Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  In June 1980 Michael went to Norfolk to be with John. He was seventeen years old, and Barbara had not been able to control him for some time. Michael never liked Maine and had resented his mother’s decision to move there after the divorce. Barbara’s sister and her husband lived in an old farmhouse near the tiny Maine hamlet of Anson.

  Michael described the farm, years later, as being “in the boondocks – the real sticks.”

  “It was five miles to the nearest store,” Michael said. “Annie and Bob and their kids had ninety cats and old dogs. I just wasn’t used to anything like it. I had to learn how to milk cows and I didn’t like that. They had chickens running everywhere, and they were mean and chased me. When it was time for dinner, Bob would grab a chicken and twist off its head. After seeing that, I stopped eating chicken and still won’t. They are the lowest, mangiest creatures on earth. I was miserable on that farm. We didn’t like our cousins, and they hated us. They called us city slickers and we called them country bumpkins.”

  Michael talked to his father only twice during the first year after the divorce. He pleaded with him during both conversations: “Please let me come live with you, Dad! I hate it here.”

  But Barbara and John both said no. John didn’t want to be bothered and Barbara wanted Michael to make a fresh start. He had failed seventh grade in Norfolk, so Barbara enrolled him in the seventh grade in Anson in the fall of 1976.

  The fourteen-year-old newcomer didn’t fit in. Michael’s language was as filthy as his father’s, he was a chain smoker – “I only smoke filterless Camels, a man’s cigarette” – and he was impossible to discipline. His goal as a student was to be so disruptive that he would be suspended from school. He succeeded.

  Barbara’s decision to move to Skowhegan in 1977 had been prompted, in part, by Michael. The Walkers had been living with Annie and Bob for about one year when Michael hit his twelve-year-old cousin, Jennifer, in the face several times with his fists. Both families decided it was time for Barbara to find her own place.

  “My mom had gone through all the money that she got from the divorce,” Michael recalled. “She had paid to have plumbing added to Annie and Bob’s house and she had taken everyone out for lobster dinners several times. She was still drinking a lot too. The money just slipped through her hands.”

  Once settled in Skowhegan, Barbara again enrolled Michael in the seventh grade. “School had started about three days before my mom took me in, and when I went into the classroom everyone was watching me,” Michael remembered. “I was really scoping out the women, and I was blowing it with the teacher but making it with the chicks.”

  Michael’s teacher asked him to take a seat and open his textbook.

  “What page, man?” he replied.

  The woman teacher corrected him. “Don’t call me ‘man.’ ”

  “Okay, man, now what page was that?”

  “I remember that everyone started howling,” Michael recalled. “That was the beginning of the end, because the teacher gave me detention, which meant I had to stay and work after school, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. I knew I was on the way out of there.”

  There was one teacher who tried to work with Michael. Years later, Michael could only remember his last name: Nixon. Each morning when Michael arrived at school, William Nixon would give him a pep talk. “We’re going to work hard today, right, Mr. Walker?”

  But despite Nixon’s encouragement and personal interest, Michael stayed in trouble.

  “I would come to school stoned as hell on marijuana,” he recalled. “I mean really blown away. I was just stoned out of my mind. Someone would say, ‘Hey, Mike, wanna try some coke?’ and I’d say, ‘Sure, man, why not?’ Or someone would say, ‘Hey, Mike, got some great speed here,’ and I’d say, ‘Hey man, give me some!’ I let my hair grow down to my waist and I didn’t care about nothing but having a good time and getting high.”

  Michael began mimicking the Hollywood stereotype of a marijuana-crazed, fun-loving teenager. Even when he wasn’t stoned, he acted as if he were by always taking on the appearance of someone without any cares, worries, or thoughts.

  “I was seeing the principal every day, and when I was in class I was acting like an idiot. I spent my time drawing pictures of marijuana leaves on the desks. I remember once we had to take this test, so I drew little pictures in all those tiny squares you were supposed to black in for answers, and the principal called me in and he said the test showed I had an IQ of two.”

