by James Comey
At the time, I was a high school senior and a nerd with few close friends. As if to prove it, I was home that night, finishing a piece for the school’s literary magazine. It was to be a brilliant social satire of the cool kids, the bullies, and the suffocating peer pressure of high school. The piece was late, and short on brilliance, but I had nothing else to do on a Friday night. So I sat at the desk in my little bedroom, writing.
In the basement with Pete, the gunman demanded to be taken up to the master bedroom. Shortly I heard two sets of footsteps just outside my door, headed for my parents’ room. Then I heard more sounds, as the closet and dresser drawers opened and closed. Out of annoyance and curiosity, I stood and opened the sliding wood door to the bathroom that connected my room to my parents’. Their room was brightly lit, and through the bathroom I could see Pete lying on the side of the bed, his head turned toward me, but with his eyes tightly closed.
I stepped into the room, looked to my right, and froze. A stocky, middle-aged white guy wearing a knit cap was holding a gun and looking in my parents’ closet. Time slowed down in a way I have never again experienced. I lost my sight for an instant; it returned in a strange haze and my entire body pulsed, as if my heart had grown too big for my chest. Spotting me, the gunman moved quickly to Pete and put his knee in the middle of his back, using his left hand to push the gun barrel against my fifteen-year-old brother’s head. He turned to me.
“You move, kid, and I’ll blow his head off.”
I didn’t move.
The gunman had angry words for Pete. “I thought you told me nobody else was home.”
The gunman then stepped off Pete and ordered me to lie on the bed next to my brother. Standing at my feet, he demanded to know where he might find money. I later learned Pete had money in his jeans pocket as we lay there, and never gave it up. I gave it all up. I told him every place I could possibly think of—piggy banks, wallets, dollar coins received from grandparents for special events, everything. Armed with my leads, the gunman left us lying on the bed and went searching.
A short time later, he returned and simply stood above us, pointing his gun in our direction. I don’t know how long he pointed it without a sound, but it was long enough that the moment changed me. I was certain I was about to die. Hopelessness, panic, and fear smothered me. I began to pray silently, knowing that my life was about to end. In the next instant, a strange wave of cold washed over me, and my fear disappeared. I began reasoning, thinking that if he shot Pete first, I would roll off the bed and try to grab the gunman’s legs. And then I began to speak—to lie, more precisely. The lies came pouring out. I explained how estranged we were from our parents—hated them, actually—didn’t care what he took from them, and wouldn’t tell anyone he had been there. I lied again and again and again.
The gunman told me to shut up and ordered both of us to our feet. He then began pushing us down the narrow hallway from my parents’ room, pausing to search rooms and closets he passed. I was now convinced, temporarily at least, that I was going to live and began trying to get a clear look at his face so I could tell the police about him. He jammed me in the back several times with the gun barrel, telling me to turn my head away from him.
I again began talking, telling him over and over that he should just put us someplace and we would stay there so he could get away. I began racking my brain, trying to think of such a place in the house—a place where we could be locked. Against all reason, I suggested the basement bathroom, telling him we couldn’t open the small window because my father had sealed it for the winter. That was only partly true: my dad had put clear plastic on the window frame to reduce the draft, but the window opened simply by raising the bottom half.
He took us to the basement bathroom, motioned us inside, and said, “Tell your mommy and daddy you’ve been good little boys.” He wedged something against the bathroom door to keep us from escaping.
We heard the door to the garage open and close as the gunman left. I started to shudder as the adrenaline wore off. Shaking, I looked at the little window and suddenly the gunman’s face filled it. He was checking the window from the outside. The sight made me gasp for air. After his face disappeared, I told Pete that we were going to stay there until Mom and Dad came home. Pete had other ideas. He said, “You know who that is. He is going to hurt other people. We’ve got to get help.” In my shaky state, I don’t think it fully dawned on me what Pete was saying, or how the evening might have played out if our nineteen-year-old sister, Trish, actually had been home.
Instead I resisted. I was afraid. Pete argued with me briefly and then announced that he was leaving. He pulled the plastic from the window, turned the half-moon latch, and raised the window open. He swung himself out feetfirst and into the backyard.
Though it was probably only a second or two, in my memory I stood for a long time contemplating the open window and the dark night. Should I stay or should I follow? I swung my feet through the window. The moment they hit the cold dirt of my mother’s garden, I heard the gunman shouting. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled furiously into thick bushes at the back of the house. The gunman already had grabbed Pete and now was shouting toward me, “Come out of there, kid, or your brother is getting hurt.” I emerged, and the gunman berated me for lying to him. Fresh out of another clever lie, I replied, “We’ll go right back in,” and I moved toward the open window.
“Too late,” he said. “Against the fence.”
For the second time that night I thought I was going to die. That was, until I heard our neighbor’s huge Siberian husky, Sundance, bound into our backyard with his owner, Steve Murray, the high school German teacher and football coach, bounding in after him.
The next seconds are a blur in my memory. I remember running from the gunman into my house with Pete and Coach Murray close behind and then slamming the door behind me. We locked the door, leaving the gunman outside to terrorize Coach’s wife and mother, who had followed him toward the commotion at our house—a move that makes me cringe with guilt even decades later.
