The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

“You all did everything perfectly,” an agent monitoring the house told them. “With one exception: wrong cat.”

  “This cat immediately climbed some drapes and was hanging on the top of the drapes, and the dog was circling at the bottom waiting for the cat to eventually tire and fall down so he could go after it again,” Grever says.

  When the occupants returned from a trip the next day, they discovered a strange cat in their house.

  “The last thing these people think is that someone broke into their house, let their cat out, put another cat in there, and then left without taking anything,” Grever points out. “So they explained it to themselves by saying their cat must have gotten out through a small door that allowed the dog to go outside. They thought this other cat must have gotten in the house the same way, and they wrote it off as pretty normal.”

  In a case in Tampa, the best time to enter the target’s home was in the afternoon between two-thirty and three-thirty. Since the agents could easily be seen, they drove a tractor trailer to the home to shield them from the neighbors across the street. But as the tractor trailer rolled into the development, telephone wires became tangled on top of the trailer. The agent who was driving radioed to the surveillance team on duty. Those agents ran to try to free the tractor trailer. Just then, a school bus full of kids showed up.

  Meanwhile, a neighbor down the street who was a friend of the target was trying to drive out of the development. He saw five agents at a side entrance to the target’s home, which was for sale. The friend stopped and asked what they were doing. When told by TacOps agent Mike Uttaro that they were interested in buying the home, he said, “It takes five guys to look at a house?”

  “This house is in lousy condition, and we have engineers and housing inspectors here to examine it,” Uttaro said. “We have an appointment with the Realtor at three.”

  While still suspicious, the man left, and the agents were able to break in and search the house.

  When breaking into homes, agents have encountered poisonous snakes and caged wild animals. “I walked in one place, I had my gun out, and there’s two cages of orangutans, and they’re going nuts,” Uttaro’s partner, Mike McDevitt, says. “I hear all this noise, and I have a penlight in my mouth, and I turn my head towards that, and all I see are these orange eyes looking at me. It was a jaguar in a cage.”

  In another case, agents found a man sleeping on a couch with a pistol on his stomach and a rifle and a whiskey bottle on the floor.

  “He’d passed out,” says McDevitt. “I remember laying there that night, looking at this, trying to figure out exactly what I would have done if he had awakened,” McDevitt says. “I wasn’t going to be able to identify myself. Since he was drunk, hopefully I’d be able to push him, and he would fall back down.”

  Uttaro, who conducted more than four thousand covert entries, was once installing wires in ceiling tiles while walking around on twelve-foot-high stilts. He slipped and almost went crashing through a window on the top floor of the Chrysler Building in New York. Another time, McDevitt accidentally cut into electrical wires in the Bronx, sending sparks flying.

  In another New York case, McDevitt broke into the apartment of a Mafia figure who was setting up a hit job. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns were lying on a sofa. As McDevitt and a technical agent from the field office were doing their work, they heard a noise outside the apartment door. As it turned out, the person outside the apartment was the hit man, and he soon entered the apartment using a key.

  There was no place to hide, so McDevitt and the other agent ran into the bathroom and closed the door. They decided they would act as if they belonged there.

  To create that impression, the technical agent took off his shirt and turned on the water in the sink. McDevitt jumped in the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain closed. Peeking through an opening in the curtain, he watched what was happening by looking in the bathroom mirror, his gun at the ready.

  Hearing the water, the hit man knocked on the bathroom door. The other agent opened the door a crack.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “Who the f—— are you?” the field agent said.

  “I brought the shotgun shells,” the hit man said.

  “The guy turns around and he says, ‘Can you lock up when you leave?’ ” McDevitt says.

  “Sure,” the technical agent replied. The hit man left, and the two agents continued their work, installing surveillance cameras and bugs.

  Rather than introducing items with bugs in them, agents may install a tiny microphone or camera in a wall, leaving a pinhole in the wall for the device. Then they paint over the area with a special fast-drying paint, matching the paint perfectly.

  “We have a paint-matching algorithm in one of our computers so we can mix paint right there to repaint an area,” Grever says.

  In installing microphones or cameras, the FBI may transmit sound or pictures through beamed light in fiber-optic strands as fine as human hair. As a result, no stray electronic emissions can be detected by debugging experts. Elevator shafts are a favorite place for running wires to transmit intercepted conversations.

  Bugging devices may be made by the Engineering Research Facility or contracted out to such facilities as Sandia National Laboratories, which develops new technology to eavesdrop on communications.

  Audio and video are monitored remotely over encrypted wireless transmissions. Besides photographing money changing hands, video can record keystrokes on a computer keyboard. TacOps agents may also install hidden software on a target’s computer to defeat future encryption. Usually bugging devices can be controlled remotely. Sometimes agents hear debugging experts sweeping an office or home. The experts almost never find anything.

  “If you know a sweep is coming, it’s easy to avoid it,” Grever says. “They’re looking for the telltale signs of electronics—radio waves, for example. You turn off the device remotely or you bury it very deeply, where they’d almost have to do a destructive search to find it.”

  When a job is finished, agents brief colleagues back at the support center, and everyone picks apart the operation.

