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Scooter Radio Program
Rosetta Kamlowsky Tapes
William Mooney, FBI Agent
Interview date: September 1975
Rosetta: Well Bill almost every other media in town has caught you and had an interview
with you except me, I’m the last one and I tried yesterday but you were elusive and you
stood me up earlier today for some Montana fishing and, you know, to be stood up for a
fish is sort of demeaning, but I accept that. You’re here now and it’s late and we’re tired
and hot and you want to get to your room and I’m anxious to get home but the point is we
are going to talk and I promised you yesterday I would not ask you anything terribly
important. You are willing to answer any questions, are you Mr. Mooney, about the FBI?
Agent Mooney: If I know the answers. ( laughter)
Rosetta: Well, today I see you in an entirely different light than I did yesterday.
Yesterday, today you don’t look like the typical stereotype FBI man. Yesterday you did.
You had on a dark suit and you were looking very dignified and rather intriguing, you
know, like you knew something know one else knew when someone was, you were
fingering someone in the crowd. Do FBI agents generally look like that?
Mooney: I don’t think so. Perhaps I looked that way yesterday because I knew
something no one else knew, I was going fishing this morning. ( laughter)
Rosetta: Is that what the big intrigue was all about. When we see pictures of FBI agents,
they’re generally in dark suits, and you know, looking kind of that way. You know, those
that surround the President certainly.
Mooney: Well those that surround the President are Secret Service Agents, they’re not
FBI.
Rosetta: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Mooney: We prefer that our fellows dress in a acceptable business attire, whatever that
might be, to conform more readily to the area that they’re in, the locality, or to also help
them in the type of investigations that they’re conducting.
Rosetta: Now, something that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and we’ve discussed it here,
people are becoming concerned that there is no place someone can hide or get away.
That all of us in the United States has a record and if you wanted to get someone you
could at any time. Now there are pros and cons to that. Does the FBI have a record on
every citizen or everyone in the United States?
Mooney: No, we definitely do not. If we take the figure of approximately 210 million
people in the United States, we have records on perhaps, at the most, 55 to 60 million
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people. A percentage of those, and the perhaps the larger percentage are criminal
records. The remainder are from military cards, when people are fingerprinted to enter
the military, other government agencies, people seeking government employment, people
who just want their fingerprints on file in the event of an accident or some, or amnesia
problem, where they couldn’t be otherwise identified, and of course, the Boy Scouts, who
get a merit badge for turning in the fingerprints of all their troops. But we do not
definitely have fingerprints or files on every person in the United States. We have no
right to them.
Rosetta: So those who would like to defect from their way of life and get lost, still can?
Mooney: Oh, I think it’s very easy to get lost in this country. Patty Hearst can prove
that.
Rosetta: Good point. Good point. What about women, in the criminal aspect. Are
women, the number of women criminals growing? Do you have cases, more and more
cases involving women as criminals in the United States?
Mooney: Rosetta, I’m not really aware that we have that many women involved in
crime. They’re certainly in the criminal element. They’re either associated with or
married to, or just on the fringes of regular criminal element. But I don’t know that
there’s that great a number of women involved in crime. They do their share certainly.
Rosetta: What does the FBI do? What is its real purpose and how do you coordinate and
cooperate with local law enforcement people?
Mooney: Well, perhaps the best way to explain it would be to ask you to imagine a large
pie and we cut that pie into wedges. Now the wedges would represent at the Federal
level the various Federal agencies, the FBI, CIA, the Secret Service, Treasury, et cetera.
Each one is given certain responsibilities by Congress. When laws are passed depending
on what the law has to do with a certain agency is designated to be responsible for it or
handle it. And we have perhaps 180 various type violations that we’re responsible for.
So our responsibilities are well delineated at the Federal level. Now there’s generally
some concurrent jurisdiction with local areas. For instance, kidnapping, bank robbery,
they’re not only Federal violations, they’re also local violations. We have made it a point
and Mr. Kelly is continuing in this same vein that we assist in whatever way possible
local law enforcement; that’s municipal, county and state, do anything we can for them,
in a training way, in services of the FBI in the laboratory facilities, the identification
facilities, whatever we can do to help them. So there’s no problem of overlapping
jurisdictions. We work that out very well.
Rosetta: It always sounds so terribly official when we hear or read that the FBI has been
called in on a case. But it’s, you know, when are you called in? You mention, what, 180
jurisdictions?
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Mooney: Well, we’re normally called in when it’s a violation within our responsibilities
or within our area. A bank robbery, a federal violation; kidnapping, a federal violation;
interstate transportation of stolen motor vehicles, federal violation; white slave traffic act,
federal violation. This is the type of thing.
Rosetta: Do you ever find local people resentful of the FBI coming in, and by local
people local law enforcement people like..?
Mooney: In my career, which spans 25 years, Rosetta, I can honestly say I have never
found that. I’ve never rubbed elbows with a law enforcement officer outside of our
agency who has in any way even appeared resentful. I’ve heard this exists. I cannot
speak from experience. I’m not aware of it.
