In the Mob, Undercover, Out of Control

The peak moment of Jerry Santoro’s life came when he bowed to kiss the godfather’s hand.

Anthony Accetturo, a powerful boss in the Lucchese crime family, was celebrating his 46th birthday over a sumptuous feast at Tiberio Ristorante in Bal Harbour, Fla.

The guest list was a virtual who’s-who of organized crime. Michael “Mad Dog” Taccetta, the Lucchese family underboss, was down from Newark, N.J., with his younger brother Marty. The flamboyant Giacomo “Fat Jack” DiNorscio was there, as were reputed Lucchese soldier Frank “Goo Goo” Suppa and 40 or 50 other guys as colorful as their nicknames.

For most of that night in 1984, the 30-year-old Santoro prowled the fringes of the party, nursing a drink. A tall, thin man with an icy stare, he was known as a connected guy, a wiseguy-in-waiting who could move a little cocaine or get a bet down on anything from a college basketball game to tomorrow’s weather.

But what the mobsters didn’t know was that Jerry Santoro was really Jerry Sullivan, a career FBI agent with a tape recorder hidden in his boot and an identity crisis in his soul that was about to explode.

He had just picked up another drink when a guy named Luigi called him over to where Accetturo was holding court. “This is Jerry Santoro. He’s a friend,” Luigi said to the corpulent mobster whose nickname, Tumac, comes from a comic strip caveman.

Accetturo, the head of the Lucchese family’s operations in New Jersey and Florida, looked into the eyes of the stranger and then extended his hand.

“It was like something out of ‘The Godfather,’ ” Sullivan says now, referring to the films he had watched time and again, ever since he was a kid.

“These guys were so mobbed-up and so tough, and I was an FBI agent. I was on a complete high. For someone who had just started this undercover work, I felt like I’d come a long way. I had kicked ass. I was sitting with the wiseguys.”

Undercover Agent Went Bad

On Friday, Jerry Sullivan headed off to federal prison in Georgia to begin a five-year sentence--not because he was a Mafia wiseguy but because he was an FBI agent gone bad. Sullivan admitted that, while working in Miami as a supervisor of organized crime investigations, he stole more than $400,000 from the office safe to pay off gambling debts--the result of an addiction he says began during his undercover work.

Standing before a judge at his November sentencing, Sullivan somberly declared: “There is no question about my being sorry for my actions. I apologize for everything I was involved in.”

But Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Oosterbaan insisted that Sullivan still had not come clean. “He is not helping us on all the cases he may have compromised,” Oosterbaan said. “This is an anti-hero story if there ever was one. Agents do go bad. But his case is different. He was enthralled by these guys.”

U.S. District Judge Alan Gold agreed, giving him just short of the maximum term allowed by the sentencing guidelines and directing him to pay $190,500 in restitution and serve three years’ probation when he gets out.

The Sullivan case is not the biggest FBI scandal. Other agents have been convicted of murder and espionage in recent years.

However, at a time when FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has been polishing the bureau’s motto--Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity--and announcing a major crackdown on job-related misconduct, Sullivan’s misdeeds have wounded the pride and tarnished the reputation of an elite law enforcement agency.

The Sullivan fiasco has forced the FBI to take a hard look at the way agents are screened and the supervision they get once given undercover duty. At Sullivan’s sentencing hearing, psychologists and two of his brothers testified to a long history of obsessive-compulsive behavior, including alcoholism and a romantic fascination with gangster movies--things that Sullivan’s lawyers contend should have tipped off the bureau that he was unfit for such assignments.

“There is a lot of institutional introspection going on to see if we failed in our oversight of him,” said Tron W. Brekke, a former chief of FBI undercover operations who now serves as deputy assistant director of public and congressional affairs in Washington.

Undercover operations are critical to the FBI’s ability to bring criminal cases against the mob, street gangs, drug cartels and corrupt public officials. Brekke said that at any given time, about 700 of the FBI’s 11,000 agents are certified for undercover work.

There is little doubt that for years the FBI thought it had in Sullivan the perfect cop.

