The Pretender Read online

  Those scenes in Goodfellas with the mobsters behind bars but still living large, dining on prime steak, fresh lobster, red and white wine were not necessarily an exaggeration. Neither Gong nor Gil lived like that, but both could retain plenty of power, even in the outside world, if they wanted it. Gong did, Gil didn’t. He had retired—a change of status he carefully concealed. One might think all of the incarcerated kingpins would call it a day, but often they don’t. Gil might even be the exception. When the system provides these moguls with the opportunity and the tools, why not keep the operation going? Even when serving a “natural life” sentence, running the gang outside was something to do inside, and there would be no meaningful consequences if caught, at least in terms of extra time added to a sentence. Administrative Segregation (today’s more palatable label for “solitary”) is a possibility, as we will shortly see. Other kingpins, those not serving life, could hope to get out someday, but the elements in their personalities that had motivated them to take the risks to become bosses in the first place were still at work. Some of these guys even risked losing their shot at parole in order to stay in the game from prison.

  And other factors were in play. The bosses in prison, as well as their soldiers, were part of tightly knit groups that were more than simply business organizations. Much more. The Mexican and Colombian cartels, the Jamaican posses, the Russian bratvas, La Cosa Nostra: they are extended families, filling many social and cultural roles, providing the members with a system of rules to live (and die) by, with a structure that gives meaning to their lives, and a hierarchy within which they live. Moving in and out of prison is, for them, a fact of life. Replacing a social club with a prison cell need not affect the individual’s role in the organization. However, it will certainly be a factor in individual power plays. A rival’s incarceration may provide an opportunity for a coup. A jailed boss has good cause to maintain a tight grip on his organization. Particularly, as is often the case, if he has family members on the outside whom he wants to protect and promote.

  Gong fell into this category. Pushing fifty, five or so years in prison under his belt, eligible for parole on his life sentence in another fifteen, he was still going strong. He had trusted lieutenants scattered throughout the Northeast, not the least of them his younger brothers Bing Nam Yong and Bing Chun Yong. And now Gil Sandoval offered to help us—the FBI, the federal government, the American people—nail Gong one more time, and for good.

  As with all my undercover roles, once I had an idea who the players were, I set about developing the role, coming up with a scenario that would fit the case, would be believable to the targets, and would provide a pathway toward gaining their confidence. In SUNBLOCK, working with Mark Calnan, a street-smart case agent I immediately liked and respected, that creative process became a collaborative one. The more time I could spend with an informant, the better. Many a case agent over the years would tell me, “You can meet and talk with him [the informant] before the meet.” A recipe for disaster. The more time I could spend with the informant, the more bulletproof the “vouch.” The more I knew about him (usually a him, but sometimes her), the more credible the story I could invent about how we knew each other, and for how long. And the greater the time between developing the made-up relationship and meeting the subjects, the more opportunities the informant would have to talk about Alex (or Sal or Daniel, whatever alias I was using) to my future new associates. It bears repeating: most informants want to minimize the strength of their fictitious relationship, in order to allow for future plausible deniability. How could I know he was a cop? I just met him a few times at a club in South Beach. They would not like it, they would try to balk, when I instructed them to tell their friends Alex lives with my sister in Miami. In fact, I’m the godfather to one of their kids.

  For Gil, none of this was going to be an issue. He was playing for the highest stakes—his entire future life—and he had every motivation to assure that Alex would have the total trust of Gong and Co. He understood what was necessary to maximize the likelihood of success. And he understood the risks. In the penitentiary, he would have nowhere to hide. Mark told Gil to put his nephew Alex Perez on his list of family members who were approved for personal visits. We planned to drive down to Lewisburg on a Thursday and stay overnight. It was June 1994. This would give Mark and I time to get to know each other better, and I would have a full day with Gil. Nor would the prison officials or anyone else with the Bureau of Prisons know who I really was. As far as all of them were concerned, I was Gil’s visiting nephew Alex. There was no reason in the world to risk a corrupt corrections officer tipping off whatever criminals had them on the payroll.

