. . . I have nothin’ to hide. I’m an open book; if I can make a buck, I make a buck.
—MEL WEINBERG, 1979
The United States Courthouse for the Eastern District of New York is a white, concrete rectangle in what is known as downtown Brooklyn. It is a clean, efficient but graceless building, with a shabbily kept park fringed with maple trees opposite the main entrance, a cool haven from the hot summer sun and a nighttime refuge for muggers and perverts. A few blocks away, over the gargoyled façades of turn-of-the-century office buildings, the pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge spear the sky, dimly visible through a blue haze of exhaust fumes.
Motorists fight for parking spaces on the narrow street fronting the courthouse amid a confusion of signs warning that the block has been reserved for the parking convenience of government bureaucrats.
It was the shank of August 1980; at 9:00 A.M. on this day it was characteristically hot and humid in Brooklyn, and Federal workers raced the last few steps to reach the air-conditioned coolness of the lobby.
Despite the humidity the air was electric with anticipation. Television newsmen with their camera crews were assembling on the sidewalks, and press photographers congregated against the row of parked cars at the curb. It was during this preparatory moment of relative calm that a nondescript car with government plates eased down the street and abruptly nosed into a reserved parking spot.
The driver, a modishly slim FBI agent, quickly exited and walked around to the passenger side, glancing up and down the street as he moved. The agent nodded quickly and the passenger door sprang open. Out stepped Melvin (no middle initial) Weinberg.
Blinking owlishly in the sun despite his tinted, aviator-style sunglasses, Mel Weinberg snipped the end from a huge Te-Amo Toros cigar, jammed it into the corner of his mouth and scanned the sidewalk running to the courthouse door. “Photographers,” he said to his companion, FBI Agent Tony Amoroso. Weinberg spoke softly. The only visual indication that he was talking was a slight up-and-down jiggle of the Churchillian cigar.
“Walk like we belong and they’ll think we’re part of the scenery,” said Amoroso. Weinberg grinned agreement and the two men moved down the street, past the idle photographers and into the courthouse. They took the elevator up to the third-floor offices of the Eastern District Federal Strike Force.
When the two men strolled into the large, nearly empty ready-room, several agents murmured automatic greetings before returning to their gin-rummy game. Weinberg and Amoroso slumped into easy chairs and sat quietly. They had worked together for nearly two years and felt no need to fill comfortable silence with useless words. Each was deep in his own thoughts.
Mel Weinberg took stock of himself. For a fifty-five-year-old confidence man, swindler, avid hustler of the fast buck, the avenues of life seemed to be merging this morning at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. He couldn’t complain. For a runny-nosed kid who had barely graduated from grammar school, he hadn’t done badly. Learning, always learning, he had progressed through a thirty-five-year career in white-collar crime—from hustling phony gold contracts over Formica-topped tables at all-night diners to lavish office suites on Long Island, a staff of 500 franchised salesmen and an annual cash income of more than $500,000.
He had worked North America and five other continents, fleecing public officials, movie stars, dictators, generals, mobsters, political terrorists and ordinary businessmen with democratic impartiality. His enemies regarded him as a conniving crook; neutrals called him a rogue, and a small army of underworld admirers and incredulous cops added to the legend daily as they swapped Weinberg stories in the world’s bars, jails, cafés, courtrooms and whorehouses.
The money was good and, through the years, Weinberg had developed an appetite for first-class living. But, as he readily admits to himself and his few close friends, the real reward of scamming is the fun of the game. Each new “mark,” or potential victim, was a new mind to be wrestled to the ground in a one-on-one battle of wits.
For a bright, agile-minded person like Weinberg, who compensates for his lack of education by sneering at books and passionately embracing the argot of the New York streets, there was heady satisfaction in skinning the powerful, well-educated elite of the business and government world. And he was able to quiet his few moral scruples by remembering an adage that had always been operational in the world of confidence games. The adage goes: You can’t con an honest man.
