Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,25

to Philadelphia and earned a sociology degree from Temple University, hoping to impress his father, a Temple alum. His father didn’t seem impressed. After college he fulfilled a dream and was hired as a Philadelphia police officer, one of his hometown’s “finest.” His father still didn’t seem impressed.

After three years as a patrolman and corporal, he joined the FBI as a special agent and made a name for himself as a fearless mob investigator in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. He became a renowned polygraph examiner and interrogator. Fleisher talked to everyone—pimps, hookers, politicians, door-men—and could wheedle information from anybody. He was a chameleon: friendly uncle, ruthless inquisitor, stout best friend, wise rabbi, comic. Once he went undercover on a Caribbean cruise as a stand-up comedian—and sent the crew to jail with smuggling convictions.

He transferred to Customs as a special agent in Philadelphia because Customs agents had more freedom to choose where they wanted to live, and Fleisher and his wife, pregnant at the time with their first child, wanted to raise their family back home. After a three-year assignment in Washington, D.C., the promotion to the powerful job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Philadelphia was a triumphant return to his hometown. He lived across the river in a five-bedroom split-level in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and occasionally did Tuesday-night stand-up at the Holiday Inn. On the surface, life was good.

Yet as he accumulated substantial government power, Fleisher had greatly expanded to meet it. At fifty years old, the once-slim FBI agent had become a corpulent man behind a desk, all five feet and eight and a half inches, and 250 pounds splendidly wrapped in Italian suits under the penumbra of a great Old Testament beard. He carried himself flamboyantly with a gold Montblanc pen in the shirt pocket embroidered WLF, a pinkie ring (like the beloved Jewish men of his childhood), a gourmand’s appetite, and streetwise wit. Fleisher’s weight worried his doctor and his wife. But the big man’s regret was that his large stomach prevented him from carrying his Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special next to his groin, cowboy style, as he had as a brash young FBI agent, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago.

He was still holding on to the dreams of youth. The comic book and TV stories of detectives, modern knights-errant, that inspired him as a boy still animated him. He’d joke about it. “I never wanted to be a government bureaucrat. I always wanted to devote my life to the battle of good versus evil.” But he meant it.

His dreams deferred had left him with a deep and unknowable sadness that could erupt to the surface in the field, paralyzing him.

As a baby-faced rookie patrolman in 1968 in tough West Philadelphia—ridiculed on the streets as too small, too soft, too Jewish—he’d answered a radio call of a toddler fallen from a second-story window at Fifty-second and Market streets. He rode with the boy in the back of the patrol wagon to the ER, but the ER doctor was having trouble reviving the boy. Suddenly a cry burst from the baby’s lips, and the doctor smiled and said, “This little guy’s gonna be all right.” The child was fine but Fleisher started crying and couldn’t stop. His partner had to lead him out of the hospital, crying for joy, “But I thought he was going to die!”

Billy wept at the scene of a murdered child, just the same over the arrest of a mob hit man. He wept when the other white officers branded a black colleague a “nigger,” shouting at them that he was a good man. The baby-faced cop insisted he’d read the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and heard the Upanishads were no different—it was clear the battle for justice was in the heart; each soul was precious. “The great religions teach us,” he said through tears, “that the loss of one soul affects us all.”

Whispers started to follow him. Crier. Social worker. Too soft. “I may be a short, fat, Jewish detective,” he later roared at critics, “but I’m the toughest short, fat, Jewish detective you’ve ever seen.”

Now the roomful of Jewish cops buzzed as Fleisher stood. He was one of them. He had a mezuzah in his doorpost protecting his house from the evil of the world with the blinding light of the one God. They loved him. It didn’t matter that Fleisher had hugged the Saudi state police in Riyadh after teaching them the