Why the FBI Ignored the Parkland High School Shooter

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It was a major event. Decades after all the main witnesses have passed into history, Frederick Tiffany’s son is still sought out for interviews.

Guys were running towards the woods.

Even after Trooper Tiffany fired a warning shot, they were still running, trying to find an escape. Jeff Tiffany is interviewed by Mike Tanzini for Channel 34 in Binghamton.

And he was ordered to fire a second warning shot because the first one, they didn’t stop running. The second shot they stopped running.

And one of the biggest reversals in law enforcement history began.

Sergeant Edgar Croswell was the real hero behind the arrests. The owner of a local beverage distributorship in the small rural town had a reputation for unusual business approaches toward other business owners.

Like murder.

Several charges had been lodged against Joseph Barbara, but the conviction was elusive.

Croswell happened to be in the right place at the time. He investigating a bad check at a local motel when he overheard Barbara’s son booking several rooms for out of town guests. There would be a meeting of crime figures from all over the country, he heard him say.

What made that interesting was that the FBI had always denied that any sort of organized crime existed on a national level.

There were rumblings in other parts of the federal government about organized crime.

Senator Estes Kefauver is one of my favorite political characters. He was a reform politician who ran against the corrupt Tennessee machine and won. He sponsored the first real pharmacy safety legislation making manufacturers of medical supplies tell the public what was in the pills they were taking.

I’ve always known that I would never be too old to be immature. And I have to confess that Estes Kefauver is my favorite because he ran for President in 1952 on the slogan “Estes is the bestes.” Yeah, he really did.

Senator Kefauver also became the voice of truth about crime. He held hearings, pulled in crime figures, produced charts. The hearings became a popular part of a new technological fad, television.

If you asked any of the thousands of FBI agents about organized crime, they would all tell you the same thing. Crime was a serious local problem. Local. But it was only local. There was no national matrix to it.

J. Edgar Hoover was most insistent. He testified before the Kefauver Committee that crime was a local problem. And he instructed all of his agents on what they thought about it. They all agreed on what was needed to defeat all crime.

…an aroused public opinion, which will act on a local level through local law enforcement authorities to wipe out the menace.

But then Sergeant Croswell overheard a telephone conversation about a national meeting of crime bosses. The bosses didn’t know there would also be a raid that would put the tiny little town of Apalachin on the map.

Mike Tanzini of Binghamton Channel 34 explains.

Not a single mobster wound up being charged as a result of the bust, but Trooper Tiffany did play a role in securing a key piece of evidence: the existence of organized crime.

Dozens of well-known crime figures were caught and arrested: Joseph Bonanno, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, and others.

So, after the small town raid in 1957, J. Edgar Hoover changed his mind. There was a national crime organization and the FBI was taking strong action to bring it down. Thousands of FBI agents happened to change their minds the next day.

I was thinking about how the FBI operated in the 1950s. They focused a lot on tracking down automobiles that were stolen and taken across state lines. They were really good about filing and retrieving VIN numbers of those stolen cars. It was their big thing.

Besides not doing anything about organized crime, there were other noteworthy things the FBI became famous for in the 1950s. One was not doing anything about civil rights.

Emmett Till was a teenager who was accused of making a friendly comment to a white woman in Mississippi. Turned out the white woman had just made the story up. He disappeared from the face of the earth. For a while. Three days later his body was dredged up from the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. He had been tortured, killed, weighted down and thrown into the muddy waters.

The FBI did nothing.

People got mad at the FBI about doing nothing about organized crime. Until 1957.

They got really mad about Emmitt Till.

Nobody got mad because the FBI tracked down stolen cars and arrested those who stole them. It was part of their job.

I thought about that after the terrible shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Seventeen students killed by a troubled teenager, many others wounded. And I thought about the reaction of my president.

President Obama became a sort of Comforter-in-Chief at such times. He would disappear from public view for hours as tearful families poured out their hearts to him. Most news of those private hours comes from families who tell of a sensitive and deeply feeling man who knew what to say, how to act. Special trips and private times.

Donald Trump is famous for many things. He is nothing if not worthy of news coverage. One thing he is famous for is exaggerated awkwardness around a tragedy. He waited for a few days, then made a sort of side trip to Deerfield Beach, Florida. It was on the way to a luxury weekend in Mar‑a‑Lago Resort in Palm Beach. He was headed to a disco party that night.

He visited the Broward Health North Hospital. There were a couple of photo ops. One photo is of a grinning President who is happy at the great job hospital workers are doing, saving some of the wounded students and all. He is surrounded by hospital staff. They are taking time from caring for the survivors, smiling on cue for their President, as Mr. Trump beams at the camera and gives a thumbs up.

Another photo is at the bedside of a shooting victim. The student is propped up a little. Concerned family members all smile widely as directed for the camera. The wounded student also smiles, looking down a little awkwardly from a reclining position. A delighted Mr. Trump grins happily. Thankfully, there are no thumbs up for a great job in surviving the school massacre.

My president’s reaction to the shooting goes beyond photographs. He is outraged that the FBI did not prevent the shooting. The young man with a semi-automatic weapon had exhibited clear signs of emotional instability. Those signs had been reported to a federal hotline.

Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2018

It is a common complaint, heard by police officers since God invented speeding motorists. Don’t you have more important things to do? Like catching criminals?

Don’t you have more important things to do?

Yeah. But I’m not doing them right now. We understand each other?

Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, The Untouchables

The complaint doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense when directed at a single police officer than at an organization. Should he be ticketing jaywalkers when a bank around the corner is being robbed? A large organization has many simultaneous responsibilities. One is evaluating the 15,000 or so tips about potential gun dangers in a seemingly crazed nation.

Decades ago, I volunteered for a couple of nights a week, for a couple of years, in the emergency room at a local hospital. Triage was an important task. A nurse was assigned to determine who had to be treated right then, who had to wait. Each night, each nurse tried to get each call about right.

Triage for 15,000 telephone tips is an impossible task to get right all the time. Too often any of us would have to make educated guesses that seem obviously wrong in retrospect. I turned left when I should have turned right.

The limit is not imposed by manpower, not even manpower diverted to other important tasks. The limit is individual rights. How decisively should national authorities react to the subject of a telephone tip? Should every person exhibiting emotional problems be arrested?

And there is another limitation.

The FBI did not pursue organized crime before 1957 because J. Edgar Hoover ordered that it not be considered. After all, organized crime did not exist.

They were kept from investigating the Emmett Till case in 1955 because the Justice Department specifically ordered them not to intervene. It was a local matter.

And if the FBI had singled out the telephone tips about the unbalanced young man from Parkland? Almost exactly one year before that horrible shooting, President Trump signed an order telling federal agencies not to interfere with weapon ownership based on most mental disorders.

Don’t you have more important things to do?

Yeah. But I’m not doing them right now.

Many thanks to our friend Burr Deming at FairandUnbalanced.

About Post Author

Burr Deming

Burr is a husband, father, and computer programmer, who writes and records from St. Louis. On Sundays, he sings in a praise band at the local Methodist Church. On Saturdays, weather permitting, he mows the lawn under the supervision of his wife. He can be found at FairAndUNbalanced.com

madmikes49@gmail.com