone and called the Postal Inspection Service in Denver. The duty inspector took my call. “Edwards, sure I know Edwards…I arrested him.”

  What luck! With one telephone call I was talking to the inspector who’d investigated, arrested, and successfully convicted Edwards. Picture? “Sure I have his picture in my file.” E-mail was just getting its feet wet with Uncle Sugar and our e-mail system was not sophisticated enough to handle a scanned photo, so the Inspector faxed me a copy of Edwards’s picture. A fax copy of a photo is a pretty shitty reproduction, but I could tell from the faxed photo of Edwards that he looked an awful like Stefano. “Overnight me a good copy would you?” And a couple of days later I had that two by three glossy in my hands. The Frenchman sure looked like Edwards.

  I called the FBI technician right away and left a message for him to call me ricky-tick…please. And I’ll be damned. They made a mistake. They compared Edwards’s prints to Stefano’s prints and…voilà! Same guy! To think how close this escaped federal prisoner was to completely scamming the judicial system into believing he was Henri Stefano from France is scary.

  We ended up indicting Edwards on numerous counts of credit card fraud committed in the Seattle area. And then I had to deal with the suppression hearing. I knew this was going to happen and I was dreading it. I was sure we had a really good chance to lose all the evid
ence. You don’t use a grand jury subpoena to seize this type of evidence; that’s why they make search warrants, for Christ’s sake! My AUSA was a little worried, too; it seems the AUSA my colleague had spoken to way back over Christmas while I was walking a golf course with Prime Minister Chrétien, had been on a one-month loan from the Social Security Administration to get some criminal experience. But by the time the case was ready for the judicial proceedings, she was long gone, back working civil cases against Grandma for cashing dead Grandpa’s Social Security checks.

  To obtain a search warrant an agent has to have very specific probable cause. Defense attorneys will still file a motion to suppress the search and invalidate the evidence, but rarely does the prosecution lose those hearings. But a frickin’ grand jury subpoena? Shit. If this evidence is suppressed, we ain’t got much. The hearing was touch and go; one minute you think the judge is on your side, and the next he’s agreeing with the defense counsel. Fortunately, I had a squared-away AUSA on this case and she put in hours of legal research, hours she wouldn’t have had to waste had we gotten a search warrant, to show the judge that case law said the seizing of the evidence was legal and the evidence should not be suppressed. We won by a squeaker, by a nose. Mr. Edwards’s crime spree was halted.

  Thomas Charles Edwards aka Henri Stefano went to jail for a long, long time. He was extradited to US district court in Denver to face the escape charges. The Bureau of Prisons doesn’t take kindly to prisoners who escape their facilities. I’m sure Mr. Edwards did some hard time in a real federal penitentiary…one with tall walls.

  And all that personal property? I had a hell of a time properly disposing of those dirty blue jeans. The King County Jail refused to take them into his jail property, the US Marshals refused to take them into their property system. I eventually got the AUSA to talk Edwards defense attorney into accepting and signing for all of it. No telling what they did with that stuff.

  Chapter 15

  Redemption

  The Beaver seemed to be following me…while I was at PPD on President Clinton’s detail; the Beaver got transferred from Las Vegas to Intelligence Division in Washington, DC, and the quest for the best cheeseburger in our nation’s capital began. The Tombs in Georgetown, Ben’s Chili Bowl, and of course the legendary Hawks and Doves; but it just wasn’t the same as those Las Vegas dives. There is something about going to lunch in a suit and tie that ruins the experience of a good cheeseburger.

  When I transferred the Redhead to Seattle after my stint at PPD, the Beaver was promoted to the resident agent in the Seattle FO’s Anchorage RA. You can bet I went to Alaska at every opportunity to help the Beaver out with protection visits and criminal cases.

  In February 1999 I was promoted to the Boise, Idaho, RA as the resident agent. The Boise office was under the supervision of the Salt Lake City office of the Secret Service. I wasn’t in Boise long before the Beaver was promoted to the resident agent in charge of the Salt Lake City office. Great. Now he was my boss.

  * * *

  There was a guy in Idaho promoting a bizarre theory that the US government, good ol’ Uncle Sugar, had sold each citizen’s birthright for $600,000. “Sovereign citizenship and redemption,” he called it. Who the government sold this birthright to was never real clear to me, but what was clear to me was that this guy was conducting seminars all over the western United States, instructing naive, poor, and surely uneducated folks that they could “claim” this $600,000 by writing a “sight draft” against the US Treasury using their Social Security numbers as the account number. As the Beaver always said when a suspect was lying to him, “It tortures logic.”

  I am sure folks paid to attend his seminars, and he was a snake oil salesman and a scam artist if there ever was one. Unfortunately, six Idaho citizens were convinced they’d just hit the mother lode and decided to start buying land, homes, cars and pickup trucks with these counterfeit US Treasury “sight drafts.”

  A detective from the Twin Falls, Idaho, PD called me one morning to report a sixty-year old-woman, Claudia Daley, and her thirty-year-old son, Isaac Daley, had used a “Treasury sight draft” in the amount of $79,774 to buy two brand-new Dodge Ram pickups from a Twin Falls car dealership. The detective said the dealership looked at the checks and thought they were legitimate US Treasury checks, completed the sale, and let them drive off the lot with the trucks. The dealership’s finance manager had taken the checks straight to the bank and was told the checks were counterfeit.

