A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  “Good thing that guy knew we were armed, so he didn’t do anything,” I said. Assistant U.S. Attorneys did not carry firearms. That was the agent’s job.

  The agent whipped his head around. “You had a gun? ’Cause I forgot mine under the seat.” He reached into the car and retrieved his weapon.

  It would be a long time before I would tell my wife about that little field trip.

  * * *

  There was something of an unwritten code about working in the office of Rudy Giuliani, as I suppose there is in most organizations. In his case, the message was that Rudy was the star at the top and the successes of the office flowed in his direction. You violated this code at your peril. Giuliani had extraordinary confidence, and as a young prosecutor I found his brash style exciting, which was part of what drew me to his office. I loved it that my boss was on magazine covers standing on the courthouse steps with his hands on his hips, as if he ruled the world. It fired me up.

  Prosecutors almost never saw the great man in person, so I was especially pumped when he stopped by my office early in my career, shortly after I had been assigned to an investigation that touched a prominent New York figure who dressed in shiny tracksuits and sported a Nobel-sized medallion around his neck. The state of New York was investigating Al Sharpton for alleged embezzlement from his charity, and I was assigned to see if there was a federal angle to the case. I had never even seen Rudy on my floor, and now he was at my very door. He wanted me to know he was personally following the investigation and knew I would do a good job. My heart thumped with anxiety and excitement as he gave me this pep talk standing in the doorway. He was counting on me. He turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh, and I want the fucking medal,” he said, then walked away. But we never made a federal case. The state authorities charged Sharpton, and he was acquitted after a trial. The medal stayed with its owner.

  It took me a while to realize that Giuliani’s confidence was not leavened with a whole lot of humility. The cost of that imbalance was that there was very little oxygen left for others. An early clue was my first press conference. I had worked with the FBI to bust a criminal ring that was stealing SUVs from Manhattan parking garages and loading them on shipping containers in the Bronx. The containers were then hustled onto ships bound for Africa or the Caribbean, where the cars were resold. The investigation, led by Special Agent Mary Ellen Beekman, who had been a Roman Catholic nun before joining the Bureau, had penetrated the operation and was secretly photographing the loading. Mary Ellen’s specialty was car-theft rings and convincing hardened criminals to become government informants. And although she didn’t approve of the foul language so common in law enforcement, she was an extraordinary interrogator; she had retained from her prior career the ability to use guilt in powerful ways to make thugs melt. The thieves in this case were so efficient that cars were on their way out of the country before being reported stolen. It was a cool case, and the FBI and Giuliani decided to do a press conference.

  My supervisor told me I was to stand behind the podium while Giuliani, the NYPD commissioner, and the head of the FBI’s New York office spoke to the press. I was not, under any circumstances, to speak or move. He then repeated a line I had heard before: “The most dangerous place in New York is between Rudy and a microphone.” I stood frozen in the back, looking like an extra from a basketball movie who had wandered onto the wrong set.

  Though Giuliani’s confidence was exciting, it fed an imperial style that severely narrowed the circle of people with whom he interacted, something I didn’t realize was dangerous until much later: a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings. Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. Attorney’s office. They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice. It was a resentment that was still palpable when I became the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan—and sat in Giuliani’s chair—a dozen years later.

  One of Giuliani’s top priorities was organized crime, a focus that actually started well before he took office. His prosecutors brought cases against individual Mob bosses like Salerno and also charged the leaders of the five Cosa Nostra families who sat on “the Commission,” which divided up criminal money among the families and refereed disputes. Most important, Rudy’s office brought civil cases to allow the government to take control of large trade unions—the Teamsters, electricians, carpenters, and dockworkers among them—to starve the Mafia of its major source of cash and influence, which came from using unions to extort money from legitimate businesses. That successful effort to destroy La Cosa Nostra continued long after Rudy stepped down as United States Attorney to run for political office.

  The most powerful of the five Mafia families was the Gambino family. Like the other families, it traced its roots to Sicilian immigrants to the United States who had found wealth and power terrorizing first their fellow immigrants and then entire neighborhoods and cities. In an early effort to battle the Mafia, in 1946, the American government deported a famous mobster, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who was sent back to Sicily, where he promptly energized and reorganized the Mafia on that island, solidifying a transatlantic link between criminal organizations that would facilitate a thriving heroin trade for decades. At the heart of that drug trade in the 1970s and 1980s was a man named John Gambino, a fluent Sicilian speaker who served as the “channel” or connection between the Sicilian Mafia families and the American Gambino family, of which he was a senior leader.

