The Last Undercover

by Bob Hamer

  We made our way to the building that housed the conference room, just off the pool and garden. Compared to last year’s facilities in New York, these accommodations were quite an improvement, though the hardwood floors were a bit worn. Still, there was a kitchenette, and turn-of-the-century photos of the greater Miami area adorned the walls. The chairs were set up in a semicircle and the attendees took their seats.

  24

  LEADERLESS, SHIRTLESS, CLUELESS

  Peter welcomed us.

  This group is unique. It’s membership-based. You are responsible as to how we move from here. . . . Even the European groups—they may hold work meetings, but the largest group that we know of is Martangue in the Netherlands and I think basically they just send out a magazine like we do and have a steering committee, but I don’t think they hold general membership meetings. But this general membership meeting really guides what NAMBLA will do for the rest of the year.

  Chris spoke next, asking for a wider participation in NAMBLA’s work by the attendees. Chris referred to this small gathering of seventeen men as the organization’s “core group.”

  Peter asked each of us to introduce ourselves, if we were comfortable doing so, and to answer the questions “What do we want?” and “What are our aspirations?” The responses were interesting: No one admitted coming for any of the organization’s stated purposes as outlined in the NAMBLA policy statement. The primary theme of their comments, as the FBI suspected all along, was “networking.”

  Sam Lindblad began. The Albuquerque resident readily admitted to being “a year and a few months out of prison, where I put in seven years.” He came seeking “camaraderie and a common soul.”

  Tim from Michigan said,

  I live pretty much in isolation from other BLs. . . . Part of my interest in coming here this weekend is meeting other BLs and begin[ning] to develop a community of people [for] exchange . . . and . . . support. I don’t really see this as a time in this country where we can go out and be, like, real vocal and active in the sense of carrying signs. . . . I think the focus for us, as a group, is to try to reach out among ourselves and provide more support than maybe we’re doing right now. I see this as kind of being dark times and if we don’t support each other, I don’t know who is going to.

  Someone followed with an “amen.”

  David Mayer came for the networking; Mike from Cleveland wanted “to develop a better networking community of other guys that have the same feelings as myself.”

  John from San Francisco identified himself as a “gaytheist” who had “been in jail twice and any commitment to anyone might facilitate my way back into jail.” Decrying his plight as a boy lover, John admitted to being “out as a gay” and “out as an atheist” but “those things are different. You go around saying you like to run your hands through a boy’s hair, or you like to kiss him or do other things like that, it doesn’t get the same reaction.”

  Substitute teacher Dick Stutsman, fifty-nine, from a small town in South Carolina, said he loved boys: “I admire them; they’re beautiful creatures.” He had lived in South Carolina for over a year, having come from Atlanta, where he was a mentor in a middle school. Dick described himself in reassuring terms: “I think I’m not a sociopath. . . . In my twenties and thirties there might have been cases where I seduced, inappropriately, people who were naïve . . . I am fearless to a fault . . . open to a fault, and I don’t want to be a danger to this organization.”

  Paul Zipszer, from the Orlando area, was attending his first conference. “Basically, the reason I came was to see what’s going on.”

  Todd Calvin from Dallas was attending his third consecutive conference and spoke passionately when he said he came for “the camaraderie, for actually being able to be yourself and having nothing to hide because we’ve all been hiding a whole lot for a long time. We don’t have to do that here.”

  Steve Irvin from Pittsburgh was “active in eighty-eight and the nineties, met a lot of nice people, then got busy and paranoid and drifted away . . . so I came just hoping to meet some new people.”

  Chris read several disjointed quotes that had nothing to do with the introductions. He quoted Tim Reed who wrote about pre-1994 Kandahar, Afghanistan, “where the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies flaunting their relationships.” He quoted foreign politicians and national writers. He quoted a writer who said NAMBLA was into “transnational prostitution” and “kidnapping.” Finally, Peter and others called him on his rambling, and we moved on to David R. Busby.

