102 /

Mark Winegardner

Agent Halvorsen Addresses the Space Coast Optimists

[This speech is among forty-four linear feet of files Barnaby “Hal” Halvorsen left to the Golden Valley Lutheran College library. Block letters at the top read, “Cocoa Beach, Fla./June 8, 1986.”]

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, as I have always had a “soft spot” for the Optimists Club. Though I am not a member, I am related to you via my old friend and your fellow Optimist, Mr. Roy Nygard, who worked so hard to organize this program. [Pause + applaud Roy.] If I may say so, I am also your ally in spirit. It is an honor to recite your creed with you, especially the last tenet, which to me is the most stirring: the promise to be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble. What lofty aims, however elusive, especially for a man who spent his salad days dancing with the twin devils of cynicism: one, that nothing is what it seems and, two, that everyone has something to hide. I, gentlemen, applaud you. [step back from podium + applaud them.]

Every law enforcement officer who has been engaged in investigative matters has that one case that gnaws at his soul on sleepless nights. For yours truly—a former Special Agent in Mr. Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation—that case involved a Mr. Kenneth Allen Kitts.

If you’re of a “certain age” and can remember the two episodes devoted to Kitts on the CBS radio program “Gang Busters,” you may think you know the ground this story will cover. But please bear with me, because in order to tell you his story, I need to tell you mine.

I am what is known as a flat-foot, which turned out to be a lucky break for two reasons. Number one because in my youth, “flat-foot” was slang for police officer. When word got out on the playground up in Minneapolis, where Roy and I grew up, that I had the medical condition of the same name, meaning the arches of my feet touched the ground, everyone gave me the business. For a while my nickname was “Fuzzy,” as in “fuzz,” a term that came about because of the static on the radios the police began to use at that time, which was the 1920s. The name-calling never got to me. In fact, it made me take an interest in the police.

Five Points / 103

I collected Dick Tracy comics and crime magazines. I had a crank-up siren mounted to the handlebars of my bike. Once, Roy and myself and some other boys were down by the river playing cops and robbers. When Roy said I had to be a robber for a change, I socked him in the mouth. I immediately regretted this, number one because Roy was my best friend and more so because as maybe some of you know, he was destined to become a professional prizefighter.

[pause + rub chin as if it still hurts.] Seriously, though, “Fuzzy” didn’t stick, but the same could not be

said for my fascination with the police, especially the FBI, which by then was under the watchful eye of Mr. Hoover and apprehending notorious hoodlums such as Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and John Dillinger. A dream was born, but first I had to overcome a few problems.

One, I had an enlarged thyroid. Two, my vision was marginal. Three, I was not only flat-footed but slow-footed, too, with times in the quarter-mile and two-mile runs that didn’t cut the mustard. Four, my father disapproved of my dream and wanted me to go to work in some capacity at Pillsbury, where he’d risen high in the bookkeeping ranks, especially for a fellow with no college degree, which he was determined that I go and get for myself. Five was that degree, which I needed to join the Bureau, but Father insisted that I take business courses. I refused. I struggled in classes that didn’t interest me. I “stuck to my guns,” and Father did likewise. He was a quiet, principled man, a first-generation immigrant from Norway but with English so American he could have been on the radio. In the bleak years after Mother died of a botched tonsillectomy, Father forsook any interest in women or hobbies other than reading and instead devoted himself to his work and raising us kids. He did a fine job, too, but from the moment I finished high school, I was on my own, financially speaking. Joining the local police would not have provided me with enough time to also get my degree, so instead I took odd jobs in stockrooms, taverns, and mailrooms, anything that left room for my studies.

I got mixed signals from people I talked to in law enforcement about what course of study would be best. Thus, my education was chopped up between two years of a night school pre-law program that turned out to be unaccredited, then two more years eking by at the University of Minnesota. By then, I was old enough to apply for the Bureau, and I did so. The head of the field office was Special Agent Frank Hanratty, a

104 / Winegardner

“gentle giant” if ever there was one. Though he wouldn’t let my four-year hodgepodge of classes substitute for a degree, he watched me shaking and sweating, full of ambition, and took pity on me. He gave me a job as a file clerk.

Needless to say, I was on “cloud nine.” I had a steady girl, Agnes, and when I came home full of joy over the foot I had in the door, I blurted out a marriage proposal. Aggie said yes. She didn’t mind that all I could afford was the smallest ring they had at Dayton’s Department Store. We “tied the knot,” and a year later, our first boy was born. I enrolled at Golden Valley Lutheran and kept taking classes. I worked my way from Files to the Messenger Room and then to Clerical Supervisor of the entire midnight shift. I was moving up, but we were struggling. Aggie had to work, too, as a librarian. Her mother watched the baby for us. Every few weeks I’d ask Agent Hanratty about getting to my goal. Every time he’d chuckle and ask to see my diploma.

Which brings me to reason number two that being a flat-foot turned out to be a lucky break, which had to do with December 7, 1941, that fateful “day that will live in infamy.”

What passion we all felt for our country! Even among the sorrows of war, there was optimism in the air. We felt we could do anything, even defeat the biggest armies in history. In spite of the baby, I would have volunteered to go fight if not for one thing: these feet.