  I was lucky to be part of a case against “the channel” and the Gambino family as one of two prosecutors in the case of United States v. John Gambino. The case had been started by two other prosecutors, who had to step aside for personal reasons. By that point, I had risen to be a supervisor in the office, and I recruited another prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, a close friend since our days in law school, to work on the case. A graduate of Harvard Law, Pat was the son of Irish immigrants and had grown up in a small apartment in Brooklyn. His father worked as a doorman, and Pat would sometimes substitute for him when home from school. He had a quick wit and no pretense at all, which was why he had no problem crashing on our couch—and borrowing our beer—at a New Jersey beach house some friends and I rented during summer break from law school.

  Fitzgerald joined the United States Attorney’s office in 1988, a year after I did, and I was assigned to supervise him during his first federal criminal jury trial. He was a legendary slob with an uncanny memory. In his trial cart—a modified shopping cart used to move documents and exhibits back and forth to court—I saw a messy stack of key documents for the case. “You gotta put these in folders,” I coached. He nodded. I returned later to find that he had put each document in an unlabeled file folder and returned them to the stack. Somehow, he still knew where each document was.

  By the time the Gambino case came around, we were both veteran prosecutors and on the phone discussing possible partners for him because the Gambino case required two prosecutors. I wasn’t a candidate because my family was planning to move out of the New York area. My wife, Patrice, was more accustomed to the cornfields of her native Iowa and the leafy suburbs of northern Virginia, and had endured New York City for years. Early in our marriage, when the opportunity to work for Rudy Giuliani had come up, I had reneged on a deal that we would raise our family in Virginia. So Patrice and I had lived in the New Jersey suburbs for six years, first in a shoebox apartment over a bike shop, then in a modest two-family house rental. With our two growing daughters, half of a house had become too cramped.

  As I stood in the kitchen talking to Fitzgerald, Patrice was listening to my end of the conversation. Suddenly she interrupted, asking me to hang up because she needed to speak with me. I told Pat I would call him back.

  “That sounds like the case of a lifetime,” she said.

  “It is,�
�� I replied.

  “I’ll stay for that. I’ll stay for you to do that case with one of your best friends. Call him back and tell him you found his partner.” We postponed our move for a year.

  * * *

  Pat and I spent months learning the case and the Mafia. We started by talking to the one man in the United States who knew La Cosa Nostra best. Luckily for us, his office was down the hall from ours. Kenneth McCabe was a former NYPD detective who joined the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan as an investigator early in the war on the Mafia. A gentle giant of a man, standing six foot four and weighing more than 250 pounds, with a deep voice and thick New York accent, Kenny knew every Mafia member by sight, name, and nickname. And he knew all that because for over twenty years with the NYPD and then the U.S. Attorney’s office he had conducted endless surveillance of weddings, wakes, and funerals, and done hundreds of interviews with Mafia members and turncoats.

  For reasons that were never clear to me, the FBI Mafia squads in New York had long been reluctant to “cover” Mafia funerals and weddings. My guess is that agents didn’t want to come in from the suburbs to cover events of marginal value that were always on weekends or at night. McCabe saw it differently and believed that was where you could learn the most, just by watching. So he watched and photographed, in all weather, weekends and nights, for years.

  The Mafia also knew Kenny McCabe and, in a strange way, respected him as a noble adversary. Kenny understood the peculiar need of Mafia members to believe they were people of honor, so he treated them with what they saw as respect, by never serving a subpoena at their homes and never embarrassing them with an arrest in front of their wives or children. As a result, members considering betraying La Cosa Nostra would frequently contact McCabe first.

  Kenny McCabe taught us La Cosa Nostra 101, then traveled with us and the FBI case agents to meet the Mafia turncoats hidden around the country, who were to be the bedrock of our case. One of those turncoats was Sammy the Bull Gravano, the former underboss—number two—of the Gambino crime family.

  I met Gravano for the first time when Pat, Kenny, and I traveled to a special federal prison for witnesses in a remote part of the United States in 1992. I remember being slightly anxious waiting for the Gambino family underboss to walk into the room. How would it go? How would he react to these two young prosecutors? What would it be like to meet with a man who had committed, by his own admission, nineteen murders?

  The diminutive Gravano stepped into the room in prison garb and rubber-soled shoes with no laces. His quick eyes swept the space and settled on the mountainous McCabe. He didn’t need an introduction. “It’s an honor,” he said to Kenny, extending his hand. Gravano then turned and spoke to me and Fitzgerald. If we were with McCabe, we were okay.

  Gravano was a critical witness. The U.S. government took a man who’d climbed to the top of the Mafia by lying and forced him to tell the truth to destroy La Cosa Nostra on both sides of the Atlantic. His life of lies and murder became essential to the search for truth and justice. When he finished cooperating, he was released to life in the Witness Security Program. (Not surprisingly, he ended up back in prison for new crimes committed in his new identity.)

  Gravano taught me a great deal about the Mafia’s culture and how, as I noted earlier, “The Life begins with a lie.” So, too, did Sicilian Mafia killer Francesco Marino Mannoia.

