“INVESTIGATING THE NEW FBI”

(PAUL MARK MOSKAL~CHIEF DIVISION COUNSEL, BUFFALO DIVISION)
The FBI of the new millennium is different than the FBI of 1950 or 1920. I think people often times think of the FBI in terms of J. Edgar Hoover. So I think there’s a lot of misconception about the FBI overzealously enforcing the law. I think that’s a view that a lot of people have about the FBI –one that’s outdated. And I think people are surprised- the Citizens’ Academy is an example- of what it is we do and why we do it and what our standards are and who we are as individuals and as an organization. So I think that if you look at the FBI, you better be current on what it is we do, or you’ll be speaking from a disadvantage—from a historical perspective rather than one looking into the future.   

(:30 OPEN WITH MUSIC & TITLE)

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT~SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, BUFFALO DIVISION)
I was interested in doing a Citizens’ Academy when I first came to Buffalo, based primarily on the experience I had when I was in Philadelphia where we had done something similar. And we did that as a result of a bad incident in the community where people were not really aware of what we did and why we did it, and found it difficult to get that word out. 

(JACK ANTHONY & ELLEN GRANT BISHOP~CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PARTICIPANTS)
Hello, hi, I’m Ellen Grant Bishop. That’s right. Nice to meet you.

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT)
When WNED approached me about wanting to view the Citizens’ Academy through the eyes of two of its participants, the reason I thought of Jack and Ellen were one- I know both of them. Jack I know very, very well. Jack has been my associate at Cradle Beach..he’s been there the whole time. So I’ve known Jack for 40 years. And in a lot of ways he’s like a father to me. And I knew that he would bring the right kind of perspective and the right kind of insight to it. And I thought he’d be a good person. Ellen as a mental health professional, which is what I was before I joined the bureau, I had some dealings with her and I knew her reputation.  And I thought one being a male and one being a female                 

was certainly a good mix.  You know, one is black and one is white, so I thought that would be kind of a perfect combination to give us the kind of perspective. 

(JACK ANTHONY)
Ellen, how were you invited to come to this?

(ELLEN GRANT BISHOP)
Well, uh, all I can tell you is that I got this letter in the mail from Bernie on official letterhead saying your name was submitted and if you are interested get back to us and it was like-first, I’m thinking, “Oh no, how do they know about me…what do they know. And it sounded really interesting-it kind of peaked my interest because, quite frankly, my stories about the FBI go back to the um, G-men kind of thing.  And then I’m thinking, well, you know, who really is the FBI, what really is that organization about. I had- the other vision I had was like  “Men in Black”, you know the original men in black, with black trench coats and black sunglasses.

(JACK ANTHONY)
And white shirts.

(ELLEN)
Yeah.

(JACK)
You know they had to wear white shirts all the time?  Hoover had…

(ELLEN)
No?

(JACK)
Yeah.

(ELLEN)
I didn’t know that.

(JACK)
I’m old enough to remember Hoover.

So it’s fun to find out more about our modern FBI.

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART I: CLASS OVERVIEW

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT)
Thank you.  You don’t have to clap. Throw money but don’t clap. (laughter).  First thing we have to do is loosen up and relax. We want you to enjoy this. You’re going to be part of the FBI family, so please feel free, relax.

We’re gonna be talking about some things tonight—and over the course of the next several weeks- that we don’t generally tell the public. We’re not going to tell you anything that’s classified because I don’t think any of you have security clearance. You certainly don’t have it from us. So we can’t tell you. We also operate on a need to know principle. We won’t be telling you things that are classified, that you don’t necessarily need to know but we’re gonna tell you more than we normally tell the public. 

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART I: FBI TOUR

(CLASS TOURS BUFFALO FBI BUILDING/ MUSIC)

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT)
This is what we call the “stu phones”- STU- secured telephone unit. I need to talk to another office about classified matters, I can pick up this phone, add my key in, push a few buttons, and after a few seconds, it will say “top secret” so I know it’s secure. No one can intercept that conversation so I can discuss classified matters, matters relating to national security.

