“Unlike Robert Redford,” said event moderator Julian E. Barnes, national security reporter at the New York Times, guest Asha Rangappa, a Yale national security law scholar and former FBI counterintelligence agent, “knows what we do now.”

Barnes then turned to Rangappa and opened the discussion by asking her to take stock of our national security institutions after four years of a Trump administration. How badly politicized are they now, and how hard will it be to undo that damage?

Nothing is broken for good, said Rangappa. However, she expects that the Department of Justice and the FBI, in particular, will take time to walk back from the politicization introduced by this administration.

“I think simply not being the target of vocal attacks by the person sitting in the Oval Office will go a long way,” she said, “but it’s going to be a challenge because under a Biden administration, there may be crimes uncovered involving people from the prior administration, and this once again will place the Department of Justice and the FBI in political crosshairs, even if they are pursuing legitimate operations.”

There’s a tradition in American politics, said Barnes, where the prior administration isn’t prosecuted when a new administration comes to power. He asked Rangappa if she thinks president-elect Biden should respect that history.

There’s too much that needs to be looked at, Rangappa said, pointing, for instance, to the paper trail that led to migrant children being taken from their families. “That to me is in the realm of when we discovered the [George] W. [Bush] administration had authorized torture,” she said.

The best way to determine if the government should take legal action against the Trump administration, she said, is to bring in a special counsel who can figure out what actual violations of federal law were committed. “I know we’re kind of special counseled out,” she joked, however, she added, “you really want someone who is insulated from political influence and has a very clear mandate that they follow.”

“That’s the best we’re going to be able to do short of letting it go, which I don’t think will be an option,” Rangappa continued.

Before the Trump administration leaves office, Barnes asked, is Rangappa concerned about any 11th-hour declassifications?

Yes, she said. What concerns her most is that the administration’s selective declassifications are all a “constant attempt to displace blame on the 2016 interference from Russia to Ukraine or some other entity.” That is one of the goals of declassifications before Trump leaves office, she believes: “to make the case [that] this didn’t happen.”

These 11th-hour declassifications, Rangappa said, will ultimately benefit Vladimir Putin the most. This information not only helps Russia with plausible deniability, she said; it primarily will help the Russians identify leaks and could potentially put sources in danger. “That’s what worries me.”

Looking further ahead, Barnes asked what can be done to prevent the norms that Trump broke during his presidency from being broken again in the future.

Strengthening protections for inspector generals of the intelligence community is one avenue, said Rangappa, pointing out, for instance, that the impeachment proceedings only happened because inspector general Michael Atkinson alerted Congress to the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s communications with the president of Ukraine. “Inspector generals are a vehicle for Congress to learn about misconduct in the executive branch,” she said. “What we saw was an attempt to cut that channel off at the knees by installing loyalists in that position or creating dubious legal justifications for not passing on whistleblower complaints.”

Audience questions piled in for Rangappa, asking her to address everything from whether Trump might attempt a self-pardon to the future of the Department of Homeland Security.

Self-pardon, Rangappa said, “depends on whether Trump is going to be a rational actor or a not-rational actor.” Rangappa also thinks it’s possible the president may step down at some point—“maybe even the day before inauguration”—so that Pence would be able to grant him, his children, and other players, like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, pardons. “That I think would be much more airtight,” she said.

Another audience member wanted to know how worried the intelligence community is about secrets Trump could reveal after leaving office. “It’s absolutely a real concern,” said Rangappa, noting the president’s $421 million of debt. “From an intelligence standpoint, he’s vulnerable, and he has valuable information that other countries would be very tempted [by]—and they’d be dumb not to try and exploit.”

One of the last questions of the discussion returned to the intelligence community itself, and how intact it is at this point.

The damage is mostly at the top, said Rangappa. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned of the last four years, the thing that has saved us is our vast bureaucracy,” she said. After all, it was a CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Ukraine call, and rank-and-file agents who continued the investigation. “Our civil service, our bureaucrats—these are the people that are making our country run,” she said. If a critical mass of people were to exit, then the culture of these organizations might change, but that hasn’t happened. “I think right now the culture of these organizations is mostly still nonpartisan,” she said.

The post After a Historic Election, Asha Rangappa Looks Ahead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the midterm elections fast approaching, and the American public seething with partisan anger, a Zócalo/Japanese American National Museum event on Friday night raised the question, “Can U.S. Democracy Survive Russian Information Warfare?”

Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” put that query to a panel of three experts—Julia Davis, a Ukraine-born film producer and founder of the Russian Media Monitor, which analyzes Russian state media in the broader context of the Kremlin’s propaganda; Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and now Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs; and Caroline Orr, a Virginia Commonwealth University behavioral scientist who uses open-source information and data analytics to examine how Russia has weaponized social media against the United States.

The short answer, given by all three: “Yes,” America can prevail.

