The FBI committed approximately seventy agents to the case over three years. This is an exceptional resource deployment even by the standards of high-profile federal investigations. The financial investment — estimated at five to ten million dollars — was similarly extraordinary. The scale of the commitment reflects what was at stake: the murder of a federal judge was not simply a murder; it was an attack on the institutional infrastructure of the federal judiciary. If it could be carried out without prosecution and conviction, the message to criminal organizations that operated in the federal court system — drug traffickers, organized crime, white-collar criminals of sufficient wealth and ruthlessness — would be that federal judges were targetable. The prosecution of Charles Harrelson and the others involved in the Wood killing was partly about justice for a specific victim and partly about the systemic message that allowing the killing to go unpunished would send.
The investigation’s primary tools were surveillance and informant testimony. The recordings — more than one thousand phone calls and in-person conversations involving Jimmy Chagra during his imprisonment — were the evidentiary backbone of the prosecution’s case. Chagra was an expansive talker even in circumstances that should have counseled caution, and the recordings captured conversations that the prosecution argued established the planning and execution of the killing. The recordings were, in their volume, a significant evidentiary asset; they were also, in their content, subject to the interpretation problems that all recorded conversations produce when introduced as trial evidence — the question of what specific statements mean, in context, is not always as clear as the prosecution’s presentation of them implies.