A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  Jewell “went stone-cold,” but Bryant could not contain his temper. “I am his lawyer. I know you can have this, I know you have a search warrant, but I tell you this: If you were doing this to me, you would have to fight me. You would have to beat the shit out of me,” Bryant recalled telling the case agent Ed Bazar. Bazar, Bryant later said, was apologetic. “He seemed almost embarrassed to be there.” As he counted out the hairs, he placed them in an envelope. The irony of the situation was not lost on Bryant. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court, but he had a disdain for authority, and he was representing a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time.

  * * *

  It took ten minutes to pluck Jewell’s thick auburn hair. Then the FBI agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. “That took thirty minutes, and they got ink all over the table,” Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have thirty minutes.” That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message twelve times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client’s going to jail. “I said, ‘I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can’t, but you are not doing this today.’ ”

  All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, “They must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair. . . . I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two.” He felt “violated and humiliated,” he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant’s outburst. He thought of the bombing victims—Alice Hawthorne, the forty-four-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than one hundred people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. “I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair.”

  * * *

  I met Richard Jewell three months later, on October 28, a few hours before a press conference called by his lawyers to allow Jewell to speak publicly for the first time since the FBI had cleared him. Jewell’s lawyers also intended to announce that they would file damage suits against NBC and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a Monday, and that weekend the local U.S. attorney had delivered a letter to one of the lawyers stating Jewell was no longer a suspect. “Goddamn it,” Bryant had told me on the phone, “the sons of bitches did not even have the decency to address it to Richard Jewell.”

  I had been instructed to come early to the offices of Wood & Grant, the flashy plaintiff lawyers Bryant had pulled in to help him with Jewell’s civil suits. When I arrived, I was alone in the office with Sharon Anderson, the redheaded assistant answering the phones. “Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant”—the calls overwhelmed her. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were rushing from CNN to the local NBC and ABC affiliates, working the shows. “Everyone has theories of who the real bomber is,” Sharon said. “I just write it all down and give it to the boys.”

  When Lin Wood arrived, he was still in full makeup. Movie-star handsome with green eyes and styled hair, Wood has the heated oratory of a trial lawyer. “It’s a war! Why in this bevy of stories does not anyone point out the fact that Richard was a hero one day and a demon the next? They have destroyed this man’s life!”

  Watson Bryant had worked with Wood and Grant years before in a local law firm. He admired Wayne Grant for his methodical sense of detail; Grant, a New Yorker, had once forced the city of Atlanta to pay large damages to a man injured while illegally digging for antique bottles in a park. But Lin Wood’s suppressed rage was a marvel to Bryant. “He is so tough he could make people cry in depositions when we were kids,” Bryant told me. Wood possessed the smooth style of a member of the Atlanta establishment, but he had a hardscrabble past. He was a boy from “the wrong side of the tracks” in Macon who at age seventeen discovered his mother’s body after his father had murdered her. His father went to jail, and Wood wound up as a lawyer. He went through college and law school on scholarships and with part-time jobs. I could hear Wood on Sharon’s telephone: “He’s more than innocent. He’s a goddamn hero. . . . Everyone is going to pay who wronged Richard Jewell. Besides NBC and the AJC, we are going to look into suing CNN and Jay Leno.”

  Through the large picture window, I had a clear view of the remains of the Centennial Olympic Park, where the bomb had exploded on the night of July 26. Where the sound-and-light tower had once been, there was now a flattened dirt field. It was possible to see the Greek commemorative sculpture that Richard Jewell used to describe for tourists at the AT&T pavilion, where he worked as a security guard.

  * * *

  Suddenly, Jewell was in the room. “Hi. I’m Richard. I’m a little late. I don’t want you to think I am rude. I am not like that.” He had an open face, a bland pleasantness, an eagerness to please. “Can I get you a Coke?” he asked me. “How about some coffee?” Jewell wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt and chinos. He occupied physical space like a teenager; he sprawled, he lumbered, he pawed through Sharon’s candy bowl. On TV his face had a porcine blankness; he appeared suspicious. In person, Jewell has a hard time disguising his emotions.

  We were alone in the conference room; I noticed that Jewell avoided looking out the window toward the park. He shifted his glance nervously away from the view. He often awakens in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, thinking of the events in the park in the early morning hours of July 27. “It took me days before I could even come in here,” he said anxiously.

  When Jewell noticed a local ABC reporter outside near Sharon’s desk, his face darkened. “I don’t want to be around reporters right now. I guess I am a little nervous. What is he doing here?” The atmosphere was now filled with tension; the reporter was escorted out.

  Moments later, we gathered in the hallway. Wood was steely: “We are going in two cars. Richard, you drive with me. Your mother will go with Wayne. As we walk down the hall right now, if the ABC people are outside, I will tap you on the shoulder and I will say, ‘How are you doing?’ You will say, ‘Fine.’ Is that understood?” “Okay, Lin. I understand,” Jewell said quietly, head bowed.

