WASHINGTON – One of Chris Swecker’s first cases as a rookie FBI agent in the early 1980s involved busting a small-time drug dealer. “It was ounces of cocaine,” Swecker recalled.
Now, said Swecker, the head of the FBI’s criminal division, “We probably wouldn’t get involved if it wasn’t a cartel.”
And street-corner drug dealers are just one type of criminal who no longer gets much FBI attention. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, transformed the nation’s best-known crime fighting agency perhaps as much as any government entity, dramatically reshaping its mission – on the fly at that – to deal with threats that are considered more imminent.
Drug crimes largely have been ceded to the Drug Enforcement Agency, while the U.S. Marshals Service now apprehends all but the most violent fugitives. Investigation of bank robberies, once a signature FBI duty, and large swaths of white-collar crime are also largely off the bureau’s to-do list.
What’s left? Public corruption, civil rights violations, organized crime – including gangs, major white-collar crime and certain kinds of violent offenses. The rationale is simple: The bureau now focuses on crime that might shed light on terror or that no other law enforcement agency can pursue.
For the past year, the task of re-engineering the FBI has fallen to Swecker, the 49-year-old assistant director in charge of the bureau’s criminal investigative division.
In a recent interview in his FBI headquarters office, Swecker described a career trajectory that has tracked the bureau’s evolution.
As he climbed the bureau ladder, Swecker rotated through a series of assignments that featured major drug investigations in Miami, Houston and Charlotte.
In the latter posting, he spearheaded the FBI’s lengthy and ultimately successful pursuit of Eric Rudolph, who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing. In early 2002, Swecker got his first taste of the FBI’s new terrorism-driven agenda when he was peeled away from his duties in Charlotte to help oversee security for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
“It was like a three-week-long fire drill,” he said of the intensity of safeguarding thousands of athletes and spectators. In late summer of 2003, Swecker found himself in Baghdad, running the FBI’s operations in Iraq, looking for terror leads in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence files and picking through the wreckage of 20 car bomb attacks for insights into the habits of terrorist bombers.
In July 2004, he took over the criminal investigative division, a unit that has shrunk to about 4,800 agents, from a pre-Sept. 11 peak of 6,800, according to FBI figures. Overall, the bureau has expanded to about 12,000 agents from 10,500.
Most agents who aren’t in the criminal division work in intelligence-gathering and counter-terrorism units.
The criminal division’s downsizing is reflected in criminal prosecution figures. In 2000, the FBI referred about 19,000 cases for prosecution but by last year the total had dropped to about 15,500, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Despite the reduction in size, retaining a crime-fighting portfolio is central to the FBI’s argument that it should remain in charge of domestic defense against terrorism. Some in Congress have urged stripping the FBI of that responsibility and placing it in a stand-alone agency focusing exclusively on domestic security.
But the FBI has contended that the line between criminal acts and terrorism has become increasingly blurred, with such offenses as money laundering and identity document fraud frequently tied to terror plots. And the bureau argues that its contacts with state and local law enforcement officials enhance its ability to combat terror.
“The intelligence gathered through criminal investigations is of huge value,” said James Kallstrom, the former head of the bureau’s New York office and now senior counterterrorism adviser to New York Gov. George Pataki.
Kallstrom said the bureau needs to double in size over the next 10 years. “We’ve got an FBI that’s one-third the size of the NYPD,” Kallstrom said.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a frequent critic of the bureau, said the FBI should be given a chance to prove that maintaining responsibility for crime-fighting assists the counter-terror effort.
“I’m not ready to say that we need (a stand-alone counter-terror agency) yet,” Grassley said.
Public corruption is the division’s current top priority. About 100 agents have been added to those kinds of cases “at a time when a lot of our resources were going in the other direction,” Swecker said.
The effort has borne fruit with a string of indictments from major probes in San Diego, Hartford, Newark, Philadelphia, Dallas and perhaps most notably, in Chicago.
The Chicago FBI office has two public corruption squads, is forming a third and “has devoted more agents than any other office in the country to public corruption. More than New York, more than L.A.,” he said.
After a flood of indictments, including that of former Gov. George Ryan in the Operation Safe Road bribes-for-driver’s-licenses investigation, federal authorities have issued a flurry of indictments in scandals flowing from the city’s Hired Truck program.
On Friday, federal prosecutors interviewed Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, although neither investigators nor the mayor would discuss the substance of the conversation.
Swecker said that agents in the Chicago FBI’s beefed-up public integrity section “will be fully occupied for the foreseeable future.”
Civil rights cases are another priority, in part because they offer openings into Muslim communities, where the FBI has struggled to establish its credibility. Agents visit mosques, Islamic centers and other gathering places to let Muslims know that the bureau will pursue hate crimes, and to ask for help in gathering information in anti-terror efforts.
“It is a tough sell,” Swecker conceded.
In other areas of crime, the bureau has become far more selective.
It still investigates large-scale corporate fraud, with about 350 cases currently open, and special scrutiny focused on the re-insurance industry because of major scandals at AIG and General Re Corp. Large-scale identity theft also gets attention, as does health care fraud because of its potential impact on public safety.
But, “when we define what’s major in some of the more traditional white-collar cases (such as wire fraud or Ponzi schemes), we’ve brought our (minimum) thresholds up to around $100,000,” and in some cases $1 million, Swecker said.
Breaking up gangs and other forms of organized crime now sometimes means following them across borders and overseas, and keeping an eye out for links to terrorists.
Swecker said criminal division agents are embedded with police services in Italy and Eastern Europe in an effort to better keep tabs on organized crime there. His unit also has ties with police in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to combat such Latin gangs as Mara Salvatrucha 13.
Among the worries: that a transnational gang smuggling illegal aliens could ferry terrorists into the United States or that fraud schemes will be used to finance terror cells.
There’s no convincing evidence that either has occurred, Swecker said. But with a smuggled terrorist scenario especially, “we’re not saying it won’t happen. We’re damned alert to the fact that it might happen.”
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