Twisted Triangle (4 page)

Because Margo had some medical complications, she stayed in the hospital for fi days. Every night, Gene slept in a cot next to her bed.

Margo kept a diary of the birth so that their child could later read a blow-by-blow description. In the little blue hardback book, she explained that Daddy Gene was very attentive. “He kept rubbing my forehead as if I needed comforting,” Margo wrote. “I really think it did more to comfort him.” After the delivery, she wrote, “They finally gave you to him and he began strutting around the delivery room like a proud papa. . . . Dad leaned you over to me and I kissed your cheek. . . . Dad sat down next to me, held you out and asked me what I thought of the name Allison for our little girl. I thought it was beautiful, just like you, and he named you Allison Akers Bennett there in the delivery room.”

After Allison’s fi bowel movement, Margo wrote, “We called the nurse to show your dad how to clean you up and change your diapers. From that point on, your dad became an expert in taking care of you. He wouldn’t hardly let me have you. I remember wak-ing up and seeing him in the chair, holding you, and just looking at you like you were the miracle that we believe you to be.”

One evening in mid-November, Gene pitched the home relocation fraud scheme to Margo for the second time while she was preparing dinner, with Allison sitting in her carrier on the coun-tertop. Gene explained once again what he and Jerry wanted to do, only this time he wasn’t backing down. He told her he was moving on with his plan, whether she liked it or not.

“This isn’t right,” Margo said. “This is not what we are supposed to be doing.”

“I’m sick of your holier-than-thou attitude,” Gene said.

He looked at Allison and then back at Margo, his voice drip-ping with contempt.

“Do you want to raise her by yourself? Because if you do, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

By this point, Margo felt that she had no choice but to give in. She wasn’t ready to give up everything she’d worked for all these years, and she didn’t feel she could raise a baby on her own. Gene had also worn her down over the years with his head games, embarrassing and humiliating her in front of their friends and colleagues, constantly exerting his very strong will. All of this had eaten away at Margo’s already fragile self-esteem, so she let Gene persuade her to bend the rules, a decision she would regret for the rest of her life.

Gene must have seen from her expression that he had won.

He nodded, and it was a done deal.

The deeper they got into the scheme in the coming months, the worse Margo felt about it. But Gene was driving this train, and she didn’t know how to get off.

“I felt I had sold my soul to the devil, and I couldn’t get out of this,” she said later.

When things got bad with Gene, Margo often looked back and thought to herself, “If my mom could put up with her life with Dad, then I, too, can do this.”

Margo came into the world as Marguerite Elizabeth Akers on November 16, 1953, in the tiny rural town of Guin in northwestern Alabama. Later nicknamed Margo by her older sister, Letta, she was the third of four children born to Ed and Gerthaldean “Dean” Akers.

Margo, her brother, and two sisters were raised in an atmo-sphere of denial, perpetuated by her mother, who reinforced the

principle that “we don’t talk about things.” Ed, who liked his Jim Beam and Cokes, ruled the roost with his dominant personality, leaving Dean beaten down and unwilling or unable to stand up for herself. With this dynamic as a model, Margo learned early on to accept that keeping the peace in an unhappy marriage, even amid verbal abuse, was the right thing to do.

One adolescent experience in particular left Margo emotionally scarred for years and sent long-lasting ripples of confusion through her sexual development.

When she was thirteen, Margo and her father were lying in bed, reading the Sunday paper together, when he reached around without warning, stuck his hand up her pajama top, and squeezed her budding breast.

“It feels like you might be growing a little bit,” he said.

Margo was stunned, ashamed, and embarrassed that he had violated her this way, then mocked her to boot.

“Where are you going?” he asked, surprised, when she started to crawl out of bed.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she lied.

She never went back to that bed and, following the tradition set by her mother, never said a word to anyone about that morning until both her parents were dead.

Years later, Margo learned that he had touched her younger sister, Jackie, the same way. Margo didn’t know until she asked Jackie about it in an e-mail after their father had died.

“Oh, that,” Jackie wrote dismissively, explaining that she’d been able to shake off the episode long ago.

But this was not the case for Margo. The experience marked a dramatic shift in the way she perceived her own body, making her feel inadequate, that she was lacking somehow. It also made her feel self-conscious, that her body wasn’t developing the way it should. Before that fateful morning, she’d never even considered how her body looked or that her breasts were small. She’d always seen herself as just a regular girl who liked to play kickball or ride bikes with the neighborhood kids.

Growing up with an abusive father primed Margo to be drawn to a domineering and manipulative man like Gene Bennett and caused her to stay far too long in their tumultuous marriage. Years later, she told herself that if only Gene had been a decent man, her feelings of attraction for other women probably would’ve remained on the shelf where she’d put them long ago.

Chapter Three

Diamonds and Denial

In early December 1986, Margo, Gene, and their new baby went out to explore northern Virginia for a place to live. They were hoping to fi a house somewhere near Quantico and within easy driving distance to DC, so they targeted Prince William County, which was just north of the academy and west of DC.

“We felt that if it was looking like I was going to Quantico, it made more sense for me to be closer to home because of child-care issues,” Margo recalled.

