Chasing Phil

by David Howard

  They’d developed a system for their 302s, reports detailing what they’d learned from their subjects that could later be useful as evidence. They roughed out what the report should include together, and then one of them either recorded it or called it in to a stenographer. Deeghan cleaned up the language and passed it on to Lowie. The 302 would then go to all relevant FBI offices around the country: This is OpFoPen. We’re in Honolulu. This morning we met with Andy D’Amato and Mark Iuteri and discussed fraud against Jimmy Kealoha. D’Amato will provide a phony takeout commitment. Each respective FBI office—for example, Miami for Iuteri’s firebombing incident—would pursue the fresh leads. All of this helped validate what the undercover agents were doing.

  Wedick was distracted by the day’s travel plans. The bureau still had no idea of Kitzer’s itinerary change. The agents had held off on telling anyone back home, hoping Kitzer would change his mind about going to Frankfurt. As government agents conducting business in a foreign country, Brennan and Wedick were required to notify the host nation by, at minimum, presenting customs officials with maroon government passports. But with Phil, the agents carried only blue civilian passports—and would be breaking the law by violating West Germany’s sovereignty.

  Worse, West Germany was roiling with domestic terrorism: A leftist militant group called Baader-Meinhof, or the Red Army Faction, had recently been hijacking airplanes and kidnapping businessmen and politicians. The West Germans were particularly vigilant about screening for anyone in the country illegally, and the agents feared that this extra layer of scrutiny would lead Frankfurt airport personnel to identify them in front of Kitzer. Wedick and Brennan had few good choices.

  Wedick figured he had at least a couple of hours of quiet before heading off to the airport to begin that journey. He entered the elevator, figuring he’d hole up somewhere outside the hotel complex. But when the door opened in the lobby, Kitzer was waiting to get on.

  “Phil!” Wedick blurted. His hand reflexively brushed the pocket where he’d stashed the recorder.

  Kitzer’s eyes widened. He stepped into J.J.’s personal space. “Oh my God, I was just going to find you,” he said. “Brennan was arrested.”

  Wedick stared at Kitzer, trying to read him. His mind churned. This could be bad, Wedick thought.

  “Come on, we’ve gotta make a call,” Kitzer said, waving him out of the elevator. “We’ve got to get some bail going.” He suggested they strategize in the Ala Moana coffee shop.

  Wedick watched him. Kitzer looked worried, his eyebrows knitted close.

  But at the coffee shop entrance, Kitzer spun toward him and roared, “April Fools’!” Then he laughed and pointed at Wedick in a way that said, Gotcha!

  Wedick stood there shaking his head. He hadn’t realized it was April 1.

  13

  The Cold Plunge

  APRIL 1, 1977

  When they reached the ticket counter at the airport, Kitzer suggested that they book a flight on Lufthansa that circumnavigated the globe en route to Frankfurt, stopping in Asia and the Middle East. Although he’d been almost everywhere, he’d never returned from Hawaii by flying west, and he thought it would be a fun three-day adventure.

  The agents were stuck. It was Friday evening back in Indianapolis, and the chances of getting the wheels of bureaucracy creaking to life were nil. Without any other option in sight, they bought their tickets and settled in for the first leg to Tokyo, which offered the kind of coach-class comfort and festive spirit that no longer exists in modern aviation. The 747 featured a bar in the back where stewardesses hovered, so Kitzer naturally gravitated there to chat and buy drinks. Soon the strangers around them became new-old friends, pulling out pictures of their kids and laughing at Kitzer’s stories.

  Wedick and Brennan tried to relax. Tapping into Phil’s joie de vivre, they chortled about Dim Lightbulb Boy and the Parking Lot Fugitive. Phil imitated how Brennan, when he was trying to remember something, squinched his right eye while simultaneously raising his left eyebrow. They roared about the way Kitzer drew Wedick into barstool conversations with women, even though—or especially because—he resisted it.

  Brennan had on his Golden Bear shirt, and Wedick wore a blue Fire Department of New York shirt with a hook-and-ladder emblem his father had given him. It was a favorite, and Kitzer teased him about the fraying seams—Wedick was literally wearing it out.

