Twisted Triangle Page 9

“He took my guns,” Margo said.

  “Why does he have the right to take your guns? Is he your supervisor?”

  “Well, no, he has no right to take them.”

  “That’s the point,” he said.

  Tony could see the fatigue on her face and heard the tension in her voice. Normally, he thought Margo appeared very self-assured, but this morning she didn’t seem like herself. He was concerned about the well-being of Margo and her daughters, but he was also concerned that Gene had taken possession of FBI property without going through the proper channels.

  “Where are the girls?” he asked.

  “They’re with him. I don’t think he would hurt the kids.”

  Tony had never met Gene. All he knew was that Gene was the kind of undercover operator whom supervisors had to monitor closely. Tony hadn’t known the Bennetts were having domestic problems, but it was not uncommon for married employees to have such disputes.

  “FBI agents are people too,” he said recently.

  Tony recalls that Margo started to tell him about the fraud and other activities that morning, but he stopped her before she got into specifics, cautioning that he would have to report such activities to headquarters. Margo simply remembers Tony asking her to come back at three o’clock to check in, after he’d made some calls to see what he could do.

  Margo went back to her office, and when John could see that she was in no condition to teach her class, volunteered to do it for her.

  Just before she headed to Tony’s office for their afternoon meeting, John said, “You ought to go in there and tell him what it’s been like. Tell him the truth.”

  She knew that she had some legal “exposure” for her involvement in the home relocation scam, but she and John naively thought she wouldn’t be in any trouble because she’d been coerced into it. They both figured the bureau would see that she’d had limited choices being married to Gene, with small children to care for.

  After talking to Margo that morning, Tony had called the bureau’s legal counsel and the firearms people at Quantico, along with Gene’s supervisor and the head of the Washington field office. The consensus decision was that Gene should bring Margo’s guns to Quantico, where Margo should leave them, secured, in the vault. If she brought them home, Gene had threatened to take them away again. Gene had also told his coworkers and superiors that his wife was unstable and shouldn’t have access to a gun at home.

  “We wanted things to cool off,” Tony later recalled. “She didn’t really need a gun. . . . If she’d insisted on having it, we probably would have let her take it.”

  Margo decided to take John’s advice and tell Tony about Gene’s extracurricular activities.

  “Tony, I’ve come to the realization that I’m married to a crook, and I can’t live like this any longer,” she said. “He’s a cheat, a liar, and a thief.”

  “Whoa, whoa, time out, Margo,” he said.

  But Tony got quiet and listened once Margo started listing specific examples—the home relocation scam, which involved Gene’s informant Jerry York; insurance fraud involving the missing diamond earrings; the new color TV and vacuum cleaner; and a $100,000 investment Gene had made in Jerry’s trucking business in Atlanta.

  Tony was shocked to hear the allegations Margo was making about another FBI agent, but he didn’t ask a lot of questions. He just treated it like any other interview and took notes to send to the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an internal affairs unit that investigated allegations of wrongdoing by FBI agents.

  Margo went home that night to another evening of torment.

  She and Gene were arguing in the kitchen after the kids had gone to bed when they heard Lindsey screaming and crying upstairs. Margo got to Lindsey before he did. She’d had a bad dream, so Margo comforted her, tucked her back in, turned off the light, and went to leave, but Gene blocked the doorway.

  “What did you do with the money?” he asked, referring to the $18,000 she’d taken from the money market account.

  When she tried to squeeze by him, he picked her up and threw her on the empty bed next to Lindsey’s.

  “Where’s the money?” he demanded. “Don’t you ever push me or shove me again.”

  Margo got up and went downstairs to call John.

  “Things are getting bad here,” she said.

  They discussed whether one of them should call the police, but Margo told him she thought she could deal with this on her own. This time, John called the police anyway.

  Gene had overheard Margo’s conversation with John, so Gene called a buddy of his to tell him that Margo had shoved him. Then he called 911.

  “My wife and I are having a disagreement,” he told the dispatcher. “She’s getting abusive.”

  He listened for a minute and said, “You should know we’re both FBI agents and have guns in the house.”

  Margo and Gene went downstairs to the living room, where they waited in silence for the police to arrive.

  About ten minutes later, an officer showed up and asked Gene what had happened. Gene told him they’d been upstairs comforting Lindsey when Margo started a fight with him.

  “She kept asking me, ‘Where’s the money?’ and then she shoved me against the wall.”

  “What did she specifically say?” the officer asked.

  Gene wasn’t prepared for the question. He stuttered and said, “What did you do with the money?”

  When Margo told her side of the story, she sensed that the officer knew Gene was lying, but couldn’t do anything.

  “Do you guys think you can go to separate parts of the house and behave for the rest of the night?” he asked.

  Margo and Gene both said yes.

  Unlike the previous night, Gene let her go to sleep on the couch without incident. Nonetheless, she woke up exhausted, feeling like an emotional punching bag.

  Her unit chief, Ed Tully, called her into his office first thing.

