The Biggest Lie Ever Told

Overture

In my childhood there was a disgustingly lurid comic book in America entitled Crime Does Not Pay.

Some of this "comic's" covers would turn your stomach. Like the one I saw around the time I turned 13, showing a guy blowing another guy's head off. The drawing depicted the very moment the murderer's bullet struck the victim's head. Brains and eyeballs flying every which way.

A churchgoer of my acquaintance complained about the sample cover of Crime Does Not Pay which I originally put in the space below to illustrate what a sickie rag it was.

She claimed that my sample, which featured a scene of sexual torture, (the October, 1970 cover if you want to go and look for it on Google Images) was a bit too sickie-porno. She found it offensive. Well, yeah, but that was the idea. The whole stupid magazine was offensive.

So I've replaced the cover I originally used with one that removes nasty old sex and illustrates only good, clean American fun: a hail of bullets followed by a guy roasting in the electric chair. No churchgoer could ever object to that.

This magazine was pure crap. It did glorify violence and sadistic sex, and it was being sold to kids.

If the original rationale was to scare youngsters away from lives of crime by showing criminals getting their supposed comeuppance, (Yeah, right!)  It didn't work.

In fact, many people feared that the magazine was having the opposite effect: making crime glamorous to kids. Under pressure from parents and clergy, not to mention a congressional subcommittee on what was then called juvenile delinquency, Crime Does Not Pay was forced to cease publication in 1955 after once having had a national readership of about six million. Later someone brought it back. You can't keep a lucrative business down.

But never mind that. Big circulation or no, this rag was, not to put too fine a point on it, a pack of damned lies and balderdash. After the story I'm about to tell, if there remains any notion in your mind that crime does not pay, and that the mounties always get their man, well, let my tale be a dose of what's known these days as "reality check."

For I have a good story on this subject that needs to be told.

Part One

My poor father.

He always boasted of being so tough and savvy. He swaggered around like his hero John Wayne, boring everyone who could not escape from listening with one story after another about how once upon a time he had intimidated somebody with his fists. Big Man. Little fists. (He was five feet eight.)

In short, (no pun intended) my father was in some ways a sad character. And once or twice he was also the biggest chump you could imagine.

I say that not in mockery, but in sorrow.

At the end of the 1960s, the port of entry into the United States between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico, run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was as rotten as an unrefrigerated, week-old persimmon. American immigration and customs officials were taking bribes from narcotics smugglers, what we now would have to call "undocumented-worker" smugglers and smugglers of who knows what all else, (today it might be fissionable material) like kids grabbing chocolate chickies on Easter morning. Or used to. (Do we still have Easter anymore, or has the ACLU gotten it abolished?)

Anyway, as that awful decade was petering out, enter my father, the INS' favorite patsy.

He had been a patsy once before, and it set his career back more than a decade.

In 1954 (so my father told me years later), my father, a Border Patrolman in those days, was stabbed in the back in an affair involving his former INS boss, Harlan Carter, who many years later became president of the National Rifle Association.

(By the way, in 1981 two Associated Press reporters broke the story that then-NRA president Harlan Carter had shot and killed a Mexican in his Texas youth, and had gotten off scot-free. In 1930s Texas, killing a Mexican was no big deal. But the irony was delicious to gun-hating liberals: the president of the NRA had once shot and killed a Mexican! And gotten away with it! Laugh, snicker, guffaw.

When this story broke in the press, I had already heard it. Long before.

I'd heard it from my father.

As a young journalist, I thought I had the biggest scoop of all time. But Dad asked me to hold off publishing the story until he gave me the green light. He was my dad. I agreed.

And then those two AP reporters broke the story before I had a chance to.

Typical of my life: always in the right place at the wrong time.)

But back to '54. Harlan Carter was my father's boss when Dad was in and out of Washington, D.C. as a Border Patrolman in the fifties. (Dad's later D.C. boss, Rex Kelley, was also a good friend -- I'm named after him.)

