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The House on Ninety-Second Street
When they were teenagers, Bob Levinson’s oldest sons thought the greatest way to spend a Sunday afternoon was to sprawl out on the living room couch with a bag of Famous Amos cookies and watch Mafia movies. Dan and Dave were big fans of Goodfellas, and Dave had memorized nearly every line spoken by Ray Liotta, who portrayed Henry Hill, a mobster in the federal witness protection program. The boys would crack up as Dave reeled off dialogue. Their father liked to sit nearby, at the kitchen table reading a book. But sooner or later, he would get up and walk over to his sons with a disapproving look. “I used to put guys like this away for a living,” he would remark, and tell them again he thought movies like Goodfellas romanticized thugs. Dan and Dave knew it came with the turf when your father was an FBI agent. “That’s cool, Dad,” they responded before going back to the movie.
Bob and Chris had seven children. The three oldest were girls, Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah, followed by Dan and Dave, then Samantha, and finally, Douglas. Their children had been born over sixteen years and they were all brought up to revere the FBI; they liked having an agent for a father. As kids, they would race to the front door when they heard it open in the evening because the first one to greet him got to pull off his shoes. He always came back from FBI trips with presents. One time, he handed out tee shirts decorated with pictures of pineapples, a reference to “Old Pineapple Face,” the name coined by Panamanians for Manuel Noriega, their pockmark-faced president who was arrested by the United States on drug trafficking charges. The kids helped him keep his files organized by stapling his expense receipts into them. None of them realized some of the receipts were records of cash that their father had paid to criminals and other sources for information.
For Bob and Chris, raising a big family on a $90,000 FBI salary wasn’t easy. The couple’s first home in Coral Springs, Florida, where they moved in 1984 after Bob transferred to the bureau’s office in Miami from New York, was tiny. The three oldest girls shared a bedroom outfitted with bunk beds and a trundle underneath that was pulled out at night. When a new baby arrived, Bob created a nursery by cordoning off part of the dining room with a curtain. Chris never went food shopping without filling her purse with coupons, and a big family night out meant going to McDonald’s on days when two hamburgers were on sale for the price of one. No one minded and the kids were happy and thriving.
By the late 1990s, the family needed more money. Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah were in college or about to start, and soon there would be four more college tuitions to pay. Bob also wanted Chris to have a bigger home and a more comfortable life. During their long marriage they had never gone away alone together for a weekend. In 1998, when he was fifty, Bob decided to leave the FBI, seven years before mandatory retirement age. After three decades as a federal agent, he joined the exodus of graying government detectives into the private sector, where he could triple his salary. But leaving the FBI behind would prove far harder than he imagined.
When Bob started in law enforcement in the 1970s, private investigators were regarded as sleazy snoops hired to catch cheating spouses or find runaway teenagers. By the 1990s a new corporate investigations industry was feeding a growing demand for information from companies, Wall Street firms, lawyers, and others. Manufacturers making pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, and high-fashion handbags needed investigators to track down criminals producing counterfeit versions of their products. Hedge funds and private equity firms were hungry for secrets about investment targets. American companies and banks doing deals with businessmen in Russia and Eastern Europe wanted to know if they were corrupt or had criminal ties.
The big investigative firms were staffed by former prosecutors, retired agents from the FBI and other agencies, and ex–newspaper reporters. They adopted the veneer of law firms and charged clients similar rates. One of the largest, Kroll Associates, employed dozens of investigators and had offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was a highly competitive industry in which firms won contracts by convincing clients they had the connections to deliver valuable “strategic” information. Often, they produced high-priced smoke—reports that blended fact, rumor, and speculation. Their tactics could also be as bare-knuckled as those of the old-time private eyes who spied on love nests. In the late 1990s, one major new source of work for corporate investigative firms came from Russian oligarchs, financial and industrial magnates who had gained astronomical wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. The oligarchs liked to depict themselves as a new breed of Russian entrepreneurs, Western-style capitalists who succeeded through shrewd dealings and risk-taking, rather than payoffs and political corruption. That often wasn’t the case, and some oligarchs hired investigative firms to dig up dirt that could be used to blackmail a critic into silence, a technique known in the trade as a “hard shoulder.”
