"You Can Win the War on Crime and Lose the War on Confidence" | John Miller on NYC, the Guthrie Kidnaping & Epstein

Today on the Fairfax Files, we're joined by one of the most experienced voices in American law enforcement and intelligence, someone I'm proud to call a friend for a very, very long time. For decades, John has held senior positions in the FBI as Assistant Director, Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Deputy Commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, and as a senior level official at the National Intelligence Directorate, working on counterterrorism, intelligence and major investigations. He's an award winning journalist who is now CNN's leading crime and law enforcement analyst. John, it's such a pleasure to have you here today.

Well, thanks, Mike. I can't think of anybody else from the world of investigations or intelligence that I've known longer than you, so I'm just nervous about what you remember.

Statistics have shown that high crime rates have gone down here in New York City, but no one thinks so. What's the gap here?

The gap is this. Murder is at its lowest rate in anybody's recent memory. You'd have to go way back — years and decades — to a time when there were a million fewer people in New York. Shootings are down to rates that any other city would envy. There are cities of a few hundred thousand people that have more shootings than a city of 8.5 million people in New York. What they've achieved in violent crime is truly remarkable. So why don't people feel safe? Burglary is down 20% this year from last year. Shoplifting is down, which is hard to believe, since when you go to the drugstore everything's locked up. The reason people don't feel safe is because there's what you hear, and there's what you know. When somebody goes to work and they go down into the subway and there's a naked man screaming on the platform, three guys smoking weed over here, somebody acting out in the corner, and they get on the train and two guys come through saying, "I'm poor and I need money and I need it now," and then there's some other guy playing a horn — you get a sense of chaos. You get a sense of, "I am seeing disorder." Disorder is different from crime, but it's not making me feel safe. So the challenge for New York City is they can win the war on crime and lose the war on public confidence.

How do you change perception?

You can't change perception. You have to change reality. The new mayor has said mental health is a serious issue, but it's not an issue for police — we need professional clinicians who can take the lead in these things so that they're not escalated. He has a plan. The thing is, I haven't seen the plan. I haven't heard the plan and haven't seen the plan in action. But look, you could do this tomorrow with no money and no bureaucracy, simply by doing what the NYPD did with shootings, but doing it on mental health issues. So what would happen if every morning at 9 a.m. the police department, EMS, the ambulance service from the fire department, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department of Health and Hospitals, social services, and the non-government organizations that have government contracts to help people in crisis — what if they all sat around a big table and said, "Let's go over the situation. What were the conditions yesterday and last night? What are the numbers of people who are living in this park over here? Parks Department, are you here? Okay. Social services, have you had people over there? What about mental health?" Once you bring accountability —

You're talking about CompStat.

I'm talking about CompStat for mental health. CompStat, remember, is every week, looking at a particular geographical area —

Same theory.

Same theory. The theory is that we have multiple agencies that overlap, but everybody protects their fiefdom and their particular turf and their particular mission and where the edges of it are. When you get everybody around the table — especially if you do it every morning and say, "Let's go over yesterday and now plan for tomorrow" — then you have an accountability where everybody can still say, "That's not my area." And you say, "Well, then whose is it?" And they say, "Well, that's this department over here." You turn to that person and they say, "All right, so you have the ball on this. How are you guys going to do this together?" That's a way of wrangling the ones that already exist without having to create a new bureaucracy, without having to fund an entire new agency and hundreds or thousands of personnel. Use the people we have. You could start this and you could start it tomorrow.

So, John, earlier when we talked about the crisis du jour and all the things that you've been facing at CNN, Iran has managed to take the Epstein issue off the front page. But something that is not off the front page is the Guthrie kidnaping. When you look at the history of kidnapings, this is so unusual, so out of the ordinary. What's your take on it?

You know this, because you have been involved professionally in your years in the intelligence and investigation world with recovering people who have been held hostage, who have been kidnaped by everything from governments to terrorist groups in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. There are groups that do kidnapings for a living, for money. In America, here's the common thread between all kidnapers: none of them have ever done it before their first kidnaping, and none of them ever do it again, because they're almost all caught. Which means when we say things about planning and sophistication and professionalism — "a well-planned kidnaping, possibly sophisticated operators" — we're kind of making that up as we go along, because we know that in almost every case, no one has any experience at this. They see an opportunity. They make a loose plan. They plan a lot on the front end, but not much on the back end. In the Savannah Guthrie case, I think the answer is — and I think the Guthrie family believes this too — the answer is right there. The answer is in Tucson. This was probably something hatched locally by someone who thought, "Here's an individual who is relatively defenseless, lives alone, is vulnerable, unable to put up a lot of resistance. If we came and took her away" — who was connected to —

Someone.

