Captains of the Nether Skies

By Andrew Zakrzewski

After the Viet Nam war and his release from the Marines, Andrew tries to settle down to a new career as an FBI Special Agent, but soon decides to go back to his roots in Aviation. Unfortunately he makes his move at a time of recession and unemployment in the aviation industry and finds himself struggling for survival. His efforts lead him to hook up with strange and even questionable operators, but along the way he meets very interesting personalities and characters who make a difference in his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304574466

Book preview

Captains of the Nether Skies

Captains of the Nether Skies

Andrew Zakrzewski

Captains of the Nether Skies

Second Edition

Copyright  ©  2013 by Andrew Zakrzewski

ISBN:  978-1-304-57446-6

All rights reserved.

Portions of this book have been previously published under the title Captain Wedge’s School of Hard Knocks.

Other books by Andrew Zakrzewski:

Captain Wedge’s School of Hard Knocks (2008)

Climb or Crash (2013)

Dive, Skyhawks! (2013)

Captains of the Nether Skies (2013)

Dedication

To Lou Rescigno, a true believer in the promise of

General Aviation.

Famous Quotes

"The greatest hazard of working as a pilot is…

slow starvation."

(A. L. Ueltschi, founder and CEO, FlightSafety International)

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

(Academia Axiom)

At one time we were the Jet Jocks…

Now I found myself, surviving, in the dank and

unforgiving environ of The Nether Skies."

(Andrew Zakrzewski)

Foreword

At one time we were the Jet Jocks, gamboling and frolicking about that Cobalt Blue stratosphere in our deadly little combat ships, and so I earned the credentials of a Marine Corps veteran and minor hero of the Viet Nam war.  It had been my intention to be a career officer and make an honorable life in the Military, but things changed, and I became a civilian again.  I had the opportunity of another career as a civil servant, but, at a time of economic recession and uncertainty, I chose to return to flying and take my chances in the world of General Aviation.

Now I found myself, surviving, in the dank and unforgiving environ of the Nether Skies, no longer able to leap over towering clouds at the flick of my wrist, but flying low and slow, scud-running, dodging poverty, unemployment, taking on jobs of questionable legality and diminishing margins of safety.  Yet in the end it all worked out, for me.

This is a book about People. Even in the scuddiest and dankest situations, I found great friends, quaint heroes, strange villains, revered role models, unfortunate sad sacks and cunning survivors.  Their stories define my own life experience and are worth telling.

Prolog

It was November 1969:  After my tour of duty in the Viet Nam war, I was back at my old Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort, South Carolina.  I would have liked to go to the Naval Air Training Command as a flight instructor, but that was not to be.  I was assigned again to Marine Aircraft Group 32 (MAG-32), where I had begun my rookie apprenticeship as an Aviator two years before.  MAG-32 still had its two F-4 Phantom squadrons and my old A-4 Skyhawk squadron, but I ended up in the Group’s headquarters and support squadron, that is, H&MS-32.  Some of my buddies felt sorry for me because I failed to be assigned to a fighting unit and wound up instead as a staff officer.  After a couple of temporary assignments, I became the MAG-32 Fiscal Officer, keeping track of how much taxpayer money our units were spending.

Colonel Huffstutter, the Commanding Officer of MAG-32, was having a Christmas reception at his house soon after I had joined the Group.  By chance, I began a conversation with one of the Colonel’s civilian guests, who happened to be the boss of the local FBI office.  Since the city of Beaufort is adjacent to the Marine Corps Air Station as well as the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot, there was a 3-man FBI resident agency in town, to investigate Crimes on a Federal Reservation and such.

I had a good discussion with the G-man.  He noticed soon enough that I had a slight accent, and I admitted to him that I had actually been born in Poland but grew up in Argentina – but I assured him that I was a U.S. citizen and I did have a top-secret security clearance.

We also need a few good men, Captain, were his parting words.   If you decide ever to leave the Marines, you should think about the FBI.  Years before, in Marine boot camp, I had a bunkmate who was forced to drop out due to health issues, later to become an FBI Special Agent – it seemed almost a logical transition.

