TRAINING DAYS, AND THE FIRST BIG CASE
That first meeting with President Trump, in the spring of 2017, was my first time inside the Oval Office, but it wasn’t my first time at the Oval Office door. In 1992, while I was in law school, I spent the summer working as an unpaid intern at the Department of Justice. One evening, a small group was given a White House tour. When we passed by the Oval Office, I remember, there was a velvet rope across the frame of the open door, as if in an old house that had been turned into a museum—which, considered from a certain angle, the White House was. We peeked in. The main thing my memory retained from that moment was the flash of the gold drapes.
That Justice Department internship turned out to be a turning point in my life. I was not a kid who watched The F.B.I.—the TV show starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as agent Lewis Erskine. The call to be an agent did not come to me early in a clear and direct way. It was indirect and slow to emerge. I did things that did not connect, and then by a process of elimination, which distilled into conviction, ended up gravitating to the Bureau.
I had grown up in the suburbs, and my dad was a corporate executive. Like a lot of kids on my block, I imagine, I looked forward to a life that was a grown-up version of the one I was already living. In college, at Duke, I took the required courses and the ones I thought I should take, eventually making my way to art history and political science. I was drawn to stories of real people—people in pursuit of love, advantage, power, salvation. In law school, at Washington University in St. Louis, I was again drawn to stories of human drama, now in the context of crime and punishment. My summer internship at the Department of Justice, in the criminal-fraud section, involved a lot of scut work—research, modest writing assignments. But I also got to read the case files and, most important, a type of document called a 302.
Those three digits are almost a magic number for me: 302. After FBI agents go out and interview subjects in an investigation, they come back and, within five days—while memory is fresh—they have to write up the results of the interview on a form called the FD-302. I caught the 302 bug reading interview reports from a public corruption case involving a pugnacious U.S. senator, his brother, and some questionable interactions they had with a defense contractor. It was a complicated business that would go on for a long time, and now it seems like ancient history. But when I read the 302s from that case, I thought, This is it. This is the marrow of law enforcement. This is the record of a conversation: people whose job it is to enforce the law actually sitting down and talking with people suspected of breaking the law, or with witnesses to a crime, or with victims of a crime, or with those who simply might have some relevant information.
Coming out of that summer, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be part of the conversations that I’d been reading about. I wanted to go out and find evidence and talk with people about the times they had crossed those invisible lines of law that structure our society, or with people who had information about others who had crossed those lines. But when I came out of law school, the Bureau wasn’t hiring. I became a small-town lawyer in New Jersey, waiting for a chance. On April 19, 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City took the lives of 168 people. The tragedy weighed heavily on me and reinforced my determination to continue seeking entry into the FBI.
Becoming an agent would mean that I’d make a lot less money than I could have made if I had taken a different path, but my wife, Jill—we had just gotten married—supported my ambitions and never counted the cost. When I told her I wanted to join the FBI, she said I should do it, because she saw how much I wanted to do it. I worked from then on with a sense that something was calling me to service, even as it gradually dawned on me that this job would entail risk and the sacrifice of much more than money.
In 1996, the Bureau’s doors reopened. At the time, the path to becoming a special agent started with a single page. To begin the process, you filled out a simple application and submitted it to your local field office. Anyone who failed to meet certain basic qualifications—such as having a college degree or being a U.S. citizen—was weeded out. If you made that first cut, your local field office began coordinating your background investigation and Phase One testing.
Phase One was a series of standardized exercises meant to evaluate your intelligence and computational skills. It also included a personality evaluation. If you made it through Phase One, you would be recontacted by your field office and asked to submit an FD-140—an official Application for Employment in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Every FBI employee, by virtue of being an employee in good standing, holds a top secret (or “TS”) clearance. A TS clearance requires passing a stringent background investigation and polygraph examination. The FD-140 was the beginning, and the foundation, of the FBI’s background investigation. At ten pages long, the FD-140 required you to give the FBI information about every aspect of your life. Not just your name and address, but every name you had ever used and every place you had lived in the previous ten years. It asked not just where you currently worked but every place you had ever worked. In between those periods of work, the FBI wanted to know when and why you were unemployed. It wanted the name and address of every school you attended and the grades and degrees you received at each. If you were ever disciplined at school, the FBI wanted to know when and why, and what punishment you received.
The FD-140 required you to give the FBI the names and addresses of all your family members and your spouse’s family members. If any of them had lived or worked overseas, the Bureau needed that information as well. The FBI asked you to provide three references, defined as “responsible adults of reputable standing” who had known you well for at least five years. In addition, they requested contact information for three “social acquaintances,” who could be your own age, and were presumably less reputable than your references, but who also had to have known you for five years.
The application required that you list every foreign country you had ever visited and any contact you might have had while there with representatives of foreign governments. The FBI wanted the details of your military service and whether you were licensed to practice law. They asked about any run-ins you might have had with the authorities, and whether you owed money to any person or business.
The FD-140 gave the Bureau a view into some aspects of your lifestyle. The FBI wanted to know if you had smoked marijuana during the previous three years or more than fifteen times total in your life, and whether you had used any other illegal drugs more than five times in the past decade. It sought to determine whether you were a communist, a fascist, or a subversive. Additionally, it wanted to know if you had ever supported the use of force to deny anyone his or her constitutional rights or had ever advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Before signing the application, the FBI let you know, and required you to acknowledge, that if hired you were expected to serve a minimum of three years and to move anywhere the Bureau ordered you to move at your own expense.
With this information, the background investigation was officially under way. Your field office set about sending messages to other field offices to investigate and confirm every fact you presented on the FD-140. For instance, I was living in southern New Jersey when I applied to the FBI, so my application was processed by the Philadelphia field office. It included the facts that I had worked in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Philadelphia sent requests for follow-up investigation (referred to internally as “setting leads”) to themselves—for Cherry Hill—and to the Newark field office and the Washington field office. Their leads required agents and background investigators in those offices to contact and interview my former supervisors and confirm every aspect of my work history. This same tedious, labor-intensive effort would be directed at every fact on my FD-140, no matter where the work took place.
After vetting the information in the FD-140, you would be called into a field office for a polygraph examination. The exam would begin benignly—with the polygraph turned off—as an FBI agent reviewed the information on your FD-140. She would ask you questions and give you a chance to clarify inconsistencies or explain things that might have come out during the background investigation. The agent would try to eliminate any ambiguity or confusion in advance of the questions that would follow.
With questions prepared and issues clarified, the agent would set up the polygraph machine and, in FBI speak, “put you on the box.” It goes like this: You are sitting in a chair with wide, flat armrests. The agent tells you to place your arms flat on the rests. Forcefully, she admonishes you not to move. At all. She places a blood-pressure cuff on your upper arm and inflates it uncomfortably. She wraps a sensor around your chest. She attaches an additional sensor to a finger. Each of these sensors is attached by wire to a box on the desk next to you. The box has multiple needles on top and a roll of graph paper that stretches beneath the needles.
When the exam begins, the agent asks you to provide yes or no answers only—the time for explanation and discussion is over. She starts by asking easy questions that call for obvious answers, such as, Are we in Philadelphia? or, Is your name Andrew McCabe? You answer Yes or No, and you don’t move. Between the questions, you can hear the dull scratch of a needle dragging across paper. You wonder what it is saying about you.
Then she asks the real questions, which are derived from the information on your FD-140. The questions about drug use eliminate the largest number of candidates. People frequently minimize their history with drugs or lie about it altogether. Getting caught lying on the polygraph means you can’t pass the background investigation. Your dream of working for the FBI is over.
I passed the polygraph, which meant I was officially “out of background” and still moving forward. There were still hurdles left—medical testing, Phase Two testing—but I was a giant step closer to the FBI Academy at Quantico.
I rehearsed how I would quit my job—how I’d tell my boss—working out the phrasing to eliminate any room for objection. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, I’d say, and I’ve decided to leave this law practice and to join the FBI. That’s what I did say, and my boss tried to talk me out of it. As had my parents. Not Jill. I took a 50 percent pay cut. To save money, we had to leave our apartment, in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and Jill moved in with a roommate. We had to be apart for the sixteen weeks of my special-agent training. I’d be in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Academy is located, and Jill would be almost two hundred miles away, doing her residency at Children’s Hospital, in Philadelphia. I started getting up early in the morning and running, so I’d be ready for the physical fitness tests. I rigged a pull-up bar, and I’d do a couple of pull-ups on the way out and a couple more on the way back.
Arriving at Quantico was like driving off a cliff. I had no idea what to expect. I was certainly excited, but I was stepping into a different world from the one I had known.
It was a hot Sunday night when I drove from Philadelphia to Quantico. After getting out of the car and stretching my legs, I walked in the main entrance and immediately passed through the Hall of Heroes, surrounded by the faces and names and stories of those agents who had made the ultimate sacrifice. Then I went to my dorm. Two to a bedroom, four to a bathroom—just like college, even though most of us were almost ten years older than college students. The man I shared a room with was a former Army captain from Rhode Island.
At that time, a new class of forty started at Quantico every other week. My class, NA9618—“NA” stands for “new agents”—was the year’s eighteenth class. All forty of us got sworn in as special agents that night. We swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From that moment on, we were special agents in training.
The next day we picked up our uniforms—hiking shoes, tan Royal Robbins cargo pants, and a dark blue FBI Academy polo shirt. We wore the uniform everywhere. No gym clothes were allowed on campus except at the gym. No jeans were allowed anywhere at the academy, ever.
Then the classes started, covering the law and techniques of investigation: how to conduct an interview; how to write up a 302; how to handle all the different kinds of documents an agent has to handle; how to dust for fingerprints. The difference between the valedictorian and the person who came in second in our class was a wrong answer on a single fingerprint ID question on a single test. Our forensics teacher was one of the agents who had searched the cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.”
The classes weren’t all brain work. Agents get a full-on physical education. Taking people into custody, defensive maneuvers, hand-to-hand combat. Everybody does some boxing. Everybody learns to clear a room. Everybody learns how to plan an arrest and how to make an arrest. An agent learns how to do all these things in many kinds of environments where you can imagine an arrest being made. A restaurant, a bar, a bank, a trailer park, a motel, a school. Those environments are packed into the most famous part of the campus at Quantico—Hogan’s Alley, a fake town, a full-sized replica community made up of all the kinds of places I just mentioned, and more, populated and run by character actors who live nearby. Every special agent in training learns the ropes in these false environments—figures out how to react and adapt in different situations.
The third big piece of training is firearms. Some in our class had never fired a gun before. Some had been marksmen in the military. No matter what their past experience, agents in training all start at the same level, learning the basic nomenclature, how to break a weapon down, and what every part and piece is called and how they work together. On the firing range, they learn sight alignment and trigger control. All forty of us shot thousands of rounds. By the end of sixteen weeks, we could all shoot very well.