  In the early days of the program, resources were scarce. Even the purchase of lock-picking kits faced a bureaucratic struggle. Agent James Kallstrom fought with headquarters to obtain the necessary funding, both when he was in New York and later when he headed the engineering section in Washington.

  “Tell me what you need, and we’ll do it,” Kallstrom would tell agents, according to McDevitt.

  In the early 1980s, the New York field office needed to quickly install a bug at the home of a Mafia figure, but no bugging device was available. So agents decided to remove a bug that already had been implanted in a Times Square hotel room of another Mafia figure, a member of the Bonanno family.

  The problem: the Mafia used the hotel room as a safe sanctuary, so a bad guy was always in the room. Supervisory agent Joe Cantamessa came up with a ruse. He told Uttaro, who became McDevitt’s assistant heading TacOps, to pretend to be a mob guy and to knock on the door of the mafioso. Sure enough, the man opened the door, shirtless.

  Uttaro claimed he owed him money. Coming from a Sicilian background, he was able to throw in some Sicilian words for effect.

  “I told him I was there to get my money, mentioning names of Italian neighbors I had grown up with,” Uttaro says. “He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he asked if I had talked with Tony about it. He was actually trying to be helpful.”

  After a few minutes, Uttaro left. Then Agent Cantamessa knocked on the man’s door. He displayed his FBI credentials and said he needed the mafioso to identify the man who had just knocked on his door.

  The mafioso agreed, and Cantamessa escorted him outside to the street, where agents made a show of pretending to arrest Uttaro, even roughing him up a bit.

  “They threw me against a wall and kicked my shins,” Uttaro says. “I screamed about police brutality and said they should all be sent to prison.” />
  Meanwhile, other agents snuck into the man’s apartment and retrieved the needed bugging device.

  When TacOps agents entered the home of CIA officer Aldrich Ames at two in the morning, they found that the end of a key blank was stuck in the lock of a door to the basement, apparently to prevent entry. They were able to remove it and defeat his alarm system. In contrast to Ames’ precautions, FBI agent Robert Hanssen had an alarm system, but when TacOps agents entered during the day, they found he had not set it before going out. The only problem was keeping track of his kids’ comings and goings.

  Often a covert entry is the turning point in a case.

  “With some of the organized crime figures, we would work for years to develop enough probable cause to get court approval for a close-access opportunity,” Grever says. “We would install microphones, and usually they feel so secure in their conversations that they will say anything and reveal themselves. They’ll portray themselves in court as these law-abiding, friendly citizens. But then you start listening to those conversations or you see the meetings, and you quickly see what their intent is.”

  After waiting years to develop probable cause, the FBI was able to plant microphones in the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan, where Gambino crime boss John Gotti hung out.

  “In that case, I remember the night the calls started coming in: ‘The target’s opening up,’ ” Grever says. “We had people racing to get into position.”

  Agents installed microphones in electrical wall fixtures near a table in a back room of the social club, in a hallway, and in an upstairs apartment. The beauty of turning an electrical outlet or light fixture into a bugging device is that it supplies its own power, so there is no need to reenter the premises to replace batteries.

  Gotti was heard on the tapes talking to other mobsters about his power and people he had “whacked.” Explaining why he ordered the murder of Louis DiBono, a Gambino soldier, Gotti said on the tapes that the Mafia member had made a simple mistake: he didn’t respect the boss.

  “Know why he’s dying?” Gotti, known as the “Dapper Don” because of his expensive clothes, asked his consigliere in a taped conversation that foreshadowed DiBono’s 1990 murder. “He’s gonna die because he refused to come in when I called,” Gotti said. “He didn’t do nothing else wrong.”

  Shortly after that, DiBono was found dead, with three bullet holes in his head.

  “Within thirty days, we had enough conversation to sink the Teflon Don,” Grever says. “The one thing about the FBI is we can be patient.”

  On December 11, 1990, FBI agents and New York City detectives raided the Ravenite Social Club and arrested Gotti. Gotti died of cancer in a federal prison hospital in 2002.

  Conversely, Grever says, “Every now and then we get indications that somebody is doing something illegal, but our surveillance of them reveals that it’s not based on valid, good information. It allows us to get them off the radar really quickly, and we will absolutely move on.”

  One of the FBI’s greatest achievements was bugging a Mafia induction ceremony on October 29, 1989, demonstrating in graphic detail that organized crime does, in fact, exist.

  “I got a phone call on a Saturday morning about nine-thirty from a tech agent in the Boston area,” McDevitt says. “He said, ‘Mike, is there any way you can get a couple of your guys to come up here? We have source information that there will be an induction ceremony tonight.’ ”

  McDevitt and Uttaro got on a bureau plane and flew to Boston. The ceremony by the Patriarca crime family was to take place the next night in the basement of a house on Guild Street in Medford, Massachusetts.

  The homes on the street were close together, making it difficult to enter the house through a side door without being spotted. One agent kept an eye on a couple next door who could see the side door clearly out their window.