  Once again Michael dropped out of the seventh grade.

  He and two other Skowhegan boys spent their days smoking pot in a shed. They called themselves the “Barn Rats,” and they installed an old carpet, lounge chairs, and an elaborate stereo system. They began stealing to make enough money to buy marijuana.

  “We would stake out a house and watch it so we knew when the people left for work,” recalled Michael. “We’d break in by just kicking in a door or a window with our boots. I got real good at rummaging through drawers with my knuckles so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.”

  Barbara knew that her son was smoking marijuana and running wild, but she had been unable to control Cynthia and Laura as teenagers, and Michael was more stubborn and had been spoiled more as a child than either of them. She simply didn’t know what to do.

  According to his own account, Michael successfully burglarized five houses in Skowhegan before the police closed in on the Barn Rats. A juvenile court judge gave Michael a blistering lecture, but because it was his first offense, he was put on probation for six months.

  At the time, Michael didn’t know his father had been arrested on burglary charges as a teenager in Scranton in 1955 and had gone through an almost identical process. When I later told him about his father’s criminal past as a juvenile, Michael considered the similarities more than mere coincidence. It was another example to him of how father and son were inexplicably bound, how fate was leading him along the same path as his father.

  Barbara was embarrassed and alarmed by her son’s arrest and decided that Michael needed professional help.

  She telephoned Marti Stevens, a trained counselor and schoolteacher with a good reputation for helping kids in trouble. Stevens agreed to accept Michael as one of six special students she was tutoring. She taught Michael basic courses for half a day; the other hours, he was required to work at the farm because Barbara couldn’t afford to pay tuition.

  “I had forty cows to handle and chickens to feed,” Michael recalled. “I hated it, but I wanted to make it. I didn’t want to be stuck in seventh grade all my life. I was still getting stoned every day, but I was trying, really trying. I remember being out in a field shoveling frozen cow shit on a freezing February day. Finally, I said, ‘Screw this, I can’t handle this teacher and I quit,’ but three days later, she called me up and got me back out there. She told me that she was going to make me pass my tests and get me into high school and she helped me. On the day of the tests, I went to school straight and I passed ‘em, and that fall, I was back in school with kids my age and they all said, ‘Hey Mike, how’d you do this?’ and I said, ‘Hey, I got my ways.’ ”

  Much to Barbara’s surprise, Michael did well in school. Off came his shoulder-length hair. Gone was the small plastic bag of marijuana that he used to carry boldly in his shirt pocket. Michael even began bringing school books home. The reason for the change was simple: Michael was in love.

  “It was the first time I really was in love with a girl, even though I had been having sex with this other chick in Skowhegan quite a long time,” he recalled. “I wanted to keep this relationship strong and healthy.”

  Michael was sixteen, his girlfriend was eighteen. She had a car, money, and came from a well-respected family.

  But after nearly two years, Michael’s girlfriend told him that she wanted to date other men. Without missing a beat, Michael returned to hanging out, smoking dope, and making trouble.

  During the summers of 1978 and 1979, Michael spent seve
ral weeks with his father in Norfolk. They developed a relationship during these sessions that Michael later had trouble describing. Most of the time, John was more of a “best buddy” to Michael than a father.

  But John still made it clear that he was in charge.

  “We had a really neat friendship, but my dad still projected his military training with me. Like I wouldn’t just walk into his den. I’d walk up to the door to the den and I would stand there until he looked up and recognized me. Then I’d ask, ‘Can I come in?’ and he’d say, ‘You can enter.’

  “I’d go over to his desk and stand there until he was ready to speak to me. That didn’t bother me though. I liked my dad a lot. He was really a cool dude and he was the most ... I don’t know exactly what the word is that I’m looking for, but I guess charismatic, yeah, charismatic, and most versatile, flexible person that I knew.

  “Why, he could be a dirty, low-down biker one day and be wearing a tuxedo the next. He could do anything or be anyone he wished, it seemed.