The middle of five children in a close-knit Irish Catholic family, Sullivan idolized his police chief father. His older brother Michael was an FBI agent. And Jerry, a onetime batboy for the Yankees’ farm team, wanted a career in law enforcement so badly that he began working for the bureau as a clerk right out of high school.

As an agent, Sullivan displayed an aptitude for undercover work and a desire to take part in Mafia investigations. He volunteered to spend 11 months studying Italian at the government’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., and finished third in his class.

Brekke, who has known Sullivan for almost 20 years, ever since acting as his supervisor on the FBI’s Los Angeles bank robbery squad, described him as “one of the . . . most dedicated new agents I’ve ever seen.”

By all accounts, Sullivan revered the FBI. But in his role as Jerry Santoro, he forged ties to the mobsters too. Eventually, he realized, he didn’t want to bust these wiseguys; he wanted to be one of them.

“I had two different identities, and I got lost,” he told The Times in a series of exclusive interviews over several months. “Friends told me, ‘You’re changing.’ I can see that now. But I didn’t know it at the time.”

Prosecutors emphasize that Sullivan never complained about the stress of undercover assignments and performed so well that he was eventually promoted.

But his relatives and psychologists say that he has long shown signs of what one doctor called “certain schizoid tendencies.”

“In other words,” explained William Ryan, a psychoanalyst whom Sullivan began seeing last year, “he may well not have been playing with a full deck of cards when he got into the FBI to begin with.”

Young Sullivan Called a Bundle of Tics

Sullivan’s strange behavior began to surface after his family moved from Massachusetts to Plantation, Fla., a bedroom community west of Fort Lauderdale, where his father worked first as a county sheriff’s deputy and then became the town’s police chief.

Through adolescence, said Sullivan’s younger brother Patrick, Jerry was a bundle of tics. “If you accidentally brushed up against him or touched him, he would go nuts,” wiping himself off with the backs of his hands, Patrick testified at a sentencing hearing.

Jerry vacuumed the house two or three times a day, cut the grass in several directions so that it was manicured like a baseball diamond, and collected so many baseball cards that it was nearly impossible to enter his bedroom.

While working as an FBI clerk and attending junior college in the early 1970s, Patrick Sullivan said, his brother became obsessed with Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” movies, playing the theme music over and over and repeating verbatim chunks of dialogue.

“When I found out he was becoming a for-real agent,” Patrick said, “and [that] he was going to be carrying a gun, I was shocked.”

But with a degree in criminology from Nova University, Sullivan did become a special agent. After graduating from the FBI’s training school in Quantico, Va., he was assigned to the Los Angeles bank robbery squad. He quickly distinguished himself, Brekke said.

“I got a call early one morning that a bank robber and killer had escaped from the medical ward of a hospital and was holed up in a West Hollywood apartment, holding a razor blade to the throat of his lover,” Brekke recalled. “I went to Jerry’s house and woke him up. At the apartment building, we climbed over the balcony and entered, and Jerry would not allow me to go first down the hall.

“He confronted the suspect, who was begging us to shoot him, and he disarmed him. He put himself in harm’s way. He was relentless, gung-ho, but not a cowboy. He would do anything you asked.”

After the language training, Sullivan and his wife, Cathy, who was an FBI secretary, returned to Miami. Months later he was dispatched to New Jersey to work on the Pizza Connection case, which made the reputations of Freeh, then a federal prosecutor, and his onetime boss, Rudolph W. Giuliani, now New York City mayor.

Sullivan’s assignment was to monitor phone wiretaps and bugs placed in cars and social clubs, listening in on Sicilian Mafiosi as they discussed the importation of billions of dollars’ worth of heroin into the U.S.

But it didn’t take long for Sullivan to realize that, although he was an honors graduate of the government’s top language school, when two Sicilians were talking the lingo of the streets, he couldn’t understand a word.

Frustrated on the job, isolated at night in a New Jersey motel room, without a car and away from his pregnant wife, Sullivan said he turned to what he could do well: drink. And he drank a lot.

Patrick Sullivan, then working as a salesman, said he frequently stayed with his brother.

