Chapter 3
Busting More Crooks in Gotham
Complaint duty, they called it. To respond in emergencies, the NYO assigned clerks and junior agents to answer the office phones during non-business hours. The clerk did most of the little work that was involved. An agent like me might draw the assignment a couple of times a month. It was the clerks’ only job, but for agents, this was additional duty that earned us time off during normal hours.
The graveyard shift was the least desirable; few of the “emergencies” reported were legitimate. Instead, most calls were from people who were paranoid, had seen unidentified flying objects, or were just plain crazy. The office even had a “nut box” index system for such people who telephoned regularly. Some called so often the clerk didn’t have to refer to the nut box.
My first night on complaint duty was uneventful but interesting and instructive. The clerk seemed to have a canned answer for just about every nut call.
Here’s an example:
Caller: “Aliens are invading my brain!”
Clerk: “Wrap some aluminum foil around your head; it’ll block the incoming signals.”
And another:
Caller: “The FBI is tapping my phones!”
Clerk: “What makes you so important that the FBI would go to the trouble?”
It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud each time a kook phoned. One of the regular kooks was Martha Mitchell, the wife of former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell. She was as paranoid as they came, and would call the FBI at all hours of the night to complain about the Nixon administration. There were special instructions on how she was to be handled should she call — Mrs. Mitchell was permitted to rant and rave to her heart’s content. The complaint personnel were to let her talk until she ran out of gas. Often that would take a long time. I had the unfortunate task of talking to her one night. Although I don’t remember the conversation, I came away concluding that she belonged in a loony bin.
At about three o’clock one morning, a call came in. The clerk listened for a while, and then put the caller on hold.
“You better take this one,” he told me.
On the line was a deputy from the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office. They had picked up an apparent kidnap victim, left bound and gagged alongside the Long Island Expressway. The victim, Brian Parrwalter, was the son and heir of James Parrwalter, who had made a fortune manufacturing electrical equipment for the automotive industry.
Kidnapping became a federal offense not long after famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was abducted and later found dead. The law was worded in a way that, if a victim had been missing more than 24 hours, it was presumed he or she had been transported interstate. This gave the Bureau the jurisdiction it needed to investigate. Moreover, the FBI routinely assisted local police when interstate commerce, as it was called, was involved.
During his two days of captivity, the victim had no alternative but to relieve himself in his trousers. When he was brought to the NYO for debriefing that night, I was the sole agent on duty, and that task fell to me. Naturally, Parrwalter didn’t want to go anywhere before cleaning himself up, and so the deputy had allowed him to shower and change clothes. That might have destroyed valuable evidence; I didn’t really know.
Parrwalter was in his mid- to late twenties and handsome. He arrived for the debriefing visibly shaken, wearing a jacket and jeans. The deputy stayed with us but didn’t ask many questions; clearly he saw this as an FBI case. For the next three hours I interviewed Parrwalter, asking him every question I could think of. Then I went over it again to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything.
There was precious little information to glean. The victim was in his father’s circular driveway late at night at their mansion in Brookville, the toniest neighborhood in the toniest part of Nassau County. He was unloading a bag from the trunk of his car when someone he didn’t see clubbed him on the back of the head, briefly knocking him out. He wasn’t seriously injured but still had a bump on his noggin when he spoke to me.
Parrwalter remembered regaining consciousness, then being tied up, blindfolded and put in the back seat of a car. One person sat beside him, and the driver and one other passenger occupied the front seats. They said little, even though Parrwalter kept questioning them repeatedly about what was going on. He was driven for what he estimated to be about a half hour. It was obvious to him from the sounds and constant honking of car horns that he was in a densely populated area, perhaps Manhattan. The car stopped and Parrwalter was pulled out by two individuals, one on each side, and led up two flights of stairs. Someone then unlocked a door and shoved him inside what he thought was an apartment. From the echoic sounds around him, he concluded it was nearly empty.
The kidnappers immediately shoved Parrwalter into a closet, where he remained until his release. In addition to pulling a hood over his eyes, they gagged him with a cloth to keep him quiet. Every now and then his captors removed the gag and gave him water but no food. I could only imagine how helpless he felt.
His sole clues about the site came from nearby sounds. One was of a telephone. It didn’t ring a lot, but calls did come in. The victim couldn’t really hear the few muffled conversations that occurred, but he did occasionally hear the sound of an elevated train as it went past. Although Parrwalter was too terrified to realize it, his kidnappers’ careful plan to avoid recognition was a sign that they didn’t intend to kill him — unless necessary.
