by David Howard
After ruling out the Secret Service (too much standing around), investigative journalism (too much writing), and the CIA (too much travel), young Jim settled on the FBI. At age fourteen, after his family had moved to a more spacious home in Staten Island, he wrote to the bureau asking about careers. One day he stood in the kitchen as his parents chastised him about his grades. The phone rang. “This guy says he’s with the FBI and he wants to talk to you,” his father said. “What’s this about?”
Jim took the phone, and a recruiter explained that he’d received Wedick’s letter and wanted him to come in for an interview. Jim eventually managed to interject that he had only just started high school.
Even without his father’s admonitions, he naturally gravitated toward responsibility. He embraced the role of altar boy at St. Helena’s Church, soaking up the Latin, relishing the precision and repetitions of the ceremony. When, at age sixteen, he was working as a counselor at Camp Notre Dame in New Hampshire, the head counselor suddenly departed in midsummer, and Jim was next in line. He happily blew a whistle in the mess hall and began making announcements about how he was going to run the place.
To help pay for his college classes, Wedick decided to become a New York City lifeguard; the competition for the position, a lucrative union job, was, however, quite intense. He’d never thought much about swimming and would be going up against teenagers who had competed on swim teams for years. Several times a week, he took a ferry and a subway to get to the East Fifty-fourth Street pool in Manhattan, where he swam laps until he nearly sank from exhaustion. He landed the job and learned a life lesson. “I had this work ethic,” he later recalled. From that point on, he said, “I’m for doing everything to the maximum. I don’t know halfway.”
In 1969, after graduating from high school, he enrolled in an accounting program at Fordham because he’d heard that J. Edgar Hoover mostly hired lawyers and accountants, and he figured he’d start with the latter. Between classes one day, he spotted a flyer with an FBI logo on it: The bureau was seeking part-time office help. This was a possible entry point. I could get in there, he thought, and then I’ll be golden.
For the next few years, he juggled a slate of classes and jobs as a lifeguard and an FBI clerk. He sometimes worked seven days a week, napping during two-hour subway rides between Manhattan, Coney Island, and Staten Island, often waking up three stations past his stop. But he was on his way. He eventually became a driver for John F. Malone, an assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, and during their trips Malone regaled him with stories of bank robberies and plane hijackings.
The fantasy nearly fizzled. During Wedick’s senior year at Fordham, the bureau offered him a full-time job as a special-agent accountant. He wasn’t interested in forensic analyses of financial ledgers, but everyone leaned on him. One bureaucrat in a three-piece suit told him, “Jim, if you don’t do this, you’re not gonna be in the FBI.” Even Malone pushed him to accept it.
He gambled and refused the job, and the FBI instead offered him a spot in its next class of trainees. He enrolled at Quantico in 1973 at twenty-three, the youngest member of his class. The other recruits nicknamed him Bronx. His counselor, Al Whitaker, was a lifer from Gary, Indiana, and he told the recruits riveting tales about the pursuit of Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger. By the time they graduated, three months later, the whole class knew that Bronx wanted to go to Gary.
This was a source of hilarity among recruits who knew the city’s reputation as a Rust Belt pothole. Anyway, the FBI didn’t send anyone where he wanted to go. The joke was that the bureau handed a monkey a dart bearing a recruit’s name and pointed at a map on the wall. But when his orders came in May 1973, Wedick’s destination read Indianapolis. Gary was one of Indianapolis’s resident offices. And fifteen months after Wedick arrived, Special Agent in Charge James Martin called him into his office. “Jimmy, I’m very sorry,” he said, “but I’m sending you to Gary.” The FBI normally assigned Gary to agents only after they’d accrued significant experience elsewhere, because it was so dangerous. But Martin had no one else to send.
Wedick thanked Martin and cleaned out his desk. When he arrived in Gary, he said, “downtown was all burned down.” The office had bullet holes in it, and people were being murdered in the park across the street. One of his new colleagues advised Wedick that when he walked out to his car late at night, he shouldn’t keep his gun in a holster. Instead, he should wear a raincoat and slip his snub-nosed .357 into a pocket where it would be easy to grab. Wedick thanked him.
