Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Meanwhile, his relationship with his father, who had overcome a drinking problem a few years earlier, underwent a significant change. The man who had been distant figure through much of his childhood became a confidant. Mark sensed that through him, his father was vicariously living out a part of life that he had never been able to experience.

  “We began to have meaningful talks on the phone after I went to prep school, which was odd because the man usually hated the phone. He wanted to know what people were doing, what I was studying, what the rich kids were like, what the girls were like. I was dumbfounded. I had never heard the guy talk that way. He had left school at sixteen, so I guess it was a world he had always wondered about.” Mark’s father and mother made the trip to watch him on the athletic field on weekends. Mark maintained a B average, played baseball, and captained Pomfret’s undefeated soccer team in his senior year. He graduated in 1978 and enrolled at the University of Tampa.

  The relationship between father and son grew even closer during the summer between prep school and his freshman year in college, when Mark frequently went out on the road with his father.

  “On the road at night, we would come into a truck stop and my father pointed out, many times, where guys would come up and offer him like twenty thousand or thirty thousand dollars for his load. You know, the deal was he could leave the truck, go in for a cup of coffee, and come back and report the cargo was hijacked. He told me, ‘It would have been no skin off my teeth, and man, there were times when we really could have used that money. It was easy money. But it would have been wrong. And there’s no two ways about it. You be honest in life, Mark. That’s it.’”

  Mark never forgot. At the start of his sophomore year, he decided to major in criminology; in his earnest way, he told his father that he intended to become an FBI agent because he believed in what he had learned about honesty and justice, as corny as it might sound. “My old man was the one person I knew I could talk to about the FBI and not get laughed at,” Mark remembered.

  During Mark’s sophomore year, his father died of lung cancer. The broken relationship would leave him with a powerful, nearly overwhelming sense of incompleteness. At the funeral, he told his mother, “If I could be half the man that he was, I will be happy. I’ll have made it.”

  He returned to school an even more serious young man, with goals firmly in place. Mark had developed a reputation as a heartbreaker among campus women, and he was chagrined by it now. He began dating a chemistry major, independent, self-sufficient, and assertive. He liked that in a woman. He liked someone who would stand up to him, who knew what she wanted, who could goad him and keep him laughing at himself, and who would share his values without question.

  When his mother introduced them in the summer of 1982, smiling, beautiful Kathy Ponticelli, it appeared, was just such a woman. He fell in love with her with the same force that she did with him. From the first night, they were inseparable.

  “We were like teenagers dating,” Kathy recalled. “We played, we talked—it was just us, there wasn’t room for anyone else in our lives. By the end of the summer, we moved together to a tiny apartment in Middletown, about halfway between New Haven, where he was going to start work in the FBI office in late August, and Hartford, where I had just got a job as a paralegal at an insurance company.”

  Many weekends, they drove down to New York City, to explore, to have dinner and see Broadway shows like A Chorus Line and Dream Girls. They did the tourist things, rode a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, had their portrait sketched in charcoal on Times Square, went to the top of the Empire State Building to watch the lights of Manhattan twinkle at twilight. One night on a Rhode Island beach, they made love in the sand and skinny-dipped in the cold ocean. He took her to Fenway Park in Boston for her first baseball game. Her parents liked him enormously. The summer seemed endless.

  “I was already pretty well straightened out, but this was the icing on the cake,” Kathy said many years later. “I loved hearing about his life—things like prep school, senior proms, college pranks, graduation day—things that I had missed. Mark had done everything the right way, always.

  “God, we were a perfect fit. For everything I learned from him, he learned something from me. He was more or less attracted to the self-assurance I had developed by then. I’d gotten all As in community college, and by now I wasn’t ashamed of who I was or what I had done. I taught him how to manage money and balance a checkbook. He was so naïve about some things—like he’d never count his change. He was an impossible sucker for garage mechanics. I showed him life: you shop around for a garage; the bills come due; the rent has to be paid; the oil has to be changed in the car. We seemed to fill in each other’s blanks.”

  They lived together for almost two years, putting aside money for marriage and a baby. When they agreed it was time to get married, Kathy decided that it was important to tell him every detail of her past, including the parts that were difficult to tell. He listened in stony silence—then walked out without a word. She didn’t see him for three days, during which time she thought she would never see him again. When he came back, he said only, “I don’t ever want to talk about that again. Any of it.” And except for when they were worried about her misdemeanor arrest coming up in the FBI background check, they never did.

  After he was promoted to night clerk at the New Haven FBI Bureau, where he fielded agents’ after-hours phone tips and edited their investigative reports as part of his duties, Mark took a second job during the daytime as a clerk at a liquor store. On Easter weekend of 1984, without alerting either of their families they drove to New York City to get married. They’d chosen New York for the wedding because they thought it would look more romantic than Hartford on their marriage certificate The only objection came not from their families but from the bureau, where Mark’s supervisor let him know that the FBI frowned on elopements, even by clerks.

  But they had other things on their mind than the FBI. They wanted to have a baby.

