Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves

PROLOGUE

Waiting for a Verdict

Sal The Hammerhead Cardaci was a small-time Brooklyn car thief. Back in the 1980s, his head was blown off by a.357 fired at point-blank range. Years later we dug up his bones in a Brooklyn basement, where they had been buried under a rough concrete slab. For the last six months those bones have been in my office, sitting on my desk in a cardboard box. Today they are in evidence, back in the jury room. I am a federal mafia prosecutor, and I am waiting for a verdict.

My defendant is Gregory Scarpa, Jr., mafia capo and hitman. Before his arrest Scarpa controlled a big swath of working-class Brooklyn and Staten Island. Over the course of his career in organized crime he killed more than a dozen victims. Now he is charged with some forty federal crimes: racketeering, conspiracy, loansharking, illegal sports betting, numbers running, tax evasion. My indictment also charges Scarpa with five gruesome murders, the ones I believe we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

For fifteen years Scarpa was a major target of the FBI. Today, on this crisp fall afternoon, he finally faces justice. Scarpa sits huddled at a long oak table with his three criminal defense lawyers. A few feet away I sit with my trial partner, veteran mob prosecutor Sung-Hee Suh. For the past six months Sung-Hee and I have worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, preparing and trying this case. Together we presented more than a thousand pieces of evidence, each one painstakingly gathered from homicide crime scenes, surveillance operations, wiretaps, garbage pulls, autopsies, and raids on mafia clubs and gambling dens. We also presented testimony from three of Scarpa’s underlings, all mafia hitmen, now in the witness protection program.*

Late in the trial Scarpa took the stand and told the jury that the United States government had authorized his life of crime: that the FBI was corrupt, that he and his hitman father had been on the government informant payroll for years, and that he had worked as an FBI antiterrorism spy, complete with a miniature camera. When I cross-examined Scarpa, I ignored these stories completely, hoping the jury would conclude they were bizarre and irrelevant fantasies. Actually, many of Scarpa’s allegations were true.

The trial lasted more than a month. Now the jury is out, deliberating. For a federal prosecutor like me, waiting for a jury to decide a case is the hardest part of the job. As an Assistant United States Attorney, or AUSA, I wield considerable power. I run investigations, authorize arrests, and shape my own trial strategy. Control is second nature. Once, however, the jury gets a case, my fate—and that of my defendants—is out of my hands. All I can do is wait.

At 11:40 a.m., Jimmy, the court security officer, scuttles into the courtroom and hands a note to Eileen Levine, Judge Raggi’s courtroom deputy. Jimmy is not supposed to disclose the contents of the note to the attorneys, but he and I have a personal connection: he used to be an Army Ranger, and I was in the Marines. He looks over at me, our eyes make contact, and he silently mouths the word verdict. Jimmy and Eileen exit the courtroom by the back door, leading to Judge Raggi’s chambers. Two minutes later, just long enough for the judge to put on her black judicial robe, they both return. Jimmy bangs loudly on the courtroom’s solid oak door and calls out, All rise. Scarpa, the attorneys, and the courtroom spectators all get to their feet.

Judge Reena Raggi sweeps into the courtroom. Tall and elegant, Raggi is known for her brains and her temper. Once she got so mad at one of my colleagues he fainted right in the courtroom. Not surprisingly, I tend to treat her gingerly, like a bomb that might explode at any minute. The lawyers approach the bench and stand respectfully at their podiums. Scarpa stays seated in his chair, watched closely by U.S. Marshals. The atmosphere, quite relaxed just a few minutes before, is now electric with tension. Eileen states for the court reporter: Case on trial, United States versus Gregory Scarpa, Junior.

Judge Raggi silently reads the note from the jury. Then she looks up and says, in her controlled, precise patrician voice, Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In the case on trial, I have received a note from the jury, which I have marked court exhibit ten. It says: ‘Judge Raggi, we, the jury, have reached a verdict.’ I will bring them in and take the verdict from them.

Sung-Hee and I return to our seats at the long wooden counsel’s table directly in front of the jury box. My body is trembling slightly, from both nervousness and lack of sleep. This is my first big mafia trial, and after months of constant work and immense pressure, I am physically and spiritually exhausted. As the jury files in, only a few feet away, I try to judge their demeanor. Conventional trial lawyer wisdom says that if a jury makes eye contact with the defendant, it is bad for the government. Several jurors, I note, are looking right at Scarpa as they take their seats.

In tense moments I tend to smile. I fight that inclination now. I look back over my shoulder into the courtroom gallery. It is packed with spectators: newspaper reporters, fellow prosecutors, defense attorneys, a few judges. This is the big case in the courthouse right now. I take off my glasses, place my palms flat on the tabletop, and look straight down, focused on nothing. With my glasses off, the world is a gray haze.

I pray only when I’m in a tough bind. Now I silently beg, God, please, let me have a guilty verdict. My desire to win this case is driven by mixed motives. Scarpa is evil personified. The FBI and the Justice Department have worked for more than fifteen years to nail him. I am 100 percent certain he is guilty. The idea that he might escape—that we might get an unjust verdict—makes me sick to my stomach. At the same time, my will to win, like that of all prosecutors, is personal and selfish. Sung-Hee and I have staked our careers on this case. If we win, we will be heroes. If we lose, no one will ever trust us with a big case again.