[extend one foot then the other toward audience? play this by ear.] Instead, I sat down that night and wrote a letter from my heart. I

discussed our national crisis and the agents the FBI would be losing to the war effort and pointed out the things I’d learned while serving as a clerk and studying for a degree. I am not a prideful man, but what pride I had I swallowed and begged to be inducted into the Bureau. Again I was thwarted.

Still, I was undeterred. I was president of our neighborhood patrol, which got written up in the Pioneer Post as the best such outfit in the Twin Cities, while continuing to “bust my tail” to be the finest Clerical Supervisor there was. I got promoted to first shift and spearheaded an initiative aimed at saving paperclips, carbon paper, erasers, and the like. My zeal may have made me a pill to work with—Agnes pointed this out at the time—so it’s possible Agent Hanratty wanted to get me out of his hair. In any case, in May of 1942, he handed me a letter from Mr. Hoover himself that accepted my application and directed me to report to Quantico for

Five Points / 105

expedited wartime training. Agnes threw me a party at the Lutheran Social Hall. Father, who was not a drinker, got up in front of everyone and raised a glass and announced that my mother would have been proud. He knocked back his drink, pushed his round wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose, sat down, and looked away. I stood and thanked him for his support. What can be lost from taking the high road? Before dawn the next day, I was on a train in pursuit of my dream, which got off the ground in earnest when I was assigned to the Birmingham, Alabama field office.

It was there that I first came into contact with Kenneth Allen Kitts.During my initial probationary period, when I was what’s called

a First Office Agent, I was assigned to Violent Crime. My first major investigation concerned Nick Montos, a skilled stick-up and escape artist. Montos would later be the first person ever to make the Ten Most Wanted List twice. Even back then, he was wanted for crimes and jailbreaks in sixteen eastern states. He was believed to be operating out of Tennessee and Alabama, and the investigation was being conducted along with agents from the Knoxville field office.

Although a First Office Agent should not be given unsupervised assignments, the War had left us thin, and I thus had the chance to be stationed in a room overlooking the entrance of the Tutwiler Hotel, armed with a camera and a stack of mugshots of Montos and his associates, one of whom was Kitts. Montos was known to pamper himself in luxury hotels, and the Tutwiler was the swankiest place in Birmingham. I’d been watching it for a while with no sign of anyone of interest until, one night, a good two hours before the end of my shift, I heard a knock at the door. It was the proper knock cadence. I went to the door and opened it a crack.

[Use Southern accent.] “It’s Agent Elmer Plankington, with the Knoxville office.”

He “roast-beefed” me, which is to say flashed his badge. I let him in. He was a dapper, barrel-chested fellow with slicked-back blonde hair. Plankington said that one of the other Knoxville agents had gotten a tip about a jewel heist Montos was planning for later that night. Plankington told me he’d secured an OK from Morton Wood, my Special Agent in Charge or SAC, to ride to the site with me, as I had a Bureau vehicle, a “BuCar,” and Plankington did not.

“How did you get here?” I asked.“I’m staying across the street,” he told me.“Lucky you,” I said.

106 / Winegardner

“Not really,” he told me. “We’re four to a room over there. You’re bunking at home with the wife,” he said, nodding toward my ring finger, “so I’d say you’re the lucky one.”

I admitted that he was right, though I worked most nights, and Agnes and I hardly ever slept at the same time.

“You’re new, aren’t you?” he asked. “With the Bureau, I mean?”“Four years,” I told him, which counted my time as a file clerk also. I

felt funny for misleading him. That wasn’t the sort of agent I wanted to be. “What about you?” I asked.

“Five years.” He frowned and adjusted his jacket so I could see his gun. It felt like watching a dog quietly baring its teeth. “Look,” he said, “the other Knoxville men are there already. They left me behind because I pulled a double shift yesterday and needed shuteye.”

I hoped his irritation might simply be due to lack of sleep. I asked when the heist was supposed to happen. He said that they weren’t sure, which was all the more reason to get there pronto. I stored the camera and we left.

In no time flat we were lost somewhere in Smithfield, a black neighborhood. Back then, cars weren’t equipped with two-way radios, so we couldn’t call for directions. Plankington was the kind of man who let out long breaths frequently. I couldn’t tell if he was tense over the neighborhood or the running late. I pulled into a filling station. Plankington let out a long sigh. “About time,” he said, and then went to use the facilities.

The pump jockey was an old black gentleman who’d lived in Birmingham all his life. He laughed when he heard how we came, and he gave me an entirely new set of directions.

After several minutes, I wondered if Plankington’s irritability had to do with bowel trouble, so I went to check on him. I knocked. Nothing. I turned the handle. Locked. Then my car door slammed. I spun around in time to see Plankington running down the street, laughing.

Except that there was no Agent Plankington. “Plankington” was the name of a school for incorrigible boys in South

Dakota, where the man who used that name spent his teen years. That man was Kenneth Allen Kitts. The picture I had of him was a poor likeness. The knock cadence? He’d observed it. He was surveilling us.

That the Birmingham and Knoxville field offices were working together on the case had been in the papers. The badge? A fake. After

Five Points / 107

that, I always looked more closely, but it was a costly lesson. The Southern accent was a fake, too.