Every office has what we call a technical  program and the agents who staff that are called technically- trained agents. These are what I call our wires and fires, smoke and mirror guys. They do all the installations, all the bugs, the wire taps. That’s part of their responsibility. Part of what they do is make concealment devices that we can place cameras or microphones in.

(ERIC E. KRUSS~SPECIAL AGENT)
Again, every agent is issued a handgun.

There are other weapons that are available to all the agent population, one of those being the Remington 870, 12- gauge shotgun. That sounds either very comforting or very ugly depending on which side of the door you’re on when you hear it.

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT)
Next we’re going to go to our workout room. All our agents are required to maintain a certain level of fitness so we give them a room to work out with. They can work out an hour to three hours a week on government time to maintain their fitness level.  

(JACK ANTHONY)
When an agent drives a car home, what can he do with it?

(BERNARD A. TOLBERT)
When an agent drives a car home, he can use it to and from home, but the cars are for official business, official government business. So I have a car but I can’t take the car and decide I want to take a trip to Detroit or New York in it. I can’t take my wife shopping, can’t go out for a Sunday drive. Basically it’s for official use.  

(JACK ANTHONY)
(Jack and Ellen walking out of garage-talking about Bernie’s car)

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART I: BUFFALO’S HISTORIC ROLE

(PAUL MARK MOSKAL)
The very first aerial surveillance utilized in an investigation was here in Buffalo, in the 1930’s.  The very first electronic eavesdropping warrant that was signed, the first wiretap every utilized by the FBI was here in Buffalo, NY.  The first time someone was put into a witness protection program was here in Buffalo, New York. The first undercover sting operation utilized by the FBI was here in Western NY.  Those are all fairly significant events, all dictated by the necessity of the situation and it’s nice to know that Buffalo met the challenge and was as sophisticated at the time as was necessary to ensure that public safety was put as the top priority. 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART II:  VIOLENT CRIMES

(GEORGE W. GAST~SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT)
Squad six is the violent crimes and major offenders program. Used to be called the reactive squad. And this is a squad that probably does the work that is most closely associated with police work.  We do day in and day out, a lot of what you all would think of as “crime.” For example, we do bank robbery investigations.    

And the FBI responds to every bank robbery in Western New York.  

I think when somebody comes out of Quantico, what they want to do, particularly someone who hasn’t been in law enforcement before, what they want to do is put the handcuffs on somebody.  I mean, that’s the mission. The mission is to put people in jail. You know. I know we do a lot of other things, and there’s a lot of other important, but when it comes right down to brass tacks, the whole mission of the FBI is to put people in jail, the people who deserve to be incarcerated.   And when you come to the reactive squad, the violent crime squad, you have an opportunity to do that, and you have an opportunity to do it fairly quickly. So it’s a good place. It’s a good place for a young agent to be. 

(STEVEN C. FORREST~SPECIAL AGENT)
These forms that were passed out, typically all the banks have these. They’ve been instructed, in fact we instruct, we have teller courses about what, twice a year George, where we do similar things to what we’re doing today, try to train the tellers in what to look for, the kinds of things to pay attention to. So typically, they will fill these out as soon as a robbery has occurred.

It’s amazing. A lot of tellers are very astute; remember everything that happened, their descriptions are terrific.  Some, based on their emotional reaction, can’t even remember the simplest thing. So, it can go either way.

(ROBBERY RE-ENACTMENT)
This is a robbery. Don’t anybody move. Don’t look at me. It’s a good thing I know where all you people live.  Don’t look at me I said.

Don’t call the police.  (gunfire)

(GEORGE W. GAST)
OK, You’ve all been robbed.

You’ve got your bandit sheets. Start filling out a description. 

(SCOTT W. CULLINS~SPECIAL AGENT)
You guys just got robbed a few minutes ago.  Now what do we have here, a male or a female?  (Male.) All right.  Now just a few questions here. Caucasian, Black, Asian or Hispanic? (Caucasian)  Ok. And this will generate a face for us here.