As it turned out, the G-man’s words were somewhat prophetic.  Soon it was announced that the Marines were overstaffed due to the winding down of the war and they had to get rid of at least 50,000 active-duty personnel within the next two years.

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AZ being pinned by Col. Huffstutter with the Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V (USMC photo, 1970).

I had joined the Marines with every expectation of becoming a career officer.  My Naval Aviator status was a bonus, but I had to admit that the Viet Nam war had disillusioned some of us and by then I wasn’t as highly motivated.  I had also met a very classy gal and too quickly ended up married.  By then, I was seriously tempted to leave the Corps and make the proverbial Big Bucks working for some airline.

I had even joined the MCAS Beaufort Flying Club that owned two 2-seater Cessna 150 airplanes, one 4-seat Cessna 172 and an old Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, the same trainer I flew when I did my Primary flight training back in the Navy school at Pensacola.  The club guys were military folk and their families, although us rated Naval Aviators seemed to show little interest in civilian flying.  But they welcomed into the club and showed me how to get my FAA Commercial pilot license through the very simple Military Competency written exam.  I felt I should learn whatever I could about civilian flying, just in case I might need to get a job.  Northwest-Orient Airlines liked to hire ex-Naval Aviators, and for a while I had good leads and a promising line on future employment there as soon as my service commitment ended.

But suddenly things were moving too fast!  My Marine Reserve service contract specified that I had to stay on active duty for at least three years after completion of flight training – this would be in October 1970 – after which I would become a free agent and could choose to augment into the Regular Marines, Career Marine Reserve, or to leave the military and move on to a different scene altogether.  By now it was already the summer of 1970 and I had thought I’d have time to make my decision.  Abruptly, the promising Northwest-Orient connection fizzled out, as now all the airlines were canceling their hiring due to the economic recession.  In the end my wife and I had already agreed that remaining in the Marines was the best way to go.  Jeanne had been a recent war widow when we met and was the daughter of an official in the Department of Defense, and she was quite OK with being a military officer’s wife.

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AZ after the war (USMC photo, 1969)

Now that the Marines were committed to the reduction in forces, or RIF, I realized that there was a very good chance that, regardless of my own plans, after October I could actually end up being unemployed.

I had been happy that when I joined the Marines in 1964, I was enlisted under the Platoon Leaders Class (PLC) program for college students, although I was commissioned as a Marine Lieutenant in 1966.  PLC carried the advantage of the early enlistment date – a college student could actually enlist years before graduation and would be kept on the books as a Marine Reserve Lance Corporal or Corporal[1] until finishing his college.  Compared to officers commissioned through other programs, the PLC’s salary and eligibility for promotions would be based on the earlier date.

…But now… in my case, it turned out that officers of my year group – 1964 – were now the most likely to get Riffed.

What to do…?  I called the FBI office and talked with the G-man in charge.  My timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

I didn’t get Riffed until December 1970, and in the meantime the FBI was kicking off a recruiting drive to hire 1,000 new agents.  The mandate was also to tap heavily into minority hiring, so my status as an immigrant was not an obstacle.  In fact, I went to the Parris Island Recruit Depot, near MCAS Beaufort, and took some Government language exams.  I got almost a perfect score in Spanish and Polish, so now I was even a certified linguist.  I filed my application, shaved off my mustache and went to the FBI Field Office at Columbia, South Carolina, for my FBI interview, and in no time I was offered an appointment to the FBI Academy.  I was going to spend a couple of months in unemployment until my class date was due, but my career future, for the near-term at least, was bright and clear.

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AZ’s letter of appointment to the FBI, signed by J. Edgar Hoover.

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[1] No duty time was required, other than the student PLC would be required to attend the boot camp the first available summer, then the Officers Candidate Course on his last available summer – while maintaining adequate scholastic and physical standards until graduation.