But according to the story Dad told me, in 1954, when they were both in Miami for some governmental reason, Harlan Carter pitched to my dad the idea that if they got a certain individual drunk, he would spill his guts about someone running an "undocumented worker" ring somewhere in south Florida. (Or as they were called then, "illegal aliens.")

Dad thought the whole thing smelled bad, but Carter was his boss, so he went along with it.

Anyway, when this supposedly blabbermouth-drunk turned blabbermouth to the wrong people, my father skeedaddled back to Washington, only to hear through channels that Carter was claiming at the top of his lungs that the whole thing was my dad's idea, not his. Who was going to take my father's word against that of his boss? Such things do not happen in the ass-kissing halls of government, believe me. Joe Dupuis, Fall Guy, Part I.

On Rex Kelley's advice, Dad decided to make himself scarce in Washington. He put in for a tour of duty in the northeastern sector headquarters in St. Albans, Vermont, where I was born in the fall of 1955.

My late dad claimed that this perfidy on the part of the late Harlan Carter was the reason my dad remained a GS-11 for the next dozen years. He just couldn't get promoted. He had too many enemies. He was blackballed by the bureaucracy.

In 1967 Dad finally got a little break. He put in for the position of Chief Patrol Inspector (the title has since been changed) of the northwestern sector, in Spokane, Washington. He got the job.

In 1968 our family moved to Spokane. But my mother, a native of Chula Vista, California, and by then no big fan of my father's, (another story for another time) hated Spokane. Nothing against Spokane; it's a wonderful city. But the truth is that my mother would have hated any place my father took her that wasn't Chula Vista. She kept the pressure on my father constantly to get himself transferred back to her home turf. It was Mom's mulishness that kept Dad in Spokane by himself for one full year -- she refused to leave southern California. So for a year the family had two homes. But finally Dad put his foot down, bought a house in Spokane and we all moved there. The Chula Vista house was rented out to a young couple.

Thanks to the unending tension between my parents, (Mom wanted to go back to southern California where her "friends" were, and that's ALL she wanted), our tenure in Spokane was fated to be short.

In the fall of 1969 my dad went on a temporary-duty assignment back "down south" to San Ysidro.

While he was there, Satan whispered in his ear, in the form of his friend and former boss Al Gearhart, who by the way had a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Harlan Carter, Al Gearhart. Texas. Texas keeps popping up in this narrative. Did my father have some karma to burn involving Texas? Who knows? Perhaps in a previous life Dad had been a soldier in General Santa Anna's army -- Santa Anna was the "bad guy" in the Texas version of the Alamo story.

I had known Al Gearhart since I was a baby. He had been my father's boss in the northeastern sector in Vermont when I was born. Later, around the time I was in kindergarten, Al Gearhart was my father's boss again, in San Pedro, California. A year or three later, Al Gearhart was my father's boss yet again, at the Border Patrol sector office in San Ysidro.

In short, my father spent a good many years looking at Al Gearhart's butt on the Border Patrol career ladder. And Dad told me years later that he knew the reason why: once those in INS circles discovered that Al's wife, Rhoda, was the niece of John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner,who had been Vice-President of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gearhart couldn't get promoted quickly enough. Again and again.

Garner was from Texas. (Yeah, Texas again.)

Now, around the time of my 14th birthday, Al Gearhart reportedly took my dad aside and told him that the job of Officer in Charge at the San Ysidro port of entry was being vacated, and Al recommended that my dad put in for it.

In fact he not only recommended it, but having known my parents for years, and taking advantage of what he knew about their relationship, Gearhart gave my dad a little "incentive:"

"If Sheila (my mother) finds out that this job became vacant," Gearhart reportedly told my dad,  "and you didn't put in for it, she'll make your life even more miserable than she's making it now."

Dad put in for the job. And he got it. And it meant a promotion to GS-13. Hurray. My mother was exultant. She was getting what she wanted, the return to southern California from Spokane. I was less thrilled; I'd been very happy in Spokane and did not want to return to Chula Vista, where I had been very unhappy in junior high school two years earlier.

