Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  During trial preparation, the AUSA decided he wanted to meet with the witnesses at the scene where the notes were passed. He wanted to get a visual feel for the events. I made arrangements with each of the bartenders to meet us at their place of employment and the scene of the crimes. One bartender really made a lasting impression on both of us. She was a cute blonde, a very petite woman, but very confident of herself, as you might imagine a woman would be who dealt with drunkards every day. You could tell she didn’t put up with any bullshit from anybody. When we left the bar, the AUSA commented that she would be the star witness. Her testimony and her vivid recollection of Hunt’s actions during and after he passed that counterfeit note were outstanding. “She’ll seal the guilty verdict,” the AUSA told me.

  During all of the court hearings leading up to the trial, Hunt was his usual mean, spitting-mad self. He was very uncooperative with the court and answered most questions posed by the judge with a “fuck this” or “fuck that” remark. He didn’t pay much attention to his assistant federal public defender. Hunt was just one mean-spirited human being. He liked to just give you a piercing, hateful stare with his jaw clenched.

  The first phase of a jury trial was the selection of the twelve men or women who would decide the verdict. As our trial began, the courtroom behind us was filled with prospective jurors. The judge went through each of the jurors who wished to be excused from jury duty, approving or disapproving this guy or that gal. Some of the excuses people came up with were just everyday stuff—an elderly parent to care for, kids in school, sick kids, a job…really? A job?

  One older guy did seem to have a legitimate reason; he was the project manager for the restoration of the USS Missouri battleship in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He had to leave for Pearl Harbor the following day and his absence would delay the restoration. The judge said, “Aloha” and the old guy said, “Mahalo” and he walked out of the courtroom.

  Prosecutors are always nervous about jury selection and I was a little concerned too, but this wasn’t my first jury trial. We had a solid case with three excellent witnesses and Hunt was such a mean bastard I couldn’t imagine losing this verdict. But you never know about juries. You just never know.

  * * *

  The Beaver had a good, one-note counterfeit pass arrest that went to trial in US federal court in Las Vegas. Yes, a one-note pass. Again, we had a very aggressive US Attorney. That might not be the only federal arrest for a one-note pass and it might not be the only one-note pass that went to a jury trial, but you can bet there weren’t many of those cases in the post-WWII history of the Secret Service.

  The Beaver went out on a duty call to McCarran International Airport one night. It was late…it was always late, or early in the morning depending on your outlook on life. He called me, woke up the Redhead, and asked if I could go with him. This twentysomething high-roller wannabe from Phoenix was sitting in first class on his short flight to Vegas. A flight attendant saw him holding up a twenty-dollar bill to the overhead reading light and loudly bragging that it was counterfeit and you couldn’t even tell.

  The flight attendant did the right thing and had the pilot radio ahead to the Las Vegas airport and the LVMPD picked him up as he walked off the plane. He was sitting in handcuffs in the substation when we showed up. The cops did a search incident to arrest and found a small amount of cocaine in his suitcase. But he only had one counterfeit note. The Beaver advised him of his Miranda rights and he immediately said he wanted to speak to his attorney. A little disappointing for us, because working the case back to the source was always our hope, you know, turn this guy into a snitch and go do some real Secret Service investigative work.

  The Duty AUSA told the Beaver to go ahead and put him in federal custody, we might be able to get him to cooperate after we talk with the assistant federal public defender. I was always amazed at how many defendants qualified for a public defender. They had to fill out a financial statement for the court and the magistrate would look it over and inevitably say you qualify. But yet when a defendant appeared in later court hearings and declared he was a businessman or whatever, no judge ever questioned his honesty on the financial affidavit. One of those mysteries of the judicial system, I guess.

  The high-roller Wannabe refused to cooperate and the US Attorney’s office proceeded with the trial. They had good witnesses, the Beaver got the flight attendant and he even found the passenger sitting next to the high-roller Wannabe. They had good testimony that the white powdery substance was indeed cocaine. The AUSA gave a good, rock-solid presentation of the evidence, it was one of those trials you just knew you would win.

  The defense called one witness, Mr. High Roller. He took the stand and lied his ass off. His testimony directly contradicted the two eyewitnesses. He gave some lame excuse that he was passed the note as change, probably at the Phoenix airport lounge when he bought a cocktail before the flight left for Las Vegas. He knew it was counterfeit and intended to turn it in to the first policemen he saw in Las Vegas.

  The Beaver had indicted him for one count of possession of counterfeit currency and one count of possession of cocaine. Possessing the counterfeit was a felony, a big time twenty-year felony. The cocaine amount was so small it resulted in a federal misdemeanor violation. A jury doesn’t know if the charges in an indictment are felonies or misdemeanors, at least the judge does not tell them whether a charge is a felony or a misdemeanor. So the jury comes back, not guilty on possessing counterfeit currency and guilty on possession of cocaine.

  We were floored by that injustice. After the trial, the Beaver asked one of the jurors, “Why did you find him not guilty on possessing the counterfeit? Our evidence was overwhelming.” This nice old lady looked at the Beaver and said, “The defendant seemed like such a nice young fellow and we knew he was lying, so we split the difference and gave him a break for possessing the counterfeit and thought the cocaine was much more serious so we voted guilty on that count.”