After what must have seemed an eternity, Parrwalter was again loaded into a car and driven back to Long Island. His kidnappers carefully placed him on the side of the road and sped away.
It was sunrise by the time I finished the debriefing. I wrote up my report and handed it in, thinking that the matter would be assigned to the kidnapping squad. Wrong. I got the case, the first kidnapping I’d worked.
Later, I interviewed the victim’s father. During the ordeal he had received three telephone calls. This was in the days before caller ID or cell phones, so he had no idea who was calling.
When the phone rang the first morning after the kidnapping, a male voice said, “We have your son. If you want to see him alive again, it will cost you $200,000 in cash — all in twenties; unmarked bills. And if you call the police or the FBI, he’s a dead man. We’re watching you, and have your phone tapped. Tonight you’ll get another call.” The caller then hung up.
The elder Parrwalter was beside himself with worry. Rather than call his banker, he got into his car and sped to the bank.
His banker was shocked at the request for such a large sum. “We don’t keep that kind of cash on hand in the vault. I’ll have to call the main bank; the money won’t get here until the morning.”
Refusing to answer questions about the matter, Parrwalter pressed for quicker action, but to no avail.
Late that evening, the phone rang again. “Do you have the money?” the caller asked. The father explained that it wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, and asked to speak to his son before any money changed hands.
“Impossible,” said the caller. “You’ll receive a call before midnight tomorrow. In the meantime, go to the supermarket and buy a box of black Hefty brand garbage bags with the cinch top. Do this yourself; don’t involve your housekeeper. Divide the bills into two even stacks and stuff them in the bags. We’ll call you tomorrow night and tell you what to do next. Remember: one word to the cops, and your son will be dead.”
The next thing James Parrwalter heard was a dial tone.
Throughout the next day and evening, Mr. Parrwalter worried. More than once he became physically ill, and thought he might be having a heart attack. But he had the money and plastic bags, just as ordered. As soon as his housekeeper left for the day, he brought inside the stacks of bills, which were in a bank bag in the trunk of his car. The elder Parrwalter was finally alone; he had been widowed several years earlier. As instructed, he carefully divided the money into two stacks and put it in the bags. Two hundred thousand dollars in twenties is 10,000 bills, which weighs about 25 pounds. Mr. Parrwalter sat by the telephone the entire evening, afraid to move even to go to the bathroom.
Just before midnight the phone rang. “Immediately take a bag in each hand, and walk to your front gate,” the voice said. “When you get outside your brick fence, drop one bag in the hedges to the left of your drive and the other bag to the right. Then go back inside your house. Remember, we’re watching. If all the money is there, unmarked, and you don’t call the cops, your son will be released before the night is out. Go now.”
The caller hung up, and Parrwalter hurried outside to comply with their instructions. He then returned to his home, and waited in the dark. He didn’t look outside, fearing that if he recognized anything or anyone, his son would be killed. The wait seemed like an eternity, but actually it was about two hours before the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office called with the good news that Brian had been found alive and unharmed.
The older man was overjoyed when his son finally walked in the front door. Tears streamed down his face as they hugged. After Brian had taken a long, hot shower and changed his clothes, the deputy brought him to me.
Once I had interviewed both father and son, I began to realize what little we had to go on: no physical evidence at all, no recognition of the caller’s voice, no idea of where the son had been kept during his ordeal; nothing.
Not being familiar with kidnappings, I hoped to get the case reassigned. My supervisor, Vinnie Daugherty, was empathetic but gave no ground.
“Vinnie, why was this case assigned to me?” I asked.
“Because you’re an FBI agent and because you took the complaint,” replied Daugherty, sober as a judge.
“But I have an accounting degree and I work corruption and financial cases,” I protested.
Vinnie said, “Okie, the FBI investigates over 200 specific violations of federal laws. Agents without an accounting background can deal with only about 150 of them. You can work ’em all. Now quit your bitching and get to work.” The look in my supervisor’s eyes told me that the conversation was over.
I moseyed down to another floor where the kidnapping squad was located. The supervisor referred me to one of his most experienced agents for advice.
“What have you got?” he asked.
“Not much at all,” was my answer. “The victim never saw his kidnappers. He thinks there were three of them — two men and a woman — but he isn’t sure.” I then repeated the impressions of his surroundings that young Parrwalter had given me.
