Twisted Triangle (7 page)

Amid Margo’s deepening discontent with Gene, Allison provided a bright spot for her, especially when the toddler uttered her fi expressive phrase right around the age of two. She was not so pleased, however, with Allison’s word choice.

Allison was sitting in her high chair in the kitchen, holding a two-handed sippy cup full of milk. She took a long slug, then set it down with a sigh of pleasure.

“Ah, shit,” she muttered.

Margo took one look at Gene and said sarcastically, “Some things have got to change around here.”

Gene just laughed. Whenever he talked on the phone, particularly with Jerry, it was “fuck this” and “fuck that sumbitch,” so Margo decided she’d better start taking the child out of the room when Gene was on the phone.

Around spring 1988, Linda and Leon Blakeney, a married FBI couple the Bennetts had worked with in Atlanta, came to the area on bureau business and stopped by the house for a barbecue.

As the two couples were catching up, the Bennetts explained that they’d purchased the land in Manassas, about two hundred acres of farmland in Kentucky, two four-wheelers— one for the Nokesville house and one for the Kentucky farm— and a giant truck that was parked in the driveway when the Blakeneys pulled up. Margo was wearing about $25,000 in gold jewelry and diamonds; she and Gene also had on their Rolex watches.

After dinner, Margo and Linda were cleaning up after their steak dinner.

“Where are y’all getting all this money?” Linda asked. “I mean I know what you make. I just don’t understand.”

Margo shrugged and said they’d been saving for years. They never took extravagant vacations. They just worked and hung out with Allison.

“Gene handles all the fi she told Linda.

But to herself, Margo acknowledged that Linda had a point. “I really hadn’t thought about what it looked like,” she later

recalled.

Margo and Gene started trying to get pregnant again in March, and by May they were successful. Their second daughter, whom they named Lindsey, was born on January 17, 1989.

On Margo’s second day in the hospital, the doctor said he thought Lindsey had a heart murmur.

“They heard a swooshing sound,” Margo said later. “Gene used to say it sounded like a sump pump.”

The doctor referred them to Children’s Hospital, where they did an echocardiogram and discovered that Lindsey had two holes in her heart, one in the ventricular wall and the other in the atrial wall. While they were examining her, they also discovered she had pneumonia, so they admitted her. She stayed there for ten days, with Margo at her side, sleeping in a cot next to the bed.

Every day, Gene would bring Allison to visit, and Margo would play with her for a little while in the waiting area.

Margo was worried because the doctors were saying Lindsey might need surgery. “This was my baby, and she was sick,” she recalled.

Lindsey’s heart defect wasn’t fatal, but Margo was worried that her daughter would grow up with a disability that would limit her life. At the end of the ten days, however, she felt somewhat reassured. The doctors said the holes often closed up by the age of two, so surgery might not be necessary.

For the next two months, Margo took Lindsey to the pediatrician once a week for a checkup, and for the next two years, she took her to the cardiologist once a month. Margo had to quit breast-feeding so that they could put Lindsey on a high-calorie formula. They also gave the baby medication to help regulate her heartbeat and a diuretic to keep fl out of her lungs.

“She was a mess, but she was a happy baby,” Margo said.

By the time Lindsey was two years old, one of the holes had closed up and the other had shrunken enough to stave off the need for surgery. The doctor suggested that they continue to monitor Lindsey’s heart on an annual basis, but Margo was relieved they were over the hump, at least for the time being.

In July 1990, Gene and Margo decided they needed to set up some fi and legal protections to provide for their children and each other, so they wrote up a will and set up a trust for the girls. They also took out separate $1 million life insurance policies, naming each other as the benefi , and signed power of attorney documents for each other.

“This was all done with the understanding that if anything happened to either one of us, the remaining person would be able to make fi transactions,” Margo said later.

As Gene grew disillusioned with his assignment with the Soviet squad, he began looking for a new position. When he learned that a spot had opened up in the Management Science Unit at Quantico, a sister unit to Margo’s, where they taught leadership, management techniques, and agent supervision, he asked Margo what the job would be like and whether he should apply for it.

Margo explained that he would be teaching at the National Academy and encouraged him to go for it.

“I knew he was very unhappy, and I felt the academic challenge at the academy would channel him in a different direction. But at that time, that wasn’t what he was looking for,” she recalled. “I think he was looking for an environment where he could do whatever he wanted.”

Margo knew that unlike an undercover operation, where Gene was in charge and could spend time in bars and nightclubs as part of his job, a teaching position at Quantico would seem overly structured and restrictive to her husband.

“You can’t afford to go out and bounce around and play outside for the entire day, not when you have to be prepared for a four-hour class,” she said later.

The day before Gene’s interview, he was feeling pretty confi dent. After talking to Dick Ayers, who was in charge of the Management Science Unit, Gene was expecting an easy afternoon of talking to a panel about himself and his background.

“Sounds like a piece of cake,” he said.

But Margo knew better: he was going to have to give a presentation to show his teaching skills.

“What are you going to talk about?” she asked.

“Dick Ayers said I can just get up there and wing it,” he said.

The next day, Gene came by Margo’s offi after he’d fi

his interview. He was agitated because they’d asked him to give a twenty-minute presentation.

