Missing Man (2 page)

The big investigative firms were staffed by former prosecutors, retired agents from the FBI and other agencies, and ex–newspaper reporters. They adopted the veneer of law firms and charged clients similar rates. One of the largest, Kroll Associates, employed dozens of investigators and had offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was a highly competitive industry in which firms won contracts by convincing clients they had the connections to deliver valuable “strategic” information. Often, they produced high-priced smoke—reports that blended fact, rumor, and speculation. Their tactics could also be as bare-knuckled as those of the old-time private eyes who spied on love nests. In the late 1990s, one major new source of work for corporate investigative firms came from Russian oligarchs, financial and industrial magnates who had gained astronomical wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. The oligarchs liked to depict themselves as a new breed of Russian entrepreneurs, Western-style capitalists who succeeded through shrewd dealings and risk-taking, rather than payoffs and political corruption. That often wasn't the case, and some oligarchs hired investigative firms to dig up dirt that could be used to blackmail a critic into silence, a technique known in the trade as a “hard shoulder.”

Bob preferred to keep his nose clean. His first job was with a firm called DSFX, in its Miami office. Construction was then under way on the American Airlines Arena, the indoor stadium that became home to the Miami Heat basketball team, and DSFX was hired to help local officials monitor possible fraud on the project. Bob also began to work with Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, trying to locate pirate factories producing counterfeits of its famous brand. At the time, drug gangs in Latin America were also doing a brisk business in kidnapping American executives and demanding large ransoms for their release, and companies used Bob to negotiate those deals. “If you do this right, it's not like in the movies,” Bob told a reporter then writing an article about corporate kidnappings. “You don't hear music in the background, only the sound of pens on paper.”

With more money, Bob and Chris, like most people, found ways to spend it. They bought a big new home in a gated community in Coral Springs and two new cars. While their three older daughters had gone to Florida State University, their two older sons wanted to go to more expensive private colleges outside the state and Bob and Chris agreed to send them.

When DSFX was sold in 2001, Bob started his own one-man shop, R. A. Levinson & Associates, which he ran out of his home. He had never operated a business before and it proved a constant hustle. He had to scramble for work, cater to clients, pay bills, collect on accounts, and make sure more money was coming in than going out. As a lone wolf, he took what he could get. His assignments were a hodgepodge, running from background investigations into Russian businessmen to counterfeit product cases. In a typical month, he might take three or four trips, including travel abroad to cities like London, Kiev, and Managua. He would book a hotel room to meet with a source and, in the evening, go to a different hotel to sleep. Before turning in, he would order room service and spend hours typing up reports to clients, responding to emails, and sending out feelers to drum up new work. The constant travel and bad eating habits took a toll. At six feet four, Bob had always been a very big man, but he soon weighed 240 pounds and had diabetes and high blood pressure.

In 2004, another large investigations firm, SafirRosetti, hired him to open an office in Boca Raton, Florida. With a steady salary, he didn't constantly have to scramble for clients and could provide his family financial security. But there was a problem—his head and his heart weren't in the work. Chasing product counterfeiters didn't compare to the thrill of an FBI agent hunting criminals for Uncle Sam. After he worked hard to investigate a case, a company's executives might decide not to alert law enforcement officials to his findings, fearing that the resulting publicity might damage their reputation or give a competitor a leg up. He would tell friends he was working for the “rich people's police,” and even some of his kids could see that he wasn't happy. He tried to strike a balance by taking on assignments for public interest groups. One organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, used investigators like Bob to track down people who had committed human rights abuses in their native countries and had since moved to the United States, often under an assumed name. When Bob met one of the group's lawyers at a Miami café, he beamed and said, “I love what you guys do.” He couldn't imagine saying that to a corporate executive.

When he traveled on jobs, he fed information he picked up back to friends at the FBI and other federal agencies. Every ex-cop turned private investigator does that in order to keep doors open when they need help. Bob, however, wanted more. He still wanted to be part of the action. Every few months, he traveled to FBI field offices in cities like Memphis, Kansas City, and Seattle to teach seminars for young agents on techniques for identifying and recruiting informants.

