Again, we had to jump through hoops before FBIHQ and the Justice Department approved our new undercover operation in March 1992. It helped enormously that this time I had “made my bones” (FBI-speak) in the Bacalao and Eastload investigations. In other words, I had successfully investigated and prosecuted major cases from start to finish. My FBI boss assigned three other Special Agents to help me work the new Pakistani UCO.
From the get-go, we ran into difficulties, including the fact that handling Cristobal Paz as an informant was a logistical nightmare. Because of the seriousness of the charges against him, no federal judge was willing to release him into our long-term custody. So every time we needed Paz to communicate with Mohammed Salim Malik, we had to seek permission from the court to take him from prison.
During the time Paz was in our custody, it was our responsibility to guard him 24/7. We assigned two older guys in the office who didn’t mind spending hours sitting in our undercover office to serve as his security team. Their duties included escorting Paz back and forth from prison to our off-site undercover office, feeding him, and dealing with his bullshit. Every time we picked him up, he arrived with another litany of requests and complaints. He wanted a steak sandwich, he needed a more comfortable bed, because the one in prison didn’t meet his standards, he didn’t like the way we were running the case.
Another challenge involved the time difference between southern New Jersey and Karachi—Karachi is ten hours ahead. From our undercover office located in an office park in southern New Jersey, Paz initiated contact with Malik via phone and fax. He explained to Malik that he had recently been released from prison and was anxious to get the drug exchange scheme moving. The Pakistani drug trafficker seemed interested.
My mother once told me, “If you want to do something right, do it yourself.” At the start of the operation, I requested a fax machine that we could use exclusively for communications with Malik. When I tested the machine that the FBI supplied by sending a sample message to our office machine, the fax went out with an FBI header—not a good idea when running an undercover operation. I made it a practice to double- and triple-check everything.
Paz was born in Cuba, and like Nestor, had come to the United States in the summer of 1980 during the infamous Mariel boatlift when Cuban leader Fidel Castro permitted 125,000 Cubans to leave the country and head to Florida. A number of those released were mental patients and criminals—Paz among the latter. Over the dozen or so years Paz had resided in the United States, he had spent most of it in prison or engaged in some form of criminal activity.
Paz had never developed a proficiency in English. Meanwhile, Malik’s faxes were carefully worded and sounded as though they had been written by an English professor.
After a month or two of at least seventy electronic messages between southern New Jersey and Pakistan, the two drug traffickers started speaking directly over the phone. Now the language barrier between Paz, a native-Spanish speaker, and Malik, a native-Urdu speaker, became a more serious issue. The former worried that his English wasn’t good enough to negotiate the complexities of an international drug swap.
He needed help. I requested and got a fourth Agent named Lee Ross, who looked about twelve years old and spoke fluent Spanish. Despite the fact that Lee was a new recruit and new recruits usually got the shit assignments, I immediately designated him Paz’s “cousin,” and used him as the English translator between Paz and Malik.
* * *
Malik claimed to be running a travel agency in Karachi. The two principals, fearful that the DEA was listening in on their communications, spoke in code, referring to heroin and cocaine as “friend,” “marbles,” or “carpets.”
“I need rugs. Lots of rugs,” Paz said during one conversation.
“How many?” Malik asked.
“Hundreds at a time. Good quality rugs.”
“I can arrange that. The rugs are the best you can find—the highest quality rugs in all of Pakistan.”
The Paz-Malik talks might have sounded casual, but were actually carefully worked out on our end. Two days before Paz was scheduled to come to our undercover office, I’d start writing the outlines of a script for him to follow. Over the weeks and months, I got pretty good at thinking and talking like a dope dealer.
At the end of one conversation with Malik, Paz would set up the time of their next communication. Sometimes Malik would call unexpectedly. A special red phone in the office was dedicated exclusively to Malik. Everyone had instructions not to pick it up when it rang.
Several times, Lee Ross answered the red phone by mistake and would have to explain that his cousin Paz was out on other business. Once, the red phone rang when Paz was on another phone yacking with one of his relatives. I got his attention, pointed to the red phone, and indicated that he should answer it promptly.
Paz, being an arrogant little prick, responded with a dismissive wave of his hand and turned his back to me. He continued to gab with his relative and ignore the ringing phone.