In television shows about cops and prosecutors, the dramatic moments are always loud: cops yelling at criminals; judges yelling at lawyers; the defendant’s family yelling at the cops. In the real world, drama walks more softly. I hear Judge Raggi talking to the jury. She is explaining the procedure by which it will deliver its verdict. I barely listen. I hear her words as if from a great distance or like a man submerged underwater. I do not refocus until I hear Judge Raggi’s voice change tone and she says, with great formality: Madam Foreperson, I understand that you, the jury, have reached agreement on the verdict. Is that correct?

The foreperson stands. To protect the jury from mafia violence, the jurors’ identities and backgrounds have been kept secret from both Scarpa and us. As a result, I know virtually nothing about her. Now, however, this anonymous woman is the most important person in the courtroom. She looks at Raggi and replies, Yes.

Raggi: All right. I am going to be using the verdict form as a guide. Let me begin with Racketeering Act Number One. As to part ‘A,’ have you found the charge of murder not proved or proved?

The foreperson pauses, and I wait, listening for the simple words that mean success or failure, justice or defeat. I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. Will Scarpa go to jail for the rest of his life, or will he go home to murder again?

FEDERAL PROSECUTORS TOIL in obscurity. Most Americans know nothing about our work. None of us is on television, and none of us is a household name. If you ask the average American what an AUSA, or Assistant United States Attorney, does for a living, he will probably draw a complete blank. Even my own mother has a hard time getting it right. She always tells my relatives that I was a district attorney, the common title for state and local prosecutors who combat most street crime. To most AUSAs, who pride themselves on their unique role, fighting the country’s most dangerous criminals, that confusion is maddening.

The fact that no one in America knows anything about federal prosecutors is troubling, for in the United States today few people possess more power. As early as 1940 Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson remarked that a federal prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. Since Jackson’s day, that power has only increased. In the words of federal judge (and former AUSA) Gerald Lynch, Congress has cast the federal prosecutor in the role of God. Hyperbole? Certainly—but a revealing comment nevertheless.

Federal prosecutors have not always had so much influence. Traditionally, crime was the responsibility of state and local governments. Federal criminal law was a sleepy and unimportant backwater. Starting in the 1950s, however, Congress passed a series of landmark crime bills that radically expanded the United States government’s role in combating crime. These bills gave federal prosecutors, for the first time in our nation’s history, the legal tools they needed to combat the nation’s most serious criminal threats: the mafia, corrupt corporate executives, gangs, and drug dealers. As a result, the federal government is now deeply involved in law enforcement in your community.

During the exact same period, Congress, the Justice Department, and the federal courts quietly revolutionized law enforcement in a second, more subtle way. Back in the old days the federal government observed a strict division of labor: agents investigated crimes, and then prosecutors handled cases in court once those investigations were completed. Today that is no longer true. Disturbed by revelations of domestic political spying by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and believing, rightly or wrongly, that lawyers would respect civil liberties more carefully than would gumshoe agents, America’s lawmakers gradually shifted investigative power from law enforcement agencies like the FBI to federal prosecutors. As a result of this transfer of power, federal agents today cannot obtain a wiretap, a search warrant, an arrest warrant, an immunity order, or most subpoenas—the basic investigative tools required in every major case—without cooperation and prior approval from an AUSA. This gives AUSAs a virtual veto over most federal investigations. In some parts of the country federal prosecutors use this leverage lightly, and agents still run the show. But in most big cities and in all the most important federal cases AUSAs tell agents politely but firmly, Investigate the case my way, or you won’t investigate at all. As a result, AUSAs today are not just courtroom attorneys; they have become our nation’s chief criminal investigators.

FROM 1997 TO 2003 I served as an Assistant United States Attorney. I supervised dozens of covert investigations, using wiretaps, searches, stings, and surveillance to bring sophisticated criminals to bay. Once these investigations were finished and my defendants were under arrest, I battled some of the nation’s most talented defense lawyers in high-stakes jury trials.

Most federal prosecutors specialize in one kind of crime or another. They prosecute gangs, or drugs, or fraud. I was never a specialist. I won a very big trial as a rookie, and from that moment on, the Department of Justice moved me from one major case to the next. I prosecuted mafia killers, drug kingpins, and crooked Enron executives. Along with a team of agents, cops, and fellow prosecutors, I helped clean up one of New York’s most dangerous neighborhoods. In September 2001 I worked briefly on the emergency response to the 9/11 terror attacks. As a result, I became an expert in almost every area of crime the Justice Department prosecutes.

I am very proud of my work as an AUSA. I know that without my efforts, and those of thousands of prosecutors and agents like me, the world would be a more dangerous place. This book is not, however, a simple celebration of the Justice Department’s work. There is also a darker side.

When I first reported for work as an AUSA, I felt totally lighthearted. What, I thought, could be more morally straightforward, more socially beneficial than prosecuting dangerous criminals? This view proved naive. Over the next few years, to my surprise, I learned that my job was an ethical obstacle course. Like most prosecutors, I tried very hard to do the right thing. Sometimes, however, I discovered that the way we fight criminals is counterproductive, encouraging crime instead of preventing it. I also learned that on occasion the best solution to a legal problem turns out to feel pretty awful. By 2003 I had become a very good prosecutor. I had also concluded, to my deep regret, that sometimes it is impossible to be both a great prosecutor and a good human being.