The kidnapping expert thought it over. “Did he recognize any of the voices? It could have been a gardener or another worker with access to the property.”
I shook my head, no.
He asked me to repeat the entire story, asked a few follow-up questions, and said, “You may not be aware of this, but most kidnappings are actually hoaxes. The so-called victim will get his buddies to kidnap him in order to extort money out of a wealthy relative. That’s probably what you have here. If not, I have no idea how you can solve this; there simply isn’t enough information. And you need to understand there isn’t a resolution for every case. So first I’d determine whether this really was a kidnapping. If you can’t confirm that it was, I’d close the case if I were you.” He then stood up and shook my hand, signaling he’d given me all the advice he could.
Over the course of my career, there were many cases I couldn’t solve. But at this time I had been in the Bureau for less than three years and, like many of my contemporaries, I had trouble admitting defeat. I spent a long time investigating the possibility that Brian had staged his own kidnapping. That led nowhere. He didn’t have the motive. All the money he could spend was at his disposal. He was sole heir to his father’s fortune, and his father was getting quite old; he was psychologically well adjusted; and then there was my interview of him. I’d spoken with young Parrwalter within two hours of his release by his captors. The degree to which the ordeal had shaken him would have been hard to fake.
I went over what I knew: half an hour from his home; bustling traffic; empty apartment; telephone; elevated train. That’s all I had. But then I developed a theory, much as with the Klegmeir case. Suppose the apartment had been rented for the sole purpose of the kidnapping? And suppose a phone had been installed for exactly the same reason? Suddenly, I had an idea. It might take an accountant’s mind to solve this one.
First, I got a map of Manhattan that also included Nassau County. Using the elder Parrwalter’s home as a starting point, I drew a circle with a 25-mile radius. I assumed this distance would be more than sufficient. Then I marked off the location of every elevated train within the circle. Next, assuming the train couldn’t be heard from more than a certain distance away I used that measurement on both sides of the tracks and marked it off. This gave me a corridor, inside of which I hoped the apartment was located.
Then, on a hunch, I requested from the telephone company a list of Manhattan phone numbers that had been connected and disconnected for a month before the kidnapping and a month after, within the streets in the corridor I had identified. In those days, the phone company was very helpful to law enforcement. These days, because of privacy laws, you can’t get this information without a subpoena.
Within a couple of weeks I had the addresses for about 20 phone numbers. In the FBI, the cost of an investigation isn’t the primary driver. Theoretically, almost any resource could be used to resolve a case. So, with the assistance of the kidnapping squad, I visited every one of them. Only one was for an apartment on the second floor, and it was in a seedy area of the city.
I interviewed the superintendent of the apartment building; he remembered renting the place on a six-month lease to a lone white male. Required up front was a month’s rent plus a security deposit. He recalled it being unusual that the renter paid two months in advance plus his deposit. But the super never saw his tenant again. When he visited the apartment to collect the past-due rent, the place was vacant except for a telephone. He picked it up but the phone was dead. In an effort to enforce the lease, the super tried to call his renter’s supposed employer, but it turned out that there was no such company. The super didn’t pursue the matter further, and rented the apartment to someone else.
At my request, he handled the rental application form carefully, made himself a copy, and gave me the original. A routine check of indices in the NYO turned up nothing, which was no surprise. I then sent the rental agreement to FBI headquarters in Washington to be processed for fingerprints. At that time there was no computerized system for identifying prints; the process was a time-consuming chore done entirely by hand, using a complicated series of loops and whorls.
Perhaps two months later, I had my answer from headquarters: One of the latent prints belonged to a bank robber out on parole. He had a long rap sheet. It looked like I’d identified at least one of the bad guys. A quick phone call to his parole officer was revealing. The criminal had requested that his parole be transferred to California less than a month after the kidnapping.
Smart crooks, like this one, don’t skip out on parole. If they’re later fingerprinted for any reason — detained by the police, applying for certain jobs, etc. — they’ll be nailed and their parole revoked. I sent a teletype to the Los Angeles division to locate and interview the felon. By some miracle the agent in the L.A. office found him and got a confession to the kidnapping. He was living the high life in Hollywood, and furnished the names of his cohorts. We even got back about $100,000 or so of the ill-gotten loot, which was turned over to the elder Parrwalter. All three of the kidnappers received long prison sentences. Score one for the accountants.
