Special Agent

"I felt my father's rage," Howard said. "We never had the understanding that we should have had. We completely missed one another."

Howard's anguish was worsened by his memories of "having this loving, most attentive mother and then suddenly having her yanked out of his world and then having a man who simply was none of those," Mason said.

"I think that my expectations of my father were very different than my brother's expectations. I required less. And I learned to live with less. And I learned to appreciate less a lot more. So if my father said, 'Hey boy, want to go to Sears with me?' I was in seventh heaven just being in the car riding to Sears with him, doing a man thing, buying a wrench. I think Howard has spent his life searching to fill a void left by my mother being gone."

As a child, Mason learned from the men and women on his block, "my village." They were first-time homeowners, postal workers and factory workers who took great pride in those hard-earned houses, tending their manicured lawns, and children like Mason, with equal fervor. Audrey Wright taught him about the value of a job well done, paying him 39 cents to clean her house, and making him pay attention to every detail.

Willy Bradley, his boss in the grocery store, urged him to dream big.

And there was "Mr. Lloyd," the police officer who came home every day "looking sharp in his uniform."

His father's toughness, and community support, steeled Mason for the world beyond his neighborhood. Like when he was 11, and he and a friend, walking to Ed's Hobby Shop, passed a group of white teenagers playing softball.

"What are you niggers doing over here?" one boy said. "We don't like you niggers over here." Then he spit on Mason.

"I had a raincoat on and the spit hit the raincoat and just slid down," Mason recalled. "I was scared to death. But I remember thinking, I have every right to go to Ed's Hobby Shop. And we kept walking."

Off to the Academy

The day he graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1980 with an accounting degree, Mason was commissioned in the U.S. Marine Corps as a second lieutenant. He commanded a mostly white platoon at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and figured the training would help his goal of joining the FBI.

His brother, Howard, had his doubts. Was the FBI a place for a black man to go?

But Mason was hearing none of it. As he said to a college friend, "Should we only pursue professions that welcomed us with open arms?"

Howard had headed on his own path, one that seemed driven largely by a desire to move far away from his father.

By the time Mason entered the FBI Academy in 1985, Hoover had been dead for more than a decade. In his class of 32, there were four African Americans, including one woman, Cassandra Chandler.

She remembers that first day at Quantico when Mason stood up with every other new recruit to say why he wanted to join.

"He was this tall, serious Marine and he was so proud to stand up and say, 'I have always wanted to be an FBI special agent,' " said Chandler, now the special agent in charge of the Norfolk office.

At Quantico, Mason stood out because he took the time to help other recruits who were struggling. Chandler was having trouble firing a gun, and Mason practiced with her.

Another woman at Quantico noticed that quality in Mason. Susan, an agent two classes ahead, spotted him during the physical fitness exam. "He was very handsome, standing tall and straight like a poster-child Marine," she said. They had lunch once but figured they wouldn't see each other again because new agents are scattered across the country. Coincidentally, the FBI sent them both to Hartford, Conn., where they became friends.

In Hartford he took on dangerous undercover assignments, buying kilos of cocaine without carrying a gun. He racked up arrests. He also risked being shot by colleagues.

"I had an agent point an M16 on me in the back seat of the car once," Mason said. "And I didn't think he knew that I was a good guy at that precise moment. And I just froze. It scared the hell out of me. Later, when we got back, I asked him, 'Did you know where I was sitting?' "

The Black G-Man

"I have never felt uncomfortable being a black man in the FBI," Mason said. "I was always treated very fairly."

Once, when he'd been working in an office with mostly Irish American agents for about seven months, a new agent, also with an Irish surname, arrived. After about three months, he told Mason, "Man, I've been invited to everyone's house for dinner."

Mason brushed it off. He hadn't been invited to any agent's house. But he chose not to be offended.

"It's their home and nobody is obligated to invite me into their home," he said. "On the job, I was treated very well."