The schedule at Quantico changed constantly. We moved rapidly from one thing to another. We were acquiring a sense of discipline, a paramilitary sense of order. I recognized the flaws of this system. Prioritizing obedience to process could create a type of groupthink that stifles creativity, independence, and critical thinking. But the Bureau is bureaucratic. It is a law-enforcement agency. It is paramilitary in nature. It also depends for its success on keeping records. It is run according to a clear and distinct chain of command. So there is a set of very basic concepts that lead to an understanding of where you stand in this big organization. You start learning those concepts at Quantico, when you’re told on the first night that punctuality is not optional. If you’re not early, you’re late. If class starts at eight, you’re there at seven fifty. Anyone who isn’t early is noticed and marked as being out of step with the program. Quickly it becomes the case that no one is ever late under any circumstances. If you have only twenty minutes between your physical education class and your law class, and you have to shower, get dressed, and cross the campus to get there—you figure it out. You make it work. Those words could almost be an agent’s motto: Make it work.
I embraced every bit of this culture, even the most arbitrary aspects of the discipline. Who I am fit with what this was. I wanted to look the way they wanted me to look. Loved wearing the same style of polo shirt every day for weeks on end. Loved the fact that everybody around me wore the same polo shirt, too. That polo shirt was a symbol of dedication. It announced your priorities. The more detailed the requirements of the academy experience, the more I responded to it. I wasn’t just acclimating to a place, I was joining a life. I felt like every quirky, inconvenient thing about this experience was necessary and important, and, in a way, even cool.
The biggest shift entailed in learning to see the world like an agent is the shift toward altruism. It’s a huge change of mind-set to go from being Joe Private Citizen, where your worries are mainly about yourself—your own safety and happiness and health—to putting all that aside and saying, I’m going to worry about everybody else first. Mortal stakes help this shift along. In one class, the instructor talked about lethal force—the times when you put yourself in harm’s way to eliminate a threat to other people. There was never a doubt in my mind that this was the best thing a person could do. It’s not that I ever wished to be in that situation, but I did feel on some level a desire to live on the visceral edge.
That desire inflects a thousand little shifts in perspective and technique, altering the way you see the world and make your way through it. You start to think of your whole life, almost every minute of every day, in terms of readiness. One example: In the car, when you unbuckle your seat belt, you slip the back of your hand inside the belt across your chest, you slide your hand down along the inside of that strap, and then you release the belt and push away with the back of your hand. You have to do it this way, because if you unbuckle it the way normal people do—reaching across your chest, overhand, and clicking the buckle with your thumb—then your arm is inside the triangle of the belt. And if you have to jump out of that car in a lethal situation, that could be the thing that costs you a tenth of a second and gets somebody killed.
Part of our firearms training was running shoot/don’t-shoot scenarios in a video-training module, to gain practice in making split-second decisions. You knock on a guy’s front door, maybe he answers and then runs back into the house: What do you do? Do you go in by yourself? Do you call your partner? You hit these decision points, and depending on how you react, the video plays differently. This is not exclusive to Quantico—police agencies all over the world use some version of it now. It’s called Firearms Training Simulation—FATS, for short. In training we would all sit there in a line, dressed in our gear, and it was nerve-racking—I could hear screaming and gunfire in the video booth where the person ahead of me was training. For all I knew, the trainee had just lost his virtual life. And I was next.
In the twenty-two years since I graduated from Quantico, FATS technology has improved. It’s all digital now, and the fake guns palpably recoil, which realistically messes with your ability to recapture your sight picture—the way you frame a shot with your gunsight. It tells you when your shot is lethal. But the best part of the whole session, as it’s run today, is the conversation after it’s all over, between the trainee and a lawyer. The lawyer asks, Why did you shoot at this point? And the trainee says, I thought I was going to die. The lawyer says, What did you see that led you to believe that your life or the lives of others were in danger? The trainee better have a good answer. Hard conversations like these teach agents to articulate every decision they make. A decision that you can’t articulate is probably a wrong decision.
After months of learning in a fake city populated by fake characters, FBI Academy training culminates with the trumpet-blaring pomp of graduation, as if we’re all becoming knights of the Round Table. Then we get plunked down in field offices all over the country. When you go to Quantico, one thing you give up is any control over where you’re going to live after you leave. Here I am. Send me where you need me. That’s the deal. You get your chance to say where you’d like to go, but the three monkeys throwing darts at the map to make your assignments do not, typically, read your preferences. You get what you get, and it’s all to satisfy “the needs of the Bureau”—the infamous tagline that explains all manner of offense, real or perceived.
I got New York City—lower Manhattan. It was a rude awakening, going from one end of the spectrum to the other. Quantico was regimented. The New York field office was a free-for-all. Where were the people handing me my new uniforms and cooking my meals?
No one would tell me what to do. There were no supplies anywhere. They gave me a car, but no place to park it. The only parking place I could find was ten blocks away, and then I got to the office in a sweat because I was late—and realized that nobody cared. I came out of Quantico’s perfectly structured world, flush with idealism, and into a world where the bosses say, Don’t give me any of that Quantico bullshit, kid.
Struggle and deprivation can be gifts. In the New York field office—the biggest of the Bureau’s field offices, with about eleven hundred agents and as many staff—you’re limited only by your imagination and energy. If you’re willing to work your tail off, even a new agent can take down the top guy in a crime family. I would spend the first ten years of my career focused on cases that grew out of two interlocking narratives: the evolution of organized crime in Russia and the export of Russian organized crime to the United States. These narratives traced a complex and inexorable process that would, despite the best efforts of the FBI as a whole, become only more dangerous. Russian organized crime today has deep ties to the Russian government. It saturates the internet. As most people are aware, the combination of crime, computers, and the Kremlin has in recent years taken aim at electoral politics—at American democracy itself.