  Wedick, in turn, called Phil “Phillip,” in a mock scolding-parent way, and slipped into his gravelly-voiced Bronx persona: “Ay! Not for nuttin’, but I told youse to move that freakin’ car already.” They called out his malapropisms—“An apple doesn’t fall from the tree” and “I was very squirmish about that.”

  They headed out to stretch their legs after checking into a hotel in Tokyo, and Wedick handed someone a camera for a picture. He was wearing Kitzer’s leather jacket, something he did frequently after finding that the coat was comfortable and looked good on him. The image snapped that day shows the three of them backdropped by spring greenery, Kitzer between the two younger men, their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders. Brennan is wearing a wide smile and a white button-down, his hair spilling across his forehead, and is leaning into Kitzer. Phil looks dapper in his other leather jacket, his hair combed rakishly, a hand draped over Wedick’s left shoulder, index finger slightly raised. They look like three friends in the throes of a rollicking adventure.

  When they headed out that evening, Kitzer was electrified. His plan was to plunge into the Ginza district, which was legendary for its nightlife. The agents, who’d never been to Japan, blinked at the city’s incandescence—the sheer volume of neon pushing back at the darkness. There were bars stacked atop bars along the packed streets, and Kitzer’s face both reflected and amplified the city’s wattage. Brennan wore a plaid blazer; Wedick and Kitzer had on shirts with oversized collars layered over the top of their leather jackets, per the fashion of the time.

  The agents spotted cops everywhere, which made them nervous. They had zero sense of Japanese customs—and spending time with Kitzer was like skiing a few miles per hour faster than your abilities dictated, constantly hovering on the edge of a stupendous wipeout. Brennan and Wedick had heard a story about when Kitzer lived in Florida in 1970. He’d bought a forty-foot Thunderbird Formula 400 speedboat and took a friend out the day it was delivered. He knew nothing about boats, and the friend offered to peruse the manual, but Phil snatched it and threw it into the water. Then he gunned the engine, ignoring the NO WAKE ZONE signs. Once they hit the Atlantic, he pushed the throttle to its limit, the boat skittering over the open water, Kitzer looking ecstatic. Somewhere out on the Atlantic, the friend noticed a red light pulsating on the control panel. Had Kitzer checked the engine fluids? Should he ease up?

  “Ah, don’t worry about it!” he bellowed, smiling rapturously.

  The red light glared as the boat hammered over the chop, and the friend began to wonder about how far a distress signal could carry. Kitzer, sufficiently sated, eventually steered the craft back to its slip. Hours later, back home, he took a call from the harbormaster. His expensive new toy was resting on the harbor’s sandy floor.

  Kitzer didn’t blink. He told the harbormaster to hold the line, saying he wanted to set up a conference call. He then dialed in his insurance agent and introduced the two men, saying they had something in common and needed to talk. He then told the harbormaster to explain what had happened with the boat and hung up. Kitzer seemed no more put out than if he’d discovered a hole in his sock. On to the next toy. He was a present-day version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, giving in to the compulsion to do something wrong simply for the rush of doing it.

  Phil picked a bar, and they squeezed in around a table adjacent to a woman sitting alone. The agents felt stretched far beyond their comfort zone. Wedick and Kitzer ducked into the bathroom and were shocked to see both a man and a woman inside. They stopped abruptly, thinking they’d walked in on something, but the couple barely no
ticed them while they washed their hands. Apparently, the restrooms were coed. Kitzer and Wedick looked at each other and laughed.

  Back at the diminutive table, they squinted at their surroundings. Brennan’s shoulder was pressed against that of a guy in a business suit at the next table who spoke some English. On the opposite side, Phil tried striking up a conversation with the neighboring woman, who was gorgeous: long hair, high cheekbones, stunning smile. But she spoke only Japanese.