We then raced up the stairs, turning out all the lights and arming ourselves. I held a large butcher knife. We didn’t have 911 in those days, so we dialed the operator and I asked to be connected to the police. I spoke to a dispatcher, who kept telling me to calm down. I explained that I couldn’t calm down, that a man with a gun was at our house and he was coming back in and we needed help now. We waited by the front door in the dark and debated going after the gunman. A police car pulled up in front of my house. We blinked the front lights and the car came to a stop. We ripped open the front door and ran straight at the officer, me barefoot and holding a large butcher knife. The officer quickly stepped from his car and his hand went to his weapon. I shouted, “No, no!” and pointed toward the Murrays’ house. “There he goes. He has a gun!” The gunman burst out from the Murrays’ front door and took off running toward the nearby woods.
As police cars from many jurisdictions converged on our little street, I jumped on my Schwinn ten-speed, barefoot, and pedaled the quarter mile to the church hall where my parents were taking ballroom dancing lessons. I jumped off the bike, letting it crash, ripped open the church hall door, and yelled “Dad!” at the top of my lungs. Everyone stopped and the crowd moved toward me, my mother and father in the lead. My mother started crying the moment she saw my face.
The police didn’t find the Ramsey Rapist that night. A suspect was arrested days later, but the case was never made and he was released. But that night the long string of Ramsey Rapist robberies and sexual assaults stopped.
My encounter with the Ramsey Rapist brought me years of pain. I thought about him every night for at least five years—not most nights, every night—and I slept with a knife at hand for far longer. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the terrifying experience was, in its own way, also an incredible gift. Believing—knowing, in my mind—that I was going to die, and then surviving, made life seem like a precious, delicate miracle. As a high scho
ol senior, I started watching sunsets, looking at buds on trees, and noticing the beauty of our world. That feeling lasts to this day, though sometimes it expresses itself in ways that might seem corny to people who fortunately never had the experience of measuring their time on this earth in seconds.
The Ramsey Rapist taught me at an early age that many of the things we think are valuable have no value. Whenever I speak to young people, I suggest they do something that might seem a little odd: Close your eyes, I say. Sit there, and imagine you are at the end of your life. From that vantage point, the smoke of striving for recognition and wealth is cleared. Houses, cars, awards on the wall? Who cares? You are about to die. Who do you want to have been? I tell them that I hope some of them decide to have been people who used their abilities to help those who needed it—the weak, the struggling, the frightened, the bullied. Standing for something. Making a difference. That is true wealth.
* * *
The Ramsey Rapist didn’t drive me to law enforcement in any conscious way, at least not immediately. I still thought I wanted to be a doctor, and became a premed student with a chemistry major at the College of William & Mary. But one day I was headed to a chem lab and noticed the word DEATH on a bulletin board. I stopped. It was an advertisement for a class in the religion department, which shared the building with the chemistry department. I took the course, and everything changed. The class allowed me to explore a subject of intense interest to me and see how religions of the world dealt with death. I added religion as a new second major.
The religion department introduced me to the philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work resonated with me deeply. Niebuhr saw the evil in the world, understood that human limitations make it impossible for any of us to really love another as ourselves, but still painted a compelling picture of our obligation to try to seek justice in a flawed world. He never heard country music artist Billy Currington sing, “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy,” but he would have appreciated the lyric and, although it wouldn’t make the song a hit, he probably would have added, “And you still must try to achieve a measure of justice in our imperfect world.” And justice, Niebuhr believed, could be best sought through the instruments of government power. Slowly it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to be a doctor after all. Lawyers participate much more directly in the search for justice. That route, I thought, might be the best way to make a difference.
CHAPTER 2
THIS THING OF OURS
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
—AL PACINO (AS MICHAEL CORLEONE), THE GODFATHER, PART II
THERE ARE NINETY-FOUR federal districts in the United States, each presided over by a United States Attorney nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The offices vary greatly in size and reach. The office in Manhattan, known as the Southern District of New York, is both one of the largest and the most well regarded. It is famous for its energy and its expansive sense of its own ability to bring cases. The office has long been accused of considering only one question relevant to its claims of jurisdiction: “Did it happen on the earth?”
I joined the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan in 1987. It was my dream job. I would work for a man who was already becoming legendary: Rudy Giuliani.
* * *
When I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1985, I still didn’t know exactly what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. After my second year, I had applied to be a federal law clerk, a one- or two-year apprenticeship working as an aide to a federal trial judge. In my final year of law school, I finally got one—with a new federal judge in Manhattan.
The judge, John M. Walker Jr., would encourage us to sit in the courtroom and watch if there was an interesting case going on. In the spring of 1986, the government was trying to use a new federal law to detain a defendant without bail on the grounds that he was a danger to the community. This wasn’t just any defendant, but Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, one of the five New York Italian Mafia gangs.