Chapter 1 – A Brief Civil Service

As soon as I had received my orders for release from active duty in late December 1970, wife Jeanne and I went to Brooklyn to live at my mother’s apartment.  Mother wasn’t exactly happy about it.  She was more than a bit leery of this sudden daughter-in-law of hers – the girl was just too smooth to be true – but I was lucky enough to get my class date for the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, to be moved up to January.  I didn’t have to spend much time at all in the unemployment line or in Mother’s apartment.  The Bureau was obligated to hire minorities now, and my language skills really helped.  They would waive the usual requirement for a law or accounting degree if one had military management experience.  My firearms skills also helped.

When my school date came up, we drove from New York back to Beaufort, where I left Jeanne living with our old military friends while I went back to Washington DC to attend 14 weeks of school at the Justice Department and the nearby Quantico Marine base where, six years previously, I had taken my Officers Candidate Course.  Afterwards, we could be stationed anywhere in the country.

Each class of agent trainees started out with fifty guys, and usually a few of them would be eliminated.  In my class, we lost only one.  The rumor was that we were to arrive at the Justice Building in business suits, white shirts and conservative ties, and this one guy showed up wearing a pastel-colored shirt.  By lunch time that first day, he had been eliminated.  Our shooting ranges at Quantico had 24 firing points, so we did our shooting in relays of 24, except that, alphabetically, I was number 49, and most often shot by myself, which gave me an advantage.

The only guy who might out-shoot me was Brooks, an ex-Air Force pilot who used to be a competition team shooter.  He, too, had been about to start school for Northwest Airlines, but his class was suddenly canceled as the recession took hold and airlines actually started laying off people. 

During that Christmas of 1970 in New York, Jeanne had given me a book about the Bureau – but she had no idea that the book, Hoover’s FBI[1], had been written as an exposè by a disgruntled ex-agent, and it cast a negative spell on my potential enthusiasm about my new career.

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AZ at the FBI Academy (AZ photo, 1971).

When the FBI sent me to Miami as my first Field Office, one of my first tasks was to get a new car, as my old Triumph car was in bad shape.  I wanted to get a new Datsun 240Z, an excellent design, but there was, like, a six-month waiting list.  But my Miami apartment was three blocks from a Jaguar dealership and while riding my bicycle one Saturday I stopped there and discovered I could buy a 2-year old E-Type Jaguar immediately, for about the same price as the new Z-car.

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Jeanne Z on South Carolina beach (AZ photo, 1970)

Enjoy your new car, said Jeanne when she moved out.  We had been married a year, but there was already trouble in paradise – she was thrilled that we had been assigned to Miami, but we had already agreed in advance that we’d live in separate apartments – at least for the time being.

As for herself, having grown up and studied in the Washington DC area, she was a trained and experienced paralegal and she quickly had found a job working for a judge in Miami.  She had researched that in order for us to divorce we had to establish residency in Florida for at least six months; yet in order to terminate the marriage quicker, we could file for annulment immediately.  She went back to her maiden name of Jeanne Cooper.  She knew that she was strikingly attractive and had always had fantasies about living on the wild side.

As a rookie Special Agent, or SA, I saw few, if any, interesting or newsworthy cases.  The Miami Field Office was a popular Office of Preference and had a lot of older Special Agents.  An employee could expect to be transferred about from one Field Office to another across the country through the years, but with seniority there came the chance to settle for good in such an OOP, until retirement set in.

The attitude in Miami was that of an old, well-worn routine.  There was a systematic approach to the activities, and as a new guy on the block, I was quickly steered onto the proper way of doing things.

Upon arrival at the Field Office, I signed-in at the Number One Register.  This is a log that one signs only twice, when first arriving at this office and again when one moves on to a different Field Office in the future.  Then I was interviewed by SAC Fred Frohbose[2], the Special Agent in Charge, and, considering my firearms skills, assigned to no. 7, or Fugitive Squad. 

The Number Two Register was signed daily, upon beginning of the workday and also at the end.  It was actually used to keep track of working hours, for salary purposes.  The Number Three Register was an assignment card that listed the daily activities that each agent expected to be doing.

