Interview with Former Special Agent Of the Federal Bureau of Investigation John Steiner ( ) on September 13, 2006 By Brian Hollstein

Transcription

1 Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc Interview with Former Special Agent Of the Federal Bureau of Investigation John Steiner ( ) on By Brian Hollstein Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on October 23, Final Edit with Mr. Steiner s corrections by Sandra Robinette on December 11, John Steiner (S): Hello. Brian Hollstein (H): Hello, John. This is Brian Hollstein. How are you doing? S: I m doing fine, Brian. How are you? H: Okay. You have the decks cleared? S: I have the decks cleared. H: (chuckle) Okay. Good. I ll start in pretty quickly here on things. First of all I have your Copyright Release and Background Form. And today s date is, and I m talking with John Steiner who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My name is Brian Hollstein and I m calling from New Canaan, Connecticut. This conversation is being recorded for the use of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and their Oral History Legacy Project. So that takes care of that. A couple of little background things. The Copyright Release that you signed covers only the contents of this particular interview and if you want to be interviewed in the future by someone or write a book or what have you, our copyright only applies to this particular conversation. I think I told you that our intention is to make these conversations available on, by transcript, approved by the Bureau, and they will check it for classified information. And then we plan to put this with a major university library and it will be available to the public through scholars and researchers interested in the people of the FBI. Any questions about the program at all? S: No, well, how long has this program been going on? H: We have about three years now.

2 Page 2 H: That we ve been doing it. We started off with our earliest members. Oldest members I mean, or earliest. Earliest members of the FBI and we have some interviews that go back as far as S: Wow! When you go on xgboys anymore, it seems like there is a lot of, some are obituaries and then there is, you know, good news. H: Yeah. Well, look at it this way though, too. We continuously make history. S: (chuckle) H: The Bureau does, and, and its people. And so, now we ve missed out on some interesting stuff that went on long ago, but more new stuff keeps happening, so that s a good thing. Put it that way. Let s start off by just double-checking a couple of things. You, you --. Oh, I don t have your year of birth. S: It was March 1, H: Okay. And where were you born? S: Dayton, Ohio. H: Dayton, Ohio. Okay, I m watching the level signal on my recorder here and you don t come through too strong. So if I could ask please that you speak up and project your voice. That ll help when the transcriber s working on it. S: Certainly. H: Your service was from 1978 to 2005? S: Yes. H: Good. That s nice modern history we ll be getting. And let me start just a little bit on your, on your background. Just very briefly. You were born in Dayton in Your schooling and that type of thing? S: I have a Bachelor of Science, major in Accounting from Wright State University and I was commissioned at the same time as a Second Lieutenant from the University of Dayton. 2

3 Page 3 S: And then I have a Master s Degree in Business from the University of Puget Sound. H: Okay. Great. S: I have a CPA certificate which has been restricted over the years to government practice. Still an active certificate. H: You had military service? S: Yes. I had two years in the army. What branch? S: Military intelligence. Oh, that s what I was in. S: Were you? H: Yeah. You went through Holabird then? S: No, I went to Huachuca. H: Okay. That s right. You re more recent. (chuckle) Yeah, I went through in 1962 at Holabird there. Yeah. Well, good. Where were you stationed in the military? S: Predominately Ft. Lewis, Washington, with the Ninth Division. H: Okay. So that was active --. That was real military intelligence then. S: (chuckle) I don t know. The war was winding down then and there were way too many Second, First Lieutenants, so I actually got out three months early though to finish my Master s Degree. I had the pleasure of being in when things were starting to ramp up so they were busy looking for people, so nobody got out at my time very easily. S: They were ramping down. 3

4 Page 4 H: Okay. And I usually ask about how people found the FBI and joined. And maybe we ll pass over that if you don t mind for just a minute. And hopefully that will become apparent why when we get into it and ask about your Bureau training. You went through it in the Old Post Office? S: No. H: No? S: Through Quantico. H: Okay. And when was that? S: In H: In 78, okay. S: May 8 th through August 22 nd, I think it was H: Okay. And that was a year after I resigned in fact. Then what was your first office? S: First office for twenty-eight years was San Francisco. Twenty-seven years. H: (chuckle) Twenty-seven years in San Francisco was your first office? S: Right. H: Okay. And what was your specialty there? S: Organized Crime primarily. But I pretty much worked gangs in Oakland. S: And then I became a supervisor. And I supervised the Drug Squad for a while and then I took over a RA in, the Northern California RA. I was based in San Rafael, California. H: Okay. And then you retired with a full career? S: I transferred to --. Got my one transfer to Pittsburgh because my wife s from Altoona. She s an Agent. Currently an Agent. And retired out of Pittsburgh. 4

