We are in a world in which we must choose between being a victim or an executioner—and nothing else. Such a choice is not easy.
—ALBERT CAMUS
We stepped on some big toes. There’s been a lotta pressure on the assholes.
—MEL WEINBERG
Weinberg sat quietly in the corner of the Strike Force office and watched it all come down. It was Saturday, February 2, 1980. The phones were ringing incessantly. Ashtrays overflowed. Styrofoam cups of half-finished coffee littered the desk tops. FBI agents and assistant Strike Force attorneys barged in and out of Tom Puccio’s inner sanctum. Everybody and everything was in motion.
He tugged contentedly at his cigar. The big day. Some hundred FBI agents were banging on the doors of Abscam targets from New York to Florida. The Senator, the Congressmen, the middlemen, the swindlers, all of them getting the bad news. He pictured it in his mind. Howdy, Mr. Congressman. We’re FBI. We got some great home movies showing your ass in a sling.
Somehow, the newspapers were on to it. Newsday and the New York Times would be running stories. NBC had filmed pictures of the agents at Senator Williams’s house. Puccio and Good were unhappy about the papers. Newsday had named every one of the Congressmen and the Senator. Puccio said that the paper’s reporters had been sniffing for the past week. Weinberg grinned. He liked Newsday. Besides, he couldn’t understand the fuss. With the story out in the open, the Department of Justice was locked in. No way to kill the cases in private.
Weinberg felt good. If he had been familiar with the word, he would have described the feeling as elation. He had met and taken some of the biggest people in the country. Rich, successful people. Educated people. Him against them. The kid from the Bronx and still world champ-een. He liked the sound of it. Greed was the equalizer. The idea of big bread was a magic wand. Wave it and, presto! smart people become instant assholes. Always.
It had been a dynamite morning. First Howard Criden had come to the hotel at the airport. Puccio wanted the attorney tied more directly to the Myers and Lederer bribes, and so Amoroso set it up. When Criden arrived, the agent assured him that the sheikh was due in any minute. Further, to reassure the sheikh he told Criden that he wanted to tell Yassir everything that he had done for him. Criden had gushed. He had started with Myers and Lederer and kept on going. He boasted that he had five more Congressmen ready to come in for bribes. He said Murtha was now ready to take the money. Then FBI agent Bill Quinn had knocked on the door. Criden stopped for the expected regal entrance of Yassir. Amoroso had opened the door for Quinn and turned to Criden.
Amoroso: Howie, my name is Tony Amoroso.
Criden (mystified): It’s okay.
Amoroso: Okay. Just so you know, okay? An FBI agent. Sorry, Howard.
Criden (pause): Yes, sir.
Quinn: Bill Quinn. How are you?
Criden (pause): Okay.
Amoroso: They’re gonna talk to you.
Criden (sighs): Okay, gentlemen . . .
At Puccio’s office later in the day, Criden admitted he had become vaguely suspicious during the last week. The undercover FBI agents used on the Philadelphia end of the sting looked too much like policemen. He said that he had continued, hoping he was wrong, because he was already too deeply involved to make any difference.
The netting of Rosenberg and Weisz was another matter. True to his word, Rosenberg had come with a suitcase, ready to stuff it with money. He had gone slackjawed when Amoroso told him that FBI agents wanted to talk to him. Weisz was a more interesting performer. Amoroso had given him $50,000, solidly linking him to the Kelly payoff. But when the FBI agents identified themselves and demanded the money back, he wouldn’t give it up, screaming that it was his finder’s fee. His lawyer finally convinced him to surrender the cash.
Now, as Weinberg blew cigar smoke he thought about Mayor Errichetti. From what an agent had said on the phone, the Mayor had clammed up when he got the news. That was no surprise. Errichetti was a stand-up man. His type of man. They would have made a helluva team. Unbeatable. Maybe a firm called W & E Investors. No. The Mayor would insist that his own initial come first.
He had last spoken to Errichetti the day after Christmas. The Mayor, for a change, had answered the phone. His voice had seemed softer, more friendly. They had reminisced. The Mayor had needled him. They’d had a couple of laughs. Sure, they had agreed, we’ll get together after the holidays. Weinberg sighed. He would miss Errichetti.
