John F. Good created what sting operation that originally targeted trafficking stolen property
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.
Mansur Rafizadeh Mansur Rafizadeh is a male with an Iranian background who worked in multiple intelligence agencies and later authored an autobiography. He worked for the monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty (or the Shah) during the 1970s and the CIA in the early 1980s, at a minimum. He worked in Manhattan in the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, diplomats with the Islamic Republic of Iran stated Rafizadeh was an agent of SAVAK (the Shah's intelligence agency/secret police) in the U.S., a claim he denied at the time. Years later, he confirmed the claim. In his 1987 autobiography, "", Rafizadeh said he was the U.S. director of SAVAK. Reviewer Nikki R. Keddie, a scholar at UCLA, stated that book could not be recommended for a general audience, as it was "too unreliable to be truly informative". In 1992, a female who also had links to the Shah, Parivash Rafizadeh, was murdered on her front lawn in New Jersey, and "The New York Times" reported that Mansur was likely her brother-in-law, though they could not confirm this.