The Murder Room (19 page)

He turned to Walter. “We’ve talked about getting together talking over cases like we’re doing now.”

Walter sniffed in disapproval. “I’m not much of a joiner.”

Fleisher burned to join the battle of good and evil where it counted, in the suffering of individuals crying for help. If their private club of detectives didn’t take on the mantle of crusaders, it could at least be a social club, old cops hashing over cases together in their golden years.

But their dream was missing something. The ASAC wielded tremendous power but sat dreaming with it like an aging king reluctant to rise and draw his sword. The humdrum routine of life enveloped him, sealed with an ineffable sadness he couldn’t identify.

The café emptied, Wendy came with pie and more coffee, the long shadows of skyscrapers striped the street. As night closed in on the café, the figures of homeless men passed like forgotten ghosts. The three talked about the serial killers who stalked Philadelphia, and the unprecedented levels of anxiety and fear they saw in the faces of ordinary Philadelphians. “I’m seeing criminals who are much more vicious, violent, and depraved than in the previous generation,” Walter said. “People who kill for the fun of it.” The enormity of their battle settled over them with the dusk, challenging their easy bravado.

A sharp, excited voice broke the quiet. “What are we going to call our club?” Bender asked. “The Sherlock Holmes Society?”

Fleisher grinned. His irrepressible friend was never down for long. “That’s the right idea, but too obvious. I have a better name in mind. Let’s call it the Vidocq Society.” To puzzled looks, he told them that Eugène François Vidocq of nineteenth-century Paris was the greatest detective who ever lived. “And he’s my hero.”

Fleisher had rediscovered Vidocq as a young man in the FBI Academy while studying the history of criminology. The French-man was legitimately the father of modern criminology. In 1811, Vidocq founded a plainclothes detective unit, composed mostly of ex-cons like himself, which Napoleon Bonaparte signed into law as a state investigative agency,
Brigade de la Sûreté
, the forerunner of the FBI and Scotland Yard. Vidocq invented criminal record-keeping, ballistics, plaster foot casts, and invisible inks, experimented with fingerprinting, and was a master of disguise. Accused of staging crimes to solve them, he was ousted from
Sûreté,
and in 1833 founded the first private detective agency,
Le Bureau des Renseignements
(Office of Information), seventeen years before Allan Pinkerton formed the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.

But it was Vidocq’s remarkable story of redemption and his belief in the redemption of others that touched Fleisher most deeply. The chief cop of Paris was a great friend of the poor and said he would never arrest a man for stealing bread to feed his family. Vidocq was Hugo’s model for Javert, the relentless detective in
Les Misérables,
as well as for Valjean, the ex-con who reforms and seeks redemption for his deeds.

Fleisher would write to law enforcement specialists around the world to recruit members to the Vidocq Society.

Bender’s face pinked with excitement. “We really bonded,” he told Fleisher on the way out. “We have a name, we’re going to get this done!”

Walter did not share his comrades’ excitement. As the fevered talk of forming societies and clubs and rooting out evil swirled around him, he grew quiet, and left the table early.

“I’m not much into groups,” he said. “The Vidocq Society, some kind of Sherlock Holmes club? It was simply preposterous. I quite enjoyed Frank and Bill, had a nice time and humored them both. I was trying to be polite, OK. But frankly, I thought the whole idea was foolish.”

A
t high noon in the Navy Officers’ Club, Fleisher looked down a long table into the faces of the best and brightest federal agents and cops from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington. This was the core group Fleisher had handpicked to start the Vidocq Society, the most accomplished and colorful experts from his various tribes: federal agents, Philadelphia cops, polygraph experts, and Jewish lawmen. On either side of him sat Frank Bender and Richard Walter. Following his luncheon with them, Fleisher had written a letter to twenty-eight law enforcement colleagues around the country and world inviting them to join a private detective club dedicated to “cuisine and crime.” Twenty-six of the twenty-eight replied with a swift and enthusiastic yes.

The air in the room was electric. Never had any of them seen so much detective talent at one table. They were a collective endowment with no obligation to any government or agency. Bender was “really excited.”

Even Walter, ever the skeptic in his crisp blue suit, launched his left eyebrow into a reappraising point as he looked down the table of renowned investigators.
The big gun at Customs really did it,
he thought.