Bob preferred to keep his nose clean. His first job was with a firm called DSFX, in its Miami office. Construction was then under way on the American Airlines Arena, the indoor stadium that became home to the Miami Heat basketball team, and DSFX was hired to help local officials monitor possible fraud on the project. Bob also began to work with Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, trying to locate pirate factories producing counterfeits of its famous brand. At the time, drug gangs in Latin America were also doing a brisk business in kidnapping American executives and demanding large ransoms for their release, and companies used Bob to negotiate those deals. “If you do this right, it’s not like in the movies,” Bob told a reporter then writing an article about corporate kidnappings. “You don’t hear music in the background, only the sound of pens on paper.”
With more money, Bob and Chris, like most people, found ways to spend it. They bought a big new home in a gated community in Coral Springs and two new cars. While their three older daughters had gone to Florida State University, their two older sons wanted to go to more expensive private colleges outside the state and Bob and Chris agreed to send them.
When DSFX was sold in 2001, Bob started his own one-man shop, R. A. Levinson & Associates, which he ran out of his home. He had never operated a business before and it proved a constant hustle. He had to scramble for work, cater to clients, pay bills, collect on accounts, and make sure more money was coming in than going out. As a lone wolf, he took what he could get. His assignments were a hodgepodge, running from background investigations into Russian businessmen to counterfeit product cases. In a typical month, he might take three or four trips, including travel abroad to cities like London, Kiev, and Managua. He would book a hotel room to meet with a source and, in the evening, go to a different hotel to sleep. Before turning in, he would order room service and spend hours typing up reports to clients, responding to emails, and sending out feelers to drum up new work. The constant travel and bad eating habits took a toll. At six feet four, Bob had always been a very big man, but he soon weighed 240 pounds and had diabetes and high blood pressure.
In 2004, another large investigations firm, SafirRosetti, hired him to open an office in Boca Raton, Florida. With a steady salary, he didn’t constantly have to scramble for clients and could provide his family financial security. But there was a problem—his head and his heart weren’t in the work. Chasing product counterfeiters didn’t compare to the thrill of an FBI agent hunting criminals for Uncle Sam. After he worked hard to investigate a case, a company’s executives might decide not to alert law enforcement officials to his findings, fearing that the resulting publicity might damage their reputation or give a competitor a leg up. He would tell friends he was working for the “rich people’s police,” and even some of his kids could see that he wasn’t happy. He tried to strike a balance by taking on assignments for public interest groups. One organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, used investigators like Bob to track down people who had committed human rights abuses in their native countries and had since moved to the United States, often under an assumed name. When Bob met one of the group’s lawyers at a Miami café, he beamed and said, “I love what you guys do.” He couldn’t imagine saying that to a corporate executive.
When he traveled on jobs, he fed information he picked up back to friends at the FBI and other federal agencies. Every ex-cop turned private investigator does that in order to keep doors open when they need help. Bob, however, wanted more. He still wanted to be part of the action. Every few months, he traveled to FBI field offices in cities like Memphis, Kansas City, and Seattle to teach seminars for young agents on techniques for identifying and recruiting informants.
From the very start of his career, Bob was a collector of information, intelligence, and people. He cast himself as the proverbial “good cop,” a big, friendly guy who liked everybody and who wanted everybody to like him. It wasn’t an act or even a stretch. By nature, he was gregarious and possessed an instinct for knowing how people wanted to be treated and what they wanted to hear. Ten minutes after sitting down in a restaurant, he would be on a first-name basis with the waiter or waitress serving him, and he would leave a big tip behind to make sure they remembered him. He loved handing out nicknames; everybody got one, family members, friends, and new acquaintances. The names were usually corny—stuff like “Professor” or “Doctor”—but people walked away charmed, thinking that Bob had coined the name just for them. He even varied how he introduced himself, depending on the impression he wanted to create. Some people knew him as Bob. Others called him Bobby. He liked to use “Bobby” at times, he explained to one of his sons, because its boyish sound made his large stature and status as an agent seem less threatening.