Weinberg puffed on his cigar and gazed absently around the still quiet ready-room. Thoughts flowed through his mind in vagrant order. He pictured his mother, still going strong in her late seventies, by now up and about in her Miami condo. He was generous to his mother, as he had been to all the women in his life. He visited her often and was considerate about helping with matters important to her happiness. She in turn had a special affection for him despite her vocal reservations about the way he made his living.
He grinned as he recalled a recent telephone conversation between his mother and his sister Sylvia on Long Island. It was occasioned by headlined accounts of his career as a confidence man. “Nobody else in the family ever did things like Mel,” she exclaimed. “I don’t know where he gets it from. But Mel is basically a good boy.”
All in all, thought Weinberg, he was satisfied with his life. There had been a few moments of pure terror, terror that turns legs to jelly and, as Weinberg would put it, makes “the asshole so tight it can’t pass a mustard seed.” There was, for example, the time he fleeced a young Miami lawyer out of $8,000 and afterward checked into the high-rise Holiday Inn in Hallandale to relax for a few days.
A few hours later he answered a knock on the door. In barged a New York hoodlum with a small band of helpers. The hoodlum, it seemed, was the mark’s uncle, and he took the swindle as a gesture of personal disrespect. The thugs calmly opened a window and proceeded to push Weinberg out as he frantically tried to fast-talk his way back into the world of the living.
As he later recounted: “I kept throwin’ the names of big hoodlums at this guy and telling him that I was connected with them and they’d be mad at him if he killed me. They kept inchin’ me outta the window and I kept tryin’ for the magic name. I finally said it just before I grew wings.”
But mostly he remembered the good times: Julie Podel ushering him to an upfront table on opening night at the Copa; the white flash of camera bulbs as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas made him an honorary citizen, blissfully unaware that he had just hustled some of the state’s leading citizens for a quarter-million in cold cash; the respect he saw in the eyes of the lesser primates when the listing “Herring with Sour Cream Weinberg” appeared on the menu at Orlando’s, a popular Long Island watering spot.
And then there were the girls and the money. Lots of them and lots of it. Good times.
It was all coming together, probably ending, here and now. The United States Government, in a rare flash of wisdom, had hired the considerable talents of Mel Weinberg, con man. He had cast his net and hauled in a heavy catch of corruptible Congressmen and public officials. Already defense lawyers were bellowing that the government, in hiring Weinberg, had assumed an unsporting advantage in the war against greed.
Weinberg was scheduled to take the stand as a government witness today. Defense lawyers had already announced to the press that they regarded Weinberg as the heart of the government’s case. They said that they were going to have the case thrown out by destroying Weinberg on the stand.
Wreathed in cigar smoke, Weinberg contemplated the battle and enjoyed the idea. Lawyers. More smart guys with college educations, offshore tax shelters, pot-head kids and bony wives who talked like they were biting on marbles and always got headaches when they climbed into the sack. He’d had a lifetime of lawyers. Their meters were always running.
Today lawyers were the enemy. He would follow his own advice: “Play stupider than them and sooner or later ya always get ’em by the short hairs.” The lawyers could be had, but nothing was going to kill the headlines. And when a con man’s face and name get too well known, he’d better find a new line of work, particularly if he’s been doubling as a government agent.
Mel Weinberg does not look like the smooth, prototypical con man. He is squat, resembling a gray-bearded fireplug; a few strands of carefully arranged brown hair tenuously bridge his bald pate. He speaks with a gravelly voice in the rich accents of his native Bronx and he talks in the slang of the underworld. He wears $200-designer sweaters and Christian Dior socks, but they don’t affect him. He admires luxury, but its nuances escape him.
He ruefully recalls the time that he was trying to impress a mark in a swank French restaurant on his first foray into Europe. Weinberg was paying and trying to act suave. He ran his finger down the wine list pretending comprehension and ordered a bottle of red listed at $45. A few minutes later, the waiter returned and with a suitable flourish poured a small amount into Weinberg’s glass to be tasted. “Fill it up, ya fuck,” Weinberg barked. “Whaddya think I’m payin’ for?” He has since absorbed a rudiment of sophistication, and a style that is unique.
