Sometimes, too, the guys doing the monitoring provided our own comic relief. One of the people we wiretapped in the UNIRAC case was Sal—or Salmonella, as we always referred to him. We put a tap on Sal’s phone at his house in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, but because of the technology on this particular device, we could receive the signal only from a high point somewhere above it. The only place high enough and accessible enough was the local VA hospital, so we arranged with the security chief there to let us have a room on one of the top floors of the building. To provide cover, he issued us security cards, complete with photos.
“What kind of doctor do you want to be?” he asked me.
“Neurosurgeon,” I said, and bingo, I was one, a twenty-seven-year-old wonder boy, at least on my plastic ID card.
My partner opted for being a “transplant doctor,” which the security chief amended to cardiologist.
Every day, we would show up in our doctor uniforms, flash our doctor IDs, then take the elevator up to the top floor and spend the day waiting for Sal to call someone or receive a call. That was our routine—until, that is, my partner began hitting on one of the nurses in the hospital library during his breaks.
“You can’t do that,” I told him. “We’ve got work to do, and you’ll blow our cover.”
“Aw,” he said, “don’t worry. I told her I’m sort of a new doctor. She’s giving me cardiology books to read. I’m helping her study.”
For a while, it seemed he was right. The romance blossomed. Our work went along unimpeded. Then one morning we were reporting for duty when the nurse burst out of an operating room with a panicked look, spotted us, and yelled, “Doctors! Doctors! We need you in here now. It’s an emergency!” At which point, my partner and I looked at each other and took off running. We weren’t going in there on a bet!
Maybe my favorite of all the UNIRAC wiretap tales involved another witness who agreed to meet a wise guy in one of the Italian-American social clubs that the New York mobs love. We fitted our guy with a tape recorder—not so miniature back then—which we strapped into his groin. (He was sure to be frisked when he walked in, but delicacy generally didn’t permit a pat in the crotch.) Sure enough, the recorder works fine, and we’re getting terrific stuff. Since the two of them have moved out front, we can even see the meeting going down. Then, lo and behold, an old mangy dog that looked as if it hadn’t moved off its spot on the social club floor for a decade staggers to its feet, sets its sights on our guy, walks over, and buries its nose between his legs. Old, the dog was; but it could still hear the sound of the tape whirling on its reel. Knowing the gig is up, our guy turns and runs down the street, where we grab him and whisk him away, eventually to a federal witness protection program. Maybe an hour after all this happened, we drove by the club again and found a street celebration going on. They must have bought a case of steaks for that old dog—the Canine Hero of the Hour.
They were all dangerous people, all people who had stolen at will, extorted money from innocents, in some cases killed and maimed their fellow citizens. But sometimes all you could do was laugh. The investigation, though, was no laughing matter. The prestige of our New York office, the reputations of Tom Emery, Sean McWeeney, Barbara Jones, and the rest of us who had signed on to the crusade were all on the line. If we had nothing to show after two years of turning normal protocols on their head, we all knew that the Bureau and our office were headed back to trying to humble the mob and appease our congressional masters with an abundance of almost meaningless nickel-and-dime gambling arrests. But damned if it didn’t work, and big-time.
UNIRAC led to the indictment and conviction of the senior-most officials of the Longshoremen’s Union in New York, but we didn’t stop there. Lead led to lead, thread to thread. Soon we were rolling up union officials and shipping-company executives in Newark, Norfolk, New Orleans, Miami, and other port towns. We didn’t go after the shippers who paid out money to the union basically because they were being shaken down—they were victims, not criminals—but plenty of other shippers were paying for a competitive advantage, and we swept them up right along with the mob whenever and wherever we found them.
To the five mob families of New York City, UNIRAC was a devastating blow and a clear signal that the rules had changed. After decades of playing cat-and-mouse with their petty minions, we finally got their attention. Anthony Scotto made sure we did.
