Seven Silent Men Page 11

  Following his conversation with the St. Louis T-shirt maker, John Sunstrom went out into the tiny anteroom and confronted a crunch of thirty-odd reporters, press photographers and TV cameramen. The soft-spoken and forthright Sunstrom stated that he had no official comment other than “no comment” and that, in fact, he hadn’t yet been able to get through to Washington headquarters. It was at this juncture Ted Keon emerged from the inner offices and, leaving the door behind him open, forced his way forward through the crowd. Keon whispered something into Sunstrom’s ear. Sunstrom politely excused himself from the gathering, kept apace as the fast-stepping Keon led the way back into the inner offices and onto a receiver lying off the hook and picked up and handed him the receiver.

  “… Agent Sunstrom,” Sunstrom said into the phone.

  “Sir,” an eminently familiar voice began, “this is J. Edgar Hoover speaking to you from Washington, District of Columbia. Why have you kept me waiting?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Director—”

  “Look at your watch, sir. What time do you show?”

  Studying his wristwatch, Sunstrom said, “Nine-fifty-one A.M., Mister Director.”

  “Sir, are you aware we began to teletype orders through to you twenty-six minutes ago and received no response?”

  “Our teletype machine is broken, Mister Director.”

  “Then fix it.”

  “Yes, Mister Director.”

  “Are you, sir, further aware that I have been personally attempting to reach you by telephone for exactly seventeen minutes now and that your lines have been busy?”

  “Mister Director, I was aware our telephones were busy but not that you were trying to reach us.”

  “Repeat after me: Romor 91-22535!”

  “Romor 91-22535?”

  “Effective this moment,” Edgar Hoover proclaimed, “the code name for the investigation of the Mormon State National Bank theft is Romor … Robbery-Mormon State. The case number is 91-22535. You know what 91 stands for, do you, sir?”

  “Yes, Mister Director.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the prefix designation for bank robbery.”

  “Federal bank robbery, sir.”

  “… Federal bank robbery, Mister Director.”

  “91-22535 … the twenty-two thousandth, five hundredth and thirty-fifth case to be investigated by the FBI since the enactment of the Federal Bank Act of 1934. And it is your case, sir. Yours and the men of your command. Romor 91-22535! It has a good ring to it. Make us proud of it, sir. Please stand.” Aftera moment Edgar asked, “Are you standing?”

  Sunstrom, who had never sat down in taking the call, told him, “I am standing, Mister Director.”

  “All that I am about to say is binding and irrefutable,” J. Edgar Hoover told him. “Effective this moment, Edward A. Grafton is relieved as senior resident agent for the Prairie Port office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You, Mister John L. C. Sunstrom III, effective this moment, will replace Mister Grafton in his role as senior resident agent and assume all responsibilities inherent in that position. This promotion is temporary. Nonetheless, your expense remunerations will be adjusted upward upon receipt of proper vouchers. Your previous position as assistant senior resident agent will forthwith be filled, also on a temporary basis, by Mister Harold H. Hennessy. You will please inform Mister Hennessy of his good fortune and instruct as to his new duties. You are free to assign to Romor 91-22535 whomever you wish as supervisor and case agent. You and your men will, as of this moment, desist in referring to the investigation of the theft at Mormon State as anything but Romor 91-22535. Effective this moment, you and you alone, Mister Sunstrom, are in charge of Romor 91-22535. How does that strike you?”

  “… It strikes me very positively, Mister Director.”

  “Assistance is en route for deployment at your discretion. Thirty agents and support personnel. Prepare for them and disregard expense. Denis Corticun will arrive to assist you in any manner you so deem. He will tend to the additional personnel for you. I have suggested to Denis Corticun that he create a flying squad to answer directly and only to you. How does a flying squad strike you?”

  “Very positively, Mister Director.” Strom had no idea what was meant by a flying squad.

  “That broken teletype machine of yours, how old is it?”

  “I’ll find out, Mister Director.”

  “Bother not, bother not. You shall have new machines. New whatever you need. You will turn the full skills and attention of your personnel to recouping the stolen monies and bringing to justice the insidious perpetrators of this momentous incursion. God be with you. God be with your men—what’s all that clatter in the background?”

  “The telephones, Mister Director. They haven’t stopped ringing since your speech.”

  “It was quite a speech, wasn’t it?”

  “Indeed, Mister Director.”

  “… I don’t know you, sir, but I like you.”