5 Page 5 Okay. That s an interesting little story too. You don t have many people of my vintage that married an FBI Agent. S: More common now. H: Yeah, oh yeah. That s kind of interesting in itself. Okay, going back, did you come in under the accounting program? S: Yeah. When I was discharged from the Army, I finished my Master s. I tried to come into the FBI in 75, but there was a freeze on, so I became a Treasury Agent, an IRS Special Agent, for two years prior to coming in. And I did come in under the accountancy program. Did you actually work in the accountancy side of things? Cause I see organized crime as --. S: I did some undercover work as an accountant early on and I handled a couple of white collar cases early on, but, no, I really never worked white collar beyond the first year or so. Okay. What were some of the problems in, in the organized crime side of things in San Francisco? S: You know, the thing about San Francisco is that most of the organized crime figures we had in San Francisco by 78 were retired guys. Had some labor issues when I first came in. A couple of the Teamsters cases were going on then. As a matter of fact, I helped out --. Early on I was helping out when they brought --. What was his name? Jimmy --? Well, what the heck was that guy s name? He was an informant. They brought him to town for a trial involving one of the Teamster presidents. S: That was one of the few organized, true organized crime cases we handled. After that, you know, most of the squad moved into working gangs and drugs. S: And you know, we d get a lead or two every now and then from New York or New Jersey or something. But we never, never had true organized crime cases. So, no families as such? 5

6 Page 6 S: No. H: So, what you did really was morphed into the more or less modern organized crime with the gangs? S: Yeah. Without question, by the late 80s or mid 80s, the late 80s, Oakland was just controlled by gangs. What were the backgrounds on those gangs out there? I mean, what type? Were they like Russians, or Italian, or Hispanic or --? S: Well, the gangs I worked were, were predominately black. We did have quite, quite a strong Asian organized crime out there. And lately, you know, the last ten years since the fall of the Soviet Union, we had some organized crime, some Russian organized crime. H: Huh. S: -- San Francisco. H: What was the attraction I wonder for Russians out there? S: Most, most of them, you know, had pilfered from the government, the Ukraine government, other governments, you know, other Soviet Bloc country governments and had built these palatial mansions in Marin County and had come there to more or less retire. S: Or, you know, to enjoy the California life style. H: Sure, what s not to like, right? S: Yeah. H: (chuckle) S: Yeah, if you got that kind of money. H: The black groups. Did they come out of political activities? Originally there were a lot of Black Muslim groups and, and black activist groups that kind of morphed into violence. And I guess maybe some of them went into gangs. I don t know. 6

7 Page 7 S: Yeah, the Black Panthers, you know, were strong in the 60s and early 70s, but by the mid to late 70s, no. The thing that drove up the gangs was drugs. S: And political --. I don t even know if some of these guys would know a Republican from a Democrat. H: (chuckle) I was thinking more about, you know, racial politics, but, yes --. S: No, there wasn t any of that either. You lined up to get your heroin in one of the projects. They didn t care if you were black, white, Hispanic, or whatever. If you had the money, you got your drugs. How active was the FBI? You know, at the time, of course, there was DEA and a lot of other people interested in drugs. Did you work much with them? S: Yes, actually, I think I was one of the, I was the first FBI Agent in San Francisco to work drugs. And I teamed up with a DEA Agent who later got fired and is serving a forty-year jail sentence. H: Ouch! S: And then I hooked with an Oakland police officer and for pretty much the next fifteen years we just moved from one gang to the other. Eventually got smart enough to know that probably the best way to do it was we put up wiretaps, which we did. But, that s what we did. Well now, you know the Bureau was never particularly interested in drugs for a variety of reasons. S: Uh, huh. H: One, of course, is that there were perfectly good drug investigation organizations out there working on it. And I guess there was, certainly was a concern about being corrupt, by corruption. S: Uh, huh. H: You know, with all the money and everything else involved in that. Did the Bureau out there tend to do the intelligence work and the police, or your police counterparts, or DEA counterparts, did the actual drug buying? 7

8 Page 8 S: No, we did it all. H: You did it all? Uh, huh. S: We did it all. Now you know I worked right hand-in-hand with them and had my own informants and worked with their informants and --. We only just took it --. We addressed it as an organized crime case. S: And, attacked it that way. I mean, the Sixty-Nine Mob, the mob in Oakland was a renowned gang for years. H: I m sorry, they were known as the Sixty-Nine, 69 --? S: Mob. H: Mob. Uh, huh. S: And then it just became known as the Mob. They got the 69 because of the 69 th Avenue where the old project was that they started out, that they controlled and then they moved throughout the entire city. If I might, tell me a little bit about how you, how you got started, got a toe hold, in developing a case like that for example. S: Through informants. You know, the Oakland police officer I was working with had an informant and I started out with him and then -- H: Oh, by the way, before we get too far along on those lines, something obvious. Please don t mention the name of any informants or any companies that might have provided cover for your activities. Sorry, go ahead. S: Yeah. So, we just built a case on, by using informants and we used the RICO Statute to make the first run at the first six leaders of the gang to include the continuing main guy. Did you do much buy and bust as such then? S: There were some buy and bust that we incorporated in as predicate acts, but, no, it was the first case, the first big case was a Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) case. They had committed roughly eight murders that we used as overt acts in the, in that first case. And then it just followed from there. 8

9 Page 9 S: After the success of the first case, then more informants were coming forward. Things, you know, they start falling apart. Their organization as a gang started falling apart and splinter groups would, would vie for the turf and by the late 80s, early 90s, Oakland, per capita, led the country in homicides. Did you have any feeling or was there any active interest in, in promoting this warfare on the part of the government? S: No, no, no, none. I mean we didn t, we didn t do anything --. I don t understand completely what you mean by promoting it. H: Well, positive, you know, positive activities to cause dissension within the group, for example. S: Oh, no, no, no. No, I didn t get anything by taking off that leadership it, it created in its own light. It created a vacuum. There wasn t anybody strong enough individually to step in and take, you know, the guy s that ended up with life in prison position. S: Position. Actually was killed in prison. And so, no. Okay. I was just, just curious. Now for people who will be reading this transcript, and, would you explain what RICO is? S: Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization passed during the Kennedy era to - - H: It s a Federal law. S: Yeah, a Federal law to address organized crime. S: It was one of the main tools that the Bureau used to, to fight organized crime. Did this differ very much from the way DEA operated? 9

10 Page 10 S: They were pretty much buy, bust. They didn t do a lot of historic cases which - -. Yeah, so, no. And to this day I don t think they do as many historic cases as the FBI does. And, do they tend to use the RICO and based on your knowledge? S: Not as often as the Bureau, no. Their, their mission s a little different, so -- S: They don t tend to. No. Good. Any particularly interesting cases you d like to tell me about? S: Well, I worked a lot of interesting cases. H: I only have about three hours worth of tape here. S: The Felix Mitchell case, I guess, you know, that s probably got to say that. Felix was, you know, the leader of the mob. And he was a very charismatic leader. When he was killed in prison, it was over a drug debt in Leavenworth. They had a hearse, horse-drawn carriage through the city of Oakland. You would have thought he was a pop star or an NBA star. H: Huh. S: Literally fourteen, fifteen thousand people lining the streets for this funeral. H: Wow! S: This casket. Of course, we got in front of it with his Ferrari. Me and the police detective went to the funeral and got in front of him with his red Ferrari and that caused a little bit of an uproar. H: (chuckle) S: We had a lot of fun with it. H: A little harassment. S: It just didn t seem right, to have that big of a funeral for a gang boss. 10