  David R. got a big laugh when he explained he “first found out about this organization somewhere around 1989 or ’90. Since I was a kid into a young adult, I was very active in the Boy Scouts. I got to go to this national meeting. . . . The then chief executive of the Boy Scouts of America, his name was Ben Love, told us about this incredible organization that he thought was so horrible, called NAMBLA. And from that point on I was a member. I didn’t have any idea that you existed, but thanks to the Boy Scouts, I now know.”

  David R., who described himself as “not gay because I like what I like,” spoke with used-car-salesman zeal: “I truly believe that, probably in my lifetime, people will come to think of people like us the way they think of homosexuals. . . . [It’s] good to get together with people who like what you like and believe what you believe, so I really like being here.” David R. also admitted to being a nudist. Soon after that, Mike from Cleveland took off his shirt and remained shirtless throughout the day. David R. told me more than I actually wanted to know, and I was hoping Mike didn’t take David R.’s encouragement any further.

  As the pointless oration droned on, I allowed my mind to go on a little R&R—while keeping enough of an ear on the proceedings to maintain the appearance of engagement in the discussion. I looked around at the guys in the room and tried to imagine them sitting in prison cells. I didn’t know for sure how the arrests would go down in this case if we were successful enough to reach that point, but fantasizing about taking these guys down—hard—helped me stay sane during the emotional wear and tear of my time as a “BL.”

  Thinking about their arrests took me back to my very first collar as a new agent. “Every Marine is a rifleman.” It’s an adage all Marines know. Even though I was a judge advocate in the Corps, I attended both the ten-week Officer Candidate School and the six-month officer basic school (known as TBS, The Basic School) at Quantico, Virginia. Upon graduation I was qualified to lead a rifle platoon into combat. Instead I was assigned to the Naval Justice School in Newport, Rhode Island, and then to the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, California. I never saw combat in the Marines, so I never really knew how I would respond to that first real moment of truth. I believed in my Marine Corps combat training but never put it to use. The four-month training at the FBI Academy prepared me for a different kind of combat. But I wondered how I would respond to that first “fight or flight” incident. Once I reported to the San Diego office of the FBI it wasn’t long before I was tested.

  My first squad assignment included fugitives, which meant we were tasked with tracking down those charged with “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution”: UFAP, in its inevitable governmental acronym form. We were following up leads on a fugitive who was wanted for robbery, kidnapping, and attempted murder. Our subject knocked over a jewelry store, then grabbed the owner and dragged her away as a hostage, subsequently tossing her off a seventy-foot cliff in an apparent effort to eliminate her as a witness. Unfortunately for him, she survived the fall and identified him. He vowed never to be taken alive and crossed state lines to elude capture, which is where the FBI came in.

  One night my partner and I were working late on some information linking the fugitive to an apartment complex in the Mission Beach section of San Diego. We managed to hop the security fence and approached the apartment in question. As I stepped forward to knock on the door, I landed in fresh cement—making a large footprint outside the door to the apartment. Since I had already me
ssed up somebody’s handiwork I knocked on the door but there was no answer. My partner and I laughed off my gaff and planned our return the next day.

  It was early the next afternoon when we approached the apartment a second time. A handyman was on his hands and knees smoothing out my mistake from the night before. He resorted to language I was all too familiar with from the Marines when, with a cherublike face, I inquired about what happened. Before I could even offer an apology—which I had no intention of doing—the fugitive opened the door preparing to leave his apartment. He looked down at the handyman and looked at us. We were dressed in “soft clothes” and appeared to be with the handyman. It was obvious he couldn’t step through the wet cement, and we assumed he was retreating to the back door. The handyman told us the apartment had a back door that led to an underground parking garage.