  J. Edgar Hoover hung up.

  … John Sunstrom, in the fall of 1960, was accepted by the FBI and sent to the Bureau’s training academy on the grounds of the United States Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. The recently widowed southern aristocrat had just turned thirty-five. Although the maximum age for acceptance into the FBI was forty-one, Sunstrom was considerably older than his academy classmates and was called Pappy by them. The moniker was short-lived. John’s skill in investigatory and administrative matters, as well as his relaxed and gentlemanly and winning manner with co-workers and the public, first at the Minneapolis, Minnesota, field office and later at New Orleans, earned him the affectionate nickname of Strom. It also won him a transfer to Washington headquarters, where he began training for a supervisory position. Except for being slightly too old, Strom Sunstrom was all the FBI could hope for in a prospective special agent in charge at some field office. The FBI, in turn, had proved to be all Strom had hoped for and more … an endless string of challenges he could rise to … an enveloping, all-inclusive way of life … an escape from his long-grieved-over ghosts, memories of his first wife. He was happier than he had been in a long time.

  On December 17, 1965, Strom Sunstrom married his dead wife’s younger sister. She was twenty-three years old to the day, a graduate student of design, ravishingly beautiful and a virgin. He was forty, prematurely silver gray, in his second year of duty at FBI headquarters and anticipatory about sleeping with his bride. Their wedding night he was overwhelmed. She was, in bed, an extraordinary lover. He had never been so gratified, so free.

  The marriage proved an instant asset. This sleek, dark-haired beauty and her tall, elegant, Lincolnesque husband made a charming and striking couple in a place where charm and appearance counted mightily. On July 1, 1967, a year earlier than most agents of equal experience would have been given such an assignment, Strom Sunstrom was made assistant special agent in charge of the Denver, Colorado, field office of the FBI. He and his wife, in their low-keyed, mellow manner, won the hearts of all whom they encountered. He became the official area spokesman for the Bureau. She was asked to speak on the women’s club circuit. They entertained often and well. They were, briefly, a golden couple. FBI golden.

  But John, secretly, longed for action … the challenge of field investigation. His wife sensed something was wrong, coaxed him into admitting he may have made a mistake becoming an administrator. Given his druthers, he confessed to her, he would revert to being a brick agent who could get out into the field and work cases instead of sitting in an office pushing pencils and practicing speeches. She urged him to resign as assistant special agent in charge. He cautioned it wasn’t all that simple. Told her such a resignation could be taken as a betrayal by Bureau superiors who had championed his promotion. He warned he might be banished to some hellhole like Detroit or Butte, Montana. She chided him for believing such goosey-gander rumors as FBI retaliation, insisted the Bureau and Director Hoover were too noble for such pettiness … said if he would be happier in Detroit or
Butte, she would be. So he requested of headquarters they reduce him in grade back to brick agent.

  Punishment was swift.

  Had Strom been alone, the retribution might not have been so vexing, but his wife insisted on accompanying him on each leg of the journey. Aside from Detroit and Butte, three other FBI offices, according to general agent consensus, qualified as bona fide “Siberias,” places of exile and often oafish and unpredictable SACs. He was first sent to Maine, arrived during a midwinter blizzard to find no one was, expecting him. When written orders did catch up, his demotion wasn’t mentioned and he stayed on as assistant SAC during the balance of the winter, living with his wife in a rented suite of rooms. Costly rooms due to the number of expensive ski resorts in the area. The couple leased a house and, with the first break of spring, sent for their furniture. No sooner had the furniture arrived and the house been redecorated than Strom was sent to the FBI office at Brownsville, Texas. The transfer order reduced him in rank back down to a brick agent. The Sunstroms again trucked their furniture to storage, this time at their own expense, and abandoned the Maine house with nine months left on the lease.

  Brownsville, Texas, was as hot and humid as Maine had been cold and snowswept, but at least the local FBI office was awaiting John’s arrival. So were the old nickname “Pappy” and whispers he had been shunted off into exile because he was too old to cut the mustard as ASAC in Colorado. Whispers also had it that Strom and his wife were blood relations. Other whispers emphasized the age difference between them. The most audible promoter of the rumor campaign was the SAC, a loutish alcoholic who, drunk or sober, was also contemptuous of nearly everything non-Northern and nonwhite. Strom, the composed southerner, took the slurs in stride. Not so the whispers that his wife had suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Hearing the Sac loudly repeat this to a fellow special agent, Sunstrom lost control of himself for one of the few times in his life. Grabbed the SAC by the neck and in a display of rage and strength that would surprise even him on reflection, with one hand lifted the man from his feet by the neck and held him dangling on high. Hurled him into the wall. Had he not been restrained by the special agent, a fellow named Jez Jessup, Strom might have gone after the crumpled rumor-monger and struck him and gotten into irreparable trouble. As it was, Jessup kept Strom back and warned the SAC that if he reported the incident to Washington, let alone pressed charges against Sunstrom, Jez would tell Washington he had seen the SAC hit Strom, deny Strom had retaliated. The SAC elected to overlook the matter.

