The Pretender Read online

  Waiting by the three or four desks that made up Mahmoud’s business, I chatted with the attractive woman who had greeted me on the initial cold call. She turned out to be his younger sister, Fatima. Astonishingly gracious and refined, she was totally out of place on Morris Avenue. With her, it was hard for me to remain in character as Alex. Even a crude knowledge of world affairs and cultural distinctions might have seemed a bit much for this shady Miami Marielito named Alex Perez. Fatima was married, clearly by arrangement, and clearly unhappily, to Mahmoud’s old gnome of a business partner, Hakim. While Hakim was only rarely at Holyland, he was not totally oblivious and was present enough to develop a dislike for me. Not a distrust, just an antipathy toward a man whose presence his young wife seemed to enjoy.

  There were a few subjects developed in the course of RUN-DMV whom I really did not want to be arrested. Fatima was at the top of the list. But for her brother and her wretched husband, she would not have been involved in anything like this—it was the family business. My concern for her mounted one afternoon well into the sting. Before telling that story, I need to lay this groundwork. What passed for high tech in those days was the beeper transmitter. Prior to cell phones, people carried beepers. The really old beepers, utilized mostly by doctors, really did just beep, nothing else. The doctor would then call the answering service. The next generation—the first ones I used—would display a number, usually a phone number, but drug dealers would often establish a set of coded number (“44,” for example, might mean “the cocaine is ready for pick-up”). The FBI provided me (and other UCs) with a device that appeared to be such a beeper but was really a transmitter to send any conversation straight to a nearby surveillance team. This was a big improvement over a shiny metal transmitter with antenna taped to the chest or carried in a pocket. I rarely used those crude transmitters, if only because I seldom had backup nearby to listen to my communication. And I was never comfortable even when I did. Who would be? If discovered, the consequences would be grim indeed. The really good beeper/transmitters actually could receive beeped numeric messages, and were thus completely safe to carry. I didn’t have one of the really good ones. Mine had little dashes painted on the screen. (Sounds pathetic, I know. And this was the ultra-high-tech Federal Bureau of Investigation!) Upon close inspection, this thing would be revealed as not a beeper at all, only a transmitter, and therefore no safer than the shiny metal transmitter with the antenna.

  On the afternoon at Holyland in question, I had as part of my toolkit, and for the first time, one of the devices that looked like a beeper but was actually a transmitter. On this occasion, my case agents, Dave and Vicki, were down the street in the van to take pictures and perhaps hear from me. In addition to the phony beeper, I also had a real beeper on my belt. Two of them? Not unusual for denizens of Alex’s world. Different numbers for different connections. Always safer to blur the lines. Waiting to meet with Mahmoud, I chatted with Fatima about this and that until she said, out of the blue and by way of advice, “Alex, there’s something you have to be careful about. The police, the undercover cops, they now have beepers that are really radios, you know, microphones so the other cops can hear what’s going on and record it. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  Wow. The word about my new toy was already out. Even Fatima knew about these things. This was sobering. Any chance she had a hunch what I was?! Could her word of advice have been more than that—a warning? In retrospect, I decided she was simply expressing a genuine concern for a charismatic rogue.

  On another visit, I leafed through an Arabic newspaper at the front counter, while Mahmoud was in his office on the phone. Looking at the photos, I came across a political cartoon depicting caricatures of a Bedouin and a Jew shaking hands. In his left hand, concealed behind his back, the Jew held a long-bladed knife. I had an inspiration. Finally admitted into Mahmoud’s office, I held up the cartoon and said, “It’s really terrible the way those Zionists murdered a holy man, while violating the border of another country.” I was referring to the recent targeted assassination of a major Hezbollah leader conducted by the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon. My knowledge and interpretation were a bit of a gamble, but I thought this gambit was worth it. Mahmoud’s face lit up. He went into a discourse on the vile character of Jews in general and the viciousness of Israeli Zionists in particular, with which Alex Perez heartily concurred. I wondered what my dad, looking down from up on high, must have been thinking as he heard this exchange.