The infamous Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972 — about the time I entered the FBI Academy. For the uninitiated, Watergate was one of the most important political scandals in American history. It began with the arrest of five men for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Their purpose was to obtain political intelligence that could be used in the upcoming presidential race that pitted Republican incumbent Richard M. Nixon against Democratic Senator George McGovern.
The five soon were charged with burglary and wiretapping, as were former White House staff member E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the general counsel for a Nixon White House fundraising organization, the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP). Only a few months before the break-in, John N. Mitchell, CREEP’s director, had resigned as U.S. attorney general to head the re-election committee.
One of the burglars, James W. McCord, said during the ensuing trial that the White House had pressured him and his confederates to cover up the administration’s role in planning the break-in. As the probe continued, Jeb Stuart Magruder, assistant director at CREEP, told a grand jury that Mitchell and John W. Dean III, the president’s legal counsel, had coerced him to deny any CREEP or White House involvement in the conspiracy.
At this point, in July 1972, Mitchell left CREEP and returned to private practice in New York. However, the government hardly forgot his role, and field offices throughout the Bureau were involved in the case. By mid-1974, the investigation had clearly implicated Nixon, Mitchell and many other highly-placed officials. Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974 — the only U.S. president ever to have done so.
Late one spring day in 1974 I was in the office, pushing paper during lunchtime. Save Neville Jones and me, no one else from the squad was there.
“Okie!” Neville shouted out from his cubbyhole. “Come here!”
On my way, I thought about the advice I was given in El Paso: If you don’t have anything to do, don’t do it in the office. Well, I had plenty to do, but from Jones’s perspective I was the only live body around when he needed someone.
Once I was in front of Neville’s desk, he shoved at me a teletype from FBI headquarters. “Here’s a new case for you,” he said without emotion.
I scanned the top of the document, which bore the heading United States of America v. John N. Mitchell.
When the enormity of it had sunk in, I said quietly, “Jesus, this is the former attorney general.”
Neville simply nodded.
“For Christ’s sake, why are you assigning this to me?” I asked. “I’ve got less than three years in the Bureau.”
With a sly smile, Jones said, “Because you’re the only one in the office right now.”
Drat, I thought. Big cases mean big paperwork.
“What do you want me to do with this?” I asked earnestly.
Jones drummed his fingers on his desktop impatiently. “Joe, what do you do with a crooked lawyer?” he questioned.
I shrugged my shoulders with an unknowing look.
“Okie,” he said testily, “you put the lying bastard in prison.”
End of discussion.
When I returned to my desk, I carefully read the four-page teletype. It requested that the NYO contact Mitchell’s lawyer and set up an appointment to interview the attorney general under oath. There were perhaps a dozen questions, the meaning of most of which was unclear to me. However, the communication briefly described answers to perhaps half of them. A common investigative technique is to mix questions to which you already knew the answers with ones that you didn’t. If a suspect lied on the control questions, one could fairly conclude that he was lying on the rest.
It was unusual indeed that an investigation was directed by headquarters; at that time, I had no experience with it. But this was Watergate. At one time or another, at least several hundred agents conducted some part of the investigation.
Locating Mitchell’s attorney was easy enough; his phone number was in the teletype. Arranging the interview was also easy. The lawyer had been expecting my call, and we scheduled a meeting for the following morning at Mitchell’s apartment on Central Park South, one of the priciest sections of Manhattan.
I didn’t know what to expect when I knocked. The door was opened at once by the maid. After I introduced myself and Nick Esposito, the colleague who accompanied me, we stepped inside. It’s difficult to describe how stunning the place was. It was tastefully furnished, and the walls were filled with original art — expensive, I presumed, though I didn’t recognize the names of any of the artists.
The very same Martha Mitchell, still in a robe, was sitting on a lounge chair. Although she wasn’t fully dressed in her daywear, her hair was carefully coiffed and her makeup was already applied. She eyed us suspiciously as we were led into Mr. Mitchell’s library.
Inside, Mitchell sat at one end of a rectangular conference table surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers sitting stiffly in their chairs.
I introduced myself first to Mr. Mitchell and shook his hand firmly while looking him in the eye, per FBI training.
He repeated my name and motioned for me to sit at the other end of the conference table.
Mitchell’s principal attorney in turn had each of the lawyers introduce themselves, but they didn’t get up, and we didn’t shake hands.
I took my seat as Nick sat beside me, but slightly to the rear.
The table was now getting crowded, and I got the impression they had expected me to show up by myself. Fat chance; headquarters had specifically instructed that the conversation not be recorded, which meant that I wanted a witness to my questions and Mitchell’s responses.
