The first fixes were the easiest. Instead of settling into the cushy Russell Office Building, Howard and I moved into its decrepit annex with the task force and set about rearranging the architecture so people would spend less time isolated in their own rooms and more time interacting across the various agencies. We also let all three U.S. Attorneys’ Offices know that while we would be coordinating with them, we would be calling the shots from now on. What’s more, we would be empaneling a grand jury in Atlanta—not Birmingham, not Savannah—when we were ready to seek indictments. Not everyone agreed with us. Not everyone even liked us. We were their worst-case scenario: two know-it-all lawyers who had flown in from the Big Apple to rip apart their cozy little world. We didn’t even talk right! But for the first time there was someone truly in charge of the investigation.
We also got some vital help from the FBI early in 1990 when Director Sessions wisely sent agent Larry Potts to take command of the task force. Larry’s leadership and investigative ability quickly helped organize the vying agencies into a cohesive force.
With a new infrastructure in place, we set out to build the case against Walter Leroy Moody Jr. the way it should have been built all along: meticulously, block upon block, with everyone pooling their various areas of expertise. That’s where things really got tricky because Moody, we were to learn, was very much the definition of an evil genius.
Proof of the genius part came in the form of a psychiatrist we hired to evaluate Moody for the government and the defense, once he had finally been indicted. Moody described himself as an inventor, literary consultant, and publisher, but the psychiatrist told us he could have been anything he wanted to be. Moody was brilliant. He could pick up a book on, say, neurosurgery, read it, and probably perform competent basic brain operations on a first try. Half the time during their sessions, the psychiatrist said, it was hard to tell who was interviewing whom.
The deeply evil side of Moody’s character emerged more slowly but with even greater power. He was a racist, to be sure, but the August 1989 “Declaration of War” and tear-gas explosion at the Atlanta NAACP office and the later bombs sent to the NAACP in Jacksonville and to Robby Robinson in Savannah had been red herrings. In effect, Robinson died an agonizing death over several hours simply to throw investigators off the trail. Roy Moody was indeed enraged at the Eleventh Circuit, but not because it favored African-Americans. In the mid-1980s, the court had failed to overturn his conviction on the 1972 charge of possessing a bomb: that was Moody’s beef. Because he couldn’t clear his record, we would finally learn, Moody was unable to achieve his life’s ambition: to become a lawyer. And because he couldn’t become a lawyer, he had declared war on the court. Irony upon irony.
By bits and pieces, the case began to fall together. I was only just getting settled in Atlanta when ATF agents uncovered a former gun-store clerk named Paul Sartain, who said he had sold a four-pound keg of Red Dot powder and four thousand CCI pistol primers to Moody while working at a store called the Shootin’ Iron in December 1989. Months later, a Florida welder named Ted Banks—Moody’s cellmate while the mad genius was imprisoned on the earlier bomb charge—would add another piece to the puzzle. At Moody’s behest, Banks had fixed end plates onto three metal pipes, similar to the end plates found on the unexploded bombs. (The pipe and plates used to murder Judge Vance were separately acquired.)
All of it was titillating. Everything seemed to fit into a larger picture. But it was all circumstantial and would remain so right to the end. The person who tied the various elements of the case together was Moody’s girlfriend and later wife, Susan McBride. Once she saw the light and began cooperating with us, the noose began to tighten for good around Roy Moody’s neck.
“Saw the light” is perhaps too kind. We had prepared a criminal case against Susan for aiding and abetting Moody in the bombings, but her assistance had been almost robotic rather than willing. He was in his fifties by then; she was still in her twenties and obviously greatly under his sway. Almost everything he did, Susan told us, was with an eye to eliminating any evidentiary link to the bombings. He would assemble the bombs in motel rooms, she said, but before he began to do any work, he would remove all this clothes and put on a shower cap. And so it was with every part of the bomb and every step of the procedure. Moody worked meticulously to eliminate forensic evidence, and with very few exceptions, he made Susan his errand girl.
