Recruiters for corporate America routinely claim they’re looking for “a team player.”
This sounds great—as though the corporation is seeking people who will get along with their colleagues and work to achieve a worthwhile objective.
And, at times, that is precisely what is being sought in a potential employee.
But, altogether too often, what the corporation actually means by “a team player” is what the Mafia means by “a real standup guy.”
That is: Someone willing to commit any crime for the organization—and take the fall for its leaders if anything goes wrong.
Consider this classic example from the files of America’s premier law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
On November 14, 1957, 70 top Mafia leaders from across the country gathered at the estate of a fellow gangster, Joseph Barbara, in Apalachin, a small village in upstate New York.
The presence of so many cars with out-of-state license plates converging on an isolated mansion caught the attention of Edgar Crosswell, a sergeant in the New York State Police.
Crosswell assembled as many troopers as he could find, set up roadblocks, and swooped down on the estate.
The mobsters, panicked, fled in all directions—many of them into the surrounding woods. Even so, more than 60 underworld bosses were arrested and indicted following the raid.
Perhaps the most significant result of the raid was the effect it had on J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary director of the FBI.
J. Edgar Hoover
Up to that point, Hoover had vigorously and vocally denied the existence of a nationwide Mafia. He had left the pursuit of international narcotics traffickers to his hated rival, Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).
But he had carefully kept his own agency well out of the war on organized crime. Several theories have been advanced as to why.
- Hoover feared that his agents—-long renowned for their incorruptibility—would fall prey to the bribes of well-heeled mobsters.
- Hoover feared that his allegedly homosexual relationship with his longtime associate director, Clyde Tolson, would be exposed by the Mob. Rumors still persist that mobster Meyer Lansky came into possession of a compromising photo of Hoover and Tolson engaged in flagrante delicto.
- Hoover knew of the ties between moneyed mobsters and their political allies in Congress. And he feared losing the goodwill of his political allies—and ever-larger appropriations for the FBI.
- Hoover preferred flashy, easily-solved cases to those requiring huge investments of manpower and money.
Suddenly, however, ignoring the Mob was no longer possible. The arrests of more than 60 known members of the underworld—in what the news media called “a conclave of crime”—deeply embarrassed Hoover.
How could the FBI have not known about this?
It was all the more embarrassing that while the FBI had virtually nothing in its files on the leading lights of the Mafia, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had opened its voluminous files to the Senate Labor Rackets Committee.
Heading that committee as chief legal counsel was Robert F. Kennedy—a fierce opponent of organized crime. In 1961, he would become Attorney General of the United States.
So Hoover created the Top Hoodlum Program (THP) to identify and target selected Mafiosi across the country.
Since the FBI had no networks of informants operating within the Mafia, Hoover fell back on a technique he had successfully employed against the Communist Party U.S.A.
He would wiretap the mobsters’ phones and plant electronic microphones (“bugs”) in their meeting places. The information gleamed from these techniques would arm the Bureau with evidence that could be used to strongarm mobsters into “rolling over” on their colleagues in exchange for leniency.
Organization chart of Mafia famiies
Hoover believed he had authority to install wiretaps because more than one Attorney General had authorized their use.
But no Attorney General had given permission to install bugs—which involved breaking into the places where they were to be placed. Such assignments were referred to within the Bureau as “black bag jobs.”
So, in making clear to his agent-force that he wanted an unprecedented war against organized crime, Hoover also made clear the following:
Before agents could install electronic surveillance (an ELSUR, in FBI-speak) devices in Mob hangouts, agents had to first request authority for a survey. This would have to establish:
- That this was truly a strategic location;
- That the agents had a plan of attack that the Bureau could see was logical and potentially successful; and, most importantly of all
- That it could be done without any “embarrassment to the Bureau.”
According to former FBI agent William E. Roemer, Jr., who carried out many of these “black bag” assignments: “The [last requirement] was always Mr. Hoover’s greatest concern: ‘Do the job, by God, but don’t ever let anything happen that might embarrass the Bureau.”