  “My dad lived alone and I liked to do things for him. I would clean the house and make it really pretty. I’d wash all the windows and vacuum every room and mow the grass. I would do everything I could to please him and make him like me,” Michael recalled.

  “I could hardly wait until I could move to Norfolk and be with him and go out on his boat and party with him.”

  On the June morning in 1980 that Michael was scheduled to leave Skowhegan for Norfolk) his mother walked into his room and sat on the end of his bed. She wanted to speak to him before she left for her job at the shoe factory.

  This is how Michael remembered their exchange: “I was in bed sleeping when she came in around eight o’clock. She was really sad. She sat down on my bed and I felt terrible because she was crying) and she said, ‘Michael, I have to go to work) but before you go I got to tell you something,’ and then she told me that she wanted me to stay in Skowhegan with her and not move in with my father in Norfolk. I said, ‘Mom) I love you, but I have to go. It’s time for me to make a break and I want to live with Dad.’ My mother began crying and left the room.

  “I honestly think that she knew what was going to happen to me and she wanted to warn me or keep it from happening,” Michael said. “She knew what my dad had tried with Laura and that my father was going to do the same with me, but I don’t think she knew how to keep it from happening. Maybe she thought I’d just tell him no. I don’t know, but when she left that morning, I really believe that she knew what lay in store for me in Norfolk.”

  Chapter 40

  The first thing that John did when Michael arrived in Norfolk was give him a $100 bill. “This is your allowance,” John said. “One hundred bucks a week.” Then John took Michael outside and pointed to a small truck. “This is my truck, but it’s also yours. You can use it any time you want.”

  There were few rules in John’s house. Michael was responsible for keeping the house dean. That was all. Anything else was okay. Within a few days, Michael had located a marijuana connection and fallen back into the habit of being stoned constantly. At first, his father didn’t mind.

  “My dad was a moderate to high pot smoker back then, and he’d tell me, ‘Hey Michael, here’s a couple hundred bucks. Go buy me a quarter pound of Hawaiian’ and I’d go do it and I’d break it up and take the seeds out of it, so he wouldn’t have to, and I’d put it in this little stash box that he had on his desk. He’d dip his pipe in there and he really liked that. We had a unique relationship for a father and son.”

  But as the summer continued, John tired of Michael’s constant smoking. He had plans for his son, and Michael couldn’t do the things that John wanted if he were stoned all the time.

  “When Michael joined me in Norfolk, he was addicted to marijuana,” John recalled, “and the beautiful thing about pot, of course, is that it makes you not care about anything. I knew that his mother had sent him to a work farm of some sort in Maine where he had to shovel cow shit, and that was exactly what I’d expected from her. Barbara was always trying to get someone else to solve her problems. It might have worked for a while, but I knew the kid wasn’t going to stop until he wanted to. So I didn’t badger him or hassle him about it at first. I let him get stoned all the time. And then one day, I went up to his bedroom because I wanted him to do some painting on the boat, and he is zoned out, totally zoned out. His eyes were red and it looked like he was ready to pass out, and I said to him, ‘Fuck Michael, why am I even talking to you? You ain’t even here! I don’t need this,’ and I left the room.

  “Later, he told me that my reaction had really scared him because I hadn’t been beating him to death with lectures. He knew that he had really disappointed me and pissed me off, and that upset him. He told me that he was going to stop smoking pot, which, of course, was just a ridiculous statement.

  “I told him, ‘Look, Michael, there is nothing wrong with smoking marijuana. Nothing. There is nothing wrong with alcohol There is nothing wrong with riding a Ferris wheel, but goddamn it, if you do it twenty-four hours a day, you are fucked up! If you go overboard and get addicted to something, anything, then it stops being fun and takes control of your life. What you kids don’t understand is the joy of moderation. ‘

  “I explained to him that something is only fun if you do it in moderation, and it seemed to make sense to him.”