Once Bob got people talking, they often kept talking. If they were criminals, they might hope he would cut them a break. Other people might cooperate to get cash or because they wanted him to solve an immigration problem. Whatever the specifics, his relationships involved the give-and-take that binds together a cop and an informant. From the start of his law enforcement career, Bob believed he could make more cases from informants than he could from working the street. Once he ran into a Drug Enforcement Administration agent he knew outside a Manhattan courthouse. The DEA agent, who did undercover buys, was dressed for the part in jeans, a battered leather jacket, and a bulletproof vest. Bob, who worked for the DEA before joining the FBI, had on his own uniform—a suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. He looked at his friend and pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. “I’m going to put more people in jail with this than you are with all that armor,” he told him.
During his seminars for young FBI agents, he talked about his experiences and showed PowerPoint slides. He discussed the types of personality traits found in people willing to become informants. They tended to be independent thinkers, he said, rather than rule followers and were often empathetic, imaginative, and social. A variety of motives might cause them to open up; some even saw cooperation with the cops as a way to eliminate or take revenge against a rival. Other informants were thrill seekers or wannabe cops. Bob sprinkled his presentation with references to espionage and true crime books, quoting passages from authors such as David Ignatius, a journalist who wrote spy thrillers, and Robert Baer, a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who chronicled his experiences as an operative in the Middle East. “‘Soon recruiting agents became as natural as ordering a pizza over the telephone. It’s all a matter of listening to what people are really saying,’” read one of Bob’s slides quoting Baer. He warned agents about the pitfalls of dealings with informants and urged them not to get too close to a source or consider one a friend. Another slide read:
When you are trying to recruit a member of a criminal organization or terrorist group, remember one thing—you are, in effect
• Selling suicide
• If that person is discovered cooperating with the FBI or law enforcement, the penalty is usually death
* * *
Bob knew from the age of eight what he wanted to be. His inspiration came from a movie called The House on 92nd Street, released in 1945, three years before he was born. The film was a B-grade thriller about a college student who goes undercover for the FBI during World War II to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring trying to steal secrets about the atomic bomb. The FBI officially sanctioned the movie, and it contained a brief introduction by Director J. Edgar Hoover extolling the agency’s mission. After Bob saw it, he was all law-and-order. While other teenagers played sports, he hung out with friends in the attic of his parents’ home in New Hyde Park, a Long Island suburb, acting out courtroom dramas. For dialogue they used transcripts from real trials that his mother typed up for lawyers to make extra money. He attended the City College of New York and worked during summers as an aide in the New York City Department of Investigations, an agency that ferrets out municipal corruption. When he graduated from college in 1970 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he didn’t attend the ceremony because he was training to be a DEA agent. The FBI required five years of law enforcement experience to qualify for a job and the DEA was the place where he would cut his teeth.
One evening two years later, he went to TGI Friday’s, then a popular singles bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. An attractive twenty-two-year-old office worker, Christine Gorman, was there with a girlfriend. Chris, who was short and had dark hair, was convinced that Bob was interested in her friend. He was interested in her. Before leaving the bar, he got Chris’s phone number, and they soon began seeing each other. The only obstacle to their romance was his parents. Chris, who had grown up on Long Island in a large Catholic family, wanted to raise her children Catholic. Bob couldn’t have cared less about religion, but his family was Jewish, and when he and Chris got married in 1973, Bob’s father cut him off and sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual for the dead.
The DEA transferred Bob to Denver, and it was there in 1976 that he got the call he had been waiting for—the FBI wanted to hire him. He went to the bureau’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned to its office in Los Angeles. It was a short-lived posting. Chris, who had already given birth to the couple’s first child, was again pregnant and wanted to return to the East Coast to be close to her family. In 1978, she and Bob got their wish; he was offered a plum assignment in New York working on organized crime cases.
In the early 1980s, one of those Mafia cases captured the country’s attention. It involved President Ronald Reagan’s choice for secretary of labor, Raymond Donovan, and allegations that his New Jersey construction company had Mafia ties. Donovan, a top executive of Schiavone Construction, denied the rumors, and FBI officials testified during his Senate confirmation hearings that a bureau investigation had found nothing to suggest connections between Donovan’s company and the mob. But after the new secretary of labor assumed his post, Time magazine published a bombshell—during an investigation in the late 1970s, the FBI had secretly recorded members of the Genovese crime family discussing Donovan, Schiavone, and a scheme to use minority-owned firms as fronts to win public construction contracts. To Bob, the revelation wasn’t news. He had headed the investigation that produced those recordings, and a bitter dispute within the bureau over his handling of the informant in the case had nearly destroyed his young FBI career.