  Cutting the BOP out of this loop had been a dicey decision. There was no rulebook to follow, it came down to a judgment call by Mark and myself, with a green light from the squad supervisor, Geoff Doyle. If anything were to go bad for me inside the prison—an altercation with an inmate hostile to Gil, or worse, being flaked by a corrections officer with a beef against Gil—there would have been some tap dancing by the Bureau attorneys. And I would have been sitting in custody somewhere, waiting for it to play out.

  After signing in with Alex’s driver’s license as ID, I was led through numerous locked impenetrable portals before entering a huge, brightly lit room with very a high ceiling. Like a combination gym/dining hall, it had rows of picnic tables and benches bolted to the floor, vending machines along a wall, and a high podium at one end, not unlike a judge’s bench, from which a corrections officer presided. The COs (corrections officers) were, to my surprise, friendly and courteous (unlike in some state prisons and local jails, I can tell you that; different hiring standards, different cultures). For the benefit of Gil’s fellow residents, I was in “full Alex”—the gel, the gold—and had expected, at the very least, long unexplained waits and a certain brusqueness, or grudging responses from the prison personnel. From the way they behaved, I could have been visiting a Courtyard by Marriott.

  Inside the visiting room, I took a seat at one of the picnic tables and waited for Gil to be escorted through the door. Ka-chunk. The tumblers of the big locks fell into place, the door on the far side of the room swung open, and in walked a short, solid, muscular man decked out in “inmate red.” Clearly Hispanic, with chiseled features, broad cheekbones, jet-black hair, and piercing eyes, Gil Sandoval would have been credible as a Mayan ruler or a governor of Sonora. Impressive guy, a leader of men. I instantly agreed with Mark Calnan’s assessment, conveyed on our drive to Lewisburg: Gil was smarter than most SACs he had run across. I stood up. From across the room Gil caught my eye, we both smiled broadly as we walked forward, then embraced as would be expected of the close relatives we were supposed to be. All performance at first, but this turned out to be the beginning of a genuine friendship.

  Professional that he was, Gil had previously told Gong very little about this nephew who was coming to visit, thus giving the nephew and his uncle time to craft and backstop a convincing and thorough legend. Too often, overeager informants have weaved a complex story about Alex, or Sal, or Eduardo, thereby saddling me with the unnecessary complications and heightened risks of trying to fit into an unlikely scenario. Recall the overly zealous informant Oscar in RUN-DMV, who spontaneously introduced me to the subject (Nair, with the dogs, in Newark) as a Colombian cocaine dealer, because Oscar thought this would sound impressive. His unsolicited contribution could have gotten me killed.

  After a good six hours (Gil was fluent in English, though we tended to speak to each other in Spanish), I left his company in that cavernous bullpen in Lewisburg totally comfortable that we could both converse persuasively about each other and about our family, to the limited extent that the subject would come up in dialogue with Gong—and future subjects. The FBI hoped that Gong would be just the first of several targets fingered by Gil. Much of what I had learned about Gil would never be revealed, not to any subjects, and certainly not now, on the printed page. Details concerning his family and personal l
ife, singular in nature and tending to identify him and his family were important for rapport building, but otherwise could only lead to harm. More important, and more likely to come up in our dealings with Gong and his henchmen, were the details Gil and I created that day in Lewisburg concerning the inmate’s ongoing cocaine business, and my role in it. We decided on Miami as our base of operations, as I could not converse knowledgeably about El Paso. Occasionally, over the following year and a half, Gil or I would have to invent new details on the spot, in the course of a conversation or meeting with Gong or one of his people. As soon as possible, we would talk on the phone and update each other about the latest backstopping detail. Our stories were always consistent. They had to be. Of course, Gong didn’t speak Spanish and Gil didn’t speak Chinese, which left English—specifically, Gong’s broken English, which didn’t allow for much in the way of fine detail. Still, Gil would be able to drop the occasional agreed-upon casual remark about his nephew Alex, adding texture and credibility to our relationship. That Alex, he stopped in El Paso last week, just to look in on my mom and make sure my brother is behaving himself … without him …

