Part 9 (2/2)
”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 gamesmans.h.i.+p 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 Apt.i.tude Program starting up at the FBI Academy at Quantico. Hoping to identify agents with executive ac.u.men, 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 compet.i.tion, and was rewarded with an invitation to become a MAP administrator.
He enjoyed the a.s.signment, 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 s.e.x 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 subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Academy library, not far away.
”There was nothing special about the unit then,” Roy recalls. ”They taught cla.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.x crime instructors were held at the BSU was forcefully brought home to Hazelwood when he came at last to his appointed works.p.a.ce, 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 p.o.r.nographic magazines, together with some nude glossies. Inside the box, as well, he found a collection of s.e.x toys, bottles of oil, and a.s.sorted materials of indeterminate use.
For teaching materials, Roy discovered a robed statuette. If you pressed its head, its p.e.n.i.s 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 bra.s.siere 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.”
9.
A p.o.r.no Show for Cops Prior to Roy's advent at the BSU, the FBI's approach to s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual criminals until the late 1950s, when Walter McLaughlin, an agent in the Philadelphia office, began on his own to offer cla.s.ses on the subject.
McLaughlin had a strong interest in criminal s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual crime instructor, now retired.
”He was an actor in the cla.s.sroom,” 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 Sa.s.s-did bring seriousness as well as showmans.h.i.+p to his presentations.
Working from both the scant textbook information then available on s.e.xual crimes and his own investigative experience, McLaughlin devised what probably was the world's first s.e.xual-crime cla.s.sification 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 s.e.xual deviancy,” says Frank Sa.s.s.
The Bureau instead steered an uneven course, alternating its approach to s.e.xual-crime instruction between prudery and prurience.
Ken Lanning, a BSU agent who is an authority on the s.e.xual victimization of children, recalls his own confusion and dismay at the FBI's state of knowledge in the early 1970s.
”I remember an in-service [cla.s.s] at Quantico,” he says, ”when we were told we actually were going to be shown some real p.o.r.nography. In order to see it, however, we had to leave the cla.s.sroom and go to another room, where it was displayed for us on a table. We had to put our hands behind our backs and walk around the table, just sort of looking at it. That was a bizarre experience.”
In the same period, Lanning began teaching the subject at field schools. He remembers being taken aside by his predecessor in the job.
” 'Ken,' he told me, 'you're about to embark on probably the greatest topic the Bureau can teach. You can't go wrong. It'll be great. Let me just give you three bits of advice.
” 'One, lots of dirty jokes. You have to have a dirty joke to go with every s.e.xual perversion that you talk about.
” 'Two, get lots of p.o.r.nography. Dirty pictures. Magazines. Movies. Pa.s.s 'em out. The cops love 'em.
” 'And three, never allow any women in the cla.s.s.' ”
Lanning asked why.
”Because if you have women,” the other agent answered, ”you can't do the first two things.”
When John Douglas first arrived at the BSU in 1977, the situation had hardly improved. Douglas remembers an incident in a cla.s.s taught by one of Roy's predecessors, an instructor infamous for his indifference to fact.
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