I’d left the keys in the car. Kitts took them. Meanwhile, the Tutwiler Hotel itself was robbed: the safe, the jewelry store, a bigger haul than I’d have thought possible. The suspect wore a mask and was built like Nick Montos. He got away “scot-free,” and then—we learned years afterward—sauntered back inside a while later and took the stairs to his room. Later that night, Kitts made it back, too, bearing the suitcase full of loot that Montos had stashed nearby.

As for myself, I didn’t try to cover my “you-know-what.” I’d made up my mind to tell Agent Wood the truth about everything. He was none too happy, but he told me that because I was new, he would show mercy. The fingerprint evidence from the “BuCar” allowed us to ID Kitts, thus adding Impersonation of a Federal Agent to his rap sheet.

We were about the same age, Kitts and myself, Midwestern boys who could have passed for cousins. Yet I’d lived my life playing by the rules, and here this thug was, wearing a fine suit, living high, and laughing at me. The more I dug into the case, largely on my own time because I’d been confined to office duty, the more he seemed to be my mirror-image. He was in trouble with the law from an early age. I wanted to be the law. He’d starred as flanker for the Plankington football team and was “fleet of foot.” I was cut from my school’s team because of my flat, slow feet. Kitts had keen eyesight. My glasses got thicker every year. Kitts escaped from where his choices took him—reform school, prison, etc.—whereas I yoked myself to goals and obligations. He had no legitimate children. My rented house was filling up with them. But when I learned that his father died from a botched tonsillectomy, I got spooked and dizzy. Did Kitts somehow know about my mother? This only made my memory of his laugh more excruciating. It was nothing like the laughter from my fellow agents, razzing me about the “boner” I pulled. Kitts’s laugh made me feel toyed with. I was not pursuing enough happiness to ward off the presence of trouble.

[pause + let that sink in.]My temporary reassignment to office duty eventually passed, yet the

effects of the incident that provoked it did not.By this time, Agnes and I had three children and the challenges that go

with that plus a fourth on the way. My hours were long ones, number one, because of my work ethic. For example, I came in early each day to spend

108 / Winegardner

extra time on the shooting range. Number two, I took a personal interest in Kitts, which, technically, was beyond the purview of my duties. Number three, I hoped to get on the good side of my SAC and fellow agents. As for the latter, I admit I spent too much time and money in bars after my shift, being the “life of the party.” I didn’t realize that my enlarged thyroid made it more difficult for me to metabolize alcohol than it was for the next guy. As for Agent Wood, he had received grief for how he assigned his manpower on the night of the Tutwiler Hotel robbery, and rumor had it that the mercy he showed me was forced upon him. He began to resent me. He wrote me up for having a messy desk, for retrieving too many of my dictated reports from the typing pool to try to improve their clarity, and even for tying up the office phone with long-distance calls to the contacts I was working on in the Kitts case. While the SAC in Omaha appreciated these efforts, this was lost on Agent Wood.

My long hours and the fact of Agnes’s mother passing away in a house fire at about that time made it unfeasible for Aggie to return to library work. I now realize, in this era of “Women’s Lib,” that she needed her job for self-actualization, but at the time I had no idea.

Two years later, Kitts re-surfaced in Omaha, living in a mansion on Turner Boulevard and represented by one of the best attorneys in Nebraska, a man with ties to the Kansas City crime syndicate. In those days, the Bureau did not use the word “Mafia,” but I was an exception and so was the SAC in Omaha, Anthony Bianchi, who happened to be of Italian extraction. The lawyer got our case thrown out of court, even the charge of Impersonating a Federal Agent, on what some would call technicalities. I, however, call them “laws.” America is a country of laws, which is what makes us great. Our system works, even if, like the Good Lord, it does so in mysterious ways. If saying so makes me an “optimist,” I plead guilty.

After the Kitts case collapsed, I cut out the front-page picture of him and his lawyer, with Kitts’s arm raised [raise arm] as if that dandified thief was the heavyweight champion of the world. I taped it to the wall above my desk. Soon after that, I started receiving pornographic postcards at my home address with only the word “Plankington” on the back, in block letters, which gives handwriting experts nothing to go on. A lawyer could claim that the postcards were coming from someone in my office, trying to hound me out of the Bureau. Meanwhile, I had to forbid my wife and children from getting the mail.

Shifting gears here: who among us has not lost something that was

Five Points / 109

awful to lose? I’m not talking about loved ones or dreams, but things. A wedding ring, for example. A pocket watch that once belonged to your grandfather. Or a large sum of money. I’m not going to ask for a “show of hands.” I simply want you to put yourself into my flat-footed shoes so that you feel what I felt when I lost my gun.

I was back on Violent Crimes and among other things still working the Montos case. We had a lead on him, in the form of a letter his sister sent to a couple just outside Birmingham, with instructions to forward it to Montos. We believed he was staying with the couple or expected soon. We staked out the house. It was in a new suburb, with few trees and amid a maze of streets that offered them six different ways to drive off. The couple had two late-model vehicles capable of high rates of speed. We had two “BuCars” on the scene, parked strategically. Neither was signed out to me because of my earlier trouble. I had to walk back and forth from one car to the other, maneuvering so as not to arouse suspicion, which two men in a car sitting in one place for a long time will do. It was taxing physical duty, especially for someone who’s not the fastest fellow, but I gave it my “all.” The War had ended and the agents who bravely served our nation overseas had returned. They called me “clagent,” which is a Bureau term for men who start out as clerks, and I suspect that they sent me car to car more than necessary, just for sport.