  Picking a lock can be time-consuming. Moreover, when a lock is picked, it remains unlocked until picked again, so a security guard who tries the door would find it unlocked, possibly tipping him off to a break-in. In addition, if an occupant such as an embassy later suspects a break-in, a forensic examination of the lock would reveal that it had been picked. After the entry, agents have to pick it again to restore it to a locked position. Because of these problems, agents developed a device not available to the commercial world that decodes the lock, allowing them to make an impression of the lock so that the required key can be made. So that a location can be reentered to fix a problem or replace a battery, agents leave the key they make with the local field office.

  After installing bugs in the house where the induction ceremony was to take place, McDevitt and Uttaro ran the sound through existing telephone wires. The day after the ceremony, they learned from local agents that the operation picked up the induction of four men under the direction of Raymond L. “Junior” Patriarca, the organized crime boss based in Rhode Island.

  Four times, Biagio DiGiacomo administered the oath: “I … want to enter into this organization to protect my family and to protect all my friends. I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey, with love and omerta.”

  Omerta is the code of silence a “made man” lives by. Punishment for violation of omerta is death.

  “We get in this organization, and the only way we’re going to get out is dead, no matter what,” DiGiacomo said on the FBI tape. “It’s no hope, no Jesus, no Madonna, nobody can help us if we ever give up this secret to anybody.”

  After blood was drawn from each of the inductees’ trigger fingers, a holy card with the image of the Patriarca family saint was burned. The tapes brought jail time for all seventeen participants in the induction ceremony.

  During his assignment to TacOps, Grever traveled as much as 170 days a year. Often he had to work on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, or Easter because those holidays—along with Ramadan—are some of the best times to enter homes or offices without being caught. On the other hand, he had a flexible schedule and could take off in between jobs. He got incentive awards for pulling off particularly sensitive jobs. Agents hate the paperwork often associated with what they do. There is little of that in the business of conducting covert entries.

  “I’ve been to every state in the Union except two, and you get to preview all the best vacation spots, because that’s often where the work is,” Grever says. “You love getting the phone call at home, grabbing your bag, and telling your family, ‘I gotta go! They need me! The country needs me!’ ”

  Agents often travel on FBI or Defense Department planes.

  “You land, and there’s people waiting for you: ‘Thank God you’re here!’ ” Grever says. “You’re like, the cape is blowing in the wind, here we go! You’re like James Bond who can break into this bad guy’s office on a secret mission and poke around.”

  The downside is that an agent breaking into a home or office could be shot. So far, it has never happened. But that is why only armed agents participate in the entries.

  “Knock on wood, we have not been discovered and shot inside,” Grever says. “We have been on surveillance tape before. But if nothing’s out of place, nothing got disturbed, there’s no alarm. Typically, the owners never ever look at their tapes.”

  “If discovered, running away is our first option,” Grever says. “The second option is to try to talk them down, explaining who we are.” However, it’s unlikely a burglar claiming to be an FBI agent will be believed, so, in case they are discovered, agents bring along Taser electroshock weapons.

  While agents can elect to wear protective body armor, “most TacOps guys think that the outline of a vest might alert an observer or would restrict their movements, or both,” Grever says. “Most of us rationalize that the idea is to not get caught and thus avoid an armed confrontation.”

  However, if worst comes to worst, TacOps agents are authorized to use deadly force.

  “You have a court order that gives the government a legal right to be there on that property,” Grever says. “If
threatened with deadly force, an agent can use deadly force against someone who thinks he is protecting his own property. Although the U.S. government may have a lot of liability, the individual agent, as long as we acted in good faith, won’t be held liable. But that is absolutely the last option.”

  3

  RED DRESS

  IN THE EARLY DAYS WHEN J. EDGAR HOOVER WAS DIRECTOR, the FBI considered break-ins at embassies so sensitive that no one would dare ask the director for permission to undertake them. If something went wrong, the agents and their supervisors would be blamed. So agents broke into embassies, placed bugs or stole code books, then wrote a memo to Hoover asking for permission. At the end of the memo, they wrote, “Security guaranteed.” To FBI officials, that meant the job had already been pulled off without a hitch. They could then sign off on the memo and forward it to Hoover without fear of a slipup.

  The charade was a metaphor for the way Hoover ran the FBI. On one hand, he was a perfectionist. When he was growing up, a maid would prepare him a poached egg on toast for breakfast at his home on Seward Square in southeast Washington. If the egg was broken, he wouldn’t eat it, and it had to be done over. Hoover would offer the offending egg to his Airedale, Spee Dee Bozo.

  Hoover’s penchant for perfection led him to pioneer use of technology to solve crimes in the laboratory. Before computers, he created a filing and indexing system that effectively kept track of massive amounts of information. He established a fingerprint registry. In essence, the FBI was Hoover’s creation.

  But Hoover’s blind spots and quirks were legendary. If an agent conducted himself poorly, Hoover felt it reflected on him personally. He codified his philosophy in the phrase “Don’t embarrass the bureau.” By that he also meant, “Don’t embarrass me.” As far as Hoover was concerned, he was the bureau. His agents were his family.

  Hoover so intimidated agents that when he wrote on a memo, “Watch the borders!” headquarters officials began trying to determine if there was a problem on the Mexican or Canadian borders.