The Pretender Page 2
The FBI doesn’t feel that way (nor did my friend, really). The FBI believes that if you’re good at 50 yards, you’ll be even better at the shorter distances you’re more likely to encounter in real life, and I agree. Combat training and shooting at Quantico involved (and still involves) the use of cars, pop-up targets, and makeshift cabins. Kick in the door of the cabin, identify any targets, and react accordingly. There might be three (cardboard) motorcycle gang members pointing guns directly at you. There might be an attractive (cardboard) woman with a revolver in her outstretched hand. Or there might be the same woman grasping an ice-cream cone. The training was good—excellent—but not, of course, infallible. Special Agent Robin Ahearn, whose class at Quantico had been two weeks ahead of mine, was assigned to perimeter security during her first fugitive arrest in Phoenix. This was less than six months after graduation. Near the entrance of the motel complex where the felon was hiding out, hearing shots, the rookie agent ran toward the sound. Two equally inexperienced agents, startled by the approaching armed woman emerging from the dark, informed that the fugitive was known to be holed up with his girlfriend, opened fire. Struck numerous times, Robin Ahearn died where she fell. Such a tragedy would shake any organization to its foundations.
And it was due to the firearms training that I came within a hair’s breadth of flunking out and, I guess, slinking back to NYC, tail between my legs, unemployed. Training is divided into three areas: Academic, Defensive Tactics, and Firearms. There are tests in each, and any failing score results in dismissal. I was set to be our class valedictorian for Academics, and was doing well if not the best in both others. On a Friday afternoon, halfway through our four-month course, we fired the required two qualification courses. On the first one, I shot the first 18 rounds from the 50-yard line well under the 1-minute-50-seconds allowed. Too far under the time limit, because in my haste to beat the buzzer I hadn’t taken the time to properly aim. I missed the qualifying score by one round. Shaken, on the second course I missed by two rounds. Three or four of us had failed to qualify. On Monday, we would have one more opportunity. Those who failed to fire two qualifying courses would be on their way home by sunset. Reapplying for my old job in the DA’s office in Brooklyn would require some creativity, but Quantico’s near-total cloak of mystery would actually be an advantage in this case … of course, I had to resign … I was unwilling to compromise my principles … blah blah blah. Maybe it would have worked. But I had no intention of finding out.
That weekend found me on the firing range, red handle in hand, dry-firing through the qualification course, as my man Jesse Ramirez stood behind me, stopwatch in hand. (Jesse had passed without a problem.) For each of the 50 rounds, I would need to integrate into my brain exactly how many seconds I had in order to take aim, to breathe, and to squeeze (not pull!) the trigger. Over and over again, we went through the course as I fired the phantom bullets. And on Monday, I sailed through the “qual” with scores in the mid-eighties, a B+, as it were. All of us made it over the hurdle—a cause for celebration by the entire class, believe me. By this point, a tangible esprit de corps had developed. That was the whole idea. The seeds of the camaraderie that binds all FBI agents were already well sown.
And it was camaraderie between a very culturally diverse group numbering just twenty-four. (Budget constraints dictated the low number. Classes generally numbered forty-plus.) For most of us, who were in our late twenties to early thirties, this was a second career. One woman had been an assistant curator at an art museum. One fellow, who was from the backwoods of Arkansas, named his gun as soon as it was issued (apparently his revolver was female). There were four attorneys (one having specialized in criminal defense); a few accountants; a high school vice principal; a flight attendant; a half dozen former police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers; and about the same number of military personnel. Four Jews: an MIT-educated mechanical engineer, a Navy pilot, and two attorneys, one of whom was yours truly. (The other one was Ben Berry. He and I were the fastest runners, alternating for first place in the timed two-mile test.) Initially, seven females, five Hispanics, and only three blacks. That last number dropped to two just two weeks into our training, when the woman, some kind of civil rights lawyer, vanished overnight. She had been overweight from the beginning and was then unable to pass the initial physical fitness trials. Mike offered her the opportunity to be “recycled” and start with another class a few months later. She declined. Her heart had never been really set on becoming an FBI agent—she had not concealed her ambivalence from her fellow classmates. (She might have been more enthusiastic had she seen the as yet to be made film, Mississippi Burning, with Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, based on MIBURN, the mid-sixties FBI investigation into the murder of three civil-rights workers.)