  By that afternoon I was being notified of “Treasury sight drafts” being passed at other businesses, including car dealerships and a foreclosure law firm; one was even deposited by a suspect into his own checking account.

  It seems a husband and wife, Jerry and Cathy Crockett, stopped by the Boise law firm processing their foreclosure on their ranch and proudly presented a “Treasury sight draft” for $125,400 to pay off their loan and stop the foreclosure. Then they went to a car dealership and bought a brand-new Chevrolet Suburban and a new Chevrolet pickup truck for $88,400. On the way out of town, headed back to his formerly foreclosed ranch, Jerry stopped at their bank’s drive through (in the brand-new pickup) and deposited a “Treasury sight draft” into their joint checking account for seventy-five hundred dollars.

  On the same day, the fifth and sixth suspects, another couple, Lester and Cindy Jolly bought two used cars on one “Treasury sight draft” for (only) $28,200.

  All six of these folks were “Constitutionalists” fervently believing the United States government had no authority over them. They refused to comply with simple laws, like obtaining a driver’s license and they refused to comply with more complex laws, like paying taxes. During the course of the investigation I’d found another common thread—they were all either heavily in debt or just plain old poor and “down on their luck” as my Dad used to say about the veterans he hired at his restaurant. All six attended one of the “Redemption” seminars and they fell for the “Redemption” tale as told by the “snake oil salesman.” Money talks to everyone, even “Constitutionalists” and they all wanted “free” money from the government they insisted had no authority over them.

  I presented the cases to a federal grand jury and we got a True Bill against each defendant. When a True Bill is issued by the grand jury, a US district court judge can sign an arrest warrant or issue the defendant a summons to appear in court. My AUSA wanted to have a summons issued for each defendant. In Las Vegas, T.J. never asked for a summons to be issued; he always let us go put handcuffs on a defendant, but, what the heck, none of them had criminal records. One was actually a retired deputy sheriff from Washington State. All six lived in very rural Idaho…way out in the middle of nowhere.

  However, convincing these six to comply with the legal authority granted by the US Congress to me was quite an undertaking. I took a deputy from Twin Falls County with me and we eventually found Claudia Daley in a ramshackle of an eighty-year-old house on a dirt road south of the Snake River Canyon. I don’t think she even had a mailbox, much less electricity or plumbing. She was cordial, but very leery toward me. She said her son and his family lived with her, but he wasn’t home. And she wouldn’t tell me where he was. She kept telling me I had no authority over her, but she accepted the summons to appear in court and accepted service for her son. I kind of got the feeling that deep down inside she knew she was wrong, she knew I did have the authority to arrest her or to serve her with the summons, but in her twisted uneducated mind she was hoping “the snake oil salesman” was right about his theory of redemption.

  Mr. and Mrs. Crockett were easy to find; their ranch was on a county road in south central Idaho near the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I called the sheriff in that rural county and he said he knew them both, “Stop by my office tomorrow and I’ll send my deputy who works that section of the county with you. My deputy is about the only guy that they’ll halfway listen to around here.”

  Crockett was working
in an alfalfa field on his small ranch when we drove up. “You have no authority over me,” he said when he got off his tractor.

  “Well, Jerry, I do; but I didn’t come here to debate you. We could go on for hours and hours about my authority, and you know what, Jerry?”

  “What?” he said.

  “At the end of the day, I doubt I’d convince you. So let’s just agree to disagree.”

  He took the summons for himself and his wife. I saw four youngsters running around the yard of the ranch house off in the distance. “Those kids probably don’t need their mom and dad being hauled off to jail, so just do them a favor and cooperate.”

  He looked at the summons and I could see his lips moving as he read it. He looked up at the deputy, “Do I have to accept this?”

  “Yes sir,” drawled the deputy.

  Jerry folded the summons and stuck it in his rear pocket, “Get off my property, you’re tre-ah-spassin’.”

  Lester and Cindy didn’t fit the mold of the other two couples. I think they had an education; Cindy was a bank teller at a local rural bank in a small town south of Boise. Lester was the retired deputy sheriff from Washington State. I pulled up to their house with a county deputy sheriff in his car. Lester was in the front yard working on his old car, the one he’d traded in the day he used the “Treasury sight draft.” Unfortunately, the couple’s new cars had been repossessed by the dealership.

  Lester hit me with the tried old “you don’t have any authority over me” line. I was done with that shit. “Lester, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked him. “If anybody should know better, it’s you. You’re a retired deputy sheriff, for Christ’s sake. You know damn well I have authority over you and you know damn well I have the authority to come on your property to serve you with this summons.” I handed him the papers. “I’ll see you in court, pal.”

  When Claudia and her son showed up at their initial appearance before the US magistrate judge, they refused to cooperate with the court, refused to be interviewed by pretrial services, refused to fill out the financial affidavit, and refused the services of the federal public defender. “Are you Claudia Daley and are you Isaac Daley?” the judge asked them.