JUNE 11, 1977
After everyone rattled around the Shaker House for a couple of days in a fidgety limbo, Phil spurred the promoters back to work on Saturday. They sat at a table in the coffee shop, picking over the details of various deals, until Phil and Mucci locked into a conversation and moved across the room so they could better concentrate.
During a lull, the other four—Jack, J.J., D’Amato, and Bendis—noticed the splintered faction. Bendis got up and walked over, then D’Amato. Soon the Junior G-Men joined them, reuniting the full group, until—fifteen minutes later—another pair of promoters cleaved off. In this way the meeting shifted, amoeba-like, throughout the day, conversations fizzling and ramping up. Schemes were proposed, batted down. Mucci handed Jack another of the stolen bonds from Pinal County, Arizona, that he’d shown the agents in February. Jack was free, he said, to try to fence it and split the take with him. Waitresses poured oily coffee and delivered plates of runny eggs and club sandwiches and pastries.
Near the day’s end, J.J. looked around and said to Phil, “You know, we’ve sat at every one of these twenty tables and messed every one of them up.”
No wonder the promoters seemed to age so quickly, he thought. They sat around eating diner food all day, smoked like Cleveland’s steel mills, and drank coffee until they switched to cocktails, sometimes as early as eleven a.m. Phil liked crème de cacao with Scotch—a sweet drink he sometimes mixed with coffee. For dinner, the agents often ordered filet mignon and baked potatoes. Phil was uninterested in food, which he attributed to a bad stomach—he and Jack were always sharing cylinders of Tums—but he often asked for the most exotic entrée. The promoters’ idea of a workout was walking from their room to the bar. Phil disdained exercise but maintained his weight of around 140 pounds. Jack, though, was naturally burly and starting to pack it on. Mucci was seriously overweight.
This lifestyle is going to kill us all, J.J. thought.
He made a decision: From that point on, his only meal would be dinner. He had started running back home, mapping out a two-mile route around the parking lot in his apartment complex. He’d brought his sneakers on this trip, and now he told everyone he was going for a run—partly as a stress reliever but also because it gave him a chance to meet with Bowen Johnson, who had recently started shadowing Jack and J.J. on their travels. The undercover agents always struggled to put together reports while they were with Kitzer because of Phil’s hours and intrusiveness. Johnson would wait in his room for his colleagues to appear, often between ten p.m. and two a.m. They usually looked exhausted as they recounted the relevant happenings of the day for their case agent. When that was finished, they collectively agreed on what to do next. It was a small, highly functioning democracy. “It was really a good group to work with,” Johnson said. “No one was out to be a hotshot, which was important because under those conditions you better be able to get along.”
There were even moments of levity amid all the pressure. One late night in New York, Jack stumbled and stuttered, trying to dictate the details of a complicated scam. J.J., sitting on the other bed, grabbed the recorder out of his hand. “Jack, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
J.J. spent the next ninety minutes trying to craft a lucid description of the fraud and noticed Jack lying on the other bed, his eyes closed. “You set me up!” J.J. yelled as Jack and Bowen started laughing. “You guys played stupid so that I would dictate!”
After the agents left, Johnson typically spent the next few hours alone, creating reports to send back to Indianapolis. If there were recordings, he drew up a list of key developments and leads for agents back home and around the country to move on even before the tapes arrived: Let Kansas know about Bernard Baker, and inform New York that Pro just ripped off $110,000. This material would first hit the desk of agent Steve McVey, who was coordinating OpFoPen full-time in Indianapolis. He would pass the tapes to the secretarial pool, which might spend the entire day creating transcripts. “We were generating enormous amounts of material on the road,” Johnson said.
This left him equally sleep-deprived, but Johnson, a Texas native with a pronounced southern drawl, was a company man. His father was an army officer, and Johnson had been an Eagle Scout who’d felt drawn to law enforcement work in high school, when he began practicing firearms with a local police team. Once out of school, he obtained his pilot’s license and ran charter flights; while teaching several FBI agents to fly, he learned about their work. “The FBI was magical, if you will, and I wanted to be a part of that,” he said.
