by David Howard
That sounded unsatisfying to Fuller—after all, Pro’s gift was talking. He wanted the wiretap. To do it, he needed a full buy-in from the prosecutors who would eventually handle the case in court. Jake Laufer, an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan with whom Fuller had worked in the past, instantly expressed support for the idea—but advised him to go further up the food chain. Fuller flew to Washington, where at headquarters he met with Jim Boland, a unit chief, who told him to go for it. Boland also suggested that Fuller talk to Robert Blakey, an attorney at the Department of Justice who was known as the father of RICO. Passed in 1970, RICO—short for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—created a way for the first time for the FBI to arrest people for taking part in organized crime. Blakey, too, gave Fuller his blessing.
As Fuller began the month-long process of applying for a wiretap, an investigative gift fell from the heavens in the form of Mel Weinberg.
Weinberg was a deeply connected Long Island–based advance-fee con man who operated under the company name London Investors. In March, the FBI had arrested him in Miami for trying to sell phony CDs, and he’d cut a deal to work as an informant. Weinberg had previously collaborated with Pro and Joe Trocchio, among many other people Fuller was interested in—and he knew lots of wiseguys. A few weeks after Brennan and Wedick had told Fuller about the Brookhaven mortgage business, Weinberg called offering the same information.
Fuller potentially had two promising avenues for pursuing Fred Pro.
—
It was nine a.m. on June 6 when the group of visitors arrived at the Trident Consortium offices. Bernard Baker, the farmer from Kansas, filed in with his Colorado representatives and broker Billy Hicks, all of them wearing cowboy hats and turquoise jewelry. They were three hours early, and their garb stopped everyone cold. “They had all my secretaries overwhelmed,” Pro said, “because they are not familiar with that kind of people.”
He called them “the rhinestone cowboys” after the Glen Campbell song, which had come out two years earlier.
Pro knew little of Baker or his application. He called Hicks into his office to make sure Baker had come with money, then spent five minutes flipping through Baker’s development plan and appraisal, memorizing a couple of key facts. He then invited everyone in.
After some small talk, Pro said he needed Baker’s Social Security number for a credit check, and that he would also have to commission an FBI background check. All of this, Pro later explained, was “a psychological method of getting the customer into an obsequious position so they’d think that we are sophisticated and had world-wide contacts.”
When Baker asked for a list of references, Pro handed over a preprinted list of banks, including Seven Oak, and explained that the Eurotrust—which he called the Martini Trust, dropping in the famous name—was likely to provide funding.
Pro handed Baker his typical commitment letter: “Gentlemen: We are pleased to confirm our willingness to process our financing loan arrangement for the amount of five million five hundred thousand dollars ($5,500,000.00) for referenced property based upon the following terms and conditions.” The loan would carry 9.75 percent interest—and if it didn’t come through, Pro would return Baker’s deposit.
The closing was scheduled for July 10.
Baker handed over the $110,000 money order and departed. Pro’s first thought was to cash it as quickly as possible so he could send $30,000 to Cleveland. He still hoped to obtain Eurotrust paper for his Iverson Bicycle pipe dream. Pro ordered his chauffeur to rush an associate to a bank in Red Bank, New Jersey. (His track record with banks was so problematic, he now hired people to cash and deposit his checks.) Then he called Armand Mucci and told him that this time, he really had the money.
Unfortunately, word came back from New Jersey the next day that the bank wouldn’t pay out the money order to a third party. Pro was frustrated; with the Iverson bankruptcy proceedings looming, he didn’t want to wait the ten to fifteen days most banks would need to clear the payment.
Mucci, desperate for Pro’s money, proposed another idea: Bob Bendis could cash the money order in two or three days at a Cleveland-area bank where he held a trust account.
Pro reluctantly agreed, dispatching his assistant, Larry Mangiameli, to safeguard the $110,000. Not that Mangiameli filled him with confidence. Everyone called him Dorian, or Dorian Gray, because he was an aspiring actor who was obsessed with the corruptible Oscar Wilde character. Mangiameli was a friend of Pro’s former girlfriend’s, and Fred had taken in the “frustrated twenty-four-year-old boy” in an altruistic gesture, hiring him as a $400-a-week gofer that spring. Pro had begun teaching him the CIA business and had recently tasked him with developing a Trident Consortium training program for bridging phone calls, so that Pro could hire a staff to placate frustrated clients. But Dorian was still a scatterbrained young man who mostly fetched coffee and cigarettes. Pro nicknamed him Dorian Laser Beam. “He talked about getting jet fighters and flying over to Saudi Arabia and having dogfights with some friends, and back and forth,” Pro said. “A very unusual boy.”
Dorian Laser Beam was the only person available. Pro prepared a corporate resolution appointing him the secretary of Trident; another document empowering Mangiameli to handle the check on Trident’s behalf; and a third letter indicating how he wanted the $110,000 broken down. He wanted $30,000 paid to Mucci in three lump sums, $27,500 sent to Pro’s broker, and the rest returned to him.
Pro instructed Dorian to babysit Bendis at the bank and to diplomatically inquire about the Eurotrust situation before handing over the $30,000. Mangiameli wrote a note to himself in which he toggled in and out of the third person: “Remember, Dorian is on a plane American 661-4242 to Cleveland with the check, ask yourself where is Andy what is he doing, what’s happening with Iverson, Armand, Fred. Ask in a nice way for references to…bank commitments going out before handing over $30,000. Will call you when I land in Cleveland, also while in bank to keep you abreast.”
Pro put him on a flight on June 8 that would touch down in Cleveland at 8:40 a.m.
—
Later that morning, Mucci knocked on Kitzer’s door at the Shaker House. Phil was half-dressed, and he pulled on his shirt and shoes while Mucci waited. He also roused J.J. and Jack, who had arrived with him in Cleveland two days earlier and were staying in an adjoining room. “Get dressed,” he said. “C’mon downstairs.”
Phil and Mucci walked to the coffee shop, and Mucci produced the $110,000 money order. Mucci recounted meeting Mangiameli as the young man had exited his flight. “Before you go any further, do you have the check with you?” Mucci had asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, show it to me.”
Now Mucci and Phil sat with Dorian at a round table. Phil ordered coffee, and Mucci told the hotel operator to hold his calls. Bendis entered and took a seat. “Dorian,” Phil said, “where did you guys get this thing from?”
“Those cowboys brought this,” Mangiameli said. “The farmers.”
“On what?”
“The potato farm.”
“Potato [farm], $110,000? This would grow all the potatoes in the world, Dorian,” Phil said. Everyone laughed.
“A dumb cowboy brought it in,” Dorian said. “It was a deal we never expected to work. They just walked in the door out of the blue.”
“What did Fred give them?” Phil asked.
“Fred gave them one of his famous contracts. They accepted.”
Dorian said that they should cash it quickly, before the rhinestone cowboys backed out. Mucci sent him off to check into the hotel so the promoters could speak confidentially. Jack and J.J. arrived; there wasn’t enough room at the table, so they settled into chairs directly behind Phil. While loading a cigarette into a filter, Phil explained that Pro “had obtained the money order from a client—a victim—that it wasn’t a stolen money order; it wasn’t a counterfeit money order. We felt comfortable taking it on that basis.”
Mucci anno
unced that he wasn’t sending any of the money back to New York. Bendis, agreeing, said that they were “very, very much down on [Pro] for what he had done in stalling us with the money.”
Phil pointed out that Bendis couldn’t just put the check into his trust account and withdraw it however he saw fit; Pro had sent written instructions. Phil came up with a solution: Bendis could type up a document giving himself the authority to disburse the money as he saw fit, on which they would forge Mangiameli’s signature.
Bendis was useful because he’d maintained a veneer of legitimacy. He had a law degree—in contrast to the others, who only claimed to have graduated from fancy colleges. He’d even managed his kids’ Little League teams. After law school, he had joined his father’s real estate management company, which was involved in federally funded low-income housing. But the company went bankrupt, and Bendis opened his own practice, focusing on real estate law. In May 1976, he’d met Mucci and become entangled in the Shaker House deal. On numerous occasions they’d come tantalizingly close to acquiring the hotel, and in the meantime Bendis started referring his other clients elsewhere.
Before things went any further, Phil made his signature announcement about entering into a conspiracy. “Bob getting up, going back to his office, and typing this letter up…we’ll have committed the first overt act,” he said, using language that appears in an indictment.
Also, by taking the money, they were “jumping into Fred Pro’s conspiracy out in New York.”
Bendis argued that they couldn’t be implicated in Pro’s swindle. They were “receiving this check as innocent holders for value,” he said. “How Fred Pro got that check in New York is his business.”
“All right,” Phil said. “If you’re satisfied with that, let’s go ahead and do it.”
But as Bendis left, Phil caught up to him in the vestibule.
“Bob,” he said. “Do you feel comfortable putting that check into your trust account? You are an attorney, [and] know what you are getting into here.”
This was no accident, that Phil had cornered Bendis away from the others. He wanted to test Bendis, see if he could rattle him. Phil thought Bendis could be spooked into signing the $110,000 over for deposit in Seven Oak instead, so that Kitzer could have it for himself.
“I was trying to frighten him,” Phil later explained, “to get the check away from him.”
In other words, he was trying to swindle money from Bendis that Bendis and the others had just swindled away from Pro, who had originally scammed it from Baker.
But Bendis said he was willing to risk depositing the check, and Phil let it go.
—
Later that day, the promoters received word that Bendis had struck out: because the check was made out to a corporation, Cleveland Trust had refused to deposit it in his account. The promoters discussed what to try next. They debated flying to the bank that had issued the check, but they studied a map and found that Tribune, Kansas, was six hundred miles from anywhere.
Eventually, Mucci decided to call a manager at Central National Bank with whom he had a rapport. His account there was overdrawn by $2,200, but, he said, “If I promise to square that overdraft up out of the proceeds of this check, I think the deal will fly.”
The next morning, they all huddled around the money order. Pro’s corporate endorsement had been crossed out and covered by Bendis’s signature and account number, and now Mucci signed his name next to Bendis’s. Someone joked that it looked like a child’s coloring book, all the different hues and outside-the-lines scrawl. Phil accompanied Mucci to Central National, where they explained their problem. The bank manager agreed to submit the money order for payment and let them know when the Kansas bank wired the funds.
Back at the Shaker House, Pro was calling hourly about his $80,000. The promoters estimated that he’d phoned fifty times during the past few days. Mucci finally called him back to report that they’d submitted the money order for payment—without saying he’d used his own account—and were waiting for it to clear.
Dorian was still hanging around the Shaker House. He’d flown back to New York once, but when he’d called Pro from the airport, his boss had ordered him to get on the next plane back to Cleveland and not come home without the $80,000. Meanwhile, Mucci ordered him to stay in his room. “I wanted him to sweat it out in a motel room like I did,” Mucci said.
Soon enough, the situation would get far hotter for everyone involved.
17
Kick the Can
JUNE 11, 1977
After everyone rattled around the Shaker House for a couple of days in a fidgety limbo, Phil spurred the promoters back to work on Saturday. They sat at a table in the coffee shop, picking over the details of various deals, until Phil and Mucci locked into a conversation and moved across the room so they could better concentrate.
During a lull, the other four—Jack, J.J., D’Amato, and Bendis—noticed the splintered faction. Bendis got up and walked over, then D’Amato. Soon the Junior G-Men joined them, reuniting the full group, until—fifteen minutes later—another pair of promoters cleaved off. In this way the meeting shifted, amoeba-like, throughout the day, conversations fizzling and ramping up. Schemes were proposed, batted down. Mucci handed Jack another of the stolen bonds from Pinal County, Arizona, that he’d shown the agents in February. Jack was free, he said, to try to fence it and split the take with him. Waitresses poured oily coffee and delivered plates of runny eggs and club sandwiches and pastries.
Near the day’s end, J.J. looked around and said to Phil, “You know, we’ve sat at every one of these twenty tables and messed every one of them up.”
No wonder the promoters seemed to age so quickly, he thought. They sat around eating diner food all day, smoked like Cleveland’s steel mills, and drank coffee until they switched to cocktails, sometimes as early as eleven a.m. Phil liked crème de cacao with Scotch—a sweet drink he sometimes mixed with coffee. For dinner, the agents often ordered filet mignon and baked potatoes. Phil was uninterested in food, which he attributed to a bad stomach—he and Jack were always sharing cylinders of Tums—but he often asked for the most exotic entrée. The promoters’ idea of a workout was walking from their room to the bar. Phil disdained exercise but maintained his weight of around 140 pounds. Jack, though, was naturally burly and starting to pack it on. Mucci was seriously overweight.
This lifestyle is going to kill us all, J.J. thought.
He made a decision: From that point on, his only meal would be dinner. He had started running back home, mapping out a two-mile route around the parking lot in his apartment complex. He’d brought his sneakers on this trip, and now he told everyone he was going for a run—partly as a stress reliever but also because it gave him a chance to meet with Bowen Johnson, who had recently started shadowing Jack and J.J. on their travels. The undercover agents always struggled to put together reports while they were with Kitzer because of Phil’s hours and intrusiveness. Johnson would wait in his room for his colleagues to appear, often between ten p.m. and two a.m. They usually looked exhausted as they recounted the relevant happenings of the day for their case agent. When that was finished, they collectively agreed on what to do next. It was a small, highly functioning democracy. “It was really a good group to work with,” Johnson said. “No one was out to be a hotshot, which was important because under those conditions you better be able to get along.”
There were even moments of levity amid all the pressure. One late night in New York, Jack stumbled and stuttered, trying to dictate the details of a complicated scam. J.J., sitting on the other bed, grabbed the recorder out of his hand. “Jack, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
J.J. spent the next ninety minutes trying to craft a lucid description of the fraud and noticed Jack lying on the other bed, his eyes closed. “You set me up!” J.J. yelled as Jack and Bowen started laughing. “You guys played stupid so that I would dictate!”
After the agents left, Johnson typically spent t
he next few hours alone, creating reports to send back to Indianapolis. If there were recordings, he drew up a list of key developments and leads for agents back home and around the country to move on even before the tapes arrived: Let Kansas know about Bernard Baker, and inform New York that Pro just ripped off $110,000. This material would first hit the desk of agent Steve McVey, who was coordinating OpFoPen full-time in Indianapolis. He would pass the tapes to the secretarial pool, which might spend the entire day creating transcripts. “We were generating enormous amounts of material on the road,” Johnson said.
This left him equally sleep-deprived, but Johnson, a Texas native with a pronounced southern drawl, was a company man. His father was an army officer, and Johnson had been an Eagle Scout who’d felt drawn to law enforcement work in high school, when he began practicing firearms with a local police team. Once out of school, he obtained his pilot’s license and ran charter flights; while teaching several FBI agents to fly, he learned about their work. “The FBI was magical, if you will, and I wanted to be a part of that,” he said.
He never could have envisioned his life as a key part of OpFoPen. Even the logistics, in the days before mobile phones or beepers, were dicey. In hotels, Johnson arranged for a room on a different floor or wing from Brennan and Wedick’s—or just stayed in another hotel—to minimize the chances of being seen with them. Generally, there was no way to make plans or coordinate. If Johnson needed to consult with the agents, he hoped to run into them away from Kitzer; he would ignore them if Phil was there. When they went to restaurants, he took a table across the room and studiously avoided glancing in their direction, while still staying vigilant to movement at their table. If J.J. was wearing the Nagra and needed a new cassette, he headed to the restroom. Johnson would wait a few minutes, then go pop in a fresh tape for Wedick, the two of them crowding into a bathroom stall. He carried a spare recorder, too, in case J.J.’s conked out.