  Kathy would always remember the night Danielle was conceived. “My doctor had told me I should go off the pill a few months before we planned to conceive. Mark had come home from his night job; we were lying in bed, and he kissed me in that way. I reached for my diaphragm, but he put his hand on mine and said, ‘It’s time. I want you to have my baby.’ We made love. This is difficult to say, but our lovemaking was always intense. This time it was so different—even the way he looked at me was different. He was making love to me as the mother of his baby, and I remember that as the most perfect moment in my life.”

  She remembered something else. “As soon as I started to show, he would not make love to me. He was petrified that he would hurt the baby. He treated me as though I was a queen.”

  Danielle was born on New Year’s Day of 1985. Eighteen months later, after years of work and a long period of anxiety awaiting the results of his application interviews and tests, Mark was finally accepted into the FBI Academy to begin training as a special agent They both would later recall this period as the happiest time of their lives, happier even than their first summer together. Kathy’s most enduring impression of her husband comes from the days right before they left for Pikeville, when Danielle was just two. She simply remembers Mark sitting, at Danielle’s insistence, on her Fisher-Price toddler’s chair, a friendly giant at a little girl’s tea party.

  4

  Federal agents have been paying informants to provide information on illegal activities in Appalachia since the days of the bloody “moonshine wars” of the Prohibition era, when the Cumberland Plateau was one of the chief sources of bootleg alcohol for Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati. Heavily armed teams of government agents were so diligent in their crusade against the prosperous hillbilly moonshine industry that railroad cars had to be chartered to haul thousands of natives off to overcrowded federal penitentiaries. To the mountaineer, already seething under the tyranny of out
side agents hired by coal companies to thwart union activity, the invasion of “foreign” law enforcement officials, operating with the assistance of local authorities, left what Harry M. Caudill called “the deep-seated conviction that he is governed not by just laws but by corrupt and venal men—men who would betray him when it was to their purpose and reward him when it was to their gain.”

  This paradigm was still firmly in place two generations later when a wild man barged into the FBI office in Pikeville late in the summer of 1987 filling the doorway with his bulk.

  “I’m telling you, gentlemen, it’s a million-dollar operation!” Charlie Trotter boomed without any preliminaries. The two agents’ first impulse was to reach for their guns. But Charlie held up his palms and motioned for them to relax, settling himself into a chair and saying, “I want to give you guys the biggest case you are ever going to work.”

  Not impressed, Dan Brennan said, “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Stolen trucks, gentlemen!” Charlie replied, folding his arms and looking from Brennan to Mark to see who was looking back hardest.

  Mark thought the man resembled Prof. Harold Hill, the flim-flam salesman from the musical The Music Man.

  “A goddamned Sears catalog of them!” Charlie declared.

  Brennan tightened his lips and found something to read.

  Charlie leaned forward to scrutinize Mark, who scrutinized him back. Charlie flashed a grizzled grin under his Fu Manchu mustache. At six feet and 190 pounds, wearing a tight muscle shirt over arms festooned with prison tattoos, Charlie adjusted the little leather cap that sat jauntily on his shaved head. Mark had never seen anything quite like him.

  Brennan excused himself and went home. Then over the next four hours, as Mark made notes and encouraged him to go on, Charlie spun out his tale of betrayal and indignation. At the heart of Charlie’s tale of woe was a willingness to sell information, and perhaps to testify if the price was right, about what he described as a huge multistate operation in stolen vehicles, truck parts, and construction and mining equipment—an elaborate “chop shop” located on a secluded mountain somewhere near the town of McRoberts, just over the Letcher County border twenty miles southwest of Pikeville. Since he was a member of the ring that ran the operation, Charlie had details. He identified the “brains” of the operation as one Vernon Mullins, who over the past several years had recruited a gang of thieves who stole the trucks and other equipment throughout several states and towed it back to the Letcher County site, from where it was being sold.

  “It’s going to cost you, but it’ll be worth the price,” Charlie promised. Was the FBI interested?

  Mark didn’t commit himself. He thanked Charlie for his time, took a number where he could be reached, and said he’d be in touch.

  When Charlie left, Mark called a local cop he knew in Letcher County and asked him what he’d heard about the operation. “Yeah, we’ve been after that son of a bitch Vernon Mullins for a long time,” the cop replied, “but you can’t get near him. He supposedly runs a big chop shop somewheres.”

  Mark then checked Charlie’s criminal record. He was a certified desperado, a hardened criminal involved in drugs and robbery, who had also done time for attempted murder. Such a résumé was not necessarily a bad thing in a potential informant, assuming you could keep him on your side.

  Brennan, looking forward to his transfer to another office within months, tried to discourage his young partner’s obvious enthusiasm. “Mark, you don’t want to mess with that,” he warned.

  “Why not?”

  Brennan whistled. “Stolen parts, man oh man. You’re overwhelmed with paperwork. It’s a real hassle. The reporting requirements are unbelievable.” He pulled out the bureau’s procedural manual to illustrate the complications ahead: Every part, every vehicle, would need to be thoroughly documented and traced to its source, which could be anywhere in the country. Fingerprints would have to be matched, owners of the stolen equipment notified and assuaged. It would require tracking down original police theft reports from every jurisdiction involved, not to mention insurance reports and claims documents. If the operation were as major as Charlie was maintaining, it would be a full-time job.