In the ILA, Anthony Scotto was Mr. Big. His dad had been a longshoreman in Brooklyn, and Tony had grown up on the docks, but a life of heavy lifting wasn’t for him. Tony went into management, heading up Local 1814, which ran the Brooklyn docks, and serving also as a vice president of the national union. Tony also rose up handsomely in the Mafia, eventually becoming a captain in the Gambino family. In honor of his dual but closely related professions, he kept an office on Court Street in Brooklyn to see to his local duties, and in lower Manhattan where he became a mover and shaker among New York’s elite.
He was from the very beginning one of our prime targets, and we worked him hard. A wiretap in his Manhattan office picked up all sorts of incriminating evidence, but we dogged him by foot, too. I was part of a small team following him one day in 1976 when we got word that a big political rally on behalf of then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was going to take place on Court Street, in front of the union local. We sent word to the Secret Service that we would be in the crowd. When the rally got under way, we were there, dressed down, and thus got to witness the future president of the United States receiving a golden grappling hook from Scotto, whom we were closing in on arresting, and from his local vice president, Anthony Anastasia, nephew of Albert “the Mad Hatter” Anastasia, who had been blown away in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan nineteen years earlier.
Carter, of course, didn’t know about any of this. He was just campaigning, but I can remember all of us who were there undercover shaking our heads as we walked away and saying this is going to be an interesting prosecution. And was it ever.
Two other things Tony Scotto was: a political power broker and a kind of Mafia-chic socialite. Tony’s union voted the way Tony told it to vote, and there were enough members that Tony was courted and feted by politicians throughout the city and state. Hugh Carey, then the sitting governor of New York, appeared as a character witness at the sentencing phase of Tony’s trial, after he had been convicted of racketeering, in large part by playing back his own words for the jury as captured on the wiretap. Former New York City mayors Abe Beame and Robert Wagner, and onetime mayor and “Silk Stocking” district representative John Lindsay joined the parade to the character witness stand. It was as if the guy had won the Nobel Peace Prize, not been exposed as a bullying, lawless, Gambino family capo, and an unrepentant one at that. When Scotto emerged from prison three years later, the pols flocked to his gala welcome-home dinner.
All that was a lesson for me, too, this one in how politics can sometimes destroy judgment and corrupt moral sense.
I spent four of the most intense years of my life working on the UNIRAC case, and my reward at the end, in 1980, was to be summoned to headquarters in Washington and handed a sterile office deep in the heart of a massive, layered, classical bureaucracy. The street, it was not. The wise guys weren’t the same either.
My job was twofold. The first part was to set up a nationwide labor-racketeering program, not geared just to the usual suspects—the ILA and the Teamsters foremost among them—but also reaching out to include a broad cross-section of unions. We worked with the Bureau’s various division offices to establish labor-racketeering coordinators, many of whom went on to set up racketeering squads of their own. All bureaucracies resist change, and the FBI was and still is no exception. But then-director William Webster was a big supporter of what we were trying to do. He knew what a blow UNIRAC had dealt the mob and wanted to keep the momentum going. Still, the work was slow and tedious, especially by comparison to what I had been doing.
Fortunately, the
other half of my job—working with the Permanent Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, what had once been known as the McClellan Committee—was just the opposite. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat, and Warren Rudman, newly elected to the Senate as a New Hampshire Republican, were chairman and cochair at the time, and both were looking for a splashy target. They decided to hold hearings on organized crime’s penetration of the labor unions, and I set about preparing committee members and staff for the hearings. Both Nunn and Rudman were not only excellent investigators, they were wonderful public servants from whom I learned a great deal.
Teddy Gleason, the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, had come out of the UNIRAC investigation unscathed. We were never able to get enough goods on him to send him to the slammer, but at the least, he would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to realize what was going on inside his union. None of that, though, discouraged Teddy. He showed up at the Senate hearings, promised that the ILA was free of organized crime and corruption, and generally gave out the impression that no one in the union movement was more for truth, justice, and the American way than Thomas W. “Teddy” Gleason.