  We sprinted toward the garage tunnel and arrived there just as the large, cast-iron door was opening. Without much thought—as will soon become obvious—I planted myself in the center of the drive and pointed my .38 at the fugitive bearing down on me in his car. I hollered out commands with Marine Corps authority. For reasons I will never understand—but attribute to God’s care for his foolish children—the suspect obeyed me. Instead of turning me into roadkill, this fugitive, who vowed never to be taken alive, stopped the car, turned off the engine, and threw his keys on the sidewalk. I rushed up to the car and stuck my .38 in his left ear, deep into the ear canal. My adrenaline was pulsating at near lethal levels and my hand was shaking, as was the barrel of the .38 lodged inside his ear. My partner and I pulled the now shaken captured fugitive out of the car, cuffed him, and waited for the A-Team to show up.

  When our more experienced squad members arrived they weren’t real happy we captured an important fugitive without their assistance, but they took him into his apartment and began questioning him. Within a few minutes I walked in, and as I approached the still-cuffed fugitive, he nodded with his head toward me and said with a quaking voice, “Th-th-that’s the son of a bitch who almost killed me.” I know I flashed an ear-to-ear grin. I faced the enemy and won. I belonged in the FBI.

  Sitting in the conference room in Miami, I wished I could jam a .38 in a few pedophiles’ ears as I read them their rights, but for now I had to remain patient. I had to smile and nod and invite them to tell me their darkest fantasies, hoping to elicit the magic words or actions that would allow the justice system to prevent them from harming any boys for a long time.

  By this time, Floyd was speaking. He had senior status in the organization, having been a member since 1981. His current responsibilities included working on the Bulletin, the Web site, and the steering committee. He said that over the years, he had been a member of the New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles chapters and “appreciated the diversity that you find among boy lovers, all shapes and sizes, all kinds of tendencies. We need to respect that and not try to force everyone into a mold.” Boy lovers did come in many “flavors,” as Bob from Atlanta liked to say. By this time, I realized it was wrong to assume that BLs always had effeminate mannerisms. They came in every sort of package, from every economic stratum. Some were openly gay, some liked adult women and eight-year-old boys, and some, like David R. Busby, were only attracted to boys.

  Floyd professed a desire to gain a “greater sense of the boy lover movement in other times and other places. We’re not the first and we won’t be the last.” So, I thought, a history buff. Of course, BLs were constantly playing on the theme of the ancient Greeks and their reported propensity for homosexual liaisons, some of which, presumably, were between older men and younger boys. Floyd’s interest in the supposed “history” of boy lovers had some context.

  James heard about NAMBLA over twenty years ago, he said, but it took him “nearly twenty years to join.” He spoke cautiously and was one of the few not to mention interacting with other BLs as a motivating factor for attending the conference. His reason was quite pragmatic. He was “attending this conference to have an impact in the organization.” Then, he warned the attendees, that it is “healthy to be fearful of society and reticent to be too open about yourselves to people you don’t know. I’m sure prisons are full of people that didn’t intend to get there.” I, of course, hoped a few more ended up that way.

  When it was my turn to speak, there was no need for tears this year. I was accepted and as comfortable in this setting as my mission and training could make me. I said I came for the “fellowship” and, referencing Chris’s earlier remarks, I joked I was “in charge of NAMBLA’s transnational prostitution ring.” Before I could complete the thought, Peter pounced, immediately chastising me. Bob from Atlanta interrupted Peter and said, “I’m Robert and I’m in charge.”

  The interchange drew laughs, but Peter continued: “The problem is, I don’t think there are any bugs here, but that’s exactly the sort of thing that’s hostile to us. . . . It’s not a good idea to say things in jest.” Peter was right on both counts. Even things said in jest might be taken literally, and there were definitely “bugs.” I would be wearing one throughout the conference.

  Bob, the attorney, wrapped up the introductions. “I’m Bob and I live in Atlanta. I was born in New York, but I live in Atlanta now. . . . I’d like to see the Bulletin have fewer pictures of eight-year-olds and more pictures of fifteen-year-olds.”

  That drew a chorus of “boos” from some of the others.