While I’m doing this I’m generally interviewing one person. And so, instead of asking him how tall is this person, trying to figure out if he’s five foot six, or five foot seven, I really don’t know how to judge height.  I ask

him-short, medium or tall and I give

them ranges for that. Short is five and a half feet and under. Medium is five seven to five eleven and tall is six feet and under. Ok so how tall is that guy? (medium)  I’ll ask the person what their build was like: I’d tell them:

slender, medium, heavy? Was he kind of square cut?  Medium? All right.

Suspects age- and it goes in ten year increments which makes it fairly easy

So..(ages called out.)  25-35? 35-45? Alright.  

Ok, what color was his hair. Was it dark, medium or light?  Dark?        

Ok was his hair, long, short, medium, balding? Ok, just go ahead and say balding (laughter). Ok, we want to go with short, that’s good. 

 

(GEORGE W. GAST)
Mark works on the squad, does bank robbery investigations, works on the violent crime task force.

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART II: FATS DEMONSTRATION

(GEORGE W. GAST)
Fats machine is-it stands for Firearms Training System. And it’s a machine

that projects on a screen different situations which force the agent to either shoot or not to shoot.

(FATS DEMONSTRATION~GEORGE W. GAST)
What you see, and remember you gotta talk, you gotta talk to your partner.  

(NARRATION FROM VIDEO)
I’m the FBI and I have a warrant for your arrest)

(GEORGE W. GAST WITH ELLEN GRANT BISHOP)
There he goes…Oh, oh, you just shot your partner in the butt. That’s all right. Go ahead, go ahead. You just shot your partner in the butt.

Now, now does he have a gun? No…your partner has him under

Control. He seems to. Yeah, he seems to. Now- what’s that?  Who’s that?

(ELLEN GRANT BISHOP)
Stop!  Stop! You’re under arrest!

Put the gun down, last time! 

(GEORGE W. GAST)
You got him! Your partner has a flesh wound in the butt, but other than 

that. He’s going on disability for awhile. Ok.

(GEORGE W. GAST WITH JACK ANTHONY)
It’s a fraud case. Non violent, right? It’s a fraud case.  

What’s she doing, what’s she doing? Warn her, warn her!  You  never talked to her. You are dead.  That’s what the red square around the thing means.

(JACK ANTHONY)
As I shot the lady on TV, I killed her, right in the neck. It was a fluke shot. As I said, I would have gone to court and said, “Yeah, she had a gun in her hand.”  And I wouldn’t have been lying because I either saw the handcuffs or maybe I just imagined it, but I thought she had a gun. 

(PAUL MARK MOSKAL)
Deadly force conjures up some very harsh images. And the name itself is slightly misleading. The policy isn’t shoot to kill; the policy is shoot to eliminate the threat.  It’s something that every agent has to make a decision on certainly before he leaves Quantico as to whether or not he or she will be capable of using that  

amount of force. But it’s one that every agent wrestles with and what they ultimately choose to do when confronted with that situation, nobody knows until they’re in that situation.  But you have to make an intellectual decision beforehand whether or not you can do that, whether emotionally, morally, ethically you can utilize deadly force. 

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART II:  FIREARMS TRAINING

(GEORGE W. GAST)
We’ve actually got six stations set up for you, all right.  Starting down on my far right, there’s gonna be a 40 caliber Glock, which is the newest handgun the FBI has been issuing out of Quantico.

The next two stations are a 9mm 6-hour on both of these two stations. This last station here will be a 38 revolver. Finally down at the end, there’ll be an MP5 10mm and over on the hill, a Remington 870 shot gun. 

Do not, do not point the gun anywhere but down range! The instructors will take it away from you and they will do it very aggressively if they see that muzzle going any place but down range.

I think the Citizens’Academy shoot is a crucial and necessary part of the whole program.  It does a couple things: one it familiarizes them with firearms.  Some of these people have never pulled the trigger on a gun in their life, many of them I would say. Secondly, I think it shows them the power of a weapon. It’s not like TV-you know people on TV they blast away and the gun barely moves in their hands. And they see that’s not exactly the way it is when you pull a trigger.

(AT THE FIRING RANGE)
Ready, (whistle) the gun is hot!

