CHAPTER 1
THE GOOD DAYS
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
THE MAN ON THE MOPED JUST grabbed her and drove away. Her little sister ran screaming into the house to tell their mother, who ran into the driveway, where the girls had been playing. But the street was quiet; her beautiful six-year-old daughter, the one with the shoulder-length brown hair and enormous eyes, was gone.
Kidnapping by a stranger is rare, but on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 14, 2016, it happened at the end of a suburban driveway in Wilmington, North Carolina. A convicted sex offender, who lived nearby after serving sixteen years in prison in North Carolina for molesting another six-year-old, had grabbed the little girl. He headed for a patch of thick woods, passing a school bus just before he turned off the paved road and drove deep into the trees. But we didn’t know any of that yet.
Stranger kidnapping is also deadly. Law enforcement knows that if the child isn’t found quickly, she will likely never be found alive. A frantic search began, with the local FBI office joining in to assist the county sheriff. News stations broadcast the Amber Alert. Volunteers and officers searched in a heavy rain through the night.
At FBI headquarters the next morning, during my regular senior staff meeting, Steve Richardson, the assistant director in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, told me about the little girl who had been kidnapped in North Carolina sixteen hours earlier. He explained that our Wilmington staff had worked through the night, doing what we could to help our local partners, but there was no sign of the little girl. We had a suspect—a convicted child molester who owned a moped—but this was likely to end very badly. I said, “What a world,” and asked him to keep me informed.
Two hours later, Richardson walked quickly into my office. “They found her,” he said, laying an eight-by-ten color photograph in front of me. “And she’s alive.” I looked down at the large picture. The little girl looked directly at me. Her strikingly large eyes were wide open; her face, still beautiful even covered in mosquito bites, was impassive, like she didn’t know what was happening. She was looking up at the officer who recorded the scene as other officers used an electric saw to cut the thick chain around her neck cinching her to the tree I could see just inches away from her head. Her torso was covered with an officer’s rain jacket, put there to cover her skin, which was raw from a night of exposure to water and insects.
I started crying. I couldn’t look away from the picture. I held my hand up, palm to Richardson, to thank him and ask him to leave, all without words. He said, “Boss, these are the good days,” and left. I kept staring at the picture. I thought of the girl and her sister and her parents and my own children and all the children who are not found and not saved.
She was saved by a tip. After the night of searching in a downpour, investigators heard from a school bus driver, who recalled seeing a man and a little girl on a moped near a wooded area the previous afternoon. Two sheriff’s deputies responded to the spot. Sergeant Sean Dixon brought his Hanoverian tracking hound, Bane. He let Bane smell the little girl’s Catholic school uniform and pillowcase before they plunged into the trees. Two hundred yards into the woods, Lieutenant J. S. Croom, working without a dog, saw her first, curled into the fetal position, her arms and legs pulled into her pink shirt, a thick chain binding her neck to a sugar oak tree. Certain she was dead, he called out to Dixon and ran toward the body. “Just the tone of his voice and the way he called my name, I knew he found something,” Dixon said. “My heart kinda dropped.” Croom later testified that he touched the still form on the ground. “And she snapped her head around and her eyes were ginormous and she said, ‘Are you here to help me and take me to my mama?’” Through the trees, Dixon heard Croom again, shouting that the child was alive, she was alive.
“She was the strongest little girl I’d ever seen in my life,” Dixon testified. “She just stared at me. I asked her if she was cold, and she said yes. She was soaking wet. She had mosquito bites all over her body.” Officers stopped a passing contractor truck and borrowed a battery-operated Sawzall. Dixon put his fingers between the tree and the chain and Croom sawed through it. The child was rushed to the hospital. Croom stood by the sugar oak and cried. Now I was in my office, staring at the little girl and crying.
Forty-seven-year-old Douglas Nelson Edwards was convicted and sentenced to prison for kidnapping, attempted murder, and sexual assault of a child. He will not hurt another child. This was one of the good days. This was why we did this work.
* * *
I never planned to be part of the Department of Justice. I knew only that I wanted to get a law degree and help people. But I didn’t know how I might do that. My first job out of law school showed me. I became a judicial clerk—a fancy way of saying “judge’s assistant”—for a federal trial judge in the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan and other big pieces of the city and its northern suburbs. My job was to spend a year helping the judge with legal research and writing.
