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  After what seemed like a long time, the conversation switched to English and turned to practical matters: a “fish” (whatever that was…) of their high-grade heroin would cost me and my people “a dollar twenty” (that, I could figure out: $120,000). I nodded and said I would check with my people and beep Richard after receiving instructions. Richard nodded to Chang, then at me. I put out the Marlboro. Chang stood up and, without hesitation, walked across the dining room and down a narrow stairway toward the men’s room. This change of venue had been prepared, obviously. These guys were pros. They had done their homework. I therefore figured they must have at least one guy somewhere outside as a lookout, countersurveillance to my own surveillance, which was three blocks distant. Mark Calnan, my case agent on this new Group II, had judiciously placed the cars well out of sight for this critical first meet. The frumpy middle-aged couple eating lunch at a table by the door—they were my immediate safety net, both veteran agents.

  Richard looked directly at me and gestured with his head for me to follow Chang. I did so, down the long, narrow, metal stairs. Now my transmitter would be broadcasting nothing but static. As Chang and I faced the urinals (the mini-Nagra in my customized crotch carrier pressing against my hand), he passed me what appeared to be an empty pack of Marlboros, which I slipped into my shirt’s chest pocket. We returned to the booth upstairs, where my subjects said a cursory good-bye and left. I lingered for a few minutes and glimpsed a little tinfoil packet inside the Marlboro pack. I picked up the bill.

  Once Mark sent the all-clear signal to my pager, I passed the cigarette pack to one of the surveillance agents who had pulled into the parking lot. In the limo, my driver, who had waited for me, realized something was up. As we talked on the drive back to the city, he was clear about being very much at ease driving for a narcotics dealer. In fact, he would be happy to chauffeur me on a regular basis. In fact, he was excited about an unexpected and desirable career opportunity. I did nothing to discourage him.

  Inside the tinfoil was a sample of Richard’s merchandise, which the lab confirmed to be the highest quality, 95-percent pure heroin. I had penetrated a serious hardcore organization with a product intended for major distributors only. SUNBLOCK, as the op had been christened, could be a big one. Very big. My biggest, as measured by a somewhat unusual standard: total years served by the targets in federal prison. And there could not have had a better case agent at the helm. Mark was truly a superior agent, mid-career with C-25, the Asian Drug Squad. Traditional hound-dog persistent investigator that he was, Calnan had been working this investigation for over a year before bringing me in. The number-one target was a Chinese Malaysian drug lord named Bing Gong Yong, widely known in the industry as Gong. His first job after arriving here from Malaysia had been in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Lower Manhattan, but he’d moved up fast. Within a few years, he was running a major heroin ring. Then Gong repaid the owner of the Chinese restaurant for his kindness by kidnapping his wife. When she died, Gong had continued to collect ransom payments. He was a nasty man. He was also an unusual target for the FBI: he was already serving a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of his benefactor’s wife, in the maximum security prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was our target because he was still running his major drug ring from prison. Richard from the diner was his top man on the outside in New York.

  The original information about Gong’s organization had been developed by Mark from investigation of two of his largest clients, Papo Cancel and Cesar Vega. They ran a narcotics organization operating in New York and San Juan. Arrested and facing the balance of his remaining years in prison, Vega agreed to work for Mark Calnan as a confidential informant. When Calnan mentioned Papo Cancel to me, memories of past encounters flashed through my brain. Nearly ten years earlier in San Juan, Will Godoy and I had been assigned to babysit a federal material witness, Carmen Rojas. Will was my buddy, a man whose laid-back persona ran counter to all FBI stereotypes—he had once showed up at a predawn staging area prior to a raid and asked to borrow one of my revolvers. (Fifteen years later, he was promoted to be Legat Buenos Aires. He is my closest FBI friend.)

  Carmen Rojas was the only witness who could tie Papo Cancel to the murder of a DEA informant whose torso had been found a few months earlier. It was dismembered, which served two purposes: hamper efforts at identification and, more important, send a message. In sharp contrast to the usual low-rent hotels where I was used to staying at for these babysitting jobs, Carmen was sequestered in a luxurious villa in a gated community near El Yunque, featuring Mediterranean-style stucco and red-gabled houses. No rejas (the security gates that adorn virtually every door and window in Puerto Rico) here, instead broad terraces facing the large shared pool, all washed by the sun and fresh mountain breezes.