(ERIC E. KRUSS WITH JACK ANTHONY)
You’re never gonna get a perfect picture. You’re gonna concentrate real hard so these are clear. Ok. When you pull the trigger it’s a nice, smooth squeeze. Don’t try to jerk it or you’re gonna dump the muzzle and the rounds gonna go low every time. There’s some recoil. It’s no big deal, it’s not that much. Make sure you hold onto it. Two hands probably better than one hand. The more skin you have on the gun, the better grip you’re gonna have. So when you hold it, just like this. Don’t get it way up high.  Make sure you don’t hit anything else, otherwise you drop your magazine, take off the magazine. The gun is hot and ready to fire. 

Nice and easy. There you go. Keep your eyes on the sights. Nice, easy squeeze. 

There you go, lean forward. You’re all set. 

(ELLEN GRANT BISHOP)
Well I did like the firearms demonstration we went to on Saturday, with those guns.  I showed some people I know and it was like, ok, Mrs. Rambo. I mean, I had the biceps pumped, that shotgun pull action. That was great.  But it also increased my respect for guns.  No question about it, how powerful they are and what they can do to the human body.

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART II: SWAT DEMONSTRATION

(GEORGE W. GAST)
 I think the Swat demo when we do it for the Citizens’ Academy, accomplishes a couple of purposes. It’s interesting for them to see the kind of capabilities the FBI has. 

(SWAT DEMONSTRATION)
Eagle down, medivac in. Eagle down, medivac in.  Just give him room. Don’t worry you’re gonna be okay.

(GEORGE W. GAST)
It’s just a fun thing to do.  I think it’s a good example of the FBI. It pulls a lot of things together. There’s shooting.  It’s just kind of a fun thing to do and I think part of the Citizens’ Academy should be fun. These people are not going to school, they’re not back in college and they’re not back in graduate school. The program should be not only informative but I think there should be a little bit of entertainment value to it also and I think that’s one of the things the Swat demo is. It’s to a certain extent, it’s entertainment. But entertainment with a purpose.

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART III: EVIDENCE RESPONSE TEAM

(GEORGE W. GAST)
ERT stands for the evidence response team. And the evidence response team  is a group of agents and support personnel who receive special training in the recovery and preservation of evidence. All different types of evidence. It’s a real important aspect cause we go out on a lot of searches. And as crimes get more sophisticated, the criminals obviously get more sophisticated, the evidence become more sophisticated. So it’s not the simple, going out and kicking in the

door and grabbing a bag of cocaine. 

(TIMOTHY B. CRINO~SPECIAL AGENT)
I’m special agent Tim Crino. I am the team leader of the evidence response team.

What we thought we’d do tonight is concentrate on certain things such as some of this high tech equipment we have here, which is the forensic light source.  

I have samples on the floor and I’ve dusted certain things. We’ll go maybe counter clockwise around the room. 

The light switch,

I did the screen of the computer.

I know I did this but I don’t know if there were any fingerprints on it. You can tell me. 

I tried to get some easy surfaces. The mouse.  You can tell if someone was right clicking or left clicking. That may even be important in a computer related crime case.

Here’s an electrical outlet that was dusted.

What we will do as a sort of a practical problem is let you lift your own prints off these jars you have in front of you.

(FINGERPRINTING DEMONSTRATION)

(TIMOTHY B. CRINO)
Go ahead and get some prints on that plastic jar in front of you.  If your hands are kind of dry, just touch your nose or forehead or something. Get them a little oily.  Don’t put a death grip on there. Just rub it and touch it. After you do that and have your prints on there, go ahead and put your gloves on, because this gets a little messy. 

Very carefully. You don’t need a lot of that. Get your brush out too. The brushes are different too.  Some are fiberglass, some are camel hair, a variety of different brushes.  Now just barely touch the top of the powder, you don’t need a lot of this. People’s biggest mistake is they go in and throw down way too much powder and just creates more of a mess than anything.  Take the brush, spin the brush around, spin it real good, get all that excess off.  Then bend your jar to where you think the prints are and in circular motions, because 90-95 percent of us have curved arches, some kind of curve in our print. Go very lightly over it and you should see prints as they develop.

(PARTICIPANT QUESTION)
How often do the locals call you out say Buffalo…how many times a

year approximately are you called out?

