Genton was now encouraging Jelicks to tell me the full story, and offered to put us in touch. This was ostensibly to embarrass the New Jersey State Police, who were in the midst of a power struggle with the SCI. Yet Genton didn’t put it to me this way. According to Genton, Jelicks himself wanted to go public with the story, and “was ready to blow up and blast the story all over the place.”
“He was like a time bomb, ready to go off, and I gave him a reasonable out,” Genton would later explain. “I felt, if he was going to blow up, he should have the name of a responsible reporter.”
After several cancellations, I finally met with Jelicks. He told me he had been involved in so many unsavory acts, that the mob had placed a price on his head; and that he was betrayed after his break-in on behalf of the State Police. Despite assurances that “the state would take care of everything,” he claimed he was arrested and beaten after his dirty work was done, and was sentenced to six months in jail. When he got out of jail, he went straight to the SCI, and agreed to cooperate with the Commission. Genton, he informed me, told him he wanted the story out “so the SCI could step in and investigate.”
Furthermore, Jelicks claimed that SCI chairman Joseph Rodriguez had told him, “It’s about time the State Police’s little white castle crumbled.”
Though the story Jelicks told me during our meeting and several telephone conversations was intriguing, he was never able to provide me with any documentation to back it up, aside from false identification cards and three social security cards he claimed he used in his undercover work. He did pass a lie detector test—administered by the SCI—but he was disavowed altogether by the State Police.
The State Police Superintendent at the time, Clinton Pagano, was reportedly incensed when he learned that Genton had reached out to me to get Jelicks’s story on the air. Pagano strongly denied Jelicks’s allegations, denouncing Jelicks as “a pathological liar” and claiming that the whole incident gave weight to his claim that the SCI didn’t cooperate properly with the State Police, and was attempting to undermine his operation with the investigation. Genton denied that his motivation was to embarrass the law enforcement agency, and said he never told Chairman Rodriguez about his efforts to get Jelicks to tell his story on television.
* * *
I was almost two months into my investigation and getting ready to break the story, when the New Jersey State Senate Judiciary Committee let it out by announcing that it was planning a hearing into the assertions of police wrongdoing and the information leaked to me to embarrass the State Police. At that point, nobody knew that Genton had been my source in SCI, so I called him to assure him that I would never reveal his name. He informed me, however, that he intended to come forward and confess that he was my source.
I received some interesting looks when I showed up for the hearing at the statehouse in Trenton. When I introduced myself to State Police Superintendent Pagano and asked him about the veracity of Jelicks’s claims, I received a dagger-like look in response. During the hearing, I heard my name echo repeatedly through the chamber as I sat in the gallery taking notes. Under questioning, Alfred Genton was asked repeatedly about his contacts with me, why he had called me, when we had met and what we had talked about.
Superintendent Pagano was visibly angry as he testified about the dangers involved in the leaks of information about his agency.
When the Committee Chairman asked him, “What is the hazard of Marvin Scott broadcasting the allegations?”
Pagano adjusted his glasses and responded, “The greatest hazard is that law enforcement must have the confidence of the people,” adding, “To have those kinds of allegations brought out publicly, and to have the organization’s members unjustifiably impugned, would diminish the public’s confidence in that organization.” Shortly after testifying, Genton resigned from the SCI, admitting that his referral of Jelicks to me had been an “indiscretion.”
As I listened from the gallery, filming the proceedings and taking notes, a reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger realized that I was the guy the senators were talking about, and approached me.
“How could you, personally, be covering this?” he asked, noting how prominently I was being mentioned in the hearing that I was reporting on.
My response was quick and simple: “Just the way I cover any other story—objectively.”
27
THE KID REPORTER WHO BECAME A CHIEF
Television whiz kid, John Miller, reporting at the age of 15 with me in 1978, and again at the age of 37 2015.
Some reporters are made; others seem to have been born for the business. John Miller was both. At 12, Miller was a news prodigy who chased stories on a bicycle equipped with a police radio on the handlebars. On the way up in his career, he had an exclusive interview with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, co-anchored with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20 program and was a senior correspondent at CBS News. He currently has access to national-security secrets as the New York Police Department’s Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism. But the whiz kid of news got his start as the youngest assignment editor and reporter at a New York television station, where I got him his first job.
The tenacious blue-eyed kid from Montclair, New Jersey, wanted to be a cop until he was 12, when he decided he wanted to be a reporter like his father—because, he said, “I couldn’t wait to be a cop.” He would chase police and fire department calls in his hometown, often racing on his bicycle to accidents, fires and crime scenes where he took pictures and sold them to local newspapers for $5. Seeing his name in the credit line printed below the picture was the fuel that kept him going. Figuring he would have a better opportunity to shoot salable pictures when staff photographers were not on the job, at night Miller kept a police radio by his pillow and if something happened, he would have his father drive him to the scene in the middle of the night. He hit it big with a picture he took of a spectacular accident, for which he received $25 from the Newark Star-Ledger. Over a period of two years, he sold about 50 photos to newspapers. While Miller had a reporter’s perseverance, he lacked the working press card required to pass police and fire lines.
