The FBI, Sexual Abuse, Swimming, and My New Book ‘UNDERWATER’

by Irvin Muchnick

This week’s news is that a Justice Department audit has criticized the FBI’s handling of sexual abuse cases. Of course, this comes after a group of elite gymnasts led by Simone Biles sued the bureau for $100 million for botching, across years, the investigation of Larry Nassar, the national team doctor for USA Gymnastics, who molested more youth athletes than we’ll ever be able to count.

How does all this fit into the dozen years of reporting for my new book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe?

Answer: Profoundly and uncomfortably. But the story probably isn’t quite as instructive as the general public tends to assume — or at least, not in the same ways. The truth is that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the persistent phenomenon of coach abuse and the levels of diligence of our iconic national government investigative agency. Nor, in the real ways of the real world, could there ever be.

Abuse and its cover-ups are a large subject, and a slippery one The FBI’s interest ebbs and flows, for it is a federal bureaucracy. The bureau rarely “makes” cases or creates subjects of wide public interest. What it does best is to respond to pressure. And in the area of abuse, pressure is sporadic, atomized, diffuse — usually weak.

There’s no constituency for policing abuse. Au contraire. If anything, when it comes to the youth sports under the umbrella of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and its various, nebulously branded “national sport governing bodies,” such as USA Swimming, along with the population of sports “stage parents,” the dominant constituency is for keeping scandals and bad actors under wraps.

With respect to FBI agents in the field, there’s even a somewhat amusing careerist dynamic that gets little attention: Many internal investigative consultants for entities like USA Swimming and the U.S. Center for SafeSport are FBI retirees whose post-retirement gigs are opportunities to double-dip on their pensions. There’s far more incentive for them to contain their client entities’ legal liability than there is to blow the lid on widespread sexual abuse.

Against that backdrop, here’s how the FBI figured into my work on UNDERCOVER over the years.

***

First, there was the bureau’s subpoena of internal USA Swimming records after the organization, in 2012, was forced by the California Supreme Court to stop defying lower court discovery orders in civil lawsuits by abuse survivors.

Swimming had been thumbing its nose at these court orders for years – in the process, piling up tens of thousands of dollars in contempt sanctions. For the apparatchiks of USA Swimming in Colorado Springs, the fines amounted to a rounding number for their overall legal and cover-up tab.

After USA Swimming finally filed, under seal, thousands of pages of internal records – including investigative dossiers on scores of accused coaches – the FBI field office in Campbell, California, outside San Jose, subpoenaed the files. This office had a particular interest in surveying the overall problem of abuse in swimming because Santa Clara County was one of the infamous capitals of abuse in the sport. It was where, for example, the local prosecutor finally brought down monster coach Andy King, who had prowled the West Coast for decades, after he raped and impregnated a 14-year-old girl.

The swimming files subpoenaed by the FBI later were acquired by my reporting partner at the time, Tim Joyce, and myself. They would inform some of our work in the early 2010s.

In 2013, as part of USA Swimming’s defense of a lawsuit by Jancy Thompson, concerning the abuse of her coach Norm Havercroft, the group’s technical vice president at the time, David Berkoff, submitted a declaration to the Santa Clara County Superior Court to support protesting my publication of information from the files Joyce and I had acquired. On the basis of legal advice, I then decided to take down certain posted primary-source documents, while continuing to use all the files wherever they were relevant to stories I was reporting.

***

Second, some FBI field offices over the years have responded to complaints of coach abuse by setting up softly publicized solicitations of tips from the public. I know, for example, that in 2013 a special agent out of the Los Angeles office, Randall Devine, let it be known that victims were being actively encouraged to call him at 310-477-6565.

***

Third, I was told by some anti-abuse activists that federal agents have been avid readers of my blog. I do not have independent verification of this. However, I can tell readers specifically that in 2014, when I was reporting on Alex Pussieldi — the Brazilian coach in Florida who human-trafficked and peeped on young swimmers imported from throughout the world — I was in conversation with a former agent who related that Pussieldi, a decade earlier, had been under the scrutiny of the FBI’s North Miami Beach field office.