The Bureau proudly proclaimed that J. Edgar Hoover, its legendary Director, had wrangled from Congress an exemption from the Civil Service rules regarding pay and salary.  The agents enjoyed a salary override of some 25% above their Civil Service salary range, for compensation of necessary overtime in the performance of their duties.  As a rookie agent, my government starting salary range was GS-10 Step 1, but with the overtime allowance it amounted to just slightly less income I’d had as a Captain of Marines.  Medical and other benefits were almost as good. 

The overtime override came at a price, however.  Each agent was expected to post between two and three hours of overtime a day.  On my second day in the Miami Field Office, I quickly learned how this really worked:  I arrived early, at about 7:20, and promptly signed in at the Number 2 Register in the no. 7 squad supervisor’s office.  Soon, another agent from no. 7 squad arrived and signed in.  Come here, he beckoned me.  I walked back to the office cubicle and he pointed to the sign-in page.

Why did you sign in at 7:20? asked the SA.

Well, I just came in, at about 7:20.  

No-no, look here, he said, pointing to the line above my name.   You see – here – Special Agent Brown signed in at 6:35.  You should have signed in at 6:36.   I must have been looking at him like he was some kind of a nut, but he looked me straight in the eye.  I actually looked at the clock on a nearby wall and checked my watch to see that it was correct.

See, he said, now I have to sign in below you, at 7:21.  We just ‘lost’ 45 minutes of overtime.

…Aah. I was beginning to see where he was going with his reasoning.

At exactly 7:45, the squad supervisors would appear and sign themselves in at 7:45.  By then the pages in all eight squad supervisors’ cubicles were full of signatures but the office floor was practically empty.  A few minutes after 8:00, the place was abuzz with over a hundred Special Agents, and the few Investigative Clerks, getting their briefcases for their daily investigative activities.

The system penalized agents if they failed to maintain their overtime at or above the office average.  If in January the average overtime was, say, 2 hours and 40 minutes per day, each agent had to post this or better in February or face possible reduction in pay if he missed the overtime for 2 consecutive months.  In reality, the supervisors would assign a third of the agents, on a revolving basis, to intentionally post time below the average, so as to keep the numbers from escalating as everyone felt compelled to beat the average month after month.  They had this down to a veritable science, including the sign-out routine at the end of the day.

Agents would appear anytime before each of the squad supervisors arrived, sign in as early as they could get away with, and then go out for breakfast.  If one knew the locations, each morning one could find dozens of agents hanging out at their several favorite joints.  They’d return to the office just around 8:00 and get ready for their day.  The Bureau expected agents to spend no more than 10% of their time at the office.  Doing one’s own paperwork was discouraged, and instead we were encouraged to learn to use the office’s stenographer pool.  Everybody should be out there investigating, except for the few agents that might opt for administrative advancement, in which case they would have extra office duties and supervisory responsibilities.

I dutifully signed my Number 3 Register, which was a card describing my activities within the day.  As a new guy, I needed to go out of the office and arrange for my apartment rental – we had arrived at a motel on Biscayne Boulevard across the street from the FBI building, but I quickly found a decent apartment in the alley next to the FBI parking lot.  Another senior agent also lived in the same building.  I had to go get my Florida driver’s license, arrange for utilities, help Jeanne find her own apartment, etc.  I even listed an hour for lunch.

Hey, come here, said Special Agent McLanahan, the assistant no. 7 squad supervisor.  He had been assigned as my mentor.  You have to list the address of what building you are going to be at, and what restaurant you will be eating at.  Really? This was getting too complicated.

For today this is OK, he said, but tomorrow you’ll be going with me and work on the street.

Come here, McLanahan said, again the next morning, after I had arrived at 7:20 and signed in at 6:18.  I was getting to believe that my nickname around here would be SA Comehere.  By now it was 8:15 and it was time to get out of the office.

This is really the easiest way to do it. He took a no. 3 register card and wrote his name on it and listed several cryptic numbers.  He told me to take a card and do the same thing, listing the various numbers exactly as he had done.  We clipped our cards on the revolving file holder by the communications switchboard.