He had come to testify that day in a cream-colored Pierre Cardin suit with matching vest, and a shirt and tie in shades of yellow. He wore a gold bracelet on one wrist and gold rings with diamond chips on each pinkie finger. This ensemble, combined with the tinted sunglasses, gave him the look of a retired mobster on opening day at Santa Anita.
Tony Amoroso looked at Weinberg speculatively and broke his silence. “The Pooch [Eastern District Strike Force Director Thomas Puccio] is sure gonna love your uniform,” he said. Both men grinned at the thought of the ultraconservative Federal prosecutor. “Screw ’im,” replied Weinberg. “He ain’t got no taste.”
The excitement in the courthouse had been building for a week ever since the start of the bribery trial of Philadelphia Congressman Michael J. (Ozzie) Myers and three codefendants—Angelo J. Errichetti, Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Philadelphia City Councilman Louis C. Johanson and Howard L. Criden, a Philadelphia lawyer.
The trial was the first in a series, all involving brand-name Congressmen and public officials, which had resulted from an audacious FBI undercover operation dubbed Abscam (short for Abdul scam). The two-year investigation, starting in the murky world of white-collar crime, had burgeoned into a massive corruption probe reaching from the city halls of the East Coast to the United States Senate and, maybe, even higher.
At the core of Abscam was Mel Weinberg, the sting man. The government had paired Weinberg with Amoroso and a series of other FBI agents to pose as the American representatives of two imaginary Arab sheikhs, Kambir Abdul Rahman and Yassir Habib. Operating behind a dummy corporation on Long Island called Abdul Enterprises, Ltd., Weinberg and Amoroso laid out the bait: The two sheikhs wanted to invest their OPEC-swollen billions in the U.S. and eventually—after they had completed the rape of their national treasuries—find permanent asylum in this country.
A small tribe of hustlers, middlemen, con men and influence brokers, that mysterious breed that seems to emerge from nowhere when there is the scent of big money, swarmed over the bait like flies. They brought in the Congressmen and public officials. And Abscam grew.
The list of indictments in Abscam was impressive. Besides Myers and his spear carriers, Federal grand juries had already returned bribery counts against Representative Raymond F. Lederer (D-Pa.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee; Representative Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-N.J.), Chairman of the House Administration Committee and the powerful subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations; Representative John M. Murphy (D-N.Y.), Chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee and Chairman of the Select Committee on the Outer Continental Shelf; Representative John W. Jenrette, Jr. (D-S.C.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and Representative Richard Kelly (R-Fla.), the only Republican in the batch.
Another Congressman, Representative John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a member of the House Ethics Committee, had dodged possible indictment and agreed to become a Federal witness in the Thompson and Murphy cases. And even now, according to office scuttlebutt, Strike Force attorneys were presenting Abscam evidence on U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., to another Federal grand jury. As Chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, Williams exerted a strong influence on the domestic policies of President Jimmy Carter.
With predictable media focus on the easily understood issue of corruption, an even more chilling thesis of the Abscam case went unnoticed: the fact that supposed agents of a foreign nation could so easily bribe some of the most powerful members of the United States Congress. Some of these very Congressmen had been at the forefront of the battle to win greater Congressional control over the day-to-day activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Almost from the beginning of the case, the government taped everything: telephone calls, hotel room meetings, casual conversations. A tape recorder with a suction-cup telephone attachment had become as much a part of Weinberg’s everyday accoutrements as his cigar snipper or the brown plastic box in which he carried his high-blood-pressure and heart pills.
