The year 1990 proved to be a turning point in my career. During the Bacalao investigation of the previous year, I’d worked as second fiddle to the Counselor, who acted as what was known in FBI lingo as the Case Agent. Now it was time for me to become a Case Agent—the captain of the investigative ship and the person who makes all operational calls, and has final authority. I was chomping at the bit.
The opportunity came in the form of an announcement over the office PA in the spring of 1990.
“Any Agent on a Drug Squad, pick up on line two.”
Calls like this arrived every hour of every day to our office. Most of them came from wackos offering conspiracy theories, or misleading tips, or complaining about aliens in UFOs flying over their homes. Sometimes I would suggest that they tilt their tin foil hat a little more to the left, or cover their windows with butter to prevent X-rays from entering. But I answered, nonetheless, hoping that one of the hundreds of calls would yield a significant lead.
On May 15, 1990, when I picked up, a Hispanic male with a heavy accent described a one-kilo drug deal that was going to take place in a drug-infested area of North Philadelphia known as the “Badlands” in an hour. The Badlands was ground zero for all drug activity in Philadelphia, and where 95 percent of our Squad’s work was concentrated.
The man provided the full names and physical descriptions of the two drug traffickers involved, a specific address, and the fact that the car they used would be equipped with a secret compartment known as a “hide.” Before I could ask a single question, he hung up.
Sensing this tip was real, I asked a clerk to check the names and address against a shared FBI/DEA database called NADDIS (Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System). Seconds after she entered their names, photos and lists of drug offenses appeared on the screen. I stood up in the Squad room and announced, “I’ve got a live one. Whoever is ready, let’s hit this quick!”
Five guys followed me out the door and into the basement, where we fired up a couple cars and raced to the Badlands. We arrived at the location at 2:05 PM. The guy on the phone had said that the two dealers would be there at approximately 2:10.
Sure enough, five minutes later the car he described pulled up to the exact address. Two Hispanic men in their midtwenties got out empty handed, and went into the house. One was the size of a moose.
I snapped pictures of the two men and the car, and then radioed the Squad and said, “Showtime, guys. We’re going to have to stop the car.”
It was a hot day with a lot of people out on the street. If we tried stopping and arresting the suspects in the Badlands, we ran the risk of having the neighborhood turn against us and creating a shit storm. More importantly, if we made the stop in the Badlands every dope dealer would know about it in five minutes, and any chance we had of “flipping” the suspects, or getting them to cooperate with law enforcement, would go down the drain.
I radioed for a marked PHPD unit to set up on Roosevelt Blvd. A few minutes later the two Hispanic guys emerged from the house, carrying a gym bag. The gym bag was a tell—most dope dealers carried their product in gym bags at the time.
We watched the two dicking around in the backseat for a while. Then they took off. They drove like old ladies, well below the speed limit and heeding every traffic sign—another giveaway. We followed at a distance, while I manned the radio and coordinated the police cars.
A mile or so out of the Badlands, I gave the order to make the stop. The marked unit lit them up, burped their siren, and we pulled up behind it. I wanted the marked unit to make the initial stop so that the dope dealers couldn’t later argue in court that they thought the guys in the unmarked car were trying to rob them, and, therefore, opened fire first—which is exactly what happened to a couple of Squad #2 Agents years later, who were badly wounded in a ferocious firefight.
“FBI! Get out of the car with your hands over your heads.”
The driver was a nice-looking young man with a Florida driver’s license, who identified himself as Nestor Lopez. He appeared cooperative, but started sweating like a pig. We separated him from the passenger, the Moose, who was already eye-fucking the cops.
By this point in my career, I’d stopped hundreds of drivers and dealt with hundreds of dope dealers. In any pair, one was always the alpha male. In this case, it was Moose. I didn’t speak Spanish, but I know enough to understand the Spanish words for motherfucker (hijo de puta), which was constantly coming out of Moose’s mouth, I told one of our guys to cuff him and stick him in one of the cars.
According to the 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures is not violated when a police officer stops a suspect on the street without probable cause for arrest, if the police officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed or is about to commit a crime and has a reasonable belief that the person may be armed and dangerous.