Two of us from NAC 85-7 had dreams of becoming undercover agents. At the beginning of their careers, SAs (special agents) don’t choose specialties, certainly not undercover. But it was already on my mind—and also on Danilo Perez’s mind. A veteran of the Colombian navy, and fellow native Spanish speaker, who later took U.S. citizenship, Danilo was assigned to a nearby dorm room. Tall and skinny, with scruffy black hair, a mustache, and a heavy accent, he did not fit anyone’s stereotype of an FBI agent. Of course, neither did I. (Years later, Danilo and I would meet up at undercover schools, both as instructors, both with many years of experience working behind enemy lines.) This was the Miami Vice era. It was a huge hit on television. Danilo would lie on his bed, with Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” playing over and over again on his Walkman cassette player. We both saw ourselves as Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, driving that high-end sports car on Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard, in our Gucci suits, en route to a meeting that would enable us to take down a Colombian cartel boss. In order to further that goal, I showed some initiative and submitted a memo requesting an assignment to Miami as my first office. Being a native Spanish speaker, with an Argentine mother, and years of experience in Latin America, I thought I would be ideally suited for conducting investigations in Miami’s Latino community. And so I suggested. I didn’t realize that my memo actually had another destination stamped all over it, only in invisible ink.
There is a tradition endured by all graduating agents a couple of weeks prior to the big day. We sat in our regular classroom chairs, Mike at the front desk, a pile of envelopes before him. After he read the name on the envelope, the agent was to come to the front of the classroom, pick up the envelope, and turn to the class. He was then to name three places: where he was from, where he hoped to be assigned, and where he expected to be assigned. Then open the envelope, take out the orders, and read aloud a fourth place, the actual Office of Assignment. Followed by lots of laughing and clapping and cheers. When it came my turn, I held the envelope and said, “New York … Miami … San Juan.” I opened the envelope and smiled. San Juan.
Spanish speakers in the classes just ahead of ours had all received orders to San Juan, not Miami. I had seen it coming. It would be an adventure nonetheless.
Mom and Dad and my little brother and sister drove down to Quantico for graduation. It’s safe to say that the FBI wasn’t what Francine and Asa Ruskin had imagined for their oldest son’s legal career, much less for his liberal arts degree from Vassar. They were liberal, secular Jews. My father couldn’t forget COINTELPRO, but those notorious domestic spying and dirty tricks activities dated to the late fifties and sixties, and died with J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. Nor could Dad get around the association between Hoover’s FBI and McCarthyism and blacklisting. In fact, the McCarthy committee investigators intimidating Americans on national TV were not FBI agents. They were staffers for the House Un-American Activities Committee, but the collective memory, aided by the media, had melded the two groups. However, it was FBI special agents who risked their lives south of the Mason-Dixon Line, investigating the racists who were tormenting civil-rights activists. (Mississippi Burning is one of the few movies that got it right.)
I discuss
ed all this with my parents. Nevertheless, sitting in the third row at the graduation ceremony in Quantico, they were still not thrilled at my change of employment. They were gratified to learn that my fellow graduates could boast all kinds of advanced academic degrees and other achievements. During the reception afterward, Dad gravitated toward Ben Berry’s father, both commiserating. Two young and promising Jewish lawyer sons—where had they gone wrong?
In my own mind, the transition to the FBI wasn’t all that radical. In Brooklyn, I was the hard-nosed aggressive prosecutor, passionate about helping the victims of violent crime, almost all of them residents of the same ghettos and living in the same dire straits as the accused. I loved the work but realized after a few years that I didn’t want to spend my entire career and life in Brooklyn. Nor did I want to follow my fellow prosecutors into the big law firms across the East River, only to end up lamenting the loss of our exciting careers as ADAs. I wanted to move in the opposite direction: more, not fewer, encounters with the juiciest field the law has to offer—the law of the wild. You can’t prosecute the criminals unless you catch them first. And I had seen many potentially good cases fail due to errors by investigators. I intended to put together cases that would be slam-dunks for prosecutors. And I did. Let the record—including this book—show that I never failed to infiltrate my targets and be accepted, and thanks to my legal background, to construct my cases with never a glimmer of entrapment. And then there’s this: I had been a good lawyer, maybe an excellent one, but I really wanted to be one of the best at something. Literally. The best. Maybe this was it.