Other times, he took on what he saw as racial insensitivity or bias.

One day in the FBI locker room he overheard some white agents talking about their kids' college applications. Then he heard one say that his son didn't get accepted at Notre Dame because the school had to accept a number of minorities.

Mason almost jumped over the lockers.

"Let me get this right," he remembers telling the agents. "The last Notre Dame yearbook I saw, you had to look to find any black students. But I'm sure those six black students kept about 4 million white students from coming in.'"

There was also the time in 1990 when he visited his old squad in Washington just as they were closing in on arresting then-Mayor Marion Barry. When he was on the squad, Mason had interviewed Charles Lewis, who used drugs with the mayor. The agents were annoyed that headquarters had denied the date for the sting because it was Martin Luther King's birthday. "Can you believe what the suits at headquarters are telling us?" one said.

Mason was stunned. "My God. To take down the mayor of the nation's capital on Martin Luther King's birthday would be extraordinarily offensive to a lot of people," he told them.

In 1983, two years before Mason entered the FBI Academy, Donald Rochon, a black agent in the Omaha office, found an ape's head pasted over a desk photograph of his son. Another time, a picture of the bruised face of a black man was put in his mail slot. After complaining, Rochon was transferred to Chicago, but the harassment continued and he received two unsigned death threats. He sued and won a settlement of more than $1 million.

In a 1991 class-action lawsuit, a group of black FBI agents charged the agency with racial discrimination in recruiting, promotions and the handling of the agents' complaints. Similar lawsuits were filed from the mid-1980s through 2001 at other federal law enforcement agencies.

"Law enforcement in general has been a good-old-boy network," said David J. Shaffer, the lawyer who represented the black agents who sued the FBI. "The FBI was high-profile because of the fundamental fact that the FBI is in charge of enforcing the civil rights laws."

The black agents lawsuit was an awkward moment for Mason. He believed he had not experienced discrimination, but he understood the concerns of other black agents. So Mason supported them with money and suggestions.

At one point, however, Special Agent Julian Stackhaus, one of the plaintiffs, butted heads with Mason after he said Mason accused him of trying to divide the black and white agents.

That angered Stackhaus, but Supervisory Special Agent Emanuel Johnson, the lawsuit's lead plaintiff, assured his colleague that he had worked with Mason and he was "a good guy." While some of the black supervisors had tried to distance themselves from the lawsuit, Johnson said Mason was different. He attended some meetings of the group. At one, Johnson recalled, Mason said that while he had not been discriminated against, he understood the need for their efforts to level the playing field for all agents.

In 2001 a federal judge approved a settlement with the black agents.

Later in his career, Mason opposed tactics he thought were racially insensitive. He was investigating allegations of fraud against D.C. officials working in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The FBI wanted to photograph and fingerprint all the mostly black D.C. employees who traveled to the Virgin Islands to learn whose prints were on a bill.

Mason objected but was overruled. "If it had been the staff of a senator on the Hill, there's no way in hell we would have done all those fingerprints."

After Sept. 11, he grew alarmed by the number of reports about "suspicious" people taking photographs or standing outside government buildings or buying bullets in a gun store. They all had dark skin.

"I told my agents, we need to be careful," he said. "We need to make sure our activities are driven by logic and evidence, not just by fear. We need to make sure that we don't treat everybody as a suspect based on what they look like.

A Wedding in the Works

I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it.

On a wintry afternoon after several years as an agent, Mason was in a hotel room on the outskirts of Hartford near the airport. He was facing the father of the woman he wanted to marry, and in a way, he was back on that pavement again, his race the only thing her father could see.

Mason and Susan, who is white, had fallen in love. For weeks her parents tried to convince her not to marry a black man. Now, her father had flown in and wanted to meet Mason to beg him to not marry his daughter. He worried about how the world would view her and any children they had. Ugly things were said. But Mason did not lose his temper, he simply said what he knew: that he was going to marry Susan.

There were also doubts in his own family.

