The FBI, a Vocation to Serve

By Robert A Casper Sr.

The FBI, A Vocation to Serve is about an FBI agent who saw his job as a vocation, not a job. Robert Casper takes you on a journey through his life as an FBI agent serving to protect the people of America. Throughout the book he describes how many agents were priests or in the seminary to become priests. You may be wondering how one goes from a priest to an FBI agent and the answer is simple. Most criminals are violent people and priests' vocation is to tend to their souls, while FBI agent's vocation is to get them off the street to protect those that can't defend themselves. The entire mission of the FBI is to protect the weaker and the integrity of the United States. They aim to use their God-given talents to protect and make society a safe and livable environment.

As Robert's children were growing up and beginning to join the workforce, he always reinforced to his children to service others. His motto is, if you have a hard time going to the office every day, maybe you are in the wrong field of work. Robert has fulfilled life and a vocation to serve. It was grand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781681390079

Book preview

The Beginning of a Fantastic Career

I was eighteen years old and out of high school and generally sick of school. I guess I was like most teenagers; I just wanted to work and not go to school. I did get a job in a warehouse working for minimum wage of $1 an hour. I made $8 a day or $40 a week. But I didn’t have to study, and my nights were mine. I was on easy street. Now my brother, Frank, and sister, Joan, were already working for the FBI. It all began when my sister was dating Bill McFaul, an FBI clerk. He lured her to the FBI, and my brother soon followed. My sister was a stenographer and my brother a clerk.

I did always want to be an FBI agent, but the idea of more school just turned me off. I did apply since I didn’t have to go to school and I would be working for the FBI. I wanted to be an FBI agent but didn’t, at first, want to earn it or work hard to get it. That would change.

On August 1, 1959, I received a call from the FBI telling me I passed the background investigation, and they asked if I wanted to join the FBI. I said, How about tomorrow?

Now all male clerks did go to school, and it was their example that got me back to school. I felt like I was on a long-distance run and I had to get into the race before life passed me by. After a few months, I was put on the night shift, working from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. I then was able to go to day school and for that year took a full college load. It was hard, but I did keep my eye on the ball, agent’s class.

After one year of day school and night-shift work, I was reassigned in the FBI to the day shift. That meant I needed to go to night school. After two years, I had sixty-six credits or enough to qualify for law school. I went to law school at night, and it took me three years to graduate with a law degree. One thing of note was that Spiro Agnew, the former VP under Nixon, taught at my school. I never had him because he was elevated to county executive before I was due to take his class. Guess what he taught? Criminal law. Agnew was loved in Baltimore; one problem he had was he was a crook.

During the five years of being a clerk, I was a file clerk, collecting confidential trash for burning, running the communications room of teletypes and phones, and putting pending and closed files back on the shelf. I was also the supply clerk for a year. I did indexing. Indexing was a very important part of the FBI records keeping.

My last two years I was an investigative clerk. I had credentials, and basically I checked records like DMV records, birth records, etc. In addition to checking records, I also went with agents on nonthreatening interviews. I was basically the witness to the interview, and my name went on the document which is known as an FD-302. Before I became an investigative clerk, I did have some interesting case told to me.

Those years as a night clerk, I really was under the influence of the night-duty agent. When time permitted, we talked. He told me about his cases, and I was super impressed. But I also learned about other cities. One agent was from Sausalito, California, just fifteen miles from my home today. It is a beautiful city, and when I asked him to describe it to me, he merely said, You have to be there to know what I am talking about. I had never been west of Cumberland, Maryland, so what did I know? One agent investigated the suspected communists, and I would drill him every night he worked. I knew then I wanted to be a security agent and a counterintelligence agent. I did think that the communists were the true threat to America and the free world, and I still do.

One of my duties was to check the Social Security Administration headquarters; this source in the Bureau was known as BACS source no. 5. Agents from around the country who had fugitive cases would send me requests to see if their fugitive was working under his true name and Social Security number after becoming a fugitive. Here’s how it worked. If a fugitive was a fugitive since March of 1960, I would see if he worked after that date. Social Security records are recorded every quarter, so if I determined that the fugitive was given credit for working the June 1960 quarter, that would mean he had been working since becoming a fugitive. Depending on the dangerousness of the fugitive, I would generally call the agent from around the country and give him the name of the fugitive’s present employer. Sometime around 1964, this source dried up. It appeared the FBI had no business checking these records, so no further check was made of them. But even as a lowly clerk, I did some other interesting things. Night clerks needed to be able to encode and decode messages when received in the communications room.