  * * *

  SUNBLOCK was a big case for me, and it was a pretty big deal for the FBI: what I call a full-court press. There are six elements at the disposal of the Bureau or any other relatively well-heeled agency embarking on a major criminal investigation: subpoenas, court-approved interceptions of various sorts (mail, wiretapping, and electronic communication intercepts), physical surveillance, interviews, informants, and undercover work. (Informants and UC agents perform pretty much the same function, but the UC is much more reliable and has much greater credibility, in court and out. The downside is the greater risk to the UC agent.) The case agent who is developing a strategy for a new investigation must decide what mix of these procedures are appropriate for the particular type of subjects and the violation being investigated. Interviews may be just the ticket in a mortgage-fraud investigation but are not likely to result in much actionable information when trying to indict John Gotti and his soldiers. Available personnel and financial resources are a factor to be weighed: sending out subpoenas to a bank and going out with another agent to interview victims of a pyramid scheme are at one end of the cost-of-resources continuum (the lower end), while obtaining court orders and wiring someone’s home and social club, and setting up a full-time surveillance team are at the expensive end. Putting together and maintaining an operation such as SUNBLOCK, one that employs five of these elements (no interviews here) over many months or, often enough, several years is an expensive, complex, labor-intensive process. But for these investigations, there’s no other way.

  As Alex Perez, I would work the Gong cartel undercover in the field, beginning with his man Richard. Both Gil and I would work Gong himself, in Lewisburg prison. Language issues notwithstanding—no Chinese for Gil, no Spanish for Gong, just his borderline indecipherable English—Gil had immediate success with the Chinese Malaysian drug kingpin. Sniffing the benefits of a collaboration with Gil Sandoval’s organization, Gong was all enthusiasm. The fact that he soon authorized Richard to give me a sample at our first meet, the one in the diner near LaGuardia, spoke to Gil’s credibility. That kind of trust usually takes time to develop, definitely in the heroin world. It would not be unusual to have several preliminary meets before the complimentary package of tinfoil changes hands.

  Gil was respected as the boss of a large cartel, but Gong was still Gong. On the organizational chart (not that we actually had one, pinned to the wall, like on the TV shows) they were up at the top, side by side. Gil’s cocaine operations, now based in Miami—El Paso had become too hot—were going strong. After reflection and extended discussions of the practical aspects and feasibility with his nephew during the visit at the prison, he had decided to accept Gong’s proposition. We, the Mexicans, would expand into the heroin business, using our existing infrastructure. Gong and his subordinates, the Chinese, would likewise be expanding into the cocaine business. They would sell us heroin, we would sell them cocaine. (None of the conversations between Gil and Gong could be recorded, of course. Their content would be relayed to me by Gil and carefully documented. Later on, when possible, I would recapture them on my cassette recorder, in my phone calls with Gong: My uncle tells me…)

  Gil’s reading of Gong (always accurate, it turned out) was that he had no intention of buying cocaine. Gong was only looking for new volume customers for his heroin. The offer to purchase our cocaine was simply to sweeten the deal, make it more enticing for Gil. Later, I would make passing comments to Richard and Chang about selling them coke, simply to maintain a pretense of interest. To which they would reply curtly. We’ll talk about it. As Gil’s nephew, Alex might have some interest in having the Chinese as customers, but as FBI agents, Mark Calnan and I would never be in position to sell cocaine, not unless it was a buy-bust in which it was guaranteed that the drugs would never leave our possession. Not the scenario here. Cocaine was just something to talk about.