  Carmen Rojas was an excellent cook, and Anna, her fourteen-year-old daughter, being a teenager around grown-ups, kept to herself. Will and I felt like we were on vacation. Almost. Early one sunny afternoon, while lying in deck chairs on the veranda, digesting Carmen’s particularly sumptuous version of the Spanish chicken dish arroz con pollo, accompanied by delicious Puerto Rican rice and beans, Will remarked that he hadn’t seen Anna for a while. Carmen said she’d gone up to her room for a nap. Cautious, Will went to take a peek. The bedroom was empty. The villa was built on a hillside, so walking into and out of the second floor windows unblemished by rejas was as easy as walking out the front door.

  A quick search did not find her.

  Carmen, where could she have gone?

  She’s been missing her boyfriend, she probably ran away to see him.

  Her boyfriend?

  Chaco’s son. Papos’s his godfather.

  Chaco was Papo Cancel’s right hand. Will made a very embarrassed call to John Navarette, our supervisor. The squad would launch an intensive search for the girl, starting in the vicinity of Chaco’s house, but meanwhile Will and I were to get Carmen in the car immediately and transport her to the Navy base at Roosevelt Roads, an hour’s drive farther east of San Juan. These were the days of Scarface-type cartels, big-money operators who knew no limits—as the DEA informant learned—and Carmen was Papo’s one-way ticket to the federal penitentiary. Before we could pack the BuCar, we heard the helicopter. It came in low and hovered over the central pool, as we crouched below the windowsills. Altogether, I had two revolvers and some extra rounds. Will had a shotgun and his five-shot snub-nose. If the helicopter carried three or four lunatics with MAC-10s, it would be a melancholy day indeed. The villas were all more or less identical, and the helicopter hovered over all of them, slowly moving from one to the other. After half an hour—the longest in my history, to that point—the chopper lifted high and departed. The cartel was vicious, but they weren’t going to shoot up an entire gated community. Minutes later, Will and I were careening down the narrow access road, Carmen secreted under a blanket on the backseat, screeching right onto the two-lane carretera and the safety of a U.S. Navy base. An unrepentant Anna was scooped up by Navarette’s agents a few hours later, in a surprise incursion onto Cancel’s turf. A risky, but critical play: with Anna in enemy hands, Carmen’s cooperation would be over and done.

  And so Papo Cancel and, later, Cesar Vega, went to jail. Papo had nothing to gain by cooperating now in the heroin operation. The federal prosecutors were not about to cut a deal with a man who had dismembered a DEA agent. But that was okay, because Cesar Vega knew it all, too, and he developed a good rapport with Mark Calnan. Based on Vega’s information, court authorization was obtained for wiretaps on the phones of Richard and other members of Gong’s organization: Paul Kwok in Canada, Denise Wei, Kevin Mong. Through subpoenas to the Bureau of Prisons (the BOP in BuSpeak), Mark obtained recordings of Gong’s calls. BOP seemed to allow inmates virtually unrestricted phone access, including the right to make collect calls to anywhere. Yes, these calls were recorded, but they were not monitored. Mark was stunned by the ease with which Gong (and, of course, the Gambinos, Gottis, various
Russians, and others) could run their organized crime organizations from within federal prison walls. It was, still is, a bizarre policy.

  Denise Wei served as Gong’s principal point of contact with the outside world. He would call her virtually every evening and ask her to patch the call through to one of his subordinates, or to a new client—and thus a new subject for Mark Calnan. Then they would use a very sophisticated code to deceive potential prying ears. Richard would ask Gong how much he should charge the hēi rén (black guy) for a fish. At least a dollar ten or a dollar twenty. What about if he wants half a fish? Then sixty-five cents. After about five minutes of this, Mark had concluded that a “fish” was a unit of heroin, which was being offered at $110,000 to $120,000. Unlike cocaine, which was typically sold in “keys,” or kilos, heroin was measured in “units,” consisting of 700 grams (24 ounces).