My world turned red. I’d never laid a hand on an informant before, and never have since. But this time, after months of putting up with Paz’s constant complaints about how stupid we were and how he was being treated unfairly, I grabbed him by the collar, lifted him out of his chair, and threw him across the room like a human Frisbee as the other Agents froze in shock.
A dazed Paz pulled himself up and proceeded to answer the phone. When the conversation with Malik ended, he turned to me and with indignation in his voice asked, “Are you fucking insane, man? You are a crazy man.… What the fuck … you could have killed me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”
I came right back at him, still boiling hot. “You ever blow me off again when I tell you to do something, you midget motherfucker, maybe I will kill you. When I tell you to answer the phone, answer the phone!” I was all ready for Round Two.
Paz backed away shouting, “You can’t treat me like this. I quit! I’m afraid to talk to you. I want to talk to the judge.”
“Listen to me, Paz, and listen clearly,” I said getting in his face. “Next time the phone rings, you’ve got three seconds to pick it up before you piss me off. You haven’t seen me pissed off yet. What just happened, is nothing.”
Paz always answered the Malik phone promptly after that.
Starting in February 1992, we listened in on approximately 135 calls between Paz and Malik. At the beginning, the odds of the operation’s success had been infinitesimal, but they slowly increased as we persevered through one obstacle after another and inched forward.
In a conversation in April, Malik said, “Listen to me carefully.… I have something really big. I’m waiting on a signal from you. I’m almost ready … and I can do any damn thing.…”
In a fax sent in June, he boasted, “Let me educate you about my product.… This product contains between 85 and 90 percent, which means you can cut it four to six times.”
He wasn’t talking about apples. Heroin of the purity he referred to was unheard of in the United States at the time and if injected would be lethal. The amounts he talked about were unprecedented as well. In the early ’90s, an exchange involving one or two kilograms of heroin was considered a huge deal in the United States. Now, we were overhearing Malik and Paz discuss the importation of up to five hundred kilograms of heroin worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The amounts Paz and Malik discussed were so staggering that the DEA suggested the entire scheme was “not credible.” Between managing the undercover operation and stealing time to spend with my family, I studied Malik and his native Pakistan. I learned that Pakistan was part of the “Golden Crescent,” and shared a long border with the country of Afghanistan—the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin—and that the majority of Afghan heroin passed through Pakistan before it was distributed to Iran, Russia, Europe, and North America. So the quantities Malik was talking about weren’t outside the realm of possibility.
The initial trade had remained the same one they had outlined in prison—an exchange of a hundred kilos of cocaine for fifty kilos of heroin. Heroin was more expensive. One day Malik upped the ante.
He said to Paz over the phone, “I need 150 pair of shoes of your best merchandize.”
“Then how many marbles will you send to me?” Paz asked.
“Fifty.”
“No way,” Paz answered. “If we do it that way you’re screwing me on the deal.”
Like most drug traffickers, Paz couldn’t add two and two together, but was phenomenally skilled at negotiating dope deals. The purity of the drugs proved to be a complicating factor. Five kilos of heroin at 90 percent purity was more valuable than ten kilos at 20 percent.
Both Malik and Paz also struggled to solve the dilemma of how the exchange would take place. Once one of them sent their drugs, what would prevent the second guy from screwing him?
On the FBI side, we also faced a conundrum. Legal restrictions prevented us from sending illegal drugs to Malik in Pakistan. Nor could we front the millions of dollars required to purchase heroin from him. In 1992, one kilo of heroin had a street value of about $200,000, and Malik was offering to send a first shipment of fifty kilos. All we needed to legally charge him was a few ounces.
Faced with both problems, we came up with a solution, which was to ask Malik to send us a sample so we could test its purity and use it to establish a network for his product in the United States. The problem was that at the time it was practically unheard of for drug traffickers to front their product because of the possibility of being ripped off. In the scenario we came up with, we were counting on Malik to realize that the possible rewards outweighed the risk.
As Case Agent, I directed everything through Paz and Lee. The mental concentration, the daily pressure, and the fear of making a minor mistake that would compromise everything we had worked toward weighed heavily. After the more taxing exchanges, I would be so mentally exhausted that I would lay on the hard concrete office floor and immediately fall asleep.