He never could have envisioned his life as a key part of OpFoPen. Even the logistics, in the days before mobile phones or beepers, were dicey. In hotels, Johnson arranged for a room on a different floor or wing from Brennan and Wedick’s—or just stayed in another hotel—to minimize the chances of being seen with them. Generally, there was no way to make plans or coordinate. If Johnson needed to consult with the agents, he hoped to run into them away from Kitzer; he would ignore them if Phil was there. When they went to restaurants, he took a table across the room and studiously avoided glancing in their direction, while still staying vigilant to movement at their table. If J.J. was wearing the Nagra and needed a new cassette, he headed to the restroom. Johnson would wait a few minutes, then go pop in a fresh tape for Wedick, the two of them crowding into a bathroom stall. He carried a spare recorder, too, in case J.J.’s conked out.
Johnson settled at a table at a white-tablecloth Manhattan restaurant one night when Kitzer was particularly chatty. After working his way through a steak, then dessert, then coffee, only to glimpse Kitzer still chatting across the room, Johnson was stumped. Finally it hit him that the place had a humidor. He whiled away the rest of the dinner meeting puffing on a stogie, ignoring the unsubtle looks of displeasure from his waiter.
Operation Fountain Pen was like that: It could be unnerving, exciting, exhausting, and befuddling—all in a single day. “No one had done this stuff before,” Johnson said, “and you’re early enough in your career that more than anything it’s a bit of a heady experience.”
That day in suburban Cleveland, Wedick had made plans to meet Johnson during his jog. They’d picked Highland Park Cemetery, located down the street from the Shaker House, for a rendezvous. Wanting to work up a sweat, J.J. ran for a couple of miles before looping into the cemetery, looking back repeatedly to make sure no one was trailing him. Satisfied that he was alone, he started looking for Johnson, who was supposed to be pretending to be paying respects to a loved one. J.J. had told Johnson not to acknowledge him unless he approached and said it was okay. If he thought he was being followed, he would just run by.
But he didn’t see Bowen anywhere. What the hell is this? J.J. thought. At more than six feet tall with a powerful farm-boy build and dark hair, Johnson was hard to miss. J.J. slowed to a walk, trying to figure out what to do—he had forty-five minutes, tops, before he would need to be back, and he’d already run for thirty or more. Just then, Johnson popped out from behind a tomb, startling him.
“Jesus, Bowen!” J.J. said. “You scared the shit out of me.”
That evening, as Phil, Jack, J.J., and Mucci sat in the Shaker House restaurant, a mellowness pervaded the room. But the languorous mood ended when D’Amato stalked in and began pacing around, fixated on his delinquent mortgage. He fumed about Pro, and the money he’d promised, and about why Trident’s schtick would never last: Pro always had to repay a certain number of advance fees when the heat got too high. “Rob Peter to pay Paul,” D’Amato said. “Keep the cycle going. But it won’t work, ’cause I tried the same thing.
“I was in the same business, and what happened? You always spend the deposit money as soon as it comes in, and people get angry. They start screaming, and the deal just doesn’t work like that.”
As he was talking, D’Amato repeatedly kicked an empty beer can against a wall.
“Andy, I’ll explain to you what your schtick is,” Phil said.
“What’s that?”
“Someday,” Phil said, “when this case gets before a jury and they’re listening to the evidence, the only thing someone is going to be able to testify about…is that Andrew D’Amato was playing kick the can in the restaurant.”
Everyone laughed.
The next day, Phil and the agents left. The money order likely wouldn’t clear for another ten or twelve days. Before they split up at the airport, Phil offered J.J. and Jack another piece of advice: If they were ever questioned about the $110,000, they should say they were absent when the promoters discussed it and had no idea what was going on.