That informant, Michael Orlando, was a onetime schoolteacher who had turned to theft and armed robbery. Another FBI agent, Larry Sweeney, initially recruited Orlando as a source, and after he learned Orlando was close to Genovese family members, he introduced him to Bob. Orlando, who was being paid $500 a week by the FBI to be a top, or “high-echelon,” informant, told Bob he was willing to infiltrate a Bronx meatpacking warehouse, run by a Genovese lieutenant named William Masselli, that served as a drop-off point for hijacked trucks and other criminal activities. In return, Bob reiterated Larry Sweeney’s earlier promise to Orlando not to disclose his identity as a bureau source even to other FBI agents working on the case, for fear it might leak out and get him killed.
In 1978, Bob wrote a fourteen-page memo to FBI headquarters based on information picked up by bureau listening devices planted inside the Bronx warehouse. In it, he said the material being gathered had “excellent prosecutive potential” for cases of political corruption, fraud, labor racketeering, police corruption, and narcotics trafficking. But the inquiry ran into trouble when other bureau agents, unaware of Orlando’s role as an informant, started reporting that he was taking part in truck hijackings and other crimes. When Bob and Sweeney confronted Orlando, he offered the informant’s perfect excuse—fellow gangsters would quickly finger him as a stoolie, he said, if he walked away whenever a crime was going down. He promised to behave, but some FBI managers viewed Orlando as an informant run amok, and before long it wasn’t clear who was playing whom. In addition, William Masselli was heard on an FBI bug telling a fellow gangster that Orlando had carried out multiple contract killings for the mob. “This kid Mike … When I say he’s a bad kid … Forget about it … He knows it,” Masselli said. “This guy’s got about ten under his belt already.”
Bob and Sweeney hadn’t seen any evidence connecting Orlando to mob hits, and they argued that arresting him for truck hijackings would prematurely end the Bronx investigation, expose him as an informant, and violate their pledge to him. Supervisors overruled them, and when Orlando was arrested, Sweeney filed a complaint with FBI headquarters. A subsequent internal FBI review largely supported how Bob and Sweeney had handled Orlando, but by then the episode had resulted in too much bad blood inside the bureau’s New York office. Bob’s supervisors took him off organized crime and assigned him to foreign counterintelligence, an effective demotion. When a job opened in the FBI’s Miami office in 1984, he jumped at it, eager to make a fresh start.
Bob’s arrival in South Florida was perfectly timed. In the mid-1980s, the world of organized crime was undergoing a sea change. It was the era of Miami Vice, as Colombian drug cartels smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States by the plane- and shipload. Bob, who spoke some Spanish, jumped right in and soon found a new informant, a Colombian-born fashion photographer, Baruch Vega, who shot assignments with top models such as Lauren Hutton and Christie Brinkley. During those years, it was almost impossible for law enforcement agencies to get information about the cartels because arrested gang members knew they would be killed if they squealed. So Bob and Vega concocted an off-the-wall strategy to try to trick cartel leaders into letting their subordinates cooperate.
The plan revolved around a fictional character they created—a corrupt FBI agent named “Bob Roberts” who was willing, if paid off, to get arrested gang members out of jail by telling his bureau bosses they had agreed to become informants. Vega told cartel leaders, with whom he hobnobbed while on photo assignments in Central and South America, about Roberts and how gang members only needed to pretend they were cooperating to be freed. Cartel heads liked the deal, so they gave Vega bribes meant for Roberts and told underlings about him. After Vega pocketed the cash, Bob or another agent, pretending to be “Bob Roberts,” visited a gang member and said they could get out of jail but only by sharing real information about drug running.
By the early 1990s, Bob became one of the bureau’s resident experts on another ethnic crime wave—the flood of mobsters, thugs, and financial con men who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, arrived in the United States from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Many of the gangs set up shop in Brooklyn and Miami, and Bob was sitting in his office in 1994 when a terrified-looking man walked in. The man, Alexander Volkov, had fled to Florida from New York after learning that a feared Russian enforcer was looking for him.
