The Burglary (21 page)

John thinks the timbre of his voice may have changed slightly at this point. Originally, the statement was to have ended here. A couple days before the burglary, John, feeling more and more concern about how heavy the impact of the burglary could be on the burglars' families, especially their children, asked the other burglars to consider adding a paragraph that would acknowledge the risk to their families. Though none of them seemed to feel the need for the additional words as urgently as he did, they all readily agreed to such an addition. With the sweet faces and hoped-for happy futures of Lindsley, Mark, and Nathan much on his mind, he wrote the new last paragraph. This paragraph meant a great deal to John Raines. In addition to reflecting his growing fears, it also was a public acknowledgment that the decision to conduct the burglary was made with full awareness of the potentially enormous danger to their families, but that they believed the danger to society posed by a secret police state was so great that this extreme step—the burglary of an FBI office—justified the high price they and their families might pay. Now, through Wingell, he was telling that to the world on behalf of all the burglars:

Finally, he read, with pride and a powerful emphasis, as though signing off:

When John Raines returned to the car, mission accomplished, he and Bonnie remember, they saw both relief and concern in each other's faces.
They wondered if the police officer was watching them from a location they couldn't see. Would he follow them as they pulled away? Bonnie drove home on a route that took them down Lincoln Drive, a graceful, undulating parkway that winds through a beautiful wooded part of Philadelphia. John remembers suddenly feeling great relief—that the burglary was done, that they already knew they had valuable FBI files in their possession, that the police officer had not stopped to question them, that the announcement of their deed was now in the hands of a reporter who would see that the world soon learned that an FBI office had been burglarized by unknown people. John let himself laugh and shout. He tore the long typed news release into small pieces, threw them out the window, and watched the wind carry them into the trees of Fairmount Park.

They laughed and laughed. It started as nervous laughter and became bold and happy laughter. It probably came from the enormous relief of not being arrested, from lack of sleep, and from the great sense of accomplishment they had started to feel a few hours earlier when they read some of the stolen files. Some of the files were important and might have an impact. All of it made them giddy the morning after the burglary on their way home to the children.

At their house, they unlocked the front door very quietly. Though they had not slept for twenty-four hours, they were not tired. The adrenaline produced by a burglary was a powerful stimulant. They showered, dressed for work, and—as though they had been there all night—woke the children and chatted with them over breakfast around the table where they had had such a good but also poignant time with them the previous evening.

Despite everything, life was still normal.

They were unbelievably happy to be there with the children. But they had no idea how long normal life would last. Over the next few intense months, the fear that they would lose their normal life ebbed and flowed, at times very forcefully. Each time a crisis threatened and then dissipated, the realization that their normal lives had not been disrupted was very precious. It was especially precious now, the morning after the burglary.

Bonnie Raines took Lindsley and Mark to school and Nathan to daycare that morning. As they would later say about themselves, Ozzie and Harriet, the quintessential American television sitcom couple of that era, were back to normal life—as much as they could be the morning after they had burglarized an FBI office. They had dinner that evening with the children and then left for the farm. That would be their pattern every day for a little more than a week: eat dinner with the children, welcome the babysitter, head to
the farm, read and analyze FBI files, come home late, get a few hours of sleep, go to work.

In New York early that morning, Muhammad Ali, his face distorted dramatically and full of pain from
Joe Frazier's hammerlike left hook to his jaw the night before, held a press conference in his room at the New Yorker Hotel, a short distance from Madison Square Garden.
Dave Kindred wrote that “the good grace of commonsense fell into his oratory” that morning as he told reporters, “I've never thought about losing.…We all have to take defeats in life.…We lose loved ones.…All kinds of things set us back, but life goes on. You don't shoot yourself. Soon this will be old news. People got lives to live, bills to pay, mouths to feed. Maybe a plane will go down with ninety people on it. Or a great man will be assassinated. That will be more important than Ali losing. I never wanted to lose, never thought I would, but the thing that matters is how you lose. I'm not crying. My friends should not cry.”