But as the panelists told an overflow crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, the United States is engaged in a new form of combat with Russia that won’t end anytime soon—no matter which political party controls Congress or the White House. Russia’s goal isn’t simply to boost a particular politician, or hand a megaphone to an extremist fringe group, but to undermine America’s core democratic values, institutions, and way of life, the panelists concurred.

“The more chaos there is here, the more it benefits Putin’s agenda,” Davis summarized. For example, she continued, even though evidence is mounting that Russia intervened in 2016 to help elect Donald Trump, the Russians wouldn’t be worried if Trump were to be impeached. Instead, Davis said, they’d be trying to exploit the situation to provoke massive civil discord, even armed unrest.

Orr said that Russian intelligence operatives have a variety of strategies and objectives for making Americans lunge at each other’s throats, even over something as relatively innocuous as whether NFL players should stand during the national anthem. In that situation, Orr said, the Russians are tapping into a preexisting societal problem of racism, and simply amplifying it digitally. “Sometimes [the Russian strategy] is to distract us, sometimes to make us fight, sometimes to make us hopeless,” Orr said.

Olney asked: Why hasn’t the United States been able to fight back more effectively against these threats. Rangappa said Americans have sufficient intelligence capacity for this contest, but also “have one big law that stands in the way of the government doing anything, and that is the First Amendment.” Rangappa, an adamant proponent of free speech, acknowledged that America’s constitutional protections are sometimes at odds with the ability to clamp down on foreign propaganda machines. “The FBI and the First Amendment are two great tastes that do not go great together,” she said.

And sophisticated digital technology has abetted perpetrators’ ability not only to carry out cyberattacks but also to hide behind a wall of anonymity. A key difference between our present age and the Cold War era, Rangappa said, is that today’s technology platforms can put out information much faster, with a much wider reach, and in ways that the United States can counter only in limited ways. One way, she said, is to force Russia propaganda outlets masquerading as journalistic enterprises to register as foreign agents, as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik recently were required to do.

Moving to specifics, Olney asked the panelists who exactly the Russians are targeting. Davis replied that, since around 2009, the Russians have been identifying people who are feeling disenfranchised, who don’t believe their votes or their voices count, and who are cynical about the state of the U.S. Russia wants to discourage such people from voting and to make them believe that democracy itself is a sham, as it is in Russia.

Asked by Olney why people are vulnerable to this type of misleading information, Orr explained that, for one thing, these messages are narrowly targeted to various segments of the population, for maximum impact.

“We’re all susceptible to believing things that sound good, things that play into beliefs that we already have,” Orr said. “They help us make sense out of things that don’t necessarily make sense,” supply satisfying answers to troubling questions, and soothe us by their sheer simplicity.

But how, Olney persisted, is it possible to build a small platform on Facebook or Twitter into a gigantic, continent-spanning echo chamber of like-minded people?

Orr replied that the Russians launch many trial runs to see what kinds of storylines will get shared repeatedly online. One Russian campaign targeting U.S. veterans has been notably successful because it taps into issues that veterans already care about, she said.

Russian trolls and bots also tend to push out controversial material during the wee morning hours in the United States. Few Americans are using social media between, say, 2 and 4 a.m. But when the East Coast starts waking up a couple hours later, it will be greeted by an inflammatory new hashtag generated in Moscow. More Americans will start wading into the conversation, at which point the Russian perpetrators can quietly melt back, undetected, into the angry online mob they’ve aroused. “It looks completely organic, it looks human-driven,” Orr said of these bot-orchestrated online conflicts.

And it’s not easy to persuade people who’ve fallen for such propaganda that they’ve been duped. “Simply telling somebody… that what they think is incorrect is not an effective way of changing people’s minds,” Orr said. “Part of the reason is, we’re susceptible to believing misinformation because we want to. We don’t want to believe that we’ve been fooled.” What’s more, she said, a lot of Russian propaganda isn’t aimed at convincing you of a particular viewpoint; its more insidious purpose is to convince you that no truth exists. The goal is to make people feel mentally overwhelmed and worn out, so they’ll stop trying to figure out which version of, say, the Syrian civil war to believe, and will give in to cynicism and despair, Orr suggested.

As the conversational mood tone grew darker than a chapter of John le Carré, Olney was moved to observe that, “This is a very disturbing situation!” eliciting uneasy laughter from the audience. Indeed, the panelists emphasized, the American public needs to awaken to the size and scope of the threat—fast. The Russians are weaponizing our most fundamental freedoms, and launching them at our own society and institutions.

“This is warfare, even in peacetime,” Rangappa said. “What I think is really difficult for Americans to understand is to get your mind around a threat that is not visible.”

There are ways to fight back. Responding to a question from the audience, the panelists mentioned Twitter accounts and websites such as Hamilton 68 that monitor Russian propaganda. Educational programs are available to teach young people how to distinguish fact-based journalism from conspiratorial fantasies, the panelists said. Congress also must play a role in hitting back at Putin and his oligarchical allies with tough economic sanctions, the women agreed. “We are in serious peril and we shouldn’t be enriching Putin and his cronies in the process,” Davis said.