Rosetta: Well, maybe resentful wasn’t the term, maybe I should say a little apprehension,
like you might discover they’re not running their, their force properly and that you might
reprimand them.
Mooney: Well, first, we have no responsibility to go in and look at what a local law
enforcement agency is doing. That’s their own administrative problem. Most of them
have inspectional services which look into that. They are trying to help themselves
because from my staff in Quantico we’re constantly sending what we call police
instructors, faculty members at Quantico, all over the United States conducting
supervisory, mid- management executive level training programs, specialized programs
for the local law enforcement officer.
Rosetta: What is Quantico?
Mooney: Quantico is a United States Marine Base, about 35 miles south of Washington,
DC, and through the assistance and courtesy of the Marine Corps, we have a designated
area down there upon which we have an academy and firearms ranges. We train our
agents there, we conduct our in- service training there, and we also run a national
academy for local law enforcement officers throughout the country.
Rosetta: It’s kind of tough becoming an FBI agent. I understand it takes some schooling,
and quite a lot of doing to become an FBI agent.
Mooney: Well, we look at it in three ways. One, the proper selection, adequate training
and then constant and secure and sure supervision. But in the selection process we
definitely look for people with a better than average education. We require, our basics
our, a law degree or a accounting degree with three years public accounting experience.
We will take other college degrees, physical sciences, languages, mathematics, for which
we would have a use provided they have, again, three or more years of some type of
supervisory and managerial experience.
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Rosetta: Do you have more and more women going in, I have to ask you these things,
since the majority of my audience is women and I am a woman so I’m interested. Do
you have women FBI agents?
Mooney: We do. We have about 30 now Rosetta. We’re not getting the numbers that
we anticipated or that we expect. We would like more. They add a very desirable
dimension to the organization. They can help out very well in investigations. We’ve
found them a real asset.
Rosetta: I fully expect to see a television show soon on, you know, we have Police
Woman, I expect to see Lady FBI Agent. You should suggest that sometime for publicity
for the FBI or do you want any publicity?
Mooney: Well, we just had about eight years with Inspector Erskine and I think we’ll
take a breather now for a little while.
Rosetta: Oh, yeah, but Inspector Erskine was a man. I’m thinking of a lady, you know a
lady FBI agent.
Mooney: We really don’t have the experience yet with the women to go into that type of
a production. See, we’ve had many, many, many years of investigative experience from
which we could draw for those series and to get something now specifically attuned to a
female or something that a female was involved in, not yet. It may come. It certainly
would have a place.
Rosetta: What area of crime has been on the increase for the FBI? Has there been one?
Mooney: Well, I think organized crime, white collar crime, computer frauds.
Rosetta: What about organized crime. Is there a re- interest, rekindling, revitalization of
this? You know the days of the mafia and the families, we think of those being in the
past. Are they coming back?
Mooney: I don’t know that they’ve ever diminished. They’re still here.
Rosetta: But we didn’t hear too much about them for a long time.
Mooney: You don’t hear about what you don’t know about.
Rosetta: Well, how are we, why don’t we know more about them?
Mooney: Well, until laws were passed which covered the activities of those people, there
was no reason for us, particularly the FBI, to investigate them. And therefore, we were
oh, concerned with the problems at hand at that time. Now there are definite laws on the
books which look at organized crime, gambling laws, et cetera, and this becomes a major
portion of our emphasis.
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Rosetta: What about opening up your files? This happened recently to the public. What
kind of chaos has this created or has it?
Mooney: Well, I wouldn’t use the term chaos, Rosetta. What it has done, it has put a
demand on us for manpower. At the present time under the Freedom of Information Act
and the Privacy Act which becomes effective the end of this month, we have designated
right close to 150 people to handle requests that are coming in from the public. Now
that’s 150 people that were doing other jobs and we don’t have bodies to replace those.
So this becomes the problem. Not the compliance with the laws. That’s something that
is being complied with and has to be, but you have to have people to do the job. And
right now the last figure I heard was that we had something like a million and a half
pages on the books right now to be reviewed in compliance with some of these requests.
Rosetta: Well what are some of these requests? What kind of people want to know what
kind of things on others?
Mooney: Well, you can only find out about yourself if you are interested in your own
file, or historical interest. Writers write in and they want to know the basics of a certain
investigation because they want to write a short story or a book on it. Or perhaps
someone who is teaching in a certain area, accounting areas perhaps, would write in and
would like us to give them the essence of some computer fraud cases or accounting cases
so they could use those in their class work and teaching.
Rosetta: Let’s see. Well, I want to thank you for taking time out for coming up here and
telling us some of these little tidbits that we may not otherwise have known. Have a nice
day in Montana and a good journey home.
Mooney: Well Rosetta, of all those that interviewed me here, you’re the most delightful.
( laughter) I’m sorry I waited so long.
Rosetta: Thank you, Bill.