One cold day in March, though, a day that included numerous occasions when I had to go in and out of the “BuCars,” I lost my gun. I was wearing an overcoat, and I had no idea when it happened. I didn’t notice it was gone until I got home that night and began to undress.

I went into a panic, which awoke Aggie, who surmised that maybe I’d lost the gun after my shift, since, owing to my thyroid problems, I appeared to be intoxicated. I took her concern at face value. She and I tried to work out a plan. The tavern where I’d been was frequented by FBI and police, so going back and asking about my gun seemed unthinkable. Aggie volunteered to go in herself, many months “p.g.” The offer moved me, but I of course could not accept.

In the morning, I called in sick, which wasn’t far from the truth. After we dropped off our older kids at school, I placed a lost-and-found ad in the newspaper and then drove Aggie around to all the pawnshops. To keep from embarrassing the Bureau, I stayed in the car with the baby while she went in. When the baby slept, I took my personal weapon from the glove box and tried sitting in my car with that coat on, both with the gun in my

110 / Winegardner

holster and without. I felt no difference. I asked Aggie to do the same. At first she stood outside our car, staring at me, but her reluctance finally gave way. As “with-child” as she was, she was a sight in that shoulder holster. Her conclusion was also that she, too, didn’t feel any difference.

Aggie suggested I retrace my steps from the day before. Negative, I told her. There were too many steps to retrace. More importantly, it would be detrimental to the investigation for me to canvass a residential area, asking citizens if they’d happened to come across a Colt revolver. But the fact remained that I was desperate. We had to do something. So I got in the back with the baby and lay down on the floor while Aggie drove slowly through the subdivision, craning her neck and looking in vain for my gun.

Finally, right as the tavern was opening, I broke down, went in, and asked the owner if he’d found a gun. He hadn’t, but I was a good customer and he promised not to say anything. I thanked him. Then Aggie and I went to pick up our kids from school.

After supper, I borrowed one of Aggie’s wigs, a short-haired number, and returned to the surveillance area. To my relief, the “BuCars” were nowhere in sight. In the time before dark I was able to conduct a thorough search. The weather had grown hot and I was sweating. Then, just as I was about to give up, my heart soared. I spied something black under a hedgerow. I reached down. It shot out and bit me in the wrist. It was a snake, almost six feet long. I pulled out my personal weapon and emptied it. The last shot blew part of its head off. Neighbors came running out of their houses, which is an irrational response to gunfire, even in the suburbs. I didn’t know how long it would take poison to reach my heart, so I picked up what was left of the snake and ran to my car, losing the wig in the process. As Roy Nygard can attest from some of our boyhood mishaps, I bleed more than most people. I had to fight the urge to pass out.

At the hospital, I learned I’d been bitten by a rat snake. It wasn’t poisonous, but, judging from my bloody, swollen wrist, I could not agree with their assessment of it as “harmless.”

The next morning, I bypassed the shooting range and went straight to Agent Wood to come clean. I expected all heck to break loose, but he stayed calm—which was actually more frightening—and even asked about my bandaged wrist. “A snake bit it,” I said. Then he, too, laughed at me—a soft little laugh, the kind that said, as low as I was in his eyes, he never thought I was this bad. [Demonstrate.] Then he sent me home to await disciplinary action.

Five Points / 111

I heard nothing from my lost-and-found ad or from the pawnshops. A few days later, the latest postcard came, this one of a naked lady sitting atop a jukebox with her head thrown back and her hands placed strategically enough for the Postal Service to deliver it. On the back, in the usual block letters, was a different message. “Want your piece back? Ha ha. / Plankington.”

The postmarks on the other postcards had varied, but this one was from Omaha. The others hadn’t had any fingerprints that didn’t belong to postal workers, and it seemed safe to assume the same of this one. The postcard didn’t necessarily mean that Kenneth Allen Kitts had my gun, but it must mean he’d heard about it. Maybe from a pawnshop owner who’d spotted me in the car and put two and two together. Maybe from the couple we were surveilling or from Nick Montos. Maybe again Kitts was surveilling me.

For the rest of the day and into the night, I sat on a picnic table in my yard, smoking cigarettes and with no appetite for food or drink, tortured about what to do. In the end, I chose patience. I would keep this postcard to myself and, for the moment, do nothing.

What happened to me next is known as a “Four-Bagger”: censure, transfer, suspension, and probation.

The censure came straight from Mr. Hoover. To this day, I shudder to think about it. I remember every scathing word, including the exact amount of the check that I had to write to the U.S. Treasury to pay for my lost gun, which was $28.91.

I knew to expect a transfer, too. I tried—as you Optimists say—to look on the sunny side and make my optimism come true. I’d chosen Omaha as my office of preference, but important work gets done in any field office, so I starting reading up on Anchorage, Puerto Rico, and the like. When the time came, Agent Wood didn’t even call me into his office. He just tossed an envelope on my desk and kept walking.