  As always, Mark considered Brennan’s advice. But he knew that if Charlie’s information was good and if the investigation were thoroughly professional, such a case would break new ground in the territory. It wouldn’t be just another bank heist, fugitive arrest, or drug bust. This—sophisticated data-based investigative procedure—was what made the FBI, at its best, the finest law enforcement organization in the world, Mark believed. This, he understood, could be a career-maker.

  “I’ll give it a shot,” he told Brennan, who shrugged and replied, “Suit yourself.”

  Obviously, the first question was, what was Charlie’s motive? The answer appeared to be fairly simple—money and a desire for revenge. The chop-shop operation employed teams of spotters, hot-wire artists, and mechanics to steal the equipment, transport it, and then disassemble it into parts. The way Charlie described it, his specialty—stealing trucks and delivering them to the site—was worth $300 to $500 a vehicle, with an extra commission on each individual part subsequently sold. Charlie was angry because he hadn’t been paid for the last truck he’d brought in, and he figured that if Vernon Mullins and his boys weren’t going to pay, the FBI was. It was no secret in the hills that the FBI paid well for the right information. Charlie figured he could become a rich man and settle a score at the same time.

  Money talked, but not all at once. Mark realized that Charlie was impetuous; like most outlaws, his plans rarely extended more than a week or so into the future. Charlie was mad, but he was wily, and before he got himself killed by spoon-feeding the FBI, the anger would have passed. Mark knew he would have to work him carefully, step by step, over the weeks and months. Eager to get going, he called him back and set up a meeting.

  It helped a lot that Mark came to genuinely like Charlie. As their alliance evolved, they met once or twice a week. Usually, Charlie would stop by the office, and they would get in the car and drive off into the hills, where they would be able to talk without being observed. Snapping open a can of beer from the six-pack he invariably brought along, Charlie was curious, laconic, and, Mark thought, hilarious when he went into his hillbilly act: “They done me wrong, Mark boy!” he would wail. “The varmints done me wrong, and they will pay!”

  Mark also realized that Charlie was working both sides of the fence, maintaining his activities with the chop-shop gang in a perilous balance between conflicting demands. While Charlie claimed that he had returned to the good graces of the gang only to facilitate the gathering of information, Mark knew that he couldn’t drop his guard against the possibility of a double-cross. Once, when Mark caught him in a lie, Charlie responded with a gravely injured look.

  “You’re a ruthless bastard, Mark. A shabby bastard, and I thought you was my friend.”

  “I am, Charlie. But I have a little bit of smarts and I know when somebody is trying to screw me over. I check things out, Charlie. Always remember that.”

  “What was them college girls like, Mark?” Charlie said, abruptly resuming their friendly conversation. “I’ll bet they wasn’t like a good wild mountain woman.”

  Bit by bit, Mark built his case. Charlie liked not only the money, but, it appeared, he also liked the attention. And Charlie delivered.

  In the fall, not long after Cat Eyes was arrested, Charlie had ridden along for the hijacking of three trucks in Maryland. They were coming down the mountains toward Kentucky when Charlie realized he had forgotten to call Mark, as arranged, to let him know when the convoy was on its way. It wasn’t time to make arrests yet, but Mark insisted on knowing what Charlie was up to. At the Putnam house on Honeysuckle Lane, the phone rang around ten o’clock.

  “Charlie, where are you?”

  “Pay phone, man. We’re coming in around
midnight.”

  “Charlie, aren’t they wondering who you’re calling? Aren’t they suspicious?”

  “The other two trucks went on ahead. It’s just me and this old boy. I coldcocked him, punched his lights out. He’s out.”

  “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “So I could call, man,” Charlie reasoned.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be okay.”

  “What are you going to tell him when he wakes up?”

  “I’ll just say I didn’t like the way he was a-looking at me. He’ll understand.”

  Already well accustomed to telephone intrusions, Kathy herself merely added Charlie Trotter to the growing list of people—Susan most prominent among them—who called at odd hours, usually with an air of urgency, wanting to talk to Mark. As she had when he was a clerk, Kathy happily pitched in to help with the official work, fielding the calls and even spending hours some nights going over his laboriously handwritten interview reports, known in the bureau as 302s. That sometimes involved interviewing Mark to clarify the account. As she edited and neatly typed the 302s for him to send on to his supervisor in Covington—well aware that an agent was judged by his paperwork—she herself became fascinated with the quirky outlaw world of eastern Kentucky.

  As a chilly autumn arrived, the Putnams were looking forward to the birth of their second child. Kathy had become pregnant a month after they moved to Pikeville. They’d planned on having two children, and as in everything else Kathy supervised, they were right on schedule. In late October, six weeks before she was due, Kathy intended to take Danielle with her to Connecticut, where they would stay with her parents until Mark joined them for what they hoped would be a three-week Christmas vacation centered around the birth of a son.