In November 1989, Moody sent Susan McBride from Atlanta to Florence, Kentucky, with instructions to purchase the shipping boxes he would later use to contain the bombs, the aluminum cake pans he employed as part of the electrical triggering mechanisms, and the priority postage packages he used to mail the bombs. As he had with his “Declaration of War” letter, he also gave Susan original documents and instructed her to make numerous copies without reading the papers or even handling them with her bare hands. Off Susan went, as she always did, and performed exactly as instructed, making the purchases and then locating the photocopying store Moody had told her to use and slipping on a pair of gloves before she began to make copies. This time, though, there was a tiny flaw in the execution. A threatening letter enclosed with the Jacksonville bomb had two good, identifiable fingerprints on it. They weren’t Moody’s or Susan’s, but they were prints, and unless we could identify whom they belonged to, Moody’s defense was sure to claim we were overlooking the real letter sender and, beyond that, the actual bomber.
Susan couldn’t remember the name of the photocopy shop, but we had agents drive her around Florence until she found it. Sure enough, a clerk who worked there recognized the odd woman who had come in months earlier and donned gloves before copying. That gave us a corroborating witness for Susan’s story—an important breakthrough—but we took prints from everyone who worked in the shop and none of them matched the one we had. We were back in Atlanta, still sweating the matter, when the Florence, Kentucky, store clerk called with a new piece of intelligence: she had just remembered that a young boy named Gordon Horton was working at the shop at the time Susan had come in. Among Gordon’s jobs, she said, was loading paper into the machines. Back the agents went to Florence to take young Gordon’s prints, and when they matched, one large concern was lifted off all our shoulders. The critical value of this evidence, corroborating Susan’s account, would be devastating to Moody at trial.
Then, at last, we got our first direct proof of actual value from the evil genius himself.
To keep the pressure on Roy Moody while we were building the larger case, we decided to go after him on a lesser charge: suborning perjury by a witness in connection with his appeal in the mid-1980s of his old bombing conviction. That case was pretty much an open-and-shut affair. Moody had clearly recruited and paid a destitute, handicapped young woman to lie on his behalf about the existence of the alleged bomb maker “Gene Wallace.” The trial was to be held in Brunswick, Georgia, so in December 1990, I went down there to handle my first case outside of New York City, an education all its own.
I was used to jury pools where half the prospects showed up reluctantly, some with Daily Racing Forms sticking out of their back pockets. These potential jurors showed up scrub faced, wearing coats and ties. I was also accustomed to having the full range of legal maneuvering available to me. It still was, of course, so long as the maneuvering didn’t involve memos or standing up in the courtroom to object or ask for a recess. Judge Tony Alaimo, his clerk informed me, didn’t do memos, and he entertained objections and recesses only if you sent him a note at the bench.
How long would I need to present my case? the judge asked me.
Oh, I told him, four to six weeks.
Fine, he said, we’ll do it in a week, and we did. (Apart from running a rocket docket and being a great guy, Tony Alaimo was a B-26 bomber pilot in World War II, helped with the famous “Great Escape” from one German POW camp and later successfully escaped from another.) But as minor as the case was in the larger scheme of things, it did give me a chance to examine Roy Moody cl
ose up, and fairly early on in the course of doing that, I discovered a chink in Moody’s armor: he talked to himself. No one knew what he said, but the possibility of getting something incriminating from his own mouth was tempting enough that Howard and I had written up an affidavit, asking permission to put a wiretap in Moody’s Atlanta jail cell, and sent it to the Justice Department. You’re crazy, the answer came back: a tap presumes one person talking to another. But Justice gave me permission to pursue it, so I took the affidavit to a wonderful but crusty old Atlanta judge named Richard Friedman, who had the same first response.
“You’re crazy.” Then he added, “And you’re from New York, too!”