Selected clerks were instructed on the use of the AFSAM 7 machine. The machine would produce an encoded white tape about an inch wide. As you typed, the machine would make holes in the tape. When the message was done, you took it to the teletype machine and fed it through another machine. The tape would produce in hard copy groups of five letters. When the guy on the other end received that message, he would also press a button on the teletype machine that would start a tape. This tape would also contain five holes on each line. The clerk fed the tape through the machine, and the message came through in a clear text.

All of this was done in a locked vault that was in the center of the office with no windows. Imagine that, I was only nineteen years old and the keeper of the keys of the FBI. I couldn’t help but be impressed with the trust the office put in me. But that is how the FBI worked. We were all employees, clerks, stenos, and agents, and there was no rank, and the system worked beautifully.

My First Wiretaps

I never asked and never knew what exact authority the FBI used to wiretap in the 1950s. It was just done and had been for years. It was done only with the permission and knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover. It was also done with the knowledge of the attorney general, and I can attest to that. Bobby Kennedy did know about our wiretaps; he visited my taproom once.

But as a clerk, I also worked wiretaps in Baltimore. There were actually two wiretaps, and both were on gangsters. They were nighttime taps. It appeared these two guys were at the famous Appalachia meeting of gangsters. That was a meeting of gangsters that a New York highway patrolman happened upon, and he noticed a lot of cars with out-of-state plates parked near this one huge residence owned by a gangster. The police checked the tag numbers, and they learned these were gangsters from all over America. This occurred in the late 1950s. Two of those guys were from Baltimore. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was no antiracketeering laws or statutes like the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) that would come later. But new legislation did make it a federal crime to lay bets off over state lines or the transmission of gambling paraphernalia over state lines. That paraphernalia could be betting slip or telephone calls or slot machines. This meant you couldn’t lay off bets from Baltimore to New York, for instance. Lay off bets meant this.

There were many ways to play the numbers in Baltimore and many games like the California Lotto today. One such game was a series of three numbers. Let’s say that a number, 321, had too many bettors. If that number hit, it would cost the bookies a million dollars. He couldn’t afford that so he would lay off part of that amount to another gangster or a gangster from another state. The winning numbers were generally on the stock exchange page in the newspaper and maybe the end of the federal treasury number.

Many in Baltimore played the numbers. Gangsters ran the numbers racket in Baltimore, but maybe gangsters is too harsh a word. In Baltimore, there was very little violence with the gangsters, and in fact, one boss did not like violence.

Both of these criminals were into gambling and prostitution. Both ran strip clubs in Baltimore. At that time, no drugs were involved. One day agent Frank O’Neil came to me and said, It appears there will be a special assignment for me. He didn’t say it, but he wrote a note that said, Tech." I still had no idea what he was talking about. Shortly thereafter, I was called into the SAC office, and also present was the supervisor and case agents for these two mobsters. I was told I was going to work a wiretap. Imagine that. I was only twenty-one years old and a clerk, yet I was going to work a wiretap. Boy, I loved this job. I do think this is a method of getting clerks to want to be FBI agents. It did water my appetite for bigger and better cases. I did feel I was part of something special.

These wiretaps were unknown to the other clerks and other agents. Strictly need to know. Every agent and clerk or steno had a top secret clearance, but it was need to know only, and you soon learned that you were not to be curious about someone else’s work. You also learned not to discuss your cases with other agents or clerks, and we understood that. The agents might have speculated about what was going on in a certain room, but no one dared ask about it. The taproom contained two machines that would record any conversation I chose to record. I would spend the entire shift with earphones on but only start the machine when there was something worth tapping.

Now there are misurs and tesurs in the FBI. A misur is a tap of a room, and the tesur is a telephone tap. I would be working two misurs. The misurs had to be put in the room of most importance where the mobsters would most likely be talking. In this case both would be put in the offices of the criminals in their strip clubs. They were put in the offices at both nightclubs.

Hoover, I was told, approved forty-one wiretaps. No more or less. If you wanted a wiretap, you need to convince Hoover yours was better than the forty-one already in existence. Why forty-one? Don’t know. I do know that Bobby Kennedy as attorney general did approve a lot more than Hoover ever did. But it was Hoover that was the one violating America’s rights.

The listening post was in a special room in the FBI office. The room contents were secret in that only those approved to know what was going on in that room could go in that room. You needed a special key. One day I was working the tap in the afternoon about 6:00 p.m. and the special agent in charge, Ed Power, brought in Bobby Kennedy.