  As Jewell walked down the hall, an ABC cameraman photographed him looking grim. Seconds after the elevator doors closed, Jewell exploded: “What are they doing here, Lin? Did you invite them? They are animals. Why didn’t you get them out of here?”

  “ABC has been good to you. How do I get them out of the office on the day of your press conference?”

  “That is what security is for!” Jewell said, quivering with rage. “Where is Watson?” he asked in the garage. “I told you: he’s at a real-estate closing. He will meet you at the press conference,” Wood said. Jewell moved to his mother’s side, as solicitous as a child. “Are you all right, Mother?” he asked. “It is all I am going to be able to do not to do something!” she said angrily.

  * * *

  When we arrived at the Marriott hotel on I-75, there was another discussion in the parking lot, about who would walk with whom in front of the cameras. Jewell turned to his close friend Dave Dutchess: “Are you all right, man?” Dutchess, a truck driver who worked with Jewell years ago, has long hair and a tattoo of a panther on his forearm. “Richard and I are like brothers,” he told me. “I would die for him.” As the cameras closed in on them, the group fled to a private room in the Marriott. The auditorium was filled with reporters. “Showtime! Showtime!” the cameramen yelled when Jewell, his mother, and all the lawyers took the stage.

  “I hope and pray that no one else is ever subjected to the pain and the ordeal that I have gone through,” Jewell said, his voice breaking. “The authorities should keep in mind the rights of the citizens. I thank God it is ende
d and that you now know what I have known all along: I am an innocent man.”

  After the press conference, Bobi and Richard Jewell remained in a private room. The bookers from Good Morning America and the Today Show pressed Jewell to step before their cameras, and when Watson Bryant told them no, Monica, the GMA booker, began to cry, “I’ll lose my job.” Then Yael, the Today show booker, cornered Nadya Light: “Is Richard doing something with GMA?”

  Upstairs, Jewell and his mother were being filmed by a CBS camera crew for a 60 Minutes news update. “Well, Bobi, did you get your Tupperware back?” Mike Wallace asked by phone from New York. “Richard, you need to lose some more weight.” Despite Wallace’s festive spirit, the atmosphere was curiously flat. Bryant urged Jewell to talk to a USA Today reporter. Jewell balked: “They can all go suck wind.”

  In the car on the way back to Wood & Grant, Bobi was angry. All of her possessions had come back from the FBI marked up with ink. “Every piece of Tupperware I own is ruined, thank you very much. They wrote numbers all over it, and I have tried everything to clean it—Comet and Brillo—but nothing works.”

  Back at the office, she sat on the sofa and listened as Bryant negotiated with Yael for a flight to New York—Delta, first-class, 9:30 p.m. Jewell was scheduled to appear on three shows in New York, visit the American Museum of Natural History, and then fly to Washington, D.C., for Larry King Live. “I would like to go home, put on my outfit, and walk in the woods,” Bobi said. “Richard, we are leaving.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Richard said.

  * * *

  One hour later, a telephone call came in to the offices of Wood & Grant. The lawyers had the call on speaker, and it blared through the room. “Goddamn it, Lin. When will this be over?” In the background, you could hear Bobi sobbing. “What in the world?” Wood asked. Jewell explained that a sound truck from ABC had been waiting in the parking lot when the Jewells got home. There had been words and threats, and Dave Dutchess had taken his stun gun off his motorcycle and waved it at the ABC van. The cameraman yelled, “Stop harassing us!” Dave yelled back “You are harassing us! Now get your ass out of here!”

  Wood shouted into the speakerphone: “Do not meddle! You cannot jeopardize where you have gotten to and what you want to do! All you have to do is put up with this for one more day and the damn thing is over. Bobi, there is nothing you can do about it; you have to stay cool.” Bobi cried back, “They are going to destroy me!”

  The moment they hung up, Wood turned to Bryant. “New York is canceled. No Katie Couric. No Good Morning America. They are losing it. You better call Yael.” “No,” Bryant said, “they have lost it. All of the above: their patience, their temper and heart.”

  That evening a very testy Katie Couric tracked Bryant down at Nadya Light’s apartment, where we had gone to watch the news. “I want you to know that I canceled interviewing Barbra Streisand in L.A. for Richard Jewell. Don’t think he is always going to be a news story. No one will care about him in three days,” she said, according to Bryant. “Look, Katie, I am sorry. But Richard is in no condition to talk to the press. He is worn out,” Bryant told her.

  Later, Jewell would tell me that that day, which should have been one of his most satisfying, was actually his worst. His notoriety had tainted the triumph; everything positive had become negative. “I was in despair,” he said. As he had for most of the previous eighty-eight days, he spent the night confined in the Buford Highway apartment, a prisoner of his circumstances, with his mother, Dave Dutchess, and Dave’s fiancée, Beatty, eating Domino’s Pizza and watching himself lead the newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC.