Volkov was hardly an innocent. He and a partner had operated a Wall Street investment firm called Summit International that was really a Ponzi scheme. When the scheme collapsed, a Russian bank that had invested with Summit hired a gangster named Vyacheslav Ivankov, who headed a gang based in Brighton Beach that specialized in blackmail, loan-sharking, and murder. Volkov initially hid out at the Miami home of a friend named Leonid Venjik, who convinced him that his best hope for staying alive rested with the FBI. Soon afterward, Volkov, his Summit partner, and Venjik agreed to become part of a bureau operation aimed at Ivankov. The three men told the Russian gangster they were coming to New York to strike a deal to repay the bank’s money. After Ivankov listened to their proposal, he responded with death threats, which were captured on hidden FBI video cameras. He was indicted and convicted on extortion charges, a case that marked the first successful prosecution in the United States of a major Russian criminal.
By then, Bob’s connections in the world of intelligence gathering were deepening. He worked closely with CIA operatives on Colombian cocaine cases and traveled to Europe to represent the FBI at international law enforcement meetings about Russian organized crime. In 1992, at a conference in New Mexico about Russian crime put on by the Justice Department for FBI agents, prosecutors, and others, he met a CIA analyst named Anne Jablonski. They clicked immediately. She was a walking encyclopedia of information about Russian gangs. He entertained her with stories about the Russian mobsters he was chasing in Miami. He soon gave her a nickname. He called her “Toots.”
* * *
When SafirRosetti hired Bob in 2004, the firm was eager to build its product counterfeiting business. Bob brought an old client, Philip Morris, to the firm along with one of his informants, Leonid Venjik, the Russian émigré in Miami who had worked with him on the Ivankov case. Venjik had a network of sources in Eastern Europe, and Bob used him on product counterfeiting investigations. Soon, Venjik started sending in reports warning that Philip Morris had a mole within its ranks.
The informant said his sources had spotted an executive from the company’s Richmond, Virginia, headquarters selling technical expertise and equipment to cigarette counterfeiters in Bosnia. That information included Philip Morris’s most closely guarded secret, the “recipe” of tobacco varieties and additives used to produce a Marlboro’s distinctive taste. As a result, the counterfeiters were flooding the market with fake Marlboros that looked and tasted like real ones. In a SafirRosetti report to the cigarette maker, Bob provided a description of the mole, who was called “David.”
From conversations overheard by the source, “David” is employed by Philip Morris in a very responsible position, but not in a sales capacity—rather he is involved primarily in “technical operations” and he displays a familiarity with the equipment and machinery involved in the manufacturing of tobacco products; he also shows a technical expertise in the areas of tobacco filters and paper, along with how “production lines” are operated.
“David” mentioned that he was going to be attending some type of “seminar” which Philip Morris was holding in the United States at the beginning of July 2004.
While at SafirRosetti, Bob continued to hear from other old informants. In 2004, one sought his help on behalf of the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazakh president was then at the center of the biggest foreign corruption case ever brought by U.S. prosecutors. In the previous year, an American oil industry consultant, James Giffen, had been arrested and charged with paying millions in bribes to Nazarbayev and other officials in the former Soviet republic to win oil exploration contracts. Federal prosecutors froze Nazarbayev’s Swiss bank account, alleging it contained $70 million in kickbacks paid him by Giffen.
Bob’s source said that he and one of Nazarbayev’s closest associates had been secretly meeting for months with FBI agents in New York in an attempt to cut a deal on behalf of the Kazakh president. In exchange for unfreezing his Swiss bank account, Nazarbayev was willing to help the United States track down Al Qaeda terrorists and identify traffickers in chemical and biological weapons. They hadn’t made any headway, so Bob’s informant asked him to contact his government sources. Bob drafted a memo and apparently sent it to several agencies, including the CIA. He wrote that the Kazakh president was willing to help the U.S. government by:
1. Identifying and locating leadership, membership and associates of Al Qaeda, utilizing the full cooperation and resources of the Kazakhstan government’s special services, including the country’s intelligence organization.
2. Identifying and locating traffickers in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as chemical, biological and nuclear devices or materials.
3. Any and all counter-terrorism targets as identified by the USG.
In the memo, Bob suggested setting up a meeting between a top U.S. official and an emissary of the Kazakh president. “This may, in fact, be the last opportunity to engage in dialogue along these lines as credibility has been lost because of the time and effort already invested” by representatives of Nazarbayev, he wrote.
