Seven Silent Men (25 page)

Decor and layout lent a surprisingly un-FBI atmosphere to the vast twelfth-floor office. Absent were the traditional bare-wood austerity and small rooms. The space was open and multileveled. Design and colors varied for different areas of operation. The ten agents assigned to handling the five-hundred-odd routine cases of the Prairie Port residency were in a main-level section of office which had a deep orange and white motif … deep orange rugs, white vinyl desks, orange vinyl desk lamps, white plastic room-dividers for privacy. The pool of twenty agents on hold for eleventh-floor Romor 91 chores and assisting the ten other agents with the Prairie Port case load, should no Romor 91 assignments be forthcoming, had a turquoise and eggshell-white color scheme. A glass-enclosed communications section, containing three teletype machines, four radio transmitter-receivers and an auxiliary switchboard, was on an elevated platform covered by dark gold carpeting. Gold trim adorned its black vinyl desks and filing cabinets. The glass-enclosed media section, with white copying machines and small printing presses and a television monitor screen connected to the press conference room, was also elevated and carpeted in green, with green trim on the white vinyl desks and cabinets. Silver and eggshell-white was the choice for the small office Corticun shared with Harlon Quinton.

The most expensive chambers to decorate were down the hall and around a corner from the main space on the twelfth floor. One was a long cafeteria-lounge done in yellows and grays and hung with silver-framed newspaper front pages whose headlines extolled the FBI's most notable achievements over the decades. The abutting area was also dual-purposed, a combination press conference auditorium/television studio containing two hundred and ten seats and two stage sets. One set was the speaker's podium facing the seats. The other, hidden from view, was an exact replica of J. Edgar Hoover's office in Washington, D.C. Here, in the press conference room, was where Denis Corticun reverted to his pinstripes and, occasionally, his former haughtiness.

Corticun, from his arrival in Prairie Port following J. Edgar Hoover's announcement of $31,000,000 having been stolen, was relentless in pursuing the media. He had talked to reporters as he deplaned from the aircraft that carried equipment for the twelfth-floor offices. He had ridden in from the airfield with reporters, chatting with them nonstop. Two hours after reaching the office, he met with them again, in a hallway. Ten hours later the cafeteria-lounge had been completed … a place in which the press could hang out and receive an endless stream of news releases created and printed by a three-man team of headquarters public relations specialists operating within the enclosed green-and-white media section.

The cafeteria-lounge, from inception, was a hit. A visiting reporter, if he waited around long enough, could usually extract a fresh bit of data from Denis Corticun or one of the three FBI PR specialists, who all made a point of dropping around between officially scheduled press briefings. Also available to the reporter were reproductions or typed recaps of what the print media, nationally and worldwide, had to say about the robbery at Mormon State. Taped shows and the transcribed texts of local, national and international television and radio coverage could also be had.

Even without Denis Corticun and the PR section's efforts, the media focused on the Mormon State robbery as it had rarely focused on any other event of this kind. Every major American newspaper, in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover's announcement of August 24, carried the story on the front page, with a majority headlining the revelation. All national newscasts led off their programs with it.

The visiting press created within Prairie Port, and for a twenty-five-mile radius around, a hotel-room and rental-auto shortage of paramount proportions. Private detective Jeb Stuart Wile, the man who solved the sensational Black Mass murders of the previous year, arrived and held his own press conference and announced he knew for a fact the robbery gang included five members, all local men, three white, two black, and that he aimed to prove it and claim for himself the rewards.

Rewards were a factor in creating what one national magazine writer stated “can only be described as a jamboree spirit around Prairie Port.” The Grange Association upped its previous cash offer for information leading to the arrest of the unknown thieves to $100,000. The Prairie Farmer Association added another $50,000; the Chamber of Commerce of Prairie Port, $15,000; the Rotarians, $8,000. Country-and-western radio station WJKB reestablished its hot line for crime information and sweetened the reward kitty by another $15,000. WJKB's competitor, rock 'n' roll station WQXY, put up its own hot line and offered $17,500 for information. The local FBI office opened its own well-publicized hot line number and soon was getting so many calls that it diverted much of the traffic up to the auxiliary switchboard on the twelfth floor, where each hour new records were set for incoming “tip calls” regarding a federal crime.