Every day thousands and thousands of cars pass between

California and Mexico at the port of entry at San Ysidro. When

the FBI launched an investigation of corruption at this facility

in 1971, my father was running it.

What my father didn't know in 1969 was that Gearhart, and certain other people in the INS as well, wanted Dad to get that job.

Why? Because they knew that very soon that job was going to become the focus of a federal investigation. And they wanted my dad to be holding the bag when that investigation broke.

Dad came to this realization 18 months or so later, when, as they say, the fecal matter hit the rotating oscillator.

Joe Dupuis, Fall Guy, Part II was about to begin.  



As Dad was being set up, I was growing up. My family returned to Chula Vista in the summer of 1970, just in time for me to become a sophomore at Chula Vista High School that fall, and for my older sister Carla to become a senior at the same school.

So now we were back in southern California. My father settled into his new job running the port in San Ysidro.

Shortly after that, weird things began happening.

For example, one of my dad's officers sent a pot of stew over to our house that his wife had supposedly made. My whole family (except for me) ate it and got sick.

Then Dad came home one night from a drinking bout with his American and Mexican cronies in Tijuana (Dad spoke fluent Spanish and had friends on both sides of the border) wincing with pain from what was apparently a cracked rib.

The story he told us at the time was that he and his friends had been lounging by a pool somewhere, and Dad had run, slipped on the wet cement and fallen down.

One of Dad's Mexican pals, Rudy Valladolid, (whom I knew well from hunting trips in Mexico with Dad in my childhood) even joked about it: "Joe was drinkin' 'Butterfly Tequila!'" Rudy jibed. "You drink too much of it and you think you're a butterfly!"

That's not what had happened. Dad told me years later that what actually happened was that a longtime Border Patrol crony of my father's named Leonard Gilman, against whom my father had unsuccessfully campaigned a few months earlier for the job of INS regional commissioner in San Pedro, had intentionally gotten my father drunk and then viciously punched him in the ribs.

Dad had known Gilman for many years, and told me much later that Gilman had always been a powerful bar-fighter, with a deadly punch. It was not hard to believe the scenario: Dad had challenged Gilman for the regional commissioner's job, Gilman had beat him out for it, having better political connections, and then one drunken night in Tijuana, resenting my father for having challenged him, Gilman delivered a drunken body-blow to the ribs of my equally-drunken dad.

Not hard to believe at all.

One of my Dad's most trusted and liked officers was Frank Castro. My parents became friendly with Castro and his wife, socialized with them.

I remember only two things about Frank Castro. First, as my father pointed out, Castro bore an uncanny facial resemblance to the famous Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. Second, Castro got my dad and me tickets to accompany him to a closed-circuit television screening at the San Diego International Sports Arena of a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry in the fall of 1970.

Ah, yes but there's also a third thing I remember: it was Castro who had sent over that pot of stew that made everyone in my family sick, and months later, both of my parents noticed a "cooling" in their relations with the Castros which neither could really explain.

What was going on? I must confess that I didn't think about it much in those days. I was 15 and busy with my own concerns, which were, basically, school and unrequited love, the only kind of love I ever experienced before I was out of my teens. Work was just a place my father went every day while I went to school. I didn't give it much thought.

Then, the following year, about the time I turned 16, Dad arranged a weekend job for me, pumping gas (something teenagers did for you in those days) in a Shell station at the corner of Broadway Avenue and L Street in Chula Vista. (A 7-Eleven and an Auto Zone occupy that corner now.)  The station's owner, Joe Byrne, was one of my father's immigration inspectors. He ran a Shell station on the side.

"On the side?" The 16 year-old that I was when I was hired (40 years ago this month) wouldn't have noticed this, but there were a few distinctly fishy things about Joe Byrne. In retrospect, I don't know why my father didn't pick up on them right away.

In 2001, a former FBI agent living in Virginia, Robert Hanssen, was caught spying for the Russians and went to prison, where he still is. It was all over the news. Hanssen spied for about 20 years before he got caught. He might have spied for the Russians for another 20 years, but for one thing: the dumb son-of-a-bitch gave himself away.