Warren Rudman, who had spent six years as attorney general of New Hampshire, listened to this as long as he could, then broke in to Teddy’s paean to his presidency.
“Well,” he said, “I understand that when you were asked to testify in the New York [UNIRAC] case, you took the fifth before the grand jury.”
Teddy went berserk as soon as Rudman spoke. You could just see the huge balloon of his ego collapsing in front of the committee members. Every time I read that the ILA has presented its annual Teddy Gleason Scholarships to deserving college aspirants, I think of that moment and recall the person whom the scholarships memorialize. Sometimes good things can come of bad people.
The Senate hearings also gave me a chance to have a minire-union with one of the most colorful characters I had run across in the four years of UNIRAC. The first time Mike Clemente and I met, I was walking around naked in the locker room of the Shelton Health Club on Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. That was my job. I was still a wet-behind-the-ears agent. Mike was a seventy-two-year-old overweight gambler, extorter, and Genovese family captain who liked to do business in the health club sauna. Regular as any mailman, Mike would show up, doff his clothes, and head into the sauna. Once he was settled in, other guys would walk in, strip down, and head in to join him, except many of them would be carrying packages full of cash from different people in the shipping industry. Sometimes, the guy who went in to see Mike would be our own witness, John, who worked for a ship stevedoring company, but John never went in with a wire because there was no place to hide it. That was Mike’s genius of using the sauna for an office.
My primary job was to protect John—to be there just in case something went wrong—but I was also there to spot the guys going in with the cash envelopes and let our agents on the street outside know when they were leaving and what they looked like so they could try to identify them from the cars they came and went in. Not surprisingly, after days and days of parading around the locker room in my birthday suit, I drew Mike’s attention. He was in the club’s rinky-dink café, enjoying his daily apple juice, when he broke the ice.
“How you doing?” he says to me. “You a lawyer?” (The club was just behind the Brooklyn courthouse. Most of its clientele were lawyers, judges, and local politicians.) Amazingly, nobody had said what to do if “Big Mike” spoke to me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Where do you work?”
“Well,” I told him, still being honest, “I’m not working as a lawyer right now. I’m not sure if I ever will.”
“C’mon,” he says, “be a judge. They got all the power; they make all the decisions. I know some. I’ll talk to them about you. They’ll hire you.”
“That’s kind—”
“No, I mean it. They’re my friends. I’ll tell them. They’ll see you.” And probably they would have.
We kept this banter up for weeks until it became a running joke between us. Then my coveted undercover role ended, and I figured Mike had forgotten me. But he hadn’t. A year or so later, I was sitting in the well of the Manhattan federal courtroom with the prosecutor when Mike’s UNIRAC arraignment got under way. He spotted me immediately and started giving me one of those thumbs-up, everything’s going to be okay signals, and I kept thinking, What is he, nuts? We’ve got the goods on him! But it was me, not himself, Mike was worried about. Finally, Mike’s lawyer came up to me and asked, “Are you an FBI agent?” I said, almost sheepishly, “Yes.” “I told Mike that,” he said, “but he insisted that I tell the judge, ‘Let the kid go. He’s got nothing to do with it.’”
Mike was still atoning for his sins in prison when the Senate subcommittee decided to hold its hearings on organized crime, so we had to make special arrangements to bring him down to testify, which was just what Mike wanted. We talked for a while before his appearance, reminiscing about the not-so-good old times. Finally, he got down to business.
“You know, kid,” he said, “I’m gonna take the fifth.”
“Gee, Mike, I sort of suspected you might do that.”
“Careful,” he went on, holding up his hand. “Don’t tell no one. I’ve been keeping them up in the air a bit so they’d let me out.”
I didn’t rat him out in advance, and Mike did take the fifth in front of all those senators and their staffs, and he got two lovely weeks out from behind bars to come to the nation’s capital and testify, or not, as things turned out. Payback, I figured, for all his concern for my well-being.