From the very start of his career, Bob was a collector of information, intelligence, and people. He cast himself as the proverbial “good cop,” a big, friendly guy who liked everybody and who wanted everybody to like him. It wasn't an act or even a stretch. By nature, he was gregarious and possessed an instinct for knowing how people wanted to be treated and what they wanted to hear. Ten minutes after sitting down in a restaurant, he would be on a first-name basis with the waiter or waitress serving him, and he would leave a big tip behind to make sure they remembered him. He loved handing out nicknames; everybody got one, family members, friends, and new acquaintances. The names were usually corny—stuff like “Professor” or “Doctor”—but people walked away charmed, thinking that Bob had coined the name just for them. He even varied how he introduced himself, depending on the impression he wanted to create. Some people knew him as Bob. Others called him Bobby. He liked to use “Bobby” at times, he explained to one of his sons, because its boyish sound made his large stature and status as an agent seem less threatening.

Once Bob got people talking, they often kept talking. If they were criminals, they might hope he would cut them a break. Other people might cooperate to get cash or because they wanted him to solve an immigration problem. Whatever the specifics, his relationships involved the give-and-take that binds together a cop and an informant. From the start of his law enforcement career, Bob believed he could make more cases from informants than he could from working the street. Once he ran into a Drug Enforcement Administration agent he knew outside a Manhattan courthouse. The DEA agent, who did undercover buys, was dressed for the part in jeans, a battered leather jacket, and a bulletproof vest. Bob, who worked for the DEA before joining the FBI, had on his own uniform—a suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. He looked at his friend and pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. “I'm going to put more people in jail with this than you are with all that armor,” he told him.

During his seminars for young FBI agents, he talked about his experiences and showed PowerPoint slides. He discussed the types of personality traits found in people willing to become informants. They tended to be independent thinkers, he said, rather than rule followers and were often empathetic, imaginative, and social. A variety of motives might cause them to open up; some even saw cooperation with the cops as a way to eliminate or take revenge against a rival. Other informants were thrill seekers or wannabe cops. Bob sprinkled his presentation with references to espionage and true crime books, quoting passages from authors such as David Ignatius, a journalist who wrote spy thrillers, and Robert Baer, a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who chronicled his experiences as an operative in the Middle East. “‘Soon recruiting agents became as natural as ordering a pizza over the telephone. It's all a matter of listening to what people are really saying,'” read one of Bob's slides quoting Baer. He warned agents about the pitfalls of dealings with informants and urged them not to get too close to a source or consider one a friend. Another slide read:

When you are trying to recruit a member of a criminal organization or terrorist group, remember one thing—you are, in effect

• Selling suicide

• If that person is discovered cooperating with the FBI or law enforcement, the penalty is usually death

*   *   *

Bob knew from the age of eight what he wanted to be. His inspiration came from a movie called
The House on 92nd Street
, released in 1945, three years before he was born. The film was a B-grade thriller about a college student who goes undercover for the FBI during World War II to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring trying to steal secrets about the atomic bomb. The FBI officially sanctioned the movie, and it contained a brief introduction by Director J. Edgar Hoover extolling the agency's mission. After Bob saw it, he was all law-and-order. While other teenagers played sports, he hung out with friends in the attic of his parents' home in New Hyde Park, a Long Island suburb, acting out courtroom dramas. For dialogue they used transcripts from real trials that his mother typed up for lawyers to make extra money. He attended the City College of New York and worked during summers as an aide in the New York City Department of Investigations, an agency that ferrets out municipal corruption. When he graduated from college in 1970 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he didn't attend the ceremony because he was training to be a DEA agent. The FBI required five years of law enforcement experience to qualify for a job and the DEA was the place where he would cut his teeth.

