JOHN McNALLY WAS AN OFF-DUTY NEW YORK POLICE detective on his way to visit his daughter Deborah in the hospital one winter night in 1969, when he spotted a robbery in progress at a liquor store near the Holland Tunnel. He pulled his car over and strolled into the store as if he were a customer.
A man with a pistol was standing behind a counter while a second man emptied one of the cash registers. When the robber moved to a second register, McNally suddenly drew his service revolver and stuck it under the man’s chin.
The other gunman whirled around and aimed his .32 at McNally, but his pistol misfired.
“Put down your gun if you want your friend to live,” McNally shouted.
The man tossed his gun to the floor.
“John was never off duty,” says Stan Kochman, an ex-NYPD cop and private investigator from New Jersey.
Kochman admits he’s not an impartial observer. As private investigators, he and McNally worked numerous cases together, including the Claus von Bulow appeal, masterminded by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in 1985. After being convicted of attempting to murder his wife, heiress Martha “Sunny” von Bulow, with injections of insulin, Von Bulow was granted a new trial. The second jury found him not guilty.
“McNally was a legend in the police department,” Kochman recalls. “He wasn’t intimidated by anything.”
McNally has been a private investigator now for 22 years. Since 1983 he and his partner, Pat McKenna, have been based in West Palm Beach, though McNally still maintains an office in New York City. During this time, they have worked for many of the most prominent criminal defense attorneys in the country.
Unlike his famous clients, very little is known about McNally, who was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He usually makes every effort to avoid the media, though that proved impossible when he stepped off a plane in Los Angeles last July to head the investigation for the O.J. Simpson defense team.
Every reporter within shouting distance wanted an interview. Time magazine, grasping for information, published a story headlined: “Who Are These Guys, Anyway?”
The article painted a less-than-flattering portrait of McNally, but a very different image emerged when the PI finally agreed to an interview with Sunshine in Los Angeles, in between tracking down crucial evidence for Robert Shapiro, Simpson’s lead attorney.
IT IS A BRIGHT SATURDAY afternoon at a Bel Air hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and McNally and McKenna are relaxing at a poolside table, their cellular phones close by. McNally, whose hair and beard are gray, could be a finalist in the annual Key West Ernest Hemingway look-a-like contest.
He makes it clear that he wouldn’t have agreed to the Sunshine interview if it wasn’t a favor for F. Lee Bailey, the flamboyant Palm Beach defense attorney who gave McNally his start in the private-investigation business and was responsible for McNally joining the Simpson team.
Throughout the interview, McNally refuses to embellish his exploits and offers only sparse information about his personal life.
He grew up in Brooklyn, attended a Catholic high school and enlisted in the Navy at 17. When he was discharged from the service, he joined the New York police department.
He moved up quickly through the ranks and became the youngest man in the department to make detective first-grade. In 1964, he was credited with helping to break one of the most famous jewel robberies in American history.
That was the year Miami man-about-town Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy and two companions broke into Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History and stole the Star of India - the largest sapphire in the world - along with other priceless jewels.
Tapping his sources on the street, McNally learned that a group of out-of-town men had been spotted partying at a local hotel.
“I ran down the lead the same day,” McNally says, “and turned the information over to the FBI.”
Two days later, the FBI arrested Murph the Surf in Miami and recovered the Star of India.
After receiving 22 commendations during his career, McNally retired from the NYPD in 1971.
The following year, he was referred to F. Lee Bailey, who had come to New York on a murder case involving two brothers named Jacobson. Bailey asked McNally to check out a rumor that the prosecution was planning to coach a witness during a mock trial scheduled to take place in an empty courtroom over the weekend.
Posing as a janitor, McNally put on old clothes and mopped his way into the courtroom where the witness was being questioned. The next day in court Bailey asked the witness if she had been coached in her testimony. When she said no, Bailey informed the prosecution that McNally could verify the witness was lying. Bailey won the case, and he and McNally began their long association.
Since being licensed as a PI in 1972, McNally has worked almost exclusively for elite criminal defense attorneys. Though he won’t discuss his fees, they are substantial. He doesn’t advertise, and never had to perform such mundane tasks as domestic surveillance.
“I started out at the top,” he says. “Lee was my jump-off point.”