The fact that we had seen the suspects coming out of a known drug house and hiding a gym bag in their car gave us reasonable cause. Also, the decision by the Supreme Court in Michigan v. Long (1983) extended Terry v. Ohio to allow searches of car compartments during a stop with reasonable suspicion.
So we were well within our rights to search the car. I calmly explained the situation to Nestor, whose shirt was now soaked with sweat and seemed ready to crack.
His response was: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”
“My friend,” I replied, “we saw you come out of the drug house carrying a gym bag and fucking around in the backseat with Godzilla over there. If you don’t tell me where the gym bag is, I’m calling the dogs.”
“I don’t have no gym bag,” Nestor contended.
I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Forget about Moose. He’s going to jail for being stupid. I thought you might be brighter, but now you’re acting stupid, too. Do you understand the situation you’re in, or not?”
In other words, I knew there was cocaine in that car and we weren’t going anywhere until we found it. But when I looked through the windows into the car, I couldn’t see a gym bag on or under the backseat.
I turned to Nestor and said, “This is your last chance to do the right thing.”
He continued playing dumb, saying, “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I called for the K-9 Unit. As soon as their van turned the corner and started toward us, Nestor said, “Okay, man, I’ll show you where it is.”
He was also in handcuffs at this point. Nestor said, “Give me my car keys.”
“Do I look stupid?” I responded. “No way that’s going to happen.”
“You’re not getting shit without the car keys, man.”
I looked at him hard. “Where’s the gym bag?”
“You’re not going to find it,” he responded.
I climbed into the car and searched every inch of the front and back. Then I popped the trunk. No bag. I asked some of the Squad guys to look. They searched under all the seats thoroughly using a flashlight. Still no gym bag.
WTF? I was starting to wonder if my mind was playing tricks on me.
Nestor saw the confusion on my face and said, “If you give me the keys, I’ll get it.”
“Alright,” I responded, “but if you try to run, I’ll shoot you in the back.” I was kidding but I’m pretty sure he didn’t know that.
I undid the cuffs and handed him the keys. Nestor got in the car, started the ignition, and punched a series of radio buttons. I heard electronic buzzing and clicking, and then something metal popped open. Nestor reached into a secret compartment between the backseat and trunk, and came out with the gym bag. Inside the bag was a kilo of cocaine. Sweet.
The Moose and Nestor were now legally completely hosed, and charged with possession with intent to distribute one kilo of cocaine. During the early 1990s when the War on Drugs was on full throttle, both men were facing serious federal jail time.
Back at the Squad, while processing Nestor, I learned he was a native of Cuba and had come to the United States through the famous Mariel boatlift of the early ’80s. He worked in the automobile industry when not selling dope, and knew his way around auto garages.
Messing with Nestor’s head, I said to him, “You’re fucked, kid, which is a shame. Your life is over. By the time you get out of jail, you’re going to be an old man. No woman is ever going to look at you again.”
After a few minutes, he looked up at me and groaned, “I gotta talk to my wife.”
“Fuck that, my man. You’re not talking to anyone. You’re under arrest.”
“Look … I’ll cooperate with you guys, but I have to talk to my wife first.”
“Forget it.”
Usually when someone who is willing to cooperate speaks to a family member, the whole neighborhood knows about it ten minutes later, which renders the potential informer useless.
I was in the mug room taking Nestor’s mug shots, when a Squad mate poked his head in and whispered, “His wife is here.”
“What?”
“His wife is sitting outside.”
That was strange because we hadn’t given Nestor a chance to call her. The only thing that made sense was that Moose—who had been processed by another Agent—must have been allowed to call his wife, and Moose’s wife called Nestor’s wife.
Peering through the one-way window to the waiting room, I saw this well–dressed, gorgeous Hispanic woman sitting with her legs crossed. She looked like a modern-day Sofía Vergara. My first thought was: What the hell’s she doing with him?
In those days, I often led with my mouth rather than my head. “What the fuck, Nestor. How’d you land her?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Your wife. She’s here.”
He looked surprised. Normally in a situation like this we didn’t allow suspects to talk to members of their families. But after letting them both stew awhile, I decided to make an exception.