“So I borrowed my father’s press card and made a pencil tracing of it,” he confessed. “I took the forgery to a printer, who charged me $15 for 100 copies. It worked. From three feet away, you couldn’t tell the difference between the real press card and the counterfeit.”
Montclair police became concerned about Miller’s safety, because he would show up at crime scenes on his bike before police got there. A police captain visited his parents, and expressed fear that their son could get killed if he continued to do that.
“Leave my kid alone,” bellowed Miller’s father, suggesting that instead of worrying about his son, the captain should get his officers to move faster.
Being a kid had its drawbacks for Miller, because many people wouldn’t take him seriously. In effect, they’d tell him to get lost. On the other hand, he said, it was beneficial, “because those who did talk to me candidly figured that because I was a kid, the information they gave me wouldn’t go anywhere.” An affable young man, Miller was well liked by the cops, firefighters and politicians he met. Even early on, he knew how to make friends and develop sources in important places.
It was because of one of those sources that Miller and I encountered one another, and developed a relationship that would ultimately change the course of the young man’s life. Miller received a tip that a suspect had been arrested in the biggest murder case at the time—the 1972 New Year’s Eve stabbing death of 28-year-old teacher Roseanne Quinn. It was a grisly murder that horrified New Yorkers and later became the basis for the book and movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
The now-14-year-old kid, who was doing some work for a biweekly publication in New Jersey, couldn’t do anything with his information, so he decided to call me as a return favor for providing him with information on a story I had done a month earlier. He informed me that police had arrested a 23-ye
ar-old fugitive, John Wayne Wilson, in Indianapolis, and said his source told him that detectives had evidence that Wilson had stabbed the woman 18 times after they had sex. I thanked Miller for the tip and tried to get confirmation from my own police sources, who were tight-lipped because, as I later learned, police had hoped to keep news of the arrest quiet until they had Wilson back in the city to charge him with Quinn’s murder. I finally reached one high-level police source, who would not provide details but, after being aggressively pushed for answers, acknowledged, “I don’t know where you got the information, you son of a bitch, but yes, we do have a suspect.”
I broke the exclusive story on our 10 o’clock newscast, and immediately received calls from friends at other news outlets seeking the information they were unable to get from police. My story was headline news in the morning newspapers, and was such a great scoop that it got me a congratulatory note with a gold star from the news director.
I had not yet met Miller personally. All of our conversations were over the telephone. He had a deep, mature voice, and I had no idea he was just a teenager. He would call me quite frequently, offering tips to stories that always seemed to pan out. He became an incredible, reliable source, who enabled me to break a number of exclusive stories.
As an incentive and a way to say thanks for all those valuable tips, I had the station cut a check for $50, which I hadn’t sent yet when I finally came face to face with him at the scene of a hostage standoff in Brooklyn. The tall, lanky kid with acne all over his face and three cameras slung over his shoulder bowled me over when he approached and introduced himself as John Miller. “
You’re John Miller?” I exclaimed in disbelief. I couldn’t believe he was only 14.
His passion for news was evident, and despite his young age, he seemed to have a better sense of how to get a story than many veteran reporters. Shortly after we met, I got Miller a part-time job working on the assignment desk at Channel 5. The teenager would take a bus into the city after school, and his mother would pick him up afterwards.
He failed gym twice because he often didn’t show up—which he justified by saying, “I couldn’t jeopardize my television job.”
The after-school job led to a summer assignment in the newsroom. As good as he was in generating stories, Miller was an arrogant kid and alienated many of the reporters, who got angry with me for bringing him to the station. One day he had the tenacity to dress down a lead anchorman for coming in late.
“My greatest asset,” Miller would say, “is that I know how to listen to the police radio and recognize what’s important.” He did indeed. He was so adept at it, he knew how to change chips in the radio to communicate directly with officers in the field. At times he even feigned being a member of law enforcement himself, in order to get firsthand information.
Miller’s news intuition produced many stories, and on occasion, when a staff reporter wasn’t available, Miller would be sent out with a camera crew to hold the microphone and ask some questions. The questions were good enough to make his editors take notice.
“But the reporters resented me,” he said. “And the anchormen did everything they could not to use my name on the air.”
Still, Miller earned his stripes. After the night assignment editor quit, Miller—then a news assistant—was awarded the title. At the age of 15, he became the youngest night assignment editor ever appointed at a television station. Slowly, the other reporters’ resentment turned to respect.
As Miller remembers it, “It was sort of mind-boggling, telling these veteran reporters—who had been in the business longer than I’ve been around—how I thought they should handle a particular story.”