  Strom didn’t find it so easy to forget … might have quit the Bureau then and there if it weren’t for his wife. Knowing how much investigatory work meant to him, she begged him to put the incident behind him, ignore everything. She argued that his exile was nothing more than official hazing at the most, bureaucratic bungling at the least. She went out and rented a house and redecorated it. Shortly after, as in Maine, Strom was ordered to yet another FBI office. This one reputedly the newest and worst Siberia on the banishment circuit. Worst not because of the physical environment, which was supposedly quite pleasant, but because of the quirky and eccentric special agent in charge … a man named Ed Grafton, who held sway in a place called Prairie Port, Missouri.

  … They faced one another over black coffee and whiskey at four-thirty in the morning at a Prairie Port railyard diner frequented by trainmen and bloody-smocked packing house workers and weary vagrants allowed in from the chill, this tall quiet southern gentleman known as Strom and the unkempt, fierce-eyed renegade Grafton, who had defied nearly everyone he could find to defy at FBI headquarters. Each man, from the beginning, recognized something in the other that engendered esteem and trust. Grafton did most of the talking, sat staring down at his coffee cup and in hushed and hoarse words explained how this eatery was his favorite spot for business meets and the time his favorite time. How offices were anathema to him, including his own Bureau offices in Prairie Port, which he seldom visited unless forced. How the running of these offices was left to whatever woebegotten subordinates he could saddle with the assignment. Grafton granted he should not be calling other resident agents “subordinates,” since technically they were independent residency operatives with great autonomy, only here at Prairie Port every one of them damn well did what he wanted them to do, when he wanted it and how he wanted. Grafton added that the agents liked, rather than resented, him for this. Grafton said that this was his “gift”: making subordinates like him. Grafton said he had gone through Strom Sunstrom’s file and had heard scuttlebutt on Strom’s exiles to Maine and Texas. He said that Strom’s banishment to Prairie Port might turn out to be more propitious than punitive if he and Strom were of the same mind. Grafton said there was a good chance he could take Strom’s latest exile and jam it right down the throats of the Bureau Brass Balls at headquarters who ordered it … force the Brass Balls to choke on the order … make them rue the day they had issued it, and soon. He said to do this would require not only Strom’s cooperation but a considerable emotional sacrifice on Strom’s part. Then, as if to play for suspense by delaying his proposition, Grafton downed a large tumbler filled with whiskey and washed out his mouth with coffee and poured more whiskey into the glass and a goodly portion into the coffee cup. Stirring the rye into the coffee with a fork, Grafton said that perhaps Strom was the very man he had so urgently been in need of … the man he had been so patiently waiting for.

  Grafton told Strom that of all the battles he had fought with Bureau Brass Balls in Washington, the bloodiest was under way. That he had begun to investigate a local Missouri man named Wilkie Jarrel and that the cries of anguish and outrage rising in the hallowed hallways of FBI headquarters were not unsimilar to those of a pack of pained hyenas giving communal breechbirths at midnight. That Wilkie Jarrel was wealthy and powerful and politically well-connected on Capitol Hill in D.C. That many of these Capitol Hill connections, fearing Grafton would expose the corrupt control Jarrel wielded over them, which was precisely Grafton’s intention, were exerting enormous pressure on FBI headquarters to drop the investigation. That the Brass Balls were responding to the pressure and doing everything possible to deter Grafton from continuing with the Jarrel matter, short of ordering him to stop. The reason the Brass Balls didn’t issue such an order, Grafton explained to Strom, was because they knew Grafton would not obey it even if it came from J. Edgar Hoover himself and that the Brass Balls didn’t dare go to Hoover with the problem out of fear that Hoover might side with Grafton, even though Hoover knew Jarrel and rather liked the louse.

  Grafton sat back and rested his hands in his lap. “J. Edgar Hoover is the greatest man who ever lived,” he told Strom in sermon-certain tones. “The FBI is the greatest crime-fighting organization ever conceived. But time has betrayed both of them. Edgar seems to have lost control of himself and the FBI. He should have quit when he was invincible. Before he was gotten to. The Brass Ball Monkeys have gotten to Edgar. The Brass Ball Monkeys have taken over at Washington headquarters. They are petty and venal and incompetent men. Not all of them. But most. Edgar is falling slave to them. A prisoner locked in the tower of his own past … his own bygone glory. Edgar has never countermanded an investigation I’ve chosen to begin. I doubt if he would do so with the Wilkie Jarrel matter. But if Edgar did, I would still go after Jarrel and hang him from the highest tree. That is what the Brass Ball Monkeys have come to realize. They see me as someone out of control. They figure if they can stop me with the Wilkie Jarrel case, they can stop me for good. Topple me from command in Prairie Port; maybe from the FBI itself, without ever having to go to Edgar. They are second-rate, these Brass Balls, but they have a chance to win out this time. Not because of themselves. Because of Wilkie Jarrel. I underestimated Jarrel.”