The Unicorn!

Medieval knowledge of the legendary creature stemmed from biblical accounts and ancient sources. In fable, it was variously described as a wild ass, a goat, or a horse, and sometimes a combination of all three. Most often, the beast was thought to be a horse, but a most unusual one, with a huge spiraling horn projecting from its forehead toward the sky. In some stories, it is described as having a goat’s beard and cloven hooves. It was said to be a wild woodland creature, a symbol of purity and grace, which could only be captured by a virgin. Its horn was said to have the power to render poisoned water potable, and to heal sickness. Its powers were thought to extend beyond even these miracles.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, there was never a confirmed sighting of the animal. Until the nineteenth century, belief in the creature was widespread among historians, writers, poets, physicians, and theologians. While many wished to believe the unicorn roamed freely, no one could prove its existence, and the legend became the stuff of children’s fairy tales.
During my time in the FBI, people would react to my occupation with "I’ve never seen one of you, except on television." Or "You can’t be an FBI agent. They can’t tell anyone what they do."
“Oh. Guess they forgot to tell us that in the Academy!”
I’d get, "I’ve never met an FBI agent in my life," and even, "I’ve heard of you, but I didn’t really believe you existed." The most common response was "Why in the world do we have FBI agents here?" The latter was far and away the most popular, particularly when I was in Iowa and Nebraska. It didn’t take long to figure out I was, in fact, a unicorn.
Another question I often fielded was "What is it like to be an FBI agent?" And yet another was "What was the most interesting case you ever worked on?"
The answer to the question "What was it really like to be an FBI agent?" was the most difficult to answer. In truth, there was no single, correct answer. Because of the popularity of the television show The FBI, people had certain image, if not stereotype, of what an FBI agent was supposed to look and act like. Another comment I frequently heard was, "You don’t look like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr."
Really! Thought I did… guess I need to change mirrors at home!
While some legends fade away, others are born and prosper.
The infancy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an American legend, began over one hundred years ago in Washington, D.C., in an institutional rather than mythological sense. Twelve Secret Service agents were assigned to form what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. It took many years for that tiny, insignificant organization to grow into the mammoth agency it is today.
Prostitution was the initial focus of the BOI. Agents were tasked with visiting and making surveys of brothels to enforce provisions of the White Slave Act. With such a limited jurisdiction, the BOI grew slowly. But it did grow, and with the jurisdictional focus on prostitution it was not a surprise that corruption was rampant, even involving the first director, Stanley Finch. Hardly the things of which legends are made.
Finally, it became clear that changes had to be instituted. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed a young Department of Justice attorney, John Edgar Hoover, as the sixth director of the BOI. When he took over the bureau, it had approximately 650 employees, 441 of which were Special Agents.
In 1935, Hoover was instrumental in changing the name of the organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During his forty-eight-year reign, which ended with his natural death in 1972, Hoover built the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency. Many innovations, including a national crime laboratory and a centralized fingerprint file, began under his watch. Many others would follow. And the legend grew.
But Hoover was also known to be somewhat capricious in his leadership. He frequently fired FBI agents if he thought they didn’t convey the image he sought. He relocated agents who displeased him into career-ending assignments and locations such as Butte, Montana, and later Alaska. Hoover wanted to be the face of the FBI and wanted his agents to be nameless and to labor in anonymity.
One such agent, Melvin Purvis, was a prime example. Dedicated, incorruptible, and hard-working, Purvis was one of Hoover’s most effective agents in capturing and breaking up gangs in the 1930s. It was Purvis who set the trap in which the notorious John Dillinger was killed in Chicago. For this high-profile case, Purvis received substantial local and even national acclaim. In no time, a jealous Hoover forced him out of the bureau. Purvis would later commit suicide, and most people felt his unfortunate demise resulted from his treatment by Hoover.
Relatively little was known about the FBI until a highly acclaimed documentary/drama, The FBI Story, hit movie screens in 1959. Starring in the squeaky-clean movie was the even more squeaky-clean James Stewart, and the film portrayed the FBI in the most positive light possible. The FBI had total control over the production, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as a co-producer of sorts, approving every frame of the film and having a pivotal role in selecting the cast for various roles. Hoover even made a brief cameo appearance.
Each member of the cast, and those later involved in the television show, had to undergo exhaustive FBI background checks. Hoover did not want anyone involved with his publicity coups to tarnish the reputation of the bureau. With the growing popularity of television shows in the 1960s, Hoover found a vehicle to further publicize his growing organization.