Every major meeting between the government agents and Congressmen, mobsters or middlemen was videotaped—particularly those meetings where actual payoffs were made. Video cameras equipped with special lenses were aimed through the screens of dummy TV sets, ceiling light fixtures, keyholes and even needle-thin holes drilled into doors and walls. The film, combined with the recorded phone conversations and audiotapes of the bugged meetings, provided the government with devastating evidence.
Throughout the investigation, platoons of FBI agents and secretaries worked late into the night transcribing more than a thousand tapes, some of which ran 150 typed pages. At times the mounds of transcripts threatened to engulf the modest Strike Force office. They were stacked on the floor against walls, heaped on desk tops and piled on most of the vacant chairs.
The attention devoted to massing this overkill of evidence went far beyond that devoted to the ordinary criminal case. And it was prompted by more than investigative fascination with electronics. Both the Justice Department (the prosecutors) and the FBI (the investigators) were emulating the pragmatism of a former Miami Strike Force director, who, when asked why he hadn’t indicted a close friend of President Richard Nixon’s for security fraud, replied, “You don’t jump on a king unless you can kill him.”
In the Abscam case, Congress was king. Congress controls the budgets of both the Justice Department and the FBI. Congress can hamstring government agencies, remove functions, eliminate departments and skewer key government officials in front of its committees. Congress has the power to subpoena and to hold in contempt. Congress has done some noble things, and it has done some contemptible things. But Congress has one enduring characteristic: it tends to regard attacks on its members as threats against the institution itself. Revenge is often swift and undiscriminating.
Right now, Congress was in a cantankerous mood. Opinion polls showed that it stood even lower than the legal profession in the public’s respect. With increasing frequency its members were embroiling themselves in scandal. Koreagate lingered like a bad dream. There was a widespread perception that Congress had become so beholden to competing special interests that it was no longer capable of operating in the national interest. Now there was Abscam. What had been public contempt for Congress now verged on hostility.
For the once legendary FBI, Abscam promised to be the benchmark of its new beginning. Sullied by Watergate, demoralized by the pettiness of J. Edgar Hoover in his waning years as Director, and harassed by charges of illegal procedures, the Bureau had been revamped, rekindled and aimed in new directions by a series of able directors. If the Abscam cases were successful in the courts, the courage and professionalism shown by the FBI in taking on Congressional corruption could restore public confidence in the agency.
Caught in the middle was the Justice Department. The Attorney General is appointed by the President. He is publicly charged with enforcing Federal laws and privately expected to be as benign as possible toward the President and the President’s friends and political supporters. This spirit of benevolence has sometimes involved the outright squelching of a criminal case, whispered warnings to FBI targets, or carefully orchestrated bumbling. There are also more subtle forms of prosecutorial avoidance, including the demand for excessive evidence, bureaucratic delays, cost-paring and the catch-all excuse: legal technicalities.
There were two successive Attorneys General during the Abscam investigation, both of whom monitored every step in the various cases. They were Griffin Bell and Benjamin R. Civiletti, both professional Democrats and close friends of President Carter. Both would appear to have acted properly, although, as the tapes poured in, they evidently had some extremely squeamish moments.
On one tape, a politically connected New Jersey garbage racketeer, who candidly talked about bribing Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson, confided that Attorney General Bell, apparently at President Carter’s request, arranged for the United States Attorney in Newark to quash an income-tax evasion case against Gibson. Other tapes detail arrangements made to bribe U.S. Senator Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia and Atlanta Congressman Wyche Fowler, Jr., both strong supporters of the President and close associates of Bell’s in the Georgia Democratic organization. Both Talmadge and Fowler, who have denied knowledge of any bribe negotiations, lost interest in the deal rather abruptly, according to an account given by a middleman who was arranging the meetings.
In still another tape, South Carolina Congressman John W. Jenrette, Jr., who said he left a White House party early so that he could meet with Abscam agents to discuss his bribe, boasted that the White House had promised him help in squelching a proposed Justice Department investigation of his part in a scandal-tainted South Carolina real estate deal. He later told the agents that his attorney had talked with Civiletti and the investigation had been killed.
