In 2010, veteran newscaster Bob Bowdon focused on the NJEA in his award-winning documentary The Cartel.7 The NJEA attracted Bowdon in no small part because New Jersey spends more per pupil than any other state and yet has many of the nation’s lowest-performing schools. This is a state of affairs with which the NJEA seems much too comfortable. Like its parent organization the National Education Association (NEA), the NJEA uses its ample clout to keep the politicians in line and the students in public schools, no matter how bad.
The NJEA was a target-rich environment for one obvious reason: its cozy political alliance with much of the mainstream bred complacency and corruption. We had documented strains of that corruption and lack of accountability in New Jersey before, most notably the case of the teacher who bragged that a colleague called a student the N-word and never got fired. Governor Chris Christie reacted, and one union official was suspended.
To show that this was not an “isolated incident,” we descended on the Borgata. The next step in the sequence was the approach. This was no longer easy. After our 2010 exposure of the NJEA and Governor Christie’s endorsement of the same, the NJEA put out a warning to all teachers about Veritas and a veritable fatwah on me. Our reporter on the case was Laura Loomer, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish blonde from Arizona who had been kicked out of her private Catholic university in Florida. Her offense was catching administrators on hidden video approving the sending of aid to ISIS. I first met her at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. After a speech I gave there, she badgered me about coming to work for Veritas. She was so relentless I could not say no. It was obvious she had the right stuff.
If Jefferson did not exactly say “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” he should have.8 It is a great quote. Many of our Founding Fathers sacrificed their fortunes. More than a few sacrificed their lives. Preserving what they gave us will always take some effort. At Project Veritas we are always on the lookout for people willing to make the sacrifice required.
My only fear about Laura at the time was that she might be a mole. I had been stung six years earlier by a young woman who planted herself in my operations and alleged all types of misconduct. As I documented at length in my earlier book Breakthrough, the judge served up a great dose of justice when he announced, “I am not able to find that there is probable cause for the harassment complaint for the incidents that occurred between October 2nd of 2011 and November 21, 2011.”9 Anyhow, Laura’s drive and intensity were such that I thought it worth the risk to bring her on board. Project Veritas is no place for the timid, and timid Laura is not.
A bit of a loose cannon, Laura has a style of approach distinctly her own. I think of it as “smash and grab.” Instead of starting with a specific informational goal, she focuses on the individual and lets her—or usually him—determine the direction. No shrinking violet, Laura extracts information from her target with only a little more subtlety than Detective Mackey on The Shield.
Although no longer with Veritas, Laura was known to approach a subject, flash a smile, and say, “So tell me all the fraud you are going to commit.” Sometimes, this approach worked. Sometimes it did not, but in either case Laura would know within fifteen minutes if she was going to succeed. If she was not, she would cut her losses and move on to a new mark.
On Laura’s first training exercise, she went to a potentially volatile Black Lives Matter event on Staten Island. Fearless, she approached Erica Snipes-Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, the massive cigarette salesman whose death during a police takedown was captured on video.
“You think Al Sharpton is kind of like a crook in a sense?” she asked Snipes bluntly. “He’s about this,” Snipes answered as she rubbed her thumb and index finger together. Anyone watching knew what Snipes meant. For Sharpton, it was all about the money. The Project Veritas video went viral quickly, earning a front-page New York Post picture and causing the painfully corrupt Sharpton a ton of well-deserved hurt among his base.10 I was proud of Laura while hoping the sensational coverage wouldn’t go to her head.
Sort of like Forrest Gump, Laura seems to show up everywhere something is happening. Not hesitant to finesse her way into VIP campaign events, she managed to take multiple selfies of herself with Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, even Bill Clinton. Recently she asked Hillary a series of hostile ambush questions during signings on Hillary’s What Happened book tour. On one occasion, at the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference, I expressed a need for a drink, and the next thing I know Laura somehow wormed her way to the head of a two-hundred-person drink line to get me one.
A shrewd observer of human nature, Laura has a particularly keen eye for the dirty old man. At the NJEA convention, she caught Klein staring at her from across the hotel’s atrium. In full view, she pulled out her lipstick, applied it sensuously, and licked her lips. Klein was snagged. “He looked interesting,” Laura told me later, “like the kind of guy who would sleep with a student and want to brag about it.”
Laura walked over and sat next to him. Klein tried to play it cool. He said he was a middle school phys ed and health teacher from Howell Township, an exurb in the middle of the state. He kept staring at her, and Laura asked how he felt about those teachers who had sex with kids as young as middle schoolers. Klein was not about to approve of the practice, but he was more than happy to talk about sex in general.
When it comes to long-con investigations, the objective of every first meeting is to get a second meeting. Laura let Klein plow deeper into the explicit details of preteen sexuality at Howell before she broke off for an imaginary lunch. They exchanged cell numbers, and she knew he would contact her. He had a dirty old man stereotype to live up to.
Sure enough, flirtatious texts appeared in her message box. Klein wanted Laura to come to his room to “hang out.” What a surprise! She now had to make what the pros call an “OPSEC”—operational security—decision. She envisioned this as a high-risk, low-reward venture. It would not have shocked her to find Klein dressed in a raincoat, axe in hand, looking all the world like the American Psycho himself, Patrick Bateman.