11 Page 11 S: My boss was pissed. H: Well, that can happen. But it s interesting though the, you know, what s important to certain communities for some reason. And showing up in support --. I don t know whether it s showing up in support or what, whether they re just curious. S: Both, both. I mean the media had made Felix into, into somewhat of a, you know, an Al Capone type figure. S: So, I guess, you know, they aren t that many horse-drawn hearses out there, so went through the streets. So, it was, it was quite the display. H: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, you attended too, right? (chuckle) Any close calls or scrapes out there in terms of, of --? These are a violent group of people. How many people did you have working on the, Bureau people, working on these cases? S: Initially just me. S: And me and my DEA partner, we got hit --. We had to go through that project. There was only one way in and one way out. And we had to go through there several times to protect informants who we thought something was going wrong. And we took gunfire. A couple of times our cars got hit. And so we didn t go through there very often. S: Luckily it was a DEA car, a DEA car that got hit right in front of me, so I didn t have to do much paper work. H: And these were --? And DEA would generally be using seized vehicles, right? S: Yeah, yeah, actually it was. It was a Cadillac, a Cadillac Seville. Now did we ever get into that very much in using seized vehicles? S: Yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah, I had a seized vehicle that I used for a number of years -- 11

12 Page 12 S: -- working gangs and drugs. H: Not being mainly though for surveillance I assume. S: Surveillance or picking up informants. You know, in anything other than a Ford or Chevy, you know. H: Yeah, the drug crowd certainly wouldn t be caught in a --. S: I had a blue Corvette that was seized actually from the Hell s Angels. H: (chuckle) S: That s the other thing we had a lot of out in San Francisco. Our squad, the Organized Crime Squad, addressed over the years was various chapters of the Hell s Angels -- S: -- in the Bay area. H: Now, did they get started out in that area? S: Yeah. Sonny Berger pretty much has been known as the founder of, or he is the one tagged as the founder, and the Oakland Chapter is the mother chapter. H: Okay, so I m not too far out then? S: No. H: We have, naturally have a place in New York, a chapter there and you see them out on the road and what have you. I don t now how many of them are real Hell s Angels as such. S: Well, if they re flying colors, then they are. These guys were kind of fat and looked like they were probably in their late 50s. S: Pretty much what they are now. 12

13 Page 13 H: (chuckle) Not that, not that I knock fat old people. (chuckle) It doesn t fit my image of Hell s Angels in general. S: They ve aged. H: Did they have much infrastructure actually there in terms of an organization? S: Yeah, I mean they have a president, vice president, sergeant-of-arms, and a secretary. S: Just like any other organization. H: Was there a lot of effort to, to infiltrate them and, and to neutralize their activities on the part of the Bureau? S: Oh yeah, yeah. I worked with an Agent. You know, I helped an Agent out because I had my own thing going, but an Agent by the name the Tim McKinley out in San Francisco. He s retired now. But I think he probably more so than anybody else in the FBI spearheaded and made it his goal throughout the last twenty years of his career to do nothing but Hell s Angels. S: And I think they even had pictures of Tim in their clubhouse. He was a go-getter. H: It might be an interesting person to talk to then. Had the Bureau actually made much effort with the Hell s Angels? S: Oh yeah, yeah. At various times during my career out there in San Francisco, we worked the Vallejo Chapter, the Oakland Chapter, the San Francisco Chapter, various members from all those chapters were indicted. For mainly drugs and --. S: Drugs, yeah, mainly. H: Did they have any other activities that they were engaged in besides that? S: Well, you know, there was a spattering of extortion, etc., but predominantly it was drugs. Methamphetamines. 13

14 Page 14 H: Yeah, there was, I guess, maybe in the east there were, you know, there were murders and, as you mentioned extortions and, I guess, a kidnap or two that came, came through. I didn t pay an awful lot of attention to them except every once in a while I d see their bikes all lined up down in the Lower East Side there. Okay, let me get to one of the core questions I wanted to ask you about. How did you happen to join the FBI? S: Well, I wanted to be an FBI Agent from the time I was little. And I don t know what it was. It might have been an old TV show or something. But then, then I met one. You know, as I indicated, I found out that my dad had been an FBI informant and had joined the Klan for, for the Bureau. I didn t know precisely what until I got the Freedom of Information stuff on his 137 file. S: But at some point I met an Agent who was my dad s handler and he had a suit and a tie on at the time. And my dad knew I wanted to be an FBI Agent when I grew up. And so he introduced me, and I just remember him, you know, being wellspoken and well-dressed. And in my neighborhood in Dayton, you know, most parents, most dads, didn t wear a tie to work. S: Blue collar H: Sure. S: So I was just really impressed with this guy and made it my mission to become an FBI Agent. H: Now you got a hold of your father s file. Was that because you were an FBI Agent or was that done as a public record kind of thing? S: I did it through, I did through channels through Freedom of Information. There was a file. The file was --. There was probably a file in the Cincinnati Office from looking at some of the stuff and knowing, you know, how to read them from being in the Bureau. S: But I think the actual files themselves and stuff they released came from DC. 14