* The correct title for this program is the Witness Security Program. People in law enforcement call it WITSEC.

PART I

Rookie

CHAPTER ONE

The Making of a Prosecutor

In June 1996, at the age of thirty, I graduated from law school. That winter I applied to be a federal prosecutor. In my first interview a grizzled Justice Department veteran named Peter Norling asked, Why do you want to be an AUSA? I mumbled in reply that I possessed a deep commitment to public service. This answer was true but incomplete. If you asked me today, I would say, I got caught stealing hubcaps.

It was spring of 1983, my senior year in high school. My brother Bill was a sophomore at the University of Texas, and he invited me and a friend named Bob to Roundup, a big fraternity party. The morning of the party Bob and I loaded up his battered Ford Mustang in Houston with a case of Budweiser and a plastic jug of vodka screwdrivers, and we barreled down Highway 290 to Austin, drinking along the way. Bob drove fast, and we got to Austin by 3:00 p.m., already totally buzzed. We met my brother and his friends at the UT student union bowling alley, where we split several pitchers of beer. Then, to kill some time before the night’s main event, Bob and I decided to drive around the city, finishing off the screwdrivers in the process. The alcohol proved our undoing. When we drove past the majestic State Capitol building, Bob saw another old Mustang sitting in the shadow of the pink granite dome with something Bob’s car lacked—authentic Ford hubcaps. I don’t recall what happened next. Did we discuss our next move, or was it instinctive? All I recall is that we jumped out of the car, and within seconds we had three hubcaps pried off with a crowbar. We were working hard on the fourth when the Austin police showed up. The car belonged to a state senator. Bob got charged with attempted theft. I got lucky. Because I was still sixteen and doing more watching than pulling, the cops decided to release me.

When I got home to Houston on Sunday, I was sober and scared, and that’s where I made my mistake. In the criminal world it is always an error to talk about your crimes. When my parents asked me about my trip, I should have clammed up. Instead, I told them exactly what happened. My confession set off a firestorm.

My relationship with my father was already very strained. Like most family disputes, this one was neither his fault nor mine, but the product of mutual mistrust and misunderstanding. My father grew up in a tough Chicago neighborhood during the Depression and World War II, the son of hardworking German immigrants. His childhood left him with a stern worldview, with life conceived as a battle. He wanted sons built in his own image, football players who understood that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, one of his favorite sayings. Tragically, we never saw eye to eye. From an early age I fell far short of his ideal: poor at sports, an intellectual, my head always buried in a book, good at school but decidedly lazy. My personality seemed to infuriate my father. To him, I seemed weak, a dreamer, likely to fail.

Alcohol made things worse. For my family, heavy drinking was a normal daily ritual. In my case, it got out of control, resulting in chaos.

I had my first beer when I was five, as a reward for a good kindergarten report card. By the time I was fifteen, I was a total mess, drunk several times a week, staying out late and sneaking back home after my parents were asleep, barely paying attention in school. My parents recognized what was happening, and they were understandably upset. By the time I was in high school, we were barely on speaking terms.

The hubcap debacle was the last blow. When I told my parents what happened, my father exploded: I will not have a thief living under my roof! Fortunately, he did not kick me out that day. I was scheduled to graduate from high school in six or seven weeks. My father told me, After you get that diploma, I want you out of here within forty-eight hours.

I was sixteen and on my own. I had little money, no job, and no prospects. I had no way to pay for college, and working at a gas station or convenience store seemed like a dead end. So I did what any red-blooded Texas boy would do. On my seventeenth birthday I went down to the local mall and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. To make my enlistment legal, my parents had to sign the papers, since I was still underage. Thankfully, they did so, for they hoped the Marines would straighten me out. After that day I had almost no contact with my family for the next ten years.

When I enlisted, I thought I was striking off on an independent path. Today I can see that I was really trying to prove to my father that I was tough after all.

I SPENT THREE YEARS in the Marine Corps, stationed in California, in Panama, on the submarine USS Blueback, and on an assault carrier in the Pacific. In boot camp I learned to march in a straight line, fire an M-16, walk a post, and hump a seventy-pound rucksack. At infantry training school I was taught to read a map and use a compass, shoot heavy weaponry, operate a radio, and blow things up. I did none of these things particularly well, but I had high IQ scores, was a fast runner, and knew how to swim. Apparently, these skills were rare, at least in combination. To my total surprise, I was selected to join Recon, the Marine Corps’s elite intelligence and special operations unit. Our motto: Swift, Silent, Deadly.

In Recon, my military skills deepened. I learned to travel on foot quietly and quickly, to swim long distances in the ocean at night, to rappel out of helicopters and climb up cliffs, to operate small boats and to service and repair their outboard engines, and to fire my rifle with a Zen-like assurance, hitting bull’s-eyes repeatedly at five hundred yards.

The Marines taught me a lot about myself. When I enlisted, I worried deep inside that I was a coward and that in the ultimate tests of life, I would fail, a fear inculcated, in equal parts, by critical parents and a notparticularly profound reading of the later Hemingway novels. After three years in the Marines this fear had disappeared. Put in tough and stressful situations, often in physical pain, I discovered that I was neither the most nor the least courageous of men. I feared the cold but could handle heavy ocean surf with aplomb. Hated heights but enjoyed the dark. Could hike farther than most men, run faster than most, shoot better than almost anyone, but would never excel in hand-to-hand combat, for I simply did not like hitting people. Above all, I learned that physical courage is an overrated virtue, rooted more often than not in a lack of imagination.