The panelists said that, while the U.S. government can take measures and Silicon Valley needs to be held more accountable for granting wide bandwidth to hostile foreign powers, in the end it’s up to us as individual citizens to pay attention to our information sources, protect ourselves, and defend democracy.

“We are the targets of Russian propaganda,” Davis said, “but we are also the solution.”

The post Only You Can Defeat Vladimir Putin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As Madison well might have predicted, allowing America’s secret agencies to operate free of the checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution would lead to an abuse of power. In 1974, a domestic spy scandal carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and exposed by The New York Times, challenged this intelligence exceptionalism and brought the espionage services into the framework of government accountability that has been a hallmark of America’s democracy.

In 1975, the Church Committee—led by Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), for whom I served as an aide—uncovered CIA espionage operations directed against anti-Vietnam War protesters (Operation CHAOS); covert schemes perpetrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to ruin the lives of these protesters and of individuals involved in the civil rights movement (Operation COINTELPRO); and National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping aimed at the telephones of American citizens (Operation MINARET) and the reading of their international cables (Operation SHAMROCK).

The CIA accumulated files on 1.5 million American citizens; infiltrated media, academic, and religious groups inside the United States; and plotted assassinations against foreign leaders in developing nations. The smear tactics of the FBI were intended to blacken the reputations of antiwar and civil rights activists, from the lowliest volunteers to the top leaders. The NSA leaned on flimsy executive orders from the days of the Truman administration to pursue MINARET and SHAMROCK targets throughout the next five presidencies (Dwight D. Eisenhower through Gerald R. Ford), without obtaining renewed authority from any of these White Houses or from Congress.

In the aftermath of these intelligence excesses, in 1975 the Congress moved dramatically (and largely in a bipartisan manner) to stretch the constitutional canvas over the hidden side of America’s government. At the end of its inquiry, the Church Committee successfully advocated the creation of a permanent standing committee for intelligence accountability, known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The next year the House followed suit by establishing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

Front page of the Sept. 2, 1963 edition of The Times of Viet Nam, published in Saigon. Photo courtesy of Horst Faas/Associated Press.

In addition, Congress passed legislation to give those two new committees meaningful authority. And with the enactment of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the executive branch was required to report to Congress not only on covert actions but also all other significant intelligence activities prior to their implementation. This was a powerful standard of ante facto reporting. With these changes, lawmakers became genuine partners in the intelligence domain, just as the Constitution had prescribed for every other policy pursuit.

Since then, the vigor and success of congressional accountability over intelligence activities has fluctuated from then until now, with a series of high points during the Carter years—the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act among them. There were several low points: the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, followed by NSA violations of the law (including the collection of social media “metadata” and the use of warrantless wiretaps against U.S. citizens), and the CIA’s adoption of a torture program in the crucible of fear that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Still, the difference in accountability between the pre-Church Committee era of benign neglect toward the nation’s secret agencies and these post-Committee problems was as stark as night and day. With the Trump Administration, though, intelligence accountability has encountered serious new setbacks.

The President has co-opted the HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California), who was a member of Trump’s transition team. And the SSCI Chairman, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), has been a weak overseer, until very recently. Now, to his credit, Burr is leading a relatively bipartisan probe into possible Russian pro-Trump interference in the 2016 presidential election, but he, too, has periodically displayed a fawning posture toward the White House.

This current moment is a good time to think about the fundamental ingredients for the success of spy accountability, of which there are two. Unfortunately, both ingredients are often in short supply.

The first requirement for effective intelligence accountability is that the executive branch and its intelligence apparatus must embrace the concept in good faith—an acknowledgment that the constitutional principles extolled by the nation’s founders apply to the veiled agencies of government, too, not just to the more open departments like Agriculture and Commerce. Lawmakers only know about intelligence activities to the extent that the president and the attorney general, plus the nation’s intelligence chiefs—the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of the CIA (D/CIA), and other intelligence agency managers—keep them informed.

Nevertheless, even this basic requirement is often absent. A vivid illustration occurred during the Church Committee inquiry, when a Defense Department truck delivered reams of documents to the panel’s guarded doorstep at the Senate Dirksen Office Building—enough to keep the staff busy for weeks. The problem was, as DOD well knew and the committee soon found out, the mountain of papers was merely a gimcrack devoid of a single useful paper. For the Defense Department—fortified by the triple steel of practiced evasiveness—stonewalling was the name of the game as it single-mindedly hindered and obstructed the committee at every turn. More recently, the second Bush Administration waved off congressional concern by assuring the SSCI Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein (D-California), that the CIA’s torture tactics merely involved a bit of “tummy slapping.” In fact, the Agency was engaged in widespread waterboarding and other cruel interrogation methods.

