“I’m not much into groups,” he said. “The Vidocq Society, some kind of Sherlock Holmes club? It was simply preposterous. I quite enjoyed Frank and Bill, had a nice time and humored them both. I was trying to be polite, OK. But frankly, I thought the whole idea was foolish.”
PART THREE
THE VIDOCQ SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 19 •
THE GATHERING OF DETECTIVES
At high noon in the Navy Officers’ Club, Fleisher looked down a long table into the faces of the best and brightest federal agents and cops from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington. This was the core group Fleisher had handpicked to start the Vidocq Society, the most accomplished and colorful experts from his various tribes: federal agents, Philadelphia cops, polygraph experts, and Jewish lawmen. On either side of him sat Frank Bender and Richard Walter. Following his luncheon with them, Fleisher had written a letter to twenty-eight law enforcement colleagues around the country and world inviting them to join a private detective club dedicated to “cuisine and crime.” Twenty-six of the twenty-eight replied with a swift and enthusiastic yes.
The air in the room was electric. Never had any of them seen so much detective talent at one table. They were a collective endowment with no obligation to any government or agency. Bender was “really excited.”
Even Walter, ever the skeptic in his crisp blue suit, launched his left eyebrow into a reappraising point as he looked down the table of renowned investigators. The big gun at Customs really did it, he thought.
The charter members of the Vidocq Society had gathered to take their collective measure, determine their purpose, vote on leadership, rules, and bylaws.
Most were men Fleisher knew like brothers. Some, like veteran Customs agent Joe O’Kane, had worked with him for years on major cases.
“Me and Bill [Fleisher] and the other guys have spent the equivalent of two lifetimes together,” said O’Kane. “We live out of suitcases, sleep in cars eating burritos on surveillance, urinate in gas station men’s rooms. 007 it ain’t . . .” Others had worked with Fleisher with the FBI or the Philadelphia PD, men who’d lassoed murderers and mobsters and stood guard for everyone from the governor of Pennsylvania to the queen of England.
“Fleisher, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’ll never work,” laughed U.S. Treasury Department special agent William Gill, the Treasury ASAC in Philadelphia, surveying the band of tough, independent-minded cops, all of them accustomed to bureaucratic jousting and rivalry and armed to the teeth. “But I love you and if it’s a good lunch, I’m in. I’m one of Fleisher’s disciples.”
Gill was impressed with how Fleisher in the past had brought together all the ASACs who helped run federal law enforcement offices in Philadelphia—FBI, Marshals, Customs, DEA, Treasury, ATF, IRS, Secret Service—for a monthly luncheon. They got to know one another and worked together in new ways. “It was great to be able to call a guy and say, hey, Bob, I need some equipment, or I need some men.”
One of Fleisher’s ASAC lunches was aboard a cabin cruiser sailing on the Delaware, a DEA surveillance boat confiscated from drug smugglers and equipped with all the latest listening devices. “The DEA was showing off, and it worked. It impressed the shit out of everybody.” Gill later borrowed the boat to put away a revenue agent who was taking huge payoffs to ignore corporate audits. The bribes were passed in clandestine meetings on a small boat in the Delaware, and it was easy for the cabin cruiser to listen in. The boat was skippered by DEA agent Steve Churchill, who would become a VSM.
“Bill’s a genius at organization,” Gill said, “at remembering everybody’s name and bringing them together.”
“You got that right,” O’Kane said. “He talks to everybody, every agent, every cop, every snitch, every reporter, every hooker, everybody. He has lunch with everybody. He wanted to talk about this new society over lunch. I said, Bill, I can’t do all the lunches you do, I can’t eat like that. There’s never been a networker like Bill Fleisher.”
The federal agents at the table, Fleisher’s peers, were a flashy group. The bounty hunter, intense U.S. Marshal Dennis Matulewicz, a St. Joseph’s University graduate, liked to quote Hemingway: “There is nothing like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Star Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent Philip Schuyler Deming, chestnut-haired and movie-star handsome, wore the ring of Washington’s officers, the Society of Cincinnati, handed down by his ancestor Alexander Hamilton. Edgar Adamson had once given his life to Christ in the seminary, but was now based in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of Interpol.