My three years in the Marine Corps had a profound impact on the way I viewed the world. Before I enlisted, I had no particular ethical orientation. I wanted to be cool, like Jim Morrison of the Doors, or Sean Penn’s perpetually stoned surfer character Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I wore cutoff jeans and Rolling Stones T-shirts riddled with holes, skipped school to drink beer at an abandoned skateboard park, and managed to get kicked out of advanced placement math. If you had asked me to articulate my values, I would have been struck dumb. At best, I might have quoted Spicoli: All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.

The Marines destroyed my prior character and rebuilt me in their own image. The impact was profound. I enlisted for very selfish reasons: to travel, to have some adventures, and to get away from Houston. The idea of service to country was far from my mind. The Marines changed all that. Day in and day out, they taught me to believe that my country and my Corps were a higher priority than my own personal well-being and that some things are so important they are worth dying for.

I was never put to that test. When the Marine Barracks in Beirut was destroyed by terrorists in 1983, killing 241, the bomb wiped out an entire Recon platoon. My unit volunteered to take its place, but President Reagan pulled the troops out instead. That was as close to combat as I got. Still, my intense training in the value of patriotism permanently influenced my values. Today I still think like a Marine. To me, the primary purpose of life is to serve others, not yourself, and to work to make the nation a better place. That commitment ultimately led me to become a federal prosecutor. In retrospect, trying to steal those hubcaps was probably the smartest thing I ever did.

IN SEPTEMBER 1986 my Marine Corps enlistment came to an end, and I enrolled in college at Yale University, the only veteran in a class of thirteen hundred. Life at Yale came as a very pleasant shock. In the Marines I shared a tin Quonset hut with a dozen other enlisted men. Our hooch had a rough cement floor and was heated by a kerosene stove. At night I had to move my bed into the center of the squad bay to avoid an agile rat—a former Marine pet that had reverted to the wild—that frequently climbed the grooved metal walls and got into my bed. There was pornography everywhere; paying prostitutes for sex was common, particularly overseas; and disputes were resolved with fists. Punishment for disobedience was swift: fifty push-ups, while your NCO kicked you in the gut with his jump boots.

Yale, in contrast, was cushy. I had my own bedroom in Vanderbilt Hall, spare and clean as a monk’s cell, with oak floors and built-in bookshelves, looking out over the shady Old Campus. My hours were my own to spend as I wished, and I passed most of my time reading—novels, history, poetry. I had expected to struggle to keep up with the other freshmen, but I quickly discovered that I could hold my own intellectually, for I had a good memory for facts and could write clear, precise prose. Even the food was good—at least compared with Marine Corps chow. But all these positives paled when compared with Yale’s greatest gift, philosophy.

The Marines had left me ethically at sea. They had wiped out most of the rudimentary values I had been raised with—probably a good thing—and replaced them with a completely new set. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: that our moral orientation is not fixed but can change and thus should ultimately be a matter of rational choice. Unfortunately, many of the values taught by the Marines were clearly inappropriate back in the civilian world. Patriotism was fine. So was courage. But fistfights, sexism, drunken brawls, and bottle smashing were out. I needed to find a new way to live.

In the fall of my freshman year I enrolled in a course in classical Greek philosophy with Professor Nancy Sherman, a noted Aristotle scholar. My first assignment was to read Plato’s Meno. In this brief dialogue, Plato suggested that we can learn to be good people if we devote ourselves to rigorous philosophical self-analysis, submitting our actions and beliefs to close and careful scrutiny. I recall being shocked as I read this simple piece. My abrupt transition from the Houston suburbs to the Marines had taught me that values are mutable but not how to choose the right ones. Plato argued that not all values are of equal worth: some choices are good, some bad, and bad choices have bad consequences. Discerning between good and bad is not easy. If, however, we apply ourselves and choose to be self-critical, we can learn to be moral—to live a good life.

Elated, curious, I devoted myself to philosophy for the next four years. When I graduated, I had a master’s degree. Most of my work was highly technical, dense papers filled with what now appears to me to be almost incomprehensible philosophical jargon. But for me, philosophy was never just a course of study. I passionately believed in what the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik calls the sunny optimism of humanism, the conviction that if I read the right books and applied what I learned, I could lead a more perfect life.

In the 1980s Yale’s philosophy department, headquartered in redbrick colonial Connecticut Hall, had no particular ideological focus, and this diffuse approach to the field seemed to rub off on me. I never adopted one single philosophical point of view. On the contrary, I borrowed bits and pieces of wisdom from a broad variety of thinkers: from Aristotle, the importance of forming good habits, of keeping one’s life in balance, of friendship and the life of the mind; from Kant, the value of honesty, a virtue I lacked as a child; from Nietzsche, the importance of rigorous, independent critical thinking; from Aquinas, the value of analytic clarity. I revered these thinkers, but one influence stood out above them all: the great nineteenth-century British utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Bentham and Mill were concerned with a very basic but critical question: What makes an action good? They answered that a person’s actions should be judged by their social consequences. An action is good if it tends to maximize overall human happiness and bad if it leads to increased suffering. To give a simple example, donating two hundred dollars to a fund for hungry children is more virtuous than spending that money on a fancy pair of shoes, for the first choice will do more to alleviate human pain.

