The Real Mel Weinberg Was the Most Dangerous Con Man Behind ‘American Hustle’ Movie 

 

 

 

February 2nd, 1980. By the time the country sits down to dinner, NBC has the story. >> Public officials from five states who have become targets of FBI operation ABSCAM. >> By the next morning, it’s the front page of the New York Times and the lead on every broadcast. The FBI has been running a sting for two years on Congress itself.

 The FBI has been running what amounts to a sting operation on the Congress where FBI agents are said to have paid out more than a million dollars in bribes. And the names are already leaking. A United States senator, six congressman, the mayor of Camden, members of a city council, an immigration inspector caught on tape stuffing envelopes of cash into their suit pockets, promising favors to a shake who didn’t exist.

 The operation has a code name, Abscam. And the man at the center of it isn’t a federal agent. He isn’t a prosecutor. He’s a 55-year-old con artist named Mel Weinberg. A swindler who 3 years earlier was facing federal prison for running an advanced fee loan scam, promising loans to desperate people, pocketing their fees, and delivering nothing.

 This wasn’t supposed to happen. Abscam was never supposed to touch Congress. It started with stolen paintings. a handful of fences in Queens, a few mob guys looking to move forged certificates of deposit. The FBI thought they were running a property recovery case. Instead, they accidentally pulled a thread that unraveled the United States capital.

 And the man pulling that thread was a convicted conman who, by his own admission, had cheated more people than he could count. Crude, profane, cigar in hand, he talked like a borch belt comedian and conned like a natural. The agent who ran him would later say it plainly, “Without Weineberg, there never would have been a case.

” This is the real story of Abscam, the one Hollywood softened, the one that became American Hustle in 2013 with Christian Bale in a combo and Amy Adams in a plunging neckline. But the truth was harder, meaner, more dangerous. Because the politicians who walked into those hotel rooms weren’t characters. They were elected officials.

 And what they did on those FBI tapes ended the careers of six congressmen and a sitting US senator sent that senator to federal prison and shook public trust in Washington for a generation. But here’s what most people don’t know. The whole thing almost fell apart before it started. And the only reason it didn’t, the only reason a fake Arab shake ever walked into a hotel suite with a briefcase full of cash is because one career criminal decided he’d rather wear a wire than wear a number.

Melvin Weineberg was born December 4th, 1924, the Bronx. His father ran a store that sold plate glass. Mel learned early that the best windows weren’t the ones you sold. They were the ones you broke. He dropped out of school of the ninth grade. By his 20s, he was running small cons, fake jewelry, phony investment deals, insurance scams.

 By the 1960s, he had perfected what he called the London investors hustle. He’d open a plush office, mahogany desks, secretaries, a view of the harbor. He’d put out the word that he could arrange any loan, any size, for clients with bad credit. Desperate businessmen would line up. They’d pay advance fees, sometimes 10,000, sometimes 50,000.

 Weineberg would promise the loan was coming. The loan never came. By the time the marks figured out they’d been had, Mel had moved on. New office, new name, same hustle. He was good. may be too good. In 1977, the law finally caught up with him after one of his marks went to the FBI. He was arrested for fraud and conspiracy.

 Looking at 3 years, his girlfriend Evelyn Knight was facing charges, too. And Mel Weinberg, who had spent his whole life selling lies, was about to make the biggest deal of his career. He offered the FBI a trade. Let him a night walk, and he’d hand them bigger fish than himself. real ones. John Good was a veteran FBI agent running the bureau’s Long Island field office out in Hapoj.

 He’d been chasing white collar fraud for years and getting nowhere. He knew that the only way to catch sophisticated conman was to think like one, and Weineberg, this fast-talking glass salesman’s son, was the most sophisticated conman Good had ever met. So Good made the deal. Mel would get probation. Knight would walk. In exchange, Weineberg would work for the bureau as a paid informant, a monthly retainer to start, and far more before it was over.

 The original plan was modest. The FBI wanted to recover stolen art. There was a network operating out of New York and New Jersey, moving paintings ripped off in museum heists, Renaissance pieces, old masters worth millions on the black market. Weineberg’s job was to pose as the American representative of a wealthy Arab shake, a fictional oil baron named Kamir Abdul Raman, who was supposedly looking to buy stolen art for his private collection.

 The FBI set up a shell company. They called it Abdul Enterprises Limited. They rented an office. They printed business cards. They opened an account at Chase Manhattan and parked $1 million in seed money. The account was real. The shake was not. Within months, Weineberg was reeling them in. Stolen paintings started showing up.