— someone with resources and money.

You wouldn't know those factors unless you knew her.

Which means there's a likelihood that's going to be somebody local. Everybody knows who Savannah Guthrie is, but people around Tucson have a pretty good idea that her mom lives somewhere in the area, lives right here. When you look at those things, you always look at people who had access and knowledge. You look at first and second degree contacts. Go back through all of the kidnapings — whether it was the Bronfman kidnaping or the Klein kidnaping or any of the famous kidnapings in New York, going back to Lindbergh — there was always someone who had some familiarity. A former employee. A current employee's boyfriend, cousin, brother. Somebody who worked on the grounds outside and had access. Someone who had worked inside. I don't think this case is going to be vastly different. Someone local who had enough contact around that house to assess what that would be like, and who had some nightmarish dream about, "We're going to demand a lot of money, we're going to do it through crypto, and we're never going to have to go to a ransom drop or pick up a package or show ourselves. We're going to take kidnaping into the digital age, and we're going to get a big payday."

But I think we kind of went sideways — that this is a kidnaping gone wrong.

Yes. Because you have a ransom demand that is crystal clear and says, "Just pay the money. You'll never hear from us again." And then you have a second note that we know a little bit about, but not all of the details, that basically ends the negotiations. And then you have opportunists who came behind that, who couldn't prove anything about having any particular knowledge that gave them credibility. These were people just saying, "Send me money and I'll tell you who did it or where she is." Those are almost 100% frauds.

And unfortunately, as time goes on, the likelihood of — I hate to say it — finding her alive is more and more out of reach.

The longer it goes, the more that diminishes.

John, would you have done anything different in this kidnaping investigation?

At the Los Angeles Police Department, I was involved in a number of kidnaping investigations. What we always counted on was contact with the kidnapers, the ability to have that two-way, a ransom drop where eventually they would have to show themselves. It was the opportunity of: do you watch it, do you arrest them, do you follow them? They didn't have any of those decisions in this case. What I think they did very well was that the police, in the form of the sheriff's office, very almost immediately recognized: this is not a missing person, this is a crime. There's blood on the stoop. Things are out of order here. Everything's left behind. And she was not at 84 going to wander off into the desert. She was sharp as a tack and not that mobile. The second thing I thought they did right was that they didn't try to run it out for a couple of weeks and then call in the FBI. They called in the FBI right away. With this unfolding on a Saturday going into Sunday, by Monday and Tuesday FBI resources from FBI headquarters and from Quantico — profilers, negotiators, telephone tracking specialists — they were all there on the ground in Tucson right away. That's what you want. You want the people with the local on-the-ground knowledge, that's your sheriff's people. And you want the people with the sophisticated equipment and techniques, and that's the FBI. They came in numbers. I can't think of anything I would have done differently.

I spoke earlier about the war in Iran overtaking the publicity about Jeffrey Epstein. There's still a lot of conspiracy theories, including whether he actually committed suicide or whether he was murdered. There are sightings of Jeffrey Epstein in Israel and in Miami. I wonder if the case from day one — and when I refer to the case from day one, the case in Florida that originally was brought against Jeffrey Epstein for sexual abuse — if that had been handled differently, whether Jeffrey Epstein would have ever reached the level of criminality that he did.

If the first prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein had been handled properly — and that extends both to the FBI's investigation and the U.S. attorney's decision, and how they rolled over local prosecutors who were pushing for that case — we wouldn't be in the conversation we are today. First of all, it would have cut off his criminal activity from the years that had to continue after that sweetheart deal that didn't really give him jail time. And second of all, it would have shown that somebody was actually punished for that crime, whether it was Jeffrey Epstein alone or Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Maxwell together. But we are where we are, and we are where we are because the Republicans came in and they said, "This is Pandora's box, and we're going to open it against the Democrats." And they opened it, and they didn't like what they saw, and they tried to close it up. And then the Democrats said, "Well, let's open it." They didn't like what they saw either, but they said, "It's too late now. Let's let all this out." But we have to ask ourselves, where are we going here? When I talk to the FBI people, they say, "We saw a lot and heard a lot in the course of that investigation. When we reopened it in the New York office, we prosecuted with the U.S. attorney the two people that we believed we could bring to trial and sustain convictions on. One was Jeffrey Epstein, the other was Ghislaine Maxwell." Now we're starting to see what happens when you take a complex criminal file from a long-term investigation and you just open it and throw all of it out there for the public. Unproven allegations come out. Scandal emerges. People's lives and careers are ruined. And other people who thought, "Because there just wasn't enough to prosecute me, I kind of got away from the whole thing," are paying in a different way. I'm not sure this is what anybody had in mind, but I'm also not sure that the politicians went into this with the right real motive. They both said, "We're doing this for the victims," but what they were really looking for was to target each other. When you start something like this, when your motives are impure, you end up paying the piper one way or the other. And I think we're seeing that, too.