There were also party considerations. Almost all of the Congressmen in the Abscam net were Democrats. They were concentrated in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, heavily populated northeastern industrial states important to the President in the 1980 elections. Although some of those indicted were strong supporters of President Carter’s primary opponent, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy (D-Mass.), many of the tapes involved Senators, Congressmen, city mayors, state legislators and party officials who were ardently behind the President. And all of them, Democratic friends and foes, would be needed after the convention when the party closed ranks for November.
Furthermore, hundreds of pages of still secret tapes, including an hour-long session with Alvin Malnik, top money-mover for mobster Meyer Lansky, bared inside details of how the mob, working with bought public officials and politicians, controlled the casino gambling industry in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City. If this information were made public, it could wreck casino gambling in Atlantic City and block it in New York and Florida. Leading Democratic politicians were closely associated with pro-casino gambling interests in all three states.
Abscam was a political burden to the Attorney General, not only because leading Democratic Congressmen faced sure indictment but also because the tapes were larded with the names of even more prominent Democrats. Among them were House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.), House Majority Leader James C. Wright, Jr. (D-Tex.), House Majority Whip John Brademas (D-Ind.) and Representative Peter W. Rodino, Jr. (D-N.J.), Chairman of the powerful House Committee on the Judiciary. One middleman even offered to produce Senator Ted Kennedy.
On the Republican side of the ledger, besides Representative Kelly of Florida, the only names mentioned on the tapes were those of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), Senator Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.), Representative Norman F. Lent (R-N.Y.), and Steven Stockmeyer, executive director of the Republican Congressional Committee. In the case of Thurmond, who has said that he was never approached with any bribe offer, it was Jenrette, a Democratic Congressman from the same state, who offered to make the contact. And in the case of Javits and Lent, it was clearly stated by the middleman that neither one would take any money personally for assisting the mythical Arabs. Instead, said the middleman, Javits suggested contributions be made to the GOP committee through Stockmeyer.
Many of these names, Democratic and Republican, may have represented nothing more than the fond pipe dreams of middlemen anxious to impress the undercover agents. But these same middlemen did produce a number of Congressmen, almost all of them Democrats, who did take bribes. And, if the Abscam cases were prosecuted and the names of the other Congressmen were revealed, the sheer number of Democratic names might foster a public impression that the party was totally corrupt.
Nonetheless, Civiletti eventually endorsed the Abscam indictments and did so despite a ready-made excuse not to prosecute any of the Abscam cases. The excuse arrived on his desk while the investigation was still in progress. It came in the form of a lengthy memorandum arguing that the government—particularly hired swindler Mel Weinberg—had gone too far in enticing some of the defendants.
The memo was sent to Civiletti by Robert J. Del Tufo, the United States Attorney in Newark, who was charged with the investigation and prosecution of Federal crime in New Jersey. Del Tufo, a Democrat, had been nominated for his post by Senator Williams. Through the course of the Abscam investigation, Del Tufo had been routinely briefed on its progress and the contents of the tapes as they applied to New Jersey politics and politicians, including Senator Williams.
The memo was the final shot in a behind-the-scenes battle for control of the investigation between Eastern District Strike Force Director Tom Puccio and Del Tufo. The feud had developed as Weinberg and FBI undercover agents penetrated deeper and deeper into the corruption that permeated New Jersey politics and government.
Del Tufo, who had been named on two of the tapes as the official designated by Attorney General Bell to kill the income tax case against Mayor Gibson, resigned, citing “financial reasons” shortly after the first Abscam indictments were returned. But not before his chief assistant told members of Puccio’s staff that he hoped the Abscam probers would “fall flat on their faces.”
Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI, all stood to be affected for better or worse by Abscam. So did many as yet unnamed Senators, Congressmen, public and party officials, businessmen, union executives and underworld figures. Abscam itself, or the hundreds of investigations that would be spawned from information contained in the mountains of Abscam transcripts, could threaten a billion-dollar investment in Atlantic City, reverse the eastward migration of casino gambling, tumble powerful political organizations and even provide a margin of difference in a presidential race.