One confrontation predictably was a heated one. That evening there was a nasty scene in Puccio’s office. Robert Del Tufo’s assistant Ed Plaza had come in from Newark to monitor the action. As usual, he came ready to fight. He had started pumping Puccio and Good and they gave neutral answers. One word had led to another and Plaza had shouted, “I hope you all fall on your faces.” Good controlled a strong impulse to punch Plaza in the nose. Plaza had stomped out. Up his, Weinberg grinned.
In the rush of events the newspapers and television made Abscam a household word. It was, they said, the biggest scandal in the history of Congress. After exploring the plight of the Congressmen, the media became interested in Weinberg, now under guard twenty-four hours a day. On one of his trips home to Florida Weinberg received a telegram from New York Daily News columnists Jimmy Breslin and Mike Daly. It read:
IF YOU CALL ME COLLECT ON THE TELEPHONE, I WILL PUT YOUR NAME IN MY STORY IN A VERY BIG NEWSPAPER IN NEW YORK.
He grinned. Just what he needed. But he was flattered. Breslin was big time. He folded the telegram and kept it as a souvenir.
There was the usual rush for credit. It was the day of the bosses. Civiletti, Heymann and Nathan took their bows in Washington. The New York Times and the New York Daily News incorrectly lionized Neil Welch, retiring boss of the New York FBI office, as the man who supervised the Abscam investigation. A fine agent, Welch had had almost nothing to do with the case. It was impossible to ignore the role of Weinberg and Amoroso. Their names dominated the tapes. Puccio kept the limelight as prosecutor of the major cases.
Totally ignored was the role of FBI Supervisor John Good, the man who started Abscam, ran it, protected it, and brought it to a successful conclusion. So were the names of others who had actually done the work: FBI Agents Myron Fuller, Jack McCarthy, Steve Bursey, Ernie Haridopolos, Bruce Brady, Gunnar Askeland, Bob Fitzpatrick, Margo Denedy, Ed Woods, Mike Wilson and Tom McShane. Little was made of the courage displayed by FBI Director William Webster. Nothing was said about Strike Force attorney John Jacobs.
Many of the Senators and Congressmen mentioned on the tapes as potential targets were interviewed by FBI agents. Their stories varied. Some were flabbergasted. They said they had never been approached to meet with Abscam agents. Others said that they had refused invitations to attend Abscam meetings. The invitations, some said, had come from lawyers and known middlemen like Silvestri.
Many of these officials were undoubtedly telling the truth. Criden and Errichetti had occasionally overestimated their ability to produce a given Congressman. Silvestri was a flagrant name-dropper. Neither Criden, Errichetti nor Silvestri, however, cooperated with the government. As a result, it may never be possible to know how many of the Senators and Congressmen mentioned on the tapes refused Abscam meetings only because they would not come from behind their middlemen and take the bribes directly. Another question left unanswered is why none of the unsuccessful bribe offers were reported to authorities.
On his trips to New York in the weeks following the arrests Weinberg stayed under an assumed name at the Holiday Inn on the Long Island Expressway in Plainview. He scanned all the daily papers and flicked the TV from one news show to another. The sting had become special to him; this was his scam, his most perfect creation.
Most of the comments were favorable. The others were predictable.
House Speaker Tip O’Neill told a reporter, “It was a setup, a goddamn setup.”
Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey said, “I deplore the fact that the rights of those being investigated have not been protected; and I deplore the rush to condemn, to joke and be cynical.”
Joseph Lordi, Chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, told an audience that he opposed “the reprehensible handling of the Abscam probe by the FBI. Never in all my years in public office in New Jersey have I seen anything like what has happened this week.”
Ira Glasser, an official of the American Civil Liberties Union, fired off a letter to Attorney General Civiletti questioning how much evidence of wrongdoing had been available before the targets for the undercover investigations had been selected.
Congressman John F. Seiberling of Ohio said that Congress needed to look into “the idea of giving some people of dubious moral standards free rein to entice anyone they can entice to commit a crime.” His concern was echoed by Congressman Peter Rodino.