The charter members of the Vidocq Society had gathered to take their collective measure, determine their purpose, vote on leadership, rules, and bylaws.

Most were men Fleisher knew like brothers. Some, like veteran Customs agent Joe O’Kane, had worked with him for years on major cases.

“Me and Bill [Fleisher] and the other guys have spent the equivalent of two lifetimes together,” said O’Kane. “We live out of suitcases, sleep in cars eating burritos on surveillance, urinate in gas station men’s rooms. 007 it ain’t . . .” Others had worked with Fleisher with the FBI or the Philadelphia PD, men who’d lassoed murderers and mobsters and stood guard for everyone from the governor of Pennsylvania to the queen of England.

“Fleisher, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’ll never work,” laughed U.S. Treasury Department special agent William Gill, the Treasury ASAC in Philadelphia, surveying the band of tough, independent-minded cops, all of them accustomed to bureaucratic jousting and rivalry and armed to the teeth. “But I love you and if it’s a good lunch, I’m in. I’m one of Fleisher’s disciples.”

Gill was impressed with how Fleisher in the past had brought together all the ASACs who helped run federal law enforcement offices in Philadelphia—FBI, Marshals, Customs, DEA, Treasury, ATF, IRS, Secret Service—for a monthly luncheon. They got to know one another and worked together in new ways. “It was great to be able to call a guy and say, hey, Bob, I need some equipment, or I need some men.”

One of Fleisher’s ASAC lunches was aboard a cabin cruiser sailing on the Delaware, a DEA surveillance boat confiscated from drug smugglers and equipped with all the latest listening devices. “The DEA was showing off, and it worked. It impressed the shit out of everybody.” Gill later borrowed the boat to put away a revenue agent who was taking huge payoffs to ignore corporate audits. The bribes were passed in clandestine meetings on a small boat in the Delaware, and it was easy for the cabin cruiser to listen in. The boat was skippered by DEA agent Steve Churchill, who would become a VSM.

“Bill’s a genius at organization,” Gill said, “at remembering everybody’s name and bringing them together.”

“You got that right,” O’Kane said. “He talks to everybody, every agent, every cop, every snitch, every reporter, every hooker, everybody. He has lunch with everybody. He wanted to talk about this new society over lunch. I said, Bill, I can’t do all the lunches you do, I can’t eat like that. There’s never been a networker like Bill Fleisher.”

The federal agents at the table, Fleisher’s peers, were a flashy group. The bounty hunter, intense U.S. Marshal Dennis Matulewicz, a St. Joseph’s University graduate, liked to quote Hemingway: “There is nothing like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Star Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent Philip Schuyler Deming, chestnut-haired and movie-star handsome, wore the ring of Washington’s officers, the Society of Cincinnati, handed down by his ancestor Alexander Hamilton. Edgar Adamson had once given his life to Christ in the seminary, but was now based in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of Interpol.

“Deming was so blue-blooded, if you cut him he bled Main Line,” said Customs agent O’Kane. “But he was a regular guy, not foppish. He wouldn’t tell you his middle name unless you made him.”

Treasury ASAC Gill sat with his former boss, Ben Redmond, reminiscing about the summer day in New York City in 1971 when their agents were scheduled to go undercover and receive a bribe in person from the godfather of the Colombo crime family himself, Joe Colombo Sr. It would have been a spectacular coup. But at Colombo’s earlier appointment to speak at an Italian rally at Columbus Circle, a gunman shot him three times in the head, putting the godfather in a seven-year coma he never came out of. The infamous phrase of chief rival and suspect Joey Gallo was, “He was vegetabled,” Gill said to laughter.

In comparison, the Customs tribe was a roughhouse gang. O’Kane, son of a Kensington millwright, didn’t know what Customs agents were until half a dozen of them with sticks and guns jumped him when he was removing a repossessed car from Customs bonded storage. The young loan officer hadn’t filled out the proper forms, and Customs agents saw it as a theft. But agents Burke and Murphy liked the way the big Irishman handled himself in the fight. When they realized it was an innocent mistake and moreover the kid was Dutch O’Kane’s son, “they clapped me on the back like I was the greatest guy in the world and told me to apply to Customs.” Like another big Irishman, Frank Dufner, he caught on as a sky marshal. Dufner had been applying to be a letter carrier—his grandfather’s trade for fifty years—when he saw President Richard Nixon on a poster recruiting armed undercover men to stop airplane hijackings. They loved the undercover work, sitting there in coach in a suit with a .38 jammed in their pants, “Just waiting, wanting,
wishing
something would happen,” O’Kane said. It seldom did, except when Dufner had to tackle a man who was furiously pounding on the pilot’s door. “It turns out he was a gay guy whose lover was pretending to have an affair in the men’s room, and it was the only door he hadn’t checked.”

