Twisted Triangle (13 page)

Gene spent the rest of the night screaming at Margo, belittling her about what a horrible mother she was, how she didn’t care about the kids, how she was a horrible housekeeper, and how bad she was in bed.

“You’re a dried-up, fl whore,” he said. “I’m going to ruin you. You will have nothing. How dare you think about taking my children! Who in the hell do you think you are, you stupid cunt?”

Allison, who was about to turn six, and Lindsey, who was al-most three, stayed upstairs, where Allison would always remember telling Lindsey to hide in her toy chest, a plastic green tub with a red top, to try to shield the toddler from all the yelling.

Anywhere Margo went in the house that night, Gene was right there with her.

“How stupid did you think I was?” he demanded. “And how stupid are you to think that you can get away with this?”

Margo started washing dishes, trying to shut out Gene’s voice. “Now you want to clean the house?” he said.

“I have always cleaned the house,” she said quietly.

Margo was feeling somewhat defi determined not to crack. She knew he wanted her to cry and beg forgiveness, but she wasn’t going to give him that. She also knew that the less she engaged him, the better.

After doing the dishes, she sat on the sofa, and he plopped himself down so that their bodies were touching. She scooted over, and so did he, until she was crammed into the corner, his body pushing against hers.

“You know, you’re very lucky you brought the kids back and didn’t leave them in Alabama,” he said.

Gene explained how he’d caught Brenda trying to move some of the kid’s things into the townhouse, how he’d figured out that Margo had set up the new checking account, and how he’d immediately called an attorney to beat her at her own game.

After Gene’s forty-minute tirade, Margo got up to grab a pillow and blanket, then tried to curl up at the other end of the sofa so she could get some sleep. But Gene wouldn’t let up.

“Oh no,” he said. “You’re not going to sleep tonight. I’ve been up for two nights making sure you couldn’t do this.”

He took the remote control for the TV, found a war movie, and turned up the volume.

“You’re going to wake up the kids,” Margo said.

Gene turned it down slightly, but every time she’d start to drift off, he’d yell at her again.

Finally, at 3 am he went upstairs, and Margo turned off the TV, but Gene came back downstairs twice to turn it back on, taking the remote with him.

Ultimately, Margo got a couple hours of very light sleep, and when it was time to go to work, she felt barely alive.

Gene continued screaming obscenities as she was getting dressed. He said he was going to take off work for as long as it took to keep his daughters safe.

“You won’t have another chance to take them,” he said.

Margo stumbled into the offi her eyes bleary, her shoulders slumped, walking like a zombie.

She’d already confi in John earlier that summer about the home relocation scam, the missing ring and earrings, how Gene had swapped out the vacuum cleaner and color TV, and about his general emotional abuse. So John was not surprised to hear about the Night from Hell she’d just endured.

“Margo,” he said. “You should not be covering up for this guy anymore.”

Margo called her divorce attorney to tell her what had happened. Betty changed course from her previous advice and told her that she now needed to stay at the house until the court settled the custody battle, or she would fall into the trap he’d set for her by filing for divorce on the grounds of abandonment. Otherwise, she’d hurt her chances of getting shared custody of the girls. In the meantime, Betty said she’d call Gene’s attorney and try to get her house keys back.

Next, John told Margo she should go talk to Tony Daniels, the top offi at Quantico, and tell him that Gene had taken her keys and FBI-issued gun.

Margo went to Tony’s offi that morning, closed the door, and sat in a chair facing him across his rather expansive desk. She explained that she was in the process of divorce and that things had gotten a little out of hand the night before.

“He took my guns,” Margo said.

“Why does he have the right to take your guns? Is he your supervisor?”

“Well, no, he has no right to take them.” “That’s the point,” he said.

Tony could see the fatigue on her face and heard the tension in her voice. Normally, he thought Margo appeared very self-assured, but this morning she didn’t seem like herself. He was concerned about the well-being of Margo and her daughters, but he was also concerned that Gene had taken possession of FBI property without going through the proper channels.

“Where are the girls?” he asked.

“They’re with him. I don’t think he would hurt the kids.”

Tony had never met Gene. All he knew was that Gene was the kind of undercover operator whom supervisors had to monitor closely. Tony hadn’t known the Bennetts were having domestic problems, but it was not uncommon for married employees to have such disputes.

“FBI agents are people too,” he said recently.

Tony recalls that Margo started to tell him about the fraud and other activities that morning, but he stopped her before she got into specifi cautioning that he would have to report such activities to headquarters. Margo simply remembers Tony asking her to come back at three o’clock to check in, after he’d made some calls to see what he could do.

Margo went back to her offi and when John could see that she was in no condition to teach her class, volunteered to do it for her.

Just before she headed to Tony’s offi for their afternoon meeting, John said, “You ought to go in there and tell him what it’s been like. Tell him the truth.”