“I . . . kind of nicknamed him ‘One More’ because he and I would be sitting up in the kitchen and I’d have to get up early the next day,” Sullivan testified. “He would say, ‘Pat, come on, stay up, let’s have one more.’ ”

Sullivan’s drinking only increased, relatives said, after he volunteered to work undercover in Operation Shockwave, which targeted Accetturo.

According to FBI documents, Accetturo had been under investigation since the early 1970s, when he moved to South Florida to avoid prosecution on New Jersey racketeering charges. But Accetturo still ran the Lucchese family’s criminal enterprise from his home in Hollywood, Fla., the FBI said.

Sullivan’s job was to pose as Santoro and attempt to collect evidence that a restaurant owner was skimming profits to pay off a $1-million debt to the mob.

According to FBI reports, Sullivan was introduced through an FBI informant to Tiberio maitre d’ Valentino Mordini in late 1983. From then on, he said, he did what wiseguys and Mafia wannabes do: hang out.

Over the next several months, Sullivan said, he used FBI cash more than 20 times to buy cocaine from Mordini and another restaurateur, Dario Mistri. He also began to work for Mistri as a maitre d’ at his Pompano Beach restaurant, called Dario’s, and took bets over the telephone.

In his make-believe role as an unmarried drug dealer with no family ties, Sullivan said, he began drinking even more, staying out routinely until 4 a.m. and neglecting his wife. And with his gangster pals, he also found a sense of belonging very similar to the one he knew in both his own Irish American family and with the FBI.

“I played tennis with these guys, hung out with them all night,” said Sullivan. “I spent one Christmas with Dario and his kids.”

A psychiatrist hired by his lawyers testified that for Sullivan, a scrambled sense of identity was inevitable. “I think that when you are drinking and drugging and gambling and everything else, and when you are associating with people all day, for hours and hours and hours, you forget at times that you are an agent doing this,” said Dr. Richard B. Seeley.

“You become so caught up with it, you are just enjoying the time or you are involved deeply in that time. And then you are thinking, well, wait a minute, I am the agent. I have to betray these people. I have to turn these people in. I have to rat on these people. And that sets up a great conflict.”

Operation Shockwave ended in October 1984 when FBI agents offered Mordini a deal in which he would testify against Accetturo. Sullivan’s cover was blown.

Assigned to a desk job, Sullivan said, he quickly realized that “I missed the life. I was home, with nothing to do but watch TV. I didn’t know how to relax.”

In April 1986, agent Ben Grogan, his FBI mentor and a fishing buddy, was killed in a wild shoot-out on the streets of Miami-Dade County that also claimed the life of a second agent and wounded five others. Grogan’s death sent Sullivan into a tailspin.

Patrick Sullivan testified that while drinking at home, Jerry often would disappear to listen to a tape-recording of President Reagan comforting Grogan’s widow. “I would go looking for him, and he would be sitting in the garage, garage door closed, in his car, car doors closed, listening to this tape over and over again and crying.”

Finally, Cathy went to her husband’s bosses and asked for help. Sullivan entered an alcohol treatment program in January 1992.

After just four weeks, he was discharged and returned to a desk job in Miami FBI headquarters. He had stopped drinking. But he started gambling.

He began small, with a $10 bet on a football game.

But because of his experience at Dario’s--placing bets and accepting cash--Sullivan knew his way around bookies. Before long he was wagering hundreds of dollars at a time. And losing. He had a second telephone line installed in the house just to call bookies.

Cathy never knew about the second phone line. Nor did she know about the rented post office box where Sullivan received his credit card bills.

And, of course, she never knew about the mounting debt, or the thefts from the office safe.

In asking the court to slap Sullivan with the maximum sentence, prosecutors argued that he was not a true compulsive because he never commingled stolen money with his own. He did not take a second mortgage on the house, sell off personal possessions or make the kids go without food.

But Sullivan says that his paycheck went directly into a family account, and that Cathy handled the household finances. “Although I thought about it, I never tried to get that money because she would find out. And that’s the last thing I wanted.”

Even as his debts piled up, Sullivan earned praise from his supervisors. In job evaluations he was called an “exceptional” agent, a “man of his word” and a lawman who “applies sophisticated, innovative investigative techniques to obtain substantial amounts of relevant information.”