At Customs, both men trained under the “Forty Thieves,” the hard-boiled inspectors who worked the night docks in Philadelphia with sticks they used to smash smuggled vodka bottles hidden under longshoremen’s coats. “Those guys were two-fisted drinkers and I loved them,” O’Kane said. “I mean they literally stood at the bar with two drinks, and they’d just as soon punch you in the mouth as say hello. They were hardball guys with hearts of gold—Irish mostly, some Italians, a smattering of German types, a few tough Jewish guys.”

Fleisher was one of the tough Jewish guys, one of the polished, college-educated federal agents, even though he happened to have come up the hard way from Philadelphia’s ethnic neighborhoods. But there was no caste system dividing the men at the table. Common achievement was the leveler. Masculine stoicism and modesty were the code in the room. “Guys don’t talk about things,” said O’Kane. “Gill was a hero on helicopter bombing missions in Vietnam, but I’ve never heard him talk about it. It gets mentioned in passing, and you know what a guy’s got.” They all had a lot.

Renowned attorney Kenneth Freeman, one of the tough Jewish guys, had walked the Philly police beat with him as a young man; Freeman went off to law school and encouraged Fleisher to attend the FBI Academy. Another tough Jewish guy, Customs special agent in charge Dave Warren, Fleisher’s boss, had helped bring him over from the FBI and its endless transfers so Fleisher could settle in Philadelphia.

Farther down the table, and back in time, was Fleisher’s Philadelphia tribe, the men he’d grown up with or served with at the police department. Short, wisecracking medical examiner Halbert Fillinger, who went to homicide scenes in his vintage fire department vehicles, had arrived in his red Thunderbird with the HOM-HAL plates. There was city homicide captain Frank Friel, legendary investigator of four thousand murders
.
“Frank’s the best man on a murder I’ve ever known,” Fleisher said.

The Philly cop family was as tight as any mob.

Only Fleisher’s cofounders, Walter and Bender, weren’t part of the family. Many of the Philadelphians had worked with Bender, but all knew Walter only as a Midwest forensic psychologist whose brilliance and temperamental nature seemed to match Bender’s. With their booming laughter and preternaturally gleaming eyes—one lit with mania, the other darkly glittering with mockery—the men flanking Fleisher seemed as ethereal as apparitions, shadowy extensions of Fleisher. They were loud, outlandish; they broke the code.

Yet Fleisher seemed to have an unspoken communion with the strange men at his side. “I’ve always had a taste for characters and eccentrics,” he said. A taste that came from his father, who enjoyed the company of gangsters, second-story men, showgirls, and assorted figures on the borderlands of darkness.

Before lunch was served, Fleisher got down to the business of creating the Vidocq Society. He introduced his cofounders, then briefly described the swashbuckling Vidocq, the society’s name-sake, and his many accomplishments.

Special Agent Dufner, once Fleisher’s partner in Customs, chuckled.
So that’s where he picked up that trick
. One winter day in 1980, they were investigating a major theft of TVs and microwaves from cargo containers when Fleisher found a footprint in the snow. He went to the store to buy plaster of paris and made an impression. “A lot of the guys in the office were laughing—you’ve gone too far, what’s this, Perry Mason?” Dufner said. “But we made about twenty arrests, and one guy gave himself up because we had his Converse sneaker impression. Fleisher was one of those guys who knew everything. I thought,
FBI agent, Philly PD, I can learn a lot from this guy
.”

Led by Fleisher, the men at the long table quickly hashed out the details of their new fellowship. They quickly chose a commissioner (Fleisher) to lead them, along with a deputy commissioner—an immodest organization model also used by the New York City Police Department, the Hong Kong Police, and the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard).