The Burglary (54 page)

“
And I remember the three of us sitting on a couch. Somehow my mind was twisting in some kind of unreality. There was only one thing that was real and that was that a child was dying. But the situation of our relationships on that couch.…I just felt I was in Twilight Zone. And I remember walking out of that hospital that day and banging on the front of my car and trying to feel, to feel something that was there and real.”

Some of the surreal nature of the relationships vanished for Doyle as he focused on the acute needs of the Hardys as their son suffered. He was particularly concerned about Peg Hardy. Fear nearly paralyzed her and kept her from visiting her unconscious son. Doyle implored her to go see him. “I told her that if he died and she had never fixed his hair or rubbed his face that she might forever regret it.” Finally, she agreed, and Doyle took her to see Billy. They stood beside his bed, “and I got her to talk to him.”

“It was a time of enormous emotional upheaval. Billy slowly died. They couldn't save him because infection set in. He died October third.”

Three days later, Doyle conducted Billy's funeral at St. Joseph's Cathedral Church in Camden. A funeral for a sweet nine-year-old child is always an unspeakably sad occasion. Certainly this one was. Doyle remembers looking into the faces of the people sitting in the pews in front of him. “The family was there, and the Camden 28 and their supporters were there.…Maybe
twenty FBI agents also were there showing support for the family.” The FBI agents and the people they had arrested were sitting near each other. Each group grieving. Each group looking slightly awkward. Each group managing to put their concern for the Hardys above their antipathy for each other.

“I don't remember what I said that night,” said Doyle, “something, I'm sure, like, ‘What can I say about a nine-year-old boy who died?' I tried to talk about the sadness of it all and the tragedy of it all. It was a bewildering, roller-coaster situation of reality and unreality, tragedy. It was a terrible tragedy. Relationships that were not reality. I found it extremely tearing inside. Just twisting without adequate expression.”

After the funeral, Peg and Bob Hardy showed Doyle two pieces of wood they had found in Billy's dresser drawer. With a nail and hammer Billy had chiseled the word “peace” in one and “love” in the other. Doyle had the pieces of wood mounted as a hanging for the Hardys “as a remembrance of Billy and his two great words for his world.”

For some of the defendants, perhaps especially Giocondo, the defendant who had known Hardy longest, it was very difficult to think of forgiving Hardy for being an informer against him and the others. How could someone so close to you do that? The idea of linking Hardy with trust now felt like an oxymoron. Nevertheless, the bond had been so strong when Hardy worked with them that the desire to support him and his family in some way at the time of their extreme loss rose above their overarching anger. It was impossible, though, for most of the defendants to erase the thought that someday soon at their trial Hardy would testify against them and help send them to prison.

17

T
HE FBI WAS EAGER
to use the Camden arrests to keep the momentum moving toward the arrest of the Media burglars. But that was impossible. The public didn't know it, but the triumphant announcements by the FBI after the arrests were hollow. What had appeared in June to be a great opportunity for the bureau to establish that John Peter Grady was what the FBI had thought he was since the day after the Media break-in—the leader of the Media burglars—never materialized.

By the time the Camden burglars were sitting in jail the morning of August 22, 1971, after they were arrested—at the same time that J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell were jointly announcing the arrests at a news conference in Washington—the FBI had no more evidence of who burglarized the Media FBI office than it did when agents jumped with joy when the Camden informer, Robert Hardy, showed up on their doorstep in June 1971.

The promise of Camden had vanished. The FBI had no evidence linking Grady—or anybody else from the Camden group, or anyone at all—to the Media burglary. This was true despite the fact that agents had listened to and transcribed hundreds of hours of the informer's conversations with Grady, including responses to the questions they had primed Hardy to ask Grady about his involvement in the Media burglary. They had photographed and analyzed the large cache of personal possessions that Grady had entrusted to the informer for a few days, including his extensive personal notebook, address book, and business records. From coast to coast, agents were given contact information for the people listed in Grady's address book and told
to interview them. His name was not known to some of the people. Others thought they might have ordered books from him, but they did not remember ever meeting him. Most important, none of them knew anything about a connection between Grady and a place called Media. Not even a conversation with a brother from whom Grady was somewhat estranged produced any valuable information. The brother lamented to the FBI that their mother had always loved John Peter more than she loved him, but he seemed to know little if anything about Grady's activities.

Still, the investigators continued to think Grady was responsible for Media and that the other Media burglars were among those arrested at Camden. Roy Moore, the star investigator in charge of the MEDBURG investigation, insisted in a memo to Hoover four days after the arrests, “These people were involved in FBI-Media break-in and later distribution of FBI records.”

But, contrary to Moore's claim, there was no certainty, only a belief. Investigators and bureau officials expressed frustration to one another soon after the initial glow produced by the Camden arrests. They did so while expressing contradictory assessments of the MEDBURG case. In internal memos, they repeatedly stated their belief that they knew who the Media burglars were. But, remarkably, at the same time they repeatedly acknowledged that they had no evidence pointing to any of the Media burglars. They were deeply disappointed that their entire Camden effort had reaped no evidence related to Media—despite accumulating an astounding 25,000 pieces of evidence from the Camden defendants, including Grady's records and a mountain of debris they collected from other defendants, even perfume bottles and chewing gum wrappers.