  Again…you never know about juries.

  * * *

  We had our twelve, and the Hunt trial was set to start the next morning in US district court for Las Vegas at nine in the morning, with the AUSA presenting our evidence and our witnesses. The Redhead took the day off so she could come and watch the trial. The courtroom was empty, no visitors in the gallery and as we were about to start opening statements for the jury, in walks the Redhead. As she took a seat in the gallery, I noticed Hunt glaring; that hateful piercing stare and overheard him asked his public defender, “Who the fuck is that?”

  At the first recess, I waited until the jury was excused to the jury room and Hunt was escorted out of the courtroom to the US Marshals holding cell, before I approached the Redhead. “Do me a favor Sweetie,” I said, “Do not acknowledge me in the courtroom, and do not even look at me. I don’t want this guy to have any inkling you are my wife. He’s a vindictive type and we don’t need that.” The Redhead understood immediately.

  This was not the first time I’d admonished her to ignore me. One Saturday afternoon we were at the local grocery store, when I simply disappeared on her. I spied a guy I’d once arrested down one of the aisles when we were walking in. He was coming straight at us; I pivoted and walked right out to the car. When the Redhead showed up with a basket full of bags she was pissed off. “I made three laps around that store trying to find you!” she said. Once I explained my disappearance to her, she got it.

  The AUSA had me testify to establish the legal aspects of the investigation and the eventual identity of the defendant, as the guy who committed the crime. The bartenders were next up and the AUSA saved Blondie for the afternoon session. She would be our last witness. The AUSA led her through the crime, perfectly. She remembered everything in great detail. The most dramatic testimony was when, after she recognized the note as counterfeit and confronted Hunt; he jumped up from his bar stool and started in with his mean, tough guy persona. Was she afraid of him?

&nb
sp; “Absolutely,” this small petite blonde said. “I was scared to death! He angrily pointed his finger at me and said if I called the police he would kill me! His exact words were he had an Uzi and he’d come back and use it on me.”

  I looked at Hunt and he was giving her the glare, the meanest glare I’d ever seen. I glanced at the jury and they noticed it too. The AUSA asked if she believed his statement; that he had an Uzi and would come back. “Absolutely,” she said again. “He’s the scariest man I’ve ever seen.”

  The defense called me as their only witness. I was shocked. Really? Me? On cross-examination the public defender had questioned my photo spread and now he really tore into me. It was all he had and you can’t blame him for trying. He was trying to establish some reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, that I had the wrong Jeff Hunt. This was the same PD who’d defended Mark Matthews, had me do a police lineup, and then was dumb enough to pick the other prisoners for the line up, eliminating any argument that the police line up was rigged against his defendant. So, I wasn’t too worried. The AUSA did an outstanding job on his cross-examination of me and we sealed the deal. The Jeff Hunt who passed those raised notes was sitting right there at the defense table.

  The jury went out for deliberation and we headed to the AUSA’s office to wait for a call from the clerk that the jury had reached a decision. I was confident, but like all prosecutors, the AUSA was worried. “Don’t worry,” I told him, “This is a done deal.”

  We had hardly sat down in his office when the clerk called. The jury had reached a verdict and back to the courtroom we went. They say a quick verdict favors the prosecution, and some say a quick verdict favors the defense. This quick verdict was guilty on all three counts of the indictment. It probably took the jury longer to pick a foreman than to reach a verdict.

  As I’ve said before, in those days, Vegas was a law and order town. Judges actually sentenced defendants to some real jail time. I had a great respect for those judges, and the fact that they were willing to hand down hard sentences validated what I did everyday.

  * * *

  The US district court judge in the Hunt case was the same judge the Beaver had in a credit card case that went to trial. And in that case the assistant federal public defender was once again, the same lawyer who (tried) to defend Matthews and Hunt.

  One of the government’s witnesses was an LVMPD cop. Beaver’s AUSA called Officer Friendly to the stand. The cop walked into the courtroom in full uniform. He was looking sharp! Neatly pressed uniform with spit-polished shoes, and his revolver in his holster. The officer took his seat in the witness chair and the public defender jumps up and screams, “That man is armed, Your Honor!”

  The judge, without missing a beat, and very calmly, I might add, peered over his reading glasses, perched on the end of his nose and said, “The more good guys with guns the better…please proceed.”

  So I had high hopes that Mr. Mean-As-A-Rattlesnake Hunt would get the maximum sentence of twenty years.

  * * *

  At his sentencing hearing a few months later, Hunt was his usual mean self. “Anything to say Mr. Hunt before I impose the sentence?” the judge had asked.

  “Fuck you!” Hunt had snarled.

  The US district court judge sentenced Hunt to eighteen years in the federal penitentiary. Eighteen frickin’ years for passing raised notes. It wasn’t the full twenty, but it was damn close. Unfortunately, the federal public defender appealed Hunt’s lengthy sentence to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court ruled in Hunt’s favor and he ended up only doing thirty-four months at Club Fed.