On a bureau business trip later that month, Gene did some house hunting and found about thirty acres of open space in the city of Manassas, which he bought over the phone from a realtor. Gene negotiated an unusual purchase arrangement for the $90,000 property: $60,000 down and annual payments of $7,000 until it was paid off.

Margo knew they didn’t have that much in savings, and she was concerned that Gene was spending the cash they would need to buy a house.

“We don’t have the money,” Margo said.

“I haven’t told you this, but I have some cash that my dad gave me before he died,” he said. “I promised I wouldn’t use it until I was thirty-fi

Gene claimed that his father had given him $60,000, which he’d kept in a suitcase in his mother’s attic ever since. He said that his father had told him not to put it in the bank, so Margo fi his father had never reported it to the IRS, and this was his way of protecting Gene, who said he would take the old bills to

the bank and exchange them for new ones so that no one would question any transaction or track the income.

At the time, Margo took Gene at his word.

Over the course of the next year, Gene and Jerry were busy working on the home relocation scam. Gene drafted a phony document to show that he and Margo had bought the Lake Capri house from Jerry, using a $15,500 watch as a down payment. The watch Gene described was an Audemars Piguet he’d been wearing for his undercover operation but had since returned to the bureau’s forfeited evidence collection.

But when the fi appraisal came back, it was disappointingly low. Gene and Jerry would have only made $16,000, or a split of

$8,000 each, so he asked the FBI to have one of its contracted relocation companies do a second appraisal. However, it came back just as low.

“Jerry decided that for that money it wasn’t worth it,” Margo said later.

So Gene and Jerry came up with another plan, which was to transfer the house to Jeanette Gilliam, the sister of Jerry’s wife, Brenda. Again drafting phony documents, Gene had a former professor, John Sullivan, pose as his real estate agent in the “sale.” He then claimed that he paid $17,430 to Sullivan in agent’s fees. In November, Gene submitted a reimbursement claim to the FBI for

$17,873 in expenses.

Margo had signed all the real estate documents and deeds, but not the paperwork Gene submitted to the bureau for reimbursement, which was handled as part of his transfer to the DC offi

In February 1988, the FBI cut Gene a $17,177 check.

“Gene ruined his career for $17,000,” Margo said later. “He was not one to leave money on the table. He liked to know he got what was coming to him. If he was eligible for [such perks], he wanted to collect them.”

For their third wedding anniversary in February 1987, Gene took Margo out to dinner at a fancy steak house in Alexandria, leaving Allison with Caroll and Gail Toohey to babysit.

Caroll had been the assistant special agent in charge at the Atlanta offi when Margo and Gene had first started working there. He was also the one who had approved Gene’s first foray into undercover work with Operation Forscore. In 1986, he’d gone on to become a deputy assistant director of the Inspection Division at bureau headquarters in DC.

After dinner, the Tooheys had a chilled bottle of champagne waiting for Margo and Gene. Gene and Caroll walked into the living room from the kitchen, each carrying two glasses. Gene handed one to Margo, and the four of them toasted.

“Happy anniversary,” Gene and Margo said to each other, clinking their glasses together.

As Margo took her first sip, she realized there was something in her fl

“What’s this?” she asked.

Gene feigned surprise. “Oh,” he said innocently, “is there something in your glass?”

Margo hurriedly fi its contents and saw an enormous, gorgeous diamond ring sitting at the bottom. She pulled it out, and Gene put it on her finger.

“Oh, my God, it’s huge,” Margo exclaimed as she took a closer look at the stone.

She’d had a similar reaction when Gene surprised her with a one-carat diamond engagement ring just after Christmas in 1983. “If we’re going to do this,” he’d said as he slipped it on her

fi , “then you need a ring.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “This is more than I ever wanted.”

When they’d talked about an engagement ring, she’d said she would be fine with a simple wedding band. But Gene enjoyed buying expensive toys and gifts for himself and Margo, such as the pair of

matching Rolex watches— gold with black onyx, diamond-studded faces— that he’d bought for them before Allison was born.

Gene, like Margo, had grown up in a family where money was always tight. This was especially true after his father, a garbage man, died of cancer when Gene was only sixteen. Gene had to quit the football team and work odd jobs to help support his mother and older sister, then immediately joined the Army. So neither he nor Margo, whose father started one failed business after another, had grown up with nice things.

Gail’s jaw dropped open when she saw Gene’s latest gift, which was three times the size of Margo’s engagement ring.

“I’m sure they were thinking, ‘Where did he get the money to buy that?’ ” Margo said later. “Crazy me. I never once thought those things. I never once said, ‘How’d you buy this?’ I just didn’t. I guess I just assumed that we could afford it, that it was coming out of our savings and salary.”

Before Caroll had asked Gail to marry him, Gene offered to get him a good deal on a diamond ring from a jeweler he knew in Atlanta. Gene brought over three or four loose stones to show him, one of which Caroll bought, had mounted, and gave to his future wife as an engagement ring.

Years later, Caroll said he had had no inkling that Gene had been running a side business selling diamonds with Jerry York.

“I don’t know of anybody who was allowed to have a side business,” he said.