Receiving somewhat less publicity than Jeb Stuart Wile was the appearance of Newark, New Jersey's, famed bounty hunters, M. L. Konvits and Pretty Boy Schline. The North Dakota Mounted Posse let it be known they too were here to seek the rewards. The Agatha Christie Garden and Deduction Society of Armbruster, Illinois, claimed to have driven over just for an outing and that any money they received in rewards would go to provide the poor and infirm with food, shelter and flowers. Thousands came just to sightsee. Robbery shirts and pillows, along with postcards and toy guns, were selling as briskly as hot dogs and soda, not only at the shrine site but throughout the city.

On the Mississippi River, tourist boats had been prospering since the early media speculation that the robbers may have fled via the river … that millions of dollars of stolen money may have fallen into the river. Craft from as far away as Louisiana and Minnesota started up or down the Mississippi for Prairie Port as the greatest treasure hunt in modern times got under way. Everything that was navigable seemed to travel the river to Prairie Port, including a two-man submarine. Maps of the Mississippi sold at a premium, as did alleged “original pilot's charts” from the glorious steamboat days of yore. Scuba gear and scuba instruction became a hot new industry in town. Treasure-hunt boats left Prairie Port hourly. Spano's, the largest department store in town, filled its fifteen display windows with masked and scuba-equipped mannequins reenacting various stages of the theft and getaway. The River Patrol and the U.S. Coast Guard implemented emergency right-of-way rules so the flotilla of fortune-seeking craft would not interfere with normal water traffic, so searchers would stay off private property along the river's banks or on its midstream islands.

The expanding treasure hunt at Prairie Port escalated the jamboree aspects into an out-and-out holiday festival. A joviality and abandonment, not seen since the last state fair or when the local high school basketball team went to the state finals, permeated, transformed the missing robbers and the efforts to catch them into a civic celebration at which a vocal majority hoped the thieves would not get captured. A joint Elmo Roper-NBC national poll reflected the same sentiment.

The more attention and publicity, the more difficult became the maneuverability of Strom and his agents in pursuing the Channels of Investigation laid out for Romor 91. Reporters hung around the parking lots used for Bureau cars, gave chase to agents driving out on assignment.

Despite this the residency was able to accomplish a great deal of work in the early days of Romor 91, interviewed four hundred known criminals and underworld contacts without the media finding out, followed up another hundred leads unnoticed.

Then came the wizard.

Strom Sunstrom had briefed Denis Corticun on what Jessup and Yates had learned inside Warbonnet Ridge and traveling through the tunnels. Suspecting Corticun had made leaks to the press as to missing millions being dumped into the Mississippi River, Strom curtly warned that none of the recent Warbonnet Ridge information must reach the press.

“How can it not reach the press?” Corticun had asked Strom. “It
is
news. Spectacular news. The scientific team and their assistants inside the Bonnet know of it, and do you suppose they'll not pass on it? Tell a wife or son or associate in the strictest of confidence? People connected with the Water and Sewerage Departments and the mud eruptions have learned the old reservoir gates were opened, learned how they were opened and by whom and for what purpose. Can we expect them
all
to remain silent? No, Strom, everyone will know, with or without me or you. If you wish, when it begins getting out to the media and the media come to me for confirmation, I will either deny any of it is so or have no comment. This has always been policy … the reason, more often than not, that the FBI has lost credibility.”

Strom countered, “Critical and corroborating information was discovered at the Bonnet. Information only the actual perpetrators could know—”

“I'm not arguing, dear fellow. I'm simply saying it is not within our control to keep it from the media. Strom, the media of the world have come to Prairie Port. Not a few local newsmen but a national and international corps. Four hundred and eleven persons in search of a story. Our story.”

“So we hold a press conference and tell all, is that what you suggest? You've been doing that since you got here.”

“Has it hurt us so badly?”

“If you ask me, yes.”

“How?”