Over the course of our careers, we've both dealt with a lot of con men. Jeffrey Epstein was one of the greatest con men that ever walked the face of the earth.

Yeah. When you look back on him and you think — all those smart people, all those sophisticated businessmen, all those experienced politicians — what was the attraction? But you're right. He was the consummate con man. He could look at a person, assess what their need or vulnerability was, and almost like a good intelligence officer, he could target that and bring them into the fold. And nobody, nobody ended up the better for it.

Given all you've seen over the years — in intelligence, in law enforcement, in journalism — what keeps you awake at night? What worries you the most? I realize that because you've been in so many different practice areas, you can turn a bit cynical. I wouldn't blame you for being cynical, but you have children, and a lovely wife. What worries you the most?

You answered the question in the question. What keeps me up at night isn't what's going to happen tomorrow. Sure, when you go to bed, you're running that in your head, especially if you're in law enforcement: "What did I miss? What did I miss? Is there something we missed?" But I have always said, when people ask, "What do you worry about?" — no time for worry. Worry eats up time and angst. It's better spent planning. Let's go back to the plan. Have we planned for everything we can think of? Do we have those plans in place? Is our reaction time going to be right? Can we prevent it? And if we can't prevent it, can we move on it to mitigate it as quickly as possible? Once you spend your time doing that, you have way less time for worry. So it's a better bargain. But what scares me the most is exactly what you asked: what kind of world have we created for our children and our children's children? We have been very bad stewards in some ways. When you look at the threat landscape today and the drivers of those threats — whether it's globalization or social media or our lack of discipline as a global society to be better people — in a world that, if you flip on the news, is racked by violence and strife, we've simply got to do better. Environmentally, if we're not going to wear the planet down to something not survivable. You can talk about global warming and deny it, but there's still melting ice and rising shores, and it's a reality. The violence, the strife, all of that. I guess the question that Martin Luther King brought up was, "Well, who's going to do that?" Maybe we are the people we've been waiting for. Maybe that time is now.

Is civility dead in our country?

We've lowered the bar. When you have the president of the United States insulting people on a daily basis the way — we stopped after high school. When you have language degradation to the point that the New York Times and cable news networks are using four-letter words in the course of covering news stories because they have to quote people. Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about defining deviancy down so that things are normalized that would have been considered not normal. We're defining society down on a daily basis. It's hard — not impossible, but hard — to turn around and go back the other direction after you think like that. That's something we should be looking towards doing.

In order to do that, I think we have to be more cognizant of the mindset of Generation Z. I read some statistics recently. 38% of Generation Z don't believe that patriotism is important. 28% believe that political violence is okay to achieve change. They do not blame our generation, and they have a right to. But without better communicating with them, without better educating them, and without better understanding them, we're going to have a questionable future.

Well, we are. And it starts with — if you don't believe in God, and you don't have to, that's something our country gives you as a right. But if you don't believe in God, and you don't believe in country, and you don't believe in this, and you don't believe in that, what is it that you believe in? We have potentially created a generation that is so self-focused, so self-involved, and so distant from concepts like service, sacrifice, and dedication to a cause larger than oneself. It's a fairly sweeping judgment, but it worries me.

It should. It worries me as well. And this year is particularly important to address these issues, because this is the 250-year birthday of our country, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Those key words — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — have always meant something to me, but they don't seem to be that important to many of the younger generation today.

Well, the pursuit of happiness seems to have taken over from life and liberty.

And that is unfortunate.

As long as they're happy.

John, thank you for your time today. It's been an incredibly informative conversation, and I hope we'll have you back one day.

I would love to. And I would be unfair if I didn't say half of what I know about this world I learned from you anyway.

I appreciate that, my friend. Let's go get a drink.

"You Can Win the War on Crime and Lose the War on Confidence" | John Miller on NYC, the Guthrie Kidnaping & Epstein

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