In 1965, The FBI premiered on primetime Sunday nights and was an immediate hit. A relatively unknown actor, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., became the new face of the mysterious FBI. Personally selected by Hoover, Zimbalist’s striking good looks perfectly depicted the image Hoover desperately wanted to convey to the American public. The show portrayed Zimbalist as Inspector Louis Erskine, whose calm, methodical demeanor became iconic to the image Hoover wanted his agents to portray. And for Hoover, it was all about image. A veritable propaganda machine, he wanted the American public to believe his organization was invincible. And that’s exactly what the public came to believe, until a whirlpool of controversy enveloped the agency in the late 1960s.
Hoover parlayed the popularity of the show, presented spurious statistics to Congress, and sought new federal violations for the FBI to enforce. The agency grew yearly and is presently comprised of nearly 35,000 employees with approximately 12,000 as Special Agents.
It’s less an organization than an institution in modern society. But the standards established by Hoover continue in place, with only slight modifications. While he, alone, was allowed to address the media during his reign, that task has since been delegated to the Special Agents in Charge who supervise what are now fifty-six Field Offices across the country, including Alaska, Hawaii, and even Puerto Rico. But the people who do the field work, the Special Agents, continue to remain faceless.
If you were an FBI agent in the 1930s, you were poorly trained and outgunned, but expected to battle the likes of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, and "Pretty Boy" Floyd, not to mention Bonnie and Clyde. In the 1940s, it was all about identifying potential spies in the war effort. In the 1950s, you were probably trying to identify communists because Hoover’s buddy Senator Joe McCarthy made that a priority.
The 1960s ushered in a new emphasis with the Mafia, which had been a plague on society for many years but hadn’t been immediately identified by the director. Instead, Hoover was preoccupied with problems such as the Ku Klux Klan, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., one of Hoover’s avowed enemies. And then, of course, there were the radical and violent student groups and the Black Panthers, among others. It was perhaps the most turbulent time in the history of the FBI.
As the 1970s dawned, the Vietnam War became the most controversial issue of the times. Mr. Hoover made anti-war protestors and other dissidents his highest priority, even authorizing illegal wiretaps and searches.
The 1980s, under a different director, focused on violent crime and drugs, which largely continued into the 1990s.
When I entered on duty with the FBI in 1979, the easy answer to "What was it like?" depended on which of the then fifty-nine field divisions you worked in, and/or which squad you were assigned to. Later, in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was assigned to an Organized Crime squad. Back then, it meant my squad was in a fight with the Mafia. It was all about gambling, prostitution, and control of the pornography industry, as well as a variety of other criminal activities. We had several undercover operations in progress, one of which was a pornography distribution business we had set up in the San Fernando Valley. Much to our surprise, five Mafia members showed up one day to muscle in on our operation, and we wound up taking out the entire Mafia family in Los Angeles. They were prime candidates for "Stupid Criminal" recognition. It’s not usually a good idea to threaten to extort the FBI.
Other squads in Los Angeles were dedicated to bank robberies, foreign counterintelligence, white-collar crime, and a myriad of other federal violations.
Bank robberies in Los Angeles were a plague in the 1980s and continue to be. On Christmas Eve of the first year I was in Los Angeles, we had twenty-four, which was then a national record. It’s probably been long-since eclipsed.
While I enjoyed my job in Los Angeles, everything other than my work was incredibly stressful. My day would start at 5:00 a.m. when I’d wake up and immediately shower, shave, and, if I was lucky, have a cup of coffee. I’d drive several miles, park my car, and meet my carpool at six. We’d leave Thousand Oaks, which was about thirty-five miles from our office, and hope to be at the office by 7:30 a.m.
The traffic to the office was bumper-to-bumper, and fraught with heavy, choking smog as we got further into the city. I wondered why my eyes were burning so badly in the first few weeks, and then I realized it was the smog. I’d race out of the office at five o’clock, meet my carpool, and pray we’d make it home by seven-thirty. They were extremely long days. It was not only exhausting, but nerve-wracking, and was turning me into a weekend alcoholic. Something had to change. It was driving me nuts.
I was fortunate enough to work on some great investigations during my two years in Los Angeles and then was lucky to get myself and my family out of there. It had to be fate. One of my buddies and I were on the elevator headed for lunch when we stopped on the floor below. Two agents on our squad got aboard. One was looking at a routing slip from FBI Headquarters and said, "Who in the hell would ever want to go to the Omaha Division?" He crumpled the paper up and threw it into the trash can. I thought about it for a few seconds and retrieved it. FBIHQ was seeking an agent with organized crime experience to volunteer for an undercover assignment in, of all places, Burlington, Iowa. I considered it, talked to my family, and applied.
And, as the great Paul Harvey used to say, "That’s the rest of the story."

