The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (14 page)

“I said, ‘Yes.’

“And she said, ‘Well, it’s back there where you’ll find all the other agents.’ ”

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the strictly regulated work environment, camaraderie was strong.

Most agents dealt with the rule against commercial radios in Bureau cars by installing their own, and then removing them whenever inspections were held. When one Norfolk office agent neglected to do so in time, and was caught, he was suspended without pay for fifteen days, punishment also known in federal law enforcement parlance as being “put on the beach.”

Without much need for discussion, fellow agents made up the offending employee’s salary from their own pockets, while he volunteered to work without pay for the suspension period.

Says Hazelwood: “Everybody, including the Bureau, was happy.”

The dos and don’ts of working cases were equally detailed, and sometimes distracting. Yet Roy discovered the artful agent had plenty of opportunity to innovate.

In one case, Roy and his partner were alerted that a pimp wanted for violation of the 1910 Mann Act—transporting
women across state lines for “immoral purposes”—had been traced to an address in Norfolk. When the agents arrived at the modest residence in one of Norfolk’s rougher neighborhoods, the only person at home was the fugitive’s mother.

Although she grudgingly allowed the agents inside, this mother was having no truck with federal officers in search of her son.

Glancing around her living room as he listened to her speak, Roy noted a Bible open on a table, and a view of the Last Supper on the wall. On a table, he saw the weekly bulletin from a Southern Baptist church. He immediately knew how to handle the situation.

“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked. “I’d like to pray about this, and I’d like you to join me. Maybe it will help you to decide whether you should cooperate with us.”

The woman agreed, as Roy expected she would, and they both knelt by the coffee table to pray.

“My partner,” Hazelwood recalls, “looked at me as if I was nuts.”

After an intense silence, the woman opened her eyes and gave Hazelwood a level look.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll call my son and tell him to turn himself in to the FBI in New York.”

“Uh,” Roy replied, “we can handle that down here.”

No sense in New York getting credit for the collar.

“Well, he’s coming down tomorrow, but that’s Saturday,” she said.

“That’s all right, ma’am. We work all the time.”

At nine o’clock the next morning, Roy was waiting in the FBI’s Norfolk office.

“And that guy pulled up with two of his girls,” says Hazelwood. “He walked into the office and said, ‘My mother told me I
had
to surrender.’

“And he did.”

Roy left Norfolk in the spring of 1973 for assignment in
Binghamton, New York, a medium-size community in the south central portion of the state, just north of the Pennsylvania border.

The Bureau had begun taking notice of Binghamton and the surrounding area in November of 1957, after a state police raid on a house near the village of Apalachin, just west of Binghamton, netted sixty-five Mafia thugs at a meeting there, including godfather Vito Genovese.

From 1973 to the middle of 1976, Hazelwood would work little else but OC—organized crime—in Binghamton, including extortion cases, gambling, and labor racketeering.

His partner was agent Bob Ross, also a veteran of Vietnam, where Ross had been an artillery captain.

Their adventures together included innumerable stakeouts. Sometimes Hazelwood and Ross posed as joggers, taking mental notes as they casually trotted around a suspect’s house. Other times they’d pick a vantage point and sit together in an unmarked Bureau car, posing as lovers.

“Roy always wore the wig,” says Ross.

One evening they followed a suspect into an Italian restaurant. Trying to be inconspicuous, the agents nursed cups of coffee at a table as their target sat down to a meal.

He was not fooled.

“You guys following me?” the suspect asked.

Ross and Hazelwood said yes, in fact, they were.

“Well, I’m going to stay here and eat,” he told them. “If you guys want to get something, go ahead, instead of just sitting there with coffee.”

Hazelwood asked what was good.

The suspect recommended spaghetti with olive oil and garlic—
ajo e ojo
—which he himself was enjoying that night.

Roy ordered the pasta, liked it, and has been ordering it ever since.

Much of the OC in Binghamton necessarily entailed the use of listening devices, called Title 3 cases after the federal statute that legalized the use of bugs. During the three years
Hazelwood spent in Binghamton, he had a Title 3 listening device in place more than half the time.