It was only a matter of time before Miller began reporting stories on-camera. Sure, he was young—but he was a damn good reporter who produced remarkable stories. His boyish charm and piercing blue eyes were assets in his pursuit of news. When he was 16, Miller did a series of reports on the problem of prostitution of young boys in New York City.
“I stood on Manhattan street corners for two nights and got a good number of solicitations. One guy offered me 50 bucks to go to a hotel with him.” But Miller never left the street. Everything was recorded through a wireless microphone he was wearing, and by a camera concealed in a nearby van.
A year later, Miller exposed one of the nation’s largest banks as the landlord of a townhouse that housed a swank brothel.
“The only way to know for sure was to go in and find out,” Miller recalled. It was a club that accepted credit cards, so while his crew waited outside, Miller went inside with an American Express card. He returned half an hour later with his proof—a receipt for $70. Moments later, he went back into the club with his camera crew, and was promptly thrown out. Police raided the place, and Miller’s revelations made for a sensational television report. The story created a stir when it got on the air—and not just among its viewers.
“My mother wasn’t thrilled with it,” Miller recalled. Nor was the cameraman whose credit card he had borrowed.
* * *
Miller knew how to play the role of super reporter. He would show up at crime scenes wearing a long trench coat, with a hat pulled over his right eye and a big cigar in his mouth. When he was old enough to drive, he bought a used police car—a blue Plymouth with four antennas—for $1,000. Miller was so convincing when he pretended to be part of law enforcement that in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter made a surprise visit to the South Bronx, Miller placed a dome light on top of his car and managed to enter the presidential motorcade.
He certainly knew how to ferret out a story, and the images to go with it. In 1978 he wanted a shot of fashion designer Calvin Klein and his daughter after she was safely released from a kidnapping. While other cameramen staked out at several locations on the street, hoping to catch a shot of them, Miller had a better idea. He chartered a helicopter and had it hover over Klein’s Manhattan high-rise. Klein and his daughter came to the window to check out the noise, not knowing they had just been caught on-camera.
When Miller turned 18, he was given a party in the newsroom, and was presented with his own legitimate press card. By then, he had earned the respect of the entire staff. News Director Mark Monskey felt Miller was such an asset to the news operation, and had such a bright future ahead of him, that he encouraged the kid—who’d flunked out of high school—to get a college education at the company’s expense. Miller enrolled at Emerson College in Boston. His assignment was simple: attend school four days a week, and work as a weekend reporter for the other three.
Miller was somewhat of an enigma at Emerson. Not even his roommate knew that he was a reporter back in New York. He set up a police radio in his dorm room, programmed to Boston police frequencies, and would receive phone calls in the middle of the night from police and other officials. His beeper would go off in classrooms, and police in marked and unmarked cars would pick him up and drop him off in front of his dormitory. After a while, Miller’s fellow students had him pegged as an undercover narcotics cop.
Although he had already made it to the big time in New York and received several awards, Miller apparently wasn’t ready to make it on undergraduate radio and television stations at Emerson College.
“At the radio station, I was told that I needed experience and a few journalism courses,” he recalled. “I was told to work on my delivery.” Same thing at the school’s television station, where he was told after an audition that he needed some more work. Although he had already worked for six successful years as a professional journalist, Miller only managed to get a B in Mass Communications from his unsuspecting professors. He never let on that he knew better.
“Better they shouldn’t know what I was doing,” he reasoned. “If I told them I was doing what they were teaching, they might have gotten intimidated and thought I was trying to tell them something they didn’t know.”
After college, Miller went on to have a distinguished career as a journalist. He continued to work at Channel 5 fo
r a while, then joined the local NBC television news team in New York as its investigative reporter, and gained attention as the only reporter Mafia boss John Gotti ever spoke to. He later joined ABC News, where he managed to get that exclusive interview with Osama bin Laden three years before bin Laden orchestrated the terror attacks on September 11th. And he won the coveted role of co-anchor of the network’s 20/20 broadcast, sitting next to Barbara Walters.
In 1994, at the age of 36, Miller finally realized his childhood dream of being a cop when Police Commissioner William Bratton tapped him as his Deputy Commissioner for Public Information in the New York Police Department. This time around, he was the source being quoted by others. When Bratton took over as Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, he appointed Miller Chief of the LAPD’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau. In 2005, he became Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI, then a Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation and Technology. He had a brief return to television as a senior correspondent for CBS News, appearing on the morning news and occasionally on 60 Minutes.
When Bill Bratton came calling again to serve as New York’s police commissioner, he wanted Miller at his side, and appointed him New York City’s Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism. Now Miller has come full-cycle—from getting his information from a police radio hooked to his bicycle, to tapping into satellites in the ongoing fight to keep America and New York safe. The kid from New Jersey was truly a natural, and I feel proud to have had a hand in helping him launch his incredible career.
28
WORKING THE STREET
As I Saw It Page 18