  Like Gravano, Franco Mannoia was confused about the U.S. justice system. He wondered why, for example, Fitzgerald and I insisted upon knowing all acts of violence in which he had engaged before we would present him as a witness in an American court. Of course, we were obligated by American law to disclose information that might call into question the credibility of our witnesses. Although confused, he was also required by his immunity agreement with the Italian government to cooperate with the Americans, so he reviewed in great detail all twenty-five murders in which he had personally participated.

  Many Mafia murders in Sicily in the 1980s involved luring the doomed man of honor to a remote location and then strangling him to death. We sat for hours listening to Mannoia matter-of-factly recount the elaborate ruses and brutal final minutes of his work. He believed strangulation, which required the assistance of four other strong men, to be an honorable way to kill, in contrast to the cowardly use of a gun at a distance.

  Mannoia explained to us the complicated rule that Mafia members were forbidden to reveal themselves directly as members of La Cosa Nostra. As in the American Mafia, the identity was to be secret, and one member could only be introduced to another member by a third member known to both. This rule against revelation once played a strange role in a double murder in which Mannoia had participated.

  He said that he and other members of his Mafia family had been assigned to investigate some unauthorized crimes that had taken place on his family’s turf. They dutifully rounded up the usual suspects, zeroing in on two men. They took the two to a remote location and interrogated each separately. Even after using classic techniques like the prisoner’s dilemma—assuring each suspect that the other was going to implicate him—the Mafia members did not obtain confessions. The two interrogation teams conferred and, by Mannoia’s account, concluded that these two criminals were actually innocent of the misdeeds in question. We asked what happened next.

  “We strangled them,” came his matter-of-fact reply.

  “Why would you do that?!” exclaimed Pat Fitzgerald. They had been innocent.

  “Because by our questioning we had revealed ourselves to be Cosa Nostra. We could not let them live with that knowledge.”

  “So what was the point of the questioning in the first place?” I interjected.

  Mannoia furrowed the placid brow that framed his sad eyes and replied, “I do not understand. It was our obligation.”

  * * *

  Mannoia was the first Mafia killer we called to the witness stand against John Gambino. We followed him by presenting another Sicilian Mafia killer, Gaspare Mutolo, who also had become a cooperating witness. Our Italian colleagues had been hiding him in an empty convent in the Italian countryside, and prior to his testimony, Fitzgerald and I, along with FBI agents, flew to Rome to interview him. As we ate homemade pasta prepared for us by this professional killer, Mutolo laid out his life as a Cosa Nostra man of honor.

  I wish I could say I felt something different when I was in the presence of a mass murderer, handing me a cup of espresso in an empty convent. In the movies, some foreboding music might play in the background or the light might dim. But there was none of that. Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta. These killers were people who had crossed an indelible line in human experience by intentionally taking another life. They all constructed their own narrative to explain and justify their killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. And to a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much.

  Mutolo had killed so many people that he couldn’t remember them all. After naming nearly thirty, he added that we should assume there were seven or eight more. At one point, he recalled killing a man named Galatalo. Then he recalled hitting another man named Galatalo with a meat cleaver, but the man had not died. On the witness stand, he remembered that he had actually killed yet another man named Galatalo, making it two Galatalos killed and one Galatalo merely hit in the chest with a meat cleaver.

  During the day, I was in court as Mutolo testified, spilling the secrets of the Mafia’s reign of death and crime, while my evenings were spent meeting with Sammy the Bull Gravano in a safe house controlled by the United States Marshals Service. Gravano had previously testified in Brooklyn federal court against family boss John Gotti, where defense lawyers made much of his involvement in nineteen homicides. Sammy the Bull didn’t know it, but part of our strategy was to present the Mob killers in such a way that the jury would actually be bored with the details of Mob murders by the time Gravano, our star wit
ness, hit the stand. Our hope was that this would make Gravano more palatable to the jury.

  Gravano, though, saw this as a bit of professional embarrassment. One evening I walked into a safe-house conference room. Gravano threw a New York tabloid onto the table before me with a look of disgust. He had been reading an article about the grim body count of our Sicilian killer witnesses, which was far higher than his own. Pointing at the paper, Gravano barked, “Jesus, Jimmy, you’re makin’ me look like a fuckin’ schoolgirl.”

  Thanks to the work of dozens of investigators and prosecutors, La Cosa Nostra’s grip on unions was broken, its leaders jailed, and its dominance on both sides of the Atlantic shattered. John Gambino’s trial jury actually hung 11–1 on all the most serious charges, in suspicious circumstances, but he pled guilty before his retrial, was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison, and has since died. There are still people in New York who call themselves Italian Mafia, but it is a motley collection of low-level criminals that would embarrass Lucky Luciano. It more closely resembles The Sopranos, without the therapist.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE BULLY

  Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  MAFIA MEMBERS MAY DRESS and talk in distinctive ways, but they are part of a fairly common species—the bully. All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.