At a hearing of Rodino’s House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Webster stoutly defended the use of special undercover agents like Weinberg. He said that the FBI had used similar sting techniques in the past. Rodino disagreed. “It’s an entirely different kind of case, a different kind of setting,” said the New Jersey Congressman. “[It is] fraught with so much peril of jeopardizing reputations.”
U.S. Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota told the press that he too had been a visitor to the Washington townhouse. He said that Weinberg and Amoroso appeared to be businessmen interested in helping some Arab friends stay in the United States. He said that they vaguely mentioned something about contributions. He added: “After two or three minutes, I stood up and said the purpose of the meeting was different than I was led to believe. I repeated three times the word illegal.” He implied that he had stalked out.
The Washington Post, scooped on the Abscam story by Newsday and the Times, complained in an editorial: “No citizen, member of Congress or not, should be required to prove his integrity by resisting temptation . . .”
There were other developments. Rosenberg pleaded guilty. Congressman Murtha agreed to testify for the government. Congress replaced Murtha on the House Ethics Committee with Congressman Wyche Fowler of Georgia. Congressman Patten decided not to seek reelection. And New Jersey State Senator Joseph Maressa gave a unique explanation of why he had taken Abscam money. He said, “The Arabian Nights portrait these two agents painted was such that I felt like it would be patriotic to take some of the OPEC money and get it back to the United States.”
Congressional committees spent weeks flexing their muscles and then quietly subsided. So did headlined promises of a massive housecleaning in New Jersey. The Casino Control Commission got some new board members, following the sudden resignation of Vice-Chairman Kenneth MacDonald. State Democratic Chairman Richard Coffee remained at the helm of his party. And Caesars Boardwalk Regency was promised a permanent license on the casual condition that Cliff Perlman and his brother divest their interests in the corporation. Earlier, Resorts International had gotten its permanent gambling license after the commission decided that the firm and its officials had no ties to Meyer Lansky.
The Department of Justice, meanwhile, concentrated on finding and punishing those responsible for leaking Abscam information to the press. Richard Blumenthal, the United States Attorney from Connecticut, was appointed to conduct the probe. Swarms of FBI agents descended on Good, Amoroso, Puccio and other members of the Abscam team. All of them volunteered to take lie detector tests and spent hours answering questions. Weinberg was interviewed twice. He agreed to take a polygraph test at the first interview. At the second he flatly refused.
Media columnist Tom Collins reported in Newsday: “The question in many journalists’ minds is a simple one: Who is going to wind up in jail: reporters or Congressmen?” He might well have thrown the entire Abscam team into his equation.
As spring 1980 advanced, the defense strategy emerged clearly. The defendants had either been entrapped or victimized by investigative overstep. And the chief government witness against them was a known swindler and liar named Mel Weinberg. Defense lawyers began playing hardball. As usual, Weinberg was in the middle.
Reports filtered into the Department of Justice that Weinberg had hustled some of the targets for expensive gifts, claiming that he would forward them to Abdul and Yassir. Most of these claims came from defense lawyers and were reported to Washington by Del Tufo’s office in Newark. New Jersey garbageman George Katz said that he had given Weinberg three expensive gold watches. The victim who complained loudest, however, was Mayor Errichetti. He claimed to have given Weinberg a stereo, a video cassette recorder, a TV set and a microwave oven. The story was first headlined in the Philadelphia Bulletin.
• • •
Another plague of FBI agents descended on Weinberg. The three watches were produced from the FBI property room in Hauppauge. Weinberg had turned them over to Good after he received them from Katz. Sure, he had asked Katz for them, he said. He wanted Katz to believe that he and Amoroso were the kind of people who would cheat their own employers if the deal was right. Why wouldn’t someone in his position do that? He denied taking anything from Errichetti, and produced a bill of sale from a local department store for the microwave oven found in his home.
“Washington’s spendin’ more time on me than it is on the Congressmen,” he complained to Good. “Suppose I had scammed the Mayor for a TV, what the hell difference would it make? Either these bums took bribes or they didn’t, and we know that they did. I don’t see them offerin’ to give the money back to the government. Why doesn’t Washington bother them?” Good spent almost every night with Weinberg. He explained that the government prosecutors had to be prepared for any defense argument.
