Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves
488
Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves
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Overview
Convictions is a spellbinding story from the front lines of the fight against crime. Most Americans know little about the work of assistant United States attorneys, the federal prosecutors who possess sweeping authority to investigate and prosecute the nation's most dangerous criminals. John Kroger pursued high-profile cases against Mafia killers, drug kingpins, and Enron executives. Starting from his time as a green recruit and ending at the peak of his career, he steers us through the complexities of life as a prosecutor, where the battle in the courtroom is only the culmination of long and intricate investigative work. He reveals how to flip a perp, how to conduct a cross, how to work an informant, how to placate a hostile judge. Kroger relates it all with a novelist's eye for detail and a powerful sense of the ethical conflicts he faces. Often dissatisfied with the system, he explains why our law enforcement policies frequently fail in critical areas like drug enforcement and white-collar crime. He proposes new ways in which we can fight crime more effectively, empowering citizens to pressure their lawmakers to adopt more productive policies. This is an unflinching portrait of a crucial but little-understood part of our justice system, and Kroger is an eloquent guide.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429939669 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 488 |
| File size: | 769 KB |
About the Author
John Kroger is a former federal prosecutor who served on the Justice Department's Enron Task Force; he was also deputy policy director of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. He now teaches at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.
Read an Excerpt
Convictions
A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves
By John Kroger
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008 John KrogerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3966-9
CHAPTER 1
The Making of a Prosecutor
In June 1996, at the age of thirty, I graduated from law school. That winter I applied to be a federal prosecutor. In my first interview a grizzled Justice Department veteran named Peter Norling asked, "Why do you want to be an AUSA?" I mumbled in reply that I possessed a "deep commitment to public service." This answer was true but incomplete. If you asked me today, I would say, "I got caught stealing hubcaps."
It was spring of 1983, my senior year in high school. My brother Bill was a sophomore at the University of Texas, and he invited me and a friend named Bob to Roundup, a big fraternity party. The morning of the party Bob and I loaded up his battered Ford Mustang in Houston with a case of Budweiser and a plastic jug of vodka screwdrivers, and we barreled down Highway 290 to Austin, drinking along the way. Bob drove fast, and we got to Austin by 3:00 p.m., already totally buzzed. We met my brother and his friends at the UT student union bowling alley, where we split several pitchers of beer. Then, to kill some time before the night's main event, Bob and I decided to drive around the city, finishing off the screwdrivers in the process. The alcohol proved our undoing. When we drove past the majestic State Capitol building, Bob saw another old Mustang sitting in the shadow of the pink granite dome with something Bob's car lacked — authentic Ford hubcaps. I don't recall what happened next. Did we discuss our next move, or was it instinctive? All I recall is that we jumped out of the car, and within seconds we had three hubcaps pried off with a crowbar. We were working hard on the fourth when the Austin police showed up. The car belonged to a state senator. Bob got charged with attempted theft. I got lucky. Because I was still sixteen and doing more watching than pulling, the cops decided to release me.
When I got home to Houston on Sunday, I was sober and scared, and that's where I made my mistake. In the criminal world it is always an error to talk about your crimes. When my parents asked me about my trip, I should have clammed up. Instead, I told them exactly what happened. My confession set off a firestorm.
My relationship with my father was already very strained. Like most family disputes, this one was neither his fault nor mine, but the product of mutual mistrust and misunderstanding. My father grew up in a tough Chicago neighborhood during the Depression and World War II, the son of hardworking German immigrants. His childhood left him with a stern worldview, with life conceived as a battle. He wanted sons built in his own image, football players who understood that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," one of his favorite sayings. Tragically, we never saw eye to eye. From an early age I fell far short of his ideal: poor at sports, an intellectual, my head always buried in a book, good at school but decidedly lazy. My personality seemed to infuriate my father. To him, I seemed weak, "a dreamer," likely to fail.
Alcohol made things worse. For my family, heavy drinking was a normal daily ritual. In my case, it got out of control, resulting in chaos.
