Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (11 page)

All of the other agents in the office were becoming more and more uncomfortable over the whole thing, including the SAIC. Everyone was nervous because if I did not go, someone else would have to.

Finally, on the last day possible before being threatened with disciplinary action, I signed the papers, an act that began the countdown for my transfer to the office of investigations, New York. As I signed the piece of paper acknowledging my receipt of orders, I did not realize that while the New York experience would do absolutely nothing for my career, contrary to the assertions of the SAIC, it would become one of the many defining points in my life.

CHAPTER 7

The New York Field Office

New York Field Office: a bottomless black hole of despair that knows no limits.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Upon receiving a T-number, or transfer number, an agent who has been selected to relocate to another assignment in a different geographical area is entitled to a ten-day house-hunting trip to the new region.

After overcoming the initial shock of receiving orders to New York rather than CAT, I began to get my affairs in order, including planning my house-hunting trip. The Charlotte assistant to the special agent in charge, who had served on PPD, was very clear about it. He said to me one day, “Dan, they screwed you, so screw them back.” What he meant was that I should do whatever I wanted to do in preparation for my move and not worry about my casework. I was not so interested in screwing the Secret Service but was in a bit of a panic about where I was going to live in the New York area on my salary.

Therein lay the worst part of an agent’s being transferred to New York. It wasn’t so much the city and the surroundings but rather the cost of living. If the government had paid agents enough to live in New York proper, things would have been much better. As it was, most agents were forced to live in New Jersey or even Pennsylvania. This made for one of the worst commutes in America.

One June day in 1986, I boarded an airplane bound for Newark, New Jersey, and my house-hunting trip, where I would search for an apartment to live in for the foreseeable future. Upon landing in Newark, I picked up my rental car and headed south to the town of Plainsboro, New Jersey, where I knew other agents lived.

Upon arriving in Plainsboro I selected an apartment on the top floor of a building overlooking the first fairway of a golf course, paid my first month’s and last month’s rent as a deposit, and went on my way. I decided that the following morning I would, just for fun, drive into New York to try to find the field office. Having never driven into New York City, I was expecting an exciting adventure and was not disappointed.

After arriving in New York I spent the day touring the field office and exploring the vast World Trade Center complex. It was like a city within a city, much of it underground. There were restaurants, banks, bars, stores, and PATH tubes—subwaylike trains that ran under the Hudson River and came out on the other side in Jersey City.

The following day I returned to Charlotte from my New York adventure, cleaned up my remaining cases, and, on a molten hot day in August 1986, climbed into my Porsche 911 and headed north to my New Jersey apartment and my new life.

A few days later I checked into the New York field office for my first day of work. One of the first things I saw upon entering the office that morning was a sign taped to an agent’s desk. It read: “New York Field Office: a bottomless black hole of despair that knows no limits.”

I thought to myself, this is still a Secret Service office. Everything should be standardized, and, therefore, the adjustment to the work itself should not be very hard. I would soon find out that the culture of the Secret Service was not universal. Large offices had their own way of doing things, and New York was the largest of them all.

CHECKS AGAIN

Even though I had over three years of experience as an agent and had worked all types of cases assigned to the Secret Service, all the recent transferees and I began our New York careers working forged checks.

The contrast between working these cases in North Carolina and working them in Manhattan and the Bronx was off the scale. In North Carolina we had to deal with a certain type of criminal and his or her rural surroundings. In New York, both the landscape and the criminals were different. Instead of mobile homes and falling-down shacks, in New York we had to enter the most horrid tenement slums in America. It was not unusual to have to step over human feces in the hallways as well as unconscious humans with needle tracks in their arms. There were no mud-caked dogs to greet one, but upon entry into these apartments we encountered another menace: the American cockroach.

In some of these apartments the walls were alive with these insects, and the cupboards and kitchens were infested. One did not dare lean against a wall or even touch anything if it could be avoided. In addition to dropping on you, these little menaces would crawl up your leg and take refuge. After returning home in the evening, the first thing an agent who had been in this environment did was to completely undress down to his skivvies and leave all clothes and shoes on the front step or hallway of his residence. On more than one occasion after I had done this and had shaken out my clothes, a roach that had managed to steal a ride would drop to the ground and then be murdered on sight by me. I could not blame the roach for wanting to get out of the slums of New York and move to the suburbs of New Jersey.

I learned that the answer to this problem was to get as many of these people as possible to come down to the field office for questioning. It was preferable to entering their world, which was both unpleasant and dangerous. Many people who were harboring friends and relatives from the police lived in these apartments, which made working a two hundred–dollar check case a great deal more dangerous than it should have been.

INVESTIGATIONS VS. PROTECTION

When I checked into the New York office I soon realized to my amazement that many agents did not want to do any type of protection but rather only liked investigations. I found this to be puzzling on many levels. Not that a person would like investigations—I just found it strange that people who wanted to be strictly criminal investigators would join an agency that spends half its time protecting politicians. For those people, there were many other options that did not include being in the Secret Service. Many sought those options and left for police departments and other federal agencies, while others stayed and bitched about having to do protection.

The Service has traditionally had a low attrition rate other than through retirement. Many of the agents who do leave prior to retirement leave within the first three years on the job. They leave because they discover that protection is not what they want to do, and if they stay with the service they will always be pulled away from their investigations to protect someone. They want to chase bad guys all the time and be full-time investigators, not part-time. People have to do what makes them happy, but I never understood why these types even bothered applying to begin with.