“Deming was so blue-blooded, if you cut him he bled Main Line,” said Customs agent O’Kane. “But he was a regular guy, not foppish. He wouldn’t tell you his middle name unless you made him.”
Treasury ASAC Gill sat with his former boss, Ben Redmond, reminiscing about the summer day in New York City in 1971 when their agents were scheduled to go undercover and receive a bribe in person from the godfather of the Colombo crime family himself, Joe Colombo Sr. It would have been a spectacular coup. But at Colombo’s earlier appointment to speak at an Italian rally at Columbus Circle, a gunman shot him three times in the head, putting the godfather in a seven-year coma he never came out of. The infamous phrase of chief rival and suspect Joey Gallo was, “He was vegetabled,” Gill said to laughter.
In comparison, the Customs tribe was a roughhouse gang. O’Kane, son of a Kensington millwright, didn’t know what Customs agents were until half a dozen of them with sticks and guns jumped him when he was removing a repossessed car from Customs bonded storage. The young loan officer hadn’t filled out the proper forms, and Customs agents saw it as a theft. But agents Burke and Murphy liked the way the big Irishman handled himself in the fight. When they realized it was an innocent mistake and moreover the kid was Dutch O’Kane’s son, “they clapped me on the back like I was the greatest guy in the world and told me to apply to Customs.” Like another big Irishman, Frank Dufner, he caught on as a sky marshal. Dufner had been applying to be a letter carrier—his grandfather’s trade for fifty years—when he saw President Richard Nixon on a poster recruiting armed undercover men to stop airplane hijackings. They loved the undercover work, sitting there in coach in a suit with a .38 jammed in their pants, “Just waiting, wanting, wishing something would happen,” O’Kane said. It seldom did, except when Dufner had to tackle a man who was furiously pounding on the pilot’s door. “It turns out he was a gay guy whose lover was pretending to have an affair in the men’s room, and it was the only door he hadn’t checked.”
At Customs, both men trained under the “Forty Thieves,” the hard-boiled inspectors who worked the night docks in Philadelphia with sticks they used to smash smuggled vodka bottles hidden under longshoremen’s coats. “Those guys were two-fisted drinkers and I loved them,” O’Kane said. “I mean they literally stood at the bar with two drinks, and they’d just as soon punch you in the mouth as say hello. They were hardball guys with hearts of gold—Irish mostly, some Italians, a smattering of German types, a few tough Jewish guys.”
Fleisher was one of the tough Jewish guys, one of the polished, college-educated federal agents, even though he happened to have come up the hard way from Philadelphia’s ethnic neighborhoods. But there was no caste system dividing the men at the table. Common achievement was the leveler. Masculine stoicism and modesty were the code in the room. “Guys don’t talk about things,” said O’Kane. “Gill was a hero on helicopter bombing missions in Vietnam, but I’ve never heard him talk about it. It gets mentioned in passing, and you know what a guy’s got.” They all had a lot.
Renowned attorney Kenneth Freeman, one of the tough Jewish guys, had walked the Philly police beat with him as a young man; Freeman went off to law school and encouraged Fleisher to attend the FBI Academy. Another tough Jewish guy, Customs special agent in charge Dave Warren, Fleisher’s boss, had helped bring him over from the
FBI and its endless transfers so Fleisher could settle in Philadelphia.
Farther down the table, and back in time, was Fleisher’s Philadelphia tribe, the men he’d grown up with or served with at the police department. Short, wisecracking medical examiner Halbert Fillinger, who went to homicide scenes in his vintage fire department vehicles, had arrived in his red Thunderbird with the HOM-HAL plates. There was city homicide captain Frank Friel, legendary investigator of four thousand murders. “Frank’s the best man on a murder I’ve ever known,” Fleisher said.
The Philly cop family was as tight as any mob.
Only Fleisher’s cofounders, Walter and Bender, weren’t part of the family. Many of the Philadelphians had worked with Bender, but all knew Walter only as a Midwest forensic psychologist whose brilliance and temperamental nature seemed to match Bender’s. With their booming laughter and preternaturally gleaming eyes—one lit with mania, the other darkly glittering with mockery—the men flanking Fleisher seemed as ethereal as apparitions, shadowy extensions of Fleisher. They were loud, outlandish; they broke the code.
Yet Fleisher seemed to have an unspoken communion with the strange men at his side. “I’ve always had a taste for characters and eccentrics,” he said. A taste that came from his father, who enjoyed the company of gangsters, second-story men, showgirls, and assorted figures on the borderlands of darkness.
Before lunch was served, Fleisher got down to the business of creating the Vidocq Society. He introduced his cofounders, then briefly described the swashbuckling Vidocq, the society’s name-sake, and his many accomplishments.
Special Agent Dufner, once Fleisher’s partner in Customs, chuckled. So that’s where he picked up that trick. One winter day in 1980, they were investigating a major theft of TVs and microwaves from cargo containers when Fleisher found a footprint in the snow. He went to the store to buy plaster of paris and made an impression. “A lot of the guys in the office were laughing—you’ve gone too far, what’s this, Perry Mason?” Dufner said. “But we made about twenty arrests, and one guy gave himself up because we had his Converse sneaker impression. Fleisher was one of those guys who knew everything. I thought, FBI agent, Philly PD, I can learn a lot from this guy.”
Led by Fleisher, the men at the long table quickly hashed out the details of their new fellowship. They quickly chose a commissioner (Fleisher) to lead them, along with a deputy commissioner—an immodest organization model also used by the New York City Police Department, the Hong Kong Police, and the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard).
They would meet quarterly over a hot lunch at the Officers’ Club to discuss cold murders. Nate Gordon, the esteemed polygraph operator, proposed that membership be restricted to eighty-two men and women in honor of Vidocq’s life span of eighty-two years. (Born in rural Arras, France, July 23, 1775, a baker’s third son, Vidocq died in Paris on May 11, 1857.) The proposal was quickly accepted. Membership would be a “rare privilege” extended to the top forensic specialists in the world, and endure for life. No one could apply; one had to be invited through sponsorship by an existing member, and approved by a vote of a board of directors that included the commissioner and deputy commissioner. A single blackball would sink a candidate. The eighty-two charter Vidocq Society Members would be formally known as VSMs.
Their meetings would exude the elegant, privileged, old-world atmosphere of a Victorian men’s club. Coffee and iced tea would substitute for brandy, cigars were verboten, and talented women and men of all races would be enthusiastically welcomed as members; it was a different time. But they were not shy about making the club exclusive; one had to be a renowned crime-fighter to even be considered. It would be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.
There was an air of whimsy about the Vidocq Society. Among the many previous dining-and-mystery societies that sprang up, mostly in New York or London, the most famous was the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1935. The Irregulars meet for dinner in New York City to discuss Sherlock Holmes in a jovial atmosphere where “it is always 1895.” Notable members included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, science-fiction writers Isaac Asimov and later Neil Gaiman, and Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe novels.
Like the Baker Street Irregulars, the purpose of the Vidocq Society would be strictly fraternal, Fleisher said. Working or retired, detectives could catch up with old friends or make new ones and stretch their minds on fascinating unsolved cases. It would be a social club for detectives.
Fleisher was even happy to admit people who were not law enforcement professionals if they brought a unique talent to forensic inquiry.
Walter frowned at that. He wanted no part of amateurs.
• CHAPTER 20 •
BUSTED
In the fall of 1990, as Bender and Walter hurtled over the dark Pacific on a flight from San Francisco to Australia, the artist couldn’t remove his eyes from the stewardess. He’d never taken such a long flight and he was ebullient; his career was soaring. The John List case had propelled him to superstar status as an international forensic artist, hailed for works of genius on the front page of The New York Times. Now he’d been invited to give a week of forensic lectures in Adelaide and Sydney with Walter and FBI agent Robert Ressler. His first appearance before the international forensic community would be alongside two of the most renowned profilers in the world. Things couldn’t be going better.