(TIMOTHY B. CRINO)
Buffalo is very rare. I can only think of a couple instances in the last several years. That’s because they have a lot of crime scene investigators and tech people to do their searches.

The smaller police forces, when there’s a big crime involved, like Wyoming Co. They were not equipped to investigate the Samantha Zaldivar case.  They weren’t equipped to do the crime scene or all the interviews that needed to be done. In a matter of hours they called us up and we had 50 agents down there.

(PARTICIPANT QUESTION)
So you were out there that day. Yes.  Was Colon the initial target of that investigation from the get go?

(TIMOTHY B. CRINO)
I wouldn’t say target. He hadn’t risen to the level of target. He was the subject- family members always are the immediate subject. To rise to target, which is a level higher, you would have to have more than reasonable suspicion.   

(THOMAS V. DOKTOR~SPECIAL AGENT)
Well, the Samantha Zaldivar case was a critical case.  Anytime it involves the homocide of a little girl, any child, it’s devastating. That one, in particular, hit home.  

So a few of us went down, I believe the day after Samantha Zaldivar’s disappearance, when she did not show up at home, and met with Ron Ely and Sheriff Capwell and a number of other investigators and officers in Wyoming County. 

Initially, we thought it may be a kidnapping based on some of the things, investigative things, that happened previously.  And we subsequently obviously found out that it wasn’t, as we all know.                  

(TIMOTHY B. CRINO)
In the Zaldivar case, I was in Samantha Zaldivar’s bedroom for several hours, conducting a search, gathering evidence, taking measurements, making sketches. In all that time, within a few feet of myself and several other experienced examiners, was a big area of blood on the side rail of the bunk bed, the upper bunk bed. We never saw it because the bunk bed was walnut, and the blood when it was dried, matched perfectly to the grain in the wood. We did not see it and we were literally standing right next to it.

We were in a room that was dimly lit, it was late at night, we had lost power, and we didn’t see it for all those reasons. Finally after we did a lot of our conventional search techniques, we brought in the alternate light source, once we had our generator powered up, shined it in that room and we immediately found this blood. And it was a huge area of blood. That blood became very significant in proving our case and the theory behind how Samantha Zaldivar was killed.                               

(THOMAS V. DOKTOR)
We would have loved to have found her alive, but we did not. And having been one of the individuals who had to physically push away the dirt and find what once was a beautiful, vibrant 7 year old girl, laying face down in the dirt, is something I’ll take to my grave. So it was a rather… a great case in terms of community and inter-agency cooperation and the best I’ve ever seen in my career with the FBI.

And we got the right guy and he’s behind bars. 

 

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART III: CHILD PORNOGRAPHY

(GEORGE W. GAST)
Child pornography is a hot topic right now. It’s a hot topic for law enforcement across the board. And I don’t know if the problem is getting bigger right now or if the problem is just more in the open.  The reason for that is the Internet.  The internet is tailor made for child pornographers. They can sit at home at a computer, remain basically anonymous on line, they can converse with each other, can send pictures back and forth when in the past they’ve had to rely on the mail. 

The other thing the internet has done for pedophiles is open up a huge, a huge area for them to make contact with kids. Who’s on the Internet?  Kids. 

(SCOTT W. CULLINS)
So it was a Friday afternoon, Oct. 22, 3:30. I was looking forward to the next hour and a half going by quickly and going home for the weekend. I got a call from a police chief down in Perry, NY which is in western NY but down further south, as probably a lot of you know and he had gotten a call and a fax from a detective out in California.   And this detective in California had been investigating child porn on the Internet and in an undercover role in the California area. He targeted one individual who he observed making advances to children over the Internet, posed as a child, basically making a date with this individual and arrested him. They got a search warrant for this guy’s house, seized a computer and had that forensically examined by a forensic examiner dealing with computers and they discovered images of child porn and instant chat messages, copies of instant chat messages. 

One of these messages was a conversation between himself and another screen name. The screen name he checked out with AOL and it turned out to be an individual in Perry, NY and his name was Douglas Bedient. 

(GEORGE W. GAST)
The agent-Scott Cullins- did an excellent job. From 4:00 on a Friday afternoon to 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon, he had a search warrant.