My first big case started with a phone call. I picked up the receiver—these were the days of landlines—and heard an old guy’s voice say, I think I’m being racketeered. It was February 1998. I had come to work early, because I was eager. It took a while for me to figure out that real work started late in the day. So when the switchboard for the main New York field office number put a call through to our squad, I was the only agent around to answer it. The old man on the phone spoke with a thick Russian accent. His voice was shaky and fearful. To protect his identity, I’ll call him Felix. Felix ran a furniture store in Brooklyn. When I went to talk to him, he told me that a Russian thug was forcing him to pay one hundred dollars a week in “protection money”—this at a time when Felix’s business couldn’t have been pulling in much more than a thousand dollars a week. Felix needed genuine protection: protection of the law, provided by the Bureau. I would be the case agent.
After Felix told his story, I went back to the office and wrote up a 302. I realized, now, that I was part of the conversation I’d been longing to join ever since my summer internship at Justice. With this case, my squad would take the playbook the Bureau had used to crack La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia’s five families, and turn it against the Russian mobsters whose activities had moved Felix to call. Before the end of that year, my squad became one of the first to use the RICO statute against a Russian-organized-crime group when we indicted the Gufield-Kutsenko Brigade, a gang that extorted not only furniture stores but also restaurants and jewelry stores; sold fake Medicaid cards and green cards; kidnapped businessmen; and burned down buildings. They played rough.
Right when I was going after these guys, one of my New York colleagues was translating a fatwa issued in Arabic by a radical jihadist who was then all but unknown: Osama bin Laden. At the time, neither the Russian Mafia nor radical Islam had been getting much attention because the country was distracted by politics: the unfolding Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal, which ultimately led to impeachment proceedings and, along the way, jacked up tensions between President Bill Clinton and FBI Director Louis Freeh. That episode was just the latest in a series of struggles, such as those involving the Khobar Towers and “Filegate,” between the director and the president that had all but alienated the FBI from the White House. It is striking that this moment in the late 1990s, when radical Islamic extremism and Russian organized crime were emerging with new clarity, was also one when the poisonous personalization of politics deflected attention from those very threats. In the present moment, as I write, both of these phenomena—foreign terrorism and foreign organized crime—represent two of the greatest threats we face.
The Bureau had a long tradition of ignoring organized crime. Old-school law enforcement was all about statistics, or “stats”—that is, measuring the numbers of arrests, indictments, and convictions. Those numbers proved the Bureau’s worth, at least in the eyes of presidents and of Congress, and justified our funding. Mob investigations, which are complicated and lengthy, tend to produce a low yield of favorable stats. Under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the Bureau for almost fifty years, starting in 1924, the FBI paid scant attention to the problem.
After Hoover’s death, in 1972, the FBI put some manpower on La Cosa Nostra. For these investigations, the Bureau mastered new ways of doing business. It learned to reckon with complicated international criminal structures, to collect and process evidence in other countries, and to overcome language barriers in order to navigate foreign courtrooms. By the end of the 1980s, the Bureau had built competence in all these areas, and the mob’s reign in New York was coming to an end. Louis Freeh helped make that happen, first as an FBI agent and later as a federal prosecutor. When Freeh became the FBI’s director in 1993, he brought this experience to the Bureau.
Freeh had a personal authenticity that immediately won the respect of agents. Everyone referred to him as Louie, whether you knew him or not. He had been one of us. He became the kind of prosecutor we all wanted to work with. Time as a federal judge gave him an imprimatur of knowledge and authority. I traveled with Freeh on several overseas trips—to Budapest, Hungary; Almaty and Astana, Kazakhstan; Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia—as part of his security detail.
Though naturally quiet, Freeh was a superb diplomat. In Russia, he drank vodka shots with officials of the MVD, the interior ministry. In Central Asia, he ate the eyeball from a barbecued goat. No matter where he was, he liked to get up early and go for a run. This meant that his advance team had to plan the running routes and run them ourselves at the exact time Freeh would, so that we could gauge lighting conditions, access routes, traffic, and crowds. Freeh held a strong seven-and-a-half-minute-mile pace. He always invited the cops or agents from the local service to join him. At every location, some local cop would want to race the FBI director to show what he was made of. Somehow, the local stallion always won. On the last night of each trip, Freeh would invite the entire team up to his room for drinks.
Under Freeh’s leadership, the Bureau developed a more international perspective. Freeh opened many legal-attaché offices—called legats—overseas, including one in Moscow. He built relationships with law enforcement in Russia and in Armenia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and throughout the Caucasus. These relationships fed Freeh’s awareness of organized-crime networks in Eurasia and how they operated in the U.S., mainly in the Russian-immigrant communities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Miami.
This work got little support from the Clinton administration. In the heady first years after Soviet communism fell, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore wanted to see democracy and free-market capitalism take root in Russia. Who didn’t? But they wanted so badly to see this that they failed to understand how firmly organized crime had taken hold in all of the former Soviet republics. You have to wonder what might have happened if the U.S. government had taken Russian organized crime more seriously during those years—but beyond a certain point, it’s also pointless to wonder. Nobody can see everything.
In 1996, the New York field office had the largest organized-crime operation in the country. There were several Italian-organized-crime squads. There were Asian-organized-crime squads. And there was a new one, just started in 1994, for organized crime in Eurasia, including Russia. As shorthand, we used the terms “Russian organized crime” and “Eurasian organized crime” interchangeably.
My first assignment had been Italian. The Colombo family. The first thing you do, on any assignment, is your homework. You read the binders. I started plowing through the whole history of investigations of the Colombo crime family, and before long I found a surprise: the names of a couple of people I knew. One had been to my wedding and given me a wedding gift. This seemed like a problem. I asked my supervisor. My supervisor said, Stop reading the binders. I was given another assignment.
