Chapter 20: Lys No Z, Part 20

REFLECTION of WARD COURIER

They say that when the late great heavyweight Muhammad Ali was the teenager named Cassius Clay, the other kids in his Louisville neighborhood didn't know what to make out of him. He stayed out of trouble and was fanatically devoted to his training. They'd heard all about him in the Golden Gloves, but nobody knew if he was really tough. Street tough. One day somebody decided to find out. Ali was out doing his running and sped by a group of kids, the biggest of whom reached out and decked him by surprise. The young Ali got up, let loose a combination - about ten shots in a second - and dropped the guy. Then, they say, he looked down with shock at his lolling antagonist and ran off like the Devil was after him.

That anecdote told me a lot. Ali's reaction was instinctive, and it was followed by contrition, even horror. Boxing was for him a sport, an art, a profession, and a means to an end. It only happened to be violent. He did not hate his opponents, and he did not want to bully anyone. He was gentle, even transcendent, outside the ring. It was one of the many reasons I admired him like I did.

That story reminds me of the man - the agent - you have just been reading about. Many of you will probably not like him much after what you've seen of him so far, and I feel like I need to go to bat for him, especially since he is one of the leading figures in the course of this book. I could never have put the picture together as far as I have without meeting him and hearing of his adventures. He really was the vital link in my understanding, and I want to present his experiences in the order in which they came in time.

He was introduced to me as Jason Jonas, and I think that is his real name. He called himself "Jake." The people I saw him with often called him "Swingo." He is some kind of undercover agent. I understood that I wasn't to ask what kind.

I have been in his presence on three occasions. I met him first in the spring of 2012, five years after some of the episodes you have been reading about. That was the only time I got to talk to him at length, and it was near the point at which the action of these two books came to an end. At that unsanctioned two-hour conference arranged by two other agents, he told me about his experiences in the line of his duty relevant to the investigation that had brought our paths together. Surely, he was also speaking on behalf of his own clarity. We're all familiar with the profile of people in certain fields - medical, military, religious, law enforcement - exposed to the fringes of human experience and still trying to make sense of things that haunted them. I think he was looking to unload as much as to contribute.

Jason Jonas was then a good-looking man with reddish-sandy hair and grey-green eyes. If I had to compare him to someone I would say that he looked like the poor man's version of Danish "Game of Thrones" actor Nicolai Koster-Waldau. He was due for a shave on the sunny afternoon I met him, and the grizzle that came through was a ruddy gold. He was about five-ten in height and neither broad nor muscular. He would be one of the first guys a bully would pick to pick on, neither so small that he was tiny nor big enough to seem threatening. He was athletic-looking, though, if you looked hard enough.

I found him to be intelligent, but not an elaborator. I had to draw things out of him. Like I was interviewing a ghost-witnesser, I was trying to put myself into the position of looking through his eyes at many of the things he said he had experienced. By the end of that conversation at an outdoor cafe, I found myself admiring him quite a bit and growing curious about what had made him who he had become and driven him to that point in his life in a reckless, violent occupation. We might have spent only five minutes on that part of things, but I was able to put together a lot about him. He was an odd mix of qualities.

Jonas had been raised in his grandmother's once-fine house in a then-depressed neighborhood near one of the discreet suburbs of Chicago. He was one of the few roughnecks at his truly elite public high school. Due this accident of his mother's inheritance and his own family situation, he saw at close hand more sides of life than most of us ever get to. He did a lot of comparing.

Of Polish, German, and English ancestry, Swingo's father Burt Jonas had been the only child of an accomplished family. Both parents died when he was a toddler. The inheritance that should have gone to his protection went instead to the wife of an uncle. He had been one of the last group of children at the orphanage of a soon-to-be-sainted Chicago bishop. When he returned from combat in Korea, Burt Jonas married a woman fifteen years his junior. He was forty two at the birth of his first son.

Elizabeth "Tessie" Nichols Jonas was a petite, compassionate woman who had been raised in an educated family of English immigrants. Her father with his British accent and manners had been an odd fit in their neighborhood. He was a tailor who always looked good but was never able to better the family circumstances in Chicago. Neither could her husband.

Burt Jonas spent most of his days shoveling frayed dollar bills into the incinerator for the Chicago branch of the Federal Reserve. It was the first and only job of his life. He never sought nor was recommended for a promotion. He spent his nights and most of his weekends at the Legion Hall.

There are no childhood pictures for an impoverished orphan. Jason Jonas' only images of his father were as a big, gruff-voiced man with long rangy limbs and a beer barrel belly ill at odds with the rest of him. He wore his dark hair in a sheeny Sha Na Na pompadour that seemed so much a part of him that one could envision it holding firm in his grave.

Burt Jonas would fight anyone at the Legion Hall at the drop of a wrong word or an affront escalating from a glance. His sons saw too much of that in their grade school days, and for too long they emulated it. They grew up with a sense of always being slighted, and a fury that could only be vented with action.

Burt Jonas had another side. He loved baseball, and he lived for those long summer Sundays in Chicago parks. He loved his friends like they were gold and had an amazing compassion for animals. The only time anyone had seen him cry was over the loss of a family dog. When he came home, though, in his cups, and the eyes narrowed and the speech slurred, it was going to be one of those nights. His two boys and their mother got good at reading it the minute he entered.

The tension between the blustering father and the delicate mother was hard on the boys. By his junior high school years, second son Jason was starting to come around. He was a star baseball player, and on weekends he was a martial artist at the neighborhood dojo. With his natural savvy and his mother's manners, those skills made him friends among the school's elite.

He saw one side of life at home and in his neighborhood. He saw another in class, on the athletic teams, and with his college-bound friends. His perspectives opened at seeing their homes and cars and possessions. His mind opened at hearing of their opportunities. Because he wanted a better life for himself, he studied these people and tried to model their behavior. He must have been an unusual boy.

[To Be Continued...]