15 Page 15 H: Okay, so talking about this is not a problem then. It s something that one could get through Freedom of Information. What was your father s name? S: John Frederick Steiner. And where was he living at the time? S: At the time he owned a bar in Dayton, Ohio. When he got out of the Marine Corps after World War II he became a cop briefly for the city of Dayton and then had various other jobs, but then he bought --. It was kind of a cop bar, but not really a cop bar, but because he was a former cop, a lot of cops came in. S: It was kind of right in the heart of East Dayton. H: And how did he happen to become a KKK member? S: You know, I m not totally sure. Well, I know how he became a KKK member. The Bureau sent him to Covington, Kentucky for his initiation. From best I can tell and from what mom said, he never took a dime from the Bureau, but they did cover his expenses in going down there to, I don t know, get enshrined or whatever the KKK does. I just was curious, did he initiate the contact with the Bureau, do you know? S: I don t know. I don t know. I m pretty sure the Agent s name, John Hecht (possibly Heck), from the Dayton Office was his handler. And I think John has since passed on, but I always wanted to talk to John and find that out. It s just that his path took him, I think after Dayton, by the time I got in, he retired shortly thereafter and he had moved somewhere and we didn t have quite the network we have now or I would have contacted John to find out prior to him passing. H: Yeah, it would be interesting. I, without mentioning anything in particular, I handled a person who had a Marine Corps background and he specifically came to the Bureau and said, I don t like what s going on and I d like to help and he went on to become a rather important informant. So I was just, was kind of curious as to how, you know, what were the steps to get involved with the Klan. 15

16 Page 16 S: My guess would be that that was what it was. I mean it wasn t like he was some, you know, I mean he, he wasn t a big fan of blacks. I mean he was prejudiced. To say the least. And, we got a letter from Hoover. He got a letter from Hoover and it just praised him for being a great American. So I don t know if he had written to them and then John was sent out to, you know, to recruit him or just how that happened. H: Interesting. Do you have any or would you be willing to share your material with us? S: Sure. H: We could copy it. S: Sure. H: And it d be a nice addition to this particular transcript when it s done. S: Yeah, I will get your address and I ll make a copy of the file as well as the Hoover letter. I think that was probably afterwards, after --. I ll send it all to you. H: What kind of activities did he engage in that you re aware of, you were aware of as a kid? S: As a kid I didn t really put it together that he was an informant. But I remember on one particular Sunday morning because of the blue law the bar didn t open till one and we lived across the street. And I remember dad, my dad saying something about he s going to have a meeting and blah, blah, blah, and he wanted us to be away from the house. Go out in the park or play or whatever. Which we did. And, there never was any activity at the bar prior to one o clock on Sunday mornings, but on this particular Sunday morning, there was a whole hub of activity. I mean, the bar was open then. It wasn t open but they were holding a Klan meeting in the bar. S: And there were guys in our house. And now looking back on the guys in the house. There were two guys in the house with the cameras were taking pictures of the people coming to the, to the meeting. So more than likely they were the Bureau guys. 16