A month later, my flight touched down at Luis Muñoz Marín airport, in Isla Verde, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
2
San Juan
There were no screeching tires and guns in hands, but the big waves were pounding the World War II–era landing craft crossing the Caribbean from Puerto Rico to the island of Vieques, eight miles east of Puerto Rico. A couple of Navy corpsmen manned the boat while my partner, Lowell Walker, and I hung on hard. Lowell—a Fulbright scholar in European literature and a former teacher at a prestigious boys’ prep school—wore Bermuda shorts and a tropical shirt and cradled a shotgun. I sported cargo pants, a baggy T-shirt, a .357 Model 686 large-frame stainless-steel revolver on my waist, and an additional snub-nosed 5-shot .38 on my ankle.
It was a beautiful night, with a cloud of stars overhead, perfect for reverie, crashing waves aside. Less than five weeks before, I had graduated from Quantico. Now here I was, heavily armed and on my way to arrest a dangerous felon on the run from the law. We still had a few miles of ocean to negotiate. Lowell Walker reached out, poked me, grinned, and shouted above the racket, “You’re a long way from Brooklyn now, Marc!”
I’ll say. We know that Miami Vice, then into its second great season, had been a major influence in my request for an initial assignment to that action-filled paradise. Instead, because of an acute shortage of Spanish speakers—real, colloquial street Spanish—the Bureau airmailed me direct to the San Juan Division. Another action-filled paradise: Puerto Rico was particularly dangerous because of the Macheteros and its splinter group, the Organización de Voluntarios para la Revolución Puertorriqueña (OVRP), terrorist organizations that idolized Fidel Castro and his regime, and employed explosives and assassinations in their campaign for Puerto Rican independence and a Cuban-like socialist state. Their sister organization stateside was the more well-known New York–based FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional). In the view of the Macheteros, FBI agents were “combatants” and thus fair game. Moreover, San Juan had a higher homicide rate than any city in the United States, and Ponce, on the south side of the island, was close behind. The island was far more dangerous territory than any stateside posting. In fact, this was officially a “hazardous duty” assignment and theoretically forbidden to FOAs (First Office Agents; that is, rookies), but that year a temporary exception had been carved out for those of us with prior law enforcement experience (even if it was white collar, I guess). I arrived in San Juan on a Monday evening and showed up at the office in the Federal Building in Hato Rey the following morning, at what seemed to me to be the crack of dawn (a mistake not to be repeated, as we will see), sweating in a wool suit and with absolutely no idea what to expect. Things got better almost immediately, when the suit came off. One of my first objectives would be to buy several guayaberas (Caribbean business-casual shirts).
John Navarette was my Supervisory Special Agent, my “SSA,” boss of the Reactive Squad to which I was assigned. John called me into his office and got right to the point: “Listen, Marc, to do this job well you need to be able to lie well. If you’re tracking a fugitive and you tell people he robbed a bank, chances are no one has heard of him. If you tell them he molested a ten-year-old girl, you’ll get his address. Just remember who you’re lying to. Try and be honest with yourself and when you can, with the ones you love. If you have any questions and need advice, feel free to come in. Otherwise I’ll see you every couple of months at your file review.” This was my kind of supervisor, and definitely not the overly regimented environment I had contemplated as a disquieting possibility. And, as I would soon learn, where burdensome regulations were in place, they weren’t necessarily set in concrete. There were means to get around them.