Dorian Mangiameli flew back to New York with a document for Pro instead of the $80,000. It was the letter D’Amato had brought home from London. It read:
Dear Mr. D’Amato,
We refer to the meeting we have had in London concerning a guarantee request by Iverson Inc. for an amount of up to U.S. Dollars $2.5 million in favor of Ambassador Factors Corporation.
As we have only received the information on this company in the last two days and because of the holidays in London due to the Jubilee, it will not be possible for us to make an offer for your client until next Thursday, 9 June 1977.
We wish to make clear that we are prepared to make such offer only on the basis of a Standby Loan commitment for 3 years for which we would establish reserves by depositing the necessary amount of money with prime international banks of our choice in London. Such deposit will constitute only the reserves of Eurotrust and would not be pledged or hypothecated in favour of Ambassador Factors Corporation. The proceeds of the deposit on the last maturity date after 3 years would be assigned to AFC.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
Yours faithfully, for and on behalf of Euro-Afro-Asiatic Trust,
G. R. Lanciault, Managing Director
Pro read the letter in shock. This was supposed to be the key that opened the vault to Iverson. Instead, the Eurotrust people were bridging him—using his own stall tactics!—and had even co-opted Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee and his use of pedantic vocabulary words like “hypothecated.”
“[W]hen Dorian gave me this,” he said, “…I really figured I got stuck. I checked with Mr. Guthrie and he told me I could wipe my ass with it. It was the most ridiculous thing he ever seen in his life, and I got took.”
He chafed for years afterward. “They really ripped me off,” Pro said later. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I rip off other people, but I thought there was some standard of honor among con men.”
Phil and the Junior G-Men returned to Cleveland a few days later, on June 18. Mucci had sent word that the bank in Tribune, Kansas, had wired the $110,000 to his account. Kitzer told him to have $5,000 ready when he arrived—a quarter of his cut.
The next day, Phil and the agents met Bendis with his wife and two kids at the Shaker House bar. Mucci was out of town at a funeral but had left Phil’s money. Bendis gestured toward an adjoining ballroom, and he and his wife and Phil walked in, leaving Jack and J.J. behind. Bendis’s two kids played a game by the revolving door. After a minute, the agents crept up to the window in the doorway and watched the threesome in the center of the ballroom.
Bendis asked his wife to hand Phil a brown Central National Bank envelope. “I’m glad to get rid of that,” Bendis said. “That is a hot item to handle.”
Phil removed several hundred-dollar bills and tucked them into his pocket.
Mrs. Bendis murmured, “Oh, so much money.”
“Well, for all the grief and aggravation we gave you sending Bob away to London, here, get yourself a dress,” Phil said. He handed her two hundred dollars.
The three of them rejoined Jack and J.J. “Gee, that was a good deal,” Bendis said. “We should get one like that once a week. It came just in time. I was almost at the end of my rope.”
J.J. smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “You don’t know how bad we needed it.”
On Monday, Kitzer, Bendis, and Mucci climbed into Bendis’s car to head for Mucci’s bank. They stopped at a diner en route, and at a table inside, Mucci said, “Okay, Phil, how are we going to cut this up, the $110,000?”
“Are you bound and determined to take the whole $110,000?”
“Absolutely,” Mucci said. “I’ll not return one dime to Fred Pro.”
“Armand, this is going to bring heat,” Phil said. “You’re not going to jerk that $80,000 away from Fred just that easy.”
Mucci nodded. “I can handle any heat that Fred puts out.”
“What about the FBI?”
“I don’t care about the FBI.”
Phil suggested that they leave $60,000 in the bank until they had a chance to see how Pro reacted.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Bendis said.
“Okay, I’ll go along with that program,” Mucci said. “But I don’t care what happens. I won’t return the money.”
At the bank, Phil took the balance of his $20,000. Mucci cleared up his overdraft and picked up $17,000 for D’Amato’s house, then withdrew some for himself and Bendis.
