Twisted Triangle Page 3

  Growing up with an abusive father primed Margo to be drawn to a domineering and manipulative man like Gene Bennett and caused her to stay far too long in their tumultuous marriage. Years later, she told herself that if only Gene had been a decent man, her feelings of attraction for other women probably would’ve remained on the shelf where she’d put them long ago.

  Chapter Three

  Diamonds and Denial

  In early December 1986, Margo, Gene, and their new baby went out to explore northern Virginia for a place to live. They were hoping to find a house somewhere near Quantico and within easy driving distance to DC, so they targeted Prince William County, which was just north of the academy and west of DC.

  “We felt that if it was looking like I was going to Quantico, it made more sense for me to be closer to home because of child-care issues,” Margo recalled.

  On a bureau business trip later that month, Gene did some house hunting and found about thirty acres of open space in the city of Manassas, which he bought over the phone from a realtor. Gene negotiated an unusual purchase arrangement for the $90,000 property: $60,000 down and annual payments of $7,000 until it was paid off.

  Margo knew they didn’t have that much in savings, and she was concerned that Gene was spending the cash they would need to buy a house.

  “We don’t have the money,” Margo said.

  “I haven’t told you this, but I have some cash that my dad gave me before he died,” he said. “I promised I wouldn’t use it until I was thirty-five.”

  Gene claimed that his father had given him $60,000, which he’d kept in a suitcase in his mother’s attic ever since. He said that his father had told him not to put it in the bank, so Margo figured his father had never reported it to the IRS, and this was his way of protecting Gene, who said he would take the old bills to the bank and exchange them for new ones so that no one would question any transaction or track the income.

  At the time, Margo took Gene at his word.

  Over the course of the next year, Gene and Jerry were busy working on the home relocation scam. Gene drafted a phony document to show that he and Margo had bought the Lake Capri house from Jerry, using a $15,500 watch as a down payment. The watch Gene described was an Audemars Piguet he’d been wearing for his undercover operation but had since returned to the bureau’s forfeited evidence collection.

  But when the first appraisal came back, it was disappointingly low. Gene and Jerry would have only made $16,000, or a split of $8,000 each, so he asked the FBI to have one of its contracted relocation companies do a second appraisal. However, it came back just as low.

  “Jerry decided that for that money it wasn’t worth it,” Margo said later.

  So Gene and Jerry came up with another plan, which was to transfer the house to Jeanette Gilliam, the sister of Jerry’s wife, Brenda. Again drafting phony documents, Gene had a former professor, John Sullivan, pose as his real estate agent in the “sale.” He then claimed that he paid $17,430 to Sullivan in agent’s fees. In November, Gene submitted a reimbursement claim to the FBI for $17,873 in expenses.

  Margo had signed all the real estate documents and deeds, but not the paperwork Gene submitted to the bureau for reimbursement, which was handled as part of his transfer to the DC office. In February 1988, the FBI cut Gene a $17,177 check.

  “Gene ruined his career for $17,000,” Margo said later. “He was not one to leave money on the table. He liked to know he got what was coming to him. If he was eligible for [such perks], he wanted to collect them.”

  For their third wedding anniversary in February 1987, Gene took Margo out to dinner at a fancy steak house in Alexandria, leaving Allison with Caroll and Gail Toohey to baby-sit.

  Caroll had been the assistant special agent in charge at the Atlanta office when Margo and Gene had first started working there. He was also the one who had approved Gene’s first foray into undercover work with Operation Forscore. In 1986, he’d gone on to become a deputy assistant director of the Inspection Division at bureau headquarters in DC.

  After dinner, the Tooheys had a chilled bottle of champagne waiting for Margo and Gene. Gene and Caroll walked into the living room from the kitchen, each carrying two glasses. Gene handed one to Margo, and the four of them toasted.

  “Happy anniversary,” Gene and Margo said to each other, clinking their glasses together.

  As Margo took her first sip, she realized there was something in her flute.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  Gene feigned surprise. “Oh,” he said innocently, “is there something in your glass?”

  Margo hurriedly finished its contents and saw an enormous, gorgeous diamond ring sitting at the bottom. She pulled it out, and Gene put it on her finger.

  “Oh, my God, it’s huge,” Margo exclaimed as she took a closer look at the stone.

  She’d had a similar reaction when Gene surprised her with a one-carat diamond engagement ring just after Christmas in 1983.

  “If we’re going to do this,” he’d said as he slipped it on her finger, “then you need a ring.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “This is more than I ever wanted.”

  When they’d talked about an engagement ring, she’d said she would be fine with a simple wedding band. But Gene enjoyed buying expensive toys and gifts for himself and Margo, such as the pair of matching Rolex watches—gold with black onyx, diamond-studded faces—that he’d bought for them before Allison was born.

  Gene, like Margo, had grown up in a family where money was always tight. This was especially true after his father, a garbage man, died of cancer when Gene was only sixteen. Gene had to quit the football team and work odd jobs to help support his mother and older sister, then immediately joined the Army. So neither he nor Margo, whose father started one failed business after another, had grown up with nice things.

