My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  There was also the practical matter of money. We wanted more kids, but looking down the road at orthodontist bills, camps, clothes, and scariest of all, college tuition, Marilyn and I kept seeing way too many detours ahead. If newspaper clippings were gold, I would have been just fine. The trials had attracted plenty of media attention, but ever since my first day with the FBI, I had been on a government-service salary schedule. Political demagoguery aside, no one gets rich off government-service paychecks.

  Unambitious, I was somehow climbing up through the executive ranks of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. As the deputy U.S. attorney and chief of the Organized Crime Unit for the Southern District of New York, my principal responsibilities had shifted from the courtroom to managing two hundred or so assistant U.S. attorneys, most of them from the very law schools that had intimidated me so much only seven years earlier. Luckily for all of us, Benito Romano was our U.S. attorney when I became deputy and led the office with great skill, earning the respect of all. If the day-to-day pressure wasn’t greatly reduced—even Yale Law graduates need lots of watching—the hours were more regular. The title on the door, though, didn’t solve our future cash-flow concerns. Only the private sector, I came to believe, could do that.

  I’d made a pact with Marilyn that I would leave government service no later than the end of the decade, and by early 1990, I was ready to honor it. I’d made some inquiries, talked with several law firms, and now I was just about to join one of the largest and most successful firms in New York City. Then, as so often seems to happen in my life, I got a phone call that changed everything.

  My duties as deputy U.S. attorney for our office had brought me into frequent contact with the Department of Justice in Washington, including then–attorney general Richard Thornburgh, the former Pennsylvania governor, and especially one of his aides, Robert Mueller. A highly decorated Vietnam War veteran—and, of course, my eventual successor as FBI director—Bob had been an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts before joining Justice and would soon be placed in charge of its Criminal Division, so we had plenty of common ground. Already we had worked together on a number of civil matters regarding the Teamsters Union, as well as on general issues coordinating our two offices. His call this time, I figured, had something to do with one of those issues, but I was wrong.

  The attorney general wanted me to take a look at a case down in Georgia and Alabama, Bob said. Four mail bombs of seemingly identical make had been mailed in December 1989, with lethal results. One bomb had killed Judge Robert Vance, who sat on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Birmingham. Another had murdered Robert Robinson, an African-American lawyer and NAACP leader in Savannah, Georgia. A third sent to the clerk’s office of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, had been intercepted by an alert security officer. The fourth bomb, mailed to the Jacksonville, Florida, office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had also been intercepted and turned over to police by NAACP staff members put on high alert by Robinson’s murder. A suspect had been identified, Bob told me, but still it was proving a very, very tough case.

  I could appreciate that, I said, and certainly I knew the broad outlines. When a federal judge is murdered, everyone in the federal system pays attention. But this was a difficult time for me, I told him; I was just preparing to leave office. The job, the law firm, Marilyn—they were all spinning through my head when I asked Bob the fatal question:

  “Why me?”

  “We know you worked on the pizza case,” he said. “We know how complicated that was. We think this case right now is in a highly confused state. Three different U.S. Attorney’s Offices are working on it—in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Savannah. There’s just not much coordination. You’ve had experience with this kind of situation. We want you to go down there and take charge.”

  I protested again that the timing was all wrong. Besides, I said, the last thing that the people in Georgia wanted was for some New York lawyer to come barging in the door, telling them how to run the show.

  Bob was undeterred.

  “We really want you to do this,” he said. “The attorney general will call if that makes a difference.”

  “Okay,” I told him finally, “I’ll go for sixty days, review the evidence, talk to the witnesses, but that’s it. I can’t get involved beyond that. I don’t have that kind of time frame.”

  I emphasized the sixty-day limit again, and Bob once again agreed. But even as I spoke, I could see that job with the Manhattan law firm begin to disappear into the mists, along with any financial security it was supposed to bring us. A little over a dozen years later when I resigned from my post as FBI director, newspapers accounts frequently noted that Marilyn, myself, and our by then six children lived in a heavily mortgaged house in Great Falls, Virginia. We did. Second mortgages and credit cards had certainly aided my twenty-six years of public service, but Marilyn’s love and sacrifice made it happen.

  Bob then told me I would be transferred “on paper” from my current position to a more “generic” trial attorney in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. It was a typical Washington apparatchik cover to satisfy the DOJ politics of having a “Southern District” prosecutor taking over another district’s most important case. (Sending someone down from Washington bordered on strong-arming; sending someone from New York City was downright insulting.) But I’d been with the Southern District of New York for almost ten years by then and wanted to finish my government career there. Besides, it was only for sixty days, right? I’ve never done well with form over substance so I simply told Bob no. I would go down south as I was or I wouldn’t go at all. The alternative was fine by me since I really didn’t want the assignment. Bob said this couldn’t be done, but then called the next day and said okay. That’s when I told him that I was bringing another prosecutor who was also not going to change his Southern District of New York title or his office for the privilege of leaving his family for the next year.

