John F. Good

John Francis Good (June 17, 1936 – September 28, 2016) was an American agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who created the Abscam sting operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Abscam led to the arrest and conviction of several elected officials at the local, state, and federal level, including Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Angelo Errichetti and U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, using a fictional Arab sheikh seeking political favors as bait. The Abscam story was portrayed in the 2013 film American Hustle; in the movie, Bradley Cooper portrayed a composite character that was based on Good and two other FBI agents who worked on the case during the two-year-long operation.

Good was born in the Pelham Bay section of The Bronx, New York City, on June 17, 1936. His father was an FBI agent who had been part of the investigation of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School, Good earned a degree in sociology from Fordham University in 1958.

After leaving the FBI in 1986, Good became a private investigator, ultimately creating his own firm. A resident of Island Park, New York, Good died at his home there on September 28, 2016.

After serving in the United States Navy, Good followed his father to the FBI and was assigned to field offices in Illinois and Texas, before being transferred to New York City and ultimately being assigned to head a new FBI office in Hauppauge, on Long Island. Good had been frustrated at the relatively low level of criminal activities he was pursuing in the quiet suburban FBI office, such as fraud and truck hijackings, and sought to find opportunities to identify bigger cases. After reading a memo about a low-level con artist named Mel Weinberg, Good envisioned using Weinberg as a means to reel in bigger fish in exchange for a lighter sentence for Weinberg. Good's early plan included using Weinberg as an intermediary to buy stolen art, with an FBI agent of Arab ancestry used to portray an Arab sheikh as the putative buyer of the high-value artworks. Abdul Enterprises, a company supposedly owned by the fictional sheikh, became the basis of the Abscam sting operation, whose original goals were to identify white-collar criminals on Long Island, but which rapidly expanded in scope and area.

...
Wikipedia