In 1993, in his capacity as a union official, my dad fell under the dreaded scrutiny of the FBI Strike Force. They were vigorously probing union corruption and the connection to organized crime. Nobody was under the illusion for a second that when Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, he went underground to join an ashram in Nepal; more like under the ground of the football stadium then under construction in the Meadowlands.
The Freedom of Information and Privacy Act permitted me to initiate a general inquiry as to my father’s criminal life—not that I knew anything about the FBI Strike Force interest in him. I conjectured it was worth a shot to see what I could see about his past, and that’s where I first found out about it. Eleven months after my first formal request for information, I received eighty printed pages in his file.
The records indicated that the FBI had indeed staked him out. They were looking into the possibilities of his swinging sweetheart deals and taking in something like $500 a month under the table, trivial stakes considering the high risk. Notes refer to him as a former numbers runner in Brooklyn, and indicate that he went to the track every day, and that his son, my younger brother, was… At which point the notes were inscrutably redacted, but no doubt they indicated my brother was a drug addict and a felon, but why this information mattered here was left unexplained. The pages were heavily redacted elsewhere, too, and they would also not send me ten more pages existing in his file on the grounds that these contained information as to confidential procedures and identification.
When all was said and done, months later, my dad would be in the clear. As explained in a March 3, 1993, internal memo to the director, re: JOSEPH DI PRISCO, the FBI investigation “has revealed no specific evidence of criminal activity based upon these allegations [of a ‘sweetheart’ deal between union officials and employer representatives]. Investigation has shown evidence of possible misrepresentation to union members involving coverage of benefits. Information regarding this possible misrepresentation has been forwarded to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“On March 2, 1993, Assistant United States Attorney GEOFFREY A. ANDERSON declined prosecution in this matter. For this reason, the San Francisco Division is placing this matter in a ‘Closed’ status.”
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I myself have been the subject of a federal racketeering investigation. Actually I was identified as the prime suspect, formally advised by an FBI agent not to leave town, my phone tapped, my meetings covertly filmed, the whole deal. In case you’re wondering, being branded the prime suspect in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act investigation is not something you would put on your bucket list. My own lawyer advised the Bureau they were on a RICO fishing expedition. Lawyers voice such a cliché to the feds, and in my case it was true. Probably. We never really understood what they were looking for, and our requests for clarification were met with the default position: “All in due time,” which meant, “wait till discovery.” We had a few guesses—having to do with my connections with people who they probably believed were mobsters, and my involvement in business ventures, restaurants specifically, in which men of Italian descent went after each other, in the courts and elsewhere. My entrepreneurial associates and friends weren’t mobsters, not really. Considering their various enterprises and all the vowels in their names, it was vaguely plausible to speculate as much, I suppose. But that I was the button in a racketeering operation? Wow, that was most surely insanely implausible. All they had to do was look into my financial assets or slice open my lumpy mattress to determine conclusively I was no big fish—but the skinniest sardine in the sea. Come to think of it, they did look into my finances, and evidently shared the numbers with people they interviewed—or so I was told by my brother, whom they interviewed.
I have been attempting for years to gain access to my own FOIA files, so far without success. But I will soldier on till I do. Seems overwhelmingly likely the FBI was intending to leverage me, to use me against my associates and to pressure me to flip on them—about what? I would like to know what their theory was. Hey, they surely knew my father’s confidential informant past, so I guess it was worth a shot.
My case was eventually dropped as well, for reasons they never explained, and not before the scrutiny shredded my life for about a year. All that time, I was an anxious mess. One thing you never want is the feds investigating you—or, as the old man would delicately phrase it, up your ass. DOJ resources are effectively infinite, and nobody is innocent of everything, including me—and with all due you know, probably including you, whoever you are.
Also as it happened, the special agent in charge, the one who told me to stick around and not take any trips, interviewed my father about my activities. Talk about a switch I couldn’t have anticipated. In advance of that interview, I had briefed him a little bit, not that there was much I cared to reveal, but he himself didn’t care to know too much, pure Brooklyn, pure plausibly deniable Pope. Afterward in our postmortem of the interview, he said it went all right, and he didn’t have anything to tell the guy. I wished I could have been a fly on the wall to hear his non-responsive, passive-aggressive answers to the fed’s queries.
How my father fared, emotionally and psychologically, during his own Strike Force investigation I will never know—which I guess applies to many other stages of his life. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t take its toll. Either that, or he had the mud to withstand the onslaught. Of course, I never knew about that investigation into him until shortly before he passed and his dementia took hold. In his lifetime, he never once said a word to me about the episode. In my dad’s eyes, and as far as his son was concerned, it never happened. Who wantsta know?