One evening two years later, he went to TGI Friday's, then a popular singles bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side. An attractive twenty-two-year-old office worker, Christine Gorman, was there with a girlfriend. Chris, who was short and had dark hair, was convinced that Bob was interested in her friend. He was interested in her. Before leaving the bar, he got Chris's phone number, and they soon began seeing each other. The only obstacle to their romance was his parents. Chris, who had grown up on Long Island in a large Catholic family, wanted to raise her children Catholic. Bob couldn't have cared less about religion, but his family was Jewish, and when he and Chris got married in 1973, Bob's father cut him off and sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual for the dead.

The DEA transferred Bob to Denver, and it was there in 1976 that he got the call he had been waiting for—the FBI wanted to hire him. He went to the bureau's training facility in Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned to its office in Los Angeles. It was a short-lived posting. Chris, who had already given birth to the couple's first child, was again pregnant and wanted to return to the East Coast to be close to her family. In 1978, she and Bob got their wish; he was offered a plum assignment in New York working on organized crime cases.

In the early 1980s, one of those Mafia cases captured the country's attention. It involved President Ronald Reagan's choice for secretary of labor, Raymond Donovan, and allegations that his New Jersey construction company had Mafia ties. Donovan, a top executive of Schiavone Construction, denied the rumors, and FBI officials testified during his Senate confirmation hearings that a bureau investigation had found nothing to suggest connections between Donovan's company and the mob. But after the new secretary of labor assumed his post,
Time
magazine published a bombshell—during an investigation in the late 1970s, the FBI had secretly recorded members of the Genovese crime family discussing Donovan, Schiavone, and a scheme to use minority-owned firms as fronts to win public construction contracts. To Bob, the revelation wasn't news. He had headed the investigation that produced those recordings, and a bitter dispute within the bureau over his handling of the informant in the case had nearly destroyed his young FBI career.

That informant, Michael Orlando, was a onetime schoolteacher who had turned to theft and armed robbery. Another FBI agent, Larry Sweeney, initially recruited Orlando as a source, and after he learned Orlando was close to Genovese family members, he introduced him to Bob. Orlando, who was being paid $500 a week by the FBI to be a top, or “high-echelon,” informant, told Bob he was willing to infiltrate a Bronx meatpacking warehouse, run by a Genovese lieutenant named William Masselli, that served as a drop-off point for hijacked trucks and other criminal activities. In return, Bob reiterated Larry Sweeney's earlier promise to Orlando not to disclose his identity as a bureau source even to other FBI agents working on the case, for fear it might leak out and get him killed.

In 1978, Bob wrote a fourteen-page memo to FBI headquarters based on information picked up by bureau listening devices planted inside the Bronx warehouse. In it, he said the material being gathered had “excellent prosecutive potential” for cases of political corruption, fraud, labor racketeering, police corruption, and narcotics trafficking. But the inquiry ran into trouble when other bureau agents, unaware of Orlando's role as an informant, started reporting that he was taking part in truck hijackings and other crimes. When Bob and Sweeney confronted Orlando, he offered the informant's perfect excuse—fellow gangsters would quickly finger him as a stoolie, he said, if he walked away whenever a crime was going down. He promised to behave, but some FBI managers viewed Orlando as an informant run amok, and before long it wasn't clear who was playing whom. In addition, William Masselli was heard on an FBI bug telling a fellow gangster that Orlando had carried out multiple contract killings for the mob. “This kid Mike … When I say he's a bad kid … Forget about it … He knows it,” Masselli said. “This guy's got about ten under his belt already.”

Bob and Sweeney hadn't seen any evidence connecting Orlando to mob hits, and they argued that arresting him for truck hijackings would prematurely end the Bronx investigation, expose him as an informant, and violate their pledge to him. Supervisors overruled them, and when Orlando was arrested, Sweeney filed a complaint with FBI headquarters. A subsequent internal FBI review largely supported how Bob and Sweeney had handled Orlando, but by then the episode had resulted in too much bad blood inside the bureau's New York office. Bob's supervisors took him off organized crime and assigned him to foreign counterintelligence, an effective demotion. When a job opened in the FBI's Miami office in 1984, he jumped at it, eager to make a fresh start.