  Gail’s jaw dropped open when she saw Gene’s latest gift, which was three times the size of Margo’s engagement ring.

  “I’m sure they were thinking, ‘Where did he get the money to buy that?’ ” Margo said later. “Crazy me. I never once thought those things. I never once said, ‘How’d you buy this?’ I just didn’t. I guess I just assumed that we could afford it, that it was coming out of our savings and salary.”

  Before Caroll had asked Gail to marry him, Gene offered to get him a good deal on a diamond ring from a jeweler he knew in Atlanta. Gene brought over three or four loose stones to show him, one of which Caroll bought, had mounted, and gave to his future wife as an engagement ring.

  Years later, Caroll said he had had no inkling that Gene had been running a side business selling diamonds with Jerry York.

  “I don’t know of anybody who was allowed to have a side business,” he said.

  But like Margo, he hadn’t asked himself questions about Gene either.

  “I found out later that he and Jerry were involved in a number of things,” he said.

  Margo and Gene drove into DC for their first day at the Washington Metropolitan Field Office, which was in the southeast quadrant of the district. The multistory building was in a rundown neighborhood, surrounded by dilapidated houses and rusty shells of cars.

  “We talked about how the place looked like a ghetto,” Margo recalled. “Parking was plentiful, but they encouraged you not to leave your cars there overnight.”

  They both worked in the same building but on different floors. Margo was assigned to the Department of Justice Applicant Squad, where she conducted background checks on candidates for the federal bench. Gene was assigned to the White House Applicant Squad, where he did similar checks on people applying to work for the president. Margo wasted no time in applying for a position at Quantico.

  Within a month, Gene moved to the FBI Liaison Office, next door to the White House, where he had the same duties but also worked as a conduit between the administration, the FBI’s headquarters, and its Washington field office. Margo stayed behind, biding her time until she could land the teaching job s
he wanted.

  “I was willing to dig in and do what I needed to do,” she said later.

  Gene disliked his job, but he knew it would be a while before he could start lobbying to get back into undercover work.

  “He thought it was beneath him,” Margo recalled. “He felt he was wasting his time. It was clear he wanted to be working investigations where he was calling the shots.”

  Gene’s new job was a far cry from running a complex undercover operation like Nickelride, which he’d launched in late 1983. During Nickelride, he and his partner, George Murray, had developed 242 indictable subjects and recovered $8.5 million in stolen goods and contraband. As he had in Forscore, Gene used Jerry as an informant.

  Gene and George, who also went out on SWAT team calls together periodically, had uncovered corruption among some local government officials, including a Fulton County sheriff ’s lieutenant and captain, and the operation expanded from there.

  Posing as diamond thieves who sold cocaine and ran a car theft ring, Gene and George dressed well, smoked cigars, and wore PPKs, small guns that law-enforcement officers would never carry. They both came up with stories, known in the bureau as “legends,” to explain why they didn’t use the drugs they were selling. George’s was that he was training for a marathon; Gene used a sob story that an old girlfriend had died of an overdose.

  George always thought Gene had a talent for making up these stories. For Gene, thinking on his feet was almost an art form.

  “He was very good, very glib, very enthusiastic,” George said later. “You’d throw out the most ridiculous legend in the world and they’d buy it. He was fabulous at this stuff.”

  Later, Margo could see how all this storytelling could have affected Gene. “In an undercover operation you were given encouragement to step outside the box and be creative—not to break any laws but certainly to be imaginative.”

  And with someone like Gene, she said, “one step leads to another.”

  In the fall of 1984, Gene began planning a raid to lure the dozens of suspects he and George had identified over the past year to one place and have them arrested at one time.

  Gene was clearly in his element—organizing and coordinating every last detail with precision—as he explained to Margo how he was putting the big finale together.

  “It’s going to go like clockwork,” he told her, laughing in appreciation of his own cleverness, which, in this case, was duly lauded and rewarded several months later by bureau officials all the way up to FBI Director William Webster.

  Margo felt proud of Gene as she listened to him on the phone, making arrangements. His plan was to rent out a nice Italian restaurant called Tony’s for an all-night party, allegedly to celebrate his underworld successes with his boss, a Mafia kingpin, who was coming to town. Gene and George often had dinner at Tony’s with their suspects, so it was familiar territory for everyone. Gene would tell them his boss wanted to meet them, and when they arrived at Tony’s, they’d be taken one by one by limousine to the now defunct Lenox Inn. After being told that the kingpin was uncomfortable with armed men he didn’t know, the suspects would hand over their guns at the back door of the hotel, then be immediately arrested by five SWAT team members in the parking lot.

  “They’re not going to know what hit them,” Gene said. “By the time they start to figure out that people are missing from the party, we’ll be ready to come in and finish it.”

  It did go like clockwork. After many of the suspects had been taken from Tony’s and arrested at the hotel, Gene’s colleagues from the Atlanta field office began to infiltrate the restaurant. Ultimately, more than twenty agents, including Margo, were involved in the raid that night, storming into Tony’s with their guns drawn.

  The next morning, Margo felt proud all over again as she read about her husband’s triumph in the Atlanta Journal.