It took months of daily phones calls to convince Malik to accept our plan. Now the remaining problem was the purity. In April 1992, I instructed Paz to try to set up a face-to-face meeting. During their next phone conversation, Paz said to Malik, “We have to get in the same room. This phone stuff isn’t working.”
“I agree,” Malik responded. “Why don’t you come here, so we can talk in person?”
Since Paz was spending his nights in a prison cell in New Jersey, there was no way he was going to Pakistan. Malik, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the country that had locked him away for ten years. I suggested another friendly country—Canada. A month later, Malik offered to send his thirty-eight-year-old nephew Shahid Hafeez Khawaja in his place. The meeting was to take place in Montreal, Canada, which Malik thought of as outside the purview of U.S. law. What he didn’t know was that Canadian and U.S. law enforcement officials had a long history of cooperation in criminal investigations.
This case didn’t prove be an exception. Canadian authorities quickly offered to help us in any way. The next problem we encountered was that we couldn’t take Paz out of the country. We recruited my old informant Nestor instead, and Paz told Malik that he was tied up with local business and was sending a trusted lieutenant to negotiate on his behalf.
I accompanied Nestor and Lee to Montreal in mid-May 1992, but as the Case Agent remained out of sight. Together with members of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) I watched as Nestor greeted Shahid at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Montreal. Shahid wasn’t what I had expected, and looked more like a goofy computer salesman than a drug trafficker. He spoke excellent English with a slight lisp.
The first actual sit-down was scheduled for that evening at a local strip club. I slipped into the seedy club ahead of time and found the manager.
With dance music blaring in the background, I said to him, “I have a business associate named Khawaja coming in later and I want you to take good care of him.” Then I greased his palm with a little green.
The manager nodded and replied, “You got it, pal.”
In the company of two plainclothes OPP guys, I watched from a side table as Khawaja arrived in the company of Nestor and Lee. The moment Khawaja spied the naked dancers twirling and grinding on the stage, his eyes almost popped out of his head.
It struck me as both funny and sad. Here was a young married man with pockets full of money who had apparently never seen a nude woman before. He sat completely mesmerized by the dancers as beads of sweat dripped from his face onto his open-collared shirt. Getting him to discuss the possible dope deal wasn’t going to be easy.
The Canadian cops and I drank beer, and tried to look inconspicuous. At this point in my career, I’d done very little undercover work, and was looking around the joint at the various customers trying to figure out who was who—traveling salesman, undercover cop, criminal. As someone who’d always been interested in peoples’ behavior, I found the clientele fascinating.
My intense curiosity caught the attention of a couple of hard-assed customers who walked over to me and asked roughly, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
“Sorry,” I answered. “I was daydreaming.”
Time to focus and blend. As the hours dragged on and Khawaja kept spending money on girls and dances, I started to worry that he’d get rolled. I also wondered how I was going to explain the hundreds of dollars we were spending in the strip club to my FBI bosses.
The next day I got Nestor to convince Khawaja to accompany him to New Jersey, so he could meet Paz in person and settle business. As in the Eastload case, Nestor played his role perfectly. But when we tried to get him back into the United States, we ran into an unexpected snafu. Because of legal issues with Nestor’s original travel documents from Cuba, he was banned from reentering the United States.
So we sent Khawaja ahead to New Jersey to relax while we finished some other drug business in Montreal, and asked FBIHQ to petition the State Department and other U.S. government agencies to quickly resolve Nestor’s travel problem so he could return to the States and not raise any suspicion. After three intense days of FBI lobbying, other government agencies refused to budge. By day five I started to worry that the whole undercover was going up in smoke. We had to calm down Malik, who couldn’t understand why we were spending time on a different drug deal.
The UCO seemed to be coming apart. One afternoon, as I was commiserating with my Canadian cop friends over drinks in their police station—yes, they had a fully stocked bar in their station that worked on the honor system—they offered to help. I assumed they knew a way to cut through the bureaucratic red tape. Instead with beer suds dripping from their mustaches they drunkenly offered to load Nestor in the trunk of one of their cars and sneak him across the border. They even suggested perforating the trunk with strategically placed bullet holes so Nestor wouldn’t have trouble breathing. I got the sense this wasn’t the first time our Canadian friends had pulled this stunt.
“You can’t be serious?” I asked with a grin.
“We’re dead serious,” one of the Canadian cops replied.