While I was taking the documents out of my briefcase, I discreetly let my eyes wander about the room. It was wood-paneled and stacked nearly floor to ceiling with books. I wondered if our esteemed former attorney general had actually read them or whether they were strictly for show. Later, because of his answers, I’d have bet on the latter. There were also several comfortable overstuffed chairs around the room near the bookcases. But it appeared that the most elegant chair at the conference table was at the head, reserved for Mr. Mitchell. I have no idea where it came from, but it looked like one a Supreme Court justice would occupy — a high back with beautiful scrollwork on the wooden part of the arms. The heavily padded chair rocked to and fro at Mitchell’s command; very comfy.
“Mr. Mitchell,” I began, “I’ve identified myself and my associate as Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” With that, I passed my credentials and Nick’s around the room. Each one of the attorneys carefully examined them, and copied down our credential numbers. Both Nick and I made sure our credentials never left our sight. Normally an agent would not hand them to anyone. But this was the former attorney general, and it seemed like the thing to do.
Once the IDs were safely back in our hands, I said, “Mr. Mitchell, as the former attorney general, you are aware that FBI agents are empowered to place respondents under oath in certain cases, this being one of them. Please stand and raise your right hand.”
Mitchell struggled to his feet and feebly raised a paw. His attorneys — in a knee-jerk reaction — stood too.
While administering the oath, I was struck by the fact that Mitchell appeared to be a tired old man, not one of the most powerful men in the former Nixon administration. The strain of possibly facing prison had obviously taken its toll.
With the formalities out of the way, we all sat down. I prefaced my questions by saying, “This interview is being conducted at the specific request of the Justice Department via FBI headquarters. The questions that I will be asking were prepared by Justice. We are not recording this interview but my associate, Mr. Esposito, will be taking detailed notes. Are there any recording devices turned on in this room?”
Mitchell and all of his lawyers simultaneously shook their heads. The questions prepared for me were follow-ups to Mr. Mitchell’s testimony before the federal grand jury. The Justice Department’s lawyers could have easily called the former attorney general back to the grand jury, but the questions were worded in a way that called for yes-or-no responses, and interviewing him in the comfort of his home was an accommodation made for his previous high position in government. The passage of time has dimmed my memory of the exact questions I asked.
I do recall that when I asked a question, Mitchell’s lawyers — I believe there were seven — scribbled down, word for word, what I said. I was amused at the overkill. Even though the attorneys were charging 1970s rates, Mitchell was doubtlessly paying a few thousand dollars an hour for what amounted to overpriced scribes; the attorneys did not utter a word during the interview. Mitchell thought carefully before answering each yes-or-no question. He evidently wasn’t sharp enough to use the fail-safe response: “I don’t recall.”
A pattern emerged early in the interview. When he told the truth, he answered fairly promptly. But when he was getting ready to lie, Mitchell took a long puff on his pipe and looked up, as if the answer would be revealed to him on the ceiling. He then would lie though his teeth. The former attorney general had been coached well enough by his lawyers: Answer the question, and stop. Don’t explain; that could lead to more questions.
The whole interview lasted maybe an hour. When we got ready to depart, Nick and I shook hands with each lawyer, and each gave us his card. I saved my last handshake for Mitchell, and thanked him for his time.
When we were clear of the building and out of earshot of the parties, Nick gleefully exclaimed, “We got him by the nuts!”
Although I agreed, I wasn’t happy inside; in fact, I was sick to my stomach. Here was the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, whose position I’d been taught to respect. But in reality he was just another slimeball lawyer, one of several I eventually would help send to prison.
The results of the interview were sent by teletype to FBI headquarters, and I thought my role was over. But with lightning speed, I received a response asking for follow-ups to a few more questions. So Nick and I repeated the process in Mitchell’s apartment once again and with the same results.
John N. Mitchell was convicted at trial in February 1975. Evidence would show that he controlled a secret slush fund used to pay for the Watergate break-in. I was happy not to have been called to testify. Mitchell was convicted with the overwhelming evidence gathered by the Justice Department and the grand jury. He served 19 months in a minimum security federal prison, and died in obscurity in 1988. The irony of the whole Watergate affair is that it was so unnecessary. A paranoid Richard Nixon somehow felt it necessary to gather political intelligence on his Democratic rival. But Nixon won handily anyhow, pulling in 61 percent of the popular vote and enough in the Electoral College to ensure his reelection.