  I had some new best friends—and a new arrangement: I would bring my clients to Holyland, and Mahmoud would fit them out with the full package. NYS driver’s license, auto registration and plates if needed, a Social Security card, utility and phone bills. The bills would be forged, but when such bills are used as proof of residence, in conjunction with an apparently valid ID, they were (and still are) accepted at face value. For the auto registrations, I would provide the titles we had obtained from DMV’s Inspector General in Albany, showing ownership by people or auto dealers who didn’t exist. Thanks to these bogus titles, we had an endless supply of phantom cars awaiting no-ID registrations. To play the role of unscrupulous buyer, we wanted reliable and composed people who would be sure to make the right impression—men, no women, because in Mahmoud’s world, women would never make the right impression. A pool of such individuals happened to be right at hand: FBI undercover agents and confidential witnesses. If I had brought in real clients, mobsters and illegal aliens, and they then disappeared with the false ID … the Bureau would have been facilitating criminal activity and incurring a huge exposure to civil liability, as the AUSAs never failed to remind us in our meetings with them. We were not going to let the fraudulent documents walk away if it could possibly be avoided. Imagine a fatal car accident caused by the FBI undercover agent’s client driving with fraudulent license and registration. The supervisor’s dismissal of the agent in American Hustle comes to mind: “… Yeah, Richie, you can go home now.”

  The first client I took to Mahmoud’s establishment was Sam Romero, an experienced UC in the past, now a tech agent. A few days prior to the meet, I went to see Mahmoud and said, “This guy is important, he’s the boss of one of the biggest cartels in Miami. His organization moves huge amounts of cocaine. Do me a favor, please treat him with kid gloves. He’s a real big shot, and if he’s pleased, he’ll send us a lot of his people to get their documents.”

  That’s the role I described to Sam, a Miami native, over the phone. He got it immediately (as opposed to Oscar Cascillo, who could have cost me my life months earlier by spontaneously introducing me to Nair as a Colombian drug lord, when I didn’t know a thing about Colombia). The day of the meet with Mahmoud, Sam Romero and I rendezvoused at my office in New Rochelle. Midforties, a bit stout, wearing a dark suit with diamond ring and Rolex. Perfect. He could credibly have ordered a hit on any of his fellow cartel bosses. Sam was a professional, we didn’t waste each other’s time. I provided the nuts-and-bolts of the meet during the thirty-minute drive to Holyland. In Mahmoud’s office, Sam was appropriately arrogant and aloof, and Mahmoud treated him with great deference, with the courtesy and remonstrations due to a man of prominence and power. A home run. On the way back to New Rochelle, Sam and I talked about mutual friends, incompetent managers, and anything that came to mind, the typical chat of friendly colleagues. It would not have occurred to either of us to talk about the case, to dissect the meet, and so forth. Tarantino got it right in Pulp Fiction, with the two hit men on their way to the job discussing the attributes of Big Macs and BK Whoppers as served in Europe—and the foot massages, of course. Who can forget them?

  Describing a recent raid, the supervisor of the squad investigating the Jamaican drug gangs gave me the idea for an exacting new character from the dark side to introduce to Mahmoud. (Apparently the large sums of money pouring in from the sale of cocaine had not trumped this gang’s communal lifestyle. The details revealed in the search of the Brooklyn apartment were graphic. In lie
u of the toilet, the many residents—men, women, children—had substituted the bathtub. Firearms and half-smoked ganja cigars littered the rooms.) My Jamaican drug lord would be like Sam, a true professional. Mike Campbell.

  “Mahmoud,” I said in the preliminary conversation at Holyland, “next week I’m bringing a new client. This one is a real lunatic. The head of one of the Jamaican posses in Brooklyn. He’s got plenty of cash, but he’s very high-strung. Anything can set him off.”

