Now that so many children spend all their spare time indoors, in front of the TV or with computer games, I wonder if they ever learn the practical knowledge that all of us neighborhood kids picked up in Braddock Park. I’m thinking in particular of a guy maybe in his thirties whom we called Cut Off because he was always chasing after us, yelling “I’ll cut off your fingers!” Cut Off did have a penknife he would flourish, and he was certainly our worst nightmare. But if his knife had a blade at all, it couldn’t have been more than an inch long and too dull to cut butter. Today’s parents would have hounded the local police chief until Cut Off was hauled away and thrown in the slammer, but our parents could never get too excited when we ran to them in panic after another of Cut Off’s sorties. They knew, I’m sure, that he lived in the park because he had no other home and that, for all his shouting, he was harmless as a teddy bear. Live and let live, they figured; and all of us, I think, finally came to understand that.
The Immaculate Heart of Mary Grammar School, which I attended through sixth grade, was one of the stranger such facilities known to man. The school had taken over a little urban commercial strip. What had once been a vaudeville theater—and still had makeup and prop rooms from its old days—was converted into the chapel. For classrooms, we used the former storefronts. Instead of being promoted from first to second to third grade, we always said that we were graduating from the butcher shop to the candy store, or the candy store to the tailor’s shop.
Our teachers were all nuns as far as I can recall, and since I was born left-handed and there was almost no greater challenge on earth for a grammar-school nun than making left-handed boys write right-handed, I came in for some special attention. (“Sinister,” recall, derives from a Latin adjective meaning on or toward the left hand.) Going on half a century later, whenever I pick up a pencil in my left hand, I still half expect to hear the swoosh of a nun’s ruler heading toward my knuckles!
Our grammar school class consisted of thirty kids at most, small enough that everyone seemed to take on a specific role. Mine turned out to be some of the best early training you can get for running a huge bureaucracy. I proved to be a good broker, a deft intermediary who could get along with the good students and the good athletes, the class stars and the class wallflowers. When a bully was picking on someone, I was usually able to find some middle ground between them, some way both of them could save face. Usually, that is; not always. Once, frustrated by a sixth-grader who kept beating up on one of my second-grade classmates despite my intervention, I hauled off and punched the kid in the nose hard enough that he bled all over the place. That occasioned another visit to our household by someone demanding justice: the sixth-grader’s father, apparently not embarrassed that his son had been bested by someone almost half his age. (My father’s punishment, by the way, didn’t take that into account either, or the facts of the case: another good lesson in practical justice.)
Junior high opened our eyes considerably. We moved on to a school next to the parish’s main church, St. Joseph of the Palisades, in West New York, just as the city and the parish were starting to undergo a sea change. Six new students were waiting in our classroom, and not one of them spoke more than a few words of English. They were all the children of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, the first wave of an influx that would transform large sections of West New York and nearby Union City into Little Havanas, just as an equal influx was upending Miami, 1,300 miles south of us. Today, St. Joseph’s—where my brothers and I were baptized and had our first communions—is largely a Cuban-American parish.
All that was for later, though. After seven years of fairly predictable schooling, we junior highers had been handed something exotic, and most of us tried to take advantage of it. We taught our new classmates English; they taught us Spanish; and before long, we were all getting along just fine. I kept up the Spanish study in high school, and by the time I graduated and got my real-estate license, I was probably the only Spanish-speaking house peddler in all of Hudson County, a nice boon to the family business for a few summers, before the new Cuban-Americans could get into the real-estate business themselves.
At the end of eighth grade, the nuns turned us over to the Christian Brothers who ran St. Joseph’s High School, a shock to the system that took some getting used to. A lot of the brothers had trained at Lincoln Hall, a fortresslike facility up in northern Westchester County, New York, where the order had been trying to reclaim delinquent and troubled boys since the mid-nineteenth century. We didn’t count many hardened cases among the ninety or so of us in my high school class, but some of the brothers still tended to treat us as if any moment we might slip out the door and steal a car or break into the locker room of the separate girl’s high school housed in our same building.
When they weren’t on the prowl for incipient criminals or trying to drum Latin through our thick skulls, the brothers made a serious effort to involve us in good works. In that, they were generally successful—in my case, with spectacular results.
The summer after my junior year, I went down to eastern Kentucky with a school community-service group called Young Christian Students. It was my first trip any distance away from northern New Jersey, and it landed us in a place that at first introduction seemed to be on the far side of the moon. This was right in the heart of Appalachia, a land of sandstone ridges and small hollows, tiny towns that looked to be half-abandoned, cold-water shacks, and small tobacco fields wherever the sun shone and the soil was up to the challenge. Our St. Joseph’s High School had aligned itself with a local parish whose mission was to educate the people and help them find jobs. As part of that goal, we YCS volunteers were sent out to do a census of the people of the region. Some of those we talked with didn’t know what state they lived in or who the president was. (“Roosevelt” was a frequent answer.) Many had never traveled more than two towns away from where they had been born and raised. Ancient cars sat rusted out beside their porches. Televisions were virtually nonexistent.