Clerkships are prestigious jobs for young lawyers, usually reserved for academic stars. I had done fine in law school, but I wasn’t a star, which explained why dozens of judges rejected my applications. The judge who hired me, John M. Walker Jr., was brand-new, appointed during my last year of law school. He had been serving as assistant secretary of the treasury when Ronald Reagan—whose vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, was the judge’s first cousin—appointed him to be a federal judge. The timing worked well for me, because Judge Walker was looking for his very first law clerks at a time when the academic stars already had clerkships lined up. To be honest, he was slightly desperate, and so was I. Thereafter, for the next several decades, he hired people with stronger academic records.
As a new federal judge, Walker was eager to do well. And, despite his own impressive credentials, he came into office with a whiff of nepotism in the air, which he worked to dispel. The judge spent twelve hours each workday in the courthouse, and usually came in at least one weekend day. My co-clerk and I were expected to be there whenever he was, which was constantly. I was twenty-five and it was wearing me out. We thought he should—and we should—get out more. The judge was a forty-five-year-old single guy in the big city—handsome, with money and a job the United States Constitution said was his for life. What was not to like? He left his suit jacket hanging in his office when he donned his robe to take the courtroom bench. I would slip into his office on the pretense of dropping off a draft memo about a case and slide his leather-bound pocket calendar from his jacket pocket to see if he had a date that evening. If he did, we could.
During the summer of our clerkship year, he was gone for an entire workday at some judicial training. My co-clerk and I were at our desks, which faced each other in a small room. I looked up from some thick book with microscopic writing.
“Let’s go to the beach.”
Jack chuckled.
“I’m serious, let’s go. We’ll grab some stuff at my apartment and take my car.” My place in Hoboken, New Jersey, was on the way to the beach town of Spring Lake, where we had a fractional share of a summer beach house rental with a dozen friends. We knew the judge’s calendar; he wouldn’t be in today. “When are we ever going to get the chance again?”
“Yeah, grab your stuff. I got no stuff.” He was right; his apartment was far in the wrong direction, up by Columbia University. I could loan him shorts and a shirt, but my shoes were far too big.
“Wait a minute. I have an idea.” Jack and the judge were the same size. I returned from the judge’s private office holding his running shoes, which he sometimes used to exercise before court. “We both got stuff. Let’s go.”
It was an incredible weekday at the Jersey shore. A Ferris Bueller day off. We swam, shot baskets, ran on the beach. And never got caught. Very, very early the next morning, I put the judge’s sneakers back in his closet.
In hindsight, I should have slapped the soles of the judge’s shoes together a time or two, out on the street. For decades, Judge Walker wondered why, on a warm Manhattan morning, wearing Nikes that had never been out of the city, his shoes left a ghostly track of sand silhouettes across the dark blue carpet of his judicial office. He mentioned it to his secretary, who shrugged, but we were very lucky that he never thought to ask us.
At the start of his legal career, Judge Walker had been an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He told stories from those days, with a mix of joy and sorrow. It had been the best job he ever had. The work, the friendships, the case stories. There was nothing like it. He would get almost misty-eyed speaking about the role and “the Office,” with reverence.
I could see what he meant when we sat in the courtroom to watch cases be argued. We saw a lot of bad lawyers—many were sloppy, unprepared, late, slippery, even disrespectful. There was something different about the women and men from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They were almost always younger than the other lawyers and stood straighter, buttoned their jackets more quickly, answered more directly, met deadlines, and admitted what they didn’t know. If they were corrected or admonished, they answered, “Yes, Your Honor,” and didn’t do it again.
But there was more to it than style points. I noticed that the judge—and even opposing lawyers—believed what these federal prosecutors said. If they described the facts or legal conclusions of a particular court precedent, or explained what happened during a phone call, everyone in the courtroom accepted their recollection, even people who didn’t know them. Something unseen vouched for them. It was strange, and, at twenty-five, I couldn’t explain it. But I was drawn to that work. I wanted that life. At twenty-six, I got the chance, and lived it in different roles for the Department of Justice over much of the next thirty years, until I was fired as FBI director by Donald Trump.
