Three Sisters Ponds

Phillip Reid

Description

In September 2000, I was sitting on a bench facing the Mediterranean Sea in the French Riviera town of Nice. I had flown there during a three-day break in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial in Camp Ziest, Netherlands, where I was expected to testify. As I sat on this bench eating lunch, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by emotion. It was an awakening: I realized that my being there was the fulfillment of one of my many life dreams and goals that were launched thirty-one years earlier from another bench facing the Three Sisters Ponds in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. Now, from a bench in the French Riviera, I began to chronicle the manifestation of those dreams and goals, accomplished through my thirty-six-year law enforcement career as a Baltimore City policeman and FBI agent.
I'm hoping my story catches on with anyone who dares to dream and set challenging and aggressive life goals.
While writing Three Sisters Ponds, there were areas of my story where I felt compelled to express myself poetically.

Sujets

• FBI
• Poetry
• Autobiography
• Baltimore
• Federal Bureau of Investigation

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798823003094
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Three Sisters Ponds
My Journey from Street Cop to FBI Senior Executive – from Baltimore to Lockerbie, Pakistan and Beyond
PHILLIP REID


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© 2023 Phillip Reid. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse 03/14/2023
 
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0311-7 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0310-0 (hc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0309-4 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904658
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1It Takes a Village (Day Village)
Chapter 2Growing up in Baltimore
Chapter 3Joining the Baltimore Police Department
Chapter 4Three Sisters Ponds
Chapter 5Recruiting for the BPD
Chapter 6Teaching at the Police Academy
Chapter 7Applying for the FBI
Chapter 8Training at the FBI Academy
Chapter 9First Office Agent
Chapter 10The Big Apple
Chapter 11My OP
Chapter 12The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103
Chapter 13The Office of Professional Responsibility
Chapter 14Hawaii
Chapter 15Alaska
Chapter 16The Vail Fires
Chapter 17Closing Thoughts
DEDICATION

I want to dedicate this book first to God. Although I’m not very religious, I cannot ignore his intercessions during critical periods throughout my life—intercessions that in most cases were not obvious or appreciated, except in retrospect.
I dedicate this book to the thousands of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day to keep this country safe and secure. Their challenges have surely increased since the tragic events of 9/11.
I dedicate this book to my mother. It was only after her death that I realized how much she had influenced my life, for better or worse, and that I became a better and more successful person because of her.
I also dedicate this book to my (poor) wife Bernadette, who put up with my twenty-eight years with the FBI, including all the time I spent away from home and all the transfers to new assignments, which forced her to change jobs and friends each time.
I dedicate this book to my daughter, Maisha, whose conception added meaning and purpose to my life and inspired me to keep pushing. As she has grown up, she has made me immensely proud as a father and grandfather.
I also dedicate this book to my three brothers, Ronald, Donald, and Skip. We have grown to be so different, but fortunately we have not grown apart.
DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed in this book are that of the author’s and not those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my best friend, Zander Maurice Gray, who has been a steady and positive source of help, influence, inspiration, friendship, and guidance over the years.
I am indebted to Alex Haley, the late co-author of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, for ensuring that the work went to press. A lot of my black brothers and sisters were just as lost as I was when it was published in the ’60s. The book saved many of us from ourselves and from our history in this country, and Malcolm X’s life, as illustrated, shed light on the challenging future we all would face. More important, this book inspired my inner strength and stimulated my intellectual curiosity—characteristics I would need in order to navigate successfully through life while pursuing my American Dream.
I also want to acknowledge the contribution of the Three Sisters Ponds to my life and career. As this book will make clear, my dreams and goals were identified, framed, and launched from a bench overlooking this majestic site in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. Thirty-one years later, while sitting on a park bench in Nice, France, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, I realized just how many of those dreams had been fulfilled.
I must give posthumous thanks to the man who was my sergeant during my assignment to the Baltimore Police Personnel Division, who later became the city’s police commissioner. He gave me the opportunity to get my bachelor’s degree, but along the way, the example he set as a manager, a person, and a friend helped me develop leadership skills that would benefit me throughout my law enforcement career. He also took on the challenge of trying to teach me how to play basketball—a frustrating effort for him because I had grown up a swimmer. He never stopped trying, although he shook his head every step of the way.
Finally, I want to thank my unit chief while I was assigned to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (internal affairs). I didn’t realize how bad my writing skills were until he started bludgeoning my reports with his red pen. The report-writing standard he set for his unit caused most of us to protest, but it also made us improve. He was unrelenting in holding us to his high writing standards and will no doubt be reviewing this book with a critical grammatical eye.
PROLOGUE