This Pussieldi tidbit was important because, in 2008, a close coaching colleague of Pussieldi’s at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Roberto Caragol, was arrested (and eventually imprisoned) by a multi-agency Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force for the Southern District of Florida. This was an operation coordinated by Alexis Carpinteria, an agent out of the North Miami Beach office, who would be honored for this work by the organization Amber Alert.

Another officer who received accolades for collaring Caragol was Detective Jennifer Montgomery of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. In 2014, Montgomery acknowledged to me that a wider net was never cast to identify and track down Caragol’s associates. She said:

“This was a very high profile case and I asked the FBI for assistance because I thought that this case would be better prosecuted in the Federal System. Against my wishes, the FBI and US Atty in our district at the time were very eager to put out a press release about Caragol’s arrest. I have to throw in that I was very vocal about my opposition to the press release at this point in the investigation because I knew that the remainder of the investigation would be in jeopardy if the media got a hold of the information. However, the final decision was made to release the information.

When we did track down the victims who we were able to identify, not ONE of them wanted to cooperate or give a statement. This could be attributed to a couple factors. The boys (who were pre-teens at the time of the incidents) were now college-age young men with girlfriends and had seen the media coverage. They were afraid to be identified and did not want to revisit that time of their lives again. Caragol, surprisingly, was still a well-liked guy. People LOVED this guy. WE liked this guy. He was a likeable guy and it was easy to see how he could seduce boys into doing things they knew were wrong. Some of the victims didn’t want to be part of the demise of Caragol’s career. This is the reason why he was not charged with any sex crimes. We had no evidence, except for his admissions, and no cooperating victims.

It would have been impossible to set up forensic interviews with every child that Caragol ever coached. Instead, we asked Pine Crest to reach out to the parents and encourage parents to try and determine if their child may have been victimized and, if so, to report it to police immediately. The press releases also asked anyone with information or anyone who maybe a victim to contact law enforcement. No one came forward. His molestation admissions, while not pursued criminally, were considered when he was sentenced for the child pornography. He was sentenced on the high end of the guidelines because of those admissions so they didn’t go unrecognized.”

***

Fourth, in 2019 several major newspapers, led by the Wall Street Journal – and citing secret grand jury deliberations – said USA Swimming was under investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, for such items as insurance fraud, hiding of assets, and abuse cover-ups. (The insurance fraud could have involved the operations of the organization’s wholly owned self-insurance subsidiiary, the United States Sports Insurance Company, which was headquartered in Barbados before its breakup in 2014.) Presumably, FBI agents were enlisted as part of this investigation.

So what happened? We don’t know, in part because the newspapers that originally reported the grand jury probe never followed up on their own coverage. What commonly happens with these investigations is that they fizzle, in apathy and out of sight. Or perhaps worst of all, they remain putatively “open” but numbingly dormant. Keeping the investigations officially open gives law enforcement “no comment” leverage while nothing is actually getting done.

***

Fifth, after the 2017 settlement, at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, of my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for material from the immigration records of former Irish Olympic swimming coach George Gibney – whom I call the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history – I was reliably told that FBI agents were dispatched to Peru to look into Gibney’s work with a Denver area Catholic Church group he called the “International Peru Eye Clinic Foundation,” which purportedly made medical mission trips to that South American country in the late 1990s.

Gibney was, and perhaps still is, under investigation by the human trafficking finance specialist at the Justice Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section.

***

Could the FBI be doing more about sexual abuse? Sure.

But will they — now, in the wake of the new Justice Department audit, or ever?

Well, that depends. Mostly on the rest of us.

The official publication date for UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe is September 10. Links for ordering from many online outlets are here.

Irvin Muchnick will be appearing at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Aspen Grove-Littleton on Friday, September 13, and at Barnes & Noble in Briargate-Colorado Springs on Sunday, September 15.