She knew that she had some legal “exposure” for her involvement in the home relocation scam, but she and John naively thought she wouldn’t be in any trouble because she’d been coerced into it. They both figured the bureau would see that she’d had limited choices being married to Gene, with small children to care for. After talking to Margo that morning, Tony had called the bu-reau’s legal counsel and the firearms people at Quantico, along with Gene’s supervisor and the head of the Washington field of-fi The consensus decision was that Gene should bring Margo’s guns to Quantico, where Margo should leave them, secured, in the vault. If she brought them home, Gene had threatened to take them away again. Gene had also told his coworkers and superiors that his wife was unstable and shouldn’t have access to a gun at

home.

“We wanted things to cool off,” Tony later recalled. “She didn’t really need a gun. . . . If she’d insisted on having it, we probably would have let her take it.”

Margo decided to take John’s advice and tell Tony about Gene’s extracurricular activities.

“Tony, I’ve come to the realization that I’m married to a crook, and I can’t live like this any longer,” she said. “He’s a cheat, a liar, and a thief.”

“Whoa, whoa, time out, Margo,” he said.

But Tony got quiet and listened once Margo started listing specifi examples— the home relocation scam, which involved Gene’s informant Jerry York; insurance fraud involving the missing diamond earrings; the new color TV and vacuum cleaner; and a $100,000 investment Gene had made in Jerry’s trucking business in Atlanta.

Tony was shocked to hear the allegations Margo was making about another FBI agent, but he didn’t ask a lot of questions. He just treated it like any other interview and took notes to send to the Offi of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an internal affairs unit that investigated allegations of wrongdoing by FBI agents.

Margo went home that night to another evening of torment.

She and Gene were arguing in the kitchen after the kids had gone to bed when they heard Lindsey screaming and crying upstairs. Margo got to Lindsey before he did. She’d had a bad dream, so Margo comforted her, tucked her back in, turned off the light, and went to leave, but Gene blocked the doorway.

“What did you do with the money?” he asked, referring to the

$18,000 she’d taken from the money market account.

When she tried to squeeze by him, he picked her up and threw her on the empty bed next to Lindsey’s.

“Where’s the money?” he demanded. “Don’t you ever push me or shove me again.”

Margo got up and went downstairs to call John. “Things are getting bad here,” she said.

They discussed whether one of them should call the police, but Margo told him she thought she could deal with this on her own. This time, John called the police anyway.

Gene had overheard Margo’s conversation with John, so Gene called a buddy of his to tell him that Margo had shoved him. Then he called 911.

“My wife and I are having a disagreement,” he told the dispatcher. “She’s getting abusive.”

He listened for a minute and said, “You should know we’re both FBI agents and have guns in the house.”

Margo and Gene went downstairs to the living room, where they waited in silence for the police to arrive.

About ten minutes later, an offi showed up and asked Gene what had happened. Gene told him they’d been upstairs comforting Lindsey when Margo started a fi with him.

“She kept asking me, ‘Where’s the money?’ and then she shoved me against the wall.”

“What did she specifi say?” the offi asked.

Gene wasn’t prepared for the question. He stuttered and said, “What did you do with the money?”

When Margo told her side of the story, she sensed that the offi knew Gene was lying, but couldn’t do anything.

“Do you guys think you can go to separate parts of the house and behave for the rest of the night?” he asked.

Margo and Gene both said yes.

Unlike the previous night, Gene let her go to sleep on the couch without incident. Nonetheless, she woke up exhausted, feeling like an emotional punching bag.

Her unit chief, Ed Tully, called her into his offi fi thing. “Tony’s in a bind here,” he said. “Based on your conversation

yesterday, he is obligated to report this, unless, of course, you mis-spoke and he misunderstood what you said. Tony is very concerned with how this is going to affect you.”

Tony and Ed were clearly trying to give Margo an out, but she was determined to proceed with what she’d started.

“The truth about Gene Bennett is going to come out, now or later, and if I take this back now, it’s going to be much worse on me later.”

“Is this really what you want to do?”

Margo nodded. “I made a decision. I’m not going to lie anymore. If it hurts me, then it hurts me.”

Tony subsequently wrote a memorandum to David Binney, the head of OPR, offi outlining Margo’s allegations and his conversations with other bureau offi about Gene.

“When questioned as to why she had waited until now to surface these allegations, SSA Bennett replied that she was trying to ‘hold her marriage together’ and that she was fearful of retaliation,” he wrote. “She emphasized that the reason she is seeking a divorce is that she can no longer tolerate her husband’s illegal and unethical activities.”

That same day, Gene fi Brenda, told her to get out of the house, and put her belongings in the driveway. He called a cab to come get her, but he wouldn’t let her take her things with her.

Margo later learned that while she and the girls were in Alabama, Gene had spent the weekend intimidating and frightening

Brenda into confessing Margo’s escape scheme into a tape recorder. He’d told her that if she didn’t fess up, he was going to call the po-lice and have her arrested for stealing his property. Then he sent her to a hotel room, which he made her pay for, and forbade her to call Margo or her own family.

On Friday, September 11, Gene requested the help of the FBI’s Employee Assistance Program and was assigned to Steve Spruill, a counselor who was Gene’s contact agent on Operation Doubletalk. The program also referred Gene and Margo to a crisis counselor, with whom they met that night to set up a system of bound-aries within the house so that they could coexist in an environment that was less chaotic for the girls.