  I won that battle, too. Howard Shapiro and I had been working together for several years by then. We knew each other’s minds, and we liked each other, and I thought I would probably need all the friendly faces I could find once the case got going. Howard was also a brilliant lawyer and well liked by the agents, and he would go on to serve as chief FBI counsel during most of my years as director. I asked Bob Mueller if either he or Dick Thornburgh would call the U.S. attorney in Atlanta and pave the way for our arrival, and he assured us that would be no problem. So in April of 1990, Howard and I hopped on a plane and flew south to see what we would find. What we found was, to put it charitably, a mess.

  The investigation was in the hands of a multipoint task force that included the FBI; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents (because of the bomb); U.S. Marshals (because one federal judge had been murdered and others threatened); U.S. Postal Service Inspectors (the mail had been used to deliver the bombs); the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; and others. That much made sense. The suspect the team had identified, Walter Leroy Moody Jr., made sense as well, for multiple reasons. But when we met with the task force for the first time in the rickety old annex next to the Richard Russell Building where it was headquartered, I could see problems all over the place.

  Task forces can be a disaster when no one shares. Information gets hoarded, then traded as if it were gold. This task force had “don’t share” stamped all over it. Each component agency was housed in its own room; there was virtually no bullpen area where everyone would come together in the normal course of the day and kick around leads and other information. The three FBI agents who had been assigned to the case were great, but they looked like kids. I asked them how long they’d been with the Bureau. Oh, seven or eight years, they answered. Ever worked a major case? No. Uh-oh, I thought, but I was wrong. The primary case agent, John Behnke, proved to be without exception the very best FBI agent investigator I would ever meet. John’s colleagues, Todd Letcher and Tracey Nor
th, were an equally pleasant surprise—the top class of agents. All three later came to FBI headquarters to help me out.

  Our next stop was the Russell Building, home to the federal courthouse and numerous federal offices, including that of the U.S. attorney for Atlanta. The post was being held down temporarily by Ray Ruckles.

  “Hey,” he said after Howard and I had introduced ourselves, “how you doing?”

  Fine, we assured him, and took a seat, but Ray had already run out of conversation. After an awkward silence, I took the lead.

  “Ray,” I said, “we’re really pleased to come here and work with you on this case.”

  “What case?”

  “No one from Washington called you?”

  “No,” he said, “I thought you guys were just stopping by to say hello.”

  “It’s not quite that simple, Ray,” I told him. “I’m supposed to take over the Moody case.”

  “What? You can’t just come in here and take it over! I haven’t heard anything about it. I haven’t seen any paper. You guys don’t even know what you’re doing down here!”

  Just to make matters more complicated, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in Birmingham and Savannah were each doing their own investigations, and all three offices, including Atlanta, had different theories of the case. These were hate crimes, or it was a case of simple extortion, or maybe the bombs were the work of someone who was incredibly angry at the courts themselves. It all depended on whom you last talked with.

  Lucky for me, the chief judge of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Gerald Bard Tjoflat, who knew the facts of the case as well as anyone in Georgia, briefed me on the case shortly after my arrival and steered me in the right investigative direction. I also got an unexpected call from former attorney general Griffin Bell, who charmingly offered me the use of King & Spalding’s law library as well as his considerable Atlanta connections—“a few folks I know around here,” as he modestly put it. Both offers were gratefully accepted.

  The presumed perpetrator had sent a slew of threatening letters to all the judges in the Eleventh Circuit, including Judge Vance. (The roster included Frank Johnson, who two years later would swear me in as FBI director. I met Frank for the first time when I went to see him about the threatening letter he had received.) The letters, sent in the name of a fictitious racist organization called Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System, appeared to leave no question as to motive: the judges were going to be killed because they favored African-Americans in their rulings. The murders of Judge Vance, who had courageously taken on racism from his bench in Birmingham, and of Robinson in Savannah certainly supported racial hatred as a motive, as did the attempted bombing of the NAACP office in Florida. To reinforce the point, Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial system followed the assassinations with a letter to an Atlanta television news anchor claiming credit for the murders and threatening further violence.

  What’s more, the perpetrator appeared to be the same person who in August of 1989 had sent a “Declaration of War” letter to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and television stations nationwide, accusing the court of “rank bias” and threatening to unleash the deadly war gases tabun and phosgene on “citizens of densely populated cities.” Simultaneously, a mail bomb loaded with a tear-gas canister was sent to the NAACP regional office in Atlanta, where it released clouds of choking fumes.

  That was where the case began, but the available evidence and leads, such as they were, had sent the various investigative agencies and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices chasing off in different, sometimes competing, directions.