  “It was an elaborate plan, far beyond the imagination of any other undercover operation that I had heard of,” she said later.

  The bureau made dozens of arrests that night on charges ranging from trafficking stolen goods to narcotics distribution and police corruption. Every defendant who went to trial was convicted, and all others pleaded guilty.

  Gene received numerous commendation letters for his work on Nickelride as well as a $1,200 bonus, known in the bureau as an incentive award.

  While Gene endured his boring new desk job in DC, he looked for a new house that offered some privacy, preferably out in the woods somewhere. He was very excited when he told Margo about his discovery.

  “I found this great house in Nokesville,” he said. “It’s in really good shape, and it has close to three acres of land.”

  Nokesville was not an officially incorporated city, but when the Bennetts moved there in spring 1987, about seven thousand people considered themselves residents of the community. It was more of a town, really, settled originally in the late 1800s by members of the Brethren Church because of the cheap farmland.

  The one-mile “downtown” strip had one stoplight, just after the giant “Welcome to Nokesville” sign that was painted on the side of an old kelly-green barn. The sign featured two large cartoon cows dancing upright on their hind legs, a tribute to the region’s dairy farms, which had gradually been replaced with single-family homes.

  The Bennetts’ two-story brick home had four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a separate one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in a converted basement. The $158,000 price was right for their combined income of about $120,000, and the house was conveniently located seven miles north of Quantico and about twenty-five miles southwest of DC.

  A heavy tree line provided a sound and sight buffer between their house and the closest neighbor’s, which was about fifty yards away and could be seen only in the winter, after all the leaves had fallen. Another row of tall hardwood trees lined the lawn in the backyard, where snakes, rabbits, and deer would wander in at night. Gene bought a four-wheeler so that he could ride it around the lot and down to the creek bed at the back of the property.

  Because they had only one car, Margo and Gene would often drive into DC together, dropping Allison at the baby-sitter’s on the way.

  In March 1987, Margo had a phone interview with Ed Tully, who was in charge of Quantico’s Education and Communications Unit. She told him about her education—a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a criminal justice emphasis and a master’s degree in counseling and educational psychology—as well as her teaching experience at the state police academy in Atlanta.

  “John Burke gave me your application, and it looks like you’ve got what we’re looking for,” Ed said.

  John, who had been Margo’s field counselor when she was a trainee, had been impressed by Margo’s academic performance at Quantico, when she’d tied for second place in her class. Ironically, Margo had never even considered aiming for the bureau before a mentor at the police academy in Atlanta encouraged her to apply back in 1981. At the time, she thought the FBI took only the best of the best, and it seemed out of her reach. As it turned out, however, her entrance test scores ranked third among the FBI’s nationwide pool of female applicants.

  By 1987, John had been promoted to deputy assistant director at Quantico. He told Margo there weren’t enough female instructors at the academy, so he was going to recommend her for a teaching job.

  Later, Ed said that Margo’s gender had given her a leg up in getting the position, but neither that nor help from higher up was the determining factor in her hiring.

  “Margo got the job because she was good,” he said.

  Ed acknowledged that her six years of experience may have been less than that of the other instructors. However, he noted that there weren’t many female agents at that time who would’ve had more experience. By the time Margo applied for the job in 1987, the bureau had 9,434 agents, including 700 women, who represented 7.4 percent of the total force. Ed’s unit, however, had only one female instructor.

  The general consensus among agents was tha
t Hoover had thought women were ill equipped, both physically and emotionally, for the demanding job of an FBI agent. Although the agency hired a few women as agents or investigators in its early days, the last one had resigned in 1927, and none was hired until two months after Hoover died forty-five years later.

  “The joke when I was coming through was that Hoover was spinning in his grave because women had been admitted,” Margo said.

  Despite widespread rumors that Hoover was gay, the bureau culture did not tolerate homosexuality either.

  A week after her phone interview with John, Margo was excited to learn that she’d landed the position. Gene was excited too, because her getting promoted to special supervisory agent meant she’d be making more money. When their colleagues joked that she was now at a higher level than he was, he’d say, “I can spend her money just as easy as I can spend mine.”

  Margo reported to Quantico for her first day as an instructor on April 1.

  The academy, which had opened its doors a few days after Hoover’s death, was located at the southern end of a 385-acre Marine Corps base, also known as Quantico, just west of the town of the same name.

  Today, the two-lane road leading to the base runs through a very green, wooded area and is marked with signs that say “Ammunition Supply Point” and “Ammo Dump.” Motorists who open their car window may hear gunfire from members of the military, shooting clay pigeons for recreation at the Quantico Shooting Club, or from agents practicing on the bureau’s firearms range.

  The academy itself, which borders on Hoover Road, has a sturdy, if not formidable, presence that conveys the seriousness of the work and study being conducted within its walls.

  That said, the interior of the series of multilevel buildings, connected by walkways that agents commonly refer to as “gerbil tubes,” feels surprisingly intimate, small, and somewhat dated, almost like a private school or community college that was once state-of-the-art but now feels more historically significant. The air is filled with a positive, conservative energy as well as a sense of patriotism and pride.