But he gave in as well. So we put the microphone in Moody’s cell, and for a solid week agents listened to nothing but gibberish and blather. (By court order, they had to stop listening if they thought Moody was saying something to himself that might pertain to the perjury trial. Our wiretap order didn’t cover that.) Then, sometime in week two, one of the agents came racing into my office, saying, “You’re not going to believe this.” There, clear as a bell as far as we were concerned, was Roy Moody on tape, saying to himself, “Now you’ve killed two … . Now you can’t pull another bombin’.”
No murder trial is simple, and this one was no exception. Our Atlanta grand jury indicted Moody on more than seventy separate counts in connection with the bombings, but the case clearly couldn’t be heard in Atlanta or anywhere else in the Eleventh Circuit’s jurisdiction. Moody had sent threatening letters to every judge in the circuit. We couldn’t possibly argue that he could get a fair trial. In such instances, it’s up to the Supreme Court to find a trial judge. For this one, the chief justice chose the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, presided over by its longtime chief judge, Edward J. Devitt. So off we all went in the spring of 1991 to St. Paul: myself and Howard Shapiro; Susan McBride and a slew of other witnesses; Moody’s excellent lawyer, Ed Tolley, with whom I was becoming good friends; Moody himself; and a truckload of evidence.
On its best day, our case was never completely solid. Even Susan couldn’t put Moody in a room with a bomb that had been sent to any of the four targets. He was too careful for that. Ed Tolley argued brilliantly on his client’s behalf; and Moody, during four days of rambling narrative testimony, lied brilliantly on his own behalf, never more so than when he insisted to the jury that what we caught him saying on our wiretap was not “Now you can’t pull another bombin’” but rather “Now you can’t pull another farmin’.” Susan’s testimony, though, carried our circumstantial evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and in the end, for all his dissembling and Mensa-level intellect, Roy Moody couldn’t escape his own words.
After Moody was found guilty on seventy-one separate counts—for which he would ultimately be sentenced to seven life terms plus four hundred years—Ed Devitt asked Tolley and me to accompany him back to the jury room. A big blackboard stood against the wall with a single phrase on it: “Now you can’t pull another bombin’/ farmin’.” Someone had drawn a big chalk mark through “farmin’.” Case closed.
Roy Moody would pop back up in the news in 1994 when an FBI crime lab chemist, Frederick Whitehurst, accused several of his fellow employees of withholding evidence and manipulating scientific tests in order to gain convictions, and by extension myself and Howard Shapiro of misconduct by offering their testimony in the case. I didn’t believe it at the time, and I don’t believe it now. Whitehurst’s allegations were more about the validity of competing scientific methods than about anything intentional, and indeed they did lead to changes in some of the Bureau’s lab procedures, but for Whitehurst to level such serious charges against his co-workers was way over the top. As for Howard and me, we had no idea the controversy was even simmering below us, and a Justice Department review agreed. But by then, Howard was the Bureau’s chief counsel and I was its director, an awkward position for both of us.
The far more pleasant lingering effect of the Moody case was the judge who heard it, Ed Devitt. Among trial lawyers, he had a towering reputation. He’d been a grade school classmate of Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, both of whom were destined for the Supreme Court. After serving in the navy in World War II, Ed had briefly been a member of Congress before losing his House seat after a single term to Eugene McCarthy. But it was as a U.S. district judge—for thirty-eight years—that he’d made his true mark. Ed was coauthor of the standard guide to jury instructions in criminal cases. He knew everyone. For nearly a quarter century, the American Judicature Society has been presenting an annual award in his name to outstanding federal judges. He was the perpetual grand marshal of the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in St. Paul, where he was known as the unofficial mayor. Most important to me, Ed Devitt had a heart full of compassion and a great sense of humor.
The U.S. Senate had confirmed my nomination to become a U.S. district judge while the Moody case was going on. The week before the trial was to end, the attorney general called to say he was ready to sign my judicial appointment certificate, the last official act before I could be sworn in, and would be sending it out to me by express mail. I dutifully reported the fact to both Devitt and Ed Tolley, the opposing counsel, just to make sure no one thought my pending status would prejudice the outcome. Neither of them did, but as Ed Tolley and I were packing up our papers in the courtroom after the trial was over that Friday, Ed Devitt’s clerk handed me a note from the judge. “Mr. Freeh,” it read, “I understand your certificate is about to come in. If you’d like, I’ll swear you in myself.”