“My friend,” I started, “I’m going to bring your wife back here, and I’m going to sit with the two of you and I don’t want you speaking Spanish. Understand?”
I called in a Mormon Agent who was fluent in Spanish just in case, and sure enough as soon as Nestor’s wife saw her husband, she started jabbering at him en Español.
The Mormon Agent turned to me and said, “She told him that she’s leaving him if he doesn’t cooperate. She wants him to do whatever you say.”
That was music to my ears. Nestor later explained that another part of the reason he agreed to cooperate was I had treated him professionally and with respect from the time of the car stop. That was a practice I’d learned during my days as a cop. I dealt with suspects the same way I would want to be treated under the same circumstances. It was up to them what type of law enforcement relationship they wanted to have. If they chose to be difficult, I could also be extremely difficult, too—totally up to them.
People usually become informants for three reasons:
1. They face criminal charges (or are “jammed up,” in FBI parlance) and are seeking favorable treatment in court.
2. They’re interested in eliminating their competition in the criminal world.
3. They’re mercenaries who do it for the money.
Types two and three are dangerous, because they can turn on you at any time. The best informers are people like Nestor, who are motivated to work with law enforcement in order to get their criminal charges reduced.
For someone to become an FBI informant they have to meet a strict set of legal criteria and be approved by the FBI brass. They generally rule out anyone who has ever been convicted of a violent crime. Since Nestor was a drug dealer with no violent offenses on his record, he was accepted. His wife turned out to be a classy, educated woman with a good job at a utility company.
She started cooperating with us from Day One. Nestor, meanwhile, cooled his heels in jail, but was entitled to a bail hearing every thirty days. Because the courts were filled with spies working for the various drug-trafficking organizations, we didn’t want to risk going to court and asking for his release. Instead, every thirty days at Nestor’s bail hearing his lawyer would argue to lower his bail. After three months, it dropped to a reasonable amount, which Nestor’s wife promptly paid. Once released, Nestor immediately reported for FBI informant duty, and I knew exactly what I wanted to use him for.
In the late ’80s/early ’90s, hides were new to both dope dealers and law enforcement. In fact, before we had stopped Nestor’s car, I’d never seen one before. It got me thinking: Maybe we set up an Undercover Operation (UCO) where we offer cars with hides, and use them to catch bad guys.
UCOs and Title III electronic surveillance were the two most complex, demanding, difficult, and effective investigative techniques in the FBI’s arsenal. I’d been part of a Title III investigation in the Bacalao case, but had never done a UCO. This seemed like the perfect time to try.
Back in those days, the FBI was just starting to use computers. So I spent several days after Nestor’s arrest calling FBI offices all over the country. I asked each one: “Do you know anyone in the FBI or law enforcement who has run an undercover operation like this?”
The Los Angeles Division happened to be my sixth call. Agents there described an FBI resident agency office in Santa Ana, California, that had initiated a similar and very successful undercover operation a year earlier. They called their’s “Loadtrak.” Like a good FBI Agent, I immediately “borrowed” their concept for the East Coast and dubbed ours “Eastload.”
Then, I traveled out to Santa Ana to see how they had set theirs up. Agents in the Orange County municipality generously shared all the nuts and bolts of their UCO. They showed me the various hide cars and trucks, and introduced me to the mechanics who had built the sophisticated hides.
Now that I could show the existence of a very successful precedent in another FBI Division, it turned out to be relatively easy to get my plan approved. Again, like a good FBI Agent, I “borrowed” all of LA’s paperwork, or “ponies” in FBI speak, and started to draft my first FBI UCO.
The process to get an undercover operation approved required extensive preparation, research, logic, hard work, and long hours. There were multiple layers of approvals to secure from our own Division, FBIHQ, and the Department of Justice. The FBI wasn’t about to invest significant time, effort, manpower, and money on some goofy idea. It took a couple of months and gave me writer’s cramps, before we got the green light from Washington with a budget of more than $500,000 for hide buildouts and dope buys.