The Department of Justice assigned the various Abscam cases to four U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Thomas Puccio got Errichetti, Williams, Myers, Lederer, Thompson and Murphy. He also got the case involving Carpentier and the bribed immigration agent. Washington got Kelly and Jenrette. Philadelphia got the three City Councilmen. Robert Del Tufo got Atlantic City, MacDonald, Maressa, Silvestri and Katz in connection with reported bribes to Errichetti and Mayor Gibson. The other three offices immediately demanded Weinberg’s help in preparing their cases. Puccio was accused of keeping Weinberg under wraps for himself.
A meeting of the four offices was called for June in Washington by Assistant Attorney General Philip Heymann. Several problems were to be thrashed out. Of foremost concern was access to Weinberg. The prosecutors from Philadelphia and Washington, who would be handling the cases in those cities, had never even met him. If Weinberg was going to be their star witness, they wanted to look at him and talk to him.
There was also the problem of the tapes. They were everywhere, and many had not yet even been transcribed. Many of the tapes were in Puccio’s office; others were in Hauppauge, still others were in Florida. Some of the cases had moved from city to city as they unfolded. A tape that was important to one of Puccio’s cases in New York was equally important to a case in Washington. Some of the tapes were vital to cases in three or four of the jurisdictions. Few copies had been made. Collecting, sorting, copying and transcribing the tapes would be a nightmare.
The leaders of the FBI Abscam team were ordered to the meeting. Good was told to bring Weinberg. The feisty con man gloated. Finally, he was coming face to face with Washington.
They gathered in the glistening J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI’s national headquarters. Weinberg was impressed. Where was the room where they meat-axed expense accounts, he asked Good. The FBI supervisor humored him. “All around you,” he said, extending his arms. “John, I believe yah,” Weinberg snorted.
They entered the conference room and took seats. Amoroso sat on one side of Weinberg, Good on the other. Good’s Washington supervisor, Michael Wilson, sat nearby. The rest of the people in the room stared at Weinberg as though he were an odd insect that had slipped through the porch screen. Screw you too, he thought, as he stared back benignly.
Assistant Attorney General Heymann peptalked teamwork, coordination and the imperatives of professionalism. Then he turned the gavel over to his assistant Irving Nathan and left the room. So much for Heymann, thought Weinberg. He decided that Nathan, who was young, smart and arrogant, personified his image of a wise-assed Washington lawyer. It was instant dislike.
The session lasted for a week. It was tough work. Again and again, Weinberg struggled to express the abstracts of the Abscam operation. It was one big sting, but thousands of little stings too. No case had any clear beginning. An idea would start in a conversation with one person. Word would pass from one middleman to the other, one target to the next. He had heaped fuel on the fire as it spread.
As he tried to explain the vast network of stings his audience would understand only parts of the illusion. Weinberg was frustrated in his efforts: as though he were describing a tapestry to people who were only interested in looking at threads. Gradually, however, they made the connections.
He listened, fascinated, as Justice Department officials discussed the elements of entrapment. It was more a discussion of what was not entrapment, than what was. Temptation was allowable. It all came down to the person being tempted. Would he have been disposed to commit this or a similar crime? That was the key question. If the government virtually wrestled a person into committing a crime, that was entrapment. None of Abscam’s targets, the team members argued, had been talked into committing a crime that they didn’t want to commit. None had said no. The only push, they explained, had been to have the defendants do personally what they had offered to do through middlemen. The crime was the same either way.
Weinberg was asked about calls that were not taped and others that were only partially taped. Patiently, he explained about the tape malfunctions. Other times, he said, he had simply run out of tapes. Each call had to be recorded on a separate tape. On days when he got eight or ten calls at his home, his supply of tapes would be exhausted. Whenever he could tape, he said, he did. Hadn’t he taped his controversial instructions to Senator Williams?
Irving Nathan asked Weinberg about a book Weinberg supposedly had been commissioned to write. Was he writing one? Weinberg truthfully replied that he was not personally writing a book. The questions then came rapid-fire. Weinberg admitted that he was involved in a book project. Nathan announced that the government did not want him to write a book. With that Weinberg blew. What in hell, he asked, had the government done for him? He wasn’t a government employee, and consequently, he didn’t have to take orders from Nathan. The matter was dropped.