I went back to his chambers and talked with him about it. My soon-to-be colleagues in New York might not like his jumping the gun like this, Ed warned, but he had impressed me so greatly during the four weeks of the trial and he was so genuinely warm that I called Marilyn to get her okay. The next day, a Saturday, Ed Devitt administered the oath of office, and I left St. Paul as a U.S. district court judge, though Ed wasn’t through with me yet.
In August 1991, I was more formally sworn in again as a judge, this time at a more appropriate venue, my new courtroom in lower Manhattan. The event, obviously, was strictly ceremonial—a chance for my wife and kids, my parents, and close friends to see me put on the black robe of office and take my place on the bench for the first time. At most courtrooms around the country, it’s a very festive time. Friends get to say a few words, as do family members. The ceremony is drawn out a bit, so everyone can savor the moment, but not in the Southern District of New York. The great jurist and Supreme Court justice Learned Hand scripted the rite for the New York court, and he kept it Puritan simple: a stark, emotionless oath-taking that might consume all of 120 seconds. Ed Devitt not only insisted on coming, even knowing the ceremony would be grim, but he had kindly offered his robe maker in Minnesota to make my own first robe, and that’s what was put on me after I had signed the oath of office (a second time) and the chief judge instructed U.S. marshal Romolo Imundi, a heroic ex–New York homicide detective and pal, to robe me that I might approach the bench.
I admit that I did notice a slight stirring as I made my way across the courtroom, but it wasn’t until I was seated at my spot on the very lowest end of the bench that my new fellow jurist Kevin Duffy leaned over and asked me the question that was on everyone’s mind:
“Hey, Louie, what’s with the blue robe?”
In the audience, I noted, Ed Devitt was laughing hysterically.
“I just wanted to make your swearing-in distinguished,” he told me later. “Those guys on the bench didn’t have a smile among them. It’ll shake ’em up a little.” It happened that when Ed forgot his own robe while riding circuit in Minnesota, he borrowed one from a state judge, who wore blue.
Sadly, Ed fell seriously ill not long afterward. Ed Tolley and I determined to go visit him at his hospital in Minnesota, but before we went, we called his clerk to ask if there was anything we could bring. Yes, we were told, there was, and so it was that two upstanding officers of the court—with the help of New York FBI
agent Bob Lennick, a technical wizard on the Moody case—snuck a bottle of Jack Daniels past the nursing station and into Judge Devitt’s room so we could all have a last few slugs of bourbon together. Ed Devitt died not long afterward, at age eighty, an inspiration to the very end.
Funny how life works out. I’d gone down to Georgia expecting, at one level, to be there no more than sixty days. That two months grew into more than a year, but I had honored the fiction that I would be leaving any day by putting up the whole time not in an apartment near the Russell Building, which would have been sensible, but in a suite at a Marriott near the airport, which was probably delusional at best. (The Marriott manager was kind enough to dedicate the suite to me when I finally checked out.)
Had I said no to Bob Mueller when he called about Atlanta and left instead for the private sector, I’m sure I would have been better off financially. I might even have still been put up for a seat on the U.S. district court. I had a long relationship with Al D’Amato, the New York senator who recommended me. And if I had never been a federal judge, I feel certain I wouldn’t even have been considered for director of the FBI. With good cause, too, because my time as a U.S. district court judge proved to be excellent preparation for the job I was going to tackle in another two years.
When I was going through my confirmation before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Joe Biden had the good sense to ask about the gaping holes in my résumé.
“You have a long background in criminal law,” I can remember him saying, “but how are you going to get up to speed on civil practice?”
He was right. I knew criminal courtrooms inside and out, but there were large areas of civil law I had only a nodding acquaintance with. To compensate, I promised Senator Biden—one of the most honorable men in Washington and my own senator now that I live in Delaware—that I would hire smart clerks, and I did just that.
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