Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

Bag Man refers to an intermediary in an extortion scheme who acts as a buffer between the payer of the bribe and the one receiving it. In Agnew’s case, his bag man—A.M. Hammerman—delivered cash payments to the vice president inside the White House. The utilization of a bag man is intended the insulate the offending parties from suspicion by creating a middleman, to blur the lines between payer and payee. Unfortunately for Agnew—and his predecessor, Dale Anderson—bag men are such a common contrivance in extortion schemes, it does not take the Baltimore prosecutors long to piece it all together.

While Bag Man focuses on Spiro Agnew’s crimes, the Watergate scandal precedes and engulfs the lesser-known Baltimore Country extortion investigation. Named after the famed D.C. hotel and home of the Democratic National Committee, Watergate is the site of the clumsy break-in and attempt to wiretap the Democrats that is ultimately traced all the way back to the office of the president. Without Watergate, the investigative zeal that swept through newsrooms and district attorney’s offices may never have spurred three young prosecutors to dig into a local corruption scheme—a scheme that moves far beyond its local roots and takes on national significance.