Bold as she was, Laura was not about to ignore a basic Veritas Rule, “Don’t work alone. Tell someone else your plans.” Given Klein’s creepiness, she went one step further. She brought along a young male Veritas journalist, Cori. Of course, this made it much less likely that Klein would try to woo her, but that was not our goal in any case. “Conventioneer Beds Strange Young Woman in Hotel Room” has not been a newsworthy storyline for about three centuries. Laura and Cori both came wired.
Sure enough, Klein proved to be creepy, but in ways that surprised even Laura. On meeting her at the door, he looked a bit undone, his eyes red and watery. Klein excused himself to “change his shirt” and came out of the bathroom sniffing and wiping his nose. She thought she knew why. Klein then launched into a rambling discussion on the etiquette of sharing drugs and on his own safety guidelines.
“I’m a teacher. I’m not driving around with fucking weed in my car,” he told them at one point, but “blow”—health teacher talk for cocaine—was another story. At this point, Cori pushed a little too hard: “Shouldn’t you be careful with bringing drugs on campus because you’re a teacher?” He even sounded like a journalist. When I first watched the tape during a debrief, I cringed just a little.
Klein flipped. He slammed his vodka glass down on a coffee table and charged at Cori, backing him up against the suite’s kitchen island. “What, do you guys have fucking wires on?” he said in a seeming state of paranoia. “He’s got a wire on,” he repeated to Laura. Now he started to poke and grab at Cori looking for a recording device.
Laura felt like she was trapped in a bad gangster movie. Her pulse pounded out of her temples, and the cortisol pumped through her bloodstream. Oh my God, she thought, this guy is going to find our wires and kill Cori. In the movie The Departed, Leo DiCaprio’s character offered some advice that would be useful fo
r a Veritas journalist in a jam: “Your heart-rate is jacked, your hand . . . steady.” This approach is easier said than done, but it is essential. There is no more stressful moment in the life of any undercover than when the target suspects a rat. In all investigative work, particularly with groups inclined to violence such as Antifa, DisruptJ20, and the Ku Klux Klan (Veritas has ongoing undercover operations in all three), the bad guys will become suspicious. That is the way human nature works. As best we can, we prepare our journalists for that eventuality.
Still, there is just so much preparation one can do. Laura and Cori had put themselves in a tight spot with little knowledge of the man they were recording. Given the thinness of their relationship, the best they could counter with under the circumstances was to laugh him off or at least try to.
“No dude,” said Cori with a relaxed smile. “Chill.” He inched closer to the black marble kitchen island, hoping that Klein would back off. He didn’t. He felt Cori’s shoulder and pants, then put his arm on the back of Cori’s neck as though he were about to snap it. For her part, Laura continued to laugh and say, “No, no he doesn’t.” She was growing more alarmed and was looking for a way out of the room. Inches away from Cori, Klein stared at him, then slowly turned to Laura, his gangster scowl morphing into a great big goofy smile.
At this point, the health teacher at the taxpayer-funded union conference began to offer the two undercover reporters cocaine. “If you want some [cocaine], you can have some. Dude, if you want some I’ll give you a taste, don’t be embarrassed. Have some.”11
Luck, they say, is where preparation meets opportunity. The drugs may have slowed Klein down. Maybe it was alcohol. In any case, he groped both of our reporters everywhere except where they had their cameras. I suppose we did get lucky that day. Still, I prefer to call our good fortune “Veritas magic.”
Going Borat
In a brainstorming session after the Klein sting, my former chief of staff, Ken, came up with an idea so perfectly “Borat” we instantly fell in love with it. We would present Klein with an award for his contribution to keeping America drug free. We went Borat here for a specific reason: the more entertaining we can make our journalism, the more eyes we can draw to the problem at hand. From our own experience, Klein is not nearly the outlier you would hope he was.
Getting into the school would not be easy. Understandably, after Sandy Hook, authorities had hardened schools in suburban New York the way they might an American embassy in some Mideast hellhole. To get in the school, we needed an operational plan. For the plan to work, we needed to understand our target’s potential motivation to meet with us at the school. Unlike many of our projects, there was no ideological card we could play.
We would have to come up with a strategy that appealed to the self-interest of both Klein and his principal.
This scheme took some planning. First, we created an educational consulting company with the benignly bureaucratic name “New Star Learning” to present the award. Of course, New Star Learning had to have a credible-looking website with my smiling image on it and plenty of boasting about our relationship with the NJEA. From Howell Township’s website I pulled the name of the vice principal, Juanita Alvarez—second bananas being an easier mark than the first almost everywhere—and called her using a burner phone.
As expected, I got her voicemail: “My name is Bill Stern. I work with a company called New Star Learning. We’re an educational organization, and we’re calling because we’re interested in reaching out to Robert Klein who is a teacher there. We’d like to present him with a certificate based on some of the work he’s done in the physical education program at Howell Township. Thank you very much.”12
In our line of work, 80 percent of communication transcends the words spoken, even on a phone call. When I called Alvarez, I made sure I sounded like it was just another day at the office—confidence, gentleness, warmth, and a touch of indifference. I had my voicemail set up with a female assistant. “Thank you for calling New Star Learning,” said the voice, adding our dopily believable slogan, “where excellence is in education and we put the students first.” As Saul Alinsky reminded us, “Whenever possible go outside of the experience of your enemy.”13 The very last thing on Alvarez’s mind was that this was some elaborate sting.