  A prodigious act of memory had first brought Roy Moody into the picture. A handmade bomb almost always leaves a signature, quirks of materials and fabrication peculiar to the individual that put it together. Once a bomb goes off, the signature is often lost along with its packaging, but half these mail bombs had been intercepted before explosion, and from them and the shreds remaining from the exploded ones, a portrait was quickly assembled. Each device was made of a steel pipe packed with smokeless powder and surrounded on the outside by finishing nails. (Eighty such nails had exploded outward from Judge Vance’s package at his home in Mountain Brook, in the suburbs of Birmingham. The best estimates are that the nails traveled at an initial speed of three thousand feet per second. Vance’s wife, Helen, who was sitting nearby, was seriously injured in the Saturday morning attack.) For detonators, the bomb maker had used the casing of a ballpoint pen, a flashbulb filament, and a green powder that served as a high-explosive primer. The bomber had placed his devices inside cardboard boxes that had been painted black on the inside, presumably to cover up any lingering traces of a fingerprint. (Opening the hinged lid of the boxes triggered the explosions.) On the outside, he had used plain brown paper and string. Each package had been addressed with a typed red-and-white label and mailed using stamps that showed an American flag flying over Yosemite National Park.

  All that was relatively easy to discern for the ATF agents first assigned to the case. The bomb had a highly distinctive signature, but whose was it? Brian Hoback, the outstanding ATF agent on the case, had no idea, but he did have the good sense to phone an ATF forensic chemist named Lloyd Erwin, who happened to be attending a conference when the call came through. Erwin listened for a moment as Hoback described the bomb. Then he grabbed a napkin and began sketching, and as he sketched, he realized that he had seen virtually this same bomb construction more than seventeen years earlier, in May 1972.

  “That’s Moody’s bomb,” he said. Erwin’s “spontaneous expertise” is the best reason for task forces.

  The 1972 bomb, contained inside a package addressed to an auto dealer who had repossessed Roy Moody’s car, had exploded prematurely in Moody’s home when his wife unwittingly opened the box. Moody contended that the bomb had been made by someone named “Gene Wallace” who was helping him regain his car. Although Wallace appears to be a complete fiction, a jury accepted that explanation. It did, however, convict him of possessing the bomb, and he served three years in federal prison.

  Multiple searches of Moody’s home failed to turn up any traces of the specific powders used in these new bombs—Red Dot for the smokeless powder and a CCI primer for the detonator—but federal agents did find a prototype for a pipe bomb in the basement of a house in Chamblee, Georgia, where Moody had previously lived.

  It wasn’t nearly enough to indict him for the bombings, but enough pieces had fallen into place to put Moody under constant and very public surveillance. (He knew from the searches that the task force was after him.) He’d leave his house in the morning, agents would follow, the media trucks would follow the agents, and every now and again, Moody would oblige his entourage by holding an impromptu press conference. The case seemed to be a matter of when Moody would crack or make a fatal mistake, or when the government would find the smoking gun that would bring him down … except that while the case against Moody was still developing, other investigators had followed a different trail to a different suspect, and had almost managed to embarrass Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and FBI director Bill Sessions in the process.

  For this group, the anonymous threatening letters had become the key to the case. Typewriters, like homemade bombs, have their own distinctive signatures, and these letters, it turned out, had all been pecked out on the same aged Underwood machine. On the theory that whoever was behind this would have a long history of rancorous relationships with the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the agents had gone rooting through piles and piles of the court’s old correspondence. There he had found a letter that not only was a perfect match but had also been signed by a junk dealer from Enterprise, Alabama. The letter made clear, he was really, really angry at the Eleventh Circuit.

  Calls went up to Washington: Forget Moody, we’ve the real goods down here. A plane was ready to whisk Thornburgh and Sessions to Alabama so they could announce the arrest on site. (Remember, this was a federal judge who had been murdered—a
major case.) Just to put an exclamation mark on the moment, the task force decided to do the arrest in grand style. A couple hundred agents scrambled to Enterprise, a town small and tight enough that a single stranger is noticed. Inevitably, the press got wind of things. A small army descended on the junkyard. The dealer and his wife were interrogated for hours. Other agents were caught on TV, digging their way through the junkyard, and digging, and digging. In the end, the typewriter wasn’t there because, after all, the guy is a junk dealer, and junk dealers by definition deal junk. Yes, he had once been in possession of the typewriter; sure, he used it to write the letter in question, but he had sold the machine to some young woman. (She turned out to be Moody’s girlfriend, but that gets ahead of the story.)

  More calls were made to Washington: things aren’t quite matching up; this might not be the best time for the attorney general and the director to board a plane. In Atlanta, Moody held a press conference to once again proclaim his innocence, this time with the added evidence of the Alabama raid. In Enterprise, one very irate junk dealer was holding his own press conferences, saying the government had ruined his reputation and threatening to sue everyone and everything in sight. And that roughly was the state of things when Howard Shapiro and I arrived in Atlanta to take control of the investigation: a Looney-Tunes scenario.

  In the Pizza Connection case, we had managed to get investigators and jurists on two different continents, out of two different legal systems, reading from the same page. Here, three U.S. Attorneys’ Offices with contiguous jurisdictions couldn’t even agree on what the case was about, and half a dozen or so investigative agencies with a mutual goal were basically not talking with each other.