That’s another reminder of the vitality of the second ingredient for successful intelligence accountability: the will of individual members of Congress to engage in a meaningful examination of spy programs. That requires aggressiveness. One former special assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey (of the Reagan Administration) urged the 9/11 Commission to pursue its investigative responsibilities with a “helicopter-raids-at-dawn, break-down-the-doors, kick-their-rear-ends sort of operation.”

Unfortunately, oversight is rarely like that. The truth is that most lawmakers on SSCI and HPSCI rarely even make it to executive-session hearings, let alone conduct helicopter raids on the CIA or the NSA. Only approximately one-third of the total SSCI and HPSCI membership participated, on average, in executive session hearings during recent years, according to my interviews with staff on these committees. While a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson famously wrote that “Congress in committee-rooms is Congress at work.” When it comes to intelligence accountability, a good many legislators have failed to show up for work.

Ultimately, it is incumbent upon all Americans to take a more active role in demanding the protection of this nation’s fundamental constitutional liberties, electing only those who vow to take intelligence accountability seriously. The security side of the equation is well represented by the intelligence bureaucracy and its allies in the private sector (such as drone and satellite manufacturers). But the counterbalance of a well-organized and well-funded coalition of privacy groups has yet to form coherently in the United States.

The post How Americans Can Keep a Closer Eye on Spy Agencies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was 12 years old and doing something seriously unlawful, though I didn’t know that at the time and it didn’t occur to me to ask my sisters. All I was thinking about was doing right by my family. We all knew something was about to change in our household—the question was how.

The year was 1970. Federal agents had stormed our house in Schenectady, New York, searching for evidence against my father. My sisters and I, without realizing it, had seen that evidence almost every evening after dinner: these small pieces of papers written in code that my dad called, “figgers.”

The author’s family home in the suburban part of Schenectady, New York, that was raided by the FBI

 
The feds’ voices downstairs were getting louder. They were now at the bottom of the stairs. As if on cue, my sisters and I dove for the items, rapidly stuffing them down our pants.

“Don’t put them in your pockets—they can search there,” Donna, the older of my two sisters, said. “Put them in your underwear.”

“But they’re scratching,” balked Elaine, who was a year older than I.

“Just do it!” said Donna.

Elaine and I did as we were told.

“What about the notebook?” I asked, opening it.

There were men’s names and numbers written next to them, which made sense to none of us. It was clear, though, this had to be hidden as well. Donna snatched the notebook and put it under her shirt.

“Does this look natural?” She tried to cover its outline with her long hair.

“Yeah, just keep your arms crossed,” I said, shifting my pants trying to make the papers in my undies more tolerable.

The shoebox was now emptied of its contents. I grabbed the lid to it put back onto the box when Elaine gasped and pointed at it.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

There on the back of the lid in my father’s own handwriting were numerous more letter and number combinations. We all gasped.

“I’m not putting that in my underwear,” Elaine said pointing at the lid.

“I’ll take the box with me,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

With the box clutched to my chest I peeked out the bedroom door for the feds’ location. They were still in the foyer with their backs to us. We gave each other a brisk, final check, making sure none of the evidence was peeking through our pants. Then, in single file, Donna with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, me with the shoebox pressed into mine, and Elaine bringing up the rear, we snuck out of my parents’ room. We fled down the hallway as the sound of heavy footsteps ascended the stairs. Just as we got to my sister’s room, the feds reached the top of the landing, with my mother in tow.

“Which is your room?” the man with the badge asked my mom in a demanding voice. My mother pointed to her bedroom and the men entered to continue their search.

Safe in my sister’s room, Donna whispered, “Go in the bathroom and flush the papers down the toilet.”

“I’m not going out there—you go,” Elaine said to Donna.

“Here, give me your papers and I’ll flush them down,” I said to Elaine.

Elaine quickly dug into her pants, producing fistfuls of the little white paper. Donna followed suit.

“You flush your own papers down the toilet,” I said to Donna, not wanting to extend any generosity on her behalf.

“It’s better if just one person goes,” she said throwing the paper at me.

Elaine pulled out a paper clip from her underwear.

“That was hurting me,” she said and handed me the clip.

“I don’t want that,” I said tossing it onto the floor while continuing to put rumpled paper down my jeans.

I got up to leave for the bathroom when Elaine exclaimed, “Wait! What do we do with the shoebox?”

We all paused.

“Put shoes in it and hide it in the closet,” Donna said.

“But what if they look inside?” Elaine asked.

“They’re not going to look inside if it’s in my closet,” said Donna.

Elaine did as ordered, though, unbeknownst to us, this logic did not make sense. Slowly, Donna opened the bedroom door and peeked out. The men were preoccupied with digging in my parents’ already excavated bedroom.

“OK,” she whispered, motioning me out the door. “Act normal,” she commanded as I slipped past her towards the bathroom and tried to walk casually despite the rumpled papers rustling in my panties.

One of the men in the flannel shirts stopped and looked up at me. My insides froze.

“Can I go pee?” I asked.

A bit embarrassed, the man nodded.