Credit for Abscam belongs to only a few people. John Good, the tireless, streetwise FBI supervisor, started Abscam and supervised it from beginning to end. Tom Puccio gave it case craft and unstinting support. And FBI Agent Tony Amoroso and a small platoon of dedicated fellow agents provided it with day-to-day professionalism. But it was Mel Weinberg who styled Abscam, wrote the investigative scenario, shaped the bait and planted the sting. As Good will quickly admit, without Mel Weinberg there would have been no Abscam.
Abscam, after all, was a massive confidence game. The United States Government was running the swindle and the marks were streetwise hoodlums and public officials. All of them had survived by being careful and it took an extraordinarily gifted swindler to catch them.
Weinberg’s touch in the Abscam investigation was as obvious to his FBI pupils as a hammerhead shark in the kitchen sink. The budget-conscious government investigator simply cannot think in terms of Dom Pérignon refreshment, rented Lear jets, leased Lincoln Continentals and authentic Louis XIV furniture. The government mind tends more to Sears, Roebuck suits, dinner meetings at Howard Johnson’s and discount rooms at the local Holiday Inn.
Weinberg was the difference. He had run every con game in the business for more than thirty-five years and been arrested only once. He was a master of the sine qua non of the confidence world: the plausible story. He could talk his way into and out of any situation. He knew how to stall, cajole, inveigle and entice. And he knew that props were vital to the game. Weinberg had to create a lure so irresistible that the targets would come to it. That lure was the aura of easy, big money. And Weinberg was able to marshal all of his skills as an experienced con man to build that aura replete with chauffeur-driven limousines.
James West, former U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh, who nailed Weinberg with his only conviction in 1977, recognized something familiar about Abscam from the first news reports. “I said, ‘Damn, that must be Weinberg,’” West told a reporter for the New York Daily News. “He’s a very unusual person. He’s very persuasive and convincing. He’s heavyset; he’s balding; he doesn’t dress well; he’s not very smooth or suave. But he’s the best talker I ever heard . . . this guy Weinberg is very good. He may be the best.”
SCENE
A private plane flying at night over New York State’s lower Hudson River Valley. At Weinberg’s feet is a suitcase supposedly containing $750,000. It actually holds torn-up phone books. Next to him in the plane sits a 320-pound hoodlum who is leading Weinberg to a remote country airport where he and his waiting confederates plan to exchange more than a million dollars’ worth of art treasures for the suitcase. The pilot and Weinberg’s “art expert” are both undercover FBI agents. Weinberg’s idea for the fly-in exchange has finally convinced the nervous art thieves to deal. He got the idea from a television movie.
SCENE
A suite at New York City’s swank Plaza Hotel. An FBI agent in the headdress of an Arab sheikh waits to receive an attorney who wants to sell the Abscam agents more stolen art. Other FBI agents are posing as the sheikh’s assistants. There is a small problem. Weinberg insists that Arabs always serve food to guests, but he is told that the Abscam budget at this stage of the investigation cannot afford Plaza-priced hors d’oeuvres. A fuming Weinberg storms out of the room and returns a short time later with his own favorite snacks—kosher corned beef, potato salad and coleslaw. The agents question whether a real Arab sheikh would be serving Jewish delicatessen to an honored guest. “Don’t worry,” says Weinberg. “We’ll tell this guy that the sheikh admires Jews so much, he only eats Jewish food when he’s outta his own country.” The attorney, who is Jewish, arrives, swallows the story—and the corned beef.