In one case, Roy and an agent from the Utica office were assigned predawn street surveillance to cover an FBI black bag team installing a court-authorized bug in a suspect’s carpet shop. As the two agents sat quietly in their car, watching the streets and maintaining discreet radio contact with the team inside, a man walking his Doberman pinscher came onto the scene.

“It was about four-thirty a.m., and the sun was going to come up in about forty-five minutes,” Hazelwood recalls. “Instead of walking on with his dog, this guy decided to walk back and forth, back and forth, in front of the carpet store.”

As time grew tighter and the first faint blue light of day streaked the eastern horizon, worried agents inside the carpet store began pleading with Hazelwood and his partner to
do
something about the man and his dog.

Finally, the Utica agent directed Roy to drive up alongside the man.

As they pulled even with him, Roy’s partner rolled down his window.

“Hey, mister,” he called.

“Yeah?” answered the Doberman’s owner.

“Want a blow job?”

Man and dog vanished at once.

Another investigative target was a Mafia-owned travel agency, which arranged complimentary trips to Las Vegas for high rollers. In the event these players ran up bills they couldn’t settle on the spot, the tour office became a strong-arm collection agency. That was illegal.

This particular set of gangsters operated above a bar in Binghamton. One night, a Bureau team installed a bug inside their office. Across a parking lot from the bar stood a paint store, where Roy and his fellow agents set up a second-floor listening post and photo surveillance operation.

“We photographed everyone who came and went,” says
Hazelwood. “We identified them, and then matched them up to their voices.”

One day the conversation inside the travel agency turned to the FBI surveillance.

“We saw their boss point toward us and say, ‘I think those are feebies.’

“We knew we had a problem”—one that required an innovative solution.

Hazelwood and Bob Ross asked the New York State Police to send out their scruffiest-looking undercover drug agent. When he arrived in Binghamton, he was to head straight for the bar beneath the travel office, making it as plain as possible that his business was drugs.

“Then,” Hazelwood explains, “we asked them to have a marked car full of troopers pull up in front of the bar. We wanted them to go in and arrest the drug agent. And we asked that on their way out they wave up at us.”

The plan worked to perfection. The state police dispatched a longhaired undercover operative to Binghamton. Upstairs over the paint store, the federal agents made a busy show for the gangsters’ benefit, snapping picture after picture of the narc as he entered the bar.

The state troopers arrived in a flourish about twenty-five minutes later. “They played it just right,” Hazelwood recalls. “They checked out his license plate and then went into the bar. He put up some resistance. They used physical force to drag him out, cuff him, and throw him into the back of their car.

“Then they waved up at us, and we waved back and came downstairs and got into another car.”

According to what the FBI picked up on the bug, Roy’s ruse was a success. Because of it, they were able to leave the listening device in place for another six weeks. The photo surveillance team took up a new vantage point and continued spying on the unsuspecting thugs.

Hazelwood enjoyed his time in Binghamton, where out-foxing
professional criminals seemed an agreeable way to earn his living. There was a component of gamesmanship that appealed to him, a contest of wits as well as will. “I loved working those guys,” he says. “It was a challenge. I had a lot of respect for them, and they had a lot of respect for us.”

Then fortune again intervened.

Roy was a capable street agent. “He was good at it,” says Bob Ross. “Some guys aren’t comfortable hitting the bricks, developing informants, running surveillance. Roy wasn’t one of those.”

But Hazelwood was ambitious for advancement.

In early 1976, he learned about MAP, the new Management Aptitude Program starting up at the FBI Academy at Quantico. Hoping to identify agents with executive acumen, the Bureau each month brought six of them back to Quantico, where they competed among themselves in the solution of management problems. The best and the brightest students could expect promotions.

“It basically was game playing,” Roy explains. “In-basket problems. Employee problems. Industry used it. When I found out about it I said, ‘Yes! I want to do that.’ ”

Hazelwood aced the competition, and was rewarded with an invitation to become a MAP administrator.