How? By living far beyond his means.

An FBI agent suddenly moves into a super-expensive house in tony Vienna, VA, and starts spending like a sailor?

They got him.

Lesson: if you're going to do something illegal, at least keep a low profile. Ostentatious spending will get you into trouble every time.  Al Capone flaunted his bootlegging fortune and wound up getting nailed for income-tax invasion. He died in prison.

Joe Byrne, my father's subordinate and  my boss in 1972, was an immigration inspector.

He also ran a Shell gas station.

He also had two Peterbilt trucks and ran his own trucking company.

He also had his own airplane.

How do you manage all of that on an immigration inspector's salary?

Well, uh...

Part Two

I worked at Joe Byrne's Shell station all through my junior year of high school, through the following summer and into the beginning of my senior year.


But more strange things were happening, and finally it all blew up. The government, which usually prefers a more subtle approach than door-bashing, despite what you might have seen in Bruce Willis movies, began moving slowly in. The FBI didn't want to make anybody panic and run -- they went about their investigation of the port of entry, as the French say, peu a peu. Little by little. My dad began getting phone calls and visits at work from the Junior J. Edgars.

What were those strange things that were happening?

Well, at the gas station, especially late on a Saturday night, I started getting weird phone calls. People "looking for Joe." Also odd visits. Guys would come poking around, again usually late in the evening, and they wouldn't buy anything. They were just "looking for Joe." One night a couple of guys wearing suits and ties came in while I was running the place alone (I was "night man" during the summer of '72, running the station by myself from six p.m. to midnight.) Once again they were just "looking for Joe." These two guys sat in the showroom for a while perusing magazines, and when Joe didn't show up, they  quietly said "good night" to me and left.

"Those guys were runners," my dad told me later. "They were looking for Joe, either to pick up or drop off some cash."

A small cast of regulars seemed always to be popping up "looking for Joe." One was a truck driver named Leroy Riddlesburger. He drove one of Joe's trucks I think, so I assumed he had a legitimate reason for his visits. Another was a Mexican named Willie Reyes, a smartass who drove a muscle car ('72 Camaro?), played loud rock music on his car stereo system and enjoyed giving me a good-natured bad time when I came out to pump his gas. A jerk, to the eyeballs.

Both of these guys were in the shit up to their ears, as we would learn later.

And this was not just about "undocumented workers," but also about narcotics. And LOTS of money.

Things were coming out more and more out into the open. By now the investigation was an acknowledged fact.

Everyone sat tight; no one broke and ran for the Bahamas, but everyone knew the feds were sniffing around.

Naturally the Mexicans became interested in all of this; it affected them too. There was a TV talk show on XEWT Channel 12 in Tijuana in those days, Juan Luis Presents. Because my dad was running the show at the border and because his Spanish was very good, Juan Luis interviewed Dad a couple of times. I watched one of these TV interviews. Of course I couldn't understand a word they were saying, but it was a rather eerie experience, seeing my father on television talking in a foreign language. I had heard my father speak Spanish often enough of course, but TV is...well, you know, TV. It creates its own reality.

Not once but twice, my dad was summoned to Washington, D.C. to testify before a federal grand jury.

I'm proud to say that my father, professionally, was as clean as a whistle (if he had possibly been a bit naive in the beginning.) After the second of his two appearances in D.C., the district attorney told the grand jury, "Unless one of you has something you want to accuse Mr. Dupuis of, I don't want to see him again."

And for the rest of his life, my father never again set foot in Washington. In fact, I don't think for the rest of his life he ever left California.

One afternoon in the early fall of 1972, when I was just about to turn 17, I got a strange phone call of my own. From my father.

"Listen," he said, "if you were planning to go down to the station this afternoon, don't go. I'll explain it when I get home."

By the time he got home, Dad had cooked up his story. "You know that Union 76 station across the street from the one you work at? The Border Patrol moved in this afternoon and busted a couple of illegal aliens who were working there. I didn't want them to see you across the street, point their fingers and say 'That's the guy who told on us.'"