SCENE
A sixty-five-foot yacht named the Left Hand sits at Fort Lauderdale’s famed Pier 66 under a full spring moon. Aboard the yacht, Weinberg, assisted by undercover FBI agents, is throwing a party in honor of Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti. The carefully selected guests include swindlers, politicians, mobsters, narcotics smugglers, contractors and at least one murder-fugitive. A hush falls over the crowd as a robed Arab sheikh steps forward, embraces the Mayor and presents him with a gleaming “tribal” dagger. Errichetti, eyes glistening, promises his friendship and aid to the sheikh. The sheikh is an FBI agent. Weinberg had purchased the dagger at an Athens flea market for $2.75.
• • •
Sitting in the Strike Force ready-room at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, Weinberg gave little thought to the effect of Abscam on national politics and the institutions of government. He could care less. As he had told Philadelphia lawyer Howard Criden in one taped conversation: “I don’t get into politics, because, uh, politics you can go nuts with. They’re all a buncha humps as far as I’m concerned.”
Abscam was a highly personal thing to Weinberg. For the last two years he had mustered every skill and used every trick he had ever learned as a con man. To Weinberg, Abscam was what victory over the Persians was to Alexander, the Sistine Chapel was to Michelangelo, Mount Everest to Hillary. It was both the fruition and the valedictory of his career in crime.
The Abscam trials (including the Myers case already underway in a courtroom just overhead on the fourth floor) were the crucibles in which Weinberg’s ultimate scam would be tested. Successive batteries of the nation’s most skilled defense lawyers over the next year would be paid millions of dollars to rip Abscam to shreds and nullify Weinberg’s testimony.
Weinberg was determined this would not happen. And he knew that the Myers case was the most important one of all. Already some of the other defendants were exploring the possibility of pleas if Myers were found to be guilty. Each of these defendants would in turn become a government witness, shoring up some of the weaker cases. But if Myers and his codefendants were found innocent, Weinberg was certain that the Justice Department would rush to quash the rest of the Abscam cases before the November election.
Since early in February 1980, when details of the Abscam investigation were first revealed in the Long Island newspaper Newsday and the New York Times, Weinberg had led a hectic life. Attorney General Civiletti, who lost all his options on Abscam when the newspapers published the names of the Congressmen and details of the actual bribes, had ordered a massive internal investigation to fix blame for the news leaks.
Despite the unflagging loyalty of the FBI, Weinberg quickly realized that he was not exactly popular at the higher political levels of the Justice Department. Twice he had been visited at his new Florida home by Department investigators who insisted that he admit that he was the source of the news leaks. Without any advance notice or preparation, he was flown to Philadelphia on Justice Department orders and shoved onto a Federal Court witness stand where he was questioned by defense lawyers who also hoped to blame him for the news leaks.
He was called to Washington by Attorney General Civiletti’s top aides and told that they did not want him involved in any book about Abscam. He refused and angrily countered he had heard that Neil J. Welch, who had had no part in Abscam, had already resigned as an Assistant Director of the FBI to write a book about it. He refused Justice Department instructions to cooperate with the United States Attorney’s office in Newark, claiming that the office was more interested in trapping him than in prosecuting corrupt politicians in New Jersey.
During this time FBI Agents John Good and Tony Amoroso stayed almost constantly with Weinberg, sympathizing, supporting and, where possible, trying to rationalize Washington’s heavy hand. At one point, Weinberg grew so incredulous of the Justice Department’s attitude that he complained to Good: “All my life I’ve been movin’ careful; I was always lookin’ over my shoulder for the law. If I knew then what kinda schmucks you guys got runnin’ things in Washington, I coulda made another five million bucks.”
But now the first trial had begun. The nation and, it was to be hoped, the jury had been shocked as Puccio turned the courtroom into a literal theater of corruption. The jurors and spectators watched enthralled as videotapes played over thirteen television sets showed Myers taking a $50,000 bribe from Amoroso and Weinberg in a motel room at New York’s Kennedy Airport. In return for the money, the Congressman promised to introduce legislation to provide permanent asylum for a mythical Arab sheikh.