After laughing my ass off, I wondered how my FBI superiors would react if they found out. Not well, I decided. The next day U.S. bureaucratic common sense finally kicked in, and Nestor was granted legal permission to return to the United States.
At our New Jersey office we produced Paz for a cameo appearance. Khawaja then called his uncle and told him what great guys we were, and asked us to take him to Atlantic City to ogle more naked dancers. He spent two days there partying. He was so distracted that we had to ask Malik to talk sense into his nephew so he could settle down long enough to work out the terms of a deal.
After months of tense negotiations, Malik finally agreed to front us 50 kilograms of heroin, which we would supposedly distribute and sell in the United States and use to convince our clients that we were supplying the best heroin in the world. All profits would be split fifty-fifty. If we were successful, Malik agreed to ship an additional 450 kilograms of heroin to be paid for cash on delivery (COD).
Even after securing a verbal agreement with Malik, no one in the FBI or DEA thought we could pull it off. I had one high-level FBI official tell me to “stop chasing the heroin fairy.” Since that edict was issued from somebody who sat behind a desk every day, I didn’t pay too much attention.
We spent the next few months painstakingly building credible backstopping legends for our purported shipping and receiving companies, and negotiating the nitty-gritty of the deal. The pace of phone calls between our New Jersey office and Karachi picked up further.
Finally in August 1992, Malik informed us that he was sending a load of heroin in steamer trunks to JFK Airport in New York. Our excitement spiked. We were finally going to get a chance to prove the skeptics wrong.
Three of us drove up to JFK and arrived after midnight. We’d already arranged for the steamer trunks to be moved to a secure room. As Case Agent, I was given the honor of opening the first of three very bulky trunks. Recognizing Malik’s handwriting on the U.S. Customs forms, visions of bricks of heroin flashed in my head.
My heart beating fast, I opened the lid of the first trunk and saw what looked like stacks of Pakistani Yellow Pages books inside. I figured the heroin had to be hidden in hollowed-out sections of the books—a common trafficking ploy. Instead when I picked up one of the phone books and opened it all I found were pages and pages of Pakistani names and phone numbers.
“Fuck!”
I frantically leafed through the other phone books. Nothing but pages.
One of my colleagues uttered some words of encouragement. “The dope has got to be in one of the other trunks.”
We ripped through the others. Same thing. Pakistani Yellow Pages, but no drugs. My heart sunk and my mood darkened to the point of devastation.
The three of us rode back to Philadelphia in total silence, as my mind imagined the heaps of abuse I was about to get from my superiors. We’d spent a lot of FBI time and money and delivered nothing.
The investigative leash squeezing tight around my neck, I asked myself, Is Malik deliberately fucking with us? Why? Does he want to do this deal, or not? My head spun in circles.
The following day, our guys fetched Paz from prison. When I told him about the phone books, he seemed as stunned as I was.
Surprisingly, Malik was unapologetic and businesslike when Paz spoke to him on the phone. He asked, “Did you receive the trunks?”
“Yes, we did,” Paz answered. “But—”
“Where?”
“JFK Airport.”
“Good. Read me the labels.”
“What labels?” Paz asked.
“The labels that were on the trunks.”
“You mean the shipping labels?”
“No, the labels put on by the U.S. Customs inspectors.”
As they spoke, it slowly dawned on me that Malik wasn’t playing games. He’d sent the load of phone books to test if a shipment from a new business address in Pakistan would pass through U.S. Customs and arrive safely at our undercover office. As an experienced international trafficker, Malik knew that any first-time delivery from a source of supply country such as Pakistan would be red-flagged and probably searched by U.S. Customs. He was being smart, not stupid, and intentionally didn’t tell us that he was sending a test shipment so that we didn’t do anything unusual.
My FBI bosses and Squad mates didn’t see it that way. From their perspective, we’d spent six months of time, energy, and FBI money for several trunk loads of Pakistani phone books. We quickly became the laughingstock of our local office and FBIHQ.
In typical FBI fashion, the comments from the Drug Squads were brutal.
“Hey, Mike. Nice work on nabbing those Pakistani Yellow Pages—how many years they going to get?”
“Yeah, next time I need to look up a car repair place in Karachi I know who to ask.”