By February 1994, he had been promoted to supervisor and put in charge of organized crime investigations in the Miami office. One of his first assignments, according to FBI testimony, was to head up a probe targeting U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), who reportedly was placing bets with a mob-connected bookmaking operation being run from a Hallendale, Fla., condominium.

That summer, Sullivan resurrected his undercover persona and, without FBI authorization, began establishing his own contacts with crime family associates. “He loves wiseguys,” said Oosterbaan, the prosecutor.

Sullivan also started placing bets with the same bookmaking operation he was supposed to be investigating.

Months later, according to prosectors, Sullivan torpedoed the entire investigation to cover up his gambling involvement with the ring--actions detailed in an obstruction of justice charge, one of 10 felonies to which he pleaded guilty.

Although no Florida case was ever made against Rostenkowski, the Chicago politician was later indicted in the House post office scandal and served 17 months in prison for mail fraud.

By early 1996, Sullivan’s debts had climbed to $100,000, and he said he was betting up to $2,000 a week--with money stolen from the FBI safe--in a desperate attempt to get even. “I was doubling up, always thinking that if I hit, I could replace the money from the safe,” he recalled. “It was like a bad dream.”

Then one day, a man he knew only as Chris showed up. During a restaurant meeting, Sullivan said, Chris threatened to kill him and his family if the debts were not paid.

In a panic, Sullivan said he told Chris he was an FBI agent. Chris seemed unfazed. “We take action from a lot of law enforcement people,” was Chris’ response, Sullivan said. “Everybody has to pay.”

Sullivan said he and Chris worked out a $400-a-week repayment plan. And he kept gambling in a desperate effort to get even.

In the summer of 1996, the FBI seized $129,000 from a check-cashing store and stashed it in the bureau’s safe, to which Sullivan had sole access.

He took the money.

That December, he got another taste of his former life when he and several other agents were assigned to arrest Nicholas “The Little Guy” Corrozzo, then heir-apparent to succeed John Gotti as head of the Gambino crime family.

Corrozzo and an associate, Ralph “Fly” Davino, were in bathing suits, walking along the beach on Key Biscayne, when the agents in dark suits and sunglasses jumped out from behind palm trees to nab them on loan-sharking and gambling charges.

What Sullivan remembers was that the other agents, young and eager to collar the mobsters, came on like gang-busters, hands on weapons, yelling instructions, making a commotion.

He urged his colleagues to calm down and ordered that the mobsters be given time to change into street clothes before they were taken into custody. “I treated Corrozzo with respect,” Sullivan said.

That was not to be his last intervention for a reputed Mafioso. In May 1997, Sullivan volunteered to appear before U.S. District Judge Stanley Marcus and testify on behalf of Daniel “Fat Danny” Laratro, who was heading to prison after a conviction on marijuana smuggling charges.

Sullivan told Marcus that Laratro, a reputed Lucchese family associate, had provided him with the names of organized crime figures involved in a waste disposal business registered in the name of Laratro’s wife. Marcus then knocked almost two years off Laratro’s five-year sentence.

But according to federal prosecutors, the information Sullivan said came from Laratro really was given to other agents by other informants. He lied, prosecutors said, because Laratro had promised to help him with his debts.

Sullivan denies being promised money from Laratro and says he testified only as an inducement to get the defendant to cooperate.

In the meantime, FBI supervisors who had begun to compare audit reports filed by Sullivan discovered a discrepancy. The total: $400,500.11.

By late May 1997, when agent Aaron Sanchez asked him to document three money vouchers, Sullivan knew his deception and career were over.

On a Friday afternoon, he walked out of the office for the last time, withdrew $400 from his checking account, left a note for Cathy at home, and then drove his mother’s white Lincoln Continental across the Everglades to a hotel on Marco Island.

From there he dialed a 900 telephone number and bet the last $100 of his offshore account on a baseball game. And then he started in on a case of beer.

The next morning, two FBI colleagues arrested Sullivan in a convenience store.

He was buying a six-pack.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.