The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [159]
After the embassy bombings, O’Neill scheduled meetings at four o’clock each afternoon, and typically he arrived as much as an hour late. His chronic tardiness aroused a lot of angry chatter among the married agents, who had children to attend. O’Neill would finally enter the conference room, then go around the table and shake the hands of each team member—another time-consuming ritual.
On one of these occasions, Jack Cloonan, a member of the I-49 squad, kissed the massive FBI ring on O’Neill’s finger. “Thank you, Godfather,” he said.
“Fuck you,” O’Neill snapped.
Dan Coleman was explaining a piece of intelligence in one of the meetings when O’Neill broke in. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to the man who, more than anyone in America, with the exception of Mike Scheuer, had studied bin Laden and his organization.
“Fine,” said Coleman.
“I’m just kidding.”
“You know what? I’m just Joe Shit the Ragman,” Coleman said heatedly. “You’re the SAC. I can’t defend myself in a position like this.”
The next day O’Neill came by Coleman’s desk and apologized. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
Coleman accepted the apology, although he afforded himself the opportunity to lecture O’Neill on the responsibility of being a boss. O’Neill listened, then observed, “You look like you comb your hair with a hand grenade.”
“Maybe I should use some of that oil you dump on your hair,” said Coleman.
O’Neill laughed and walked away.
After that, Coleman slyly began to study O’Neill. The key, Coleman decided, was that “he had come from nowhere.” O’Neill’s mother still drove a cab in Atlantic City during the day, and his father operated the same cab at night. O’Neill’s uncle, a piano player, helped support them when the casino economy died. O’Neill had left home as soon as he could. On his first job, when he was a tour guide at FBI headquarters, he would carry a briefcase to work—as if he needed one—and he immediately attempted to exert control over the other guides. They resentfully called him “Stinky” because he was always in a sweat.
Coleman had a sense of the empty space between the public O’Neill and the private one. The flashy suits, the gleaming fingernails, concealed a man of humble background and modest means. It was a front O’Neill could scarcely afford on a government salary. Belligerent and belittling at times, O’Neill was also anxious and insecure, frequently seeking reassurance and dragging a long tail of debt. Few knew how precarious his career was, how fragmented his private life, how unsettled his spirit. Once, when an agent got so angry at O’Neill in a meeting that he began screaming, O’Neill stalked out of the room and calmed himself down by making calls on his cell phone. “You can’t do that,” Coleman told the agent. “Tell him you’re sorry—you didn’t mean to disrespect him.” O’Neill was as emotionally dependent on respect as any gangster.
But he was also capable of extravagant and almost alarming gestures of caring, quietly raising money for victims of the bombings he investigated and personally making sure his employees got the best doctors in the city when they fell ill. One of O’Neill’s friends in Washington had bypass surgery during a blizzard. Traffic in the city was shut down, but he awakened to see O’Neill at his bedside. He had tramped through eighteen inches of snow. Every morning he insisted on bringing coffee and a pastry to his secretary from a kiosk on the street, and he always remembered birthdays. These gestures, large and small, spoke to his own longing to be noticed and attended.
TEN DAYS AFTER THE EMBASSY BOMBINGS Jack Cloonan got a call from one of his intelligence contacts in Sudan telling him that two men involved in the case were