Fat Tony was straight out of a Mob movie. He was overweight, bald, walked with a cane, and kept an unlit cigar in his mouth, even in court. He had a gravelly voice and would use it to call out in court to supplement something his lawyer had said. “Dat’s an outrage, ya honah,” he erupted from his seat. His codefendant Vincent “Fish” Cafaro, with his narrow face and dark eyes, actually looked like a fish to my twenty-five-year-old eyes. To prove Salerno was a danger to the community and bail should be withheld, the federal prosecutors offered tapes of conversations made by an FBI bug planted under a table at Fat Tony’s social club, the Palma Boys, located in an Italian enclave in East Harlem. Salerno could be heard talking about ordering beatings and killings, and being quite clear about his role: “Who am I? I’m the fucking boss.”
The case showed that in a Mafia family the boss was not to be questioned. His words about life and death meant someone was going to die. And the worst sin was betraying the family, becoming a “rat.” The Mafia was all about loyalty, and you left it when you left this earth, whether by natural causes or otherwise. Only rats left the Mafia alive.
I sat there, mesmerized, as the two federal prosecutors, both Assistant United States Attorneys, made the case against Fat Tony. They had tapes and witness testimony about Fat Tony and Fish ordering “hits,” breaking legs, intimidating unions, and running a Mob family. The defense argued it was all just “tough talk,” but the prosecutors presented powerful evidence undermining that preposterous claim. The two prosecutors were only a few years older than I was. They stood straight, spoke clearly and candidly. They didn’t overstate, they didn’t posture. They seemed to have no other motivation than tackling injustice and telling the truth. I was struck by lightning. “This is what I want to do with my life,” I thought. I would join a law firm in New York and get the extra year of experience I needed before I could apply to be a federal prosecutor. And it would be a year I would never forget, because of one person.
* * *
I was a twenty-five-year-old lawyer in New York at a law firm that did me the great favor of shipping me off to Madison, Wisconsin, for most of that year to work on an incredibly complicated, and boring, insurance case. It was a gift, though, because Richard L. Cates was the so-called “local counsel” on the case, which was being litigated in state court in Madison. Cates, then sixty-one, was hired to offer local knowledge to the big shot, big-city lawyers who were going to handle the case. I saw in Dick kindness and toughness, confidence and humility. It would take me decades to realize that those pairs were the bedrock of great leadership. I also saw in this man of extraordinary judgment a fierce commitment to balance.
Dick died in 2011, after a life that began in a New York orphanage and was spent seeking joy in his work and his relationships. He married the love of his life, had five kids, went in and out of public service, including two stints in the Marine Corps during wartime, and never lost his drive, in the words of his son, “to protect the weak from being crushed by the strong.” He moved his family to a farm outside Madison so his children didn’t get soft. He rode his bike miles to work. He played with his kids endlessly, and then with their many children.
Despite all the darkness he had seen, Dick found life and people endlessly interesting, and would laugh about both. He would take a deposition with nothing in front of him, not even a piece of paper, beginning the session by giving the witness a big smile and saying, “Tell me your story.” His mind and memory let him track the story and ask follow-up questions for hours.
I don’t think Dick Cates taught me a single explicit lesson in the year we worked together. At least I don’t remember any. But for a year, as a brand-new lawyer and soon-to-be husband, I sat at his side and watched him. I watched him laugh at pretension and at pressure. I watched him make commonsense decisions when big-city lawyers were tied up in knots of overthinking and arrogance. I watched him light up at the mere mention of his wife and
children and grandchildren. I watched him move heaven and earth to be at their events, their dinners, their projects. I watched him not care that he earned a fraction of what the New York and Los Angeles lawyers on the case were paid. He was a happy man.
This is the person I want to be, I thought. My effort at life-plagiarism has been imperfect, but the lessons were priceless. That is what it means to lead and keep a life. “I’m so glad I went to a big law firm” is not something you hear often, but I am.
* * *
Assistant United States Attorney is a nonpolitical career lawyer position, in which the lawyer represents the United States in criminal or civil cases in the district where he works. In 1987, I was assigned to the criminal division. My job was to assist federal agents—FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, or United States Postal Inspectors—in investigating federal crimes and, where appropriate, bringing charges and prosecuting the cases in court. Over the next six years, I investigated and tried all kinds of cases, ranging from mail theft, drug dealing, and bank robbery to complex frauds, arms exporting, racketeering, and murder. My first case involved the attempted murder of federal ATF agents by a drug gang during the execution of a search warrant. The dealers had fired down on the agents from a fire escape as the feds tried to penetrate a fortified drug location.
In an effort to convince a reluctant witness to cooperate against the gang, the lead agent on the case drove me to an apartment building in northern Manhattan—turf controlled by drug gangs. He said that if she trusted the prosecutor who would speak to her in court, it might convince her to testify. We climbed six flights of stairs to her apartment and the agent knocked on the door. The witness opened the door and admitted us to the small apartment. She led us through the front room, where a man in his twenties sat on a stool with his back to a wall. He didn’t move or speak, but stared at us intensely. In a back room we spoke privately and quietly with the woman. I made my best case for her to cooperate, but she wouldn’t commit. As we walked out, the man on the stool remained motionless, again just staring. As the agent and I left the building and crossed the sidewalk to the agent’s car, I said that the guy on the stool looked pretty scary and guessed that he likely had a gun in the back of his waistband.