Posted on 06/04/2002 4:09:04 AM PDT by ninonitti
Two years ago in the dog days of August, we drove to Washington, D. C. The main idea was to tour a couple of colleges. On a whim, we fell in with the tourists who lined up for a quarter-mile around the J. Edgar Hoover building.
It was more than seven years after a van loaded with explosives drove into a garage at the World Trade Center. Five years after Tim McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Whitey Bulger's favorite FBI agent had already been indicted for the first time. And a terrorist attack that would kill 17 crew members aboard the USS Cole was only a few weeks away.
I suppose I anticipated seeing plenty of Tommy guns on our FBI tour. But I also assumed there'd be some recognition of crime in a New Age world of dark allegiances and shrinking borders.
What we got instead was life-sized cutouts of Lester ``Baby Face'' Nelson and John Dillinger in their favorite zoot suits. If I'm not mistaken, I think those doomed public enemies, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, were also included in this G-man's gallery of hallowed rogues.
Inside the house that J. Edgar built, you see, it's always 1930-something and prairie banks are still at the mercy of machine gun-toting hoods, who seldom forget to tip their felt hats to the ladies.
At FBI headquarters, it seems all the myths are kept under glass in climate-controlled halls. Think of it as a kind of corporate credo: At the FBI, myth is our most important product.
Last week, a South Boston G-man was essentially convicted of becoming a South Boston gangster. John ``Zip'' Connolly went down on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges. This ex-agent fought Italian organized crime, so that Irish organized crime could prosper.
Around here, we considered Zip's public fall from grace a bit of a big deal. But in truth, the corruption of John Connolly was little more than a pimple on the FBI's global landscape of incompetence.
Let's face it, what were the mortal sins of a G-man with a weakness for manicures and silk suits, compared to a Bureau that could not - or would not - connect all the ominous dots raised by the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, almost a month before 9/11?
``J. Edgar Mueller'' was the headline on William Safire's op-ed column in yesterday's N.Y. Times.
Right before our very eyes, Robert Mueller III, the Bureau's beleaguered new director (who also knew our boy Zip, back when he was an assistant U.S. attorney under Bill Weld) is rearranging a lot of blue smoke and mirrors in a rather frenzied effort to re-invent the FBI.
``For years, (the FBI's) most important attribute was always PR,'' said veteran Boston trial lawyer Anthony Cardinale. ``It's past time they get back to the business of being real cops, who do real police work, who generate their own leads.
``For too long, their whole system has been informant-based,'' Cardinale added. ``The big problem with paying for information, is that your case is only as good as the person you're paying. Absent any real police work, you always run the risk of being used. Myth-building only gets you so far.''
John Connolly actually discovered this hard lesson years before the guilty verdict landed on his meticulous coif, back when he was still a vice president at Boston Edison. He was compelled to go to criminal extremes in a futile attempt to get one of his psychopathic informants out of jail.
He failed in spectacular fashion. If a pair of local gangsters like Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi were able to use the FBI to their unrestricted advantage for almost 12 years, one shudders to think what a savvy al-Qaeda operative could do.
The trouble with protecting a myth is that it can smother the work of those noble agents who are trying to do the job in the field.
In Phoenix, FBI agent Kenneth Williams urged his superiors to investigate why so many Middle Eastern men were signing up for flight lessons in the U. S.
Coleen Rowley, the chief division counsel in the FBI's Minneapolis office, fired off a 13-page letter to Robert Mueller complaining that keepers of the FBI myth in Washington had frustrated the efforts of Minneapolis agents to take a hard look at Zacarias Moussaoui before 9/11.
What has honesty within the bureaucracy of the FBI gotten Coleen Rowley? Not much more than a promise she won't be fired. That's no way to treat a good cop.
Maybe it's time for Bob Mueller to take down ``Baby Face'' Nelson, pack up the old myths and live in the here and now.
Look at the number of criminal cases they failed to pursue against the Clinton Cabal.
I guess it is difficult for the FBI to connect the dots no matter how simple a criminal investigation really is, especially in the presence of political corruption and organized crime.
I also have 5 FBI agents (2 of them are top FBI agents in Southeast Florida) being investigated by the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington D.C. for lying about an FBI interview.
The U.S. Attorneys and FBI in Maryland are agreeing to not investigate or prosecute the Italian Mafia if they will sell their profitable rackets to the Irish and Jewish Mafia.
Last week, a South Boston G-man was essentially convicted of becoming a South Boston gangster. John ``Zip'' Connolly went down on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges. This ex-agent fought Italian organized crime, so that Irish organized crime could prosper.
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