Since you’ll be riding with me for the next few days, these numbers are the case files I’ll be working on.  Pretty soon you’ll be getting your own case numbers too.  You don’t have to list where you actually go, as long as you are pursuing any one of these cases.  The operators at the switchboard can reach us by phone or usually by radio call anytime during the day.  I’m a supervisor so I do have a car phone.  Just make sure you don’t turn your radio off.

I was learning the realities of being a Special Agent – it was boring as all heck.  Contrary to popular belief, there were very rare instances, usually accidental, of confrontations with lawbreakers.  Although everybody wore their gun, typically the service-provided .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Model 10 six-shooter, the chances of dealing with a perpetrator were extremely remote.  99 percent of the work was collecting and sending or receiving information.  After much time gathering leads and evidence, sometimes for years, when a perpetrator was eventually to be arrested, usually a whole team would come out to do the deed.  Just as often, local police or other federal agencies such as U.S. Marshals would make the actual arrests – although the FBI always managed to snatch the spotlight and get the credit.  Local public safety agencies, such as our Miami-Dade Sheriffs, had no love for the FBI.

In my first two or three weeks, I drove around with McLanahan, and eventually I began to be assigned my own cases.  My squad, no.7, was the Fugitive Squad, responsible for investigating dangerous suspects at large and was manned by agents with good weapons skills.  Our squad also had an airline hijacking response team, which might have been exciting, but it was also the squad that dealt with several other crimes such as TFIS, or thefts from interstate shipment, where I spent most of my investigative time, around truck warehouses and airport baggage and cargo docks.  I soon came to suspect that most of my cases amounted to thefts of shipments by the warehouse/trucking company people themselves, who reported the losses to us as part of their insurance claims process.  Even our FBI supervisors seemed to be interested mainly in getting the paperwork done, without any expectation of actually solving any of those rather minor crimes.

One of my very first TFIS cases showed promise.  I was sent to investigate the theft of two pistols that had been shipped from New York City to the Tamiami Gun Shop in Miami.  UPS had delivered the parcel, but it turned out to be empty.  Someone had cut the bottom of the box and had re-sealed it.  I learned that this was the 7th and 8th pistol that had gone missing in shipment from New York to the same store in the last few months.  I was onto an intriguing crime wave!

I spent a lot of time learning how the UPS parcel handling works and decided that it was unlikely that the theft had happened once the package was in the system.  Likely, it was an inside job by the shippers themselves, or else the UPS driver who picked up the package and the driver who had delivered it were the only guys who had the opportunity to do the deed.  I interviewed the local UPS supervisor and two of the Miami delivery drivers, to no avail, and sent a memo to New York for them to do the same.  In a few days I received a terse reply from agents in the New York City Field Office that they had looked into the matter and had developed no leads, recommending I just close the case.  The FBI ran the NCIC[3], a computerized data base of stolen property and fugitives and such, and I would have expected the New York agents to at least learn the serial numbers of the guns from the shipper and enter them into the system, but they didn’t even do that (I have to assume they must have deferred that crucial task to local NYPD cops).

Ironically, in my last case at the Miami Field Office, I had entered into NCIC such information on a valuable Krieghoff shotgun that was lost from the Eastern Air Lines freight service, and NCIC yielded a hit on this item a few days after I had entered the data into the system.   It turned out that two freight handlers in Miami could have been suspect, and both of them had recently quit the airline.  Now they both lived together sharing a mobile home, and one of them had just joined the Hallandale Police Department in North Miami, and it was he who sent out an inquiry to NCIC, through his police office, obviously to find out if the shotgun had been reported stolen.  I unraveled the whole case and talked to the Hallandale chief of police, suggesting that they polygraph the new cop, since it was illegal for the FBI to do so.  When they did, he confessed quickly, but by that time I was being transferred to Chicago and I was no longer involved in the case.  It was one of the few potentially interesting crimes I handled.