Shortly after the coordination session, the hostility between the Abscam team and Ed Plaza of Robert Del Tufo’s office in Newark erupted into another bitter quarrel. It happened on June 18, 1980, at the office of the United States Attorney in Washington, where Plaza and his assistant Robert Weir had come to interview Weinberg and Amoroso. Good was present.
Weinberg refused to talk with them, as did Amoroso. Good bluntly told Plaza: “You’ve been breaking our balls since the beginning of this case. You don’t believe in this case. You’ve been lying to us; you’ve been telling untrue stories. You’ve been after Mel’s ass. We don’t trust you. We don’t want to talk to you.”
Plaza replied, “That’s a lie.” Weir then asked Good to put his cards on the table. Good didn’t hesitate. He pointedly asked why Newark had not yet impaneled a grand jury to begin hearing evidence on the Abscam cases it had been assigned by the Justice Department. All of the other U.S. Attorneys’ offices, he said, had already gotten indictments. The implications of Newark’s passivity were clear.
The meeting broke up and the three team members stalked out as Plaza and Weir placed a call to Heymann. But the Department of Justice took the cases away from Newark. The Attorney General sent a member of his own Washington staff to take over the Abscam cases assigned to Del Tufo’s office. Del Tufo resigned the next month. But Plaza and Weir stayed on. Later they would appear as witnesses for defense attorneys attempting to overthrow the Abscam convictions.
In July, there was a dress rehearsal in Philadelphia for the coming Abscam trials. The Philadelphia Councilmen had made a motion before a Federal judge to throw out their indictments charging that the government had violated their rights by orchestrating the Abscam press leaks. Reporters and editors from Newsday, the New York Times, NBC and the Philadelphia Inquirer were subpoenaed to the hearing. So were Good, Weinberg and a bevy of government officials.
Scheduled to go on trial in Brooklyn the following month were Congressman Myers, Mayor Errichetti, attorney Howard Criden and Criden’s law partner, Philadelphia Councilman Louis Johanson. Errichetti’s lawyer was Ray Brown, the attorney who had completely changed the focus of a New Jersey murder case and won acquittal for his client after maneuvering a New York Times reporter into a contempt sentence for refusing to reveal his sources of information. The Philadelphia hearing smacked strangely of Brown’s strategy.
The only real casualty of the hearing was Jan Schaffer, a plucky Inquirer reporter, who was given a six-month contempt sentence for refusing to answer a question that might reveal her sources. Weinberg’s debut as an Abscam witness was not exactly a triumph. He seemed ill at ease, a person in search of a posture. At one moment he was cocky, at the next hesitant. Richard Ben-Veniste, Criden’s lawyer, adroitly skipped from subject to subject, testing Weinberg’s defenses for the bigger trial to come.
Weinberg was totally unprepared. He had been at home with Marie in Florida under the impression that he would not actually be called to testify in Philadelphia. The night before, a call had come from New York. He would testify the next day. Marie hurriedly packed an overnight bag and he left the house immediately with two FBI agents. At that late hour connections into Philadelphia were made with difficulty.
Both government and defense witnesses are usually prepared by their lawyers before testifying. From these prep questions, witnesses get an idea of what to expect on the stand. There was no session with Assistant U.S. Attorneys of the Philadelphia office before Weinberg took the stand the next day. They sat at the prosecution table voicing few objections to Ben-Veniste’s wide-ranging examination. The judge was crusty, frequently demanding that Weinberg answer questions more explicitly. Alone on the stand he felt abandoned.
For the usually ebullient Weinberg, it was a low point. Over the following days he was unusually subdued, wondering if the fix had already been made in Washington. Was his side setting him up to be the Abscam fall guy?
Thomas Puccio reassured Weinberg emphatically. The government was determined to make the charges stick. Puccio himself would try the cases in Brooklyn. Good and Amoroso virtually lived in Weinberg’s hotel room early that August as he studied transcripts of the Myers case. They dined with him almost every night, reinforcing his ego, helping him anticipate defense tactics. Weinberg’s brash confidence flowered again in the sunshine of their attention.
