The Pretender Page 10

  Some CWs and CIs are selected and recruited based on their specialized knowledge and connections in a specified area, as was the case with Timmy. With others, such as Oscar, the investigative value is their ability to scour the countryside (or, more likely, the cityscape) and pinpoint criminals in the targeted activity, then gain their confidence. (Much like a good undercover agent, in fact.) John Sultan worked in a similar capacity. He didn’t live on the streets, he certainly didn’t have his acre of criminal turf that he knew like the back of his hand, but John had a great knack for building rapport: criminals, terrorists, they wanted to trust John Sultan.

  Oscar Cascillo’s street connections were already extensive when he started working with us, but he was also a bloodhound. My case agent Dave Clark had merely to point Oscar in the right direction. But Oscar’s motivation for working for Dave and the FBI was cash—two hundred here, four hundred there—so we had to watch out for the bullshit. His information had to be interpreted with appropriate circumspection. Or like I just wrote, trust these guys just as far as you need, and no more. Or to put it bluntly, in Oscar’s case: maybe half of his information from the streets was worth anything. In stark contrast with John Sultan: the cash wasn’t that important to John, and there was never any bullshit from him.

  One early summer afternoon—the year is now 1992—I was riding with Oscar in his big old boat of a Chevy convertible, a car that could be, and often was, parked in Washington Heights or the South Bronx, without fear of its disappearing (its value on the hot-car market wouldn’t have covered the cost of a good parillada (delicious Hispanic BBQ)). With his Hawaiian print shirt, Panama hat, and gold-capped front teeth, the paunchy middle-aged Venezuelan Oscar looked right at home in the big convertible. We were driving to Newark to a gas station/car repair/used-car lot owned by a Bengalese immigrant Oscar had unearthed. The man’s name was Nair, and he could, according to Oscar, obtain driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and other fraudulent documents. This could be a good score for RUN-DMV.

  Oscar had been out there once, but even though he didn’t know the street address or the name of the place or Nair’s full name (Nair itself ranks with Smith and Rodriguez for uniqueness), he promised me he could find our target in one of Newark’s many run-down South Bronx look-alike neighborhoods. Driving over in Oscar’s car was probably not the smartest thing to be doing, either, but Nair had already seen the Chevy. It wouldn’t cause any agita when it reappeared at his shop. I was carrying my mini-Nagra and my Walther PPK. I didn’t have a transmitter because I was alone (Oscar didn’t count), with no surveillance backup. There was no one nearby to listen to any transmission. In those days, we UCs were almost always on our own. Only rarely did I have surveillance covertly covering me from a van down the street (for example). Today, there would be a mandatory surveillance team, lots of preapprovals, other red tape. Nair’s establishment would probably be formally surveyed prior to any meets, his criminal history and INS status checked, and so forth. It’s safer for the UC now, I guess, but also much more cumbersome and, in some cases, limiting. This is an issue I’ll develop as the book unfolds. Moreover, all that background work required today is resource intensive and costly, and the Bureau’s resources are not limitless. With the result being, I suspect, fewer UC meets and fewer subjects investigated through covert ops.

  And backup surveillance is only safer, not safe. It is not foolproof. What is? This case in point: Shortly after I had established my relation with Mahmoud at Holyland, Vicki and Dave wanted to take some pictures and get a feel for the place. They arrived before my scheduled meet with Mahmoud and parked the minivan with tinted windows down the street, but with line of sight to the storefront. (If the subjects of such surveillance are considered to be “surveillance conscious,” a third agent would have driven the van to the site, parked, stepped out, and walked away, leaving it “empty,” as far as anyone could tell.) At Holyland, Dave and Vicki just parked and crawled in back with their equipment. No one on Morris Avenue noticed, or cared. Mahmoud himself was now more at ease with me. Over the course of two or three meets over a period of a couple of months, I had made it clear that I had frequent contact with people in need of false IDs. Mahmoud had no problem understanding why they would be a popular commodity in the circles I frequented, and he went on, at surprising length, as to what he could provide—primarily, real driver’s licenses, car registrations, and Social Security cards. He sincerely regretted that he had no sources for green cards. (I guess so, since Ortega charged $15,000 for this service, as mentioned.) Mahmoud and I discussed prices, and now I haggled a little more, because it was necessary.