  “Everybody has his own tastes, you know,” Bob said. And then he returned to the oft-stated theme of most BLs:

  I love the Bulletin. I love the pictures. I’m sorry that we can’t have sexier pictures like we used to have. I like to come here just to hang around with other boy lovers, just to juice up my engines. I was out of the closet thirty years ago, and I started getting more comfortable with liking boys about twenty or twenty-five years ago.

  Following the introductions and Peter’s safety lecture, we began a discussion to determine the agenda. The conference was to last two days, and most of the morning session would be taken up discussing what we would be discussing.

  Had I really been interested in advancing the stated goals of this association, I would have been frustrated by its lack of organization. Since my interests lay strictly in the criminal conduct of its members, however, I merely sat there attempting to look engaged.

  The air was thick with ideas being batted around with no apparent rhyme or reason. Dick Stutsman wanted to know, “What are the ways to change society’s opinions?” His question was never addressed.

  Chris, my socialist comrade, advanced the idea of regional meetings for those of us who attended conferences, to handle the neglected “social aspects.”

  Others threw out other notions, but no one was taking notes, and Peter was having trouble keeping the discussion flowing smoothly. When James brought up Robert’s Rules of Order and suggested the “meetings could be structured in such a way to more easily obtain the goals of the conference,” he was drafted to chair the proceedings.

  It was James’s first conference and within an hour he held the gavel: a born leader. Sam assumed the role of secretary and began taking notes. To everyone’s relief, James and Sam quickly got the meeting on track.

  Tim observed that the organization was being held together by two or three people and that more leaders were needed.

  I thought to myself, Same song, four hundredth verse.

  25

  CRIMINAL ADMISSIONS

  The first break would be a most welcome respite. The discussion during the session was of little value for my mission, and I hoped break time conversations would lead me in the right direction. Just before the break, I realized the recording time on my concealed camera had expired. Saying I needed to take some of my medication, I excused myself from the meeting and hobbled to my room. I took off the peephole camera strapped to my chest and replaced it with a digital audio recorder that was easier to conceal.

  David Mayer and I sat at poolside. Within seconds, he complained abou
t the pace and structure of the meeting. I rolled my eyes and agreed. I told him it was similar to last year. “That’s why I just came for the fellowship.” Todd joined us. The conversation began angling in promising directions.

  David: I agree. I mean, I would just come to socialize. . . . This is worthless. Bob [the Atlanta attorney] is right. I’d have a much better day walking the beach looking at boys with a couple of you . . . going, “Yum, yum cute . . . yum, yum cute,” letting my imagination go.

  Todd: Do politics a little bit and celebrate what we love the rest of the time!

  I brought up the issue of travel with Todd, but before he could answer, David said that he, Todd, and Paul Zipszer talked about travel last night after I went to bed.

  David: Where’s the travel bureau? When we were talking about it last night, we know that someone knows. So, give us that information. . . . I don’t know who’s lying to who. . . . They’re lying to themselves. Like, “This is all political, this is all to change society . . .” Bullshit. Like, bring on the boys!

  Throughout this conversation, David kept referring to Paul Zipzser as “the guy with all the muscles.” Twice he said, “I gotta play with his chest!” The exchange was humorous, but in a few seconds, as David was talking, he stood up, circled around me, and began rubbing my chest, demonstrating what he desired to do to Paul. Had I still been wearing the camera, he would have easily found the device. It might have been a challenge to explain the wires running up my stomach, my multiple “nipples,” and a pinhole camera taped to the front of my ribcage. It’s unfair to say I dodged anything like a real bullet, but the discovery would have ended the investigation much sooner than anyone in the FBI desired.

  Todd said he traveled a lot but was unsuccessful at finding boys. “I have good ‘gaydar’ for many adults who are gay, or at least I think I do, but for kids, I just don’t.” I had to conceal a smile; apparently, his gaydar wasn’t working as well as he thought.