INTERVIEWS WITH THE ATTORneys McNally has worked for bring a sharper portrait of him into focus. There is a remarkable degree of consistency in their feelings about the investigator, who, they say, is the best in the business.
Fred Hafetz, a longtime lawyer and a former chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, has used McNally’s services for more than 20 years. He met the PI in the early ’70s, when Hafetz was representing a defendant in a murder case and needed to locate a witness.
“All we had was a nickname and a little information about the neighborhood,” Hafetz remembers. “I turned the information over to John on Friday. On Saturday he found the man. Amazing.”
What comes across repeatedly is McNally’s ability to find witnesses and to get them to talk. When asked how he does it, he shrugs, saying, “You have to work to get them on your side. I try to take that extra step. Other PIs might interview someone by phone. I like to do it face to face.”
McNally’s world is not the slam-bang stuff of TV heroes like Tom Selleck of Magnum P.I. or James Garner of The Rockford Files. There are no car chases or shootouts. McNally has a gun license in both Florida and New York, but he seldom carries a weapon.
Not that there haven’t been a few tense moments.
Gerald Alch was a criminal defense attorney for 34 years before becoming a district court judge in Massachusetts. In the mid-’70s he was working a murder case in Indiana, and McNally was along as his investigator. When Alch received an anonymous death threat, McNally insisted that as a precaution they trade motel rooms.
“When you have a private investigator who’s willing to take a bullet for you, it’s pretty hard not to have confidence in him,” Alch says.
Barry Slotnick, a New York attorney who in 1984 hired McNally to investigate the case of subway gunman Bernhard Goetz, tells a story that illustrates McNally’s ability to get the kind of information that can prove vital during a trial.
In 1980, Slotnick was defending two young Hasidic Jews charged with attempted murder. Searching for a key witness for the prosecution, McNally moved seamlessly through the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a mixed-race neighborhood where Hasidic men wear black formal garb and full beards. Finally, he found the witness and interviewed him. When he briefed Slotnick, McNally said he was certain the witness had been smoking marijuana during the incident he claimed to have seen.
Dubious, Slotnick told McNally it hadn’t been mentioned in the police report.
McNally shrugged. “Well, I guess they didn’t pick up on it.”
When Slotnick questioned the witness in court, he asked the man if he had been smoking marijuana at the time, and the witness said yes. Then Slotnick asked him if he was able to see the event while he was smoking.
“Yeah, man,” the witness said. “Marijuana makes me see better.”
Slotnick’s clients were acquitted.
AT THE HOTEL ON SUNset Boulevard, McNally and McKenna are drinking out of cans of beer from their cooler, and McNally is feeding potato chips to a squirrel that has scampered up to the table.
What does he think about the Time magazine article that quoted an assistant U.S. Attorney as saying McNally was a confidant of Gambino crime-family members? The question clearly irritates the PI.
“If I work for five different lawyers, am I the confidant of five different defendants?” he asks rhetorically. “No. It’s because of the lawyers I work for.”
Lee Bailey, coming to McNally’s defense, says, “If John were a confidant of the mob, I wouldn’t be introducing him to any of my clients.”
When Judge Gerald Alch is asked the same question, he reacts in disbelief. “You’ve heard of the impossible dream? That’s the unleapable stretch. John has the ability to get the job done without ever crossing the ethical or moral line. He never gets that line blurred.”
According to Time magazine, McNally does have his detractors, but it is difficult to put a name to such sources as “a high-ranking member of the NYPD” or verify the statement that “law-enforcement sources” told Time that McNally was the target of an FBI investigation.
When asked about the Time story, an FBI spokeswoman said that the agency would not confirm or deny any investigation, past or present. She added, however, that the “law-enforcement source” mentioned in Time was not the FBI.
The news that McNally and McKenna were working for O.J. Simpson’s defense team was not warmly received by a group of California private investigators, and a complaint was filed by the Los Angeles County Criminal Investigators Association. Their law firm sent McNally and McKenna a cease-and-desist order, stating that they were not licensed to operate in California.
McNally flips open a thick, three-ring binder and jabs at a page.
“I called Sacramento (the state capital) when I first got out here and was told I did not have to have a California license to work a particular case,” he says with heat in his voice. “I called a second time to confirm that and I was told the same thing.”