A fter twenty-eight years of service, I’m now retired from the FBI and have settled into the much slower-paced lifestyle and never-ending summer climate of Naples, Florida. Having lived in Honolulu, I consider Naples the Hawaii of the mainland. Since arriving here, I’ve finally found time to reflect back on my extraordinary thirty-six-year law enforcement career as both a Baltimore City policeman and an FBI agent.
I do recall the particular moment when it really hit me for the first time that I had fulfilled the majority of the dreams and goals that I had set for myself, and how fortunate I was to have chosen a career that had made it all possible.
At the time I had been in law enforcement for thirty-one years. I had just completed my third week of waiting to testify in the murder trial of Lamin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al Megrahi, two Libyans we had identified during a three-year, international terrorism investigation as being responsible for the December 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed the plane’s 259 passengers and crew plus eleven citizens of Lockerbie. The trial was being held on an unused US Air Force base, Kamp Ziest, located in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Waiting around to testify had gotten a little boring, although I was watching the proceedings on a closed-circuit TV near the courtroom. After spending three years of my life working this case (two on the island of Malta as the lead FBI investigator), and then waiting another nine years for it to be brought to trial, I wanted to see the accused bombers in the flesh. So when a couple of other agents waiting to testify suggested that we go into the courtroom and watch the trial in person, I quickly agreed.
It was a very different courtroom scene than we were used to in the United States. Presiding over the trial was a panel of three Scottish judges wearing wigs and robes—they could have come straight from King Arthur’s court. The defendants were wearing jalabiyas. They were sitting together and were not in restraints or protected by armored glass. I was shocked by the casualness of their demeanor and by their apparent lack of concern about the proceedings. Though there was significant security in place, I would have preferred to see the accused murderers of 270 innocent people wearing hand and ankle shackles and hot-orange jumpsuits.
As I was just getting comfortable in my seat, Megrahi and Fhimah simultaneously locked gazes with me. Their eyes immediately lit up with panic and distress, and they started talking rapidly to each other. Though we had never met, it was obvious that they recognized me from the intelligence briefings I knew they had received about the FBI and our investigation on Malta. The briefings had probably included photos. They both pointed at me—the black, bald FBI agent who had been pursuing them for years—and they began talking more and more loudly. Their discussion quickly became disruptive to the proceedings, and their attorney complained to the judges about our presence.
All three of us were asked to leave the courtroom immediately and told not to return until we were called to testify. I was embarrassed about being asked to leave, but at the same time I felt good about seeing the defendants in the flesh and finally facing them down. During our three years of investigation, they had returned to Libya, where they couldn’t be apprehended. It had taken a lot of hard work, personal sacrifice, and diplomatic pressure by a significant number of investigators from numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies and governments all over the world to get these two into a courtroom.
Looking Megrahi and Fhimah in the eyes at long last was a bittersweet moment. I was torn between the urge to jump for joy and the urge to jump the railings that separated us so I could physically assault them. Though I had pursued and arrested murderers in the past, nothing in my experience had prepared me for mass civilian casualties. And the defendants’ casual demeanor made me suspicious; it seemed to reflect an audacity, an expectation on their part that they were