I was going to Omaha! Not even Des Moines, North Platte, or one of the branches but Omaha itself. I knew that SAC Wood figured that if SAC Bianchi wanted me he could have me, but Mort Wood was a good man. When I shouted out my gratitude, he pretended to ignore me.

My suspension—“beach time,” it’s called—was for three months. My probation, the fourth bag, came with a pay cut and would go on for one year.

I took my medicine like a man, although going to Omaha softened

112 / Winegardner

the blow. However, I was barely settled in when I got laid low with what I thought was a bad ticker. [Point to heart.] I was in my early 30s, but it was racing like those stock cars up at Daytona. My eyeballs bulged out so far they scared my kids. It turned out that my thyroid was attacking other parts of my body. To tell you the kind of man Mr. Hoover was, he sent me a letter wishing me a swift convalescence and thanking me for sending him those dirty postcards so that they could be examined by experts.

During this time, Father, who’d retired from Pillsbury, came with his new wife, a former nurse, to help out. Aggie got hired on at the library at Creighton University, and we had plenty of room, for a change. We were staying in a big Tudor home that belonged to an Army colonel stationed in Japan who needed someone to housesit and watch his dogs. He wore us out writing letters to the dogs, never to us. I couldn’t bring myself to write back pretending to be a poodle, especially while I was ill, though I did let him know that one of them, Flopsie, ran off, which was a white lie, as it was run over by Father’s Chrysler. The colonel was outraged, but his complaints weren’t directed at us. Everything was addressed to the surviving dogs. True story.

My first day back at work I felt reborn. Although I spent most of the day helping other men with paperwork, I was able to speak briefly with Agent Bianchi. I would not be investigating Kitts per se because there was no open Kitts investigation. Still, the cases I’d be working seemed substantial. The FBI I grew up idolizing was a force for change, not just a protector of the status quo. I mean no criticism of Mr. Hoover’s obsession with Communism, but it was crime, not ideas, that I wished to fight. Tony Bianchi was a throwback to this same mindset. I was thrilled to be under his command.

That night at supper, as I recounted my day, Father seemed annoyed. My enthusiasm may have been too much for someone who wasn’t committed to a victorious attitude for daily living.

“You know what your problem is?” Father said to me.As a professional investigator, I had a few theories. But I held my

tongue, especially in front of my children.“Your problem is, you’re a man who’s built to fall in line but unable

to stay in step.”I suspect he’d read this somewhere. Father was a reader but not an

original thinker.“That’s a rotten thing to say,” Aggie said, “about your own flesh and

Five Points / 113

blood.”“You’re his wife,” Father said. “Surely you, better than anyone, know

that I’m right.”“Whatever kind of man I am,” I told Father, “I don’t need my wife to

defend me.”Aggie took offense at this only because she didn’t understand how

I meant it. She and Father’s wife rose and started clearing the table. The children scattered and went to their rooms.

I pointed out to Father that I didn’t go into bookkeeping or business, as he’d demanded.

“That’s a primary example,” Father said, “of your inability to stay in step.”

“I do have flat feet,” I blurted. I was trying to make a joke.Father reached across the table and grabbed me by the wrist. “I only

hope you don’t get yourself killed,” he said. This, I now realize, was his way of telling me he loved me. I was unable to hear what he was really saying while he was still here to say it.

Instead, I politely asked him to leave the next morning. They left that very night. Aggie and my kids begged them to stay, but it was a waste of breath. The wife waved as they drove off. Father’s hands gripped the wheel at ten and two. His eyes were fixed toward home.

[pause. don’t forget to drink water.]That unpleasantness aside, and with my medical problems under

control, it seemed that my ship had come steaming into Omaha. My gun had not turned up, but neither was there evidence it had been used to commit a crime. No one called me “clagent.” The two most decorated SA’s in the district took me under their respective wings, which kept the others from treating me as if they feared my bad luck would infect them. My probationary period flew by. I showed a flair for developing informants. The best ones are motivated by fear or self-importance, and I had an instinct for seeing this in people. At home, I’d received no new postcards. My kids were healthy and attending the very fine Omaha city schools. Aggie’s little sister Cora, a redheaded “firecracker,” came to live with us and watch them. And Aggie got a promotion at the library. As time went by, her work outside the home became less a source of friction, though I admit that I remained a product of my times.

I had not, I assure you, forgotten about our “friend,” Mr. Kitts.Omaha had more bars per capita than any city in America, many of

114 / Winegardner

which were fronts. It was a national “layoff center” for the Mafia, meaning that bookies elsewhere placed bets in Omaha to spread their risk. Omaha had ties to the biggest bookies in the U.S., even Meyer Lansky, who controlled the Dodge Park Kennel Club, just over the river in Council Bluffs.

What did this have to do with Kitts? Number one, it put him in touch with men who knew how to unload anything he was of a mind to steal. Even bartenders with no connection to anything illegal were still in the know. It was child’s play for an undercover agent to find out how to fence jewelry or move a stolen Cadillac or a bag of “mary jane.” The biggest fish in the pond was Bennie “The Blimp” Barone, a café owner connected to the people atop the Omaha underworld. Given Kitts’s outward display of wealth, it seemed certain he was or would be in need of Barone’s services, and we worked with local police so as to monitor that situation.