Alvarez and I played phone tag for a month. I didn’t push it. Only a scammer would, and we were hardly that. No, not us. On April 23, I finally made contact with Alvarez. I reminded myself that the most critical imperative of that first contact was to obtain a second one.
“Hey, there,” I said casually, “we’re from New Star Learning, and we’re an education consulting company. We’re trying to give out awards. Robert came across our radar, and we’d love to sit in on his class and present him with an award.”
“That’s nice!” said an unsuspecting Alvarez.
“What I’d just like to do is send one of our employees to sit in on his class, present him an award, take his photo, and put it on our website for a new section we are developing for instructors throughout the tristate area.”
“That’s great,” she replied.
“It’s called the Stay Ahead award,” I elaborated. “It is primarily for anti-drug efforts and education throughout the tristate area.”
“Okay.”
Alvarez was hooked. Now it was just a question of arranging the details. I kept the conversation light and congenial. She had trouble nailing a date, she laughed, “because of spring break and its effects on us.” I kept that laugh line in my memory bank. It would be a good place to pick up next time. I expressed an interest in having Klein say a few words at the awards presentation on the importance of staying away from drugs.
“We’d love to get a photo too!” I enthused.
“Um, the only thing with that is,” said Alvarez, “we cannot publish student’s pictures.”
I quickly backtracked. “We wouldn’t,” I said. “It would just be of him up front.”
As in any sales call, the important thing is to never give the target an excuse to back out. Alec Baldwin’s Blake character said it best in Glengarry Glen Ross: “ABC. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing. Always be closing!”14 Veritas reporters learned how to deal with roadblocks, how to find a work-around, how to let targets find a way to say yes, how, ultimately, to close.
And close I did: May 20, 2015, eighth grade phys ed, 9:47 a.m. It does not get more specific than that. I put the phone down, calmly exhaled, and looked at the two journalists in the room. “May 20,” I smiled. We would hold off on the champagne until we got the video.
Disguise
A prime Veritas Rule is that your manner matters more than your costume. Nevertheless, a disguise is often needed, especially if the agent is me. I chose high-water khaki pants that fit a little too tight, the inevitable blue blazer, a striped blue tie, and shades straddling the top of my highlighted blonde hair. “You look like a middle-class white kid who works in white-collar education,” said my director of field operations. “You play the part well.” Thanks, Mac, that’s part of the game.
In choosing a name, it is generally wise to use your own first name in case one of your partners slips up. My problem was that my name had become a little too well known, at least in NJEA circles. So I adopted the official-sounding “Bill Stern.”
Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome
Since it was critical that we record the award ceremony on camera, Luke, the “New Star Learning cameraman,” was to come with me. Although Westchester County and Howell Township are in the same metropolitan area, it is easier to calculate the time for a trip to the moon and back than to calculate how long it would take to drive during rush hour from one end of the New York City metro to the other. I miscalculated. I arrived after 9:47 a.m. I was not too anxious. The class lasted forty-five minutes. As long as we got in before it ended we were good, but Luke was nowhere to be
found. He was coming from Jersey City, a slightly easier drive. He should have been there. If we did not record this ceremony, it might as well not happen. There could be no do-over.
Everything, I reminded myself, is a test. I kept calling and texting. Nothing. Finally, I received a text from Luke. The Howell Township police had detained him near the school because his long camera bag looked suspiciously like a rifle case. The police guard their schools as if every kid there was named “Barron.” Unfortunately, I had not properly briefed Luke on what to say in a situation like this, in part because I never could have predicted the police would mistake the camera bag for a weapon. At that moment I had to make an instant calculation: abort the mission and get out or somehow improvise, adapt, and overcome. I chose the latter.
Problem was I did not have a camera. Well, yes I did, sort of. I had left my old iPad in the car. The resolution was weak and the acoustics weaker, but it did have a video option. I jumped out of my car, pretended to talk on my cell, smiled and waved at the friendly officers like a man on a mission.
The school’s two large metallic front doors were intimidating. I felt like I was about to give an award to an inmate at Riker’s Island, not to a teacher at a nice New Jersey middle school. I went to hit the button and give my name. When I noticed that the door was slightly ajar I opened it slowly and positioned myself inside the foyer in front of the next set of doors. Fifteen seconds later, a teacher leaving the building opened those doors. I breezed by her, still “talking” on my cell, “Hey Rhonda, it’s Bill Stern. Did you get those reports on Passaic County for the New Star finalists?” I passed the test. I looked sufficiently dorky and official. She ignored me.
I’m in, I thought to myself. Here we go. I headed for the main office, armed with nothing but an iPad, a plaque, a mission, and some high-grade chutzpah. Three secretaries stood just inside the office door. They looked at me suspiciously.
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