This is perfect, he thought.
During his first week, he took a case involving a ring of thieves stealing tractor-trailer trucks loaded with steel. He cultivated a local thug named Tom as an informant. There was one problem: Tom feared that mobsters would sniff out that he was a snitch. To deflect suspicion, Wedick staged a scene at two in the morning in which he walked into an underworld bar and said he was looking for Tom. Of course, Tom was sitting right there, and Wedick left after staring right at him—making it clear that he had no idea who Tom was.
The next day, Tom drove Wedick along the shores of Lake Michigan, into a warren of warehouses and junkyards and eerie incinerator silos. It was like a set for a dystopian movie. Tom stopped at a massive chop shop—a place where stolen trucks were cut apart with acetylene torches and their pieces sold off. Five rigs carrying massive steel coils were parked there. The thieves had targeted those trucks so they could melt down the steel and resell it. Together, the trucks and steel were worth more than $2.5 million.
The find established Wedick as an ambitious upstart, someone who wasn’t about to wait his turn to claim center stage. He was intense and cocky, talked like a New Yorker, and grew a lush mid-seventies mustache that made him look a few years older. A single guy who could function on little sleep, he hurled himself into his cases, hounding after every detail so obsessively that he would skip lunch, then dinner, then wonder why he felt light-headed at ten o’clock. He nicknamed his desk “the vortex.”
His unbridled chutzpah sometimes led to trouble. He once went out looking for a fugitive alone—a rookie mistake—and, during an ensuing foot chase, fell through ice into a pond. He hoisted himself out by grabbing an overhanging tree branch. On another occasion, as Wedick walked to his car in the small hours of the morning, he watched a vehicle pass slowly. They’re coming back, he thought. Sure enough, the car circled around and stopped in front of him, and the two occupants got out and demanded his wallet. Wedick had already pulled his gun. The would-be muggers lunged back into the vehicle and squealed away.
Some agents viewed his near-ecstatic fervor as an affront. “There was an element of ‘Who do you think you are, kid? You’re going to blow the pecking order out of the water,’ ” he recalled.
He notched so many arrests in bank robbery and fugitive cases that the bureau assigned him a new 1976 Ford Thunderbird that year, passing over older colleagues.
But for Wedick, the office was more than an outlet for his fanatical work habits. His family was almost eight hundred miles away, so he created a surrogate version by harnessing his natural ability to connect with people. A relentless extrovert, he bought an office coffeemaker to create a water-cooler type of gathering point. He organized the office Christmas party, collecting money and putting up decorations, even holding it in his apartment complex one year. He bantered with everyone, greeting and chatting up the office janitor and the concession-stand guy as if they were pals from back on the Bronx playgrounds.
Wedick cast a wide social net. He befriended federal prosecutors and clerks and cops in Hammond, one town over. He wasn’t just young and therefore invincible; he was also an FBI agent and thus even more invincible. Wedick shared a three-bedroom apartment with Kim Jordan, who was also in his twenties and the federal court chief judge’s law clerk, and the scene was like his family’s overflowing Bronx apartment. A rotating cast of visitors and friends occupied the third room, including Hammond Times reporter Bob O’Hearn, who
wrote extensively about the FBI in Gary—in particular, Wedick’s arrests. Wedick dubbed this extended circle “the Federalies.” Sometimes he rallied the troops for happy hour drinks, and other times Wedick, who liked to exercise, persuaded everyone to go to Omni 41, a local health club.
Wedick was, as he put it, “happy as dirt”—and right where he wanted to be.
—
All of this made Brennan’s Kitzer pitch sound distinctly unappealing. The only reason Wedick paused to consider it was Brennan himself. During his first assignment, in Indianapolis, Wedick had pulled overnight shifts in which his job was to sort incoming teletypes. He’d noticed Brennan’s name on many of the big cases coming out of Gary, and when he was assigned there in August 1974, he watched how Brennan operated.