The many jokes made at my expense rattled my waning confidence. The person in the Squad most supportive was my immediate boss, The Colonel, who pulled me aside and told me to keep my head down and keep working the case.
Determined to rally the team, I told them that every day we remained in the hunt was a good day. Malik was still talking to us and didn’t seem suspicious. By this point, I had listened to hours of conversations, and felt I could detect even the subtlest change in his tone and manner.
We inched forward. Finally, on October 12, Malik informed us that six pieces of luggage would be departing Karachi, Pakistan, for Philadelphia on Swiss Air flight #395 the following day. Three of the pieces would contain jogging suits and the other three pieces of luggage would hold the “requirements” that had been discussed.
All of us remained low-key this time. When I told my bosses the news, they seemed unimpressed.
The shipment was scheduled to land on October 15, 1992, at Philadelphia International Airport. If we seized it as law enforcement, we risked tipping off Malik and his associates. So we arranged to receive the boxes in our current role as UCAs (Undercover Agents).
Once we confirmed with Customs officials that the “six pieces of luggage” had arrived for our covert company, we had them moved to a private and secure area. We arrived at the airport around 3 AM when very few people were around.
My heart rate rising, I led the way into the secure backroom and saw the luggage—three suitcases and three large boxes wrapped in layers of thick plastic and burlap. Recognizing Malik’s handwriting on the Customs forms, my mind raced to dozens of possible outcomes, some good, some awful.
We set the suitcases aside, and then as professional courtesy as the Case Agent, I was given the privilege to open the first box. Lee handed me a box cutter and I struggled and cut through the thick plastic and burlap. Holding my breath, I reached inside the first box and removed … a handful of cotton bathrobes.
“Not again!” It felt like my heart had stopped beating. A huge cloud of doom filled the quiet room.
Issuing a stream of curses, I threw a handful of robes to the floor in disgust. Then I reached my arm deeper into the box. Under another layer of robes, I felt something hard and rectangular. Holding my breath, I moved my hand to the right and grazed another brick-like object, then another, and another.
“Pay dirt, guys!” I shouted. “I think we got something!”
Time seemed to stand still as we tore through the boxes and removed one brick after another. Each brick we assumed held one kilogram of heroin and was worth about $200,000 in the United States. As they kept coming, we beamed at one another like kids on Christmas morning. I was smiling so much, I must have looked like a complete idiot.
“Can you believe this, Mike?” one of the guys asked.
“We’ve hit the fucking heroin lottery!”
We eventually counted forty-six bricks containing a total of 44.6 kilos of heroin, or slightly less than a hundred pounds. Lab tests later determined that they averaged 85 percent purity, which was unheard of at the time. Cutting it three or four times would triple or quadruple its street value.
The DEA later placed a street value of $180 million on it, and we had gotten the heroin without spending a dime of government money. It seemed unbelievable.
Then it dawned on me that we’d better lock the heroin away quickly. So we packed the bricks in the trunk of our car and raced back to our FBI office, arriving at 6 AM. The secure evidence vault wasn’t going to open until the start of regular FBI working hours, 8:15 AM.
We piled the bricks on a long metal dolly and waited in the Squad #3 work area. The only way I could think of to secure the heroin before the vault opened was to climb on top of the bricks and sit on them.
I was half asleep when the first person entered the office. It was the leader of the other Drug Squad—Squad #2—a tough, competent Supervisory Special Agent with twenty-five-plus years of experience. When he saw us sitting on the bricks of heroin wrapped in plastic, he froze as though struck by lightning.
“Is that what I think it is?” he stammered.
“Yup.”
“Coke or heroin?”
“It’s heroin. Forty-six kilos.”
“Holy shit!”
More Special Agents arrived. Word of the seizure spread like wildfire through the office. Someone called FBIHQ in Washington and news of the haul circulated there as well.
People I barely knew surrounded me, patted me on the back, and congratulated me. I’d become the most popular guy in the office in an instant. The only thing I wanted to do was lock the heroin into the evidence room, and go home to see my wife and kids, who I’d practically ignored for the past year, and sleep.
Weeks later, as the excitement of the seizure continued, I learned that the Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigation Division—the number-three official in the FBI hierarchy—was on his way from Washington to hold a press conference. It dawned on me that only days earlier, this official and most of the other people congratulating me, didn’t know my name. Suddenly, a mere five years into my career, I’d become the FBI’s “Golden Boy”—FBI-speak for an Agent who can do no wrong.