  After a few months, Mark had Gong’s entire network identified: Richard (Kau Hung, technically, but I will stick with Richard) and the Karaoke Club in New York’s Chinatown, where he lived and worked. Denise Wei and her husband, Kevin Mong, a top Gong lieutenant, were located at their Country Club Road home in suburban Bedminster, New Jersey. Their nearby business, The Golden Dragon restaurant, providing a legit front operation. The Kao Yang restaurant in Somerville, New Jersey, operated by Vivian Tsai, Gong’s sister, and base of operations for trusted Gong lieutenant, Nanjing Fang, rounded out the nucleus of the heroin smuggling organization. Mark Calnan had it all. His squad-mates also started conducting physical surveillances based on information obtained from the calls. Once the date and time and weight and cost had been overheard, the agents would set up on the Karaoke Club and cover the transaction. But as strong as the case was becoming, there was one more investigative technique that Calnan wanted to use. To make the case airtight, he needed a UC. Of course.

  I’ve mentioned that the Janus backstopping units also serve as informal clearinghouses for UC assignments. Mark called the New York crew, looking for an experienced sleuth capable of passing for a high-level operator in a Hispanic cocaine trafficking organization, capable of penetrating a major heroin ring. Janus New York had been providing operational support to my UC ops for years. One of the veterans recommended alias Alex Perez, a highly respected, mid-career agent based in New Rochelle, with five years’ experience as a full-time undercover. Mark called me, we met, and he laid out the situation. There was also an international angle here, as there is with most drug rings: Canada, prominently, then perhaps Malaysia, from where the drugs were exported. With the prospect of conducting UC ops internationally, not only in Canada, but also in the Far East, I, Marc Ruskin, was excited that Alex Perez might be moving up a level in the world of covert activities. I had never worked a drug case as a UC, but I had developed a conceit that the undercover operation that Marc Ruskin would not succeed in had not yet been conceived, and it never would be. Somewhat obsessively (in retrospect, perhaps somewhat irrationally), I wanted to see how far I could push the envelope. SUNBLOCK would be my answer. This was a big deal for me. On the spot, Mark offered me the assignment. On the spot, I accepted. This was late summer, 1994. BLUE SCORE had recently been brought to a successful conclusion. Pleased with the results of the high-profile police corruption case, Craig Dotlo didn’t squawk when I committed myself to this job for another squad.

  After reviewing, in painstaking detail, the results of the investigation to date, Mark and I spent a couple of weeks developing a scenario wherein I was still alias Alex Perez, still mysteriously linked to Metro-Dade. Only now I was also the nephew and trusted number two of a convict named Gil Sandoval. Gil was not my uncle, of course, but he really was the deposed leader of a Mexican cocaine cartel in the eighties, arrested and convicted in Texas. He was serving “natural life” (that is, without hope of parole) in Lewisburg. He was going to die in jail, period, and he knew it. His was the first life-without-parole sentence ever obtained by the U.S. Attorney’s office in El Paso, and they were proud of the fact. They had exploited the sentence for maximum press coverage and had a vested interest, both institutional and political, in seeing to it that the sentence remain unaltered. The U.S. Attorney’s office had made it clear that there was only one way that Gil would leave the custody of the Bureau of Prisons—in a cheap pine box. A clearly hopeless situation for Gil. Or was it?

  Gil saw another option. Very remote, but … it was an option. As the deposed leader of a Mexican cartel, he was, almost by definition of his former status, a bright and entrepreneurial man. In his early forties, he had risen from true poverty to become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar global enterprise. And just as with the Fortune 500, it takes a certain level of intelligence and unique personality traits to achieve the position of number one. In Lewisburg, Gil determined that he could and would make himself useful, very useful, to any government agency that realized what a gold mine he could be. Having developed a level of professional caution necessary to his survival, he carefully developed a relationship with his prison counselor. Once assured that this counselor was trustworthy and wouldn’t sell him out to fellow inmates, Gil asked to be put in touch with the DEA—one of his infrequent mistakes, as he would soon learn.

