Al Scudieri, the Lead Investigator for the James Hoyer Law Firm, has been elected as the 2012 President of The Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc
Nearly 8,000 former FBI agents strong, the organization supports the FBI itself as well as former agents that have health or economic problems. The group also provides college scholarships to relatives of current and former FBI agents.
Scudieri started with the FBI as a 16-year-old high school student, encrypting messages by hand in the bureau’s New York City offices. When he became an agent after college, he was assigned to the FBI’s Birmingham field office, where the work mostly involved arresting Vietnam War deserters. His next assignment, in Washington D.C., was to the Soviet surveillance squad, tailing people who showed up at the Soviet embassy to try to identify them.
In the FBI’s offices in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Scudieri worked organized crime (casino fraud), extortion and terrorism cases involving FALN, a nationalist group that was setting off bombs.
His last FBI posting was to Tampa, where he would spend 18 years. He worked the Organized Crime Squad (focused on Santo Trafficante and associates), the daisy chain scandal (which netted Florida Power President Angel Perez, for bribery) and the prosecution of real estate developer Allen Wolfson (which led to the failure of Metropolitan Bank, America’s largest-ever bank failure at the time.)
Other notable Tampa cases included wiring George Steinbrenner to catch a gambler named Howard Spira (who was trying to shake him down for $150,000 to help Steinbrenner get dirt on star player Dave Winfield) as well as a 1992 case in which Colombians tried to buy Stinger missiles and machine guns from a man who happened to be an FBI informant.
The capper to Scudieri’s 18 years in the Tampa field office came in 1983 when the FBI wired developer Pick Talley and caught then-Hillsborough County Commissioner Jerry Bowmer shaking him down for a bribe. The feds then turned Bowmer, who wore a wire and caught fellow commissioners Fred Anderson and Joe Kotvas also seeking bribes, which led to the spectacle of a majority of the local county commission led from the courthouse in handcuffs.
With the Tampa FBI, Scudieri worked with Bill James and Chris Hoyer, prosecutors on the U.S. Attorney’s Strike Force. After Scudieri left the FBI in 1995, he stayed retired for the 4th of July weekend before joining James and Hoyer at the Tampa law firm they had opened, which specializes in fraud and whistleblower cases. Scudieri has since been chief investigator at the law firm of James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich.
Scudieri will serve for a year as president-elect of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc., before taking over as president in 2012.