  Driving over with Mike, I provided an overview of what the scenario should look like. Like Sam Romero, he had his role ready in twenty minutes. Emerging from the Chrysler Imperial in front of Holyland, tall and thin, with the long dreadlocks and scraggly beard and glaring eyes, he exuded menace. His agitation was such that he loudly refused to enter Mahmoud’s office. I went inside and persuaded Mahmoud to come outside. He wasn’t sure how to react to the wild man out front, and he could not have been eager to have this hothead inside Holyland. But he was no stranger to rough characters and he appreciated the now certain knowledge that I, Alex Perez, likewise moved in dangerous circles. He was willing to proceed with the deal. The Rasta paced up and down the sidewalk spitting out instructions; Mahmoud and I at his side. Passersby walked right on by, not even glancing at the volatile scene. The next time I saw Mahmoud, he confessed that he was relieved when the Rasta and I finally drove away. And of course he appreciated the profit (at least $2,000—each time I brought somebody in).

  Not wanting to shortchange South Florida as a hotbed of criminal intent and activity, I brought in the “top lieutenant” of my earlier client, “cartel boss” Sam Romero, played by a handsome young Hispanic agent, Diego Rodriguez. Though relatively new to UC work, Diego gave the role a brash arrogance that worked perfectly. A natural, apparently, he nevertheless did not stay with undercover work. As of this writing, Diego is Chief Global Security Officer for Univision, having retired as the Assistant Director of the NYO, one of the half-dozen most powerful agents in the Bureau.

  Next up was Steve Kim, a stocky native of Seoul who spoke flawless Korean should the need arise. As we drove over, he listened impassively to my standard exposition of the game plan. Mahmoud was busy when we entered Holyland, and we waited by the counter. Making small talk, Kim said something about his family in South Korea. When I realized he was talking about his real family, not some fictitious story for others to overhear, I made a curt remark, in character for Alex, and Steve stopped talking. When we entered Mahmoud’s office, I was surprised to see two young Arab men—midtwenties, perhaps—standing behind the boss’s desk. They just stood, arms folded, unsmiling: poster boys for the PFLP. With the door closed, myself directly across from Mahmoud and Kim to my right, it was a bit close in the room. Both Kim and I were wearing recording devices, my mini-Nagra in the customary underwear pouch, Kim’s full-size Nagra in an elastic carrier around his belly. Between the two of us we had only one weapon, my standard Walther PPK.

  Mahmoud was amiable enough and engaged in the culturally mandatory preliminary small talk—queries about family health, observations concerning the state of the economy, the folly of mainstream politicians—before turning to Kim.

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “Uh … uh … uh”—Kim turned and looked at me, imploring; the proverbial “deer in the headlights.”

  “Uh … uh … What was your name again?”

  All eyes on Kim. Then, all eyes on me. Mahmoud and the two Palestinian poster boys glaring. Mahmoud finally broke the long silence. I wasn’t counting, but it seemed like a minute or even more before he finally shouted at me, “What the fuck? You’re bringing people here you don’t even know!”

  Mahmoud’s shock was equaled by my own stunned amazement. Without a doubt, this was the most dangerous situation in my brief UC career—my considerably longer FBI career. I had not anticipated that Steve might crap out like this. My mind was racing to come up with something good. Finally I replied, “Hey, there’s nothing to worry about, Mahmoud, the guy who sent him to me is someone I’ve known for years, someone I trust completely. He wouldn’t send me anybody that wasn’t okay. This guy’s just an illegal, he needs a DL and a Social Security card.”

  Mahmoud looked at me, looked at Kim, looked back at me. Then he turned his head and barked an order in Arabic to one of his men, who nodded and left the office. As I am trying to make light conversation, pathetically, in my imagination I am translating Mahmoud’s orders: “Jamal, pull down and lock the front gate, get Mohamed and Abdul to pull the van around the back…” I thought about my puny .32 up against two or three MAC-10s and 9mm pistols.

  Finally—maybe five-seeming-like-twenty minutes—Jamal returned carrying … the DMV and Social Security forms. Survival! As he handed the forms to Mahmoud, I smiled and asked Steve to wait outside. After he left I said, “Listen, Mahmoud, this guy is obviously a real asshole. We’ll take him to the cleaners, make as much money off him as possible.” Mahmoud nodded and smiled. We were friends again. In the car headed back to New Rochelle, I did in fact tear Kim a new asshole. I yelled at him the entire trip, no doubt due to the fear that I had suppressed during the meet. Steve was contrite, and he should have been, but some of the blame was mine: I had assumed that he had prior UC experience, but he didn’t. Nor would he ever. After this maiden voyage, he gave up UC work. He had already had his fill. Fair enough. It’s not for everyone. A nice guy really, he ended up as Legat (legal attaché) Seoul, a position of significant responsibility but generally involving limited risk. A diplomat, not a street agent.