This turned out to be the best possible bad luck. I got moved to squad C24, Eurasian organized crime. At the time, Russian mobsters were seen as the junior varsity when compared to the Italians. Both kinds of gangsters were interested in the same targets of opportunity—drugs, human trafficking, money laundering, and financial fraud—but if the Italians got involved, the Russians would go running.
The criminals’ hierarchy also applied to cops who chased them. New York City loves its Mafia. It’s part of the culture there. So those of us who worked Russian organized crime were like redheaded stepchildren. The Cosa Nostra squads had twenty-five years of intelligence collection to draw on. They knew who was in what family, who was affiliated, who was at war, who had cooperated, and they had a deep bench of grand old men. We had nothing like that.
Second fiddle suited me fine. And like a lot of underdog teams, our squad had the best coach. In style, Raymond Kerr was a G-man’s G-man: rock-square jaw, purse-lipped smile, steel-gray hair, pants creased, shirt tucked. He must have had a suit coat or blazer around somewhere, but you never saw it. He wore gold-rimmed glasses for reading. Every two years, Kerr would trade in his immaculate Bureau car—his Bu-ride, a Ford Crown Victoria, the legendary Crown Vic preferred by old-school cops and taxi drivers everywhere—and get an even more pristine new model. I can still hear the soft whoosh of the SWAT-issued Gore-Tex raincoat, sleeves sliding on side panels, as Ray walked into the office. But what I remember most is his voice.
Kerr was the ultimate agent’s supervisor. He was completely focused on cases and operations, and on throwing bad guys in jail. He would sit in his office for hours and talk to us about the people we were chasing, the informants we were using, and the prosecutors who were building cases with us. He was our strategist, our sage, our cheerleader, and our conscience. He pushed us to meet aggressive goals and helped manage our expectations when things didn’t quite measure up. After a colossal mistake on a case where my partner and I arrested the wrong person, Kerr told us that if we made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time, we had nothing to worry about. Then he made sure we had our professional liability insurance paid up. Even though we were federal government employees and theoretically protected by the Justice Department, you never knew when you’d need a backup policy. Kerr taught us to be prepared, always do our best to get things right, and not take it out on ourselves if things didn’t go our way. The only sin was to do nothing at all.
When Kerr was angry, you knew it. He wasn’t a screamer. Instead, he got quiet. The rock-square jaw got rockier. And before he told you what he really thought, Ray would toss a quick glance to each side, over his shoulders, as if there might be somebody standing behind him listening. It was the kind of thing you would expect an informant to do, in a dark alley, in a 1940s movie. There never was anyone listening in—it was just a tell, his way of emphasizing that the next thing he said was for you and no one else. After the side-to-side look, he’d look you straight in the eye, point his finger at your chest, and say, That guy’s not just a moron. He’s a fucking moron.
Kerr had been in charge of the first Asian-organized-crime squad, so he knew how to build from the ground up. He found people with real knowledge about Russia, like Michael McCall, to add to the team. A fluent Russian speaker who came over from counterintelligence, McCall brought an understanding of how organized crime worked in the former Soviet Union and an awareness of how it was being exported to the U.S.
The central idea of Russian organized crime is vory v zakone. The phrase means “thieves-in-law” and refers to the top tier of the underworld. Russian organized crime grew out of the Soviet prison system and reproduced the hierarchies of the gulags. The only law the vory observe is the “thieves’ law,” a strict code that says they will never work, never hold a legitimate job, never do what the authorities tell them to do.
To be a made man in the Italian Mafia means being accepted into a family, in a bona fide induction ceremony—we’ve all seen the movies. The path to becoming a made man in Russia is different. The vor must have been to prison, done hard time, and declared himself a thief for life. People who live like that will, as a consequence, keep going back to prison. The more times the vor goes in and out of prison, the higher his status, which is written on his skin. Icons are as important in Russian crime as in Russian religion, and one way to spot the vor is by his tattoos. The tattoos are an intricate symbolic language, inscribed with ballpoint pen ink and sewing needles, dark and rough and hittery-skittery. Crosses on the knuckles indicate the number of times a man has served time in prison. Stars on the shoulders signify authority. The real leaders who emerge from that process are the vory v zakone.
One of the first vory of stature to come to the U.S. was Vyacheslav Ivankov. From the prisons of Siberia he made his way to Brooklynski—Brighton Beach, the home base of Russian organized crime in the U.S. Spinning cycles of extortion that touched the worlds of nightlife, sports, entertainment, and investment banking, Ivankov became the first target of Kerr’s squad. In late 1995, they got him. In news footage of his perp walk—with Mike McCall at one elbow and his partner, Lester McNulty, at the other—Ivankov actually spits at the camera. The month Ivankov went on trial, the New York Daily News alleged that he put out a murder contract on both agents. All the way to sentencing, in 1997, he refused to admit any guilt for anything. “I am not in a church,” he told the judge. “I have no need to make a confession.”
After C24 caught its first big fish, the waters were calm for a while. I and a few other new agents joined the squad—Ray’s Day Care, we called it. Fresh out of Quantico, full of piss and vinegar, we knew nothing. We were all eyes, all ears. A lot of the Russian gangsters were unrefined, but their behavior had its logic. One man arrested in New York for murder confessed that, back in Russia, he had carved up a few bodies with a blowtorch. A blowtorch is better than a saw, he explained, because it is so much cleaner. Dismember and cauterize, in one easy step.
At first, our investigative strategy was, basically, to walk around asking people, Are there any vory v zakone here? This strategy did not get us very far. Kerr taught us to take a different approach. We started asking, Who’s hurting people? Who’s ripping people off? And especially, Who’s showing off? There’s a big overlap between gangsters and people who look like gangsters—a big overlap between true vory and people who go to wiseguy nightclubs and flash a lot of money. We would get to know the bartenders at Russian mob clubs. A bartender at, say, Rasputin in Brighton Beach, might tell us, These five guys come in here every night, spending loads of money. There’s girls all over the table. We’d ask the bartender to describe those five guys in detail.
