Twisted Triangle (5 page)

But like Margo, he hadn’t asked himself questions about Gene either.

“I found out later that he and Jerry were involved in a number of things,” he said.

Margo and Gene drove into DC for their fi day at the Washington Metropolitan Field Offi which was in the southeast quadrant of the district. The multistory building was in a rundown neighborhood, surrounded by dilapidated houses and rusty shells of cars.

“We talked about how the place looked like a ghetto,” Margo recalled. “Parking was plentiful, but they encouraged you not to leave your cars there overnight.”

They both worked in the same building but on different fl Margo was assigned to the Department of Justice Applicant Squad, where she conducted background checks on candidates for the federal bench. Gene was assigned to the White House Applicant Squad, where he did similar checks on people applying to work for the president. Margo wasted no time in applying for a position at Quantico.

Within a month, Gene moved to the FBI Liaison Offi next door to the White House, where he had the same duties but also worked as a conduit between the administration, the FBI’s headquarters, and its Washington fi offi Margo stayed behind, biding her time until she could land the teaching job she wanted. “I was willing to dig in and do what I needed to do,” she said

later.

Gene disliked his job, but he knew it would be a while before he could start lobbying to get back into undercover work.

“He thought it was beneath him,” Margo recalled. “He felt he was wasting his time. It was clear he wanted to be working investigations where he was calling the shots.”

Gene’s new job was a far cry from running a complex undercover operation like Nickelride, which he’d launched in late 1983. During Nickelride, he and his partner, George Murray, had developed 242 indictable subjects and recovered $8.5 million in stolen goods and contraband. As he had in Forscore, Gene used Jerry as an informant.

Gene and George, who also went out on SWAT team calls together periodically, had uncovered corruption among some local government offi including a Fulton County sheriff’s lieutenant and captain, and the operation expanded from there.

Posing as diamond thieves who sold cocaine and ran a car theft ring, Gene and George dressed well, smoked cigars, and wore

PPKs, small guns that law-enforcement offi would never carry. They both came up with stories, known in the bureau as “legends,” to explain why they didn’t use the drugs they were selling. George’s was that he was training for a marathon; Gene used a sob story that an old girlfriend had died of an overdose.

George always thought Gene had a talent for making up these stories. For Gene, thinking on his feet was almost an art form.

“He was very good, very glib, very enthusiastic,” George said later. “You’d throw out the most ridiculous legend in the world and they’d buy it. He was fabulous at this stuff.”

Later, Margo could see how all this storytelling could have affected Gene. “In an undercover operation you were given encouragement to step outside the box and be creative— not to break any laws but certainly to be imaginative.”

And with someone like Gene, she said, “one step leads to another.”

In the fall of 1984, Gene began planning a raid to lure the dozens of suspects he and George had identifi over the past year to one place and have them arrested at one time.

Gene was clearly in his element— organizing and coordinating every last detail with precision— as he explained to Margo how he was putting the big fi together.

“It’s going to go like clockwork,” he told her, laughing in appreciation of his own cleverness, which, in this case, was duly lauded and rewarded several months later by bureau offi all the way up to FBI Director William Webster.

Margo felt proud of Gene as she listened to him on the phone, making arrangements. His plan was to rent out a nice Italian restaurant called Tony’s for an all-night party, allegedly to celebrate his underworld successes with his boss, a Mafi kingpin, who was coming to town. Gene and George often had dinner at Tony’s with their suspects, so it was familiar territory for everyone. Gene would tell them his boss wanted to meet them, and when they arrived at Tony’s, they’d be taken one by one by limousine to the now defunct Lenox Inn. After being told that the kingpin was

uncomfortable with armed men he didn’t know, the suspects would hand over their guns at the back door of the hotel, then be immediately arrested by fi SWAT team members in the parking lot.

“They’re not going to know what hit them,” Gene said. “By the time they start to fi out that people are missing from the party, we’ll be ready to come in and fi it.”

It did go like clockwork. After many of the suspects had been taken from Tony’s and arrested at the hotel, Gene’s colleagues from the Atlanta fi offi began to infi the restaurant. Ultimately, more than twenty agents, including Margo, were involved in the raid that night, storming into Tony’s with their guns drawn.

The next morning, Margo felt proud all over again as she read about her husband’s triumph in the
Atlanta Journal
.

“It was an elaborate plan, far beyond the imagination of any

other undercover operation that I had heard of,” she said later.

The bureau made dozens of arrests that night on charges ranging from traffi stolen goods to narcotics distribution and police corruption. Every defendant who went to trial was convicted, and all others pleaded guilty.

Gene received numerous commendation letters for his work on Nickelride as well as a $1,200 bonus, known in the bureau as an incentive award.

While Gene endured his boring new desk job in DC, he looked for a new house that offered some privacy, preferably out in the woods somewhere. He was very excited when he told Margo about his discovery.

“I found this great house in Nokesville,” he said. “It’s in really good shape, and it has close to three acres of land.”

Nokesville was not an offi incorporated city, but when the Bennetts moved there in spring 1987, about seven thousand people considered themselves residents of the community. It was more of a town, really, settled originally in the late 1800s by members of the Brethren Church because of the cheap farmland.