Next came something we called “backstopping”—or fabricating a story with false documents to support an undercover operation. In this case, we wanted to set up a business that rented out cars with hides to drug dealers and thereby catch a lot of bad guys. We scoured the local area for an appropriate facility and found a huge warehouse in an industrial complex across the Delaware River in New Jersey big enough to accommodate twenty cars with private offices in front. Video monitors, listening devices, and one-way glass had to be installed.
More importantly, we had to build a profile for the business by incorporating it and getting insurance, just like a real company. Everything had to look perfectly legit if scrutinized. To start our fleet, we picked out three government-seized cars, a van, and a truck and hired the same Santa Ana mechanics to build hides inside them. They had to be the best, because if I wanted to run a successful FBI UCO, every detail had to be done right.
As the Case Agent of the UCO, I would be managing everything from behind the scenes. I also needed people to help me with logistics and the enormous amount of FBI paperwork that would be generated. From our Squad, I selected a young African American FBI Special Agent named Hank Roberts, whom I had just finished training to be my #2, and another Squad Agent named Wayne Kent, to be the admin guy. (More on Kent later.)
Critical to the success of the operation would be the undercover guys who would actually interact with the drug dealers and sell our services. Nestor and his wife were going to be our front people. With street cred among traffickers around the Philadelphia area, they were perfect to spread the news about our business. Since they couldn’t appear to be managing the entire business themselves, they were going to need assistants to help man the showroom and do other tasks.
Our “clientele” was likely to be largely Hispanic, so we wanted native-Spanish speakers. At the time, the only Agents in our office who spoke fluent Spanish happened to be white. While working the Bacalao case I had gotten to know a number of New Jersey State Troopers, who had helped us execute stops, arrests, and huge drug seizures on Route 95 between New York City and Philadelphia. I picked two excellent, aggressive Hispanic NJ State Troopers to be our undercovers. They jumped at the opportunity to get out of uniform into plain clothes with plenty of nice jewelry and watches courtesy of the FBI.
In November 1990, five months after stopping Nestor’s car and after spending $250,000 of FBI money in start-up costs to create MRK Services, we were ready to launch Eastload. Given the financial investment from the FBI, the pressure to succeed was high.
Armed with a pocketful of freshly printed business cards, Nestor went out into the drug-trafficking community and spread the word about our services. They included the five vehicles with hides and the first brick-sized cell phones.
Nestor acted as our recruiter, vetter, and salesman, and handed out business cards to major dealers only. We didn’t want this to be a walk-in-off-the-street kind of business. If you didn’t have a business card from Nestor, you didn’t get in.
He did his job so well that when we got ready to open our doors one morning at 9 AM, there was a line of people waiting to get in. Once in the showroom, drug traffickers checked out our vehicles and phones. Then just like in a legitimate car dealership one of the undercovers would saunter over and discuss price and terms.
A typical conversation went like this:
UNDERCOVER: “How many pairs of shoes do you have?” (Undercovers never used the terms of cocaine or kilos.)
“Four hundred,” a customer answered.
“Then you’re going to need the van. Right this way.”
Our sparkling white Econoline van had a hide that could accommodate five hundred kilos and rented for $500 a day. We never let a conveyance leave without having a positive identification on the renter as a predicated drug trafficker, and a valid legal reason to initiate an investigation. All our vehicles were equipped with trackers, and everything that went on in the showroom was video and audiotaped.
Within weeks, we became the Hertz of drug dealers in the Philadelphia/southern New Jersey/New York City area. Demand for our services was so high that we had to order five more vehicles. The vans and trucks were by far the most popular, and they were being used to move large loads.
Even with ten vehicles in our arsenal, we had to be extremely selective. There were only so many vans and trucks we could follow and arrests we could make. It got to the point where we were turning down eight out of ten requests for our products.
Additionally, we were running Title III intercepts on the cell phones we leased out. Swamped with paperwork and the logistics of tracking vehicles and phones, we started to narrow our focus to only the big suppliers. At the same time, we had to be strategic in order to hide our hand.
Say we followed a car to a stash house. Instead of hitting the car, we might raid the stash house days later and with legal warrants. Next time around, we might do the opposite. The point was to confuse the bad guys and wall off our New Jersey operation. We didn’t want the dealers to suspect that the FBI was running the car and cell phone rental scheme, and they never did.