He went out to the magistrate’s house and got a search warrant signed for us to go down and seize the computer at Douglas Bedient’s residence.  We did that Saturday evening.     

We found thousands and thousands of images of child porn, on his computer, on other discs he had at his residence.  He had recently adopted, he and his wife had recently adopted two young children from Korea and he was a third grade teacher. And I think that’s what really struck home. Here’s an individual that is engaging in transmission and trading of child porn, who’s basically got children under his care and guidance every day.   

(SCOTT W. CULLINS)

I have no evidence that Mr. Bedient actually engaged in any sexual activity with anybody. He was not accused of nor convicted of that. Nor did he take a plea to that effect. The only thing he took a plea to was having, was being in possession of these types of materials which he knew was illegal and which he did anyway.  His claim was he was conducting his own investigation, which is the typical claim for these kinds of dealers. 

(PAUL MARK MOSKAL)
Child pornography, different from most other types of crimes, probably different from 99 percent of the crimes the FBI works. The reason is-the victim.  Not that there’s a preference for crimes or victims, but there’s something so heinous, so inculcated in us about protecting children that it takes on a different level of meaning to everybody involved, whether it’s the investigator or the prosecutor or the general public.

As a consequence, Congress has enacted some very specific laws that make it a federal crime to be in the mere possession of child porn as selling or distributing, other kinds of contraband.  And it’s just so ingrained in this culture, our society that it is something that is so wrong,        that it takes on a greater importance to all of us. 

 

 

CITIZENS’ ACADEMY PART IV: TERRORISM

(JOHN P. CULHANE JR.~SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT)
Three-squad crimes, with the exception of economic espionage, where it’s not state sponsored, deals with ideology. For the most part, these violations deal with people who want to hurt us because we’re American or because you’re white or because you’re black or Jewish or because I don’t know why. We deal with people and crimes who want to hurt somebody for whatever reason they decide is important and Tim McVeigh is a class example.

(MICHAEL LIWICKI~SPECIAL AGENT)
We have a videotape that we show at the Citizens’ Academy that had an audio portion on it of a young lady on the telephone across the street, planning a meeting. I think it was the EPA or some other federal agency, when the bomb actually exploded.  And the screams, the terror that followed are something that will stay with me forever.  I didn’t hear the kids but I think of the kids a lot.

(MUSIC AND IMAGES FROM OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING)

(MICHAEL LIWICKI)
When I give presentations on Oklahoma City, I’m often asked why did Tim do something like that.   In the course of our investigation we investigated and interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people from his kindergarten teacher right on through high school and we got a picture of a rather normal individual. Went into the military, became a gunnery sergeant, was a very well respected gunnery sergeant. His platoon members loved him. They all remembered one thing about Tim.  They all will tell you Tim was openly a racist, that he opened read and pushed this book, called “The Turner Diaries.”  Try to get a hold of this book today. It’s darned near impossible. This is the book that Tim used as his bible. I tried reading this book and I forced myself to finish reading this book. It’s truly a piece of trash. It was written in 1978 by a neo-Nazi by the name of William Pierce and in it is a race war that he describes and in it he describes exactly where the bombs will go off, how big the bombs will be, everything. Tim followed this to the “T,” right down to the time of the bomb. The bomb, as you know, went off at 9:05. In the book it goes off at 9:15 in the morning. That’s how close he followed this book.

I came to know the family members, in particular Bill McVeigh, and I got to be what I consider very close friends with him.

Bill has gone through hell and back from things that were said to him, done to him, both at his place of employment and at his home and neighborhood. He’s coping with it as best he can. I’m a father and I’ve thought many times how I would react to a situation like this. I have a son in the military right now, in the Marine corps.  So I think about these things and how an individual can cope with that, I don’t know.

On the one hand, it made me feel bad that I’m putting someone’s son in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.  On the other hand, and I think this is what the public needs to remember, is how many people died at the hands of that bomb, and how many children died. It wasn’t easy learning about the kids and seeing the pictures. I still get choked up about it.  There aren’t too many people who actually saw the dismembered bodies of those kids and I think that if anything, that kept us going in that investigation.