Number two, and better yet, Omaha and its environs were swarming with people who drank and gambled too much. Thus, on any given night, all over town, there were people running around loose-lipped and/or carrying more gambling debt than they could handle. That’s happy hunting ground for a dogged nondescript lawman who seems at home on a barstool.

Which is how I met Bobby Donato at a joint called Gil’s. I’d come for a drink with my sister-in-law, giving Cora a break while Aggie watched the kids for a change. Out front, up rolled a two-tone Nash Ambassador Airflyte. A slim man in a white suit got out and opened the door for a tall icy blonde. He guided her inside, into the booth behind us, then went to the bar. A bald thug whispered in the man’s ear, which made him go white as his suit. Soon, though, he composed himself and went back to the booth with drinks, including a round for us. We all—him, the blonde, me, and Cora—ended up hitting it off, firing up the jukebox, and dancing to “race music.” We never saw baldy again, but over the course of the night, Bobby made enough remarks about sure things and point spreads that I knew he was in up to his eyeballs. I asked what he did. Pre-law at Creighton, he said. I stopped shy of asking if he knew my wife. He asked what I did. The insurance game, I said. His eyes flickered. Honest citizens hear “insurance” and unless they’re in the business, too, which was often the case in Omaha, they’ll change the subject. But a criminal hears “insurance” and wonders if you’re trying to tell him you’re a loan shark, a money launderer, or the like. Bobby said maybe he could use some insurance, which no one says in

Five Points / 115

a bar if it’s insurance they’re talking about. I said, yes, I was the man to see. He said it wasn’t insurance he needed right now so much as a “job on the side.” I said I wasn’t hiring, but I knew a guy. I gave him the number of an undercover agent. The four of us closed the place. As we stood by his car saying our goodbyes, Bobby told us he’d inherited some dough from an uncle in Chicago, answering a question about how he’d paid for the Nash that I hadn’t asked.

The next day, I did some digging. The Omaha PD had a file on him. He was a war veteran from a family that ran three pizza parlors. Right after the war, Bobby accused his uncle, who managed one of the pizza joints, of stealing money. The uncle blamed Bobby, Bobby hit the uncle in the head with a sand wedge, and the uncle pressed charges. The parents fired them both. Bobby got off with just parole. He’d worked briefly at the Dodge Park Kennel Club and other places that pointed to him running with a bad crowd, but according to his parole officer, Bobby was indeed a full-time student at Creighton, courtesy of the GI bill. Last semester, the Creighton registrar told me, Bobby Donato had made the Dean’s List.

I met the undercover agent in the narthex of a chapel at Boys Town. I suggested that when Donato came to him, he point him toward Kitts. I held my breath. The agent knew my history with Kitts. In Birmingham, they’d have mocked me, but this man put a hand on my shoulder, complimented me on my moxie, and told me he’d see what he could do. I’d have to steer clear of both Kitts and Donato, he said, and naturally I agreed.

While I waited, I banished thoughts of how my gun might surface, when I’d receive another postcard, or any guilt I had about taking a young man in trouble and getting him in more trouble to suit my ends. I vowed to think only the best and expect only the best. Also, I was preoccupied with other cases and some complications at home that I’d rather not go into. Thus, I took little notice of a “bank job” that took place in Garretson, South Dakota, just outside our district. The head teller had been abducted from his home at 3 am by men in stocking caps and army-surplus coveralls, who drove him to the bank, had him open the vault, then pistol-whipped him, tied him up with piano wire, and left. Not long afterward, the undercover agent had sufficient evidence to pin it on Kitts, Donato, two other associates, and, it seemed, Bennie the Blimp. Unfortunately for me, when the case broke, I was taking a personal week, to help Cora move back to St. Paul. By the time I returned, the Bureau had already stormed the Last Chance Café in Council Bluffs, breaking up a celebration of all involved in

116 / Winegardner

the Garretson job and hauling them off to jail. The interrogation of Kitts was well underway, led by Agent Bianchi himself. I was assigned to get what I could from Bobby Donato.

First I tracked down the blonde and learned that Bobby had taken her with him on a trip to Garretson, with a stop along the way in Sioux City. Apparently, this was when they “cased” the bank. The blonde admitted she’d had relations with Donato in motels in each town, which meant he’d taken her across state lines with the intent of getting her to give herself up to debauchery, so we had him on the Mann Act. Donato drove, but Kitts had gone, too, along with a known prostitute.

Gradually, I earned Donato’s trust and got him to admit that he’d been involved. The prosecutors started to work out a deal for him. The Witness Protection Program hadn’t yet been created, but we did basically the same thing with cooperative witnesses when it was warranted. If Donato told all, we had Kitts for sure, plus all the other robbers and fences, possibly even Bennie Barone. It was all I could do not to march over to Kitts’s jail cell and tell him what was coming, but I stayed in step, waiting for my time to come.

Thus, when I heard Kitts himself planned to cooperate, I could hardly breathe, I was so blindsided. He denied any involvement in the bank robbery, but he agreed to testify against two men who’d helped him burglarize some of the nicest homes in Cedar Rapids. Agent Bianchi believed Kitts would eventually confess to the Garretson job, too. Sadly, this hope was scuttled when Kitts went to Cedar Rapids to testify and escaped from the courthouse jail.