That first tour in Washington had too few days filled with Mike Clementes and too many days weighed down with bureaucratic drudgery. I should have been complimented by being summoned to headquarters, and at one level, I was. As I wrote earlier, I also met my wife, Marilyn, while I was in D.C., the biggest and most unintentional reward of all for my UNIRAC service. But at heart, I’d been handed a desk job, and I wasn’t ready for one. New York City and all the excitement of the work I had done there kept whispering in my ear, luring me back. The question was how to get there and with whom.
I’d had a feeler from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York even before coming down to Washington. Bob Fiske, who was then heading up the office, told me that he thought my investigative background could make a big difference for the staff and asked if I was interested in a position. I was, but I thanked Bob and said no, in part because I didn’t want to leave the Bureau and in part because I found the prospect intimidating.
No U.S. Attorney’s Office has launched more prominent legal careers than the Southern District of New York. Bob would later become famous as the Whitewater special prosecutor during the Clinton administration—a choice, by the way, that I was proud to support. And Bob was just one in a long string of distinguished people to hold the office. Robert Morgenthau, a great prosecutor and still the most powerful of New York City’s five district attorneys, served eight years in the office, beginning in 1962. Rudolph Giuliani ran it with great dedication for six years in the 1980s, amassing enough political capital in the post to eventually become a two-term mayor of the city. Rudy was not only a brilliant lawyer and U.S. attorney, but he epitomized for me the highest principles of public service.
Three of the office’s very best alumni—Bob Bucknam, Jim Bucknam, his brother, and Howard Shapiro—later worked with me at the FBI as chief of staff, senior adviser, and general counsel, respectively. I could not have done the job without their talent and dedication. Mike Chertoff, now the Secretary of Homeland Security, was one of my closest colleagues in the office. I helped hire and tried cases with Frances Fragos-Townsend, a great lawyer from the Brooklyn DA’s office whom FBI agents told me to hire. She was later a key assistant to Janet Reno and Condi Rice, and is now the special assistant to President Bush on homeland security.
Historically, the Southern District has always exercised a strong degr
ee of independence from the federal Department of Justice even though it is officially under Justice’s thumb. (At DOJ, it’s jokingly known as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Sovereign District of New York.) The office is also the nexus of a network like none other in the U.S. attorneys system. Alumni respect each other and for the most part maintain their friendships and collegiality—a fact I would note two decades later when I appeared before the 9/11 Commission investigating the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Some observers expected Richard BenVeniste to lead the attack on me. As he showed all the way back at Watergate, he’s a relentless and expert prosecutor. But Richard had come through the Southern District of New York, too, and we had known of each other for many years. We chatted amiably before the hearings and he seemed to have confidence in the accuracy of what I was about to say. Afterward, he complimented my testimony as balanced after ripping into so many others. All that, though, and the confidence I felt going into those hearings, is for later.
Inevitably, high-profile offices and high-energy U.S. attorneys attract the best and brightest new lawyers, and that’s what really concerned me about the position I had been offered. The office was stuffed with overachievers from law schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan. Rutgers was a fine law school, but it just wasn’t in that class. To be honest, I told Bob Fiske, I didn’t know if I could compete with those guys. I meant what I said, but after a few months crawling around the belly of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, I was willing to give it a try.
Bob had returned to private practice when I called him, but he put me in touch with John Martin, who had replaced him, and John and his staff interviewed me and eventually offered me a position. By then, there was no question that I wanted the job, but meeting Marilyn had me thinking I was on a lucky streak, so I made one last attempt to have things both ways, appealing directly to Bill Webster to grant me a leave of absence to go to New York with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The director wanted to say yes, but there was no precedent for doing so and plenty of reason to worry that others might line up behind me with similar requests if he granted mine. I’d still be working closely with the Bureau and its agents, but when I quit headquarters for New York in the early spring of 1981, I figured I was leaving the FBI for good.
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