The Murder Room

One of Fleisher’s ASAC lunches was aboard a cabin cruiser sailing on the Delaware, a DEA surveillance boat confiscated from drug smugglers and equipped with all the latest listening devices. “The DEA was showing off, and it worked. It impressed the shit out of everybody.” Gill later borrowed the boat to put away a revenue agent who was taking huge payoffs to ignore corporate audits. The bribes were passed in clandestine meetings on a small boat in the Delaware, and it was easy for the cabin cruiser to listen in. The boat was skippered by DEA agent Steve Churchill, who would become a VSM.

“Bill’s a genius at organization,” Gill said, “at remembering everybody’s name and bringing them together.”

“You got that right,” O’Kane said. “He talks to everybody, every agent, every cop, every snitch, every reporter, every hooker, everybody. He has lunch with everybody. He wanted to talk about this new society over lunch. I said, Bill, I can’t do all the lunches you do, I can’t eat like that. There’s never been a networker like Bill Fleisher.”

The federal agents at the table, Fleisher’s peers, were a flashy group. The bounty hunter, intense U.S. Marshal Dennis Matulewicz, a St. Joseph’s University graduate, liked to quote Hemingway: “There is nothing like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Star Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent Philip Schuyler Deming, chestnut-haired and movie-star handsome, wore the ring of Washington’s officers, the Society of Cincinnati, handed down by his ancestor Alexander Hamilton. Edgar Adamson had once given his life to Christ in the seminary, but was now based in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of Interpol.

“Deming was so blue-blooded, if you cut him he bled Main Line,” said Customs agent O’Kane. “But he was a regular guy, not foppish. He wouldn’t tell you his middle name unless you made him.”

Treasury ASAC Gill sat with his former boss, Ben Redmond, reminiscing about the summer day in New York City in 1971 when their agents were scheduled to go undercover and receive a bribe in person from the godfather of the Colombo crime family himself, Joe Colombo Sr. It would have been a spectacular coup. But at Colombo’s earlier appointment to speak at an Italian rally at Columbus Circle, a gunman shot him three times in the head, putting the godfather in a seven-year coma he never came out of. The infamous phrase of chief rival and suspect Joey Gallo was, “He was vegetabled,” Gill said to laughter.

In comparison, the Customs tribe was a roughhouse gang. O’Kane, son of a Kensington millwright, didn’t know what Customs agents were until half a dozen of them with sticks and guns jumped him when he was removing a repossessed car from Customs bonded storage. The young loan officer hadn’t filled out the proper forms, and Customs agents saw it as a theft. But agents Burke and Murphy liked the way the big Irishman handled himself in the fight. When they realized it was an innocent mistake and moreover the kid was Dutch O’Kane’s son, “they clapped me on the back like I was the greatest guy in the world and told me to apply to Customs.” Like another big Irishman, Frank Dufner, he caught on as a sky marshal. Dufner had been applying to be a letter carrier—his grandfather’s trade for fifty years—when he saw President Richard Nixon on a poster recruiting armed undercover men to stop airplane hijackings. They loved the undercover work, sitting there in coach in a suit with a .38 jammed in their pants, “Just waiting, wanting, wishing something would happen,” O’Kane said. It seldom did, except when Dufner had to tackle a man who was furiously pounding on the pilot’s door. “It turns out he was a gay guy whose lover was pretending to have an affair in the men’s room, and it was the only door he hadn’t checked.”

At Customs, both men trained under the “Forty Thieves,” the hard-boiled inspectors who worked the night docks in Philadelphia with sticks they used to smash smuggled vodka bottles hidden under longshoremen’s coats. “Those guys were two-fisted drinkers and I loved them,” O’Kane said. “I mean they literally stood at the bar with two drinks, and they’d just as soon punch you in the mouth as say hello. They were hardball guys with hearts of gold—Irish mostly, some Italians, a smattering of German types, a few tough Jewish guys.”

Fleisher was one of the tough Jewish guys, one of the polished, college-educated federal agents, even though he happened to have come up the hard way from Philadelphia’s ethnic neighborhoods. But there was no caste system dividing the men at the table. Common achievement was the leveler. Masculine stoicism and modesty were the code in the room. “Guys don’t talk about things,” said O’Kane. “Gill was a hero on helicopter bombing missions in Vietnam, but I’ve never heard him talk about it. It gets mentioned in passing, and you know what a guy’s got.” They all had a lot.