Right around that time, two Miami-based FBI agents visited Bob at his SafirRosetti office. For months, he had been passing along to the bureau information Leonid Venjik was giving him about counterfeiters selling fake Marlboros. As was his practice, Bob hadn’t revealed Venjik’s identity in the memos, referring to him simply as his “source.” The FBI agents told Bob they were interested in the information and were hoping he might give them his source’s name or set up a meeting with him. Bob smiled. He replied that he had never given up an informant during all the years he spent in their shoes and he wasn’t about to start.
The visit hadn’t been a friendly call. It was a test and Bob had failed. The DEA already knew that Leonid Venjik was Bob’s informant because the drug agency, along with police officials in Austria, were investigating him for trafficking in counterfeit Marlboros and cocaine. Venjik had even bragged to an undercover DEA agent that he was playing Bob by feeding him dribs of information in order to use his role as an informant to collect money from SafirRosetti and shield his crimes. Bob had been totally in the dark, and if he had given up Venjik’s name to the FBI, the episode might have ended there. But by refusing to do so, he heightened the suspicions of some DEA and Austrian investigators that he had known about Venjik’s activities. He then dug himself a deeper hole. After Venjik’s arrest in Austria, Bob flew there in December 2004 to visit him in prison and gave Austrian authorities a sworn affidavit attesting to his honesty. He was doing exactly what he warned young agents not to do for an informant, and, with each well-meaning step, he made things worse for himself.
In early 2005, he learned that a federal prosecutor in Miami was asking questions about him, a sign that he might soon face charges. Chris urged him not to worry; everyone knew he was honest, she said, and they would come to their senses. But as the months passed, the federal prosecutor handling the inquiry, Joseph Cooley, let Bob twist in the wind. When Bob tried contacting Cooley, his calls weren’t returned. It was a tactic he had seen prosecutors use when they wanted to make a target sweat.
Bob became so gripped by anxiety that he called David McGee, the lawyer in Pensacola. Dave had spent twenty years as a federal prosecutor before going into private practice, and he knew Bob from his days as an FBI agent. Bob asked Dave to represent him as his lawyer. “I’m going to get eaten alive by the knowledge that my life, my livelihood, my reputation will be in ruins by the time that people find out this is a big mistake,” Bob said in a note. “I did not spend a lifetime in law enforcement and investigations … to go over to the other side.”
On that same day, Bob sent a letter to Joseph Cooley from Panama, where he was working on a case for the Center for Justice and Accountability, the human rights organization.
I am writing this letter from Panama City, Panama where I am trying to locate and bring about the apprehension of an international fugitive wanted by the Government of Spain for torture and human rights violations. I believe that I’m getting close to getting this guy, utilizing 35 years of experience in this business and the assistance of sources I recruited and directed.
A horrible tragedy is about to happen to me and it is in your power to do something about it. A miscarriage of justice and colossal error is about to take place, in effect ruining my life, my reputation, in effect, all that I have built over a career spanning more than thirty-five years.
It is very tough to be able to concentrate my efforts on catching bad guys when you hear the kinds of things that I am now hearing.
I have not done anything wrong.
I have not conspired to violate any law.
I have lived a life dedicated to law enforcement, even after I retired from the FBI helping practically every federal agency, foreign law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL and the U.S. intelligence community.
I strongly urge you to hear my side of whatever story is being put to you and your investigators, and that this be done as quickly as possible.
Cooley’s response was more silence, and Chris’s faith began to waver. Bob told Dave McGee she had started to ask him what they were going to tell their children if their father was indicted. Bob had alerted his bosses at SafirRosetti about Venjik’s arrest, and the firm scrambled to stop payment on a $50,000 check it had sent him. Explaining to Philip Morris that its money had been going to a trafficker in counterfeit Marlboros wasn’t going to be easy. SafirRosetti executives told Bob they were closing his office in Boca Raton. He was a talented investigator, they said, and offered to send him freelance jobs, but they had come to realize something about Bob that he probably already knew: he didn’t have the polish, the patience, or the interest to make it in the corporate world.
