FBI agent’s dream career started when Jimmy Hoffa went missing
By Chris Graves (’87)
Greg Stejskal was a newly minted and eager FBI agent, assigned to the bureau’s Detroit office in 1975, when the call came that the former Teamsters president had vanished.
Like every agent in the office that July day, Stejskal — a Nebraska native who knew more about football and constitutional law than mafia and labor unions — was tapped to help find Jimmy Hoffa, who was last seen getting into a car outside a metropolitan Detroit restaurant.
Stejskal couldn’t know then that day would begin one of the most famous and fascinating criminal cases of the century, but it began his storied three decade FBI career, one that reads more like a movie script than a resume. At 26, Stejskal (’71 and ’74) was the guy in the suit with a badge he had read about in the Landmark Books series The FBI, as a fifth-grader growing up in central Omaha in the ’50s and ’60s. He was Jimmy Stewart in The FBI Story. He was Robert Stack in The Untouchables.
“From about the age of 10, I really wanted to be an FBI agent,’’ said Stejskal, who is now retired and living with his wife of 47 years in Michigan. “So, I went to law school with the idea of going into the FBI.”
The only other career he contemplated: football. Stejskal attended the university on a football scholarship, but he is quick to joke that his days under former coach Bob Devaney were short-lived: “I practiced more than I played really.”
It would be his days in Memorial Stadium, though, that taught him the skills he put to use as an agent. “When you play a team sport, you learn a lot of lessons about teamwork. At least I did. I think I took away a lot of good values from football.
“I subscribe to the fact that sometimes sports can get way out of perspective,” he added. But they are ultimately an allegory for life. The values that you learn — the discipline and the work — relate well to other things.”
Stejskal detailed his career in his 2021 book FBI Case Files Michigan: Tales of a G-Man. Readers, he cautioned, should not see it as a memoir or autobiography. Rather, it’s a collection of stories from his front-row seat to some of the most important and newsworthy cases in the last 30 years. A case is not built by one person, he said, but rather a team working together.
“It wasn’t like I was a big part of all of those cases, but it was just amazing to be involved in all them,’’ he said.
Indeed. Stejskal is the agent who helped identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, a domestic terrorist who sent 16 bombs to people before the FBI caught up with him in a ramshackle cabin in Montana.
He is the agent who pushed, at the prompting of former University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, to investigate the illegal trafficking of prescription steroids among college athletes in 1988, at a time when the DEA and FBI were focused on cocaine and heroin trafficking. The FBI sting operation, dubbed Equine, netted more than 70 drug dealers in several states and Canada and seized 8 to 10 million dosage units of real and counterfeit steroids. (A call from George H.W. Bush’s White House to FBI headquarters kept Stejskal’s steroid investigation alive.)
Stejskal met Schembechler in 1982 after he asked the FBI to talk with Michigan players about illegal sports gambling. The two remained friends for decades and Stejskal again credited his knowledge of football and his friendship with former Husker football coach Tom Osborne as helping to build his rapport with Schembechler.
“I think (between) football players and coaches, there’s a certain mutual respect there,” he said.
He is also the FBI agent who warned Major League Baseball about the use of anabolic steroids in 1994 — a claim later denied and then recanted by the League during the dark years of its steroid scandal. Years later, Stejskal helped arrange for Oakland Athletic players Jose Canseco’s and Mark McGwire’s steroid supplier to testify during a Senate subcommittee. Both players later admitted steroid use.
He was also the case agent in the first criminal prosecution that would test the boundaries of the First Amendment when perceived threats were made on the internet in the 1995 case United States v. Alkhabaz. And while ultimately the prosecution lost the case on appeal, Stejskal called it perhaps the most important case he worked. It set a precedent and foreshadowed the web of current issues related to threats, free speech, the internet and social media.
At issue, he said: “When can law enforcement or when should law enforcement intervene? Or, do they have to wait?”
The case is still studied by law students, he said.
He is quick to point out, too, that the work of an FBI agent was filled with hurry-up-and-wait days and weeks, administrative paperwork and filing of court documents and testimony that sometimes spanned years.
First as a special agent and then as the senior resident agent in the FBI’s offices in Detroit and later in Ann Arbor, Stejskal helped foster a collaborative relationship with local law enforcement on bank robberies, undercover drug operations and surveillance, said Rich Kinsey. Kinsey met Stejskal when Kinsey worked for the Ann Arbor Police Department, from which he is now retired. The two were among a group of Michigan law enforcement detectives in Washtenaw County that coined themselves “The League of Justice.” The group, which met socially, formed strong professional relationships that helped each agency catch criminals.
“You know the way the relationship between local police and FBI are portrayed in the media and television and movies: That they don’t get along? That couldn’t be further from the truth. We really get along well … and much of that is because of Greg Stejskal,’’ said Kinsey, now a sergeant with the Chelsea (Michigan) Police Department.
Kinsey worked with Stejskal for years before Kinsey retired from the Ann Arbor Police Department. He still calls the agent a friend.
“He is the epitome of an FBI agent. He’s just a great guy,’’ Kinsey said. “Just picture John Wayne as an FBI agent and that’s Greg Stejskal. Honestly, he’s big, tough, honest, funny, very witty. And he’s smart. He’s really smart. And he gets the job done.’’
Stejskal would still be at it if he could. The FBI has a mandatory retirement age of 57. The bureau extended his job for six months to allow him to finish his work and train his replacement.
“My feeling was that I always wanted to be an FBI agent. So why would I leave until I was asked?’’ he said. “I loved the job.”