But it was a long flight, and Bender’s mood rose and fell and finally went into a free fall at 30,000 feet. The truth was, he told Walter, that it was his first long trip away from his wife in their twenty years together, and he was filled with worry. He had called her from all their airport stops, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, to tell her he loved her.
He was still finding it hard to believe, but his wife had recently informed him their marriage was officially on the rocks. Not with Wife No. 2, as some friends referred to Joan, but with Jan—the original pretty blonde, the rock of his life.
“Jan’s talking to a lawyer about divorce,” he said glumly, staring out over the black ocean.
“As your friend, I’m trying to act surprised,” Walter said tartly.
“I know, I know. I never thought it’d come to this. Jan’s the center of my life. I’ve always had affairs, but I made a mistake. I had the wrong kind of affair.”
“Yes, of course,” Walter said sarcastically. “I see.”
Bender didn’t seem to be listening. “. . . Jan thinks the celebrity stuff is going to my head. I can’t help it if my work attracts attention.”
In the modern media age, Bender was becoming better known in his time than Michelangelo was in his. People magazine asked him to sculpt the bust of one of the “25 Most Intriguing People” of 1991—Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old hunter found in a glacier at 11,000 feet in the Italian Alps with a stone arrow in his back and a knife in his hand, on the losing end of the first known European murder. Ahead of the scientific proof, Bender gave the Iceman short hair because “it just felt right.” The Sonnabend Gallery in New York City made him the featured artist in an exhibit with the work of Andy Warhol called “Monster,” Ronald Jones’s installation about crime. From photographs of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis, he sculpted an old woman, imagining that she had survived the death camps. “She had a beautiful singing voice,” he told the Associated Press. “She sang for Mengele. Then he shot her. It was the most moving experience of all the work I’ve done.” Now it wasn’t just Philadelphia newspapers calling; it was Time and Newsweek and Match in Paris, movie producers, Hollywood agents, and celebrities on the phone, in addition to the coroners, city cops, grizzled private eyes, models, photographers, reporters, cranks, quacks, collection agencies, and jealous husbands who had long burned up the wires on South Street.
Jan wrote in her diary that her husband was no longer the young, humble, devil-may-care artist who talked about being a voice for the dead who had no one to speak for them. He was on the phone with journalists and Holl
ywood and TV people day and night. “He talks about himself all the time,” she wrote.
Things came to a head after they’d been fighting for weeks and months, with long, bitter silences and the tension building. On top of everything else, Jan was tired of being broke and poor. The week that John List was captured, a Time magazine writer had said that Frank Bender was more famous than the president of the United States. Bender’s nearly forty forensic sculptures, which occupied most of his time for more than a decade, had produced spectacular results—but each bust paid only about $1,000, sometimes more, sometimes much less. Sometimes nothing at all. Meanwhile, Frank’s steady money from commercial photography withered. Jan took a job as a perfume tester at Strawbridge & Clothier department store, and a second job as a law-firm receptionist. Frank found part-time work repairing nicked and damaged tugboat blades, diving underwater in the polluted Delaware River—with his extraordinary hands, he was brilliant at feeling the flaws in total blackness. They sold their belongings, including Frank’s last motorcycle and his van, to keep going.
The bottom fell out recently, Frank said, when he was lying in bed one morning and Jan started screaming.
“Are you fucking Laura Shaughnessy?” Her shouting echoed through the old meat market, reaching the ears of their daughter Vanessa.
Frank was fed up with Jan’s cold, dismissive attitude. “Yes, I am,” he said nonchalantly. “Now can I go back to sleep?”
“Might I suggest,” Walter said dryly, “that that was the wrong thing to say?”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Walter glared at him.
“I’ve got to restore The Balance,” Bender said quietly and with reverence, as if it were a lost artifact of The Knights Templar. “I violated The Balance.”
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