Attorney General Bobby Kennedy

I was introduced to him, and I still remember he was wearing a blue shirt, tie, and sport jacket. In his New England accent, he said, How are you, Bob? He asked what the tap was all about, and I told him. Now, Kennedy loved wiretaps, as I said before. I asked him if he wanted to hear some conversations, and he said he did. I did put on the tape player several conversations about gambling, and Kennedy seemed pleased and enjoyed it. As we all know, when he was running for president, he publicly stated he knew of few wiretaps and said he never approved them. That way, he put the blame on Hoover for his violation of American rights. I saw a character flaw in the man, but in those days, no one from the FBI leaked anything, and we went about our business. There were many rumors in the FBI about Hoover and Bobby Kennedy. Most of the public knew they didn’t get along, and the rumors substantiated that. It was rumored once that Hoover would not go to Kennedy’s office when he wanted to speak with Hoover. Hoover merely replied, He knows where my office is. The Kennedys hated Hoover but feared removing him from office. It was known in the Bureau that Hoover did have some good stuff on Jack Kennedy.

Although Bobby Kennedy stretched the facts and politician, to me he was a dedicated person. Is that inconsistent? He hated the mob, and we all know the feud between him and Jimmy Hoffa. He also was driven by his disdain for bigots in the segregation movement. Kennedy so wanted to get Hoffa that every case involving the Teamsters Union had the title Jimmy Riddle Hoffa. Every teamster case gave Bobby the hope he needed to get Hoffa, and he did. The Baltimore office did have a Hoffa squad. Bobby really dogged the man. He was also courageous when he forced the integration of the University of Alabama. Remember when Alabama governor George Wallace refused the black woman’s admission? He stood in the doorway, and Kennedy didn’t know how that would work out. If Wallace would have refused to move and the US marshals tried to remove him, what would the national guard of Alabama do? We can only speculate. I like Bobby’s agenda, but I probably wouldn’t have voted for him and someone I couldn’t trust.

As a result of the taps, one of the mobsters was charged and convicted of tax evasion. I remember I attended a meeting with the FBI and US Attorney’s Office, and the consensus of opinion of those there was that the gangster should not be sent up the river too long. He was a nonviolent person, and he was sentenced to nine months in jail, enough time to disrupt his operation. He had a big going-away party before he was to enter jail and in nine months had a big coming-out party. I enjoyed the experience, but more importantly, I really felt a part of the FBI and not just the clerical staff. It continued to open my eyes to the important role the FBI plays every day in protecting America.

Melvin Davis Rees—Murderer

I did enjoy the many FBI stories I was told as a clerk, but one was special to me. It was special because it taught me how to think logically and how the FBI investigate very important cases. I was not involved in this case, but I thought it would be an interesting reading.

When I was a clerk, there was a family that disappeared. A husband, wife, and children, both girls, ages three and one and a half. Shortly thereafter, the husband and the three-year-old were located in a shallow grave in Virginia, and later, the wife and the other child were found in the woods in Maryland. She had been raped and hanged from a tree in the woods. Her little daughter was killed by a blow to the head with a pistol. He hit the girl so hard the gun handle’s grips broke off and were found at the crime scene, and that would be his undoing.

It was a kidnapping case and did fit the criteria for FBI investigations. This case really caught my attention, and I followed the case to the end. The agents focused their attention in the Maryland area near Washington, DC, and Virginia. Imagine, if you will, someone so pressed for violent sex he spent at least three or four hours disposing of the husband and child, then went to Maryland to satisfy his psycho tendencies. He was a psychopath and a classic control issue.

Many leads were dead ends, but the case agent figured that maybe he didn’t kill all of his rape victims. He did clean up the crime scenes, which indicated to the case agent that he did it before. So the agents from the Silver Springs, Maryland, resident agency decided to look at unsolved rapes. The case agent reasoned that if a psychopath would kidnap an entire family to satisfy his perverted needs, maybe he would kidnap a couple just to get the woman. He also concluded that the husband and children must have been put in the truck to drive from county to county. He realized it would be very difficult to drive away in a car with four people, including two adults.

Now there were numerous rapes that were unsolved in both Maryland and Virginia. Several were interesting, but one caught the case agent’s eye. This was a rape at lovers’ lane in Virginia. Evidently, the rapist would come upon a car with lovers and, with a weapon, force the man into the trunk while he raped the girl in the car. The woman did survive the rape and left the guy in the trunk for the victim to release him. Why didn’t he kill her and her