It was clear that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, took pains to represent itself as the good guys in all its public dealings.  Agents were expected to conduct themselves in such a way so as not to besmirch the image of the organization in any way, even in their most private lives.  Back in Washington DC I had shared a room with two other trainees, one of whom had previously served in another Federal agency in a Western state.  He had made tremendous efforts to qualify for consideration as a FBI candidate, including losing some 60 lbs of weight.  He did succeed in getting his appointment to the FBI Academy but, during our training, it was revealed that he had had a relationship with a female co-worker in his previous job before his own divorce was finalized, and he was summarily disqualified.

Special Agents on the job were to wear suits at all times, except, of course, when engaged in undercover work, although in the hot climates of Florida and some Southern states it was acceptable to wear sports coats and clip-on ties.   Perpetrators were called subjects [of an investigation] and never suspects, and our investigative interrogations were to be referred to as interviews.  We were never to be pushy or rude or threatening and we were expected to use patience and persistence in unraveling the various cases we would work.

Some cases were oddly inane, and some very comical ones as well.  One early morning before sunrise I was assigned on loan to a team from squad no. 2, which dealt in stolen cars and other such rackets.  There would be a sweep to arrest more than a dozen ring members simultaneously all over south Florida that morning.  An older agent and I were to go pick up a guy who was involved in a car theft-and-chop ring.  This chief mechanic guy had a Slavic name, so they wanted me along because I spoke Polish, just so as not to intimidate the guy, I guessed. 

We drove to Ft Lauderdale and knocked at the address, a nice suburban home.  It was just getting light outside.

The wife opened the door wearing her nightgown, we identified ourselves, and we asked for the perpetrator.  He came downstairs in work clothes and offered no resistance while my older agent read him his rights.  I took out my irons and proceeded to handcuff him.  The wife wailed and sat down in tears.  A couple of the kids were up in the stairwell, watching.

Hey, Andy, said my temporary partner.   Put that away.  Let’s not embarrass the guy in front of his family.

Once we were outside, I took out the irons again.

Hey, Andy, let’s not make a scene in front of the house, in case the neighbors might be watching.

The guy was quite corpulent.  By the time we had him in the car, there was no way that I could handcuff him with his hands behind his back, as per FBI procedure.  I had to try to put the irons on him in front.  Now the guy had huge forearms and wrists like Popeye the Sailor.  I found I couldn’t even get the handcuffs on him at all.

Don’t you have a rope or something in the trunk? I asked.

My partner didn’t seem to be concerned.  We carried him without the restraints.  I was hoping the guy wouldn’t feel tempted to grab him by the neck as he was driving us back to Miami.  This could make another cool how-not-to story down at the FBI Academy.

We arrived at the Field Office just as several other teams were arriving with prisoners.  The local news media were already at work.  We walked our passenger to the building without incident.  He modestly turned his face away as the cameras were clicking away.

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[1] Hoover’s FBI; the Men and the Myth – William W. Turner, 1969.

[2] SAC Frohbose retired almost immediately thereafter.  Sick with cancer, he shot himself at home with a shotgun a year afterward.

[3] National Crime information Center, accessible to all law enforcement agencies.

Chapter 2 – Lure of the Skies

There was plenty of time to kill during a typical FBI day.  Once, I found myself in the town of Opa Locka to track and capture a deserter from the Army, another comical situation, and I couldn’t resist visiting the airport.  Opa Locka was a quaint town in North Miami, left over from Florida’s real estate land rush of the 1920’s.  The municipal buildings and post office, and even the Amtrak train station, sported Arabian-style architecture, minarets and all.  Streets were named after Arabic characters such as Ali Baba or Scheherazade.  At one time the Opa Locka airport had been a Naval Air Station, and it was my airport of entry back in 1958 when I had immigrated from Argentina, before the Miami International Airport had existed.