Lynn Mason-Wyman, now a teacher in Norfolk, carried the memories of racism from her youth, remembered the white girls who had taunted her, the white man who'd seen her and her friends riding their bikes in his neighborhood and told them, "Why don't you niggers get on the other side of the tracks where you belong?"

She also wondered about the brother she adored: "I was kind of hurt because I felt like maybe he thought that black women weren't good enough," she said.

He was in love, Mason told her, and "if you can't dance at my wedding, don't come."

They were married in September 1987, in a church in West Hartford, and a plastic black groom and white bride sat on top of their cake. Lynn came, along with Mason's father and several neighbors from Chicago. Susan's mother was there and her brothers walked her down the aisle. But her father was a no-show.

And so was Mike's brother, Howard, who was supposed to be the best man. He called before the wedding to say he couldn't come because their father would be present and he couldn't be in the same room with him. The tug of their past was pulling them in different directions. "It broke his heart," Howard said. "I should have been there."

"It was the best of times and the worst of times," Susan recalled, going through their wedding album recently. It wasn't until the next summer that Mason and his wife would see her parents. When they did, no one talked about what had happened. In fact, the family would never talk about it. Susan said her parents are in poor health and could not be interviewed.

When the boys, Matthew and Benjamin, were born, Susan's mother and father embraced their role as grandparents. Her father built a cradle for the boys.

Shortly after their younger son was born, Mason's father-in-law approached him. "He said, 'You are really a good father and a good husband, better than I ever was,' " Mason said. "And I said, 'Oh, thanks.' And then he grabbed my arm and he said, 'No, look at me. You are a better husband and a better father than I was.' "

Mason was already well up in the FBI ranks, stacking up one promotion after another and moving his family back and forth across the country. They would make seven moves in 14 years.

Three years ago, Susan was talking to her father on the phone. By this time, she had left the FBI to raise her sons. "You know, you were right about Mike and I was wrong," he told her.

Soon afterward, Mason suggested to Susan that they renew their vows. "By then, her parents were treating me like a son," he said. In a tiny church in Clifton, relatives from both families gathered to watch Susan's father walk her down the aisle.

Making Up for Lost Time

It was a cold day in downtown Denver when Howard Mason pulled up in his Toyota Corolla to pick up his little brother at his hotel. Mike Mason was back in town to give another speech, and this time he and his brother, who works in the shipping department of a wireless phone company, finally connected.

"Man, it's great to see you," Mike said as he got into the car, the seat already pulled back for his 6-4 frame. " Sixteen years."

"It was one of those magical moments," Howard said.

They had lunch at an Italian restaurant, and Howard could hardly taste his food. His brother was "always one of the only things in life" that made sense to him. They laughed and reminisced about growing up on Wallace Street, and touched on the moments Howard had missed over the years: Mike's wedding, their grandparents' funerals, their father's funeral six years ago.

Mike talked about his boys, now 12 and 15, whom Howard had never met.

His sons are being raised to know all sides of their heritage. He wants them "to know their history and be comfortable with their blackness. I make them understand that their daddy didn't get where he is without the sacrifice of many, many people. I'm sitting where I'm sitting now because of people who sat-in at lunch counters. And that act is never lost on me," he said recently.

What Mike also hopes is that his boys remain close, no matter where their lives take them. He has often told them about their uncle and what good friends he and his brother had been.

"I always worry about my father legacy with my boys, with all the time and sacrifices this job requires," Mike said. "It's the one job I don't want to screw up. With fatherhood, you don't get a do-over."

After talking for eight hours, some of the time spent at Howard's apartment, Howard drove his brother back to his hotel. They agreed to get together again. Maybe the uncle would finally get to meet his nephews. They embraced.

As he watched Mike walking way, Howard felt the old big-brother tinge.

Was Michael going to be okay?

He caught himself. Mike Mason would be fine. His little brother was a man who had made it to the top of the FBI.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.