Eventually, the victim of a crime would describe a criminal who sounded like one of the five guys at Rasputin. Now we were getting somewhere. We would poke around to see what connections might exist between this person and that person, build up a trove of what’s called association evidence.
It’s great to have a tape recording of a thug threatening a victim. But that’s rare. It’s also great when you execute a search warrant and find a shoebox full of happy-snap pictures in their house. That shoebox is a gold mine of association evidence. Oh, really? You don’t know the guy? That’s funny, because here’s a picture of you and him at the beach. That can be valuable not just in building the case against your subject, but also in building your knowledge of the organized-crime networks in the area. Look, here’s that guy Leo is investigating. I didn’t know Leo’s guy knew my guy. Then I go talk to Leo, and it turns out that both of our guys went to St. Barts for Easter break.
Where is all this going? As an agent, you don’t know at first. You probably won’t know for a long while. And the starting point can seem innocuous, like that call from Felix, the furniture-store owner.
Kerr said I had to go out and interview the guy. Felix lived in a predominantly Russian part of Brooklyn, but his store was in Flatbush, a very different neighborhood. Imagine a five-foot-eleven-inch whippet, so excited: That was me. I told a salty old New York detective who had been assigned to the squad where I was going, and he said, Whoa, whoa, you can’t go out to that neighborhood by yourself. One white guy in that neighborhood in the middle of the day: victim. Two white guys together in the middle of the day: cops. Then he asked, What are you driving? Light blue Chevy Caprice, I said—classic bubble cruiser. You’re good, he said. You’re fine, you’re gonna be fine.
Kerr said, Who are you going to take with you? I rattled off the names of the most senior people on the squad. Kerr said, Let me see … He looked out his door and saw Greg Sheehy. He said, Take Sheehy.
Sheehy? Sheehy was more junior even than me. Didn’t even know the almost-nothing that I knew. But again, best possible bad luck. Sheehy proved to be a great agent and an even better friend. From that day forward we were partners. So we drove out to Flatbush. Met with Felix in his store. Raw space, wallboard, almost like a warehouse storefront, stacked to the ceiling with bargain furniture, priced to move. The clientele appeared to be all working people from the neighborhood, without a lot of money to spare. Felix told us a story.
The story was about a guy named Dimitri Gufield, who had been Felix’s partner in a different furniture store years earlier. Then Dimitri moved back to Russia for a year. When Dimitri returned, he reintroduced himself to Felix. Dimitri was a gangster now, and he expected Felix to start paying him protection money. Felix was deeply offended by this. Offended to be treated as a stooge by someone he thought was a peer, an equal. We’re the same, we’re furniture guys! Who are you to think you’re some tough gangster?
Dimitri lived in a nice colonial house out on Long Island. Had a nice family—wife, kids—and they lived what seemed to be a respectable middle-class life. But Dimitri’s dream, the thing he wanted most in life, was to be a big-time gangster. He gathered a little crew around himself, and every young punk in this crew had to go out and identify businesses to extort for protection money. Dimitri’s own focus was on furniture stores, because that was what he knew.
Krysha is the Russian word for roof. The word can be used literally or figuratively. Krysha refers to the exterior top surface of something, such as a building or a car. Or krysha can refer to a person who provides the same kind of protection as a roof. “I’ll be your krysha”—I’ll be your roof—means that I will stop things from falling on you. Since the early 1990s, most businesses in Russia have had to operate with the protection of a krysha. Even if provided by the police or other government officials, the krysha is ultimately tied to organized crime. There is no effective distinction, in Russia, between organized crime and government, so kryshas have proliferated to where they block out the sky. Everyone lives under protection. The transformation has been systemic. It cannot be attributed exclusively to the actions of any one individual. But under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, the cohabitation of crime and government became the norm. Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.
Dimitri pitched guys like Felix, and Felix agreed to pay right off the bat. Felix was irate, he felt humiliated, but he was susceptible because he had a family, too. Then Dimitri wanted more. He went back to Felix and said, The other owners, they look up to you. I need you to bring them together. We’ll have a meeting. Call in half a dozen of them. I’ll be there. You’ll tell them you’ve decided to start paying me, and you’ll tell them they should follow your lead and pay me also. That’s when Felix called the FBI. He didn’t want to go through with this meeting. He hoped we could protect him from the protection racket.
A phone call and a story like Felix’s are uncommon. An agent does not often get tipped off to an extortion demand as it’s happening. So Sheehy and I were keyed up. We went back to Kerr’s office, wondering what we should do, and Kerr asked if Felix would wear a wire. I said, I think so—this guy seems all in.
Felix was all in. In our first meeting with him, he said, I shouldn’t have to pay, because this is America. Nobody has to pay for protection here. He looked at us, two fledgling FBI agents, and he said, about the thug who was trying to rule that neighborhood by fear and force, I don’t need him—I have you. Felix was a tax-paying, green card–holding, law-abiding citizen, and his calculus was just that simple. Hearing what he said, I experienced again what I had first felt at Quantico: a shift in the most basic sense of who I was and of my purpose in the world.
Two days later, we went back to Felix’s store, and in his little office he took off his shirt so I could put the wire on him. The recording device was a metal box about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with wire leads connected to microphones coming out of it. Putting the microphone up high on the chest catches the sound best, but on a hairy guy—and Felix was hairy as a bear—you can get a lot of scratching sounds. The device itself has to be hidden somewhere that won’t be found on a typical pat-down, so we tucked it into a pocket designed to hang in the groin area from an elastic waistband.
