Part 9 (1/2)

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 Sat.u.r.day,” 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 a.s.signment 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 G.o.dfather 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 t.i.tle 3 cases after the federal statute that legalized the use of bugs. During the three years Hazelwood spent in Binghamton, he had a t.i.tle 3 listening device in place more than half the time.

In one case, Roy and an agent from the Utica office were a.s.signed 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 b.l.o.w. .j.o.b?”

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.'