When the FBI Comes A'Calling

"Eugene? The FBI is here...you wanna chat with them?"

Taking me to jail? Or on a date? YOU be the judge!

It’s 2023. So, naturally, I am shocked when anyone actually calls me on the phone. It seems, these days, almost a breach of protocol, or a luxury, that anyone would expect that what they could say in a well-worded, and pithy, text they could also drag you through in a phone call. But like Octave Mirbeau suggested when he said that some backs cry out for the knife, so it seems that some texts scream “call me back.”

Like?

Like: “Eugene? The FBI is here…you wanna chat with them?”

There are no, nor have there ever been, any occasions where this would have seemed a nice way to round out my day. In fact, in anticipation of moments like this I had trained myself to not respond to my name in public places. Time, and subpoenas wait for no one, and while it’s true that I’ve done nothing to warrant any interest or comment from authorities, I also know that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’ve done.

Or like Stalin said when trying to force a confession out of someone during a show trial, “Does he weigh more than Russia?” Sometimes the state just wants/likes to remind you that you do not, in fact, weigh more than Russia. Those are moments primed for using your public code name, the name that throws off the scent and gives you just, maybe, a few seconds lead time on whatever disaster awaits.

My public code name? Well, it used to be Abe Lincoln until I got arrested for telling the police that my name was Abe Lincoln. False Information to a Police Officer is, apparently, a thing now, so? Code name: Fontaine.

I had nothing to fear. I mean it’s not like I’m doing anything, I think, while I think of all of the things that I’m doing that I would call “not doing anything”.

However, given that the text-er had just used my real name, at the FBI’s behest, I was guessing that they already knew who I was. Enough so that they were requesting an audience. A request that got an immediate call back from me.

“Are they there? Now?” My voice was level and modulated. I mean after all, I had nothing to fear. I mean it’s not like I’m doing anything, I think, while I think of all of the things that I’m doing that I would call “not doing anything”.

“Yes. They want to come by your house,” she said. “But I wouldn’t give them the address when they asked where you lived.” She had mockingly suggested that, being that they were the FBI, maybe they would know this already.

“Well, Eugene seems to have a lot of addresses,” they told her and she told me and now I was gripping. You see, I do have lots of addresses and have lots of them for precisely moments like this.

“My house? No.” Since I had caught the lawyer lurking in the bushes in front of my house, a lawyer knee deep in the whole OZY scandal, a lawyer who would not identify himself at conversation beginning when I braced him mid-bush, outside of saying his name was “David”, I had sworn off responding to men in suits in the bushes at my house. “Send them to the Academy. I’m there now.”

“They’re going to call you now though,” she said. Seemed like she was relieved to have them out of her life and if she was relieved I was guessing that I would be too.

“Is this Eugene? Robinson?” They didn’t sound like Elliot Ness. Or Kevin Costner, or Robert Stack, his film world corollaries. They sounded like telemarketers. But very, very, serious telemarketers.

“Ah…the FBI!” I said, neither confirming or denying my name, and maybe a skosh too excitedly. “Come on by!” See, by now I had figured out that much like the bush lawyer, whose last name I later found out was Brooks, they wanted to talk about OZY.

“Great. What’s the address?”

“C’mon…you’re the FBI….”

I could hear him sigh. He could have probably Googled it too. But you know, G-d love the working man. So I just gave it to him.

Now, before we get any further I should say, unequivocally, that by no measure and no way would it, or should it, ever be construed that I am a snitch. Snitches get stitches, after all.

THAT being said…when they, two guys in suits in their mid-30s, walked through the door of the jiu jitsu academy that’s my home away from home, my enthusiasm was evident.

I may have strayed a bit, topic-wise, and also started turning in people who had tapped me before. Or people I knew whose companies had gone public. Or folks that had given me funny looks.

Maybe something about being at the Academy. Maybe something about it being Tuesday. Or maybe something about the whole continuing OZY imbroglio got me going and I, in a fit of being able to, in the interest of justice, really just “help” someone get past the bullshit, something disgraced and indicted liar CEO Carlos Watson had often accused me of, and get to the truth, I was happy. So happy I hugged them.

Yeah yeah, I know. I was just as surprised as they were. Surprised and stinking after two hours of jiu jitsu.

“You can’t rat on a rat.” Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger’s right hand man in the Boston Irish Mafia Kevin Weeks told me for my FIGHT book, in response to people’s claims that he had gotten a shortened sentence because of ratting. Bulger had been working with and for the Feds for years. Something Weeks had just figured out and something I was now recalling as I settled into two hours of chatting with representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice.

They were interesting guys and their mien, professional hazard I am sure, suggested that they didn’t believe a word I was saying, even when all I had said regarded it being Tuesday, which it was, and it being hot outside, which it also was. It took maybe 20 minutes for them to relax and see things for what they were: I was just a concerned American who…in the interest of justice, wanted to tell them about the tortures of the damned that I had endured while working for indicted liar Watson.

I may have strayed a bit, topic-wise, and also started turning in people who had tapped me before. Or people I knew whose companies had gone public. Or folks that had given me funny looks. But I largely felt this to be my duty. As an American. And a concerned citizen.

After two hours they were shifting in their seats, a hard wooden bench, and trying to wrap things up. But I wasn’t finished. This was leveling of all family business. Corleone style.

Thirty more minutes later they just stood. Guys had started to file in for the next class. Guys who were uncharacteristically quiet when they saw the two guys in suits with no shoes — no stepping on the mats in shoes! — who looked every bit exactly what they were.

Later I emailed one of the special agents. He called me back. I emailed him again. He called me back again. I started to email again and then got it. He was never going to write me back. And so I called.

“Hey,” I started as he had answered on the first ring. “I want to write about your visit. But will this fuck you up? Your investigation I mean?” I mean it’s not every day you get braced by the Feds. It seemed press worthy to me.

He paused. Then slowly said, “as you know I can’t tell you what to write or what not to write…”

I just didn’t really want to be the guy who set a tormenter free by accident though.

“However, I can say this…” his voice had dropped an octave. “It wouldn’t be…helpful, if you did.”

“Gotcha.” And I did. In the interest of justice I would hold my fire until such time as it seemed appropriate to not do so anymore.

Later telling a friend how proud I was of myself for not snitching, he called bullshit on my not snitching claim.

“That’s exactly what you did!”

“No…no…in the interest of justice…”

“You know I don’t think that that phrase means what you think it means…”

What does he know? What I know is that you shouldn’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time. I also know that you shouldn’t go to bed with a price on your head. And finally, a stitch in time, saves the sheep a dime.

Look, the point is, in the end, that the good must make right this evil wrong.

Or something like that.

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