  Copying my mini-Nagra tape to a cassette—one of my evening chores after every taped meet with a subject, with one copy for the AUSAs, one for Dave and Vicki—I was surprised to realize that a mere second or two had passed between Mahmoud’s outburst following Kim’s panicked comment and my impromptu response to Mahmoud. In Mahmoud’s office, I felt like that passage of time had slowed to a crawl, but in real time it was actually just the opposite. The flow of conversation was almost uninterrupted. A lot of research has proved that this strange slowing of subjective time happens often in gunfights and other high-risk situations. In these Twilight Zones, the brain is actually doing a lot of work and taking action in the briefest of moments.

  At the Christmas party in New Rochelle that year, I was talking with a typist from the off-site steno pool who transcribed that cassette audio of the meet with Kim.

  “I was so scared,” she told me. “I thought that they were about to kill you. I was sure of it.”

  “Susie, you were listening to it several months later. Don’t you think you’d have heard about it, if I’d been killed?”

  “I know. But I was still scared.”

  With good reason. Like I said, that was the most dangerous moment in my career so far. But all for a good cause: That whole sting, with FBI insiders posing as the buyers, would provide real cases against Mahmoud, his employees who processed the work, and the numerous clerks at the DMV and the Social Security Administration.

  * * *

  Alicia and I moved back and forth, back and forth. On a typical day, we’d start at the Yonkers or Bronx DMV. We’d drink some coffee, get a few no-IDs done, get some conversation on tape with a few runners, and if lucky, with a complicit DMV clerk smoking during a break. Then maybe we’d head to the South Bronx for a stop at Holyland, or down to Lower Manhattan to meet Jabes Ortega, the Dominican coyote (illegal alien smuggler) mentioned earlier as the runner with the connections for green cards. With his long, high-end leather trench coat and quality suits, Ortega was operating in a different league from most of the RUN-DMV cast of characters. He was nobody’s fool. One day, sitting in the front passenger seat of the red Cherokee (my new UC car), across the street from the Federal Building downtown, Alicia seated in back, Ortega noticed the three beepers on my sun visor. Two real, one the transmitter that could get me in trouble. He reached for the transmitter. I grabbed his wrist.

  “That’s not yours. That one’s for some of my other f
riends. The one on the left is yours. You want to see the numbers on yours, no problem.” (“Yours” as in “the one you call.”) He got the point, and our conversation about the fraudulent green card I was buying continued. With him—and him alone, among the RUN-DMV subjects—I wasn’t Alex. The Bu had provided me with a seized Colombian passport in the name of … frankly, I don’t remember that alias. I do remember my “legend”: I had fled Cartagena with the Nacionales on my heels, and I was now (as revealed by hints and casual comments over time) reestablishing myself in the cocaine business. Back home I had been an exporter. Now I was an importer. Ortega and I spoke only Spanish. Before adopting that legend, I knew from John Sultan (who had been the one to unearth Ortega originally) and from Vicki’s subsequent background checks that Ortega, in all likelihood, knew less about Colombia than I did.

  At a following meet, just as I was making the down payment of $3,000 for Ortega to obtain an “A Number” from the INS (the first step toward permanent resident status), he said, “You’re from Colombia, how come you speak Spanish with a French accent?”

  A sharp customer, this one. I looked at Ortega and smiled and replied, “I’m impressed.” That wasn’t a lie. No one had ever caught that issue with the accent. Working on the theory that the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed, I continued, “When I was eighteen, I got into some trouble. Really big trouble, not just with the Nacionales, but with some really bad people. The kind of people who mess you up seriously and permanently. I had to disappear, really disappear, somewhere no one could find me. I ended up joining the French Foreign Legion. After ten years in the Legion, almost never speaking Spanish, well now I guess I’ll have the accent forever.”