Not a very good story. Not plausible at all. But I was on the eve of my 17th birthday, and this was my father talking. I didn't question him for a minute. If that's what he said, that's what he said.

As usual, I went about my business.

But about a week later, Dad walked in with another announcement.

"The FBI closed down the station and Byrne's in jail. You don't have a job anymore."

For some reason that came as a shock to me. After all, I had been working at this gas station for the better part of a year, and was accustomed to the pocket-money it gave me.

My father was ready for that. "Look," he said. "You're in your senior year of high school now. I know you relied on the station for money. But your studies are more important. So, for now, just concentrate on school and I'll give you a few bucks a week, okay? Take a break."

Nice birthday present. Nice Dad, when he wasn't threatening to beat me up.

So, we had all been "cashiered," we Byrne employees. I had to go down to the station that night to pick up my last paycheck.

It was strange, seeing the station locked up at 6 p.m. It was also strange seeing both of Joe's Peterbilt trucks locked in the service bay. The FBI had impounded them.

"Al," Joe's indescribably crotchety father-in-law (he was always screaming about something) was there to cut those final checks.

"I don't understand it," he said when he handed me mine. "I can't believe he's guilty. Joe always talked down drugs. He always said he'd brain any of his kids if he caught them using drugs."

Self-interest trumps rhetoric, one more time. I took my check and went home.

Joe Byrne was sentenced to six years in prison. Frank Castro also went to jail, as did a number of others. As for the higher-ups involved in all of this, including Al Gearhart, they didn't go to prison but some of them, including Gearhart, were forced to retire as an alternative to being prosecuted.

Eventually my father, too, was forced to retire. Not because he was implicated or guilty in any way, but because, as whistle-blowers in the government invariably do, he had once again made powerful enemies. By the fall of 1973, when I was starting college and "Operation Clean Sweep," as it had been called, was over and done with, my father was being threatened by the powers that be with the worst retaliation bureaucracy can inflict on any of its minions: transfer to a job they don't want or some place they don't want to go.

My dad was 59 by then, and had spent most of his career in southern California. He had seen what happened five years earlier when he transplanted the family from Chula Vista to Spokane: my mother declared Cold War. Now he had two kids (my older sister Carla and me) in college. Between Carla's and my college careers, and my mother's demonstrated antipathy for any place but Chula Vista, there was no way my dad was going to accept a transfer to St. Paul, Minnesota.

And his enemies knew it.

Dad retired from the Immigration Service on January 1, 1974, three-and-a-half months shy of his 60th birthday. Over the next three decades he would delight in watching his government enemies drop dead, one by one. Dad lived to be 91, and in his old age one of his proudest boasts was that he had outlived every enemy he ever had.

In fact I remember one in particular. I was living in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1995, working for the U.S. Department of State. I saw an obituary in the Washington Post for a guy named James Greene. The obit said that Greene had had a long career in the Immigration Service.

I made a phone call to my dad. "Hey, Dad, during your Border Patrol and INS days, did you know a guy named James Greene?"

"Jim Greene? Sure, I knew him," Dad said.

"Was he a friend or an enemy?"

"ENEMY," Dad said without hesitation.

"Well, he's dead. I saw his obituary in the newspaper this morning."

I swear, my father almost chortled.

Al Gearhart, my dad's perpetual boss the whole time I was growing up, also dropped dead in the years following Operation Clean Sweep. Heart attack.

My father expressed no sorrow or regret when Al Gearhart suddenly died, never mind the fact that they had been "friends" for decades, had even played golf together. Gearhart had become an "enemy" during the Clean Sweep debacle. As close as our families had been when I was a child, after Clean Sweep my father never spoke to Gearhart again, and when Gearhart died, Dad responded only with a shrug.

When we left off the saga of Joe Byrne, he had just been sentenced to six years in federal prison for taking bribes from narcotics smugglers.

Fast-forward six years.