When I was first exposed to utilitarianism, I thought it a bit simplistic, but over time I found the utilitarian ideal increasingly compelling. As a child I had been extremely unhappy, so the idea that our goal in life should be to decrease human suffering resonated powerfully with me. I also liked the emphasis on selflessness. In the Marines I had been taught to place the safety of others before my own well-being. Now the utilitarians provided an ethical justification for that viewpoint. Looking back, I can see that I was not really doing much independent thinking—I was influenced primarily by philosophers who could explain and rationalize my own ethical intuitions. At the time, however, I felt as if I were making a great voyage of intellectual discovery.

My new utilitarian beliefs influenced many of my life decisions, both serious and trivial. When I bought my first car, I got a Honda Civic. From a utilitarian perspective, the high gas mileage, cheap price, and ultralow emissions seemed hard to beat, even though I secretly yearned for an SUV. The same kind of analysis shaped my career. When utilitarians make life decisions, they weigh the social consequences of their potential choices. As a college senior I asked: What job can I do to help decrease human pain? I considered becoming a philosophy professor or a high school teacher. In the end, however, I concluded that in a democracy the most direct way to improve human conditions is to get involved in politics. In May 1990, when I graduated from college, I packed up a U-Haul and moved to Washington, D.C.

DURING JUNE 1990 I walked the halls of Congress, handing out résumés. Within three weeks I had a job as a legislative correspondent with Representative (now Senator) Charles Schumer of Brooklyn. Every week Chuck received more than five hundred letters from his constituents. My job was to draft his responses. The first week I received my first lesson in practical politics. When Chuck reviewed my efforts, he told me, In every one of our responses, we have to say that I agree with the writer. So read every one of their letters closely, and find something in it with which we can agree. Then emphasize that in your response.

I thought about this for a moment and then asked, What if we disagree with every single policy position the person wrote about?

Chuck paused and stared at me, a quizzical expression on his face, as if the answer were obvious. Then tell them we agree that the issues are important.

From my time with Chuck, I learned that democracy actually works. Chuck paid very close attention to his constituents. He was also willing to fight to protect them. One morning, in a misguided effort to save money, the Bush administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs canceled without prior warning the minivan rides that severely disabled veterans relied upon to get to their VA medical centers. Within hours Schumer’s office was bombarded with telephone calls from panicking veterans who could not get to their hospitals for essential care like dialysis. As a veteran I thought the department’s action was outrageous. I talked to Chuck, and he agreed we had to take action. We immediately drafted a tough letter to the administration demanding it restore this service. He and I then worked the phones, calling other Democratic congressional offices, lining up support. When we had gathered twenty signatures from Chuck’s closest allies in the House of Representatives, we faxed the letter off to the VA—and to every major newspaper in the country. Faced with this political heat, the administration quickly backed off, and the rides for vets were restored.

Every day Chuck’s congressional mail contained a giant stack of public policy magazines and think tank position papers dealing with the entire spectrum of national issues: foreign relations, national security, crime, health care, education, the economy. When I was hired, I discovered that most of this material went into the garbage. I put it into a box instead. Every night I carted the box home and stayed up late, reading, trying to learn my new trade.

One night, while skimming a trade journal titled Space News, I stumbled on an intriguing proposal to reform NASA’s wasteful contracting procedures, an idea that could save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. I wrote a brief policy memo summarizing the idea, and then I nervously handed it to Chuck the next day. Chuck looked at me skeptically at first—a natural reaction, for who wants policy advice from the mail guy? To his credit, he gave me a chance and read the memo. Within a few months Chuck’s NASA Contracting Reform Act had passed the U.S. House of Representatives, and it was ultimately signed into law.

Over the next year several more of my ideas, on issues ranging from defense policy to telecommunications regulation, were passed by the House of Representatives, a tribute to Chuck’s legislative skill.* Chuck gave me a raise and a promotion, but I was ambitious, and I wanted to try my hand in a larger sphere. After a short stint working for Speaker of the House Tom Foley,* advising him on economic and education policy, I signed on in the fall of 1991 as a deputy policy director with the campaign of a newly declared presidential candidate, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

BILL CLINTON WAS A POLICY ADVISER’S DREAM, for he had a voracious appetite for new ideas. Almost every day I faxed him at least one memo on some aspect of domestic or foreign policy from my office in Little Rock—some two hundred in all over the course of the 1992 campaign. Sometimes he rejected my ideas outright. I once suggested tinkering with the operation of the Federal Reserve Board, the secretive group of bankers and economists that sets monetary policy. Clinton wisely sent the memo back, the relevant paragraphs crossed out with a black marking pen. If, however, he liked an idea, he would incorporate it into his stump speech that very day or save it for a major policy address. Over time I quietly made a significant contribution to his policy agenda, helping craft his proposals for deficit reduction, hiring one hundred thousand new cops, and reinventing government to improve efficiency and cut waste.