His restoration was complete when he read in the newspapers that defense lawyers were predicting they would wipe the courtroom floor with him. They would hammer at his background as a professional swindler. They intended to prove that he had been a thief and liar all of his life. When they finished, they said, no juror would ever believe him. It was a well-planned strategy, designed to put a witness on the defensive.
What the defense lawyers failed to understand, though, was Weinberg’s excessive pride in his criminal career. Crooks who boast about their crimes quickly wind up in jail. That had been Weinberg’s lifelong cross, as though a painter had been forced to hide a masterpiece in a locked closet. Now Weinberg would get a chance to display his to the entire world. He couldn’t wait to take the witness chair.
• • •
Every eye in the Brooklyn Federal Courtroom was on Weinberg as he came through the doors on that August morning of 1980 and walked to the stand.
Pete Bowles caught the scene in Newsday: “Melvin Weinberg, the government’s chief undercover informant in the Abscam operation, walked into Federal court yesterday wearing a three-piece, cream-colored suit, patent leather shoes, a gold bracelet, two pinkie rings and a smile of confidence.”
Weinberg gazed over at Federal Court Judge George C. Pratt. A tall, thoughtful jurist with a keen mind, Pratt was generally regarded as a rising star on the Federal bench. He would preside over the bulk of the Abscam trials for the next year.
Thomas Puccio gently took Weinberg through the prosecution’s case. Amoroso had already introduced the videotape of the Myers payoff as evidence. Weinberg for his part described the various taped conversations he had had with Mayor Errichetti and Howard Criden. Skillfully, Puccio linked them to the bribe, a careful orchestration. For the record, he also asked Weinberg about his old conviction in Pittsburgh. It went quickly.
Then the defense lawyers took over and hammered at Weinberg for the next three and a half days. The game plan was evident in their questions. To establish entrapment, they introduced the tape in which Weinberg coached Senator Williams in the hotel lobby. Hadn’t he done the same with Myers and the other defendants? He replied that he hadn’t. They pointed to gaps on the tapes and to conversations for which there were no tapes. Hadn’t he erased and destroyed tapes that would have shown him coaching the defendants to commit crimes? No, he had not.
They led him through the various salary and bonus payments he had gotten from the government. Wasn’t he really a bounty hunter, paid by the scalp? He could barely conceal a smile as he denied it. Wasn’t he going to get rich on a book? He admitted that he hoped so. His answers were cool and exact. The witness seemed completely at ease.
Then they launched into his criminal career, asking him about his early days of window smashing, the Yaqui Indian deal, the South American trip, Swiss Bank Associates and London Investors. They painted a picture of a committed swindler and he admitted to it. Twice, Ben-Veniste asked him why he was smiling.
Defense attorney John Duffy had fired the first salvo:
Duffy: Do you know what a con man is?
Weinberg: A con man is someone who will try to con ya outta somethin’.
Duffy: Maybe I can help. Is he a fellow who lies?
Weinberg: A con man tries to tell the truth as much as possible. Otherwise he will get in trouble.
Duffy: Are you a con man?
Weinberg: I don’t know. They say I am.
Duffy: Have you spent most of your adult life living by your wits, sir?
Weinberg: That’s correct.
Duffy: Living off of money that you got from other people under false pretenses?
Weinberg: That’s correct.
Duffy: Is it fair to say that a confidence man will lie, cheat and swindle whenever it serves his purpose to do so?
Weinberg: That is correct.
Duffy: To further his own interests?
Weinberg: That is correct.
Duffy: And you say you have been known as a confidence man?
Weinberg: That’s correct.
Next to question Weinberg was Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and the tiger of the defense. Weinberg admitted that London Investors had been a scam and that he had franchised it out.
Ben-Veniste: In the London Investors scam, you had actually franchised that scam to con men all over the world?
Weinberg: We franchised it, but not to con men.
Ben-Veniste: Not to other con men, but for other con men to use the same scam?
Weinberg: That’s correct.