Slipping into the bathroom, I locked the door and turned on the faucet. Unbuttoning my pants over the toilet, the incriminating contents spilled over the bowl and onto the floor. I coughed to cover up any atypical bathroom sounds and ran the faucet water even harder. Then, as quickly as possible, I scooped up the countless of pieces of paper from the floor, threw them into the toilet, and flushed them down. I watched as the little white papers swirled around the bowl, then down through the narrow funnel, and disappeared with the water. A sense of relief and accomplishment came over me. The evidence was gone.

I looked in the mirror with a sense of pride, took a deep breath, then shut the faucet. As I closed the lid on the toilet seat, I suddenly noticed numerous pieces of white paper casually floating back up in the bowl as the water refilled the basin.

Panicked, I jostled the knob to re-flush the toilet, but it wouldn’t flush again since the tank hadn’t fully refilled. I turned the faucet back on, straddled the toilet seat, lifted the heavy tank cover, placed it on my lap, and desperately tried to see if I could somehow speed up the water flow. A forceful knock suddenly shook the door. It was so jarring my body jumped, knocking the hefty lid off my lap. My hands grabbed the sliding, porcelain top only millimeters before it smashed onto the tile floor.

“Is somebody in here?” a man’s voice said.

My heart palpitated.

“Yes, just a minute.” I said, trying to sound casual and calm.

My hands shook as I flushed again. But it was still too soon and the papers just swirled around as if on floats in a swimming pool.

Suddenly, in a moment of feminine inspiration, I grabbed a large box of sanitary napkins from the bathroom closet and put a pad down my undies. I then snatched the numerous pieces of paper from the toilet and put them between the pad and me. Water splashed over my pants. It felt as if I were wearing a wet diaper.

The box of sanitary napkins, with the word “Kotex” prominently labeled on its side, purposefully remained on the counter. I tried to dry off the wet spots on my pants to no avail, took a deep breath, then opened the bathroom door. The large man with the badge stood on the other side.

“You can use the bathroom now,” I said nonchalantly and stepped aside, revealing the family-size box of Kotex on the counter.

The man stiffened a bit and looked away. I walked back to my sister’s room. The satisfaction of seeing his red face made the stress of the situation and the discomfort between my legs totally worth it.

Back in Donna’s bedroom, my sisters circled around me to see if everything went as planned. I shook my head.

“Some are still in my pants. And it’s gross.” I said miserably.

“Why didn’t you flush them?” Donna demanded.

“I couldn’t. The toilet’s still screwed up since you flushed that stupid Kotex down it,” I shot back, remembering only then why the toilet hadn’t work properly.

“Well, I doubt anyone will want to look in your pants anyway,” she said.

Just as I was about to fire back, an abrupt knock interrupted us. No one moved. The doorknob rattled, but couldn’t open. It was locked.

“Open the door, please,” a man’s voice on the other side insisted.

I adjusted the contents in my pants. Elaine looked at me in alarm.

“You’re all wet down there,” she whispered, pointing to my crotch.

My pants were wet from my waist to my thighs.

“Hide,” Donna said.

I looked around for a safe haven, but there was none. Another knock hit the door.

“Open the door,” the man commanded, this time without attempting to be polite.

I dove into my sister’s bed, pulled the sheets up to my waist, grabbed a magazine from the nightstand, and pretended to read it.

“Not in my bed,” Donna insisted.

“Too late,” I said with satisfaction.

“Open the door now,” the voice demanded.

Elaine and I looked at Donna. Donna inhaled deeply. With one arm still crossed over her chest trying to hide what lay underneath, she unlocked and opened the door. The large man with the badge stood on the other side of the doorway glaring at us. The three of us stared back. Donna played with her hair, placing it over her chest.

“We’ll have to search this room.” He said then turned towards me.

“You’ll have to get out of the bed.”

Donna and Elaine shook their heads, mouthing the words: “No, don’t!” Just then the other three men entered the room.

“Excuse us, girls—we’ll need to check your room,” said the nicer man in the flannel shirt and khaki pants.

“Do I have to get up? I’ve got wicked cramps,” I groaned in feigned agony.

“You need to get out of the bed,” demanded the man with the badge.

The guy in the flannel shirt and khaki pants elbowed him.

“She’s fine.” He then turned to me. “You can stay there,” he said in a fatherly way, which didn’t please the head honcho.

Donna and Elaine sat beside me on the bed. The men began their search of the room. My mother stood in the doorway, depleted, with a shell-shocked expression on her face. It was only years later I was able to understand the anguish she was going through.

The men opened each drawer in the dresser, removing garments. Then they searched the closet. Our eyes were glued to their every move as their hands went through sweater pockets, jean pockets, all pockets. One of the men took the boxes from the closet. One by one, he opened and inspected them, inching his way closer to the shoebox with the “figgers” inked under its lid. Just as he was about to reach for it, the man with the badge got up.

“OK, let’s check the other room,” he said, and left.