The Unicorn!

Medieval knowledge of the legendary creature stemmed from biblical accounts and ancient sources. In fable, it was variously described as a wild ass, a goat, or a horse, and sometimes a combination of all three. Most often, the beast was thought to be a horse, but a most unusual one, with a huge spiraling horn projecting from its forehead toward the sky. In some stories, it is described as having a goat’s beard and cloven hooves. It was said to be a wild woodland creature, a symbol of purity and grace, which could only be captured by a virgin. Its horn was said to have the power to render poisoned water potable, and to heal sickness. Its powers were thought to extend beyond even these miracles.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, there was never a confirmed sighting of the animal. Until the nineteenth century, belief in the creature was widespread among historians, writers, poets, physicians, and theologians. While many wished to believe the unicorn roamed freely, no one could prove its existence, and the legend became the stuff of children’s fairy tales.
During my time in the FBI, people would react to my occupation with "I’ve never seen one of you, except on television." Or "You can’t be an FBI agent. They can’t tell anyone what they do."
“Oh. Guess they forgot to tell us that in the Academy!”
I’d get, "I’ve never met an FBI agent in my life," and even, "I’ve heard of you, but I didn’t really believe you existed." The most common response was "Why in the world do we have FBI agents here?" The latter was far and away the most popular, particularly when I was in Iowa and Nebraska. It didn’t take long to figure out I was, in fact, a unicorn.
Another question I often fielded was "What is it like to be an FBI agent?" And yet another was "What was the most interesting case you ever worked on?"
The answer to the question "What was it really like to be an FBI agent?" was the most difficult to answer. In truth, there was no single, correct answer. Because of the popularity of the television show The FBI, people had certain image, if not stereotype, of what an FBI agent was supposed to look and act like. Another comment I frequently heard was, "You don’t look like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr."
Really! Thought I did… guess I need to change mirrors at home!
While some legends fade away, others are born and prosper.
The infancy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an American legend, began over one hundred years ago in Washington, D.C., in an institutional rather than mythological sense. Twelve Secret Service agents were assigned to form what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. It took many years for that tiny, insignificant organization to grow into the mammoth agency it is today.
Prostitution was the initial focus of the BOI. Agents were tasked with visiting and making surveys of brothels to enforce provisions of the White Slave Act. With such a limited jurisdiction, the BOI grew slowly. But it did grow, and with the jurisdictional focus on prostitution it was not a surprise that corruption was rampant, even involving the first director, Stanley Finch. Hardly the things of which legends are made.
Finally, it became clear that changes had to be instituted. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed a young Department of Justice attorney, John Edgar Hoover, as the sixth director of the BOI. When he took over the bureau, it had approximately 650 employees, 441 of which were Special Agents.
In 1935, Hoover was instrumental in changing the name of the organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During his forty-eight-year reign, which ended with his natural death in 1972, Hoover built the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency. Many innovations, including a national crime laboratory and a centralized fingerprint file, began under his watch. Many others would follow. And the legend grew.
But Hoover was also known to be somewhat capricious in his leadership. He frequently fired FBI agents if he thought they didn’t convey the image he sought. He relocated agents who displeased him into career-ending assignments and locations such as Butte, Montana, and later Alaska. Hoover wanted to be the face of the FBI and wanted his agents to be nameless and to labor in anonymity.
One such agent, Melvin Purvis, was a prime example. Dedicated, incorruptible, and hard-working, Purvis was one of Hoover’s most effective agents in capturing and breaking up gangs in the 1930s. It was Purvis who set the trap in which the notorious John Dillinger was killed in Chicago. For this high-profile case, Purvis received substantial local and even national acclaim. In no time, a jealous Hoover forced him out of the bureau. Purvis would later commit suicide, and most people felt his unfortunate demise resulted from his treatment by Hoover.
Relatively little was known about the FBI until a highly acclaimed documentary/drama, The FBI Story, hit movie screens in 1959. Starring in the squeaky-clean movie was the even more squeaky-clean James Stewart, and the film portrayed the FBI in the most positive light possible. The FBI had total control over the production, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as a co-producer of sorts, approving every frame of the film and having a pivotal role in selecting the cast for various roles. Hoover even made a brief cameo appearance.
Each member of the cast, and those later involved in the television show, had to undergo exhaustive FBI background checks. Hoover did not want anyone involved with his publicity coups to tarnish the reputation of the bureau. With the growing popularity of television shows in the 1960s, Hoover found a vehicle to further publicize his growing organization.