Felix’s street nickname, which was accurate, if not imaginative, was Big Felix. He was so large that the Velcro ends of the elastic waistband were never going to meet. He leaned over a table and I stood behind him, trying to pull the thing together—like a lady’s maid tightening the strings on a whalebone corset. Then Felix had an inspiration: We could make the waistband stick with packing tape. We wrapped it around and around him and then sent him in. I remember wondering what it was going to feel like when the tape was peeled off.
The meeting was at another furniture store. Dimitri Gufield and his number two, Alexander Kutsenko, along with a man named Mani Chulpayev, who turned out to be in many ways the brains of the gang, rolled up in tricked-out Benzes and BMWs and swaggered onto the sidewalk wearing three-quarter-length black leather jackets. Nothing subtle about this scene. Sheehy and I were staked out up the block in a car. We took a lot of pictures.
Later, when the meeting was over, Dimitri went out on the sidewalk and talked to his guys in front of Felix, and talked to Felix alone a little more. Felix was chain-smoking, gray faced, perspiring heavily. We met up with him later and went to his store. By now he was drenched, looked like he was having a heart attack, fumbling with his keys, couldn’t unlock his own front door. We got the wire off. Then Felix described what had happened. One of the older people in the meeting, Pavel, who was in his late seventies, allegedly owed Dimitri money on a separate debt, so Dimitri made Pavel sit in the middle of the group. Dimitri berated him and slapped him around as he told the rest of the furniture-store owners about the payments he wanted them to make. When a woman told Dimitri, No, she wasn’t going to pay, Dimitri started beating Pavel, as if to show, This is what’s at stake. By the end of the meeting, everyone there—except for the woman and her business partner—agreed to pay. Back outside, Dimitri told his guys, I want the woman beaten, I want her put into the hospital so she stays there for at least two weeks. That’s what Felix heard him say at the end, when he was melting in sweat. We took off the wire and listened. It was all there.
On our instructions, Felix called another meeting with Gufield, Kutsenko, and Chulpayev, and he asked them not to beat the woman. He said he would pay for her. We paid Felix, Felix paid them, and from then on it was a steady cash flow. We spent the next few months collecting as much information about the gang as we could. The first step in the collection stage of an investigation is to figure out who all the targets are. Once you know who they are, you figure out where they live, whether they’re married, what they drive, what their phone numbers are. Who else do they hang around with? What else are they doing? Who else are they extorting? Are they running drugs? Sheehy and I followed the members of the gang, doing surveillance, nights and weekends. We found a guy on the Upper East Side who hooked them up with stolen cars. We found a connection to a gun supplier in South Carolina who sold them semiautomatic weapons, including a MAC-10.
We went to a federal prosecutor, Judith Lieb, who put the whole case together under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—the RICO statute. Passed by Congress in 1970, RICO is the law that made it possible for the U.S. government to prosecute the Mafia—and the law that deters organized crime from infiltrating legitimate businesses. RICO allows the leaders of a racket to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to commit, or assisted others in committing, but did not carry out with their own hands. It is one of the most important laws enacted in the past half century, and it has global reach.
Every RICO charge has to go to the Department of Justice for approval because so much is at stake in the language. No one wants to bring a RICO case that gets challenged and risk an appeal that pulls the teeth out of the statute. The path to use this statute against Italian crime families is well trodden. But we found no preexisting language for a RICO case against a Russian-organized-crime group. Individuals had been arrested and indicted for the various predicate offenses that could have gone into a RICO case, offenses such as drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping. Apparently, the Bureau had never alleged an overall RICO conspiracy involving a Russian-organized-crime enterprise.
We put it together, Lieb charged it, and we arrested six guys right off the top—the two leaders of the crew, three guys who were “furniture,” or muscle, and the key figure in the case, Mani Chulpayev. Mani was not in New York the day we made the arrests. He was in Los Angeles. He and his partners, it turned out, were also involved in human trafficking. They would bring women from Russia and Uzbekistan to the U.S., seize their passports, and make them work as prostitutes to earn money toward getting the passports back. Mani was in Los Angeles delivering one of these women to a pair of Russian dentists who wanted their own live-in prostitute. The L.A. field office put Mani on a flight back to New York, and Ray Kerr gave us a master class in how to flip somebody.
Mani was Uzbek. He had immigrated to the U.S. as a child. His father supported the family by running food carts in downtown Manhattan. By the time of his arrest, he was five feet six of puffy hubris. In the interview room, Greg and I were not getting off jump street with him. Then Kerr walked in and sat down in his perfect dress slacks, perfect dress shirt, gold-rimmed glasses, tie perfectly knotted.
Ray started talking to Mani. He said, You don’t have to say anything, Mani. Don’t say a word. Just sit here, just listen. Listen to us. I’m gonna tell you a little bit of how this process works, what kind of system you are in now, what’s going to happen after tonight, what’s going to happen tomorrow morning, what’s going to happen to you, what you’re facing, when you’ll be able to speak to your lawyer and your family. I’m just going to talk to you a little bit—just stop me and ask me questions if you’d like—but you don’t have to say anything. Don’t feel any pressure. We’re not going to ask you any questions right now.
I could see Mani thinking, Ahhh, this is all right—I can handle this.
Kerr laid out the situation for him. Here’s how it works. You’ve been charged by complaint. This is what that means. You’re going to get to see the judge. It’s an initial appearance. Ray walked him through the process and then started slowly asking a couple of questions. And Mani, being a spectacularly arrogant person and wanting to tell of his greatness, began to talk.