It was all a tremendous culture shock, and yet the more I talked to the people out there, and especially the ones my age, the more I learned. I could tell my new teenage friends about the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Gunsmoke. They could tell me about alcoholic fathers, about leaving school at age seven to do what little paying work could be found, about their own run-ins with the law. One friend I made that summer told me about a little town called Sandcastle. The place was so tough, he claimed, that every evening when it got dark, the sheriff just up and left the place to the shooters. All I could do was look at him with my jaw hanging open. How could you have a town without a policeman to keep order?
Sometimes my ignorance was just plain comical. As part of broadening the employment base of the region, we worked part-time on an experimental farm that was trying to encourage locals to plant cucumbers that could then be sold at farm stands and to grocery chains. We would even take people out into the fields to show them how to pick cucumbers … except that I kept calling them “pickles.”
“You wait until the pickle is about this long,” I’d explain, “and this green, then you grab it by—”
“Cucumber!” someone would call across to me. “It’s called a cucumber.”
“Well, it looks like a pickle to me.”
At least I didn’t call it a kosher dill.
The program worked, though, even in spite of know-nothing summer farmers like me, and it wasn’t just some Save Appalachia flash in the pan, either. Father Henry Beiting, the local priest who ran it, stuck with the project until it was one of the largest employers in that part of the state, and he remembered just about everyone who had passed through his door. I’d been FBI director for maybe a year when I got a note from Father Beiting congratulating me and asking if he could come by for a visit for old time’s sake. As he was getting ready to leave, I asked where he was headed next.
“Oh,” he said, “I’m off to the Capitol to see one of my good friends, Hal Rodgers. Do you know him?”
Know him? Not only did Hal Rodgers represent the Fifth District of Kentucky, where I had once grown pickles, but he was also chairman of the Appropriations Committee that oversaw the FBI.
Every high school career should have at least one moment when all the self-consciousness of being a teenager falls away and you see the world clearly for what it is. For me, that trip to Kentucky was such a time. Everything I had been told about the joys of serving and helping came together in that experience. I got far more out of those seven weeks than I ever could have given back to the people down there. In a way, though, I was even luckier because I had two such experiences in high school, the second far more negative.
I hadn’t given a lot of thought to college by the time my senior year rolled around, but to the extent that I had a fantasy school I wanted to attend, it was the United States Military Academy at West Point. My dad had shown me the campus during a trip to Bear Mountain, and I’d loved everything about it: the uniforms, the way the place sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson, the crispness of everything. “Duty, Honor, Country” seemed to speak personally to me. Dad was an army guy himself, a big influence, but West Point was also free if you could get in. The real-estate business limped along from year to year, but there was very little margin in the family budget, and my brother Bill’s tuition at his private university had taken care of just about all the excess.
In truth, I also thought I might have a fair crack at getting into West Point. My grades weren’t as good as Bill’s and I was no star athlete, but I’d had my share of A’s and B’s, and I’d played a lot of intramurals. My classmates had also elected me head of the student disciplinary board. In effect, I was the presiding judge whenever the Christian Brothers would recommend some miscreant to us. Outside of school, I’d made Eagle scout, and I faithfully delivered the Hudson Dispatch. Several times a month, I also resumed my old altar-boy duties, and I had my Young Christian Student activities to bolster my résumé, including the time I spent in the evening reading to kids at St. Joseph’s School for the Blind, down in Jersey City. I had no idea what the academy was really looking for, but I figured I was at least in the same solar system as its applicant pool.
Before any St. Joseph’s student could even think about applying to college, though, he had to go through the oldest brother in the school, and that was a challenge. This brother hadn’t risen to his college counselor’s post, he’d sunk to it. Not only could he not cut it in the classroom anymore, rumor also had it that the brother had a drinking problem. As near as I could tell, he was stone sober when I showed up for my session.
“What do you want to do?” he asked as I was settling uncomfortably into my seat.
“Gee,” I said, “I’d love to go to the U.S. Military Academy.”
Why not give it my best shot?
The brother harrumphed a little, picked up my file, had a look at it, then turned back to me.
“You’re not really college material,” he finally said. “Go to trade school. Plumbers do very well these days.”
I felt as if someone had driven a stake through my heart. I’m finished, I told myself as I left that meeting. I’ll never get into West Point. There’s no sense even applying. I didn’t, either, and I was too dumb back then to get a second opinion. But somewhere in the back of my brain someone wiser than I was must have been monitoring all this because I never, ever again let anyone convince me that I couldn’t achieve a goal if I set my heart on it.
Coincidentally, years later I was asked to join a Bronx-based Army JAG unit and was often a weekend warrior assigned to West Point.
CHAPTER 4
“The FBI? You’re Crazy!”