It is now 1978. I, down on my luck as usual, am working as a cashier in a little, independent beer-and-wine store in Bonita, California, right over the hill from Chula Vista. (Actually, one could argue that this store was in Sunnyside, a less-"chi-chi' place than Bonita, further out Bonita Road on the way to Spring Valley. But the store's short-lived owner, an overconfident, overloud and overweight insurance salesman and general jerk-off named Ty Williams, insisted on calling the place The Bonita Wine Cellar.)

It was nothing of the sort. It was a 7-Eleven without the goods, and doomed to fail. The place had been a liquor store prior to Ty's " buying" it, but he was too cheap to pay for a liquor license. So he tossed some beer, wine, soft drinks and bread in there, installed me behind the cash register, and then sat back on his big fat, wine-drunken ass and waited for the place to make him rich. But that same summer, a Von's supermarket opened just around the corner and down the street. Their beer and wine was much cheaper than ours, so people bought from them instead of us. And we didn't have much to offer anyone besides overpriced beer, Coke and a few loaves of bread. Von's and its neighbor Big Bear killed us. In those days the big grocery chains in California were not yet allowed to sell hard liquor. That changed later. But even if we had had a liquor license, Von's would eventually have killed us.

And even in 1978, when the big grocery chains did not yet have liquor licenses, the Bonita Wine Cellar was doomed to fail, given the half-hearted, half-ass, penny-pinching way Ty Williams chose to run it.

Still, when the business did fail, he blamed me. I quit.

Six months later he was out of business. Since 1979 that place has been a dry cleaning shop.

One Saturday afternoon I was standing behind the cash register at the "Bonita Wine Cellar," reading a book as usual because as usual there was no business and nothing else to do.

 Joe Byrne walked in.

And I don't mean that in the sense that Thomas Mann meant it in Tonio Kroeger: "Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm walked into the room." Mann's italics implied metaphor.


No metaphor for bourgeois normalcy here. It was Joe Byrne, the real article. In the flesh. Out of jail. And happy.

Yes, just as I remembered from my teen years, Joe was grinning, as my father used to say, "like a jackass eating shit in a briar patch."

Joe had always borne that jackass grin. And, after having been sentenced to six years in prison and serving four, he still had it.

He also still had his dirty money.

Yes, here we reach our ultimate point: "Crime Does Not Pay?" Baloney. Crime is the world's most lucrative racket if you don't get caught.

And sometimes even if you do.

Joe was in a fine mood that day, for an ex-con or anyone else. As he explained to me, his trucking company had just landed a lucrative federal contract. They were building Interstate 805, which runs from the Mexican border at Otay Mesa up to a spot near Del Mar, where it merges with Interstate 5. Byrne Trucking was in on the project, to the tune of god-knows how many taxpayer dollars.

Byrne Trucking? Didn't that all end when Joe went to prison? Didn't the FBI impound his two trucks?

Yes, but what the FBI didn't impound, because they never found it, was the money. Joe had stashed it all over his property before he went to jail. In fact I think he admitted at some point that even he had forgotten where he put some of it.

Didn't matter; there was plenty left, and when Joe got out of prison, his ill-gotten gains awaited him with open arms. He went right back into the trucking business, and by 1978 was prospering as never before.

I never saw Joe Byrne again.

But let's fast-forward another 18 years anyway. In the spring of 1996, at a time when my father and I were not speaking to each other, by the way, Dad nevertheless sent me a newspaper clipping.

It was Joe Byrne's obituary. And quite an obituary it was. Joe had been out flying his private plane one night (yes, he got another plane as well) with his younger son Pat, and they crashed into a mountain. End of Joe, end of Pat, end of story. Okay. Well, one might argue until one is blue in the face about the mills of the gods grinding slowly, but if you ask me, that is not justice by anyone's definition. Byrne got to enjoy himself, living high off the proverbial hog, for a full 20 years after giving four years to jail. Crashed plane or no -- and it is too bad he took his son Pat with him --  I think he struck a pretty good bargain with the gods, all in all.

If that's your idea of a bargain.

I guess to some people it is. I guess to Joe it was, because he was smiling from ear to ear when I saw him two years after he got out of jail.

Still, my father outlived Joe Byrne. He had that, and so do I.