17 Page 17 S: Yeah. Me and my brothers, you know, weren t allowed, the three of us weren t allowed to be in the house. But I remember seeing them coming in and coming out. Did your father have any regalia or anything around the house that indicated that he was a Klan member? S: I don t know if he had a robe or not. But he had a bunch of --. Yeah, he had all the pamphlets and all the flyers that he would pass out at rallies or whatever. He had all that stuff. H: Did you ever see him in action as a Klan member? S: Uh, uh. H: At what point did you get a feeling that there might have been a double life here? Did he ever tell you that, what he was, what he was doing? S: Yeah, in a roundabout way he did. And, then after I became an FBI Agent, he only lived a few more years after that. He died in 81. He told me that he had been an informant and that he did it because, you know, it was the right thing to do and these guys weren t really Americans. S: The whole flag waving thing was the reason he did it. He really loved this country. H: Well, by the time, by this time though you were a grown man and -- S: Yeah. H: -- and had entered, had entered or about to enter, the Bureau. Had there been any, any indications earlier than that? S: No, not really. I mean, you know, our lives just, I mean, by then I was, I think I was a freshman or sophomore in high school when this rally was held, or this meeting was held at the bar because I think as I said on my I was the class president of my class. And then the Dayton Daily News published this article that the Blue Chip Tavern, Jack Steiner, you know, there was a Klan meeting in the, in the Blue Chip on Sunday morning and within a week I was called to the principal s office and told that I was no longer the class president. H: Huh. 17

18 Page 18 S: You know. I still get bitter about that. You know, what would I have said even if I would have known that he was, you know, an FBI informant, the FBI was taking pictures. H: Yeah. S: I wouldn t have known what to say. I do remember him just saying, Don t discuss, don t discuss what I m doing with anybody. S: And our phone would ring off the hook. I remember after that newspaper article, you know, everybody s phone back then in the late 60s was published, so we, we couldn t even answer the phones from the hate calls we got. H: And these were anti-klan calls and --? S: Yeah. H: Was, was the Klan very strong up in that area? S: Apparently they were. I mean there were rumors, and I don t know --. I know several of the prominent black African-American political machines at the time and they were the target of the Klan s hatred. Was there any overt action on their part? I mean, bombings or what have you? S: Yeah, that part s kind of, I m fuzzy on. I really don t know. I think there was a series of arrests though for something they were planning. And that happened in the late 60s or early 70s. Whether or not my dad s info contributed to that or not, I don t know. S: But, they did become disruptive at some point in the early 70s. And whether they self-destructed or because of the Bureau s, the Bureau s efforts, they somewhat vanished. H: Well, the, the file that you obtained, I gather then didn t have any operational information. S: No, they redacted all that and a lot of it is heavily redacted. 18

19 Page 19 S: You can see where, you know, he went to Covington, was sworn in, and, then, you know, a lot of black marks through the paper work. H: Did he become a, take a leadership position that you know of? S: No. H: But he did make available his --. He went to meetings I gather and then he held a meeting at the bar. S: Right, yeah. He went to several --. You know, there were several meetings that he went to and recorded on. Well, this meeting that was held at his bar must have been a seminal meeting of some kind or an important one. S: Must have been. It must have been a (unintel) meeting. You can t tell from the file from what I got. You can t tell what was reported. What they discussed there. H: But it did get into the newspaper. S: Yeah. H: And caused a, a lot of grief in your young life. S: Yeah. H: You mentioned getting threatening telephone calls and what have you. And you lost your position as the class president. Were any other things going on at that time because of his activities? S: I mean other than your standard burglaries and stuff, not really. That I remember. H: I m sorry. Standard burglaries? S: Yeah. Our house was burglarized. H: And by someone and you don t know whether that had was, had to do with -- S: No. 19

20 Page 20 H: -- the Klan stuff or -- S: No, they, they never --. He got shot. My dad got shot. He d come home and the burglar was down in the basement and came up and he went, he had a.22 long rifle and when he opened the basement door the guy hit him with a blackjack and when he went down on the ground the.22 discharged and went through his leg. H: Your father s leg? S: Yeah. H: Oh, boy. S: And the guy got away. He was, he never, the rest of his life he never, never went anywhere without a pistol in his pocket. H: Huh. S: At that particular time he didn t have a pistol. H: And this was around the time of the Klan, became known as a Klansman. I m sorry. I talked over you. S: I m sorry too. It was right around that. In the earlier stages of that from what I can tell from the file. Uh, huh. Well, that s certainly a different chain of events I ll tell you that. I ve been --. We ve got several interviews of former, former Agents who handled informants and who were very active in the south, mainly down in Mississippi and are most of the interviews that we have right now during the civil rights era. So it s kind of an interesting thing to get a chance to get some information concerning, you know, from the other side of things. Did they, did they make much, the Bureau any effort to cover him through, and doing an investigation on him and interviewing him or anything like that? S: You know, I don t know. I m not sure. But I do know that he also turned in one of our neighbors who worked at Wright-Pat and he had stolen a generator that was worth about six grand and he had it in a garage. And although the file didn t say it, all of a sudden it was the FBI that raided that garage down the street. And I still remember them. One guy had a tommy gun when they hit the house. And they recovered that. And it was right around that time period that I met, that I formally was introduced to John Hecht. So I m thinking that Jack turned in the guys down the street who stole that generator out of Wright-Pat. 20