  Two DEA special agents arrived at Lewisburg to interview and evaluate Gil’s value as a confidential informant. Gil offered to work with them on a long-term basis, and as proof of his goodwill he provided invaluable evidence for what would be a major case. For several years, Gil’s organization had been smuggling huge quantities of cocaine from Colombia into Mexico, and then across the border near Juarez into the El Paso region of Far West Texas. He made generous payments to various government officials in order to operate without significant government interference. He understood that occasional, minor losses had to be tolerated so the face-saving officials could boast about their achievements and demonstrate how effective they were in carrying out their duties. Gil had maintained meticulous records of these payments, records that were still in the possession of his former subordinates.

  Most important among the public officials on Gil’s payroll was the prize he offered the DEA: that very agency’s Assistant Regional Director for Northern Mexico. Gil could provide the goods for an airtight public corruption investigation and prosecution. He had ongoing contact with fellow cocaine cowboys who were still making payoffs to this corrupt upper-management official. He could arrange for his friends to initiate incriminating conversations, to be recorded with phone intercepts. He would even notify investigators when payoffs were scheduled. They could get the indisputable evidence on video.

  It was a great pitch. Made to the wrong team.

  The DEA agents listened attentively. When they returned to their office, they wrote up their report. Gil Sandoval was an obvious fabricator. Desperate as a result of his hopeless “natural life” status, he had provided the interviewing agents with clearly fallacious, wildly concocted, unsubstantiated, anecdotal accounts, many of which were self-contradictory. They closed his file with the DEA and recommended that no future law enforcement agency have contact with him. They also advised the Bureau of Prisons of their conclusions, suggesting he not be allowed future contacts with other government agencies. They did their best to bury Gil Sandoval.

  However, Gil had done well in his rapport building with his counselor. After striking out with the DEA—annoyed with himself for his naïveté, he should have known better—he persevered and his counselor reached out to the El Paso office of the FBI. In that office, Rick Getty got the ticket to assess Gil and recruit him, if he had real potential. Rick did his homework. He went through the trial transcripts, the investigative reports that had led to Gil’s conviction, and read the report of the two DEA agents. Old-timer that he was, he felt intuitively that something was off. It didn’t ring true. Those DEA investigators’ conclusions were not consistent with every other document concerning Gil. And Rick shared the historically mutual distrust between the FBI and the DEA. That distrust is—has to be—denied by management, but it has always existed
and still does.

  Rick Getty decided that he would fly up to Lewisburg and see Gil for himself. The result was one of the great decisions in his career, and I’m sure there were many. Gil Sandoval became a crucial informant for the FBI. By having developed a formal relationship with the Bureau, Gil had overcome a major hurdle. His master plan to earn his way out of that “natural life” sentence was now under way, no longer the impossible fantasy of a hopeless inmate in whose case they had thrown away the key. With quiet perseverance he set about developing relationships, capitalizing on his pre-conviction status as a cartel boss to establish himself as a major player with his counterparts behind the big bars in Lewisburg. He soon identified Bing Gong Yong as an ideal target: a global-level heroin trafficker, a big boss moving large quantities of the number-one evil drug with a large network of lieutenants and soldiers. Just what the Bureau would be looking for. By the close of Rick Getty’s initial meeting with Gil Sandoval, they had come to a meeting of the minds. Rick would “open” Gil as a CI, a confidential informant. Neither he nor anyone else in the Bureau could make any promises to Gil about an eventual beneficial impact on his tenure in prison. All would depend on the quality and quantity of cases Gil helped develop. Understood. The paperwork was completed, which would provide the mechanism for documenting and keeping track of Gil’s contributions, substituting a code name for his true name, which would be kept secret.

  As Gil provided profiles of likely candidates for targeting, Rick would run the names through the Bureau databases. With Gong’s name … Bingo. Rick called Mark Calnan. I have someone I think you’ll want to meet. If he can help with your investigation of Gong, he’s all yours—but when it’s over, we want him back! In large part, the success of the whole SUNBLOCK op came to hinge on Gil’s information concerning his fellow inmate at Lewisburg, the still-wheeling-and-dealing drug lord Bing Gong Yong (and a junkie himself, it turned out, which is unusual for most high-level kingpins, most of whom know better).