He was at large for one long year.I am not one to “toot my own horn,” but when Kitts was captured—

by my old friends from the Knoxville office, at a roadhouse called The Three Gables in Fayetteville, Tennessee—it was because of leads initiated by my interrogation of Bobby Donato.

As before, Kitts admitted nothing about the Garretson job. He still enjoyed top-notch legal representation, but his track record as a flight risk allowed us to send him to Leavenworth to await trial. For months, prosecutors and agents more experienced than myself tied themselves into knots trying to get him to say anything. Their target was Barone and, ideally, the underworld figures above him, though Agent Bianchi assured me that there was no chance Kitts would be set free. The best he could hope for was a lighter sentence. I understood that this served the greater

Five Points / 117

good. But that’s when I played my trump card. “What if Bobby Donato can give us Barone?”

“Can he?”“What if I told you Donato drove Kitts and all the loot from the

Garretson job to Barone’s house and, at Kitts’s instigation, carried it inside for appraisal and disposition?”

“Did he?”“He can and he did,” I said.“He’s just looking for a deal,” Bianchi said. “Same as Kitts,” I pointed out.“It’ll be Barone’s word against Kitts’s.”“Who’s more credible in a court of law? A war hero who made a

couple mistakes or a hardened criminal like Kitts?”Bobby wasn’t actually a hero, but I was full of passion and Agent

Bianchi didn’t feel the need to correct me. Nonetheless, he was skeptical. The other men in the gang were telling the same story Kitts was, with no mention of Barone, who hadn’t yet been charged with anything.

“Let me interrogate Kitts myself, sir,” I said. “If I get a confession, Donato gets his deal. If not, nothing lost, not even the Bureau’s time. I’ll take a personal day and drive my own car.”

That didn’t prove necessary. Agent Bianchi sent me to Leavenworth, accompanied by Agent Orr, one of the veteran agents who’d taken me under his wing. Agent Orr drove.

When we arrived, Kitts was already in the interrogation room, chained to a metal chair. His lawyer was with him, standing, smoking a cigarette. We stopped in front of the one-way mirror. The lawyer was acting as if he were here for a social visit, all smiles, chirping about the baseball season.

“Kitts knew we were coming?” I asked Agent Orr.“The lawyer did. I contacted him.” I felt stabbed in the gut. “I wanted a chance at Kitts alone.”Agent Orr smiled. “All we’d have gotten from a surprise visit to

Kenny-Boy is a request to have his lawyer present. We’d be stuck here for two days while fancy-britches in there took his sweet time showing up.”

“Does he know about Donato?”“He knows one of the other men spilled everything, but not which

one. Nothing that wasn’t going to come out at some point.” He patted me on the back. “Ready?

As ready as I ever would be. My heart was back to its racing ways.

118 / Winegardner

We entered the room. Kitts looked up. Agent Orr introduced me to the lawyer, and the lawyer introduced me to Kitts.

“We’ve already met,” I said.Kitts scowled. “Him I know,” he said, nodding toward Agent Orr. “But

who are you?”“Think Birmingham, Alabama.”Agent Orr took a seat at a table in the corner and took out a legal pad

to take notes.“Never been there,” Kitts said.“You and me, lost, stopping at a Sinclair station for directions.”Kitts shook his head. “No idea what you’re talking about, friend.”The postcard of the naked woman atop the jukebox was in the front

pocket of my pants. I started to reach for it.“Gentlemen,” the lawyer said, “you should know that my client is

prepared to confess.” He and Kitts exchanged a look. Kitts closed his eyes and nodded.

“The gun,” I said. “What about the gun you used to assault the bank teller in Garretson? Where did you get it?”

Agent Orr cleared his throat and looked at me like I was nuts, but I was bursting to know.

Kitts let out an exasperated sigh. “That wasn’t me,” he said. “It wasn’t my gun, either. It was those other two boys. I told them not to do it, and I yelled at them once they did do it.”

I looked at Agent Orr, who gave a tiny shrug. Donato hadn’t seen the pistol-whipping with his own eyes. And the teller had said that someone had said not to hit him, although there was no way to prove that the person who said it was Kitts.

“You’re saying it wasn’t your gun?” I said. “That it wasn’t your quote-unquote piece?”

“Who called it a piece?” Kitts said. “I called it a gun, and it wasn’t my gun.”

He shifted in his seat as if his drawers were made of the coarsest wool. My heart was slowing down to a better rate. Kitts seemed so much smaller than I’d remembered. Separated from his fancy clothes and my fancier ideas about him, this was all he was: a pitiful creature who had to be cordoned off from the rest of the herd.

Nothing more.“A full confession?” Agent Orr interjected. “What, precisely, are we

Five Points / 119

talking about?”This is the cynicism born from the demands of a life in the Bureau. If

everyone has something to hide, if nothing is ever what it seems, it follows that no confession can ever be full.

I, Hal Halvorsen, stand before you as a man who chooses to believe otherwise.

Kenneth Allen Kitts confessed to nearly everything about the bank robbery that Donato had. I had the privilege of getting it out of him, typing it up myself, handing it to him, and watching him sign it with an FBI inkpen.