The one-mile “downtown” strip had one stoplight, just after the giant “Welcome to Nokesville” sign that was painted on the side of an old kelly-green barn. The sign featured two large cartoon cows dancing upright on their hind legs, a tribute to the region’s dairy farms, which had gradually been replaced with single-family homes.

The Bennetts’ two-story brick home had four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a separate one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in a converted basement. The $158,000 price was right for their combined income of about $120,000, and the house was conveniently located seven miles north of Quantico and about twenty-fi miles southwest of DC.

A heavy tree line provided a sound and sight buffer between their house and the closest neighbor’s, which was about fi yards away and could be seen only in the winter, after all the leaves had fallen. Another row of tall hardwood trees lined the lawn in the backyard, where snakes, rabbits, and deer would wander in at night. Gene bought a four-wheeler so that he could ride it around the lot and down to the creek bed at the back of the property.

Because they had only one car, Margo and Gene would often drive into DC together, dropping Allison at the babysitter’s on the way.

In March 1987, Margo had a phone interview with Ed Tully, who was in charge of Quantico’s Education and Communications Unit. She told him about her education—a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a criminal justice emphasis and a master’s degree in counseling and educational psychology— as well as her teaching experience at the state police academy in Atlanta.

“John Burke gave me your application, and it looks like you’ve got what we’re looking for,” Ed said.

John, who had been Margo’s field counselor when she was a trainee, had been impressed by Margo’s academic performance at Quantico, when she’d tied for second place in her class. Ironically, Margo had never even considered aiming for the bureau before a

mentor at the police academy in Atlanta encouraged her to apply back in 1981. At the time, she thought the FBI took only the best of the best, and it seemed out of her reach. As it turned out, however, her entrance test scores ranked third among the FBI’s nationwide pool of female applicants.

By 1987, John had been promoted to deputy assistant director at Quantico. He told Margo there weren’t enough female instructors at the academy, so he was going to recommend her for a teaching job.

Later, Ed said that Margo’s gender had given her a leg up in getting the position, but neither that nor help from higher up was the determining factor in her hiring.

“Margo got the job because she was good,” he said.

Ed acknowledged that her six years of experience may have been less than that of the other instructors. However, he noted that there weren’t many female agents at that time who would’ve had more experience. By the time Margo applied for the job in 1987, the bureau had 9,434 agents, including 700 women, who represented 7.4 percent of the total force. Ed’s unit, however, had only one female instructor.

The general consensus among agents was that Hoover had thought women were ill equipped, both physically and emotionally, for the demanding job of an FBI agent. Although the agency hired a few women as agents or investigators in its early days, the last one had resigned in 1927, and none was hired until two months after Hoover died forty-fi years later.

“The joke when I was coming through was that Hoover was spinning in his grave because women had been admitted,” Margo said.

Despite widespread rumors that Hoover was gay, the bureau culture did not tolerate homosexuality either.

A week after her phone interview with John, Margo was excited to learn that she’d landed the position. Gene was excited too, because her getting promoted to special supervisory agent meant she’d be making more money. When their colleagues joked that

she was now at a higher level than he was, he’d say, “I can spend her money just as easy as I can spend mine.”

Margo reported to Quantico for her first day as an instructor on April 1.

The academy, which had opened its doors a few days after Hoover’s death, was located at the southern end of a 385-acre Ma-rine Corps base, also known as Quantico, just west of the town of the same name.

Today, the two-lane road leading to the base runs through a very green, wooded area and is marked with signs that say “Ammunition Supply Point” and “Ammo Dump.” Motorists who open their car window may hear gunfi from members of the military, shooting clay pigeons for recreation at the Quantico Shooting Club, or from agents practicing on the bureau’s fi range.

The academy itself, which borders on Hoover Road, has a sturdy, if not formidable, presence that conveys the seriousness of the work and study being conducted within its walls.

That said, the interior of the series of multilevel buildings, connected by walkways that agents commonly refer to as “gerbil tubes,” feels surprisingly intimate, small, and somewhat dated, al-most like a private school or community college that was once state-of-the-art but now feels more historically signifi The air is fi with a positive, conservative energy as well as a sense of patriotism and pride.

On her first day as an instructor, Margo remembered how she’d only recently been through the sixteen grueling weeks of training herself.

John Burke, who was still a special agent at the time, had greeted her class of trainees by distributing copies of the book
Dress for Success
, telling them that looking the part of an FBI agent was half of getting the job done.

She remembered how she and her classmates had worked hard to excel physically as well as academically, walking tall and with purpose through the halls of the academy, where agents and trainees

alike seemed to share the feeling that they were doing something important with their lives.

Trainees were tested at the end of each block of training and had to score a minimum of 85 percent to pass. The pressure was excruciating because those who failed more than two tests were dismissed from the academy.

The fast-paced classroom curriculum was challenging for Margo, but the blocks of defensive tactics, strength, endurance, and firearms training were even tougher, testing not only her physical fi but her emotional fortitude as well.