On the Reactive Squad, about a dozen of us worked violent street crimes, and we always had more than enough to do. My desk was in the very large “bullpen,” where each squad had a cluster of desks near the entrance to their respective supervisor’s office. Obscuring a clear view of the ceiling was a permanent haze of cigarette and cigar smoke. Navarette assigned me a handful of cases, ranging from fugitive investigations to theft of government property (such as an agent’s gun from a parked car), gave me the keys to my BuCar (as the newest agent, I rated the oldest vehicle, naturally, a clunker reminiscent of the ’65 Ford Falcon I owned in college), and assigned me a Training Agent named Mark Llewellyn. Any concerns I may have had about the stringency with which Mark would keep tabs on me were rapidly dispelled. He was an old-timer by San Juan standards (that is, five or six years on the job), affable but aloof and with the look of a retired prize fighter. I quickly gleaned that I was free to contact him at any time and for any reason—so long as that reason was a dire emergency and my life was in peril. With Navarette and Llewellyn, I was batting 2-for-2 when it came to immediate supervisors. Not always the case with rookies, believe me.
Years earlier, J. Edgar Hoover, had promulgated the 10% Rule: Agents were to spend no more that 10 percent of any given day in the office. The remaining 90 percent was to be spent in the field, investigating cases. That would be a job unlike anything I could have dreamed of, but did the FBI actually work like that? So far, yes. It was a great relief. Other than a daily morning appearance in the office, I was on my own with my BuCar, my BuWeapon, and my BuCases. However, that “daily morning appearance” was not pro forma, and the subtleties of that little bureaucratic dance were one of the first important lessons my fellow agents on the Reactive Squad made certain I learned, because my performance could affect them directly. Here’s how it played out. On a table or podium outside each supervisor’s office door in the bullpen was a clipboard with a sheet of paper, the all-important “1 Register,” its significance emphasized by its numeric designation. Each agent, upon arriving in the office, would sign on the highest open line, and indicate time arrived. Now, the official BuDay was 8:15 a.m.–5:00 p.m. And in order to qualify for overtime—an extra 25 percent on the paycheck, which, when you’re paid peanuts is not peanuts—ten additional hours per week were required. So the first agent in the office would sign in at somewhere in the neighborhood of 6:05 a.m. Regardless of the time his wristwatch may have erroneously reflected. The next agent would time his arrival at 6:08 a.m., say. Everyone would have arrived by 6:25 a.m., despite what any of their wristwatches might have reflected. The missing ten minutes could be made up at the end of the day. At 8:15—usually right on the nose—the supervisor wou
ld walk out of his office and draw a diagonal line across the register under the last name, with his initials, in order to prevent late arrivals from cheating Uncle Sam. This practice was enforced by the supervisor’s boss, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, aka the dreaded “ASAC,” who was traditionally the hatchet man for Special Agent in Charge. The ASAC would patrol the office searching for minor infractions. Our man Navarette would first look across the squad area. If any faces were missing, he would draw the line on the sheet in such a manner as to allow the missing agent to squeeze in a signature, just above it. This agent might then sign in at 7:10 or 7:20 a.m., in order to avoid the appearance of abusing the favor.
Let me be real clear here: All of the agents averaged way more than forty hours a week—more than the overtime-triggering fifty hours—and all would and did work around the clock, without hesitation or complaint, in time of crisis—in San Juan, a frequent state of affairs—but few were bound by petty rules. As to what I was learning of BuCulture, I liked it. My preconceptions concerning the buttoned-down image of the FBI had already been in enthusiastic free fall, beginning with Navarette’s and Llewellyn’s carte blanche dispensations, and continuing with my early dealings with real street agents. I was in my element.
An important note about weaponry. In those days, FBI agents didn’t yet carry pistols with extra magazines, which were more likely to jam than revolvers, and more complicated to maintain. They were not “agent-proof,” in management parlance. However, the revolvers took much more time to reload. In San Juan, therefore, everybody carried a backup to the .357. Even agents working white-collar crime carried two guns—a point noted in the squad’s plea to FBIHQ for enhanced security measures for agents on the Isla del Encanto. (The weapons didn’t change, however headquarters agreed to finance alarm systems in all the residences, with quick response by armed private security guards. This was a major relief for agents out conducting investigations, who were concerned for their families’ well-being.)