I had my first beer when I was five, as a "reward" for a good kindergarten report card. By the time I was fifteen, I was a total mess, drunk several times a week, staying out late and sneaking back home after my parents were asleep, barely paying attention in school. My parents recognized what was happening, and they were understandably upset. By the time I was in high school, we were barely on speaking terms.
The hubcap debacle was the last blow. When I told my parents what happened, my father exploded: "I will not have a thief living under my roof!" Fortunately, he did not kick me out that day. I was scheduled to graduate from high school in six or seven weeks. My father told me, "After you get that diploma, I want you out of here within forty-eight hours."
I was sixteen and on my own. I had little money, no job, and no prospects. I had no way to pay for college, and working at a gas station or convenience store seemed like a dead end. So I did what any red-blooded Texas boy would do. On my seventeenth birthday I went down to the local mall and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. To make my enlistment legal, my parents had to sign the papers, since I was still underage. Thankfully, they did so, for they hoped the Marines would straighten me out. After that day I had almost no contact with my family for the next ten years.
When I enlisted, I thought I was striking off on an independent path. Today I can see that I was really trying to prove to my father that I was tough after all.
* * *
I SPENT THREE YEARS in the Marine Corps, stationed in California, in Panama, on the submarine USS Blueback, and on an assault carrier in the Pacific. In boot camp I learned to march in a straight line, fire an M16, walk a post, and hump a seventy-pound rucksack. At infantry training school I was taught to read a map and use a compass, shoot heavy weaponry, operate a radio, and blow things up. I did none of these things particularly well, but I had high IQ scores, was a fast runner, and knew how to swim. Apparently, these skills were rare, at least in combination. To my total surprise, I was selected to join Recon, the Marine Corps's elite intelligence and special operations unit. Our motto: Swift, Silent, Deadly.
In Recon, my military skills deepened. I learned to travel on foot quietly and quickly, to swim long distances in the ocean at night, to rappel out of helicopters and climb up cliffs, to operate small boats and to service and repair their outboard engines, and to fire my rifle with a Zen-like assurance, hitting bull's-eyes repeatedly at five hundred yards.
The Marines taught me a lot about myself. When I enlisted, I worried deep inside that I was a coward and that in the ultimate tests of life, I would fail, a fear inculcated, in equal parts, by critical parents and a notparticularly profound reading of the later Hemingway novels. After three years in the Marines this fear had disappeared. Put in tough and stressful situations, often in physical pain, I discovered that I was neither the most nor the least courageous of men. I feared the cold but could handle heavy ocean surf with aplomb. Hated heights but enjoyed the dark. Could hike farther than most men, run faster than most, shoot better than almost anyone, but would never excel in hand-to-hand combat, for I simply did not like hitting people. Above all, I learned that physical courage is an overrated virtue, rooted more often than not in a lack of imagination.
My three years in the Marine Corps had a profound impact on the way I viewed the world. Before I enlisted, I had no particular ethical orientation. I wanted to be cool, like Jim Morrison of the Doors, or Sean Penn's perpetually stoned surfer character Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I wore cutoff jeans and Rolling Stones T-shirts riddled with holes, skipped school to drink beer at an abandoned skateboard park, and managed to get kicked out of advanced placement math. If you had asked me to articulate my values, I would have been struck dumb. At best, I might have quoted Spicoli: "All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine."
The Marines destroyed my prior character and rebuilt me in their own image. The impact was profound. I enlisted for very selfish reasons: to travel, to have some adventures, and to get away from Houston. The idea of service to country was far from my mind. The Marines changed all that. Day in and day out, they taught me to believe that my country and my Corps were a higher priority than my own personal well-being and that some things are so important they are worth dying for.
I was never put to that test. When the Marine Barracks in Beirut was destroyed by terrorists in 1983, killing 241, the bomb wiped out an entire Recon platoon. My unit volunteered to take its place, but President Reagan pulled the troops out instead. That was as close to combat as I got. Still, my intense training in the value of patriotism permanently influenced my values. Today I still think like a Marine. To me, the primary purpose of life is to serve others, not yourself, and to work to make the nation a better place. That commitment ultimately led me to become a federal prosecutor. In retrospect, trying to steal those hubcaps was probably the smartest thing I ever did.
