Longtime Agent Heading From FBI to P.I.

Frank Calley says he is just under 6 feet tall--”OK, five inches under.” Before they turned gray, his hair and triangular mustache were reddish.

“He likes to run around and scream and yell about catching varmint robbers,” said one former partner.

And so, after 25 years as an FBI agent, Calley has earned the nickname of Yosemite Sam, the squatty little cartoon character who totes a pistol in each hand and chases Bugs Bunny into hair-raising predicaments.

“I guess it’s because, well, I’m a little door-kicking guy,” Calley concedes. “I’m not the shy and retiring type.”

Calley may not be bashful, but he is retiring--from law enforcement, at least.

Starting Feb. 1, he becomes Calley, P.I. His name will be added as the third partner in the highly regarded private investigation firm of Tynes and Esposito in Tustin.

Thursday night, the law-enforcement community and others--he invited his tailor and barber--sent him out in style, at a bash in his honor at the Irvine Marriott Hotel.

Although there were the standard roasts, most of his colleagues honored a longstanding, unwritten tradition.

“Never bash a guy on his wedding or his retirement,” said FBI agent John O’Neill, who has worked with Calley in the Orange County FBI office for several years. “Anything else is open game, of course.”

Thus, O’Neill divulged before the party that “poor Franky was born in upstate New York, placed in a basket and sent floating down the Hudson River. Gypsies got him and sold him to the FBI in the 1940s. It was very classy at that time to buy pagan babies.”

In fact, Calley arrived at the “bureau,” as agents call the FBI, in 1961 via more pedestrian routes. He has held positions in Washington, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Diego and has been sent on special missions to other parts of the country. The FBI sent him to language school to learn Serbo-Croatian.

Since June, 1982, he has been the FBI’s man in Orange County: the special agent in charge of the Santa Ana resident office overseeing a staff of more than 50.

On Jan. 2, Calley, 50, officially retired from the FBI, turning in his badge and credentials and gun and packing up such mementos as a purple high-top Converse All-Star tennis shoe worn by a bank robber--before Calley busted him. Dubbed “The Jumper,” the bandit vaulted counters in sneakers to rob banks.

Calley’s capture of that crook and others would make a good book. He is keeping that idea in mind. With the help of some colleagues, he ticked off some possible material this week.

Born in 1936 in the little town of Goshen, N.Y., Calley grew up in Maybrook, “about 80 miles from New York City in Rip Van Winkle territory.” He has two brothers, both of whom have been FBI agents. One still is.

His dad was a freight conductor and brakeman for the New Haven Railroad. By the time he reached Maybrook High School, he also was working for the railroad, shoveling snow off the tracks. He graduated as valedictorian in a class of 13, Calley said.

Before he finally earned a bachelor’s degree in education, with minors in chemistry and math, Calley had several jobs that help to explain, perhaps, his ability to get along with the everyday person: He moved ice from railroad ice cars, painted with a crew on the Poughkeepsie Bridge, served a three-year stint in the Marine Corps and pumped gas at a service station. In his senior year at the University of Michigan, he met and married his wife. Their son, Matt, was born during Calley’s first year of law school, about the same time their money ran out.

For a time, he worked as a salesman at an oil company and as a claims adjuster at an insurance agency. In the fall of 1961 he enrolled in the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va.

His first six months as an FBI agent were spent in San Diego, at the Camp Pendleton resident office, which no longer exists.

“My oldest daughter, Cheryl, was born there,” Calley said. “I was working seven days a week, 12-plus hours a day, and it was probably the best work of my career. It was new. I was learning it. I worked with older, experienced agents who take you under their wing and teach you the ropes.”

By the late 1960s, it dawned on him that he had emerged as one of the veterans.

“All of a sudden you become one of these guys, and it’s a real eye-opener,” said Calley, whose entire face smiles when he grins. “All of a sudden you’re a little older, a couple of inches thicker in the waist, hair grayer and your temper a little shorter. . . . This job takes its toll.”

At this juncture, Calley was transferred from Washington back to Los Angeles, where he worked bank robberies.

“Bank robberies are Franky’s real turn-on,” said O’Neill, 47, who worked with Calley in several investigations.

One of the chapters in his book could be called “The Dumb Bank Robbers I Have Known.”

There was the guy who wrote his demand note for money on his own deposit slip and couldn’t figure out how Calley nabbed him. And the quartet of robbers who were caught pushing their car into a gas station near the bank. Or the pair who left their getaway car idling outside the bank, only to return with their loot and find that it had been stolen.

One of his favorites was the bandit whose gang assigned him to steal a getaway car. When he stole his uncle’s car, his cohorts jeered. He stole a plate--just one plate--off a car and placed it at the rear of his uncle’s automobile. Witnesses to the bank robbery jotted down both plate numbers.