Soon I signed up for a multi-engine course with the Burnside-Ott Aviation Training Center.  I had a FAA Commercial Pilot certificate already from the days of the flying club at MCAS Beaufort, but it was limited to single-engine airplanes.  At that time I had been actually flying – occasionally – the C-47 Hummer and perhaps if I had shown the FAA some paperwork, they might have also had given me the Commercial Pilot certificate including ratings for both single- and multi-engine airplanes.  It was a moot point, because at the time I had taken the Military Competency exam with the FAA, I wasn’t even aware that there was such a thing as multi-engine rating.

Anyway, my first instructor at Opa Locka, Mr Roudebush, explained to me that the whole gist of the multi-engine training was not how to operate an airplane with two (or more) engines normally, but how to successfully deal with any situations involving a loss of power on one of the engines, which would throw the airplane into an unbalanced condition and, in many circumstances, could lead to a fatal loss of control.  I realized that, in my limited experience in the Marine C-47, I never had reached that point of training, and I embraced earnestly my learning with Roudebush.  Also, I soon developed a good relationship with Erwin Fix, the Chief Instructor at Burnside-Ott, he also being an immigrant from West Germany.

From time to time I drove with an experienced agent, but most of the time, true to my lone wolf tendencies, I preferred to drive alone on my investigations.  MM-138 was the call sign of my FBI car, a bare-bones white Rambler Ambassador with no air conditioning.  My arms grew tired from cranking the windows up & down several times a day in the Miami heat.

I was riding with McLanahan again, since he had to accompany me on a couple of my investigations to see that I was progressing well, for my periodic fitness report.  As a matter of idle conversation, I mentioned to him that I’d be taking my FAA flight check for my multi-engine certificate any day soon.  I wasn’t concerned that he might object that I would be doing a personal activity during working hours.  Every agent did that – when I had been riding with him, it seemed that we’d work on one or another of his cases for an hour or two each day, while he spent practically the rest of the time prospecting for contractors and suppliers for a swimming pool he was planning for his house.

That flight school must be quite expensive, on a new agent’s salary, eh?

Nah – I have my Veterans benefits that pay 90% of the cost.

"Aren’t VA benefits intended for vocational training? he asked.  Like, now you already have a good career going in the Bureau," he said, provocatively.

I realized I was getting on shaky ground and decided to shut up.  Was he suggesting that there was a conflict of interest, or lack of sincerity on my part?  Might using VA benefits for recreational training be a Federal Crime?   Since I had read that book that Jeanne had given me, I had been taking everything about the Bureau with a grain of salt.  It was also true that J. Edgar Hoover was very possessive of his agents and objected to conflicts of interest and pursuit of dangerous activities such as skydiving, horse-riding, racing, and, of course, flying in private airplanes.

Eventually, years after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau would take advantage of aircraft that would be confiscated and would use them for their own purposes.  Similarly, the U.S. Customs Service would also utilize aircraft that came into their possession.  Agents who had a pilot license might be assigned to fly as part of their official duties, but both the Customs and Bureau air operations suffered from a very poor safety record.  When I worked at the FlightSafety International in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, we offered an Instrument Refresher course to improve any multi-engine pilot’s flying skills and situational awareness, and the FBI and U.S. Customs pilots were some of our most dismal students.

By 1985, Piper Aircraft had taken a Cheyenne IIIA airplane, a good long-range corporate turboprop, and modified it into the CHET, for the U.S. Customs drug interdiction program.  It was equipped with a radar system transplanted from an F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter.  We wondered how we would manage to train agents to fly this sophisticated machine, given the low caliber of Fed pilots we had seen so far.  But the U.S. Customs Service did well by hiring professional-level pilots out of the military, many of them dual-qualified in helicopters also.  But, back during my Special Agent experience in 1971, there was no such thing as FBI Air.

A looker like my wife Jeanne would soon tire of working in the legal office and want to explore the opportunities in a town such as Miami.  She’d try to get into the modeling business, but she was already thirty, a year and a half older than I, and teenage girls were the rage.  She still tried to get into TV commercials and such.