Ben-Veniste: Right. You were like the MacDonald’s of con men?
Weinberg: That’s correct.
Weinberg was excused from the stand and the case dragged on. The Mayor’s nephew-driver Joseph Di Lorenzo testified that he had delivered TV sets, a stereo and a video recorder to Weinberg at his uncle’s request. Under cross-examination from Puccio, he said that he never asked Errichetti about the contents of attaché cases the Mayor had carried from the Abdul office. During a court recess, the youthful Camden Energy Director remarked to a stranger, “If I asked my uncle a question like that, he’d smack me in the mouth.”
Both sides made their summations. The defense argument was best posed by Duffy. He told the jury: “It’s Mel versus Ozzie [Myers]; that’s what it boils down to.” Judge Pratt gave his charge on Saturday, August 30, 1980, and the jury retired. Weinberg returned to his motel, a Holiday Inn near New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
Weinberg sat that night at a table in the hotel dining room with FBI Agent Steve Bursey and two friends from Long Island. He puffed on his cigar and confidently predicted a guilty verdict. The Myers case was Abscam’s strongest. Without it the others would surely fail.
But as the evening waned without a verdict, he showed tension. He toyed with the food on his plate and bit more deeply into his cigar. Twice he left the table to call the Strike Force office in Brooklyn. “Nothin’ yet,” he reported at 9:35 P.M. He sat down again and talked. “Both sides took their best shot on this one,” he said. “If we win, I think the rest of them will fold. But if we lose this one, we got big problems. It took big balls for the FBI to take on Congress. There could be a lotta blood on the floor.”
Shortly after 10:30 P.M., Weinberg went up to his room. He tossed the jacket of his three-piece Pierre Cardin suit onto the king-sized bed and called Puccio’s office again. “Nothing’, huh?” He hung up and slouched on the bed. The bureau was piled high with tape transcripts. He was supposed to study them for future trials. He waved toward the transcripts. “Well, if the verdict comes in bad, at least I won’t have to read all this shit,” he said.
Shortly after midnight, the phone rang. Weinberg had been watching a movie rerun on television. He grabbed the phone. “Yeah?” he barked. There was a pause as he listened. He broke into a grin. “All of them? On the big ones? Great. Thanks.” He turned to his visitors: “Guilty,” he said. “What did I tell ya.”
Weinberg was wrong about future guilty pleas. The five remaining Congressmen would all go to trial. Weinberg and Amoroso would testify each time. And all five would be found guilty. The Williams case would not be tried until April 1981.
Weinberg was the prime defense target at each of the Congressmen’s trials. He blunted the attacks with an unexpected blend of candor and humor. Myers, Jenrette and Thompson all tried to explain away the damaging videotapes with the excuse that they had been drunk when the bribes were passed. Given the lush-quotient of Congress, the excuse was plausible, but juries didn’t buy it. Kelly argued that he had taken the money as part of his secret investigation of hoodlum Ciuzio and others. The jurors convicted him anyway.
Several days after the Myers trial, Weinberg was back in Florida. He had come home to Marie. Now he stood with his son on a pier near his house. Nestled alongside was his boat, a trim sports cruiser. A friend was there to talk for a few minutes before father and son went fishing.
Suppose, he was asked, the convictions were overturned by a higher court. Would he feel that Abscam had been a waste? “Nah,” he answered. “We showed what was really goin’ on. The tapes are the record. Nobody can change that. New Jersey stinks and so does Congress. The courts can find all the technical shit they want, but it don’t affect the bottom line. Nothin’s gonna change though, because that’s the way people are.”
He said that he couldn’t resume his career as a swindler. “I’m too well known,” he grinned. “I’d have to go awful fuckin’ deep in the woods to find a sucker who ain’t heard of me. Besides, knowin’ too much makes ya nervous. I’d always be lookin’ for empty screwholes in doors. And if some poor bastard came to me with an attaché case, I’d probably smack him in the nose and toss it out the window.” He paused for a minute as he prepared to shove off. “But then again,” he shrugged, “who knows?”
The boat swung away from the pier and nosed into the bay. As the cruiser moved away, its name stood out in bold letters painted on the stern:
UP YOURS II