  Chapter 9

  “Looked a Lot Like Eddie Murphy”

  I went back out on the campaign trail with Senator Simon. He was actually the front-runner for a while, but faded into the pack after Iowa and New Hampshire. When he skipped the Super Tuesday primaries, I figured he was about done. Simon finally pulled out in April 1988 and he returned to the Senate. Senator Simon, his wife, daughter, and son were some of the nicest people I have ever met, and I’ve met a bunch. I remember seeing them on an airport tarmac somewhere down the campaign trail later that year. The senator and his family saw me, took the time to stop and asked how I was doing. And I ran into them years later in Illinois and I’ll be darned if they didn’t remember me and again take the time to say hello. Small-town folks…you can’t beat their hospitality.

  After the Democratic convention was held, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was nominated as the presidential candidate to run against Reagan’s incumbent vice president George H. W. Bush, and he chose Senator Lloyd Benson of Texas as his running mate. I was assigned to Senator Benson’s detail for the remainder of the campaign season. I did those twenty-one-day rotations all the way through to the first Tuesday in November. I really loved working on the details. The Redhead wasn’t so crazy about me being gone so much of that year, but she enjoyed the bigger paychecks.

  When I was a GS-9, I wasn’t making much money and the overtime we got paid was a big help. Early on in my career, a senior agent once told me the key to keeping the wife happy about your heavy travel schedule was to break the news to her the correct way. He said he always started a conversation with his wife, not with, “I have to go on the road again,” but with, “I’m going to make a lot of overtime next week.” I used that line extensively the next few years. I added some additional lines as she started to catch on to my ruse, “You know that new couch you been thinking about? Well, next month I think we’ll be able to afford it.”

  I was back in Las Vegas after one of the rotations with Senator Benson. It was a hot, lazy Vegas Saturday afternoon; the Redhead and I were lounging around and relaxing at home. I was the duty agent and the telephone rang. It was our after-hours answering service. The operator told me an investigator with First Data Resources (FDR) in Omaha, Nebraska, was on the line and he wanted to speak to an agent. “Put him on the line,” I said as I glanced at the Redhead. She had that frown on her face that said, “There goes my weekend with my husband.”

  The investigator told me he’d been tracking two suspects who were using falsely applied for credit cards to bilk banks out of big bucks. The suspects were in Las Vegas and they were racking up the fraudulent purchases and cash advances on numerous credit cards. He said the security manager at Neiman Marcus had just discovered both had been in his store and I should call him for some more information. The investigator gave me a laundry list of casinos and shops the suspect had hit that day.

  I called the security manager and arranged to meet him, then I called the Beaver and we headed down to the Fashion Show Mall. The store security manager told us that a black female and a black male were in the store and made high dollar amount purchases with stolen credit cards. The pair had “Texas Department of Identification” cards to match the names on the credit cards. He said they spoke with an odd British accent.

  These suspects had Nigerian credit card fraudster written all over them. In the late eighties and even the early nineties the Secret Service nationwide and the three of us in Las Vegas noticed a huge increase in fraudulent credit card transactions. In Las Vegas, that resulted in us arresting Nigerians from either Houston or Dallas doing cash advances with Visa, MasterCard and American Express cards at casinos. The Nigerians were using fictitious “Texas Department of Identification” cards as identification. There was no such agency in the state of Texas.

  * * *

  We had been called to Bally’s Hotel and Casino numerous times and the three of us had hauled a lot of Nigerians out of Bally’s in handcuffs. Why Bally’s? Bally’s was located on Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road; I guess it was the first stop for them when they came onto the Strip from the airport. Who knows? I had a conversation with the Bally’s casino cage manager on one investigation and told her the “Texas Department of Identification” was a dead giveaway that the credit card was stolen or obtained fraudulently,
because there was no such agency. Consequently, anytime a cash advance was attempted with that type of identification, Bally’s security grabbed the individual(s) and called us.

  Not very long after I had alerted the cage manager of this scam, Bally’s called us one night and reported a black male, with a British accent was attempting to get an eight-hundred-dollar cash advance on a MasterCard credit card. He presented a “Texas Department of Identification” card with the same name as that on the credit card. He claimed his name was John Rhodes.

  Bally’s had run the credit card transaction through the system and they’d been given an authorization number—thus, the cash advance was approved. If a merchant received an authorization for the charge, very seldom would they question the transaction. The credit card companies stressed to their merchants that clerks should be trained to spot a counterfeit card, but a credit card obtained with a false application was a genuine card issued by the bank.

  So now I’m sitting in the security office at Bally’s with a guy who is upset because he’s been grabbed by Bally’s security, for what he claims is no reason. He’s a little pissed off. The federal credit card statue, Title 18 United States Code Section 1029, has a one-thousand-dollar threshold, so unless I can document at least a thousand dollars in fraud, he hasn’t violated that statue and I can not arrest him for that. However, I know his Texas identification is fictitious, it is counterfeit, and so I could arrest him for that. But I knew Donnie’s old adage “You can bet they aren’t who they say they are, and you can bet it is not the first time they’ve done it” was as true as the Vegas sky is blue.

  I advised Rhodes of his Miranda rights and started the interview with some innocuous questions about his personal information.

  Name? “John Rhodes.”