  To be successful, the UC has to think like and act like a real criminal, to project all the indicia of really being what he claims to be. If you agree to whatever price the subject wants, you are too eager to close the deal, you’re not looking to make money, you’re just looking to complete the buy. To anyone who is the least bit street-smart, alarms will go off, if only in the deepest recesses of the brain. On the other hand, if you make it clear that you’re willing to walk away from the deal, that you’re not interested in the subject personally, that all you care about is making money, that you can always buy the documents or drugs or guns or whatever from a hundred other guys, then you are sending out signals that you are for real.

  Mahmoud understood that if his fraudulent docs were going to be worth my while, I needed enough of a margin to add my cut. We struck a deal in principle. After the meet, at a prearranged location (a McDonald’s parking lot), I joined Vicki and Dave in the back of the van. My adrenaline was still flowing. I was in that post-UC-meet state of mild euphoria mixed with heightened ego.

  “Can you believe what he was saying? Was that an amazing conversation or what?”

  A bemused smile from Dave: “All we could hear was static. But as long as you’ve got it all on your tape, we’re fine.”

  We were fine only because I hadn’t needed their help! We might not have been fine if I had needed it. I was developing a new appreciation as to the value of surveillance in UC operations. If the surveillance team can hear and make out what’s going on, maybe they can respond in time, but thirty seconds can be and probably is an eternity if the meet falls apart. For example, some years before, in Philadelphia, undercover agent Chuck Reed, forty-five years old and a father of three, was sitting in the back of drug-dealer Jonathan Cramer’s Mercedes-Benz discussing a future buy while the confidential informant sat in the front passenger seat. As no money and no drugs would be changing hands, it was the kind of meet that one would consider very low risk. Neither the UC nor the dealer would be worried about a rip; the dealer would not be contemplating a possible bust. Nothing to be concerned about. It was late morning on a sunny but brisk March day in 1996. They were parked in the lot of the Comfort Inn, in Philadelphia’s Old City.

  Reed had his portfolio, the kind with a zipper running along the top between the handles. Inside was his Nagra. Placed to his left on the transmission bump, it was situated so as to clearly record all three occupants of the car. Cramer, inexplicably hinky, reached back in a sudden motion, pushed aside the handles of the portfolio, peered inside, and exclaimed: A wire! Reed instantaneously drew his gun. FBI … DON’T MOVE. Cramer also reacted instantaneously: the gun under his right thigh was suddenly in his hand and firing. The one surveillance car a few hundred yards away heard a volley of gunfire as Reed and Cramer fired away within the close confines of the Benz. The surveillance team watched as a door opened and someone rolled out—the informant, escaping the rain of bullets. Both Chuck Reed and his subject were mortally wounded.

  The bottom line: No matter how close the surveillance backup is positioned, the best I could hope for is for the cavalry to arrive in time to pick up the pieces. As an undercover agent, I was totally responsible for my own well-being. If I wanted to enhance my chances of survival, I needed to do it myself.

  I wasn’t thinking about all this in the front of my brain as Oscar and I rolled toward
Newark, but it had to be in the back, didn’t it? I knew that 90 percent of the time, being a special agent working the streets is not dangerous. But when it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. The reason there are not more fatalities is that the men and women who become agents are not your average people. Pluck someone off the street and make them an active agent on the streets (not a desk jockey) and see how long they last. It probably goes without saying that this is especially true for UCs. Very few UCs are killed—only Chuck Reed during my career along with one UC fatality each from the NY State Police, DEA, and Newark PD (this officer was waiting to testify inside the courthouse)—and this is only because of the nature of the people doing the job. Not your typical people. Not your typical agents. While this may seem obvious, it certainly wasn’t obvious to me. Not then. I had sincerely felt that what I was doing every day was as safe as any other job in the Bureau. It took several years for me to realize that almost no one was getting killed only because it was Jack Garcia, or Lee Howell, or Mark Pecora, or, yes, Marc Ruskin, doing the work.