  * * *

  “This case has everything—the FBI, the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights, from the First to the Sixth Amendment,” Watson Bryant told me in one of our first conversations. It has become common to characterize the FBI’s investigation of Richard Jewell as the epitome of false accusation. The phrase “the Jewell syndrome,” a rush to judgment, has entered the language of newsrooms and First Amendment forums. On the night of Jewell’s press conference, a commentator on CNN’s Crossfire compared Jewell’s situation to “Kafka in Prague.” The case became an investigative catastrophe, which laid bare long-simmering resentments of many FBI career professionals regarding the micromanagement style and imperious attitude of Louis Freeh and his inner circle of former New York prosecutors, who have worked together since their days at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District. Within the bureau, the beleaguered director now has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children. Like Freeh, those near him have also acquired a nickname: Louie’s yes-men. Two of Freeh’s closest associates, FBI general counsel Howard Shapiro and former deputy director Larry Potts, have been severely criticized, respectively, for advising the White House of confidential FBI material and for an alleged cover-up of the mishandling of the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, where FBI agents killed the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a white supremacist.

  In November and December, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Jewell affair. Responding to an attempt by headquarters and certain officials to distance themselves, according to FBI sources, several agents, including a senior FBI supervisor in Atlanta, have provided the OPR with signed statements insisting that Freeh himself was responsible for “oversight” during the crisis. These agents “shocked the investigators” because they reiterated, when asked who was in charge of the overall command of the investigation, that it was the director himself.

  What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh’s future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the FBI have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh’s chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s, it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor’s table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam’s answer was immediate: the FBI has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain.

  Richard Jewell had a reverence for authority that blinded him to the paradox of his situation. He idealized the investigative skills of the FBI and could not understand that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy. Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter has invited Jewell to Washington to testify at congressional hearings on the FBI’s conduct in the Atlanta bombing. Ironically, the bungling of the investigation might lead to the reshuffling of personalities at the top of the bureau and threaten Freeh’s reputation. In October, according to the Washington Post, Freeh sent an unusual memo to all twenty-five thousand FBI personnel: He would not be abandoning his post amid reports of problems with the Jewell case and Filegate, and of a growing dissatisfaction inside the bureau. “I am proud to be the FBI director,” Freeh wrote.

  * * *

  From the beginning, Jewell was perceived in the public imagination as a hapless dummy, a plodding misfit, a Forrest Gump. On one of the first days he worked as a security guard at the AT&T pavilion, he noticed that his coworkers were covering the steps inside the sound tower with graffiti. On one step Jewell scrawled with a flourish two bromides: If you didn’t go past me, you are not supposed to be here and life is tough. Tougher when you are stupid. Soon after he was targeted as a suspect in the Olympics bombing, the FBI confiscated the step. Analysts appeared to believe that the graffiti contained a clue to his character. “They told the lawyers the statement was an obvious taunt,” Jewell said. In fact, the second line was an expression he had cribbed from one of his favorite actors, John Wayne.

  “To understand Richard Jewell, you have to be aware that he is a cop. He talks like a cop and thinks like a cop,” his criminal lawyer, Jack Martin, told me. The tone of Jewell’s voice drops noticeably when he says the word “officer,” and his conversation is filled with observations about traffic patterns, security devices, and car wrecks. Even the vocabulary he uses to describe the
eighty-eight days he was a suspect is out of the lexicon of police work, and he continues to talk about his situation then in the present tense: “This is an out-and-out ambush, and I am a hostage.”

  Jewell has a need to accommodate. He can be startlingly opaque. On the afternoon of July 30, Jewell answered the door of his mother’s apartment to Don Johnson and Diader Rosario from the FBI. “We need your help making a training film,” they told him. “I never questioned it,” he told me. The next day Rosario appeared again with a search warrant. “The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, ‘Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you. Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn’t do anything.’ And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy.”

  Leaving the apartment on one occasion, he told the agents, “I am wearing a bright shirt so y’all can see me easier.” He recalled feeling anger when he read descriptions of himself as a child-man, a mama’s boy, and “a wannabe policeman,” but he said, “If I was in the place of everybody else and I saw a thirty-four-year-old guy living with his mother, I would have reservations about that, too. I would think, Why is he doing that?”

  * * *

  Atlanta magazine reported that there was no record of a Jewell family in Danville, Virginia, where Richard Jewell was born. Atlanta referred to an article in the Danville Register & Bee that asked, “Did Richard Jewell ever sleep here?” “This is a part of my life. Richard and I do not like to speak about,” Bobi Jewell told me one night at dinner. Richard was born in Danville, but his name was Richard White; his father was Bobi’s first husband, Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. According to Bobi, Richard’s father, who died recently, was “irresponsible and a ladies’ man.” When Richard was four, the marriage broke up. Bobi found work as an insurance-agency claims coordinator and soon met John Jewell, an executive in the same business. Shortly after John Jewell married Bobi, he adopted Richard.