When I look back at these events today, I find them astounding. Why would anyone like Bill Clinton take advice from an inexperienced twenty-six-year-old? At the time, however, I thought it was natural. My ego inflated to absurd proportions, and I began to believe I was entitled to help set national policy. Instead of keeping my mouth shut and trying to learn from others, I pressed my own agenda. I harangued Governor Clinton about the importance of deficit reduction, argued with Senator Gore over carbon taxes, and vetoed several of Hillary Clinton’s pet domestic policy ideas. When I disagreed with recognized experts like Harvard economist Robert Reich, I sent Clinton blistering memos criticizing their work. At the time I thought I was just doing my job, fighting for good public policy. Now, however, I know I must have looked absurd, an arrogant kid who was in way over his head. The press eventually picked up on this. When, after the 1992 election, I found myself in a job as a senior policy analyst at the ripe old age of twenty-six, the conservative Washington Times had a field day. How old would that make a ‘junior policy analyst’? the paper asked. Fourteen? At the time I was offended. Now it makes me laugh. The Times editors were right, of course. In life, experience matters, and I did not have any.

My time working with Clinton was priceless because I got to learn about American politics at the side of a master. Watching him work a crowd, I saw firsthand the source of his power, a matchless ability to forge an instant emotional bond with each person in a cheering crowd, using just a wink, a smile, a wave, or a silently mouthed thank you as he looked in his or her eyes. Later, when I found myself in front of juries, I found these lessons invaluable. By 1993, however, I was ready to leave. Part of this was personal pique. After every successful presidential campaign, some advisers get shoved aside in the inevitable scramble for power, and I, because of my abrasiveness, was one of the victims, relegated to a backwater at the U.S. Treasury Department. But it also reflected two larger concerns.

My first job with Chuck Schumer was unimpressive at first glance: negligible pay, cramped little cubicle, no prestige. I spent the vast majority of my time drafting letters to angry Brooklyn constituents. But though my job was unimportant, I found it personally rewarding because the results were real and concrete. When veterans lost their hospital transportation, we got them relief almost immediately, and when we found a problem that needed correcting, Chuck introduced legislation. For a person with a deep utilitarian desire to reduce pain and suffering, that kind of direct action and measurable progress was very satisfying.

When I worked for President Clinton, in contrast, progress was less easy to see. I certainly had an enviable job. I got to know Clinton and Gore pretty well, and I was on a first-name basis with the government’s top officials. The Washington Post reported my beep-me-at-home access to George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and the rest of the Little Rock stars. But it felt incredibly hollow. I attended endless staff meetings, shuffled huge stacks of papers, and wrote memos crafting themes for Clinton to articulate, but I never saw any real measurable results. The higher my position, it seemed, the less it had to do with helping real people, the more with manipulating voters and the press. I found myself hungering to do something more practical, to find a job with positive real-world results.

I was also troubled by the atmosphere of moral and political compromise. Clinton was a political shape shifter, constantly modifying his positions in response to the immediate political context. In the campaign, for example, we began the primaries by opposing federal gay rights legislation in a calculated effort to distinguish ourselves from our more liberal opponents. When, however, we found ourselves in a three-way battle against both President George H. W. Bush and the billionaire Ross Perot, desperate for support from our liberal base, we shifted 180 degrees. The same thing happened with deficit reduction. One day we were deficit hawks, and the next we were sending Congress a pork-inflated stimulus package that even Congress did not want.

At the time this constant changing of position seemed disastrous to me, for it sacrificed the president’s long-term political and moral credibility in exchange for fleeting short-term advantage. But it also depressed me personally. I had gone to Washington to help fight for good policies. Now I found myself trapped in a cynical game in which public policy was a bargaining chip. Our goal, it seemed, was not to make the country stronger but to make a president more popular.

During the campaign Clinton had promised to streamline government by eliminating one hundred thousand government bureaucrats. That struck me as a good goal. So, in the fall of 1993, I decided to start with myself. I resigned from the Treasury and enrolled at Harvard Law School. My goals at the time were simple. I wanted to remain in public service, but in a job that offered concrete, measurable results and moral clarity, a job where at the end of the day I would know I had done something useful and ethical. I was not certain, but I thought I had identified that job: prosecutor.

* I should make clear that in every one of these cases, Chuck took my initial idea and made it much better. These were his bills, not mine, and they reflected his own very deep command of public policy.

* The Speaker was a very good man, but he was more interested in being Speaker than in using his power for good. We had no agenda, no goals, and no plan. I found myself being a policy adviser to a man uninterested in public policy.

CHAPTER TWO

The Code of Silence Murders

During the summer of 1994, after my first year of law school, I worked as a law clerk for the U.S. Department of Justice in Boston. My first day on the job, to my surprise, I was assigned to the biggest case in the office, the Charlestown Code of Silence Murders.

Charlestown is a small Boston neighborhood of some fifteen thousand residents, famed for its historic landmarks, Bunker Hill and Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution. To Bostonians in the early 1990s, however, Charlestown was known primarily for violence. Between 1975 and 1994 more than fifty-five people were murdered in the neighborhood. According to news reports, the police and Charlestown residents knew who committed nearly all the murders, for there were often eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, no one in the community was willing to step forward and testify against the killers, for Charlestown was ruled by the Irish Mob, and it enforced a strict code of silence: townies did not talk with the police, on pain of death. In the United States, roughly 60 percent of murders are eventually solved by the police. Because of the code of silence, that figure in Charlestown was less than 25 percent.

