Taking A Byte Out of Crime

By Elaine Shannon/Washington

With his bronzed good looks, silky sales pitch and dangerous smile, Leather Importer Iran (yes, that's his name) Michael Kesselman, 41, found it easy to dazzle women and men alike into doing his bidding. They put him up, made his airplane reservations, introduced him to buyers for chic West Coast boutiques and took him to celebrity-studded parties. Some of Kesselman's admirers became so enthralled, federal investigators found, that they even peddled drugs for him.

Yet Kesselman proved so elusive that at times Inspector John Stafford felt as if the character he was tracking were more fictional than real. Stafford, who works for the U.S. Marshals Service, spent 3 1/2 years looking for Kesselman in connection with British charges of cocaine trafficking and money laundering. "He was a charmer," says Stafford. "He was mobile, smart, bounced around to all these different spots, and you couldn't get a handle on him."

Kesselman was finally run to ground in Waikiki several weeks ago, thanks to a computer program called Scorecard. The invention of Ron Wutrich, 28, a self- taught computer analyst for the Marshals Service, Scorecard is one of a new breed of investigative tools that promise to revolutionize the way authorities hunt down fugitives from justice. U.S. officials say Wutrich and Scorecard are the heroes of an international manhunt, disclosed last week by Attorney General Edwin Meese, that has resulted in the arrest of 210 people, including 166 top-priority narcotics traffickers.

The manhunt, code-named WANT, for Warrant Apprehension Narcotics Teams, was conducted by squads of Marshals Service investigators operating out of eight cities and three foreign countries. Howard Safir, head of operations for the Marshals Service, conceived WANT as a way of getting at traffickers who have plenty of cash and ready-made support networks to hide them. In the past, says Safir, "if a drug trafficker was out more than 48 hours, he was basically home free."

In January Safir surveyed U.S. Attorneys and Drug Enforcement Administration offices around the country, put together a list of some 700 most wanted suspects and had WANT field teams in place by March 1. The basics -- shoe leather, hunches and luck -- played their part, but what made the operation click was Scorecard, an electronic indexing system that Wutrich put together in just two months. "It's the thinking man's search," says John Pascucci, the WANT project manager.

In computer terminology, Scorecard is a "relational data base," a powerful filing and retrieval program that can not only search for clues but ferret out relations or links between those clues. In a complicated case involving operations in several cities, Scorecard can quickly identify a suspect's contacts and associates. Says Wutrich: "Our system even makes suggestions on where a fugitive might be or who is the strongest person to lead you to him."

Safir, intrigued by Scorecard (named for its creator's favorite pastime, keeping baseball statistics), rented an office in San Francisco's Federal Building and assigned Wutrich to teach two dozen other investigators to use the system. Working at 15 terminals tied to an Altos 3068 computer, they fed in data about each fugitive from interviews, rap sheets and computerized files from the FBI, DEA and other government agencies. They learned to query for patterns and to dispatch tips to the field task forces. Investigators who had spent their careers exchanging information via slow, spotty teletypes became born-again high-tech detectives. "You've got so many decisions to make when you're dealing with paper," explains Wutrich. "Do you file a license plate under one suspect's name or another, or the kind of car or the arresting officer or the place? With this computer, you can search out any piece of information, no matter how you've filed it."

In the case of Donnie Wayne Snell, a motorcycle-gang enforcer wanted for shooting a Texas highway patrolman, Deputy Marshal Ed Stubbs used the Scorecard system to predict where Snell was heading. A deputy sheriff in Montana said that he had seen someone matching Snell's description driving through town with two other men. Stubbs went to a map, drew a radius around the spot and figured the men had to be heading for Casper, Wyo., or Rapid City, S. Dak. He put out leads to law officers in the area, who started watching the roads. Reported sightings were relayed to Stubbs, who used the computer system to corroborate or discount them. Within ten days, the search focused on an isolated farmhouse outside Rapid City. A dawn raid netted Snell without a shot being fired.

Kesselman was one of Scorecard's most challenging cases. Inspector Stafford used the program to compile a list of the suspect's known aliases, addresses and friends, and zipped them to WANT teams in New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Hawaii. Agents went out in force and ran down the list in a day or two. "If you put enough pressure on someone, it's going to go," reasoned Stafford.

As the noose tightened, Kesselman headed for Oahu. But by then marshals there were keeping watch on half a dozen likely hideouts. They lucked into someone who remembered seeing the 6-ft. 4-in. blond at the Aloha Towers condo near Waikiki. The marshals staked out the lobby and grabbed Kesselman when he stepped off an elevator with a couple of women. "He was very surprised," says Deputy Marshal Gary Shuler, who made the collar. "If it hadn't been for WANT, there's no question that this guy would still be out there."

Safir, impressed with Scorecard's results, is setting up a permanent computer center in the Marshals Service's suburban Washington headquarters. Wutrich, meanwhile, is already working on a "smarter" program, which may give the likes of Iran Michael Kesselman even less room in which to hide.