It felt good, but there was still a lot of investigative work to do. In order to make arrests we had to attach bodies to the drugs. Fortunately, the internet was in its infancy as was twenty-four-hour cable TV news channels. So news of the seizure didn’t reach Malik and Khawaja in Pakistan. Our goal now was to lock them up.
The lure was the millions of dollars in cash owed to Malik from the supposed sale of the heroin in the United States. During a conversation between Malik and Paz on October 27, Malik proposed that Paz travel to Hong Kong to deliver the first payment of $2 million to his nephew Khawaja. Through Paz, we tried to convince Malik to travel to Hong Kong with his nephew.
In ’92, Hong Kong was still a British colony and subject to U.S.-UK extradition agreements. Since the transfer of sovereignty to the Chinese People’s Republic was scheduled to take place in a few years, our liaisons were both British police who spoke Chinese and People’s Republic of China police who spoke some English.
Other than the Canadian cops, I’d never really worked with foreign law enforcement counterparts before, and didn’t know what to expect when Lee, another Agent, and I arrived in densely populated Hong Kong. I soon learned that cops are cops no matter where they work. Both the British and Chinese police were very warm hosts, complete ballbusters (in foreign languages), and wined and dined us nonstop, as we continued to try to convince Malik to leave Karachi with Khawaja and meet us in Hong Kong.
Since my tastes in food are pretty basic, I avoided the more exotic dishes. At one buffet dinner, I thought I was eating a chicken dish, only to learn that it was really pigeon. No thanks.
During another evening escapade that involved the consumption of copious adult beverages, a group of very happy UK and Chinese officers helped me into a car and took off like maniacs into the countryside. They seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. I, meanwhile, had no idea where we were going or what they were up to.
After forty minutes of winding through the dark countryside, we pulled up to a decrepit saloon/club in the middle of nowhere where my foreign hosts were greeted like regulars. One of the Chinese cops introduced me to a woman of about seventy with two missing front teeth. She bowed and I nodded politely as the cop and woman jabbered back and forth in Chinese. Before I knew what was happening, the elderly woman took me firmly by the hand and was leading me to a backroom.
That’s when a British cop stopped me and explained that the old woman was a very experienced prostitute who was prepared to grant me three carnal wishes.
“Thanks,” I said, turning back, “but I’m fine.”
One of the Chinese policemen told me that I didn’t know what I was missing and that the old woman’s missing front teeth only enhanced her “skills.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mean to insult her or her skills. But I think I’ll pass.”
Minutes later another prostitute joined us at our table and asked for my business card to keep as “a memory.” A strange request, I thought, in our current setting and one I politely declined. It’s not that I’m a prude; I just didn’t think it was smart to leave an FBI calling card as a memento in a whorehouse—although I did see many business cards from customers from all over the world, including Dallas, Texas.
As we left my police hosts explained that we had driven into Communist China. They found great amusement at my shocked reaction. Now I was really glad that I hadn’t accepted the three carnal wishes from the elderly woman. Imagine the reaction if I had and the news got back to FBIHQ.
Let’s see if we got this right.… While on official business you took a detour into Communist China to have sexual relations with a toothless, seventy-year-old woman?
Lee, the third FBI Agent, and I remained in Hong Kong for a week, hoping that Malik would join us and we could arrest him. But the canny drug trafficker didn’t budge. Nor did he respond positively to other entreaties to meet in London or other locations around the world.
Finally, in January 1993, four months after the heroin seizure, Malik and Khawaja were arrested by Pakistani law enforcement. During the last recorded call between Paz and Malik, we directed Malik to a location in Karachi where the Pakistani authorities were waiting for him.
Because of the extradition process, I knew it could take months before we had Malik and Khawaja in U.S. custody. Still, I was enormously pleased. My team and I had arrested one of the world’s leading heroin traffickers and had seized an enormous amount of heroin valued at $180 million at no cost. In fact, it had been the largest heroin seizure in Philadelphia history, and the eighth largest in the world at that time.
After only five years in, I was feeling very good about my choice to join the FBI. Little did I know that a little more than one year later, my promising FBI career would suddenly become a real-life nightmare, all because of the prized, seized heroin.