Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [38]
He readily admitted that he’d filed no tax returns and paid no taxes on his ill-gotten gains. Asked why he hadn’t paid taxes, he responded blithely, “I didn’t file because I stole the money, and had no job, and couldn’t show how I earned it.”
The mobster DeCarlo and his associates weren’t about to forget Zelmanowitz, but by 1973, they had no idea where he was. That’s why “Maris” was so angry when Lipset’s operative took pictures of him in the hotel lobby in San Francisco. And it’s also why the private investigator Murphy had returned a clean, but unverifiable, report on Maris. Murphy was helping his former colleagues at the FBI maintain Zelmanowitz’s fictional identity lest the mob find him and kill him.*
In the end, Creative Capital got its company back, Lipset got out of the lawsuit, and Creative Capital was stuck with the bill for his extra investigation. “Maris” disappeared from sight in 1973, relying once again on the FBI to build a new life for him somewhere else. On the lam that year, Zelmanowitz called a reporter, but refused to say where he was calling from.
“My whole entire cover is being destroyed and torn apart,” Zelmanowitz said. “At this moment, I am traveling very far and very fast.”
Lipset noted that Zelmanowitz sued the FBI for $12 million for failure to protect his identity, but he lost that case, too.
IN THE CREATIVE Capital saga, Lipset had a client who had been wronged. But not all his clients were so virtuous. Like many of today’s corporate intelligence operatives, Lipset was happy to work for anyone who would pay. By his own account, he didn’t flinch when he was asked to work for Jim Jones, the founder of Peoples Temple, the infamous religious cult in San Francisco. At the time Lipset went to work for him, Jones was still masquerading as a Christian preacher, although there were already rumors that some of his followers were being held against their will.
This case would end in a spectacular tragedy in 1978, when the insane Jones ordered the followers who had come with him to the jungles of Guyana to kill themselves with poison. More than 900 church members—men, women, and children—died there. While the suicides were going on at the jungle settlement, some of Jones’s followers drove a truck to a nearby airstrip, opening fire and killing a United States congressman and several reporters who were trying to leave Guyana after conducting an investigation of the cult.*
The horrific tragedy didn’t seem to weigh on Lipset’s conscience. In an interview conducted for Patricia Holt’s biography, Lipset said his work for Jim Jones began in the late 1960s, when Jones began to feel that he was under threat of assassination. Lipset went to Jones’s facility in Ukiah, California, and offered some advice: how to set up a defensive perimeter around the church, how to avoid driving on the same roads twice, and how to avoid repetitive schedules. Lipset passed along other basic security tips to Jones, including how a security team could serve as bodyguards, each man responsible for keeping his eyes on a certain sector so the team could maintain 360-degree awareness of people around the preacher. Lipset said that Jones didn’t seem crazy in those early days.
But when pressed on whether he felt it was right or wrong to work for a man like Jones, who was facing allegations that he deprived his followers of their freedom, forced odd sex practices on them, and confiscated their money, Lipset responded with a blithe comparison of Jones to the U.S. Army, in which he’d served, and to the Catholic Church.
Asked if he would work for a group if he knew the people in it had lost their ability to make choices for themselves, Lipset said:
It’s a matter of degree. I see people giving up their choices every day…. If you’re a soldier in the Army, you give up even more freedom—that’s because you wanted to when you joined up. You made the decision. That’s your business. It’s certainly none of my business.
Applying that stunning moral