Brennan clearly knew a promising case—which was part of what made Wedick leery. If this one was so great, why wouldn’t Jack work it himself—or keep it in reserve for a slow stretch, as many agents did? Wedick thought he knew the answer: It sounded like a meat grinder. Whoever took the case would likely find themselves endlessly conducting and transcribing interviews, reviewing financial records, applying for subpoenas—typical white-collar-crime sausage-making tedium.
But Brennan had a way of working people. He hid a bullish persistence under a kind of southern-gentleman act that was so disarming, you somehow ended up agreeing to do whatever he wanted. He continued to hector Wedick. “It’ll just be one case,” he said. “Norman Howard is a great informant who knows a lot, and you’d love working with him.”
He tried another tack: appealing to Wedick’s ego. So J.J. could handle the toughest cases? This guy Kitzer will be far more challenging than any nitwit bank robbers.
Wedick said he would think it over.
—
As Wedick pondered Brennan’s proposition that night, he began to look at the Kitzer case differently. Allen Ezell had already tried the conventional route to nail Kitzer, and so far it hadn’t worked.
They needed a new strategy, and the most obvious one Wedick could think of was also one that held serious appeal for him: They might need to work undercover.
The FBI had long avoided such operations, but lately it had begun to take a few tentative steps in that direction. Back in Indianapolis, Wedick had chatted up Dean Naum, the first agent there to take the bureau’s bare-bones training class for undercover work. Naum wore street clothes instead of a standard-issue suit and walked with a swagger. Wedick had sought him out. “Dean, I’d like to work undercover stuff,” he’d said.
Naum had waved him off. “Not ever in your dreams, kid.”
But after arriving in Gary, Wedick openly campaigned for undercover training. In May 1976, his boss, Orville Watts, wrote a memo to headquarters outlining Wedick’s “intense desire to attend a school associated with bureau undercover work, including the schooling in driving a tractor-trailer rig. SA Wedick’s interest in such a school, desire to work in an undercover capacity, ability to meet and converse with people even under the most unusual or trying circumstances, age and physical appearance would all be an asset.” Wedick had requested the truck-driving school thinking he could use that to infiltrate organized-crime theft rings.
Indianapolis already had Naum and another agent in place for undercover jobs, and the FBI’s program was still in its infancy. The training was in high demand, and Wedick, who was young, probably wasn’t going to be chosen for at least another year.
Maybe, he thought, the Kitzer case was a chance to jump to the front of the line. Which made it far more appealing than it had sounded at first.
There was one problem: Wedick knew that if he took the case, Brennan was likely to want to join in as soon as he was free from his current trials. Brennan had a way of reaching into cases in which he was peripherally involved if he thought they weren’t moving quickly enough, or when he was suddenly freed up from other commitments. There was a paradoxical impulsiveness to his easygoing personality. Back home, when Brennan’s four-legged console television set broke, he didn’t bother reading the manual. He just took it apart with Becky standing by asking if he knew what he was doing and making sure he’d at least remembered to unplug the thing. Somehow he always managed to make it work—but Wedick didn’t subscribe to this kind of seat-of-the-pants, often impulsive way of doing things. He had no interest in taking the Kitzer case only to have Brennan later insert himself and start tinkering. Brennan would have an obvious motivation to do so: He had opened the case, and he stood to get credit for any result. But to Wedick, the thought of both of them grappling for the reins of the case was distinctly unappealing.
Driving to work, Wedick thought up a solution, and when he arrived at the office, he tracked Brennan down. “Look, I’ll do this, Jack, but I want no interference from you,” Wedick said. “If you stick your hands into this, I’ll prepare the memo to close this case faster than you can blink your eyes.”
Brennan agreed without hesitation. He knew Wedick would work it hard, and he didn’t want the opportunity to disappear.
—
Within hours, Wedick was sitting with Norman Howard, going over the way Kitzer operated. They agreed that they should strike quickly, while Kitzer was reaching out, and they invented a story they could use to lure him in.