“We got to the house, and they were at the kitchen table with the money still doing the ‘one-for-you and one-for-me deal,’ ” Calley recalled.

Then comes the chapter on “The Smartest Bank Robbers I Ever Met.”

In March, 1972, a band of crafty men tunneled and blasted their way into the vault of the Laguna Niguel branch of California First Bank.

At the time, it was the biggest burglary in American history. At least $12 million in cash, jewelry, stocks and negotiables were stolen from the safe-deposit boxes of some of the county’s wealthiest citizens. The actual loss may never be known because some depositors had no records of their property and others never reported their losses for reasons agents believe had something to do with taxes.

Calley and another agent were the first at the scene of the brazen break-in. The burglars were sophisticated. They used liquid Styrofoam to silence the exterior alarm, filled burlap bags with dirt to muffle an explosion and rewired the vault’s interior alarm before spending an entire weekend inside, breaking open hundreds of safe-deposit boxes. They left few clues.

Weeks and weeks later, they visited a man in Tustin named Earl Dawson. His nephew was one of the burglars, who had hidden their getaway car in Dawson’s garage.

“We drank a lot of beers with them, told a lot of Marine war stories,” Calley said. “We told him he still had a duty to his country. We fed him the American flag, and he bit it.”

By the end of the afternoon, they had persuaded Dawson to let them open the car trunk. Inside, they found, among other things, nearly all of the burglary tools. Calley thought he recognized something else, one cotton work glove. Its mate had been left in the vault.

During the late 1970s, the National Bank of Nevada in Reno was robbed of $1,444,000 during a convention of police officers at the casino next door.

“Renrob was the big one,” O’Neill said. “Calley got one of the three guys’ girlfriends to roll over on him. He just used that charm of his and talked her into seeing how it was in her best interest to turn him in.”

FBI agent John Warren remembers more than one case in which Calley saved his life while they worked bank robberies together between 1973 and 1975. In one instance, they were on the trail of two Detroit bank robbers who were “rather notorious,” Warren said. “They’d had 13 or 14 robberies, and they’d beaten and killed several people.”

Calley and Warren found the pair in San Clemente. Calley wrestled one of them to the ground. At that point, a bystander told them the partner had been staying with a woman across the street. In the moments that followed, Warren found himself facing the barrel of an M-14. Calley crashed through a window to “draw down” on the bad guy.

“You save their lives, they save yours,” Calley said. “That’s just how it all works at the bureau.”

Warren recalled a different situation. He and Calley had arrested a hit man in Fullerton after he drew a knife on them. They got him in handcuffs. They put him in one door of their car. He scampered right out the other door.

“We never charged him with escape,” Calley intoned. “It would have been awful hard to explain how someone in handcuffs got away from us.”

In June, 1978, Calley became the special agent in charge of the Long Beach resident office. He moved to Orange County permanently four years later.

His fondest memories are of his time here, where his eight children--including four stepsons by a second marriage to Inez Calley--grew up. A resident of Mission Viejo, he has spent much of his off-duty time coaching Little League, “probably the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done,” he said.

He’ll have more time for that now.

After a vacation to Hawaii, Calley will return to business with Bill Tynes, a retired investigator with the Orange County district attorney’s office, and Bernie Esposito, a former detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Tynes, who spent 23 years with the district attorney’s office, and Esposito, who was a detective with the Sheriff’s Department nearly as long, said the only partner they ever considered was the veteran FBI agent.

“Back in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was working bank robberies for the FBI, and I was working robberies for the Sheriff’s Department and we’ve just maintained a friendship ever since,” said Esposito, who with Tynes has run the private investigation firm for five years. “We knew for quite a while we needed another person because of our workload, but the right person just wasn’t there.”

Then came Calley’s retirement.

“I think he’ll make an absolutely fantastic private investigator,” said Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates, who lives in San Juan Capistrano and recalled him and Calley “screaming and cheering and hollering for our kids” when they played volleyball together in school.

“Every once in a while you get somebody with an extraordinary ability and charm that creates a trust and ability to draw law enforcement officers together. . . . He has the intuition where he can deal with people from all walks of life. I’ve seen him in settings with very important people and also the hardest of criminals. Some people are just very gifted with it and he has it.

“He’s just an extraordinary guy who’s very, very capable,” Gates said, “and I hate to see him retire.”

Calley said that he and Gates go to the same tailor.

“We keep showing up at dinners with the same jacket on,” Calley said. “His is longer. He just better not wear the new suit I’ll have on at my retirement dinner.”

He didn’t.