Four more days passed before Pro realized that the money order had been cashed. On June 24, Bernard Baker called to ask about his loan. Pro had started explaining that he was having trouble clearing the money order—Mucci had told him as much earlier that day—when Baker informed him that, in fact, it had been cashed in Cleveland, and the money was now sitting in an account at Central National in the name of Armand Mucci.
Fuming, Pro called Mucci and demanded that he send back the balance of $80,000. They began shouting at each other. Mucci told Pro, “You ripped off somebody, so how do you like it when we rip you off for a change?”
As Pro bellowed a reply, Mucci said, “Fuck you,” and hung up.
Pro called back repeatedly, but Mucci wouldn’t answer. Fred seethed. His coveted Iverson deal had fallen through, and now he’d lost the $110,000.
He picked up the receiver again. This time Pro dialed Joe Trocchio, his sometime mob muscle. He would not let this thievery stand.
Brennan and Wedick headed home to Indiana on June 20, but they had barely returned to their lives when Phil called again. He wanted them to accompany him to Haiti to work on starting up First National City Bank. They’d been expecting this: With Seven Oak on the verge of burning out, Phil was hungry to get the new vehicle running, but they needed a break. The travel was murderous: two weeks, then ten days, then nearly three weeks, during which Jack slipped off his wedding ring and had little contact with Becky, and J.J. abandoned a romantic interest in his apartment building.
Phil’s neediness was easier for J.J. to handle. He now saw that he could build his future around this case, and he burrowed so deeply into the work that he scarcely noticed the absence of any personal life. After they returned home and caught a breath, he collared Jack to go to Indianapolis for meetings, and to finish reports and catch up on paperwork. They often returned home so late that Jack flopped on J.J.’s couch for the night.
Even still, they both struggled to fulfill their basic obligations—especially the routine paperwork. Jack found this aspect of the job particularly problematic. He had a tendency to start things and not finish them, and the scrap heap on his desk now resembled the aftermath of a rockslide.
At one point Jack submitted a reimbursement voucher for more than $7,000 that he’d charged on his personal American Express. Each expense was supposed to be assigned to an open case. “Jack would just say, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, just put ‘Miami, $4,000,’ ” J.J. recalled. Then he would send the invoice to the FBI’s accounting office (run by the infamous Cox brothers, widely referred to as “the Cox-suckers,” who were notorious for bouncing expense vouchers that had a single out-of-place number).
Inevitably, the form soon reappeared in Jack’s box stamped with the word DISALLOWED. He regarded the paper as if it carried news of an office smallpox outbreak. Although J.J. also went months without submitting travel vouchers, he laughed at Jack’s palpable allergy to the bureau’s box-checking ways. The only letter of censure Jack ever received was for not submitting paperwork in a timely manner.
“Nobody’s caring about your AmEx bill, okay, Jack?” J.J. said, laughing. “It’s the harsh truth, get over it.”
Sometimes the demands, the stress, and the pull of different worlds created friction. J.J. wanted to work long days, even when they had time away from Phil—they had prosecutors to meet with, strategies to discuss. There was always another task. At some level he knew the case was consuming him, but he didn’t care. Work, he later acknowledged, was “almost like an addiction.”
Jack, meanwhile, wanted to go home and relax and see Becky and his sons after spending so much time on the road. He was acutely aware that his boys went without seeing his face for long stretches. He also enjoyed meals on a conventional three-a-day schedule, while J.J., who now ate only dinner, chafed at his partner’s food breaks.
One day, everything boiled over. The agents retreated to a conference room in a far corner of the office and began screaming at each other. Even from behind the closed door, the shouting was so loud that everyone sitting nearby stopped working and looked at one another in alarm. No one had seen Jack get angry before. Eventually someone went to find Frank Lowie, who tentatively knocked on the door: “Are you guys all right in there?”
Lowie opened it halfway. J.J. and Jack looked over, flushed and startled. They said yes, sure, they were fine. They just needed to blow some lava out of the cone.