  It distresses me to report that Chuck Reed worked undercover only occasionally. That terrible afternoon in Philadelphia was just such an occasion. That’s an obvious problem. To have an agent who primarily works as a field agent occasionally take the reins as a UC is akin to the cardiologist who occasionally performs open-heart surgery. In medicine, this doesn’t (it is to be hoped) happen often, and the equivalent shouldn’t happen in UC work. But there are not, as a practical matter, enough full-time UCs to handle all the potential cases. It was perhaps a reflection of my exaggerated self-image, but I would never turn down a case, particularly one involving potentially violent subjects. My reasoning: If I didn’t handle it, someone else would. If I did the job, there was less likelihood that things would break bad. And if another, perhaps less experienced UC was injured because I had turned down the role, I would be responsible (or so ran my logic).

  * * *

  On the way to Nair’s place, I told Oscar exactly how to explain my background to this new subject. I told him several times, and I had him repeat it back to me, in English and in Spanish, to make sure he had it straight. I said quite clearly, “Bueno, Oscar, escúchame bien. Alex is an old friend from Miami, a Cubano, he’s had to leave Florida and needs new ID. Don’t tell this guy [Nair] why I had to leave, don’t tell him anything he doesn’t need to know. It’ll just hink him up. He’s not going to ask and he’s not going to care.”

  “No te preocupes, Alex. I got it, entiendo, hermano!” Like all confidential witnesses and informants I worked with, Oscar knew me only by my street name. If he doesn’t even know another one (my real name), he can’t possibly slip up and use the wrong one. John was an exception. First: I had initially approached him as Marc, in order to interview him regarding his complaint to the state AG’s office. (These were the early days of my UC career. I quickly learned to never participate in noncovert, true-name activities.) Second: He was several cuts above other CWs.

  After getting off the highway, we drove along the dreary streets, the tenements interspersed with weedy lots enclosed by rusty fences, ramshackle businesses, and dirty grocery stores. Oscar pulled the Chevy into a large corner lot. There were a couple of gas pumps, a lot of cars, and a fairly large, old garage building with a few bays and a wooden door leading toward an office area. The bays had cars in them, with a few mechanics moving around. We were first approached by a pack of large, well-groomed, and seriously menacing German shepherds, then by a short, stout middle-aged man with long, stringy gray hair. Oscar had provided me with a general description. This was Nair. When he gave a command to the pack, they trotted away obediently. He led us through a large room and into a back office, and waved for me and Oscar to sit opposite his cluttered desk. The door stayed open and the dogs trotted in and out and around, with Nair apparently oblivious to their presence or to any disconcerting effect they might have on his guests. I didn’t mind them. “Beautiful dogs,” I remarked. Nair smiled. Then Oscar made the introductions.

  “This is Alex, I told you about him. He’s a major cocaine dealer from Colombia.” I looked at Oscar. If the Bu’s UC procedural manual had permitted it, I would have shot him dead right there in Nair’s little office. He had made a thoughtless, terrible mistake. What if Nair had replied “Colombia!” Excellente. What part, my friend? My wife and I lived there for ten years before coming to the U.S.” Maybe I wouldn’t be alive to write these pages.

  But he didn’t. What Nair did was start the conversation in Spanish, then revert to English once he was apparently satisfied that I was a native speaker. He fished around in his desk and pulled out an envelope containing a number of worn Social Security cards. He asked me to choose one with a name that I liked, and said that he would obtain a New Jersey driver’s license to match. He could also, maybe, get me a passport, but it would be expensive. A couple of hundred for the SSAN card alone, another $1,000 for the DL. We haggled. I argued for a discount, saying I could bring him more clients. He countered that he was just making a small profit; there were others he had to pay. Then we struck a deal. Back in the car on the New Jersey Turnpike, I confronted Oscar, “What the fuck where you doing? I told you Miami, Cubano. I told you NOT to say anything about any criminal activity, just to hint that I had some problems. You said it back to me. I told you what I wanted you to say!”