Someone interrupted, and said, “Champ …”

“Don't call me champ,” Ali said. “Joe's the champ now.”

In Washington early that morning, J. Edgar Hoover did not yet know that he had been hit. When he found out, unlike Ali, he was not philosophical.

8

I
T WAS
7:40
A.M.
Tuesday, March 9, at the Media FBI office. As usual,
Frank McLaughlin was the first agent to arrive. There had been a burglary the night before—at a bank in nearby Glenolden. It was a failed burglary. Nevertheless, he had worked on it until 2 a.m. He went home after he was done rather than return to the office to file a report, and slept very little before he left for work.

McLaughlin was tired, but he was not too tired to notice, as he approached the office entrance, that something looked different. “It looked to me like somebody had tried to force something in the lock.” He tried to open the door. As he wrote later in an official report, when he inserted his key, “it turned completely around as though it was in putty.”

He “automatically looked at the second door, and I could see that it was ajar. I suspected that there was a burglary. I mean I've been in this business a lot of years.…About this time, another agent came up, and I said, ‘I think we've got a burglary.' ”

One of them very cautiously pushed the door open as far as it would go. The two agents squeezed through the narrow opening. McLaughlin remembers scanning the scene:

“The place was ransacked. The doors of cabinets were open and files were gone. I walked into my office, and the desk drawers were rifled.”

Soon all five agents who worked in the office had arrived and were taking in the unprecedented scene: an FBI office emptied of its files, apparently by burglars. One of the agents “immediately and quickly searched the Resident Agency [what small regional FBI offices like this one in Media were
called] to determine that no one was in the RA.” They moved from room to room and soon discovered that all drawers and file cabinets had been emptied. Locked desk drawers had been pried open. The extension cord to a radio transmitter was cut.

At 7:50 a.m., McLaughlin called supervisor
J. Clifford Ousley at the Philadelphia office and told him the Media office “has been broken into and all the files are gone. Nobody's hurt. Nobody's injured.” At this time, he told Ousley, the resident agency “was secured and a neighborhood investigation was instituted.” According to the investigative record, he gave Ousley these details:

McLaughlin's call to Ousley set in motion one of the most intensive investigations in the history of the FBI, one that would consume the director, beginning the moment he arrived at his office in Washington about an hour later.

Ousley, the supervisor in Philadelphia, immediately alerted
Joe D. Jamieson, the special agent in charge (SAC) in Philadelphia. It fell to Jamieson to notify the director's office that the Media office had been burglarized. When Jamieson had been transferred from the Savannah, Georgia, office to Philadelphia as SAC in March 1964, he had told a reporter that FBI work, including his job as SAC in Philadelphia, would be “mainly a sales job.” Given how the FBI was managed under Hoover, with constant attention to building a positive public image of the bureau and the director, there was a lot of truth to that statement. Salesmanship was a central part of the FBI. But a sales approach would not do the job this morning. Jamieson soon would be placed on probation because the burglary happened on his watch. That was minor compared with the punishment Tom Lewis, the agent in charge of the Media office, would receive.

Beginning that morning and continuing for a month, Jamieson headed the investigation. He called Washington headquarters before Hoover arrived. A memo based on that phone call was prepared for Hoover by a member of the director's staff:

So they could fully inform the director about the burglary as soon as he arrived at the office that morning, Hoover's top aides prepared a memorandum based on all the information that agents in the Media and Philadelphia offices had phoned and telegraphed to headquarters. In the hour before he arrived, a sense of crisis grew among his aides. They sent a bulletin to all FBI offices in the country:

This was not how the workday usually started at the Media FBI office. Until this morning, the office was usually a quiet, calm working environment. Agents in Media spent most of their time on what they considered typical and preferred cases: bank robberies, stolen cars, and other stolen goods. The office seldom was in the news, which was the way the agents
liked it.
The last time the Media office was in the news prior to the events that started unfolding the evening of March 8, 1971, was exactly four years earlier on March 9, 1967, when the
Philadelphia Inquirer
ran a light feature story that reported that the FBI office that served Chester and Delaware Counties had been moved from Chester to Media.