  The waiter tried to help the foreigners along with his few words of English. The three men attempted to order Scotch, which was an ordeal of loudly pronounced words and pantomimes, but the waiter brought them a pitcher of some other alcoholic beverage. Kitzer rejected this as plainly wrong—he wanted a highball with ice. He shrugged in mock outrage, and the beautiful woman, watching, smiled back. Then she leaned over and poured three drinks into their glasses.

  Kitzer now no longer cared about his Cutty Sark. Seeing this act of neighborly kindness as an invitation, he reached for her hand. She offered it up, and he kissed it with a small bow. The waiter hovered nearby, seeming eager to communicate something but incapable of doing it. Kitzer ignored him. The tables were so close together that he merely had to lean to enter the Japanese beauty’s personal space. After more failed attempts at verbal communication, he moved in for a kiss.

  At that moment, the room erupted. The maître d’ came running over, yelling in Japanese, and chased the woman out. The three of them looked at one another in astonishment.

  “Hell, that’s not right,” Kitzer said. “Let’s go over there. Who is that guy?”

  Brennan’s neighbor bumped his elbow. “That girl,” the man said, leaning toward Brennan. “She was a he.”

  Jack looked at him, puzzled for a moment; then it hit him: The woman was a transvestite, and probably a prostitute—which explained the staff’s reaction. Jack told the others, and he and Wedick exploded with laughter.

  Kitzer joined them, but less enthusiastically. Wedick was already grinning at him and shaking his head, and Kitzer knew that it would not be the last he would hear of this.

  —

  Hong Kong was merely a refueling stop, so they hoped they’d have an opportunity to explore Bangkok, but when they touched down the airport seemed to be sliding into chaos. Several months earlier, Thailand’s military had responded to student protests with a massacre, then staged a coup, leaving the economy in a slag heap and the nation palpably tense. Airport employees stood around, listening to a loud, shrill speech being piped in. Kitzer and the agents looked at the scene uncomfortably, not understanding a word of the diatribe but surmising that it would be wise not to venture out.

  Karachi, Pakistan, was another refueling stop. As the plane prepared to leave, the final passenger to board dropped to his knees and kissed the floor. When Brennan asked for his story, the guy explained that he worked for a transport company in New York that had sent a cargo ship. The Pakistanis wouldn’t unload it because of a labor dispute, so the guy had been dispatched to try to settle it. But then someone put a knife to his neck and he was held hostage for eighteen days; his captors had just released him ahead of their flight.

  It was as if Kitzer and the agents had signed up for a tour of the world’s testiest geopolitical squabbles. They next flew to Athens, where airport officials were on the alert for hijacking attempts by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (and, indeed, six months later, the terrorist group would take hostages on another Lufthansa flight). Brennan watched armed guards in jeeps surround the plane as it pulled up. They hadn’t expected to leave the aircraft, but airport personnel refused to refuel the plane until everybody on board had exited. The stewardesses piped up with instructions: Do not stand in large groups inside the terminal. Clusters of people made more attractive targets for gunmen.

  The terminal was eerily empty, and the counters were mostly unattended. Kitzer, Wedick, and Brennan split off from the other passengers and hunkered in a recessed corner, their senses alive and alert, as if they were Neanderthals clustered around a fire, listening to the sounds of an incomprehensible new world. Airport employees on a balcony pointed down at them. As they kept vigil, the conversation tilted toward the personal, Phil revealing some details about his life off the road. His wife, Audrey, was a farmer’s daughter from southern Minnesota who’d been a stewardess on one of his flights to Miami in the 1960s. She was nearly a decade younger, but he was fun and dazzling. Soon after they were married a son, Jeffrey, arrived. They lived in an old run-down farmhouse in tiny Ellendale, near where she grew up, south of Minneapolis. She taught Sunday school and competed in a bowling league.

  Audrey was near her parents there, which was important because Kitzer was gone most of the time. Kitzer tried to blend in, but that was tricky for a Chicago guy who traveled the world, meeting with bankers and businessmen, not to mention high-finance swindlers. Ellendale folks noticed when, in a bar, he flipped through a wad of hundred-dollar bills—one local would later describe it as “big enough to choke a horse”—then asked for change. People talked about the time he went to buy a TV and pulled out his money and a roll of thousand-dollar bills spilled onto the floor.