In 1965, The FBI premiered on primetime Sunday nights and was an immediate hit. A relatively unknown actor, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., became the new face of the mysterious FBI. Personally selected by Hoover, Zimbalist’s striking good looks perfectly depicted the image Hoover desperately wanted to convey to the American public. The show portrayed Zimbalist as Inspector Louis Erskine, whose calm, methodical demeanor became iconic to the image Hoover wanted his agents to portray. And for Hoover, it was all about image. A veritable propaganda machine, he wanted the American public to believe his organization was invincible. And that’s exactly what the public came to believe, until a whirlpool of controversy enveloped the agency in the late 1960s.
Hoover parlayed the popularity of the show, presented spurious statistics to Congress, and sought new federal violations for the FBI to enforce. The agency grew yearly and is presently comprised of nearly 35,000 employees with approximately 12,000 as Special Agents.
It’s less an organization than an institution in modern society. But the standards established by Hoover continue in place, with only slight modifications. While he, alone, was allowed to address the media during his reign, that task has since been delegated to the Special Agents in Charge who supervise what are now fifty-six Field Offices across the country, including Alaska, Hawaii, and even Puerto Rico. But the people who do the field work, the Special Agents, continue to remain faceless.
If you were an FBI agent in the 1930s, you were poorly trained and outgunned, but expected to battle the likes of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, and "Pretty Boy" Floyd, not to mention Bonnie and Clyde. In the 1940s, it was all about identifying potential spies in the war effort. In the 1950s, you were probably trying to identify communists because Hoover’s buddy Senator Joe McCarthy made that a priority.
The 1960s ushered in a new emphasis with the Mafia, which had been a plague on society for many years but hadn’t been immediately identified by the director. Instead, Hoover was preoccupied with problems such as the Ku Klux Klan, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., one of Hoover’s avowed enemies. And then, of course, there were the radical and violent student groups and the Black Panthers, among others. It was perhaps the most turbulent time in the history of the FBI.
As the 1970s dawned, the Vietnam War became the most controversial issue of the times. Mr. Hoover made anti-war protestors and other dissidents his highest priority, even authorizing illegal wiretaps and searches.
The 1980s, under a different director, focused on violent crime and drugs, which largely continued into the 1990s.
When I entered on duty with the FBI in 1979, the easy answer to "What was it like?" depended on which of the then fifty-nine field divisions you worked in, and/or which squad you were assigned to. Later, in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was assigned to an Organized Crime squad. Back then, it meant my squad was in a fight with the Mafia. It was all about gambling, prostitution, and control of the pornography industry, as well as a variety of other criminal activities. We had several undercover operations in progress, one of which was a pornography distribution business we had set up in the San Fernando Valley. Much to our surprise, five Mafia members showed up one day to muscle in on our operation, and we wound up taking out the entire Mafia family in Los Angeles. They were prime candidates for "Stupid Criminal" recognition. It’s not usually a good idea to threaten to extort the FBI.
Other squads in Los Angeles were dedicated to bank robberies, foreign counterintelligence, white-collar crime, and a myriad of other federal violations.
Bank robberies in Los Angeles were a plague in the 1980s and continue to be. On Christmas Eve of the first year I was in Los Angeles, we had twenty-four, which was then a national record. It’s probably been long-since eclipsed.
While I enjoyed my job in Los Angeles, everything other than my work was incredibly stressful. My day would start at 5:00 a.m. when I’d wake up and immediately shower, shave, and, if I was lucky, have a cup of coffee. I’d drive several miles, park my car, and meet my carpool at six. We’d leave Thousand Oaks, which was about thirty-five miles from our office, and hope to be at the office by 7:30 a.m.
The traffic to the office was bumper-to-bumper, and fraught with heavy, choking smog as we got further into the city. I wondered why my eyes were burning so badly in the first few weeks, and then I realized it was the smog. I’d race out of the office at five o’clock, meet my carpool, and pray we’d make it home by seven-thirty. They were extremely long days. It was not only exhausting, but nerve-wracking, and was turning me into a weekend alcoholic. Something had to change. It was driving me nuts.
I was fortunate enough to work on some great investigations during my two years in Los Angeles and then was lucky to get myself and my family out of there. It had to be fate. One of my buddies and I were on the elevator headed for lunch when we stopped on the floor below. Two agents on our squad got aboard. One was looking at a routing slip from FBI Headquarters and said, "Who in the hell would ever want to go to the Omaha Division?" He crumpled the paper up and threw it into the trash can. I thought about it for a few seconds and retrieved it. FBIHQ was seeking an agent with organized crime experience to volunteer for an undercover assignment in, of all places, Burlington, Iowa. I considered it, talked to my family, and applied.
And, as the great Paul Harvey used to say, "That’s the rest of the story."