Renowned attorney Kenneth Freeman, one of the tough Jewish guys, had walked the Philly police beat with him as a young man; Freeman went off to law school and encouraged Fleisher to attend the FBI Academy. Another tough Jewish guy, Customs special agent in charge Dave Warren, Fleisher’s boss, had helped bring him over from the FBI and its endless transfers so Fleisher could settle in Philadelphia.

Farther down the table, and back in time, was Fleisher’s Philadelphia tribe, the men he’d grown up with or served with at the police department. Short, wisecracking medical examiner Halbert Fillinger, who went to homicide scenes in his vintage fire department vehicles, had arrived in his red Thunderbird with the HOM-HAL plates. There was city homicide captain Frank Friel, legendary investigator of four thousand murders. “Frank’s the best man on a murder I’ve ever known,” Fleisher said.

The Philly cop family was as tight as any mob.

Only Fleisher’s cofounders, Walter and Bender, weren’t part of the family. Many of the Philadelphians had worked with Bender, but all knew Walter only as a Midwest forensic psychologist whose brilliance and temperamental nature seemed to match Bender’s. With their booming laughter and preternaturally gleaming eyes —one lit with mania, the other darkly glittering with mockery—the men flanking Fleisher seemed as ethereal as apparitions, shadowy extensions of Fleisher. They were loud, outlandish; they broke the code.

Yet Fleisher seemed to have an unspoken communion with the strange men at his side. “I’ve always had a taste for characters and eccentrics,” he said. A taste that came from his father, who enjoyed the company of gangsters, second-story men, showgirls, and assorted figures on the borderlands of darkness.

Before lunch was served, Fleisher got down to the business of creating the Vidocq Society. He introduced his cofounders, then briefly described the swashbuckling Vidocq, the society’s name-sake, and his many accomplishments.

Special Agent Dufner, once Fleisher’s partner in Customs, chuckled. So that’s where he picked up that trick. One winter day in 1980, they were investigating a major theft of TVs and microwaves from cargo containers when Fleisher found a footprint in the snow. He went to the store to buy plaster of paris and made an impression. “A lot of the guys in the office were laughing—you’ve gone too far, what’s this, Perry Mason?” Dufner said. “But we made about twenty arrests, and one guy gave himself up because we had his Converse sneaker impression. Fleisher was one of those guys who knew everything. I thought, FBI agent, Philly PD, I can learn a lot from this guy.”

Led by Fleisher, the men at the long table quickly hashed out the details of their new fellowship. They quickly chose a commissioner (Fleisher) to lead them, along with a deputy commissioner—an immodest organization model also used by the New York City Police Department, the Hong Kong Police, and the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard).

They would meet quarterly over a hot lunch at the Officers’ Club to discuss cold murders. Nate Gordon, the esteemed polygraph operator, proposed that membership be restricted to eighty-two men and women in honor of Vidocq’s life span of eighty-two years. (Born in rural Arras, France, July 23, 1775, a baker’s third son, Vidocq died in Paris on May 11, 1857.) The proposal was quickly accepted. Membership would be a “rare privilege” extended to the top forensic specialists in the world, and endure for life. No one could apply; one had to be invited through sponsorship by an existing member, and approved by a vote of a board of directors that included the commissioner and deputy commissioner. A single blackball would sink a candidate. The eighty-two charter Vidocq Society Members would be formally known as VSMs.

Their meetings would exude the elegant, privileged, old-world atmosphere of a Victorian men’s club. Coffee and iced tea would substitute for brandy, cigars were verboten, and talented women and men of all races would be enthusiastically welcomed as members; it was a different time. But they were not shy about making the club exclusive; one had to be a renowned crime-fighter to even be considered. It would be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

There was an air of whimsy about the Vidocq Society. Among the many previous dining-and-mystery societies that sprang up, mostly in New York or London, the most famous was the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1935. The Irregulars meet for dinner in New York City to discuss Sherlock Holmes in a jovial atmosphere where “it is