When asked if there were any other investigators involved on the Simpson case, McNally nods his head.
“Yeah,” he says. “We have an ex-LAPD sergeant named Bill Pavelic acting as a consultant.”McNally smiles at McKenna. “We are that ‘army of investigators’ you keep hearing about.”
McNALLY HAS HAD HIS SHARE of personal tragedies. His son, John, was killed in a car accident in New York in 1981. Devastated, McNally and his wife, Elaine, left New York for South Florida, and bought a condo in Jupiter, where McNally took a two-year hiatus from his work. Elaine died in 1992.
Today, McNally devotes himself to his private-investigation business, which has grown dramatically since he moved to Florida. Over the years, he has built up a network of PIs he calls on when he’s too busy to handle a case himself. Using this network, he was able to put together a team to investigate the country’s first toxic-dumping racketeering case in 1990.
New York attorney Michael Walsh represented one of the corporations charged with the illegal dumping of medical waste. McNally set up surveillance teams to follow hospital employees to determine who was actually dumping the waste products.
The information that McNally’s team uncovered convinced the jury that it was hospital employees, either intentionally or negligently, who were improperly disposing of tons of toxic waste.
In this case, as in many others, McNally got little credit for turning a case in the client’s favor.
“It’s not important for John to take credit for a lawyer’s success in the courtroom,” Walsh says. “I like to think of him as the stealth detective.”
F. LEE BAILEY HAS LONG BEEN an advocate of the value of a top-flight investigator. “I’m a great believer in the notion that if your investigator is good enough, almost any lawyer will do,” he says.
Bailey devoted a section of his 1982 book, To Be A Trial Lawyer, to the responsibilities and skills of a PI. The attorney believes that an investigator must try to ensure that the lawyer he’s working for gets no surprises during the trial.
McNally agrees.
“It’s just as important to find out the bad stuff as the good stuff,” he says.
To do this, McNally puts a witness at ease, then obtains a statement without the subpoena power of the police.
Miami attorney Jay Hogan has known McNally since the PI moved to Florida 13 years ago.
“John can talk to a guy in a candy store or a penthouse or the CEO of a corporation,” Hogan says. “He seems to be the kind of man who invokes trust from all kinds of people.”
On his first contact with a witness, McNally identifies the law firm he’s working for and then presents his calling card.
“I’ll ask if they’ve read the police report that has their statement in it,” he explains. “If they say no, I’ll give it to them. You’ve got to give a little to get a little. Often they’ll finish reading the police report and tell me, ‘That’s not what I said.’ Then I’ll ask, ‘So what did you say?’ “
McNally tries to form a bond of trust with the witness that lasts throughout the trial. Sometimes an attorney will ask him to go back to a reluctant witness and persuade him to testify. In a case like this, McNally says that the best approach is to appeal to the witness’ sense of fair play.
“With each witness, I have to be as good as my word,” he says.
IT’S APPROACHING 4 O’CLOCK, and McNally announces that he has to meet someone in Malibu and excuses himself to get ready. Pat McKenna stays at the table to talk about the man he is assisting in the Simpson case.
McKenna has a master’s degree in criminology and is a former corrections-parole officer who came to Florida from Calumet City, Ill., in 1978. He has traveled to Europe and South America on investigations and worked such high-profile assignments as the IRA Stinger-missile case in West Palm Beach in 1990 and the William Kennedy Smith rape saga in 1991. He and McNally have been associates for more than a decade.
McKenna is tanned and looks fit.
“I’m 46 and can’t keep up with the guy,” he says about the less-than-svelte McNally. “John is always thinking, always on his toes. He never rests.”
McKenna admits he is in awe of McNally, even though they sometimes argue and challenge each other about tactics. McKenna talks of how proud he was when, as a notary public, he was asked to perform the wedding ceremony for McNally’s daughter, Eileen, in Jupiter. He also mentions McNally’s generosity.
“John could have had the William Kennedy Smith case, but he gave it to me,” McKenna says.
He frowns, trying to come up with a fitting way to express admiration for his friend and mentor.
“I’ve learned a lot on my own, but when I’m with John, I know I’m working with the master,” he says. “It’s like a painter being asked to work with Michelangelo.”