But Ray interrupted, rum voiced, the perfect host: Okay, before you go any further, let me just say you should probably—you know, we’ll stay here as long as you want—we’ll stay here all night with you if you like. We’ll get you some food, we’ll get you something to drink. We’d love to hear what you have to say. I’m sure you have a side of this, and we’d like to hear what that is. Before you do that, you should know that you do have the right not to speak to us.
Mani said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that. Don’t worry about it. And he signed the consent to be interviewed without an attorney present, and proceeded to tell stories that we had never heard before. He told us about the time the crew kidnapped a guy, took him to somebody’s basement, tied him to a water heater, beat him with a tire iron, and stubbed out lit cigarettes in his ears. Told us about collection kidnappings they had been doing that we had no idea about. Guns they had bought. Stolen cars. The human trafficking.
As he spoke we could start to see how the various income streams converged. The guy on the Upper East Side who was the connection to stolen cars also had a person in the New York State Health Department who could create fraudulent Medicaid accounts. For a few hundred dollars, you could get a Medicaid card and have total access to health care. There was no operating cost for the scam. It was pure profit. We asked, Do you know who you did this for? Mani said, Yeah, I know who I did it for. It’s all in my notebooks. He had kept a handwritten ledger of who brought in how much money for which job; who owed money; who had been paid. It was like the Rosetta stone of the gang’s activity. We got the notebook and charged the gang. He laid it all out to us that night.
When our squad shut down the Gufield-Kutsenko Brigade and another gang with a similar MO—rackets revolving around violence—it had a chilling effect. Wiseguy nightlife started powering down. White-collar insurance fraud started picking up. One gang set up medical mills all around the city, hustling for people who had been in car accidents. Patients came in to the mills and got pushed through a dozen doctor’s appointments in an hour. The mill would bill for every bogus treatment, while insurance companies got taken for a ride. To prove the case—which resulted in fourteen arrests and the closing of several clinics—we staged a car accident on paper and wired up three NYPD detectives who went undercover as patients.
By the following year, Russian organized crime was moving further away from violence and toward the bigger prize of high finance, a realm that was more abstract but in some ways even more threatening to the country. By the end of 1999, the FBI had helped shut down a seven-billion-dollar Russian money-laundering scheme that had been operated through the Bank of New York. (The bank ended up paying thirty-eight million dollars in fines because it “did not adequately monitor or report suspect accounts.”) That case, in retrospect, looks like a moment when Russian organized crime staked an early claim on the American frontier. The money laundered had come from a mixture of legal and illegal activities. The laundering itself was done by people who worked as legitimate professionals. The more that criminal money became entangled in legitimate business, and the more involved that formerly legitimate professionals became with organized crime, the more difficult it would eventually become for law enforcement to remove the criminal elements from the U.S. economy. Like the melding of organized crime and government in Russia—where each depends on the other for reinforcement and resources—the Bank of New York money-laundering case offered a glimpse of what the world can look like when the boundary between legitimate and criminal business is blurred. The Bank of New York case also signaled how much money Russians could bring to the table.
During the next few years, it became clear that Russian oligarchs—the men who, during Russia’s transition from communism to kleptocracy, made billions by acquiring state-owned companies for a song—were supporting some of the vory outside Russia, but not yet in America. We realized that Russian criminals had so much money that if the money came here, whole institutions could be undermined. So while most of our squad continued chasing thugs around Brooklyn or figuring out the latest financial fraud schemes, Kerr made sure one guy kept watch over the big fish beyond our shores.
That kind of work could be even harder to justify than more typical organized-crime investigations, because it might never lead to indictments and stats. Kerr protected our squad’s ability to do it anyway. He could see that something sinister was taking shape out there. It had spread from Moscow to Tel Aviv, and now we were seeing it in London. Globalization is not just for Google. Kerr’s support for big-fish background work exemplifies one of the most important things I learned from him: If you see something that needs to be done, your whole job is to make your best effort to do it.
The fingerprints of the vory were turning up in America with growing frequency. We chased leads on Russian gangsters sent to New York to “organize” the rackets in the city. We followed leads about young Russian players in the National Hockey League who were being extorted by gangsters back in the homeland. One of the kingpins we were tracking, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, concocted a scheme to guarantee a gold medal for Russian pairs figure skaters in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The fix worked. The Russians were awarded the medal, but after the ensuing scandal about the judging, the members of the second-place team were awarded duplicate gold medals, too.
Vadim Thomas, one of the best investigators on our squad, pitched the figure-skating case to the Southern District of New York—known as the Sovereign District of New York, because the U.S. attorney’s office there has a lot of power and does not shy from using it creatively. Tokhtakhounov was indicted and arrested by Italian police on charges of conspiracy to rig the competition. For months the FBI worked with the Italians and with Interpol to get him extradited. Before long, word came to the squad that a Russian oligarch had pledged two hundred million dollars to get Tokhtakhounov out of jail. Next thing we knew, his release was ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. He was gone, in the wind, back to Russia, where he has been living openly. (And from there, he allegedly continued to run criminal enterprises in the United States. In 2013, Tokhtakhounov was indicted for money laundering in connection with an illegal gambling ring that operated out of Trump Tower. Several months after this indictment, Tokhtakhounov was a VIP guest at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow.) We’ve never had a chance to get him again. In the scheme of things, the evident corruption behind a figure-skating medal may seem trivial. But for me and for a lot of guys on our squad, this was a critical turn of events.
One of our worst fears was that the top tier of the vory v zakone would use money to undermine Western institutions in which many millions of Americans have reflexive faith. That fear had now been realized, and we asked ourselves what institutions might be next, and we asked whether any American public official might be susceptible to a two-hundred-million-dollar bribe, and we asked whether democracy itself might become a target.