 Forged certificates of deposit, counterfeit stocks. The fences trusted him because he sounded like one of them. He talked their language. He knew which restaurants in Little Italy you sat in the back of. By the spring of 1979, the case was producing real arrests and real recoveries. And then somebody mentioned that the shake might also be interested in casinos. Atlantic City was booming.

Casino licenses were the new gold rush. And in New Jersey, casino licenses required political approval. That’s where Angelo Erai came in. Around 50 years old, mayor of Camden, New Jersey, a short, thick-necked political boss with a gravel voice and a reach that stretched across South Jersey. He was also a state senator and the FBI would soon learn completely for sale.

 By late 1978, a middleman had steered him to Weineberg. The pitch. A wealthy Arab investor wanted to pour hundreds of millions into Atlantic City. He needed a casino license. He needed friends in government. Could the mayor help? Ericetti could help with anything for $400,000. He looked the undercover man in the eye and said the line that opened the whole case. I’ll give you Atlantic City.

Ericetti didn’t just take the bait. He delivered. He started rattling off a rolodex of corruption like a man reading a grocery list. Congressmen, senators, officials who could be bought. And he made the introductions himself. The cameras hidden in a hotel suite near Kennedy Airport rolled the whole time. That was the moment Abscam stopped being an art theft case.

 It became something nobody at the FBI had planned for because within weeks was walking congressman through the door. The first was Michael Joseph Meyers, Democrat, Pennsylvania’s first congressional district, Philadelphia. Everybody called him Azie. A former long shoreman with rough hands and rough manners. A politician more comfortable in a union hall than the House of Representatives.

On August 22nd, 1979, Azie Meyers walked into a suite at the Travel Lodge near Kennedy Airport. The hidden camera was rolling. They explained that the shake needed help staying in the country, maybe a private immigration bill in Congress. Any obstacles? Meyers grinned. And he said the line that became famous.

Money talks in this business and walks. >> Money talks in this business and walks. He took $50,000 in cash and stuffed it into his pocket. He’d later complained that he thought the price was supposed to be a hundred grand. The FBI caught every second of it. You have to understand what was happening here.

 The FBI didn’t go looking for these congressmen. The congressmen came to them. Erachetti, the mayor of Camden, was the conduit. He had relationships across both sides of the aisle. He told his political friends that a foreign businessman wanted to spread money around in exchange for favors. The politicians could have walked away.

 They could have called the FBI. Instead, one after another, they showed up. They sat down. They took the envelopes. And nearly all of it was filmed. John Generett was next. Democrat, South Carolina’s sixth district, a handsome 43-year-old lawyer with a wife named Rita, who would later pose for Playboy and write a tell- all about their marriage.

 Jen Rat met with the operation in late 1979. He took $50,000 and he gave the case one of its most quotable lines, telling an undercover agent he had lararseny in his blood that he’d take the money in a goddamn minute. that ended up on front pages across the country. Then came Raymond Leer, Democrat, Pennsylvania, $50,000. Then Frank Thompson, Democrat, New Jersey, a 13-term veteran who chaired the House Administration Committee, $50,000.

 Then John Murphy, Democrat, New York, Staten Island, who didn’t take the envelope himself, but sent his lawyer to pick up the 50,000 for him. Then Richard Kelly, Republican, Florida, the only Republican caught in the sting. He took 25,000 in cash, stuffed it into his pockets on hidden camera, then patted down his jacket and asked the agent across the table, “Does it show?” Six congressmen, five states, both parties, nearly all of them on tape taking the money or talking it through, making promises they had no business making.

And then there was the senator Harrison Arlington Williams Jr. Democrat New Jersey, a four-term US Senator pushing 60. Chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, a genuine power broker who had spent more than 20 years in Congress. Williams didn’t take cash directly. His scheme was more complicated.

 He met the FBI’s fake shake team at a lavish yacht party in Florida. rented boat, women, food, drinks, music. Williams pitched them on a titanium mining venture. He wanted the shake to finance it. In exchange, he’d use his Senate position to steer government contracts to the mine. He didn’t take an envelope.

 He took something arguably worse. He took a hidden 18% stake in the company on paper worth millions. And he was caught on tape promising to use his official office to enrich himself. By the fall of 1979, the FBI had a problem. Too much success. They had so many officials on tape, they didn’t know what to do.

 The operation had spiraled far beyond anything good and his how team had imagined. They started preparing indictments and then before they could announce anything officially, somebody leaked. On the evening of February 2nd, 1980, NBC broke the story. By the next morning, the Times, the Post, and every network had it. The FBI had run a two-year undercover operation.

 They had filmed members of Congress taking bribes from fake Arab shakes. The country exploded. Politicians screamed about entrapment. Civil liberties groups condemned the FBI. The Justice Department scrambled to control the narrative. And in living rooms across America, families watched grainy surveillance footage of their elected representatives sliding envelopes of cash into their suit pockets.