  Within a month of our meeting in Lewisburg, I gave Gil the green light to pass alias Alex’s beeper number to Gong, while requesting a contact number for Alex to use with Gong’s people. After doing a little research on the mechanics of call forwarding, I devised a very useful ruse to mask my true location. Contacting the Florida telephone company as Alex, I obtained a local number, with all the optional bells and whistles. Then, I set up the call forwarding so that when I placed a call, on the recipient’s caller ID would be displayed a number with my 305 South Florida area code. Two weeks after Gong had been given my beeper number, late one evening when I was at the office in New Rochelle, my new SUNBLOCK 800 number beeper went off. I checked the list of known numbers Mark had given me. In the preliminary stages of the case, methodically, painstakingly, he had developed much intel regarding Gong’s organization, their names, addresses, phone numbers. This beep was from the Karaoke Club operated by Richard, believed by Mark to be one of Gong’s chief lieutenants. Gil had already passed me his name. From the case agent’s perspective, this was a major step forward. Corroboration of the intel already developed, and more important: First Contact.

  From the New Rochelle Hello Phone, I returned the call.

  “Hello … is this Alex?” The man on the other end of the line had a heavy Asian accent. “I’m calling for my brother in Lewisburg.”

  This was Richard. I said I was planning to be in New York in two weeks and would give him a call a few days before, then beep him to set up an initial meet—the one at the diner at the end of which he slipped me the small sample of his product. After receiving that sample and confirming its 95-percent purity, I filled in Uncle Gil on the meeting. He was going to tell Gong that both of us were very pleased with the quality of the sample, that he had instructed me to make a small buy on my next swing through New York. Just five ounces. A test run, just to see how things went. Then we would move up to the serious level. After some de rigueur haggling, we set the price at $4,300 an ounce, $21,000 altogether. With heroin on the street having a purity no higher than 10 percent, the 90-percent product we would be purchasing could be cut and produce a very respectable profit margin. It’s important to note that, operationally, Mark did not have an unlimited budget for SUNBLOCK evidence purchases. He had asked me to stretch the allocated budget as far as I could without compromising my credibility. I was to cast a wide net, meeting Richard’s associates in New York and his counterparts in other cities, while keeping costs under control. The initial proposal had been approved with a six-month budget of nearly $200,000, of which 75 percent was allocated for purchasing evidence, i.e., buying wholesale heroin. An impressive sum on paper, perhaps, and a fair amount of money for the Bureau to let “walk,” but at the level we were dealing with, it could be burned through rapidly if care was not applied. Ultimately, Mark would have to request budget enhancements, which always involved internal haggling with the Bureau bean counters. (Gil and I weren’t the only ones who had to haggle.) Mark got mo
re money. I don’t remember how much. Knowing the Bu, I’m guessing an additional fifty thousand. Gil’s professional caution with regard to the heroin purchases, as exhibited to Gong by making initially modest buys, served multiple purposes. In the first place, Gong would expect it, and in the mirror world of covert operations, it is often the case that there are several layers of “reality,” where behavior is tailored to the perceptions of the targets while actually serving the practical exigencies of the investigators and prosecutors.

  Within a short couple of weeks after the agreement about quantity and price for my first modest purchase from Richard, the phone rang one night at the New Rochelle office on my 305 area-code number. I wasn’t expecting this call. Gil hadn’t advised me it was coming because he didn’t know, either.

  “Alex?” It was a high-pitched foreign voice. “This Sonny from Lewisburg. You know me?”

  “I know you.” It was Gong, and this was to be the first in a bizarre series of conversations that would stretch through the following year.

  “So you want to open Chinese restaurants? You want…” The rest of the sentence was unintelligible. Now I had to ad-lib. Gil and I had not known what code Gong would be using. “Fish” was all I knew about. Almost half of what the man said was so garbled and accented as to be beyond comprehension, but not wanting to piss him off, I responded to the tone of his utterances with a concurring huh huh or ah ah or yeah yeah or whatever utterance seemed to keep the conversation moving.

  “Sure. My brother in Lewisburg. He owns many Mexican restaurants. He wants me to open Chinese restaurants.”