Wife Jeanne, from her model’s composite (AZ photo, 1971)

I asked our FBI photographer about recommending someone to make a photo composite, or visual resume, for her.  To my surprise, he said he’d be glad to do the job himself, for a token fee, since he claimed to have lots of experience with that as a sideline.  He came and took all sorts of photos – he was very impressed with Jeanne and said that she had the chirasma (sic) – but then he never delivered any of the work.  He suddenly quit the Bureau and went to work for the Miami Herald.  I finally ended up taking my own photos of Jeanne and printing her up a couple hundred composites and resumes.  Photography had been one of my hobbies, but now I no longer had access to my own darkroom, and ordering custom photo finishing work from commercial developing labs proved to be very frustrating.

My little desk was next to that of an older agent, SA Robert Dwyer, of the no. 1 squad, who specialized in tracking activities of certain potentially subversive Latin American individuals.  He had been to the Government language school in Monterey, California, and talked Spanish very well.   He loved the (Iberian) Spanish culture and lived in a plain apartment on the opposite side of the FBI parking lot from my apartment.  My apartment block didn’t have a laundry room, so I sometimes walked to his block to use the washers & dryers.  He was dating a stewardess from Eastern Air Lines and learning to play the classical guitar.

Soon we got another new agent, Morales, who was of Mexican descent.  He had also been a Captain of Marines, although not an airman, and his hobby was the equestrian arts.  He kept trying to estimate whether he could afford to buy and maintain a fancy horse on his Special Agent’s salary.  He was in the no. 4 squad, tracking crimes from Federal Reserve banks and Federal credit unions, and he was one agent who really earned his overtime pay.  He handled loads of checks and vouchers and briefcases full of bank records, interviewed bankers, bad check artists and swindlers and constantly shipped and received lots of paper to be scanned for fingerprints to the FBI labs in Quantico, Virginia.

Oh man, said Morales once.  To think I gave up the Marines for this crap.   As for myself, I had been riffed, so I had no choice but leaving the Marines, but I never found out what were the circumstances of his separation from the military.  In FBI lore, Special Agents who screwed up were put into the applicant squad, the most dismal of jobs, where they’d spend their time checking out facts and references listed in the myriad of Federal job applications – say, if a person was seeking an appointment as an FBI stenographer, or a Federal Judge, or Assistant U.S. Attorney, every detail on his application had to be actually followed up and verified by some FBI sad sack.  SAs who really screwed up could be expected to be transferred immediately to the Butte, Montana Field Office.  SA Morales was getting the feeling that the Bank squad must be just as dismal of a job as the Applicant squad.

Morales had studied music as his major in college, and his specialty was the Flamenco guitar.  It so happened that Dwyer and I both had been dabbling in guitar, so we hit it off immediately and the three of us actually spent a lot of time together.  I even learned a few Flamenco strokes on my guitar.  I had bought it in the Philippines during my tour in Nam.

Dwyer and I would sometimes hang out at the Dinner Key marina at Coconut Grove, down in South Miami, since he had been a yachtsman in years past and his airline girlfriend lived nearby.  We would ride our bicycles in the local parks, using the girl’s apartment as a base when she was away on her international flights.  She was a gorgeous 25-year old, sharp enough to be a supermodel.

Don’t even ask, said Dwyer, when I expressed an interest in dating a stewardess.  Believe me, you couldn’t afford dating these glamour girls.

Dwyer was a great help when I had to decide whether to quit the FBI and also when I was suffering from a bit of depression due to my hassles with ex-wife Jeanne.  He had turned 55 and was putting in his paperwork for Federal retirement, and he and his girl had decided to get married.  Being a lifelong bachelor, he probably had a lot of money saved up.  Last time I saw him, he was making plans to go on an African safari for his honeymoon.  I got the feeling that she had her claws into him and his May-September marriage and honeymoon presaged some bad auguries.  She would suck him dry and discard him like an empty shell, I’d bet – but love is blind, as they say.

By the end of 1971, I was getting done with my rookie Special Agent experience in Miami and was deemed ready to be transferred to a more permanent Field Office.  My  good friend Special Agent Joe Yablonsky, who was a high-ranking member of the Miami office – at the FBI Academy they told legends about his exploits when