* * *
IN SEPTEMBER 1986 my Marine Corps enlistment came to an end, and I enrolled in college at Yale University, the only veteran in a class of thirteen hundred. Life at Yale came as a very pleasant shock. In the Marines I shared a tin Quonset hut with a dozen other enlisted men. Our "hooch" had a rough cement floor and was heated by a kerosene stove. At night I had to move my bed into the center of the squad bay to avoid an agile rat — a former Marine pet that had reverted to the wild — that frequently climbed the grooved metal walls and got into my bed. There was pornography everywhere; paying prostitutes for sex was common, particularly overseas; and disputes were resolved with fists. Punishment for disobedience was swift: fifty push-ups, while your NCO kicked you in the gut with his jump boots.
Yale, in contrast, was cushy. I had my own bedroom in Vanderbilt Hall, spare and clean as a monk's cell, with oak floors and built-in bookshelves, looking out over the shady Old Campus. My hours were my own to spend as I wished, and I passed most of my time reading — novels, history, poetry. I had expected to struggle to keep up with the other freshmen, but I quickly discovered that I could hold my own intellectually, for I had a good memory for facts and could write clear, precise prose. Even the food was good — at least compared with Marine Corps chow. But all these positives paled when compared with Yale's greatest gift, philosophy.
The Marines had left me ethically at sea. They had wiped out most of the rudimentary values I had been raised with — probably a good thing — and replaced them with a completely new set. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: that our moral orientation is not fixed but can change and thus should ultimately be a matter of rational choice. Unfortunately, many of the values taught by the Marines were clearly inappropriate back in the civilian world. Patriotism was fine. So was courage. But fistfights, sexism, drunken brawls, and bottle smashing were out. I needed to find a new way to live.
In the fall of my freshman year I enrolled in a course in classical Greek philosophy with Professor Nancy Sherman, a noted Aristotle scholar. My first assignment was to read Plato's Meno. In this brief dialogue, Plato suggested that we can learn to be good people if we devote ourselves to rigorous philosophical self-analysis, submitting our actions and beliefs to close and careful scrutiny. I recall being shocked as I read this simple piece. My abrupt transition from the Houston suburbs to the Marines had taught me that values are mutable but not how to choose the right ones. Plato argued that not all values are of equal worth: some choices are good, some bad, and bad choices have bad consequences. Discerning between good and bad is not easy. If, however, we apply ourselves and choose to be self-critical, we can learn to be moral — to live a good life.
Elated, curious, I devoted myself to philosophy for the next four years. When I graduated, I had a master's degree. Most of my work was highly technical, dense papers filled with what now appears to me to be almost incomprehensible philosophical jargon. But for me, philosophy was never just a course of study. I passionately believed in what the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik calls "the sunny optimism of humanism," the conviction that if I read the right books and applied what I learned, I could lead a more perfect life.
In the 1980s Yale's philosophy department, headquartered in redbrick colonial Connecticut Hall, had no particular ideological focus, and this diffuse approach to the field seemed to rub off on me. I never adopted one single philosophical point of view. On the contrary, I borrowed bits and pieces of wisdom from a broad variety of thinkers: from Aristotle, the importance of forming good habits, of keeping one's life in balance, of friendship and the life of the mind; from Kant, the value of honesty, a virtue I lacked as a child; from Nietzsche, the importance of rigorous, independent critical thinking; from Aquinas, the value of analytic clarity. I revered these thinkers, but one influence stood out above them all: the great nineteenth-century British utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Bentham and Mill were concerned with a very basic but critical question: What makes an action "good"? They answered that a person's actions should be judged by their social consequences. An action is good if it tends to maximize overall human happiness and bad if it leads to increased suffering. To give a simple example, donating two hundred dollars to a fund for hungry children is more virtuous than spending that money on a fancy pair of shoes, for the first choice will do more to alleviate human pain.