The two other men followed him out. We waited, praying the man searching the shoeboxes would leave as well.

“I just want to finish in here,” he said.

We wished, hoped, and prayed to Jesus that our thoughts could levitate his body up and out of the room.

They could not.

He reached for the last item: the box with the incriminating evidence under its lid written in my father’s hand. We watched as his right hand lifted the cover exposing to us the handwritten code.

Everything stopped.

The man stared into the container, then looked up at us puzzled. A dirty, old sneaker and a red shoe lay smashed together inside the shoebox that read, “Nurses White Clogs Size 8 ½.”

We smiled back.

The man placed the box top back over the shoes never looking to see what was inscribed underneath its lid. He smiled politely back at us and left the room.

The three of us watched as he disappeared out the door. Without speaking a word, we looked at each other. Had we done it? Had we hidden the “figgers”? My sisters and I sat motionless listening to the men in the other room rummage through drawers and closets.

Then the clanking stopped. The men’s voices moved from the other room past our door, then down the hall. Their heavy footsteps descended the stairs and after what seemed like an eternity, all was quiet. We sat and waited.

The muted sound of a door closing came from downstairs. The three of us raced to the window. The four giant men walked out from the garage, the same way they entered, got into two Ford sedans—one black, one grey—backed out of the driveway, and disappeared down the road.

Downstairs my mother was on the phone as she stood over the stove, staring at the saucepans as bubbles rose and popped in the red, thickening gravy.

“I always hated what he was doing. That damn Fiorentino. I knew he should have never gotten involved with him.” My mother’s voice trembled as she spoke. She was crying.

“Mom, is Dad okay?” I interrupted as my sisters and I stood in the kitchen waiting for reassurance.

“Why don’t you go out and play, honey,” she said softly. “I’m on the phone.” She turned away to wipe her eyes.

“But, is he arrested?” Donna asked.

“Everything’s fine. Why don’t you go do something?”

“Can I stay over Louise’s tonight?” Donna asked, seizing her opportunity.

“Yeah, go.” My mom said dismissively.

Donna ran upstairs to get ready, probably to meet some boys with her best friend.

Frustrated and confused, I went into the family room where the once folded laundry lay spewed over the floor, chairs, and disheveled couch cushions.

“Jerks,” I muttered under my breath.

The hockey game was still on. It was the third period and the Rangers were losing. I sat on the couch and picked up the laundry that lay on the floor and started folding it all over again. I didn’t care about the game. I didn’t care if the towels were folded perfectly. I just wished those four stupid men had never come here, had never set foot in this house on this day looking for my father. And all I wanted was for my dad to come home.

Hours later, my dad briskly walked in wearing his pelted fedora and grey wool overcoat. His mood was upbeat, much more upbeat than usual. I was in front of the television and turned to him, surprised.

“Dad!”

“Hey, Kack!” That was the nickname he used when joking around with me.

I wanted to run and put my arms around him, but I didn’t. I didn’t know what to do so I just looked at him. He smiled at me and quickly disappeared into the kitchen. Whispers were heard, though I couldn’t make out what my parents were saying. I went into the kitchen. My mother was serving my father his dinner. She did not seem too pleased.

“Daddy, are you going to go to jail?” I asked.

My dad leaned toward me, smiling. “Don’t worry,” he said lightly.

“Let your father eat his dinner. Go watch TV,” my mother said firmly.

Reluctantly, I obeyed.

***

My dad’s name was in the papers a day or two later. Some relatives distanced themselves from us, feeling ashamed and angered to have the family name sullied. Even some of my father’s close friends didn’t come around as often. I was ridiculed by a boy at school.

One thing his arrest didn’t affect was the family business. Regular customers continued to patronize our store. Many joked, teasing my father that they had no idea he was such a gangster. He had always been good to them and they loved him no matter what.

The family store, which was built in 1967

 
My father didn’t serve time. In fact, the charges were dropped. No physical evidence was ever found (something of which my sisters and I were secretly proud). We never told him we hid the “figgers.” We couldn’t. We were never allowed to speak about what happened. And as time went on, we never did.

My father no longer brought home bags or shoeboxes full of little pieces of paper. I believe he distanced himself from Fiorentino and Cathy since I never heard him on the phone talking code after that, but I was never really sure; for about a year afterwards, there would be clicking on the other end of the line when I picked up the receiver to make a call.

Perhaps my father did know what we did on that Saturday, though he never acknowledged it. When I became an adult, he often invited me to join him for lunch with his friend Tony at The Joint, a diner the local politicians and bookies frequented. He pointed out the two-way mirror on the back wall where cards and numbers were being run in the room behind it, and the hidden buzzer under the counter by the front door that alerted those in the back room if law enforcement entered looking for something other than a good, Italian meal.

My father believed that to be a good husband and father, he had to be a good provider. He was, even if it meant bending the rules to do so. I’m not sure what this says about me, maybe just that on the deepest level I’m my father’s daughter. We needed to save him and that was all that mattered.

