Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Earley Pete

Author:Earley, Pete [Earley, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pete Earley, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 38

Had John Walker, Jr., not been a spy, he would have liked to have joined the FBI after retiring from the Navy. This is what he said, with all seriousness, during one of our prison interviews. The idea of exposing people, catching them doing something wrong, really turned John on. As it was, he became a private detective after his sales association folded. His first job was with Wackenhut, an international security company.

John simply appeared at the Wackenhut office one afternoon and asked to speak to Philip Prince, the manager of investigations. Prince had been in charge of Wackenhut’s office in Norfolk for only one month and had been a private detective for only four months, but his inexperience didn’t show. He was a highly decorated retired Marine who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam. His military experience gave Prince a self-assured style that impressed John.

John’s proposition was simple. He was willing to work dirt cheap in return for on-the-job training.

“Money really isn’t a problem,” he told Prince. “I’ve got my pension and I’ve made some really hot investments. I don’t want to earn more than five thousand a year or I’ll get Uncle Sam peeking into my knickers.”

John’s timing proved to be perfect. Wackenhut had been much more interested in promoting its security guard services in Norfolk than in investigating cases. As a result, Prince’s office was poorly staffed, poorly equipped, and poorly budgeted.

“He was very up front about what he wanted,” Prince told me later, “and quite frankly, I was impressed. John spoke intelligently and at the same time admitted that he had a lot to learn. The biggest thing was he was dying to go to work. I mean immediately!”

Prince sent John to Thomas Nelson Community College, where he whizzed through several special courses on arrest procedures and suspects’ rights that the state required before granting a private investigator a license.

At the time, Wackenhut handled mostly messy divorce cases. Virginia didn’t have a no-fault divorce law, so angry spouses often hired Wackenhut to find evidence of adultery. Prince was trying to move the agency away from such piddling cases into investigations of insurance fraud, a more interesting and lucrative area.

Because of its shipyards and large blue-collar work force, the Tidewater area was a hotbed for workmen’s compensation claims, and it was not unusual for an insurance company to find itself being ordered to pay benefits to a disabled worker for the rest of his life. However, if an insurer could prove the worker hadn’t been seriously injured while on the job or had exaggerated those injuries, it could either cancel or reduce its liability payments.

John soon became Wackenhut’s star investigator of insurance fraud. While other Wackenhut employees were content to punch a time clock, he worked nonstop. Each case John was assigned seemed bigger and more important to him than the last. And he refused to give up until he obtained a “kill” – his terminology for catching a disabled worker doing some physical task that he shouldn’t have been able to accomplish because of a work-related injury.

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