When I was first exposed to utilitarianism, I thought it a bit simplistic, but over time I found the utilitarian ideal increasingly compelling. As a child I had been extremely unhappy, so the idea that our goal in life should be to decrease human suffering resonated powerfully with me. I also liked the emphasis on selflessness. In the Marines I had been taught to place the safety of others before my own well-being. Now the utilitarians provided an ethical justification for that viewpoint. Looking back, I can see that I was not really doing much independent thinking — I was influenced primarily by philosophers who could explain and rationalize my own ethical intuitions. At the time, however, I felt as if I were making a great voyage of intellectual discovery.
My new utilitarian beliefs influenced many of my life decisions, both serious and trivial. When I bought my first car, I got a Honda Civic. From a utilitarian perspective, the high gas mileage, cheap price, and ultralow emissions seemed hard to beat, even though I secretly yearned for an SUV. The same kind of analysis shaped my career. When utilitarians make life decisions, they weigh the social consequences of their potential choices. As a college senior I asked: What job can I do to help decrease human pain? I considered becoming a philosophy professor or a high school teacher. In the end, however, I concluded that in a democracy the most direct way to improve human conditions is to get involved in politics. In May 1990, when I graduated from college, I packed up a U-Haul and moved to Washington, D.C.
* * *
DURING JUNE 1990 I walked the halls of Congress, handing out résumés. Within three weeks I had a job as a legislative correspondent with Representative (now Senator) Charles Schumer of Brooklyn. Every week Chuck received more than five hundred letters from his constituents. My job was to draft his responses. The first week I received my first lesson in practical politics. When Chuck reviewed my efforts, he told me, "In every one of our responses, we have to say that I agree with the writer. So read every one of their letters closely, and find something in it with which we can agree. Then emphasize that in your response."
I thought about this for a moment and then asked, "What if we disagree with every single policy position the person wrote about?"
Chuck paused and stared at me, a quizzical expression on his face, as if the answer were obvious. "Then tell them we agree that the issues are important."
From my time with Chuck, I learned that democracy actually works. Chuck paid very close attention to his constituents. He was also willing to fight to protect them. One morning, in a misguided effort to save money, the Bush administration's Department of Veterans Affairs canceled without prior warning the minivan rides that severely disabled veterans relied upon to get to their VA medical centers. Within hours Schumer's office was bombarded with telephone calls from panicking veterans who could not get to their hospitals for essential care like dialysis. As a veteran I thought the department's action was outrageous. I talked to Chuck, and he agreed we had to take action. We immediately drafted a tough letter to the administration demanding it restore this service. He and I then worked the phones, calling other Democratic congressional offices, lining up support. When we had gathered twenty signatures from Chuck's closest allies in the House of Representatives, we faxed the letter off to the VA — and to every major newspaper in the country. Faced with this political heat, the administration quickly backed off, and the rides for vets were restored.
Every day Chuck's congressional mail contained a giant stack of public policy magazines and think tank position papers dealing with the entire spectrum of national issues: foreign relations, national security, crime, health care, education, the economy. When I was hired, I discovered that most of this material went into the garbage. I put it into a box instead. Every night I carted the box home and stayed up late, reading, trying to learn my new trade.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Convictions by John Kroger. Copyright © 2008 John Kroger. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE: Waiting for a Verdict,I. ROOKIE,
1. The Making of a Prosecutor,
2. The Code of Silence Murders,
3. The Teddy Bear Burglary,
4. Operation Badfellas,
5. The Human Factor,
II. MAFIA PROSECUTOR,
6. The Scarpa Crew and the FBI,
7. Hitmen,
8. A Mafia Murder Trial,
9. How We Beat the Mob,
III. THE WAR ON DRUGS,
10. Wiretaps,
11. Bushwick,
12. Hunting "The Puma",
13. The Dark Side,
14. How to Win a War on Drugs,
15. 9/11: Emergency Response,
IV. ENRON: WHITE-COLLAR CRIME,
16. The Enron Debacle,
17. The Broadband Scam,
18. Getting Away with Fraud,
19. The Fastow Dilemma,
EPILOGUE: New Beginnings,
Sources,
Acknowledgments,