I didn’t emerge from this experience with any great moral strength, perhaps the opposite. As I got older, I realized that this event planted a seed of an understanding in me: Doing what is necessary in life involves actions that may not always be quite, shall we say, on the up and up.

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My mother was in the kitchen doing what she characteristically does on a Saturday, making spaghetti sauce, meatballs, sausage, and braciole for the week. The comforting aroma of sautéed garlic, onions, and tomatoes cooking with the frying meat filled the house. I treasured Saturdays for the simple reason that I felt loved.

Two of my older sisters were upstairs in their rooms doing whatever. (Bonnie, the oldest, was away at college.) Being the youngest of four girls, followed later by my brother Tommy, I was never included in their affairs, and pretended not to care much, since they ridiculed me whenever I was with them. And so being downstairs alone with the laundry and the hockey game suited me just fine.

Saturdays, my dad was at his store working. On Sundays, though, Dad and I watched football together. I loved watching sports with my father. It was one of the few times I felt the closeness he and I once shared before my brother was born. Then I became like my sisters; girls with whom he didn’t know how to communicate or show outward signs of affection. But watching football together was our bonding time. Except when he decided to root for teams who were not from New York.

“Get out of the room!”

“What?! Why? New York is winning.” I’d be completely confused.

“Out. Now!” He’d say as his jaw clenched and his finger pointed threateningly at me.

He never explained why he would, at times, change his New York affiliation, but then, he never explained much of anything. He didn’t make sense to me sometimes, my father. Yet on this day, this Saturday, I began to understand who my father was and how to play outside of the rules.

There was an abrupt knock on the family room door. Since my brother’s friends entered through that door, I called out, “Come in,” while keeping my eyes glued to the game and continuing to fold the towels. After a slight beat, there was another knock. This time more forcefully.

“It’s open!” I said with annoyance, not knowing where my brother was or why my brother’s friends suddenly developed a hearing impediment. But again, more knocks.

Irritated, I got up to answer the door. As I swung it open, a gold badge and an identification card with a blurred picture of a man’s face was shoved within millimeters of mine. It was thrust so close to my nose that my eyes couldn’t focus to read what I assumed I was supposed to be reading.

“I’m lieutenant so-and-so of the FBI.”

He was a tall man in a dark suit. “Is your father home?”

Without waiting for a response or an invitation, his arm stretched out several feet like a Gumby toy and brushed me and my pile of towels aside as he entered the family room. When my eyes and mind refocused, I saw three other men standing in the garage. They were the biggest men I had ever seen.

Two were dressed in similar outfits of red plaid flannel shirts, khaki pants, and work boots. The third man behind the intruder wore a dark suit as well. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, he just followed suit, no pun intended, and entered the house after the man with the badge. The other two men in plaid flannel and khakis walked past me into my family’s home. No one bothered to wait for an invitation.

“Come on in,” I muttered sarcastically under my breath.

Though I did not understand exactly why these four oversized men were in our home looking for my father, I sensed my dad’s odd little nightly rituals had something to do with it.

The author’s father (third from the left), standing behind his mother and with other members of his family in 1941.

 
My father, Angelo, was a generous man, a self-made man with only a high school education who treasured his family. He was a storyteller, a raconteur, whose charm amused those he enjoyed entertaining.

His mother, Teresa, was an industrious and formidable woman, not unlike the icon from Calcutta. She made things by hand (doilies, handkerchiefs) and started selling small dry goods out of her two-bedroom flat in the Italian section of Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood. Business went so well that her husband Carmelo, a mason by trade, built a department store across the street with two apartment dwellings on the second floor. Thus, the family business was established. When my father returned from World War II, he moved into one of the flats upstairs and ran the department store with my grandmother.

The store was successful not only because it provided for the needs of the small immigrant community, but also because my father had a personal touch with his customers. He took great care in measuring a proper fit for their new shoes. He covered their children’s schoolbooks with plastic, provided money order service for those without a bank account, and supplied goods from dresses to toiletries.

The author’s grandfather, renovating a building so the family could run a department store on the first floor and live on the second.

***

As the four massive men stood looking around the family room, I called for my mother, who was in the kitchen oblivious to the intrusion.

“Ma, these men are here to see Dad.”

My mother came out from the kitchen wiping her hands on the mapine (Italian slang for dishtowel). As she graciously extended her arm with a smile to greet them, the large man in the dark suit said, “Ma’am, I have a warrant for your husband’s arrest.”

My mother’s smiling countenance dropped liked the ball at Times Square, as if a shock went through her body from head to toe. The four giant men then circled her like dogs with their prey. My small, agile body quickly slipped by them unnoticed as I dashed upstairs, knowing that any incriminating evidence they were looking for needed to be found, hidden, and destroyed. What that evidence was exactly I wasn’t certain, but I knew what it looked like, and so did my sisters. We saw it almost every evening after dinner.