Howard called Kitzer afterward and explained that a buddy of his had a brother, Nick Carbone, who owned a restaurant in South Bend, Indiana. Carbone had made some poor decisions that had created financial trouble, and his bank, St. Joseph, had balked at his $50,000 loan application. The bankers had indicated that Carbone lacked adequate collateral. Howard told Kitzer that Carbone would make an excellent prospect for a $50,000 Seven Oak Finance letter of credit, which Carbone could use to improve his bottom line.
Howard, of course, knew that Seven Oak didn’t have $50,000. Kitzer was in the business of taking money, not handing it out. He offered the illusion of assets—a kind of financial hall of mirrors in which a banker or victim might be flummoxed into turning over money. For a fee, Kitzer would send a businessman a phony bank statement showing a six-figure balance—again, to insinuate wealth where none existed.
Kitzer told Howard that this sounded fine. He could provide the letter of credit for 10 percent of face value, or $5,000.
—
On October 21, three days after Kitzer called his pizza shop, Howard walked up to a fashionable apartment building on Fullerton Avenue, on Chicago’s North Side—the home of Kitzer’s friend Debra Marshall. Howard was wearing a hidden wireless transmitter that allowed Wedick to listen from a van parked outside. He told Wedick that he could get Kitzer to talk about the fraudulent nature of Seven Oak.
“Hey, buddy,” Howard said when Kitzer answered the door.
“Hey, Norman,” Kitzer replied. He introduced Marshall to Howard and then asked, “How about a drink?”
“What you got?”
“Scotch.”
“Yeah, I knew you didn’t have anything but Scotch,” Howard said, laughing.
Marshall interjected that, in fact, she had wine.
“Good, give me a little wine,” Howard said. “One cube of ice.”
Kitzer asked what Howard had been up to.
“Just kicking around,” Norman answered. “I’m mad at you, though.”
“Why’s that?”
Howard reminded him that at one point Kitzer had planned to include him in Mercantile Bank & Trust—maybe even send him to the Caribbean to run it.
Kitzer didn’t hesitate: “Do you have fifty bucks in your pocket?”
“Say what?”
“Because you owe it to me.”
Howard sounded baffled. “For what?”
“This is just the day before yesterday,” Kitzer said, pulling out a copy of the Wall Street Journal article. “Here’s the Caribbean thing—in the Journal.”
“Oh, okay,” Howard said, laughing. “I owe you fifty bucks.”
Kitzer laughed, too.
“What, did it blow apart, huh?” Howard said.
“Yeah, it blew apart,” Kitzer said. “I’m in it.”
“I guess my name would have been in there if you didn’t cut me out,” Howard said, realizing where Kitzer was going.
“Because you were cut out, it cost you fifty.”
“Fifty. Okay. All right.”
“Was it worth it to keep your name out of the Journal?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Howard conceded.
Inside the van, Wedick marveled at how effortlessly Kitzer had flipped the conversation to put Howard on the defensive.
Howard asked about Seven Oak. “Let me see that stuff you got,” he said.
Kitzer showed Howard the paperwork from London: financial statements, stock certificates. He controlled one hundred thousand shares of Seven Oak stock. “I call all the shots,” he said.
“In other words,” Howard said, “on a letter of credit, this guy, all he’s got to do is come to you and you make the phone call and we got it, right?”
“That’s right.”
Flipping through the pages, Howard came across the name 219 Dearborn Corp. Kitzer explained that that was the holding company he’d formed.
“How did you come up with that?”
“How do you think?” Kitzer said. “You know what 219 Dearborn is.”
“No, I don’t, really. Is it the stock exchange?”
Kitzer laughed. “It’s the federal building.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Howard said. “That’s the Everett Dirksen Building.” He was referring to the skyscraper at 219 South Dearborn Street in downtown Chicago.
“Right, right,” Kitzer said. “The FBI, the whole shot…the United States courthouse. I was being very facetious that day.”
Howard then tried to help Wedick out by probing into the bank’s legitimacy. “You don’t have to comply with the laws of this country, relative to issuing?” he asked, referring to the British bank.