We learned that most major Colombian suppliers were located in New York City, and made them our priority. When local Philadelphia dealers used our vehicles to travel to New York City, we assumed they were carrying money. And when they returned to Philadelphia, we figured they were transporting dope. Sometimes we’d let the money go and seized the dope. Other times, working with the New York FBI or New Jersey Police, we seized the money.
Once we followed one of our vans to a drug house in the Badlands and watched guys fill the hide with hockey bags. When we stopped the van on the Jersey Turnpike, we discovered the hockey bags were packed with a half million dollars in cash—a good day’s haul.
Sophisticated and experienced drug-trafficking organizations like the Colombians built losing dope in law enforcement seizures into their business model. They moved so damn much of it that forfeiting some was no big deal. But hitting their money really pissed them off. The recorded conversations at MRK were hilarious, with dopers complaining to our undercovers that they were having a run of bad luck, and us encouraging them to push harder to make up the losses, and when they did, whacking them again.
In the spring of 1991, Eastload became so successful that word about our rental operation had spread from the streets into far away federal prisons. A pint-sized Cuban dealer named Cristobal Paz, serving a ten-year sentence for distribution of cocaine at a federal prison in Kentucky, learned about us through a business associate in Philadelphia named Theodore Santiago.
Paz’s sentence was about to expire and once out, he wanted to make fast money. We first heard Paz’s name when he reached out to Nestor through Santiago and inquired about our hide cars and phones. When we ran Paz’s name through NADDIS, it showed up in connection with more than twenty drug investigations. Come on down!!
Literally days after Paz’s release from prison, he strutted into our showroom with Santiago like he was the real-life Scarface. As I listened the arrogant little fuck demanded one of our hide cars immediately. Trouble was we didn’t have any available.
Paz puffed out his chest at one of our undercovers and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
Minutes later, he held up one of our brick-sized cell phones and said, “Give me two of these. You know the FBI can’t record these.”
He was mistaken. We not only had federal court authority to listen on the cell phone he rented from us for ninety days, we also subpoenaed his phone records from prison. They revealed that Paz was communicating with major Colombian suppliers in New York and talking with them about setting up windfall future deals.
A week or so after his first visit, Paz got the hide car he wanted and started moving dope. We followed the first car to his New York supplier. The second time he rented a hide car from us, we waited until he left and hit his stash house, which contained thirty-five kilos of cocaine he had just obtained from a Medellín kingpin in New York.
Hoping that Paz could lead us to bigger fish, we made the strategic decision not to immediately arrest him. Because of the seizure of the thirty-five kilos, he owed money to the kingpin in New York—a Colombian man named Jose Gonzalez-Rivera. We focused on Paz and Gonzalez-Rivera almost exclusively for months, tracking their daily movements and monitoring their communications and learned that Gonzalez-Rivera was dealing directly with the Pablo Escobar organization in Medellín.
Two years into Eastload and after a year of following Paz, we’d amassed an impressive amount of highly incriminating evidence against Paz, Gonzalez-Rivera, and their associates, and it was time to throw their asses in jail. On arrest day, we had the undercover troopers order five kilos of coke from Paz. The exchange took place on the Jersey side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge—not far from the location of our showroom. The cops accepted four kilos to be paid for later, and rejected one kilo by claiming it was of inferior quality, or “shit.” The whole transaction was videotaped.
When Paz drove away, I signaled a marked New Jersey State Police unit to pull him over and arrest him. Simultaneously, we grabbed Jose Gonzalez-Rivera and ten of their top associates in New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.
On February 7, 1992, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania returned a twenty-eight count indictment charging the twelve defendants with multiple federal drug offenses for conspiring to distribute in excess of 320 kilograms of cocaine valued at $6 million dollars. In the indictment, the U.S. attorney stated, “This is the first time in this district that we have brought an indictment against a Medellín, Colombia, cartel cell leader.”
Both Gonzalez-Rivera and Paz were charged with a CCE—running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, aka the federal “Kingpin” criminal statute, the heaviest federal drug hit possible. If convicted of the CCE count, they faced life in prison.
I loathed Paz at this point. To underline the point that he was being charged under the Kingpin statute, I put a paper Burger King hat on his head for his booking photo.