Dinner was a nightly ritual. It was my father’s insistence that we eat together as a family, something that I could never understand. It’s not as if he waxed poetic at the dinner table. He just wanted us all there, together. It didn’t occur to me back then that it was probably the only time he saw his family together in one place at one time, given his seven-day work week. For me, it was just another rule by which I had to abide.

When dinner was over, we girls would clean up. My brother was allowed to go off and play. My father remained at the head of the table and took out a brown paper bag or a shoebox from the store, or both. He waited patiently as we wiped the table clean and dried it. Then he’d pour the contents of the shoebox or bag out onto the tabletop.

They were always the same type of items: narrow rolls of paper, the kind taken from a small adding machine, and other individual bits of paper held together by paper clips. He used the paper bag to make his notes, or if it were a shoebox, he’d write on the back of its lid. On these small bits of paper were odd writings—two or three letters with a dash followed by numbers, none of which made sense to me.

“Dad, what are those numbers?” I’d ask.

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say with a Brooklyn accent.

My father wasn’t from Brooklyn—his cousins were—and he didn’t normally speak with a Brooklyn accent, but there were certain words he would pronounce as if he were raised in Bensonhurst.

“But what do they mean?”

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say, continuing his calculations.

When he finished at the table, he went into the family room with his paper bag or shoebox of “figgers.” He called either a woman named Cathy or his friend, Fiorentino, (a name you couldn’t make up) and spoke what sounded like code into the phone.

“Hey Fior,” his nickname for Fiorentino, “INT-175, FDV-150, ZJH-333.” And so the one-sided conversation went.

When he finished the phone call, he’d typically walk to the fireplace, empty the shoebox or paper bag of all its contents, and light everything on fire. I’d watch with him sometimes as he waited until the papers ignited. The fire didn’t last long and he’d spread the bits of paper around, making sure they were all dark dust.

***

Upstairs my sister Donna was on her bed. She was a senior in high school and president of her sorority, and always had an air of superiority. She shot me an annoyed look as I rushed in.

“The cops are here. Dad’s under arrest!” I blurted.

Donna shot up like a rocket as my sister Elaine, only a year older than I and the one to whom I was closest, rushed into the room.

“It’s that thing he’s been doing,” Donna said.

“What is that thing he’s been doing? I asked.

“You know, those papers.”

“But what are those papers?”

Whether my sisters knew or not, I couldn’t tell. They didn’t answer. But whatever it was my father was doing, even though we knew deep down it was not totally above board, we were going to hide from the men downstairs. Donna went into combat mode.

“Let’s go into Mom and Dad’s room. Search the drawers. Anything you find, those bits of paper, stuff in your panties.”

Like a well-organized sports team, we made a game plan: to strike before the feds ascended the stairs. Time was of the essence and we had to be discrete.

Downstairs the feds kept my mother in close sight. They made sure she had no chance to stash away any convicting proof of my father’s guilt as they scoured through cupboards, drawers, and sofa cushions, unaware all the while that actual evidence tampering was happening one flight above them.

Donna took on my mother’s dresser, Elaine the smaller closet, and I the walk-in closet where many shoes boxes lay on the shelves. I dug through sports jacket after sports jacket, wanting to find something, anything, that would save my father from the wolves downstairs, but there was nothing except paper clips and loose change.

“I found something!” Elaine exclaimed.

Donna and I ran over to her. My heart pounded. Elaine’s hands shook as she held small pieces of yellow paper. Quickly unfolding them, we realized … it was a false alarm. They were store receipts from recent sales.

“Put ’em in your panties anyway—they could be code for something,” Donna ordered. Elaine obeyed.

I peeked out my parents’ bedroom door to see where the feds were. Only their legs and shoes were visible from the top of the stairs as their feet disappeared into the living room. Their next stop would be the second floor.

“They’re getting closer,” I whispered as I rushed back to the closet. I looked around for where to continue my search. The shoeboxes sat on the shelves as if screaming at me. Of course! I ripped open lid after lid as I eagerly expected to find the gold, the treasure, the Ark of the Covenant (though I didn’t actually know what the Ark of the Covenant was)! But instead of finding the evidence and saving my father, all that stared back at me were pairs of high heels, low heels, slip-ons, men’s dress shoes, and loafers. My excitement turned to frustration and all I wanted was for this to end, for the large men downstairs to go away, for my mother to continue making her sauce, and for me go back to folding the laundry and finish watching my hockey game!

The men’s voices downstairs were getting louder. They were now at the bottom of the stairs. I hurried to get the last box on the shelf, accidently knocking another off its ledge. Its contents spilled onto the floor. I froze. There, on the carpet in the middle of my parents’ walk-in closet, were what seemed like millions of little pieces of white paper with the all-too-familiar code on them and a small, dark notebook.

“I found them! I found the ‘figgers’!” I whispered straining not to shout.

My sisters rushed over. The three of us stared at the evidence the feds were coveting strewn over the floor. Now, Donna, Elaine, and I had to figure out what to do with it.

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