The prosecutors wouldn’t have anything to do with the Mann Act charges. In the end they were content to get everyone armed robbery counts, even Donato, though his sentence was the lightest of the bunch. Everyone, I should say, shy of Bennie Barone. Kitts, unlike Donato, denied having anything to do with Barone, and in our office there was speculation that Kitts took the “rap” to protect Barone and the crime kingpins above him. But that was only speculation.

The newspapers went wild. Kitts’s confession appeared verbatim in every major newspaper in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota, and many others throughout the country. So did the pictures of him in handcuffs with Agent Orr and myself standing behind him. “Gang Busters” gave the case two whole episodes, #719 and #720. I framed the letter of commendation I received from Mr. Hoover and it still hangs above the headboard of my bed.

My transfer to the Kansas City field office was a promotion given to me for a job well done, but for some reason the air went out of my sails. The next two years were a blur, what with Father’s apparent suicide, my divorce trial, and the renewed problems I was having with my thyroid. There’s no sense blaming this on my SAC in Kansas City or anyone else but yours truly. To put to rest what many have said about me, none of it had to do with my feelings about Kitts’s escape from Leavenworth. He was loose for two years, during which I never even looked into the case, and when he was apprehended they stuck him in Alcatraz. At about the same time, my SAC in Kansas City submitted an annual review so poor Mr. Hoover himself asked me to resign. I was charged with accusing a superior officer of personal animosity. Of low production, meaning that I spent too much time in the office and on the telephone discussing personal matters. Of poor judgment in my development of informants, including personal

120 /

fraternization. Of having a messy desk. I fell in line, stayed in step, and did the hardest thing I’ve ever done

in my whole life, which was to borrow the typewriter from the office of the motel where I was staying and write out my letter of resignation and walk it without hesitation to the nearest mailbox. A bullet couldn’t have ripped through my heart with any more force than the sound of that iron door clanging shut. I sprinted back to the motel and wrote another letter, begging Mr. Hoover to disregard the first letter and to give me my job back.

I’ll take questions now, but to anticipate your first two: number one, I don’t know if Kitts is alive or dead. And number two, as Optimists, how do you think Mr. Hoover responded?

[On the back of this, the final page, in a spidery feminine cursive, someone wrote, “From pocket of Dad’s good Sport-Coat. Throw away?”]

Five Points / 121

Anya Silver

New Dress

Hello, lovely disguise. Come swing short and loosearound my thighs. Cowl my neckline, let my throat

rise out of your yellow folds like a virgin.Cup my shoulders; cling to my breasts so closely

that my skin accepts you, sister, knit and piecedby strangers’ hands, but closer to my body

than my own husband. You absorb in your stitchingmy wrist’s vanilla and anise, the sweat of anxiety,

a hasty last morsel of soup, or blood from a bandagepulled off too soon. And those gazes I scorned

when I was younger—I accept them so eagerly now,not knowing how long my face will stay,

how long I’ll be able to walk on these legs, slim in black tights, before sickness forces me down.

When no man will want me for a lover, or dreamof pulling you over my head, you’ll caress me,

won’t you? You’ll be with me, faithful friend, when my body starts to turn.

122 / Silver

Skirts and Dresses

My pants hang, deflated, in the closet.It’s been weeks since my legs filled them,since a button rested beneath my navel.My body craves dresses, a single seam fallingfrom shoulder to knee; or else skirts, side-zipped, hooked, sheen of fine cotton, sky-blue; or red wool above high black boots.

To sweep my hand under me and smooththe silk before I sit, to rest cross-leggedand tuck my feet beneath the tentedcloth, or, like a child, to lift the hemslike a hammock for acorns and cedar cones.To walk with air on my calves, legs bare.To skim the hips, to slim the thighs. To float, sway, strut, and put away fear.

Because I have no time to lose before the waning,untrimming, the razor of illness against my skull—let me slip into something beaded, lacey, fine.Let a dress fall softly from its hangerthe way I first fell into my husband’s arms.Let me feel again, and again, like that.

Five Points / 123

David Kirby

Ten Thousand Hours with You

Nobody in our adorable little one-horse town knows whether Turandot is pronounced with a long or short “o” or if the “t” is voiced or silent, so I write opera critic Anthony Tommasini at the New York Times, and he says that the vast

majority of people in the opera world pronounce the character’s name as “TuranDOT,” like “spot,” and I think, now there’s a good fellow, courteous, well-informed, not so full of himself that he can’t write to a country mouse like me,

and so I post his reply as a Facebook status update,and you’d think that’d settle it, that the opera lovers of Tallahassee would let go of their plow handles and wipe their sweaty brows with their bandanas and say, “Well, looky here, Ma, this newspaper

feller says he knows how to pronounce it, and heought to know, him being Eye-talian and all,” but no, my update hasn’t been on-line for more than fifteen seconds before someone writes that Puccini scholar Patrick Vincent Casali

has written an article in which he says that “the current practice of sounding the final ‘t’ of Turandot’s name is incorrect,” and the next thing you know, people are weighing in as though Anthony Tommasini and I hadn’t settled the whole

thing just minutes before, but that’s human nature for you, isn’t it? In study after study,

researchers have established something they call the Ten Thousand Hours Rule, which says that’s