“Dick told me that I didn’t need to prepare for the presentation, and I feel like I was set up,” Gene said as they walked to their cars.

Margo was embarrassed about how badly Gene had done in his interview, but she felt she could be honest with John Hess.

About a week after Gene’s interview, she asked, “Gene didn’t do too well on the presentation, did he?”

“No, no he didn’t. He just didn’t come in prepared.”

It wasn’t until a few years later that John Hess told her what John Velier, an instructor who would later replace Ed Tully as their boss, had said about Gene: “He struck me as the kind of guy that you couldn’t trust,” John Velier said. “I would always have to lock my desk when I left the room if he was my offi mate.”

Dick Ayers, who rode with Ed Tully to work every morning for seventeen years, felt the same way.

Ed later recalled, “Dick Ayers thought he was a complete phony, and he was right on the money. Dick had him pegged from day one. . . . He was a bullshitter, and they don’t really garner a lot of trust.”

In September 1989, Margo, Gene, and the girls went back to Champaign, Illinois, where Gene was born, to see his widowed mother, Alene, who was dying of breast cancer. Gene returned to Champaign in mid-November and got a temporary transfer to the bureau offi there so he could stay and take care of her. Margo and the girls stayed behind in DC.

Alene was about fi feet four inches, and had a soft look about her. Like Gene, she battled with her weight. At one point she’d been heavy, then lost quite a few pounds, evidenced by the loose skin hanging from her arms. A sun worshipper, she baked herself in shorts and tank top whenever possible, so her face was always tanned. The pack of cigarettes she smoked every day only deepened the wrinkles.

Alene shared a modest lifestyle with Gene’s sister, Linda, in a ranch-style house with three bedrooms and one bathroom, built in the 1950s. Alene operated a child-care business out of their living room, so it was cluttered with baskets of toys.

Linda, who was three years older than Gene, was an elementary school teacher and spoke in a high-pitched, childlike voice. She had gone away to college, then came home to live with her mother, who treated Linda more like a sister than a daughter.

Unlike Gene, Alene didn’t use profanity, and although she didn’t go to the local Baptist church while Margo and Gene were visiting, she did attend regularly. Gene told Margo he was raised Baptist, but he never wanted to go to church.

Alene’s family had grown up poor in rural Kentucky, living in abandoned houses and playing in the woods. She and Hazel, one of her younger sisters, once told Margo they used to climb onto people’s roofs to watch where the road workers put their lunch pails, then stole their food.

“We were just terrible,” Alene said, nodding.

“I wonder if they ever fi out where their lunches were going?” Hazel asked rhetorically.

Alene turned to Margo and said, “We didn’t have any food.

That’s how poor we were.”

After Gene’s mother died in December 1989, he came back to Virginia around Christmastime, planning to return to Illinois to settle the estate after the holidays. On his fi night back, he complained to Margo about Linda.

“I hate her,” he said. “I thought of sneaking back and releasing cockroaches under the house.” Then he laughed and said, “She’s terrifi of cockroaches. That would really show her.”

Gene had told Margo that he’d never gotten along with his sister. “He always felt that she was a goody-two shoes and a stick in the mud,” she said later.

When he went back to Champaign the fi week of January, he immediately sued Linda, accusing her of draining their mother’s bank account. The estate and lawsuit were all settled in a short trial at the end of the month, when the judge ordered all assets to be split between the two siblings.

All told, the estate was worth about $150,000, including cash and proceeds from the sale of the house. Gene packed up a bunch of his mother’s belongings into boxes, shipped them back to Virginia, and came home.

Hazel and her husband, Harry, called Gene on his fi night back. Apparently, they found Linda in a fl and the house a mess when they returned from dropping Gene off at the airport in Indianapolis. Linda said Gene was responsible and accused him of taking all kinds of family photographs and other items of sentimental value to her.

“Can you believe it? That crazy bitch blamed me for trashing the house,” Gene told Margo, laughing.

He explained that he’d taken Hazel and Harry through the house before they’d gone to the airport, and it had been in immac-ulate shape. “She didn’t think I would have shown the house to

Hazel and Harry. She must have come in, pitched a fit and trashed the house and then blamed it on me.”

At the time, Margo believed Gene’s story. But years later, she fi that Gene was spinning legends again, that he must have booked a later flight so he could sneak back to trash the house and make Linda look like she was nuts.

Linda got married, moved to Florida, had a family, and, as far as Margo knows, never spoke to Gene again.

In mid-1991, Margo started talking to Gene about wanting a third child, which she thought might help her stay engaged in the marriage. But he said no.

“I want to make sure that we can provide for our kids and ourselves,” he said, explaining that he couldn’t see putting three kids through college. “Having a third child will put a strain on us fi .”

Margo accepted his answer, but fi it was still up for discussion.

Around the same time, Gene finally got the new challenge he’d been seeking. He was transferred to the Public Corruption Squad in Tyson’s Corner, an arm of the Washington field offi where he was assigned to ferret out elected offi who were taking bribes, exchanging favors for votes, or manipulating land transactions or rezoning efforts.

On July 15, he received a commendation letter from Washington’s special agent in charge, Thomas DuHadway, for his recently approved Operation Doubletalk, an undercover case resulting from more than two years of investigative work.