He enjoyed the assignment, and also discovered how much he enjoyed living in the wooded hills of eastern Virginia. When, after eighteen months at MAP, the Bureau seemed ready to relocate him again, Roy went shopping for another gig at the Academy, anything to avert another transfer. All that was available was the sex crimes instructor’s slot at the BSU.

“I put in for it,” says Hazelwood, “although I really had no particular interest other than I didn’t want to leave Quantico.”

Since joining the FBI, Roy had put aside his old fascination for extreme and unusual criminal behavior. While at MAP, he’d paid almost no attention to the Behavioral Science Unit, located in the subbasement of the Academy library, not far away.

“There was nothing special about the unit then,” Roy recalls. “They taught classes like everyone else. I really had no particular interest in them.”

Nor did he have an inkling of what he was getting into after his arrival at the BSU, January 1, 1978.

He discovered space was at a premium throughout the subterranean office warren. But at least most of the other agents’ brick-walled cells were connected with one another by a hallway.

The esteem in which sex crime instructors were held at the BSU was forcefully brought home to Hazelwood when he came at last to his appointed workspace, a converted mop closet in the dreariest, darkest corner of the underground complex.

On his otherwise empty desk, Hazelwood’s predecessor had left a box full of pornographic magazines, together with some nude glossies. Inside the box, as well, he found a collection of sex toys, bottles of oil, and assorted materials of indeterminate use.

For teaching materials, Roy discovered a robed statuette. If you pressed its head, its penis jutted out. There was low-grade fraternity humor everywhere.

Alarmed, Roy looked around the room to find a pair of women’s black lace panties and a brassiere nailed to the wall behind his desk chair.

Affixed to the adjoining wall was a whip. A sign beneath it read: “Without Pain There Is No Pleasure.”

Prior to Roy’s advent at the BSU, the FBI’s approach to sexual crimes closely paralleled that of law enforcement in general: that is, the less attention paid to the subject, the better.

Part of the reason was turf. Unless a sexual crime occurs on a government reservation or in conjunction with a federal offense such as kidnapping, the FBI has no authority to investigate it.

“The Bureau always has been focused on its own jurisdictions,” says Roger Depue, Hazelwood’s former chief at the BSU. “Whatever you do, if it doesn’t have any immediate relevance to an FBI investigative jurisdiction, it is going to be an uphill battle getting their attention.”

The FBI paid practically no attention to sexual criminals until the late 1950s, when Walter McLaughlin, an agent in the Philadelphia office, began on his own to offer classes on the subject.

McLaughlin had a strong interest in criminal sexual deviance, and labored long to legitimize its study. But since he never published, McLaughlin endures as an influence today mostly in the recollection of his former Bureau
colleagues and students. Even they do not fully agree on the nature and significance of his achievements.

“He was an immense influence on my life,” says R. H. Morneau, Jr., a former agent and sexual crime instructor, now retired.

“He was an actor in the classroom,” remembers Russ Vorpagel, another retired agent who worked for a time at the BSU. “He’d jump up and down and giggle and laugh and scratch himself and we’d all think, Oh, boy. This guy is weird.”

McLaughlin, diminutive and highly energized—“He was built like a little tank,” recalls Frank Sass—did bring seriousness as well as showmanship to his presentations.

Working from both the scant textbook information then available on sexual crimes and his own investigative experience, McLaughlin devised what probably was the world’s first sexual-crime classification system for law enforcement.

In it, he divided offenses into types—voyeurism, exhibitionism, rape, etc.—and then wrote a multipage discussion of each crime category, including a number of case histories for each sort of behavior. He even offered general advice on how best to handle victims.

The system ultimately was adopted as instructional material by agent instructors, a small victory. “He had a terrible time trying to sell the FBI administration on the need for police training in the field of sexual deviancy,” says Frank Sass.

The Bureau instead steered an uneven course, alternating its approach to sexual-crime instruction between prudery and prurience.