  “Tony’s in a bind here,” he said. “Based on your conversation yesterday, he is obligated to report this, unless, of course, you misspoke and he misunderstood what you said. Tony is very concerned with how this is going to affect you.”

  Tony and Ed were clearly trying to give Margo an out, but she was determined to proceed with what she’d started.

  “The truth about Gene Bennett is going to come out, now or later, and if I take this back now, it’s going to be much worse on me later.”

  “Is this really what you want to do?”

  Margo nodded. “I made a decision. I’m not going to lie anymore. If it hurts me, then it hurts me.”

  Tony subsequently wrote a memorandum to David Binney, the head of OPR, officially outlining Margo’s allegations and his conversations with other bureau officials about Gene.

  “When questioned as to why she had waited until now to surface these allegations, SSA Bennett replied that she was trying to ‘hold her marriage together’ and that she was fearful of retaliation,” he wrote. “She emphasized that the reason she is seeking a divorce is that she can no longer tolerate her husband’s illegal and unethical activities.”

  That same day, Gene fired Brenda, told her to get out of the house, and put her belongings in the driveway. He called a cab to come get her, but he wouldn’t let her take her things with her.

  Margo later learned that while she and the girls were in Alabama, Gene had spent the weekend intimidating and frightening Brenda into confessing Margo’s escape scheme into a tape recorder. He’d told her that if she didn’t fess up, he was going to call the police and have her arrested for stealing his property. Then he sent her to a hotel room, which he made her pay for, and forbade her to call Margo or her own family.

  On Friday, September 11, Gene requested the help of the FBI’s Employee Assistance Program and was assigned to Steve Spruill, a counselor who was Gene’s contact agent on Operation Doubletalk. The program also referred Gene and Margo to a crisis counselor, with whom they met that night to set up a system of boundaries within the
house so that they could coexist in an environment that was less chaotic for the girls.

  At first, the counselor tried to get Margo to live in the basement, but she refused to be relegated to servant’s quarters. Instead, she agreed to sleep on the couch in the living room, but to shower and get ready for work in the basement apartment.

  While Gene was with the kids in the evening, Margo often went for a run, which she would spend praying, crying, and begging God for the strength to get through this ordeal. Once, when she returned from her run, she found that Gene had removed the last check out of her checkbook. She figured this was retaliation for withdrawing the $18,000 from their savings.

  Margo and Gene had registered Allison at the local public school, but he wouldn’t let her go because he thought Margo was going to steal her away while he was at work. For that matter, Gene refused to go to work for the next three weeks, telling his supervisor that he needed to stay home so Margo couldn’t abscond with his daughters.

  Margo called the school to tell them Allison would not be attending after all, which ultimately resulted in a truant officer’s coming to the house and informing Gene that he could not keep Allison at home. Gene finally relented and enrolled both girls at the private Appletree Preschool, where Allison had gone the previous year. Every day, he sat outside in his car for the duration of the four-hour program.

  At a September 18 hearing, a judge ordered a temporary custody arrangement that gave the girls to Margo from Saturday morning until she dropped them at school on Monday and to Gene for the rest of the week.

  Margo’s attorney thought it would be better not to fight Gene on this arrangement and to try to get through the divorce as quickly and with as little rancor as possible. But Margo knew that nothing was ever easy with Gene Bennett, who was taking even more joy in playing head games these days.

  “I don’t think any court’s going to give a cunt-sucking whore like you custody of those kids,” he said to her one morning, revealing for the first time his strategy to paint her as a lesbian so that he could get full custody of the girls.

  “What are you talking about?” Margo asked.

  Gene just smiled and walked away.

  Another morning, he stood watching as she filled her travel mug with coffee. Margo noticed that it had an odd chemical smell, so she didn’t drink it. She asked her colleagues to sniff it, and although they, too, noticed the strange odor, some could not accept that Gene would intentionally try to poison her.

  Next, Gene complained that his Jeep wouldn’t start because someone had been messing with it, and he accused her of unhooking his distributor cables to harass him. One morning she got in her car and found that someone had turned up the volume full blast on her radio, which gave her a jolt when she fired up the motor. Gene had the only other set of keys.

  All these psychological tactics kept Margo off balance.

  As soon as the custody arrangement went into effect in mid-October, Margo moved into the townhouse she’d rented in Woodbridge, ending thirty-seven days of domestic battle. But because she had to leave the girls with Gene, the war was far from over.

  On October 22, 1992, Margo had her first interview with two agents from OPR, John Roberts and Phillip Reid, in DC.

  At first, it seemed like an informal meeting, not an interrogation. She sat on a couch as the agents asked her to clarify the allegations in Tony’s memo and to walk them through the home relocation scam.

  “You realize you have exposure in this case,” John Roberts said.

  After he’d issued this warning for the third time, Margo suddenly realized what he was saying—that the bureau was not going to be as understanding as she’d initially anticipated and that she probably should talk to a lawyer.

  “Look, this interview is over,” she said. “I want you to understand that I am fully committed to telling the truth, but I need to seek guidance from someone first.”

  Margo immediately called Betty.

  “I think I need an attorney,” Margo said.

  “I think you do too.”

