Such great lines:
Rep. RICHARD KELLY (R-FL): "Does it show?" (Bribe money in his suit pocket).
Rep. OZZIE MYERS (R-PA): "Money talks. Bullshit walks." (To phony Arab sheik.)
Watch ABC News video here.
John Good, Architect of F.B.I.’s Abscam Sting Operation, Dies at 80
By ANITA GATES
OCT. 18, 2016
John F. Good, who developed and directed the F.B.I.’s Abscam investigation, resulting in grainy black-and-white videotapes on the evening news that showed elected officials accepting bags and envelopes of cash from what appeared to be an Arab sheikh, died on Sept. 28 at his home in Island Park, N.Y. He was 80.
The death was confirmed by his brother, Kevin.
Abscam was a two-year inquiry in the late 1970s and early ’80s in which agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation posed as representatives of wealthy Arabs willing to pay bribes for influence.
The idea evolved after Mr. Good, who was running the bureau’s first Long Island office, in Hauppauge, saw a routine F.B.I. memo about Mel Weinberg, a reputed small-time con man operating in the vicinity. Mr. Good’s bosses had been encouraging him to develop bigger, more important cases, and he thought Mr. Weinberg might be able to help ferret out wrongdoers, essentially by fooling a lot of people, a lot of the time.
In the beginning, Mr. Weinberg pulled in people who were thought to be interested in selling high-priced stolen art. A bureau employee of Lebanese descent was recruited to pose as the potential buyer, a wealthy sheikh who was portrayed as owning a company called Abdul Enterprises (the source of the name Abscam).
When the operation targeted the mayor of Camden, N.J., Angelo J. Errichetti, and he proved to be open to further suggestion, the net widened, and the sheikh’s story changed. Now he was offering money for influence in the halls of government.
The investigation resulted in bribery and conspiracy charges against a United States senator, Harrison A. Williams Jr. of New Jersey; six members of the House of Representatives; and a dozen others, including Mr. Errichetti. All were convicted. (Mr. Williams died in 2001, Mr. Errichetti in 2013.)
The sting operation was fictionalized in the 2013 film “American Hustle,” starring a shaggy, bearded Bradley Cooper as a composite character representing Mr. Good and two other agents.
In an interview that year with The Washington Post, Mr. Good seemed amused by the renewed attention to the case the film had generated. He pointed out that a number of plot elements — including the romantic triangle among the characters portrayed by Mr. Cooper, Amy Adams and Christian Bale — were pure Hollywood inventions.
But Hollywood’s depiction of the hidden-camera recordings of encounters between politicians and the “sheikh” and his representative was pretty much the way it happened, he said.
Most of the operations took place at a large house in the Georgetown section of Washington, Mr. Good said. “It was wired completely,” he recalled. “I watched all of the payoffs go down, every single one of them.”
The operation was criticized by some as relying on entrapment; others faulted it for essentially not knowing when to stop. At a Senate hearing on undercover investigations in 1982, the Abscam team was accused of having been made “giddy” by its success.
Turning down the opportunities presented to meet with additional legislators would have been suspicious, Mr. Good said.
“If we were real crooks out there looking to bribe congressmen, and somebody came to us and said, ‘Look, I got a better fish for you,’ how can you say, ‘No, I don’t need him’?” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
The relationship between Mr. Good and Mr. Weinberg “was sort of a marriage made in heaven,” Edward A. McDonald, the former chief of the United States Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn, said in an interview, “because they were both very imaginative and resourceful.”
But, he added, “John kept a tight leash on Mel.”
Speaking to NJ.com in 2013, Mr. Good summed up Mr. Weinberg as “a very, very intelligent guy — a little on the crude side, but with a magnificent ability to con people.”
Dealing with tough guys was hardly new to Mr. Good. He had been part of the so-called hijack squad, a group formed in the 1960s to end the rampant truck hijackings from Kennedy International Airport. The job offered considerable opportunity to meet potential Mafia informers.
“He was a very, very unusual F.B.I. agent,” Mr. McDonald said of Mr. Good. “He knew how to deal with criminals. He was not a guy who sat at his desk,” but more “what used to be called a street guy.”
John Francis Good was born on June 17, 1936, in the Bronx, the eldest of the six children born to Harold F. Good, himself an F.B.I. agent whose assignments included the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case, and the former Mary Keogh.
He graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in 1954 and received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Fordham University in 1958. He served in the Navy before joining the F.B.I.
The bureau assigned him to Springfield and Decatur, in Illinois, and to El Paso before he returned to New York. He worked in the bureau’s Manhattan office before he was chosen to run the office on Long Island.
Mr. Good had been looking into shoddy sewer pipe construction and possible payoffs in 1978, when the Weinberg memo turned up on his desk.
In addition to his brother Kevin, his survivors include a daughter, Elizabeth Farrell; a son, John; another brother, Thomas; three sisters, Kathleen Genzardi, Mary Elizabeth Good and Eileen Good; and three grandchildren. Mr. Good was divorced many years ago.
After retiring from the bureau in 1986, Mr. Good worked as a private investigator and in 1994 founded his own firm, Lawn, Mullen & Good, now L.M.G.I. Ltd., in Babylon, N.Y.
He took pride in being a realist, particularly about his F.B.I. work, which was not always as glamorous as Hollywood portrayed it.
“If they just did it the way Abscam was done,” he said, referring to “American Hustle” in his interview with The Post, “it would be a very boring movie.”
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