Most law enforcement officials believed the Charlestown killers would never be brought to justice. On March 6, 1992, however, the Boston police received a major break. That day the police executed a search warrant in the Charlestown apartment of George Sargent, a local cocaine dealer, and busted Sargent with his stash. Caught red-handed, Sargent flipped—that is, began to cooperate with law enforcement. That evening he told police detectives that he worked as a street distributor for two major drug traffickers, Michael Fitzgerald and John Houlihan, who ruled the Charlestown neighborhood and enforced the code of silence. Sargent told the cops that Fitzie and Houlihan were experienced killers who had recently executed several drug dealers trying to move in on their turf. He also warned that if word leaked out that he was cooperating, Houlihan would try to kill him. Weeks later the cops met with Sargent again and recorded his statements on audiotape. This precaution turned out to be prescient. On the night of June 28, 1992, George Sargent was shot twice in the chest while walking down Bunker Hill Street, Charlestown’s main thoroughfare. A crowd gathered around the body of the dying informant, and an anonymous voice hissed, Shut your mouths and don’t be a squealer.

Nothing motivates federal prosecutors and agents more than the murder of a witness. Armed with the leads Sargent provided before he died, AUSA Paul Kelly and a team of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents went after the Fitzgerald-Houlihan gang. Ultimately, they hit pay dirt in the form of Bud Sweeney. Sweeney was a former cocaine distributor for Fitzgerald and Houlihan who had the temerity to go into business for himself. In 1993 Houlihan tried to kill Sweeney on three separate occasions. In the last attempt Sweeney was shot seven times, and though he was paralyzed, he maintained a tenuous hold on life. Sweeney recognized that at the rate he was going, he would be dead before the year was out, and so he made a fateful decision: he contacted the DEA, agreed to testify against his former bosses, and disappeared into the Witness Security Program. Armed with Sweeney’s cooperation, Paul Kelly had enough information to indict the Fitzgerald-Houlihan gang. That’s when I showed up.

On my first day as an intern Karen Green, the Deputy U.S. Attorney, told me I would be working with Paul on the Code of Silence case. As she walked me to his office, she said, very casually, I hope you’ll check in with me every once in a while, to let me know how the case is going. At that moment the remark seemed innocuous. I soon learned otherwise. In many U.S. Attorney’s offices, there is tension between the front office—the senior managers—and the frontline grunt prosecutors. In Boston that tension was palpable, even to a clueless intern. Karen was well known as an excellent attorney, a leader of the Massachusetts bar, but her prior stint as an AUSA had been in the Civil Division, representing the government in environmental and tax disputes, and she did not always trust the cowboy prosecutors on the criminal side of the office. Criminal prosecutors in turn thought a civil attorney like Karen simply did not understand law enforcement.

This fault line surfaced in my first five minutes on the Code of Silence case. As soon as I sat down in Paul’s office, in one of his decrepit Naugahyde chairs, he remarked with a tired smile, So, is the front office sending you down here to spy? I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say.

After stuttering for a few moments, I told Paul that Karen had asked me to keep her up-to-date but that I wasn’t going to do anything behind his back. I just want to learn how to be a prosecutor. Anything I tell her, I’ll tell you first.

Paul looked at me for a moment, studying my face, and then he smiled. Good. Let’s get to work. Paul was not a petty man.

That morning I got my first assignment. Paul handed me a copy of the federal criminal statute book and a thick cardboard redwell folder filled with DEA investigative reports, grand jury transcripts, search warrant returns, and drug lab reports—all the evidence in the Code of Silence case. He also printed out a draft indictment charging Fitzgerald, Houlihan, hitman Joseph Nardone, and a dozen underlings with forty federal offenses: murders, armed robbery, drug trafficking, racketeering. Take this stuff and read it, he barked, gruffly but kindly, with a touch of Boston accent in his voice. Then write me a memo. For every crime charged in the indictment, make sure we’ve got enough evidence to indict. Also, if you can think of any additional crimes I should charge, put that in too. As I packed up my book bag, Paul gave me one more piece of advice: Don’t leave this stuff lying around. It could get someone killed. I walked out of the office a few minutes later with a very tight grip on my bag.

That afternoon I took the train back across the river to Cambridge and went to the Harvard Law School library, to my customary seat in the main reading room. When I dug into the redwell, the first thing I found was a DEA six, as DEA investigative reports are called, summarizing a debriefing session with Sweeney, the paralyzed informant. I began to read it, and within five minutes I was mesmerized.

If you are a law-abiding citizen in the United States, life is pretty orderly. People go to work, pay their taxes, raise their children, cut their lawns. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of another, more sinister world that exists alongside our own, a parallel universe of crime and violence, but we almost never encounter it, except on television or in movies. Now, however, I discovered that this criminal underworld was not just a fantasy, the creation of Hollywood directors, but was quietly bubbling all around me, a separate moral universe with its own values, its own rules, and its own heroes and villains. Every day, I learned, desperate men toting M-16s were knocking off armored cars, selling kilos of cocaine in back-alley meetings, and delivering beatings and hits to keep rival dealers off their turf. In this world nothing was what it seemed. Kerrigan’s, an innocuous Charlestown flower shop, was actually a secret command post for the Irish Mob, and a run-down bar just a few blocks from my apartment was not just a hangout for rummies but the office of hitman Joseph Nardone. Nardone bragged that he was a headache specialist: you got a headache, I will take care of it. Bring five thousand dollars to the bar in a shoebox, and you could have your enemies killed.