  John suggested that Michael cut down on his marijuana use gradually. If he did, Michael could begin helping John on various insurance investigations at Wackenhut.

  Michael got excited. Working with his dad as a private eye was something that he really wanted to do. He promised to try, and John sent him to take the same private investigator courses that Philip Prince had sent John to.

  A number of changes occurred at Wackenhut that fall before Michael finished his training and turned eighteen, the minimum age required by Virginia to obtain a private investigator’s license. Prince had built up an impressive investigative unit by then and successfully weaned the office from the nickel-and-dime divorce cases. But Prince was dissatisfied with his salary. It hadn’t grown as fast as the office’s case load, nor had he received a promotion. He resigned to start his own private detective agency, which he called Confidential Reports.

  John figured Wackenhut would tap him for Prince’s job, but instead the company transferred Michael Bell from its Richmond office and put him in charge of investigations. John was outraged, with good reason. Michael Bell did not bend his ethics to meet John Walker’s standards.

  “I didn’t care for his methods,” Bell recalled. “I told him, ‘John, not everyone is guilty. When an insurance company hires us, it wants us to find out the truth,’ but John thought everyone was guilty and he kept dreaming up all these scams to prove it.”

  John suddenly found himself being constantly reeled in and second-guessed on the few cases that Bell assigned to him. Even when John pulled off a good scam, his new boss was critical.

  “What if a person with a legitimate injury gets hurt during one of your scams?” Bell asked. “You know someone might try to pick up groceries from a cart and actually hurt themselves. You’re going to open us up to a lawsuit!”

  John ignored Bell as much as possible, but Bell didn’t let up. One afternoon, Bell called John into his office. An attorney had called and complained that John had offered to lie on the witness stand in order to win an insurance case. John denied the charge, but Bell didn’t believe him. John left Wackenhut that afternoon and drove to Phil Prince’s house.

  “How about a job?” John asked.

  Philip Prince knew that no one in Norfolk had as good equipment as John did. They quickly struck a deal and became partners in October 1980.

  The two men opened an office in the Kempsville Professional Building, only a few miles from where Art and Rita lived and where Walker Enterprises had been located.

  Because John owned most of the physical assets – guns, video equipment, electronic bugging devices, and his surveillance van – he w
as named corporate president. Confidential Reports had a meager beginning. During the first two months of 1981, it handled only fifteen cases, the biggest one paying $348. In all, Prince and John billed $1,341.95.

  Even though both men received military pensions, their case load was barely enough to pay office expenses, so John agreed not to draw a salary. Instead, Prince would just keep tabs on how much John was owed, and when the company got into better financial shape, John could collect his back pay.

  There was only one problem with the arrangement.

  John needed some way to account for the extra money that he made as a spy. So he told Prince that he was forming his own company on the side for tax reasons. It was incorporated January 30, 1981, with John listed as president and Arthur as secretary-treasurer.

  Technically, the company specialized in helping companies guard against industrial espionage, but it was really set up as a way for John to conceal his spy money. His cockiness was reflected in the company’s name: Counter-Spy.

  “I didn’t feel the FBI was ever going to catch me at this point. That’s why I called the company Counter-Spy, rather than making it one word. I thought it was rather funny,” John told me. “Here I was advertising the fact that I was a spy, and that is what I was using this business for – laundering my spy money.”

  Invoices from Counter-Spy show that John billed a number of fictional and actual persons for “technical countermeasures.” Nearly all of the billings were fake.

  Meanwhile, business at Confidential Reports picked up.

  Prince, refined and smooth, spent his time sweet-talking clients and charming local attorneys and insurance company representatives. John stayed behind the scenes and did most of the actual investigations.

  In May, Prince was able to convince three national insurance companies to hire Confidential Reports to perform investigations of suspected fraud. None of the cases amounted to much individually, but in June, one of these insurance companies hired Prince and John to investigate ten suspected cases of insurance fraud, and in July, Confidential Reports collected $5,390.68 from its clients.