The little fucker was so pissed at the prospect of spending more time in prison after that he tried to chest-bump me as he got up from the chair. I read the CCE statute to him, emphasizing the life sentence potential, and I could see the gears turning in his head.
I remember thinking: I hope this asshole doesn’t have anything to offer, because I don’t want anything else to do with him.
The arrests of Paz and Gonzalez-Rivera were the culmination of an enormously time-consuming and exhausting UCO—two years of sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks with many missed birthdays and holidays. In return, we’d arrested approximately fifty drug dealers and had taken a huge amount of dope off the streets.
Over those two years, I’d tried to be a good father to our growing family, which now included five-year-old Russell, Michael born in 1987, and Paige born in 1990. I’d even signed up to coach my son Russell’s T-ball team. But because of my unpredictable work schedule, I sometimes ended up missing three or four games in a row.
Now I wanted to make it up to my wife and kids after basically being MIA for two years.
In meetings with Paz and his lawyer after his arrest but before his trial, Paz kept intimating that he possessed valuable information, which he was willing to share in exchange for favorable consideration in court. A big part of me didn’t want anything further to do with him. I was also dealing with something like thirty other defendants, some of whom were offering to cooperate and kick-start new investigations.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Shane Thomas, who was handling the case and a good friend of mine, advised, “You’re letting Paz get under your skin. It’s better to hear him out.”
“Alright,” I answered. “Tell his attorney that in our next meeting, Paz either plays his card, or we’re moving on.”
A few days later, Paz, his attorney, Shane Thomas, and I met in Shane’s office.
I looked Paz in the eye and said bluntly, “This is your last chance. Shit or get off the pot.”
He leaned back, nodded confidently, and said in heavily accented English, “You know who I can give you on a silver platter?”
“Who?”
“Mohammed Salim Malik,” he said with great importance.
I’d never heard the name before. “How do you spell that?”
Paz spelled it for me and I wrote it down.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You never heard his name before?”
“No. I don’t know who the fuck he is.”
“Go look him up, man. He’s famous. He’s one of DEA’s most wanted.”
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, but I showed no reaction. “Let’s hear what you’ve got on him first.”
Paz explained that while he was serving time in federal prison in McCreary, Kentucky, he had met Mohammed Salim Malik, who was in for ten years for trafficking hashish to the United States. The two dope dealers had discussed a wide-ranging international plan whereby Pakistani heroin would be traded for cocaine from Medellín, Colombia, with Malik and Paz serving as the intermediaries.
The scheme was brilliant in a diabolical way, as it would open huge markets for both the Colombians and Pakistanis in Europe and the Americas, respectively. And had the potential to be a huge, multimillion-dollar operation.
Paz explained that the two men had finalized the plan months before Malik finished serving his sentence. Malik had gotten out first and was now back in Pakistan and waiting to hear from Paz and put the proposal into action.
I walked away thinking, If this is real, I’ve got to pursue it. But my wife won’t be happy. I was also concerned that a year had passed since Paz had been released from prison. Maybe Malik had lost interest in the scheme in the interim.
First thing I had to do was check to see if Malik really was as important as Paz claimed he was. When I looked him up on NADDIS, all these alarm bells went off instructing us to notify DEA immediately. Malik was a prized target and considered one of the top five heroin distributors in Pakistan.
Shane and I spoke to the DEA and they said they had open cases on Malik. But the reality was that he was walking around free in the city of Karachi, Paz was offering to cooperate with us, and the DEA and FBI shared jurisdiction in drug cases, including international investigations.
We responded to the DEA diplomatically, “Great. We’re here to help. We’re going to take a shot at him ourselves.”
My gut told me that Malik could be a major win. Other Agents on our Squad were more skeptical, asking, “How are you going to get in touch with him?” And, “Why are you bothering?”
“I’m bothering,” I answered, “because he’s one of the top heroin distributors in the world, and he needs to be locked up—again.”
I’d already been lucky once with the tip that led me to Nestor. I wasn’t going to let the excuses of my exhaustion, or the added workload, or the possible consequences at home cause me to turn my back on this opportunity either.
It was time to saddle up again.