* * *
I loved working at the Department of Justice, and the FBI, which is only one of the components of the department. The organization is extraordinarily complex, made up of more than one hundred thousand people all over this country and around the world. They are:
Special agents and deputy marshals.Prosecutors, most of whom work in one of the ninety-four United States Attorney’s Offices in all fifty states and the U.S. territories.Civil lawyers who represent the government in lawsuits, and are also spread all over the country.Analysts, scientists, paralegals, secretaries, clerks, mechanics, teachers, guards, and thousands of others who make the far-flung organization work.That’s the Justice Department. It is a diverse collection of people who all depend on the same thing—the thing I started to sense as a young law clerk sitting in Judge Walker’s courtroom, a gift they received on joining the department. It is a gift they might not have noticed until the first time they stood up and identified themselves as a Justice employee and said something—whether in a courtroom, in a conference room, or at a cookout—and found that total strangers believed what they said next.
They were believed because, when they spoke, they weren’t seen as Republicans or Democrats. They were seen as something separate and apart in American life—a group of people trying to do the right thing. I often describe that gift, which makes possible so much of the good they accomplish, as a reservoir of trust and credibility, a reservoir built for them, and filled one drop at a time by those who went before—most of whom they never knew. They were people who made sacrifices and kept promises to contribute to that reservoir. They were people who made mistakes, and admitted them. They were people who made hard calls without regard to politics or privilege, who sought the facts and applied them to the law.
The obligation of all Justice employees is to protect that reservoir, to pass it to those who follow, who will likely never meet or know them. The problem with reservoirs is that it takes tremendous time and effort to fill them, but one hole in a dam can drain them quickly. The protection of that reservoir requires vigilance, an unerring commitment to truth, and a recognition that the actions of one may affect the priceless gift that benefits all.
As a new federal prosecutor, painful lessons awaited me about my obligations to an institution—beyond any case—and to ensuring the whole truth was always told.
CHAPTER 2
THE FLY
The object of the superior [person] is truth.
CONFUCIUS
SPECIAL AGENT ALINA SACERIO-POLAK WAS eight months pregnant, so she instinctively shielded her torso as she covered the rear alley. The darkness of the October night offered some cover, but she still pressed herself tightly against a back corner of the brick Manhattan apartment building. She held her weapon in two hands, low-ready position, tight against the wall, watching the fire escape across the alley.
She heard the synchronized noise as her colleagues executing federal search warrants shouted “Police!” and banged on the doors of two identical rear apartments, one above the other, in classic drug dealer fashion: #8 was the retail outlet, #12 was the fortified stash. It was the late 1980s in New York City. Successful crack dealers were careful, and violent, even toward law enforcement. She tucked in tighter against the wall.
Seconds after the banging began, two men climbed out the retail drug apartment onto the fire escape. Sacerio-Polak and her partner shouted at them to stop. In reply, five shots rang out from above. She instantly pressed her cheek against the bricks, one eye far enough around the corner to search for the muzzle flashes above, and felt the sting of brick shards hitting her cheek as a round struck the brick by her eye. She returned fire, missing the shooter, but the drug dealer dropped his gun into the dark alley and began climbing behind his partner. She keyed her radio and alerted the agents stationed on the roof, who arrested the two.
The shooter, who claimed he was a salesman for a fictitious liquor store, was wearing thirty-one hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry and had hundreds of dollars in cash in his pocket. He became one of the defendants in my first trial as a federal prosecutor, a five-defendant trial on charges of drug dealing, gun possession, and attempted murder of federal agents. It was exciting stuff, but the case had some serious problems—in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York we called them “issues,” a word that had a more optimistic ring to it.
One of those issues was “The Fly.” He was the paid informant who had gone to apartment #8 and used federal taxpayer money to make “controlled buys” of crack vials in the days before the raid. The Fly, a Black man who was probably around forty, made his living by going places too dangerous for an undercover agent and pretending he was a drug user needing to score. It didn’t require great acting ability. The Fly was a recovering addict and active methadone user, but he wouldn’t be consuming the drugs he bought; they would become evidence in federal criminal investigations. Number 8 at 165 Edgecombe Avenue in Manhattan was a dangerous place controlled by a Jamaican drug gang; another customer had been raped there at gunpoint by one of the men who would later flee up the fire escape as his fellow gangster tried to kill federal agents. That danger was why the feds were trying to shut the operation down, and using the Fly to buy drugs.
The crack purchased by the Fly was evidence in my case, and he was to be a key witness. I met with him several times to prepare him to testify. The Fly, whose real name was Steve, insisted on being called the Fly or just “Fly,” but I wasn’t comfortable with either of those. He wasn’t a great witness, but all I needed him to do was tell the jury about his trips to #8, after which he had initialed the crack vials he purchased, using the felt-tip marker the agents handed him when he returned to their car. And inside these heat-sealed bags with the evidence stickers were the vials. He recognized his initials. I offer them as evidence, Your Honor. Done.