  Betty gave Margo the name of a criminal defense attorney, but he was too busy to take her case, so he referred her to another lawyer, Brian Gettings.

  Brian was in his late fifties and, after smoking for most of his life, had developed throat cancer. He’d recently undergone surgery that left a hole in his throat, which he sometimes covered with his hand when he talked. His voice always sounded hoarse, as the air whistled through his windpipe, even more so when he was tired.

  When they first discussed her case, Brian was frustrated because she refused to take his advice and stop talking to the investigators.

  But Margo felt that she was in a no-win situation. She’d made a commitment to herself that she wasn’t going to lie anymore, and now telling the truth was causing her problems as well.

  Brian finally accepted her position.

  “Okay,” he said. “But if this is the route you want to take, you have to let me help you.”

  Brian negotiated an immunity deal with OPR so that nothing Margo said during her interviews could be used against her in court as long as she agreed to help them build a case and testify against Gene if necessary. Margo fully cooperated with the investigators, providing copious documentation, much of which would have disappeared when Gene raided her desk if she hadn’t moved the materials to John’s filing cabinet.

  Brian accompanied Margo on the three interviews she had with investigators. Federal prosecutor Marcia Isaacson also attended the interviews, which took place in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section in DC. Marcia, who looked slightly younger than Margo, seemed to empathize with her plight.

  On December 23, Gene sent an eleven-page memo to Robert Bryant, the special agent in charge of the Washington field office, launching a counteroffensive against Margo and giving the FBI a very different version of events.

  He accused her of exhibiting “peculiar behavior, odd personality swings and medical abnormalities.” He also claimed she’d accused him of being “a psychotic undercover agent with multiple personalities,” a claim that would prove to be wholly ironic three and a half years later.

  Margo did not see this memo until her attorney gave it to her several years later as part of the divorce proceedings, but she was not surprised by its contents.

  In his memo, Gene said he felt required to report a number of illegal or actionable activities on Margo’s part. (He would be found guilty of committing at least two of these himself in the coming year, and, according to Margo, committed some of the others as well.) Gene accused her of falsifying bureau documents, having lesbian affairs with women in and out of the bureau before and after she joined its ranks, failing to notify the bureau that she had mononucleosis and bulimia, committing insurance fraud, stealing bureau funds, abusing illegally obtained prescription drugs, illegally wiretapping their house using FBI equipment, stealing things from their home, and failing to pay off debts.

  “I approached this situation from the beginning by being honest and upfront with everyone about my personal and family situation, as I knew it would be foolish to try to handle this situation alone,” Gene wrote, commending his counselor Steve Spruill for helping him through it.

  In the midst of all this nastiness, Margo managed to have a bit of fun on a girls’ night out in November with her friend Dianna, Patsy Cornwell, an agent who worked in the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, and a Richmond police officer.

  Since the night of Patsy’s book party in July, she and Margo had been chatting once or twice a month, either by phone or when they’d run into each other at Quantico.

  Patsy wanted to do something nice for Margo’s birthday, so she had them all meet at her house, where she had each of them wear something of hers. One wore her mink stole, Margo sported one of her jackets, and Dianna put on her sapphire necklace.

  Patsy had rented a limo for the night and poured each of them a glass of champagne as they were driving to dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak H
ouse.

  “You deserve to have a good time tonight,” she said to Margo. “You’ve been through so much crap.”

  Patsy had just returned from a trip to Hollywood, where she’d been trying to drum up interest in making a movie based on her books. Patsy suggested they stop at Blockbuster Video to rent Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway, whom Patsy was courting to play the role of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, along with Demi Moore and Jodie Foster. Patsy really had a thing for Jodie Foster and was frustrated that she couldn’t seem to finagle a meeting with the two-time Oscar winner.

  Patsy, who was in a bit of a manic mood that night, decided to call Faye Dunaway from the limo. She couldn’t reach her, so she left her a message.

  When Margo first met Patsy, she seemed down to earth. But Margo sensed that her friend was getting caught up in a frenzy and was losing her equilibrium, which sometimes caused bizarre behavior. Several months later, Patsy told her about the day she drank Bloody Marys, followed by wine with dinner, then flipped her Mercedes on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Margo was worried that her friend was spinning out of control, with no one to ground her. Patsy was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar.

  After dinner and more drinks on Margo’s birthday, they piled back into the limo and went to a nightclub, where they danced with each other and puffed on the little cigars that Patsy liked to smoke, another affectation of the Greta Garbo image she was cultivating at the time.

  They stayed over at Patsy’s, where Margo slept on the large U-shaped couch. Patsy left for a while, then came back with a woman and waved at Margo in the darkness as the two of them went into her bedroom.

  Margo felt no jealousy. She and Patsy had turned the corner and were comfortable being just friends. She was happy for Patsy that she was so successful and had so much money to spend on limos and the best steak house, and to lease cars and buy clothes for her friends. But Margo had come to realize that they wanted different things out of life. Margo didn’t want or need all that flash. She also didn’t want to be one of the leeches she saw clinging to Patsy.