 The trials began that summer, and here’s what made ABSCAM unprecedented. Nearly every defendant cried enttrapment, and in the end, every conviction stood. Kelly, the lone Republican, even got a trial judge to throw his conviction out on enttrapment grounds. But an appeals court reinstated it. The tapes were too clear.

 The cash was too real. The promises were too explicit. Azie Meyers was convicted first. On October 2nd, 1980, the House voted 376 to 30 to expel him, the first member expelled since 1861. He served 21 months in federal prison, and decades later, he was still at it. In 2022, he pleaded guilty in a separate ballot stuffing scheme and went back to prison.

 Frank Thompson and John Murphy were convicted in December 1980, three years a piece. Thompson served about 2 years. Murphy about 16 months. John Generett was convicted that fall and served 13 months. Raymond Letterer was convicted in early 1981 and resigned from Congress that May. He served 10 months. Richard Kelly was convicted in January 1981 and served 13.

 All of them sentenced to roughly three years. All of them served reduced terms. But the biggest fall was Harrison Williams, the sitting United States Senator. On May 1st, 1981, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted him on all nine counts: bribery, conspiracy. Receiving an unlawful gratuitity, conflict of interest, the Senate moved toward expulsion.

 Rather than become the first senator expelled since the Civil War, Williams resigned on March 11th, 1982, just as the vote neared. He was sentenced to 3 years and fined $50,000. He served 21 months, the first United States senator to sit in a federal prison in more than 80 years. Angelo Ericetti, the Camden mayor who had opened the whole congressional pipeline, was convicted of bribery and served nearly 3 years.

 He never returned to politics. He died in 2013. And what about Mel Weinberg, the con artist whose hustle had brought down a senator? He walked completely. probation charges dropped and about $150,000 from the FBI for his work. He retired to Florida. He gave interviews. He bragged. He claimed in his typical borch belt style that he was the best damn undercover operative the FBI ever hired.

His story filled a book, The Sting Man, that became the basis for American hustle. And when the film came out in 2013 with Christian Bale playing a version of him, Weineberg was unimpressed. He said Hollywood got it wrong. Mel Weineberg died May 30th, 2018 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He was 93 years old.

 He had outlived most of the politicians he helped destroy. John Good, the agent who built and ran the entire operation, kept a low profile for the rest of his life. He thought the movie missed the point. The real story as he saw it wasn’t a flashy con artist and his fem fatal partner. It was about how easily power could be bought.

 How part of the United States government had been corrupted one envelope at a time by a fake shake who never even existed. That good believed was the lesson nobody wanted to talk about. Absom changed federal law enforcement permanently. In January 1981, Attorney General Benjamin Civil issued the first formal Attorney General guidelines for FBI undercover operations.

 The Civility guidelines restricting how the bureau could use undercover stings against public officials. The FBI had to get higher level approval. They had to show predication. They had to document the chain of decisions. The era of cowboy stings, where a single field office could orchestrate a national corruption case on its own initiative, was over.

But the cultural impact was bigger than any guideline. Abscam was the first time the American public watched their elected officials in grainy surveillance footage take cash in exchange for political favors. It happened in their living rooms, on the evening news, on the front pages. It was visceral, undeniable.

There was no spin. There were no excuses. The tape was the tape. And what the tape showed was a Congress that in too many cases was for sale. When David O. Russell made American Hustle in 2013, he stylized everything. The comovers, the disco, the marriage drama. The film opened with a title card that read, “Some of this actually happened.

” And that was the truth. Some of it actually happened. But the parts that did happen, the real envelopes, the real promises, the real betrayals of public trust, those parts were darker than any Hollywood script could capture. Because the real American hustle wasn’t about Mel Weinberg. It wasn’t about a charming con man pulling one over on the FBI.

 It was about a United States senator trading his official influence for a hidden stake in a fake mining company. It was about six congressmen from both parties walking into hotel rooms tied to a shake who didn’t exist. It was about a mayor in Camden who treated his office like a vending machine.

 And it was about a smalltime grifter from the Bronx who almost by accident exposed the rot at the center of American politics. Mel Weineberg spent his whole life selling people things they didn’t need. London investors, phony loans, fake jewelry. The biggest thing he ever sold was an illusion. A wealthy Arab shake who wanted to buy America one congressman at a time.

 And the politicians lined up to buy it. Every last one of them. The abscam tapes still exist. They sit in federal archives. The footage is grainy. The audio is muffled. The lighting is bad. But you can see the envelopes change hands. You can hear the promises being made. You can watch a sitting member of Congress smile, count the money, and slide it into his coat pocket.