FBI mastermind in Abscam sting operation
Neil J. Welch, a maverick FBI official who helped mastermind the political corruption sting operation that ensnared a senator and six congressmen and negotiated the surrender of the escaped killer of Kitty Genovese, died on June 29 in Omaha, Neb. He was 89.
Mr. Welch joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation after law school, seeing it, he said in a 1979 interview, as “a good place to start my career.” He stayed for nearly three decades.
As the special agent in charge of field offices in Buffalo, Detroit and Philadelphia and the supervisor of the biggest office, in New York, where his title was assistant director, he won the respect of agents as an innovator and motivator.
But he often vexed his bosses in Washington by focusing his investigations not on bank robbers and draft dodgers but on organized crime and corruption.
He expressed contempt for the “ponderous” and “ineffectual” headquarters bureaucracy under J. Edgar Hoover, the former FBI director.
In the 1970s, Mr. Welch butted heads with his superiors in Washington by refusing to engage in the dirty tricks authorized under Cointelpro, the bureau’s counterintelligence operation that targeted anti-Vietnam War protesters and radical groups as varied as the Socialist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Welch preferred to focus on wrongdoing by public officials. His most spectacular corruption case was the multiyear Abscam investigation, which he oversaw with Thomas P. Puccio, head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force for the Eastern District of New York.
The case culminated in 1980 with charges against federal legislators and local officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for accepting bribes from agents posing as Arab sheikhs and businessmen in return for political favors. Defense lawyers argued that their clients had been entrapped, but the courts disagreed.
The convicted defendants included Sen. Harrison A. Williams, D-N.J., and Representatives John Jenrette, DS.C.; Richard Kelly, R-Fla.; Raymond F. Lederer and Michael Myers, D-Pa.; John M. Murphy, D-N.Y.; and Franklin Thompson, D-N.J.