Moore confessed to Hoover the total lack of progress in MEDBURG while simultaneously expressing certainty that the bureau could take advantage of the momentum set in motion by the Camden arrests. “There is no physical evidence or witnesses to FBI-Media burglary,” he wrote, just four days after the Camden arrests and after he had written to Hoover about the great public relations benefit of the arrests for the bureau. Apparently deeply frustrated, Moore wrote, “Matter can only be resolved by admissions. We now have key subjects in custody and must keep pressure on them to obtain admissions.”

He described his new strategy to the director:

“Direct, positive and prompt action is the best way to defeat the group—hit them hard and turn the spotlight of public opinion against them now and stop future offenses. This action should also hinder them from
recruiting new personnel.” And, he noted, it would deplete their money by requiring them to “put up huge sums of money for bail and attorneys.”

Moore recommended two new approaches, both involving pressing Camden defendants to confess to their involvement in Media. First, agents should conduct pointed interviews with the Camden defendants, and second, they should put them under oath in the closed confines of a grand jury and press them with questions about the burglary. Moore wanted the Department of Justice to empanel a grand jury soon for this purpose.

He summed up for Hoover what he thought would be necessary to arrest the people he was sure were the Media burglars. He was confident they were among thirty-nine people who had been targeted by agents and could be smoked out now by bringing indictments against them for three draft board raids that were unsolved crimes. The thirty-nine people he thought should be indicted had been winnowed down from four hundred “New Left activists” the MEDBURG squad had investigated in the Northeast in their search for the Media burglars, beginning the day after the burglary. He described the dimensions of the herculean effort that had taken place. For each of those four hundred people, agents had developed complete backgrounds, information about their associates and activities. “Informants were developed and directed seven days per week.…Voluminous files developed.”

By the time of the arrests at Camden, he told the director, the people believed to have conducted the Media burglary had been winnowed down to thirty-nine suspects, most of whom had been arrested at Camden. A focus now on these thirty-nine people, Moore told the director, would unlock Media.

The fact that the Camden defendants were now facing sentences of up to forty-seven years in prison, Moore thought, meant that if they were forced to testify in secret before a grand jury it was likely they would be intimidated into revealing what they knew about their own or others' involvement in Media—presumably because they would be willing to exchange information about their own or other people's roles in Media for reduced sentences for their roles in Camden. Pointed interviews, plus “prompt additional indictments,” Moore predicted, “will bring heavy pressure on entire Berrigan movement and … will likely serve as the means to obtain admissions regarding the FBI-Media burglary.”

Hoover liked Moore's plan. In a memorandum to his four highest aides—Tolson, Felt, Sullivan, and Rosen—shortly after the Camden arrests, he wrote, “Moore feels as I do. If we proceed with … Selective Service cases, we could break the Media case.…Mr. Moore stated that nothing would
make him happier than to make the arrests this week.” The grand jury would be disguised as an investigation of draft board break-ins, but its real purpose would be to smoke out the Media burglars. If subpoenaed witnesses refused to testify, Hoover said, “the judge could fine them for contempt,” bringing even more pressure.

To Hoover and Moore's great disappointment, Department of Justice officials refused to convene a grand jury now in response to their request. Use of the subpoena power of secret grand juries by the department to compensate for weak or failed FBI investigations had been strongly criticized in the past year. The MEDBURG investigative files reveal how this strategy that had been used repeatedly in the recent past haunted the bureau in this case. It wasn't that department officials had scruples about using grand juries as fishing expeditions when bureau investigations failed; the Nixon Department of Justice had in fact convened several such grand juries and based prosecutions on the results. But Justice officials expressed concern that doing so now might generate so much criticism that it would jeopardize the bombing–kidnap–draft board conspiracy case, which was scheduled to go to trial in January 1972 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This case, designed to rescue Hoover from his embarrassing November 1970 accusations against the Berrigan brothers and others, rested nearly entirely on very slender evidence that had been brought before a grand jury. Moore's grand jury proposal targeted at the thirty-nine people was tabled until after the Harrisburg trial.

With this decision by Justice officials, Hoover found himself in the unusual situation of not being permitted to move forward in his preferred way on this case that was most important to him—the Media burglary—because of a case that had been created to defend baseless claims his top aides had pleaded with him not to make in November 1970. To all other causes of failure to solve the MEDBURG case, add Hoover being hoist by his own petard.

Now, as throughout the MEDBURG investigation, the official record indicates that investigators and headquarters officials did not confront their failures and reassess their strategies. Instead, Moore and other investigators, with Hoover's approval, remained wedded to their original assumptions about who had committed the crime, and stayed focused on that track. Even when they explored what could be learned from the behavior of Camden defendants that might point to similar behavior by the Media burglars, they stuck with their original assumptions. They had observed that the Camden burglars usually drank in local bars late at night after they finished casing
duties. That prompted visits by agents to every bar in Media and its environs in the fall of 1971, armed with photos of possible suspects. Bartenders did not recognize any of them. They also examined local apartments near the FBI office that had been either vacant at the time of the burglary or vacated soon afterward. Fingerprints lifted from surfaces, cigarette butts, and an empty beer can found in those apartments were sent to the FBI lab with no positive results.

In an attempt to uncover new evidence in Media, a team of agents who had not participated previously in the investigation was assigned to survey the community. When they were done, their work, combined with work by earlier agents, meant that eighteen hundred local people who lived or worked in thirty-five square blocks, an area that must have included nearly the entire town, had been interviewed. Result: “No information of value was developed.”