  Nonplussed by my anger, with broad smile, cigarette dangling: “I thought it would make a better impression. You know, make him think you’re a big shot drug dealer.”

  As a source, Oscar lived up to all the stereotypes, and then some: ready to say anything to anybody if he thought there was some benefit in it. Benefit to him.

  * * *

  In the RUN-DMV era, official surveillance was rare, as I’ve mentioned, but ultimately I did have backup on the scene, though it took some creative effort on my part. The whole question of my personal safety and the limitations of surveillance based a block away had focused my attention. My search for a respectable way to make this job and this life less likely to end abruptly was already in the back of my mind when I attended a three-day seminar for NY-based SAs on the Bureau’s UC ops. The covert location was a Midtown hotel in Manhattan. Some of the speakers were UCs I had come to know well in the past couple of years, so this would be an opportunity to schmooze and relax for a few days, a break from the street.

  Among the attendees I noticed an odd couple, their body language seeming to indicate that they were friends, not more. Perhaps squad-mates with an interest in learning about the subject. The guy looked like the antithesis of UC, what I would have described as the FBI type least suited for covert activity. Actually, a caricature of a special agent. Large and slightly overweight, he sported a signature police officer mustache and wore dark-blue “tactical” SWAT-like clothing, inappropriate for the office, really inappropriate for a covert conference. On his Sam Brown (police belt, of course) he carried: a large automatic pistol, a double mag-pouch with two additional high-capacity ammunition clips, a handcuff pouch, a collapsible baton in a pouch, and a handi-talkie in leather clip-on holster. What a character. I concluded that he probably worked foreign counterintelligence, where he’d be unlikely to make more than one arrest every couple of decades. I’ll note that I carried a pistol at the conference, nothing else. I had stopped carrying handcuffs six months out of the academy.

  Meanwhile, this agent’s companion projected a different image. Blond shoulder-length hair, a close-fitting, sleeveless, short white dress, high heels, and long legs, she would have appeared more at home at F.I.T. (Fashion Institute of Technology) about twenty blocks to the south than at this FBI function. During a break in the action I learned her name: Alicia Hilton. She had three years of agent time and was very, very interested in undercover work. I told her that I would be happy to bring her along on some of my meets. She could be Alex Perez’s old lady. Did she want to run the idea by her supervisor? She did indeed. If she got the okay, she’d call and we’d set something up.
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br />   I also had to check with my immediate boss, Craig, as well as my case agents, Dave and Vicki. They approved my thinking and my plan. The initial reasoning behind bringing along a female UC to some meets was not security. I had developed a number of friends among the runners at Yonkers, but in my efforts to develop their trust, developing Alex as a credible and likable scoundrel, I had neglected to present a personal side. While this alone would not have raised suspicion (just the opposite, such reticence would be perfectly in character for the cautious outlaw), it opened the door for what was becoming an increasing number of offers from my new friends on the street to introduce me to pretty young women. Julio Dominguez’s girlfriend had a recently separated best friend, looking to meet someone. Was I interested? Carlos had a cousin, single, and very attractive. Would I like to meet her? Outright refusals would have been rude and harmful to the painstakingly developed relationships, but my continued postponement of all such proffered introductions to available young women would soon become problematic.

  Outside of Hollywood, UCs don’t allow themselves to become romantically (or otherwise) entangled with subjects of the opposite gender, nor with their friends and families. It’s also true that Ben Berry—my classmate at Quantico and one of the UC agents in the ill-fated COMMCORR investigation—had met his future wife while undercover in COMMCORR. But she was not remotely connected to the case. They met playing cello in a string quartet. And that situation had still been complicated. And it was equally important not to allow a situation to develop that could lead to speculation, accusations, or awkward circumstances. Several years later, I worked a La Cosa Nostra case in Long Island and Queens along with another, younger UC. After a late-night meet, the wife of one of the subjects asked the UC for a ride home. On the way, she asked him to pull over at a quiet spot. She had said she wasn’t feeling well, but as it turned out she was feeling well enough to try to go down on the guy, a maneuver that he (purportedly) was able to dissuade her from executing.