That spring, while on a trip to Washington, Bob visited Ira Silverman, the retired television journalist, at his home in Falls Church, Virginia, a D.C. suburb. The men had been close friends since the 1970s, when Bob was a young DEA agent and Ira was digging up crime stories for NBC in New York. They both loved chasing crooks, and Ira would show up unexpectedly at Chris’s apartment when she and Bob were dating to buttonhole him and talk about cases. Ira became such a regular presence in the lives of the Levinson kids that they grew up thinking of him as an uncle.
On the day of Bob’s visit, the weather was pleasant and Ira suggested that they sit in the backyard. Bob said nothing to him about his troubles at SafirRosetti or Joseph Cooley’s inquiry in Miami. Still, Ira sensed something was very wrong. Bob had always been happy and upbeat. That day, he seemed defeated, almost suicidal. Out of the blue, he told Ira that he felt that his life had been shit and that he should have spent it doing something of value. Instead, it had all been a waste. When Bob left, Ira was worried about him.
In the end, Cooley dropped his inquiry after finding the evidence didn’t implicate Bob. The investigator was relieved, but he was back out on his own and needed to find work fast. He grabbed one of the first cases he was offered even though its financial terms weren’t appealing. Typically, private investigators get their fees and expenses paid as they work on a case. But they can also enter into contingency-style arrangements, forgoing part of their payment until the conclusion of a case. Most investigators steer away from the arrangement, which is known as a “success fee,” but Bob apparently agreed to work on that basis for a New York law firm, Reed Smith. It was defending the Bank of Cyprus in a lawsuit brought by a group of investors who claimed that the bank had laundered Russian crime funds. Bob spent three months on the case. When the judge hearing the lawsuit delayed issuing a decision, his bill to the law firm, which exceeded $100,000, was left hanging.
He faced a big financial shortfall and realized he couldn’t keep on living from case to case. He needed steady income. One possible job was a full-time position with a group that investigated auto theft. He also applied for a job as a part-time instructor at the CIA’s training center, where new operatives learn skills such as how to interview sources. Then Anne Jablonski, the CIA Russian crime analyst, told him she thought she could get him a part-time consulting contract with the spy agency. Bob and Anne had stayed close since their meeting in the early 1990s, regularly swapping information about cases. Anne was now working in an analytical unit called the Illicit Finance Group, which specialized in gathering information about international crime, foreign government corruption, and money laundering. The intelligence was summarized in briefs sent to top government officials at the White House and elsewhere.
To Bob, it sounded like a dream job. He would get to work with an old friend on big, heady assignments. But getting his contract written and approved seemed to take forever. Every month, Anne told him about a hang-up, budgetary constraint, or technical snafu. Several times, the contract’s language had to be reworked to make certain that it would be awarded to Bob rather than being put up for competitive bid. Numerous CIA officials, including ones from the agency’s spy side, had to review the contract and sign off on it. He tried to stir the pot by sending Anne notes about the hot leads he could pursue once he was on board and proposals for areas to investigate. He kept his notes friendly, but there was also an insistence in their tone. “I strongly believe that I will be able to pull this one off,” he wrote her, about a possible Russian crime investigation. “If so, we would be right in the proverbial center of the action.”
In early 2006, Anne brought him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to meet with the head of the Illicit Finance Group, Timothy Sampson, and other analysts who worked in the unit. He jotted down their names and specialties: Anne, Sarah, and George covered Russian organized crime and business in Eastern Europe; Kristin followed corruption in the Middle East; Katy’s area of expertise was Venezuela and international bribery; Eric followed the global trade in narcotics; other analysts were responsible for countries such as Iran or North Korea or oversaw broad subject areas like money laundering. Soon after he returned home, he went through his files, pulling old reports and sending them to Anne to distribute to her colleagues. “Attached is another paper I promised your staff when I was up there earlier in the week,” he wrote.
Finally, in June 2006, his CIA contract was approved. When Anne notified him about it, Bob quickly replied. He was thrilled to be back in the game.
Today is my thirty-second wedding anniversary and aside from celebrating those years with Christine, I’m going to (prematurely) celebrate this. It seems like something too good to be true. I really look forward to working with you and trying to make a contribution. Yeah, you really made my day, Toots.
Copyright © 2016 by Barry Meier