Over the next week I wrote Paul a memo carefully analyzing his case. For each criminal charge listed in the indictment, I identified the essential elements that the government would have to prove in order to convict and then listed all the evidence that satisfied those elements. I did not find any holes, but I did discover an important point that Paul had apparently overlooked. The Fitzgerald-Houlihan gang had sold a large amount of cocaine. As I flipped through the federal statute book, I realized that its leaders were criminally liable under the government’s drug kingpin statute, the continuing criminal enterprise, or CCE, law. In the memo I carefully explained why CCE might be added to the indictment. Later that week I handed my work in to Paul. He read it silently for ten minutes while I nervously fidgeted, and when he got to the CCE section, he laughed. "It’s good you caught this, but it isn’t an error; it’s a strategy. I’ve already charged RICO, an incredibly complicated statute.* The jury’s gonna have enough problems with that as it is. If we add CCE, we run the risk that they will get totally confused. So we’re gonna keep it simple."

Paul complimented me on my work and asked me for a copy on disk. Then he cut and pasted my entire memorandum into his own official prosecution memo, asking the front office for approval to indict. I was glad he liked my work and felt I had passed a test.

A few days later Paul told me that Karen Green had insisted that he put a CCE charge into the indictment. When I heard this information, I raised both my hands shoulder high, palms out, in a classic defensive gesture, and blurted, as quickly as I could, It wasn’t my fault! Paul just laughed. One week later Paul indicted the Fitzgerald-Houlihan gang. The vast majority of indictments are matters of public record. On any business day you can go down to your local courthouse and find out who got charged with a crime. Paul, however, put this indictment under seal, so it would remain secret.

IN EVERY MAJOR FEDERAL CASE with multiple defendants, agents and prosecutors plan and execute carefully coordinated simultaneous arrests, an event known as a takedown. The goal is to pick up every single target at once, before word hits the street and the defendants have time to flee.

A few days after securing the indictment, Paul and I walked over to DEA Headquarters to attend the final takedown planning session. At the main security post, we flashed our IDs, signed into a logbook, and then were escorted upstairs to a large open-floor squad room filled with desks and filing cabinets, where dozens of agents were waiting. These were the first federal agents I had ever seen, and I took a close look. Almost all white, almost all men, many of them abnormally big, suggesting they spent some serious time in the weight room. Most of the agents had 9 mm pistols strapped to their bodies in shoulder holsters. Others had small black or nickel-plated revolvers in ankle holsters peeking out from under the cuffs of their trousers. As soon as we got through the door, we—or, rather, Paul—got a hero’s welcome. Many of the agents shouted, not exactly hooray, but something close, a deep, rumbling haaaaaaayyyyy. Some clapped. The agents all got up and crowded around Paul, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, congratulating him on the indictment. That was the moment I realized, for the first time, how important this case truly was. A few minutes later the meeting was called to order.

I had assumed, up to this point, that Paul would play a small role at the takedown meeting. Paul was just a lawyer, after all. Arrests, I thought, were certainly the responsibility of the DEA agents on the case. I was surprised, then, when Paul got up to run the meeting. He reviewed the indictment with the assembled team and went through the list of defendants, one by one.

Who wants Billy Herd? he called out.* A couple of agents looked at each other wordlessly and then raised their hands.

Who wants Kevin Haugh? A couple of agents chuckled.

A grizzled veteran said, We’ll take him, Paul.

Someone immediately shouted, Don’t forget your body armor! and everyone laughed.

Another team volunteered to pick up an informant who was going to be placed in the Witness Security Program. An agent called out boisterously, You guys gonna take life insurance out on her? and again everyone laughed.

Paul ran through the rest of the defendants, reviewed the time schedule, and told the agents to get the defendants down to the courthouse for arraignment as quickly as they could. A few minutes later we were back out on the street. The next day, after clockwork arrests, every single defendant was in custody.

IN MANY DISTRICTS a major case like Code of Silence would not go to trial for years. In Boston, however, Judge William Young put the case on a fast track, with the trial scheduled just a few months away, in November. For Paul, that meant he had no time to waste. A few days after the takedown, we began to prep for trial. Though we felt rushed, the quick timetable was probably wise. Right after the takedown, three of our witnesses had their cars firebombed, and we were forced to relocate or provide protection to more than a dozen people, at an ultimate cost of more than a million dollars. Getting the case over as rapidly as possible was probably best for their safety.

Paul possessed some pretty good evidence in the Code of Silence case. Sweeney was a powerful witness, and Nardone’s girlfriend had also flipped—agreed to testify—giving us another inside look at the gang. We bolstered their testimony with damning forensic evidence. Acting on an informant’s tip, we pulled a snub-nosed.38-caliber pistol—a murder weapon—out of the polluted Mystic River behind the Bunker Hill projects. We also matched a microscopic DNA sample from the lip of a beer bottle abandoned at a murder scene with the DNA of one of our defendants. Despite this proof, Paul was still worried about the relative weakness of the case, for it relied too much on circumstantial