“For one thing, the criminals seem to be coming off better than the FBI. Are you sure you're not their press agent?”

“What else is bothering you, Strom … about me?”

“Now that you bring it up, I have this curious suspicion that in addition to plain old conferences, you do a bit of unofficial leaking to reporters on the side.”

“You mean as in the instance of several million dollars spilling into the Mississippi River?”

“Yes.”

“I did leak that. Your local newsfellow, Chet Chomsky, somehow got wind of it and was going to say so on the air. I found out he found out and what he intended to do, so I beat him to it. I leaked it to. Nancy Applebridge and the Associated Press. I made two new friends for us, Applebridge and AP, and one enemy, Chomsky. The next time out I'll leak something to Chomsky and he'll become a friend as well … and
we'll be in control
.”

At the special 3
P
.
M
. press conference on the twelfth floor Denis Corticun wore his pinstriped suit, stood at the podium in front of a large FBI seal and said that, no doubt, all the reporters present had learned of the mud volcano being neutralized and water having escaped from Tomahawk Hill reservoir … stated that these two events tied directly into the robbery of Mormon State National Bank … revealed that long-forgotten sluice gates in the reservoir were opened and the tunnels flooded by the very same man who caused the power dips—a scientific wizard.

Details on how the gates were opened and what exactly caused the power shortages weren't answered. Nor did Corticun disclose other aspects of the operation. It made no difference. Wizardry prevailed. A Wizard of Darkness, as the ABC commentator said after ABC's nightly national newscast led off with Corticun's revelations and on-the-scene reports from Tomahawk Hill reservoir and the Prairie Port headquarters of the Missouri Power and Electric Company. CBS's man invoked the images of Professor Moriarty, Dr. Fu Manchu, Raffles, and Jekyll and Hyde. A well-known TV host made his entrance dressed as the Wizard of Mormon State, accompanied by six frogmen whom he introduced as the rest of the Mormon State robbery gang, with a half-minute ovation of clapping and whistles and foot stomps. The wizard, like the Mormon State robbery itself, seemed to be just what a diversion-starved media and public were in need of.

A period of dullness and uneventful waiting pervaded as the summer of 1971 came to an end. Children were going back to school and Mark Spitz captured the AAU final in 220-yard freestyle swimming and World Series fever was nearing and professional football had begun its exhibition season and Chase Manhattan, the country's sixth-largest bank, had lowered its lending rate one full percentage point and the pullout of United States troops in Vietnam had left only 22,000 GIs there and had deescalated combat to a near standstill. Little else was new or good. The economy was in such ragged shape President Nixon had imposed a 90-day wage freeze, which the AFL-CIO agreed not to challenge in court. Crime was up. George Jackson, convict and author of
Soledad Brother
, was killed in a San Quentin shoot-out.

Had not the wizard materialized, there wasn't all that much to make headlines with over the final days of August and the opening week of September except for death and politics. The wizard and Mormon State dominated all other news. Corticun leaked to Chet Chomsky a startling item: the wizard had spliced into the city's main power line while that power line was “live” or “hot,” a feat few mortal men could do. A second leak, which Corticun provided the UPI via Nancy Applebridge, dealt with the wizard having rewired critical generators inside Warbonnet Ridge.

The faceless wizard made the cover of national magazines. A London newspaper decried the wizard as being nothing but a second-rate, made-in-America plagiarizer of England's spectacular Great Train Robbery. Until Mormon State, the train heist was title-holder for the largest cash theft in recorded history, over $7,000,000. Nonetheless it concurred with the quoted evaluations of experts who assessed the wizard, and at least some of his accomplices, as possessing skills equal to those of electrical engineering Ph.D.s or above. A review of international psychology profiled the wizard as having one or possibly two Ph.D.s, possessing, at minimum, a 175 IQ and having genius skills in mathematical probability and theoretic electronics. Television was the prime commercial beneficiary of the manhunt, generating estimated profits of three to five times its investment. Prairie Port's economy had also gained. One commentator likened the windfall from the robbery investigation to that of the Super Bowl moving to the city and staying two whole weeks.