  He’d told Audrey’s father, Lawrence Jensen, that he was a broker in the finance industry, and no one pressed him beyond that. Jensen believed that if a man didn’t want to tell him his business, then he wouldn’t ask. Kitzer tucked a telex machine into an upstairs bedroom closet and otherwise projected to this modest middle-American world the image of a successful businessman. When he was around, Kitzer was good to Audrey and Jeffrey and was a steady provider, and he spent every Christmas at home. She appreciated that he’d agreed to live in her beloved hometown.

  Kitzer didn’t tell them about the dark secrets lurking in his past.

  —

  A decade earlier, on March 20, 1967, the central characters in the collapse of American Allied Insurance went on trial in federal court in Bismarck, North Dakota. The Kitzers had successfully petitioned for a move from Minneapolis, where, they’d argued, they couldn’t get an impartial jury. A local newspaper described the pending drama as “sensational” and noted “an air of excitement” for the “big-city trial.”

  The prosecutors aimed to portray the Kitzer empire as an exotic pyramid scheme, one insolvent firm propping up another for the purpose of getting rich. “This case involves bribery, blackmail, payoffs and corruption,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Foley told the jury. He described one of the Kitzers’ businesses as their “personal checking account.”

  “They stole, they gypped, they plundered, they took,” he said.

  Several young women testified that Kitzer had invited them on trips to Florida, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Audrey Jensen said he flew her to Miami twice and bought her a fur coat. Foley charged that the Kitzers took at least $3.7 million in cash from Allied and replaced it with worthless securities—and were “bad people” who had abused the “great concept of social justice” that insurance represented.

  The government’s chief expert witness, a U.S. Treasury employee, spent more than fifty hours on the stand, trying to explain the dense thicket of Kitzer companies and transactions. The prosecution stretched across a sonorous six weeks. For the Bismarck jury, which the New York Times described as “six North Dakota housewives, three nurses, and three laboring men,” this was a lot to digest.

  The Kitzers built their defense around one concept: Confuse everyone even more.

  When the defense team took its turn, lawyers walked the jury through a jungle of contradictory accounting data. Witnesses opined that the government had declared American Allied insolvent based on a capricious set of accounting principles, arguing that Minnesota’s insurance examiners had pointedly undervalued or disregarded legitimate assets to justify crushing the firm. Given more time, they said, the company might have blossomed.

  The trial took a bizarre turn when, one day, the lawyer for David Kroman, the president of an American Allied affiliate, informed the judg
e that Kroman had been discovered by police at four a.m. in a locked car pulled off a road outside Bismarck. Kroman was hefting a loaded shotgun and claimed he’d been forced off the blacktop at gunpoint because he was transporting documents proving that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated John F. Kennedy. The judge declared a mistrial and dispatched Kroman for a mental exam. The four other defendants continued to stand trial, though Magnusson, the insurance commissioner, interrupted the proceedings for a three-day stay in a Bismarck hospital after a fainting spell in his hotel room.

  Frank Oliver took over from there. A flamboyant and blustery lawyer representing the younger Kitzer, Oliver sometimes defended mobsters in Chicago while wearing a cape. He claimed the Kitzers were collateral damage in a high-level political plot led by former U.S. attorney Miles Lord. The conspiracy, which included Minnesota’s governor and attorney general, had had two goals: to damage Lieutenant Governor Alexander Keith, a former Kitzer employee who harbored ambitions to challenge Governor Karl Rolvaag in a primary, and to get Lord appointed as a federal judge. To accomplish all this, Lord had needed to destroy American Allied. One defense lawyer even gave it a name: Operation Get Kitzer.

  To bolster this theory, Oliver, known by some in Chicago as the “Caped Crusader,” dragged virtually every key Minnesota political figure to North Dakota to testify, including Rolvaag, who had lost his reelection bid the previous year. When Junior himself, then thirty-four, took the stand, he mesmerized the jury for eight days, portraying himself as a scrappy and striving young businessman who’d been ensnared in a net of political intrigue that reached all the way to the White House.