Roemer laid out the dangers of these “penetration” assignments in his autobiography: Romer: Man Against the Mob (1989)
Agents faced not only the threat of arrest by police, but that of death at the hands of the Mob.
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WHAT EMPLOYERS OFTEN MEAN BY “A TEAM PLAYER”: PART TWO (END)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on January 20, 2022 at 12:13 amIn 1959,, J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, declared war on the Mafia.
He set up a Top Hoodlum Program and encouraged his agents to use wiretapping and electronic surveillance (“bugging”) to make up for lost time and Intelligence.
But planting “bugs” demanded illegal trespass into mob hangouts.
Making this even more hazardous: Hoover imposed restrictions on these assignments that could destroy an agent’s professional and personal life.
William E. Roemer, Jr., assigned to the FBI’s Chicago field office, was one of the first agents to volunteer for such duty.
William Roemer
In his memoirs, Man Against the Mob, published in 1989, Roemer laid out the dangers that went with such work:
If he had been arrested by the Chicago Police Department and identified as an FBI agent, Roemer would have:
If he had been intercepted by the mobsters, he would have likely been shot.
Given the huge risks involved, many agents, unsurprisingly, shunned “black bag jobs.”
The agents who took them on were so committed to penetrating the Mob that they willingly accepted Hoover’s dictates.
In 1989, Roemer speculated that former Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North had fallen victim to such a “Mission: Impossible” scenario: “The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions….”
Oliver North’s mugshot
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan’s “arms-for-hostages” deal known as Iran-Contra had been exposed.
To retrieve seven Americans taken hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, Reagan had secretly agreed to sell some of America’s most sophisticated missiles to Iran.
During this operation, several Reagan officials—including North—diverted proceeds from the sale of those missiles to fund Reagan’s illegal war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
In Roemer’s view: North had followed orders from his superiors without question. But when the time came for those superiors to step forward and protect him, they didn’t.
They let him take the fall.
Roemer speculated that North had been led to believe he would be rescued from criminal prosecution. Instead, in 1989, he was convicted for
That is how many employers expect their employees to act: To carry out whatever assignments they are given and take the blame if anything goes wrong.
Take the case of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the world’s biggest retailer.
In March, 2005, Wal-Mart escaped criminal charges when it agreed to pay $11 million to end a federal probe into its use of illegal aliens as janitors.
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided 60 Wal-Mart stores across 21 states in October, 2003. The raids led to the arrest of 245 illegal aliens.
An ICE raid
The illegal aliens had been hired as janitors at Wal-Mart stores.
Many of the employees worked seven days or nights a week without overtime pay or injury compensation. Those who worked nights were often locked in the store until morning.
According to Federal officials, court-authorized wiretaps revealed that Wal-Mart executives knew their subcontractors hired illegal aliens.
Once the raids began, Federal agents invaded the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, seizing boxes of records from the office of a mid-level executive.
Of course, Wal-Mart admitted no wrongdoing in the case. Instead, it blamed its subcontractors for hiring illegal aliens and claiming that Wal-Mart hadn’t been aware of this.
Just as the FBI planned to have its agents take the fall in “black bag” cases, Wal-Mart meant to sacrifice its subcontractors for hiring illegal aliens.
The only reason Wal-Mart couldn’t make this work: The Feds had, for once, treated corporate executives like Mafia leaders and had tapped their phones.
Which holds a lesson for how Federal law enforcement agencies should treat future corporate executives when their companies are found violating the law.
Instead of seeing CEOs as “captains of industry,” a far more realistic approach would be giving this term a new meaning: Corrupt Egotistical Oligarchs.
Their phones should be tapped, their boardrooms and bedrooms bugged, and their closest associates should be given immunity to testify against them.
A smart investigator/prosecutor should always remember:
Widespread illegal and corrupt behavior cannot happen among the employees of a major government agency or private corporation unless:
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