Secret Service investigations generally center around financial crimes—there is no physical victim, although perhaps someone’s credit card has been stolen and used, or a person is stuck with the loss of receiving a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. The case can, therefore, be put into a drawer and left unattended for twenty-one days, which is the usual maximum time a field agent will spend on the road doing temporary protection, let’s say on a presidential candidate. For example, an agent could be working the biggest credit card fraud case in the history of his office but is also on a presidential candidate detail that requires him to go out on a twenty-one-day rotation. What happens to the big caper for those twenty-one days? In many cases it goes into a drawer, where it sits until the agent returns and picks it up again. For obvious reasons, this could not be done with murder cases, kidnappings, extortion, bank robberies, and such.

Much to the annoyance of the agents who would rather chase counterfeiters, credit card thieves, and check forgers than protect politicians, protection—not investigations—is king and always trumps investigations in importance in the Secret Service. The New York office lived in a world of its own, however, in that many agents there believed the primary job of the Service was investigation, not protection. This myth was regularly shattered when POTUS visited New York, or when it was UN General Assembly time, which occurred every fall.

During UN General Assembly time, virtually all investigative work in New York came to a halt due to the huge number of visiting foreign heads of state who by law are protected by the Secret Service. Every agent from the office was used in some way to support the protective mission, and during such times, it became glaringly obvious that protection was the number-one priority. The investigative-oriented agents, however, continued to insist that they were real cops, that investigations were the main purpose of the Secret Service, and that agents who liked protection were mindless pretty boys.

Some of these agents liked to dress à la Don Johnson from the
Miami Vice
TV show, which was popular at the time, complete with no socks in warm weather. Having a scruffy beard, longer than normal hair, and a complete wardrobe of go-to-hell clothes was considered by these men one way of thumbing their noses at protection. Although they did this under the guise of blending in with the people on the street, another reason was that the grungier they became, the less likely it was that they would be pulled for a protective assignment. As far as blending in, most looked like what they were: Secret Service agents dressed in messy clothes trying to look like the man on the street.

Still, an agent in New York had to produce investigative results, and as long as an agent did, no one bothered him. The bosses realized we all worked very hard, as well as enduring the unendurable beast that was the five boroughs of New York, so our taking a little personal time every now and then, including coming into work a bit late on occasion, did not bother them. In such a pressure-filled environment as New York, it had to be that way. If the bosses cracked down too hard, there would be a quiet mutiny. No arrests would be made, so a balance had to be struck between work and relaxation. Most of the bosses in New York had started there and had a solid understanding of what it meant to be a manager in such a challenging place.

Not much in New York was standard-issue, including the regular investigations engaged in by the Secret Service. In addition to counterfeit and credit card investigations, somehow the NYFO had also received jurisdiction over a form of telephone service theft known as “blue boxes.”

Blue boxes were Texas Instrument calculators that had been reconfigured to produce telephone tones. A person attached the instrument to his or her phone line, and then, using the tones that emitted the same sound as regular telephone buttons being pushed, made long-distance calls anywhere in the world for no charge—in effect, stealing service from the phone company. This was in the day when few had cell phones, and most of these criminals who were blue-box artists were from other countries. This was in some way a federal violation, and we only investigated them for the easy arrest and conviction stats they generated.

We did a lot of these cases, and they were relatively simple. A warrant was not required, since a federal officer may make an arrest without a warrant for a felony in progress. The telephone company monitored the line, and when it became active, they contacted the waiting search team, and in they went, seizing the blue box and placing the owner under arrest. Again, the offense in and of itself was not one of the biggest, but the entry into areas where blue boxes flourished was dangerous. In 1984, going to a corner deli in New York could be dangerous.

Criminals involved in stolen credit cards or counterfeit money and even blue boxes were usually involved in other things a lot more serious. While a person might not be willing to go to war over phony money, he might over drugs or a lot of genuine cash he had from ill-gotten gains. You never took anything for granted on any execution of a warrant, and we served a lot of warrants in New York.

A warrant execution team is broken down into sections, the first being the entry team. The entry team is usually comprised of the strongest agent, with a battering ram made of a large-diameter piece of storm pipe with handles welded on, and an agent armed with a short shotgun. The remainder of the team, approximately six agents, then follows.

Upon entry, the shotgun agent and the agent with the battering ram clear the rooms one by one, searching for anyone who might pose a threat. Upon finding anyone, they pass him or her back to the rest of the team, where he or she is handcuffed and detained in a central area, such as the living room. After the premises have been secured, the people taken into custody are sorted out as to who needs to be kept and who can be released. Anyone on the premises is thoroughly searched, for agent safety, and an agent is posted at the door to ensure that no newcomers show up while a search is in progress. After the scene has been secured, the entry team helps the search team look for the items to be seized. The fun of the entry is usually over in less than two minutes, but it is pure adrenaline. You never know what potential threat is waiting on the other side of the door.

The Supreme Court had ruled that before knocking down a door when executing a search warrant, the police had to announce their identity and purpose, and then wait a reasonable amount of time for the person residing at the residence to answer the door. The law could have been a hindrance to law enforcement were it not for the fact that the Supreme Court never defined what constituted a reasonable amount of time. As a result, we knocked and yelled, “Police, search warrant,” and before the “t” in warrant was enunciated, the door was down and we were in. To wait any longer gave the bad guys time to get rid of any evidence they might have or, more importantly, grab a gun and kill you.