Despite Brother Counselor’s best efforts to discourage me, I did go to college—at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick—and even got some scholarship aid to attend. As the crow flies, Rutgers is hardly any distance away from North Bergen, all of thirty miles down the New Jersey Turnpike, but in some ways it might as well have been on the other side of the continent.
Most overwhelming, at least initially, was the sheer scale of the place. I’d had ninety kids, all boys, in my high school graduating class, fewer than four hundred of us in the whole school. The first class I attended at Rutgers was Biology 101, held in what is now the old gymnasium on George Street. There must have been a thousand of us enrolled in that section. The teacher lectured from a TV monitor. Somewhere on the screen was posted the telephone number you could call if you had any questions, and the limited hours the teacher was available. Suddenly, Brother Counselor seemed almost warm and cuddly.
Appropriately enough, given the trajectory of my future life, my roommate freshman year was from Arkansas. Even more appropriately, we had trouble communicating. I spoke a New Jersey slang that must have sounded to him like I’d stepped out of some Edward G. Robinson gangster film of the 1930s. He favored homespun colloquialisms and spoke in a soft drawl far different from the twangy Kentucky accents that had been my only other exposure to dialects outside the greater New York City area. We got along just fine as things turned out, but I think we were both a little shocked at first to find ourselves in each other’s company.
The biggest shock of all, though, was the Vietnam War. By the time I got to New Brunswick in the fall of 1967, the antiwar movement had begun to seep into the classroom and color student activities. When I finished my undergraduate degree four years later, there were almost daily demonstrations against the war. Often the campus was simply shut down; when it wasn’t, there didn’t seem to be a teacher of any subject who couldn’t turn the classroom discussion to the war. In my two years as an American Studies major, I probably heard more about Ho Chi Minh than I did about Herman Melville, more about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution than about the Federalist Papers. For a while during the fall of my sophomore year, the so-called Fort Dix 38—thirty-eight mostly African-American soldiers thrown in the slammer at nearby Fort Dix for protesting the Vietnam War—were almost more popular than the Rutgers Scarlet Knights varsity football team; and remember, college football began at Rutgers. The first intercollegiate game ever was played on a field along College Avenue: Rutgers topped Princeton 6–4. The year was 1869.
To be honest, I stayed mostly on the sidelines through it all. I was a straitlaced Catholic kid, raised to respect authority. I suppose I had more of a consumer’s attitude toward college than many of my fellow students: except for the scholarship aid I was getting, I was mostly paying for all those course hours myself.
That’s another factor that kept me from getting deeply involved with the social activism of the times: I was working almost half of every day, month in and month out. Summers, I kept up my real-estate work with Dad and sweated on a truck dock in North Bergen, New Jersey, unloading eighteen-wheelers and restacking the goods into smaller trucks. In New Brunswick, I got most of my jobs through Manpower, Inc., then the nation’s leading temp-worker agency. Some nights, I’d be the hired hand on a beer truck; other nights, I’d be mixing and serving drinks at some rich guy’s home. (Mixing and serving, I should add, with no training whatsoever. I can’t imagine what I poured into the glass when I got my first order for a Manhattan.)
I was straitlaced in other ways, too. Beginning my sophomore year, I rented an apartment over a jeweler’s on George Street and began subletting out the bedrooms to other students. I’d grown up in a boardinghouse; this stuff was second nature to me. But this was no Animal House. The third floor of the building was Varsity Sports Central: a constant parade of women up and down the steps, parties all night long. Our apartment, by contrast, was as quiet as a churchyard. Most of us ate in the university dining hall and spent our evenings either working or in the library. Everyone who wasn’t holding down a night job was generally in bed by midnight.
Yet I did manage to get outside my little circle, and the circle wasn’t quite so small as it often seemed. I got to know one of the football players upstairs, a wonderful young man named Jed, maybe a foot taller an
d a hundred pounds heavier than me. Like just about all his fellow football players, Jed was very upset by all the antiwar activity on campus. Coaches demand that their players submit to authority, and Jed was a natural patriot. But he was also a deep thinker, and none of the party animals on the third floor had any desire to discuss the war with him, so the two of us talked often about the pros and cons of what was happening all around us and across the Pacific. There were legitimate issues being raised, I told him, and between us we tried to understand what they were and figure out how we felt about them. Whatever doubts we might have raised in each other’s minds, Jed joined the marines after college, and he was killed in Vietnam. His death shook me badly.
I found one of my richest undergraduate experiences lying right in my doorway, literally. I came home late one night from working on the beer truck to find an old man sleeping in the alcove of our apartment building. This was winter, about two in the morning. By the looks of him, the guy was homeless. He was certainly disheveled. I can’t remember anymore if he was still cradling a bottle, but he reeked of booze. I thought about calling the police and asking them to take him to a shelter, but he looked so forlorn that I carried him up the stairs to our apartment, laid him down on a sofa in the living room, and covered him up as best I could. In the morning, I got him some coffee, and we began talking, and that’s when my education began.
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