The two men wore suits, flashed badges and claimed they were from the FBI, Tom Kaluza said. They rode in an unmarked car with a blinking light in the back window.
Kaluza said the men stopped him Jan. 25 in the parking lot outside his office at the Developmentally Disabled Resource Center. Being pulled over as he drove out of the parking lot was weird enough, but what really shook him up were the questions the pair of purported government agents asked.
They called him by his first name, Kaluza said. Then, they wanted to know about Iran.
Tom Kaluza and his brother, Bill, graduated from Tehran American School on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1976.
Kaluza now lives in Lakewood with his mother, Marge. He is 49. He suffers from cerebral palsy and has hearing problems. But he has two degrees from Red Rocks Community College and supervises 15 clients at the DDRC. He insists he saw the words Federal Bureau of Investigation on badges and lip-read the word “Iran.”
“They asked me if I was from Iran,” Kaluza said. “They asked me about President Bush. It was very strange. I was scared.”
“The first thing we need to know is if it was a bona fide stop or not,” said Bill Kaluza, who called the Denver office of the FBI the night his brother was stopped and has called several times since.
“I got a woman on the complaint line,” Bill Kaluza continued. “She said she did get a report from the duty officer who I called on the night this happened. She said she sent an e-mail to all agents in Denver to see if they recognized the description of what happened. She said she had gotten nothing back.”
When I reached her Friday, Denver’s FBI spokeswoman, Monique Kelso, told me: “We don’t normally confirm or deny our interviews. This sounds too spyish for us. It’s too far-fetched.
“The FBI never talked to Tom Kaluza.”
FBI agents rarely make traffic stops, Kelso said. “We do not have peace-
officer status. We have to have probable cause to think a federal law has been broken.”
Protocol also requires agents to show badges and photo IDs with names and titles. Tom Kaluza saw no pictures with the badges he was shown.
While Tom Kaluza plans to file a
police-impersonation complaint with the Lakewood Police Department, he and his family continue to puzzle over the questions about Iran. The questions took Tom Kaluza by surprise and left him shaken.
“My mother is still in touch with certain Iranians who live stateside,” said Bill Kaluza, whose father worked as an accountant for oil companies operating in Iran in the 1970s.
But the Kaluzas have no clue if those communications led to Tom’s encounter.
“We were evacuated when the Shah fell” in 1979, Marge Kaluza said.
The whole thing could be a prank. The family’s Iranian connection is no big secret. Tom keeps his high school diploma and senior yearbook at his mom’s house.
For 30 years, the Kaluza brothers have included their high school graduation information on job applications and other paperwork.
Still, Tom Kaluza recognized neither the tall man nor the short man he said pulled him over as he drove out of the parking lot.
Two and a half weeks later, no one he knows has stepped up to say, “Gotcha!”
All of it has the family feeling at loose ends, if not creeped out.
Tom Kaluza said he is still trying to talk with FBI officials to get them to acknowledge what Kelso told me.
What the family needs, noted Bill Kaluza, is “confirmation” that the men who spoke to his brother were not from the FBI. The second step will be figuring out who they were and what they were after.
Because there have been so many instances, Colorado just stiffened state laws against civilians impersonating cops.
It’s time to let the new law work, if the guys who stopped Tom Kaluza were civilians.
If they were not, it’s time to worry.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