21 Page 21 Well, now how old were you when you actually met this FBI Agent? Do you recall? S: I would have been probably a sophomore in high school. Maybe a junior. So you were old enough that your father could trust you. S: Yeah. H: I mean this could have been potentially life and death I guess. S: Could have been. I mean, you know, I m sure the Klan wouldn t have been happy if they knew that when they came to the Blue Chip that day they were getting photographed. And their license plates and their names were going to end up in a file. H: Yeah. And at least a severe beating anyway. S: Yeah. H: Down south it would probably would have been an attempted murder but --. Anything else you recall from that time? S: Well, I just --. Since later in life and going and being in the Bureau, sometimes you hear criticism of the Bureau about a lack of response in the civil rights era and, you know, and not taking the Klan and other anti-black organizations seriously. And, in fact and in truth they did. At least in my world they did. S: And I m sure that in other parts of the country they were, you know, keeping as close as tabs at they were in the Cincinnati Field Office. Well, you know certainly a place like Dayton, it was important naturally but it certainly was on the periphery in comparison to Mississippi. S: Yeah. H: And Alabama and Louisiana and, you know, the Deep South where the Klan was in effective control of many organs of the government. S: Yeah. 21

22 Page 22 H: And was really raising hell. So, it s just kind of interesting that even on what might be considered a peripheral area, the Bureau was active and, working this stuff. S: Yeah. H: Very interesting. Anything else I should know? S: No, that was about it. H: (chuckle) S: Saw your thing on the xgboys, I don t know why I responded to who sent you that because I very rarely ever talked about this. I talked about it once before to a newspaper reporter when I was finishing up my last gang case. They did a little profile on what I d done in putting the gangs away in Oakland and we touched on this briefly. But other than that I never really talked about it. I don t think that very many people in the FBI knew that my dad was an informant. H: There will be a few people who know about it now. But what we re going to do is I ll take this tape and have it copied and then we send it to a former Bureau steno who will do the transcription. Once we have the transcription, I ll have a copy sent to you. S: Okay. H: And you can look it over and, and see if there s anything that, you know, that think needs to be clarified or spelling or, you know, bunch of things like that. Do a little edit job on it. S: Uh, huh. H: And then once, once you approve of it, we ll send it down to the Bureau and they will, to the publication people. They ll look at it for classified information. And then we ll make a final copy of it and you ll get a copy of that and with all of the material in a nice package. And we ll call it part of history. S: Glad you re doing this, Brian. Not me, but for, you know, I mean, somebody who has interviewed Melvin Purvis or something. Those old famous guys. That would have been really something. H: Oh yeah. Well, we have one guy who was, he s dead, but his son had a daily diary that he kept from

23 Page 23 S: Wow! H: --showing --. One of the cases, it s a shoot-out in Florida with the Ma Barker gang. S: Oh, really! H: And then, what is it? Pretty Boy Floyd. He and another Agent were chased by Floyd through some cornfields and it was only the fact that the Agents lost control of their vehicle, that they escaped being murdered. S: Oh, wow! H: Floyd had a Browning automatic rifle and was peppering the back of their car. So, there s some really interesting stories and hopefully in the very near future we ll be able to make an announcement concerning the placement of our archives and then not too long after that things will be opened up and people will be able to start seeing it. We have over, as I mentioned in the gboys note there I think, we have over a hundred interviews now. S: Wow! me your address. I will make a copy of that file. H: Okay. Well, actually I m right in the membership directory. Brian Hollstein. And it s, it s in New Canaan, Connecticut. S: Okay. H: And, yeah, I ll look forward to that. We ll make copies of it. I ll also put it on disk so that you can have it for a permanent storage too if you d like that. And we ll get it right back to you. S: Great. All right. Well, thanks, Brian. H: Thank you very much. 23