The afternoon before the Fly’s expected testimony, he reported to the United States Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan and waited in the seventh-floor reception area, sitting on the blue faux-leather couch until I returned from court to practice his testimony one last time. That morning, as was our habit during the trial, agents and I removed from the office’s huge evidence vault the two metal carts holding the gun and drug evidence in the case. This day, we took only one of the carts to court. We wouldn’t need the second cart, which held the Fly’s crack evidence, until he testified. But I needed it to rehearse later with the Fly, so, as I left for court, the cart was in my office, guarded by a group of federal agents.
Then two things happened. First, each agent in the group assumed it was someone else’s job to guard the drugs, as they wandered out of my office. Second, the Fly got lonely, stood up from the blue faux-leather couch, and did his own wandering, toward my office to find someone to chat with. That’s how the Fly and the Fly’s crack evidence came together without supervision. At that moment, the Fly decided to stop being a recovering addict; he stuffed the heat-sealed plastic bags into his pants and left the building, ending up high as a kite in a dumpy motel near LaGuardia Airport. But it would be days before I knew any of that.
Instead, what I learned after a long day in court was that drug evidence was missing from a cart in my office. The agents and I searched everywhere, as my throat began to tighten. Because I knew the history. I knew that a little more than a year earlier, shortly before I started as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, another AUSA had been arrested for stealing drug evidence to use and to share with prostitutes living in his apartment. I knew that Rudy Giuliani, the United States Attorney who imagined for himself a bright public future, got very angry at that AUSA and ordered him handcuffed to a chair in the public lobby of the office, where the young man waited and sobbed until his court hearing was ready. That sobbing prosecutor with the missing drugs went to jail for three years. Rudy had asked for a twelve-year sentence.
I was having trouble swallowing when my supervisor told me Mr. Giuliani wanted to see me in his office that evening. Rudy and his deputy were there, and wanted to know what had happened to the drugs in my case. I explained that I had no idea. They said they wanted a sworn affidavit from me to that effect. Of course, I said, and returned to my office to type out the statement swearing that I had not stolen the drugs from my own case. I could type but no longer swallow.
My supervisors also told me to immediately tell the trial judge. The missing drugs were the basis for charges in the trial that was under way, I had talked about the informant’s purchases in my opening statement, and the defense lawyers expected the informant to be a witness. They had to know. So, the next morning, I went to see the judge and told him and the defense lawyers the story, except for the ending, which I didn’t yet know. That ending saved my career: agents found the Fly semiconscious in his Queens motel room, with the torn and empty and no-longer-heat-sealed evidence bags around him.
I didn’t call the Fly as a witness, didn’t offer any evidence of his controlled purchases of crack from #8, and dropped the charges connected to those purchases. The case survived the Fly.
But there were issues still to come.
Although the Fly didn’t testify, a brave young woman did, describing how she was a regular customer at apartment #8—earlier in the same year as the federal raid—until she was raped at gunpoint by one of the defendants in my case, one of the two who fled out the window and up to the roof. Not the one who tried to murder the agents in the alley; the other one. After the assault, she ran from the apartment and called the police, who found the same two running the operation. The judge in my case wouldn’t let her describe the sexual assault, because it was a state crime that couldn’t be included in a federal indictment, but allowed her to tell the jury about the thriving drugstore and the two men who ran it.
And, of course, the federal agents testified about what they saw, heard, and found when they executed the search warrants that October night. The evidence—drugs of all kinds, guns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition—went in fine. Then I got clever during my summation to the jury.
It was a throwaway line, really. How did the jury know the shooter was also a retail drug dealer? Because he had no job, wore thirty-one hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry, and had hundreds of dollars in cash—all in small bills. “When you sell things for that [street] price,” I told the jury, “you don’t get big bills.” I was pretty pleased with my first-ever summation.
I had practiced what I would say. Pacing back and forth at night in our tiny living room, I advocated to my pregnant wife playing juror on the brown corduroy couch.
“Very good,” she said, “but why do you keep walking back and forth?”
“That’s what lawyers do,” I said. “You know, like on TV.”
“Yeah, don’t do that. You look like a giraffe in heat. You are six feet eight inches tall. You frighten people. Stand still. And stand back.”
Copyright © 2020 by James Comey