And the country was given a chilling civics lesson on the screen as Myers took the money from Amoroso and said, “Tony, you’re going—let me just say this to you—you’re going about this the right way. I’m gonna tell you something real simple and short. Money talks in this business and bullshit walks. And it works the same way down in Washington.”
In still another taped court exhibit, Myers was seen in a Philadelphia hotel room, complaining to another undercover FBI agent that he had only gotten $15,000 of the $50,000 handed to him by Amoroso and Weinberg. He asked for another $85,000 for himself and to take care of various Philadelphia City Councilmen and unspecified mobsters. Other tapes and witnesses revealed how Myers’s three codefendants, Mayor Errichetti, lawyer Criden and City Councilman Johanson, had divided the balance of the $50,000 bribe to Myers among themselves—their commission as middlemen for putting the bribe deal together.
And in what Newsday’s Pete Bowles described as “pure Marx brothers,” the government showed a tape in which Criden and Errichetti unsuccessfully tried a reverse con on Amoroso and Weinberg, introducing a junior member of Criden’s law firm as Mario Noto, Deputy Director of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. The courtroom howled with laughter as a suspicious Weinberg asked the poorly coached ringer to repeat his name and the fake Noto replied, “Mario Nopo. N-O-P-O.”
Even the Democratic Convention, which was going on in New York City that week, couldn’t push Abscam off the front pages and the defense took a heavy mauling in the newspapers and on TV and radio. Weinberg was scheduled to take the stand as a government witness as the trial began its second week and defense attorneys confidently assured the press that the entire case would turn around once they finished beating up Weinberg on the witness stand.
It was 9:50 A.M. when John Good walked into the now busy ready-room, went over to Weinberg and Amoroso and deadpanned: “Always sitting around. Don’t you guys ever do any work?” Both men groaned and Amoroso extended his hands palms up in the ageless Italian gesture of helplessness in the face of injustice. Good smiled encouragement at Weinberg and said, “They’re going to try to get you to lose your temper on the stand, Mel. Just tell it like it is and don’t let them get to you.”
“Hey, John,” said Weinberg, his cigar at a jaunty angle. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
“Okay,” Good said, glancing at his watch. “Why don’t we get on upstairs so you can see what it looks like before things get started. All the pretty girls want your autograph.”
The three men went out to the elevator, Weinberg stroking his beard in the same automatic way and for the same reason that a woman unconsciously pats her hair when she hears she is about to meet a member of the opposite sex. The elevator disgorged them into the crowded fourth-floor hallway. Lawyers, reporters, defendants, friends of defendants, spectators, marshals and court attendants milled in front of the courtroom door. “Over there,” said Good, indicating a doorway opposite the courtroom with a nod of his head, “is the marshal’s office. When you’re not on the stand, wait there.”
Weinberg stood unnoticed in the doorway of the marshal’s office for several minutes, looking curiously at the defendants as Good and Amoroso went into the courtroom. Errichetti, expensively dressed, gray hair modishly swept back, machine-gunned conversation at his statuesque blond wife and his lawyer Ray Brown. The Mayor’s wife noticed Weinberg and she quickly bit on the knuckle of her right index finger—the ancient Sicilian sign of a vendetta.
A few feet away, Criden peered owlishly through his horn-rimmed glasses at Weinberg over the shoulder of his bantam-sized attorney Richard Ben-Veniste. Myers, his handsome Irish face set in the look of contrition affected by small boys as they enter the confessional, and Johanson, a forgettable man, huddled down the hallway with their lawyers Plato Cacheris and John J. Duffy.
A bustle of movement inside the courtroom signaled that the Honorable Judge George C. Pratt had taken the bench and the trial was ready to resume. The defendants and their lawyers, followed by assistants toting large black trial bags, scurried into the courtroom. The huge doors swung shut and Weinberg was alone in the hallway with his thoughts.
A few minutes later, the courtroom door cracked open slightly and a blue-uniformed court attendant peered out at the man in the hallway. “Weinberg?” he asked. Weinberg nodded slowly. “You’re on.”