The Pretender Page 5

  Because the Macheteros tended to be more active after dark, we usually worked after dark, setting up on whomever we were following that week, or that month, at around two or three in the afternoon, and usually putting him to bed around ten or eleven, maybe twelve, depending on his routine. Many had “day jobs,” so if they weren’t moving by then and the lights had been out for an hour or two, they weren’t going anywhere. (They didn’t have the patience to play games, sit in the dark for an extended period, on the off chance that there might be a surveillance team outside.) On those occasions that they did enter their cars late in the evening, we would be in for a long, often productive shift.

  After a typical shift, Armando Rodriguez (Oso) and I would drive down to Condado, get a bite to eat, then move on to one of the two or three clubs that catered to a mix of expats and young Puerto Ricans. Eventually, we’d head back to our beachside condos. When I got up midmorning the next day, I’d go for a run, maybe put in a little beach time, then load up the BuCar and head off to work. Altogether, not a bad life for a single guy.

  And then, suddenly (or so it seemed), it was August 1988, three years since my graduation from Quantico, and I had orders for reassignment to the New York office. My Transfer Luncheon (the Bu has a capitalized name for everything, and I mean Everything; I’m sparing readers most of them) was held at Mona’s, a beachfront Mexican restaurant, one of our favorites. All SOGers, ground and aerial, were on hand, but only a couple of the office supervisors; the SOG agents who weren’t leaving the island had to remain covert and could not be seen with a full Bureau complement. The gang presented me with a plaque commemorating my assignment to the Isla del Encanto—and then, as per tradition, roasted the hell out of me. I wasn’t going to take this lying down. Fueled by screwdrivers, I retaliated with my own observations and jibes, some prepared beforehand. There were lots of laughs that afternoon, and few of the jokes would pass muster with today’s politically correct thought police. Driving away in our respective BuCars, all of us were soused, and I, for one, was also thoughtful. Puerto Rico had been a big deal for me—truly a major transitional stage in my life. I had loved the transition from the courtroom in Brooklyn to the FBI Academy in Quantico to the mean streets of Puerto Rico. Not for a moment did I doubt that I’d made the right call by changing careers.

  But what about where I was going? Would the New York gig be as enlightening and rewarding as my first Bureau assignment? I was pretty confident that the answer would be yes. I’ve already admitted that I had joined the FBI because I thought it might provide the opportunity for me to be the best at something important. Three-plus years later, I knew that I had made the right move.

  3

  Learning to Live a Lie

  Learning to lie is one thing, and it takes practice, but learning to live a lie—that’s something else entirely, a much greater challenge, and that’s what undercover work is. The seed for my interest in working behind enemy lines had been planted many years before, watching old movies about the OSS agents in Nazi-occupied Europe. Then, while working for Pat Moynihan in Washington, I met a retired undercover agent from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (predecessor to the DEA). This man had as much character as anyone I met in the capital, particularly on the Hill, where character often seemed to be an actual impediment to career advancement. In Puerto Rico, I found gratification in the surveillance work against the local terrorist groups, but I also realized that I didn’t want to be just a watcher, a voyeur, a ghost. Not for the next twenty-five years. The goal was to become a player, maybe the best one, to see how far I could push the envelope, and in the FBI, I figured out, one elite job leads the way in that regard.

  But first things first. My initial assignment stateside was not going to be undercover. I knew that. Inside the walls of the fortress, the Bureau works like any other organization: whom you know counts, along with who’s on vacation and who’s retiring next month. In New York, the usual first job for young agents, even those with extensive street experience, as I now had, is with the “applicant squad.” These agents run background investigations on applicants to the Bureau, mainly, but also on political appointees and the like. The running joke about this tedious work: “Gear up, guys, we’re going out on an applicant arrest tonight.”

  But fortunately, I had in hand an introduction to James Kallstrom, czar of the fifteen or so SOG squads in the Big Apple. (Eight years later, in 1996, as Assistant Director in Charge of the NYO, Jim would head the Bureau’s investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the southern coast of Long Island—and rule that it was not terror related, but a failure of the aircraft. After eighteen months, the final report concluded that there was no evidence of a terrorist act. Civilian investigators eventually determined that the cause had been an electrical short circuit triggering an explosion of flammable vapors in a fuel tank.) Jim took me on board and assigned me to a newly formed squad, SO-13. A mixed blessing, as I was soon to learn.

  Our supervisor on SO-13 was Thom Nicoletti, “Crazy Thom,” one of the two genuinely out-of-control agents I came to know in my quarter century with the Bu. Despite bringing an NYU coed to a covert “off-site” for a tryst (she was of age—Thom was in his midforties), despite punching Special Agent in Charge Carson Dunbar (a big boss) in the face, Thom somehow managed to survive and thrive. He was a former Marine, former Secret Service Agent, who looked like, and patterned himself after—in my story, almost predictably—Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice. Down to the $10,000 Rolex and the Gucci suits. After New York he ended up in Hawaii, a plum assignment … but stepped on some toes and was exiled to the Guam Resident Agency. Until the governor of Guam personally declared Thom “PNG” (persona non grata), and had him deported. After Thom’s retirement, he was observed on various telecasts toting an AK-47 while standing guard behind former Afghan president Hamid Karzai. I came to like this man but would tread with care in his presence. For two years, I was happy enough working under him on a wide array of cases—surveillance in the investigation of the murder of DEA agent Everett Hatcher, a few organized crime cases, several foreign counterintelligence ops—but also feeling that surely this wasn’t quite my destiny. I chafed at the bit. I was growing tired of being a ghost, a shadow, an invisible agent. I had learned all there was to learn about the surveillance and countersurveillance business. The time was approaching for me to make a move. But to what squad? Openings for inexperienced wannabe undercover agents were rare indeed. And how to get there without incurring Crazy Thom’s wrath and retribution, because he was well known for interpreting any request for transfer to another squad as a betrayal worthy of retribution. Agents naïve enough to approach him for a frank discussion about filling a vacancy in the Bank Robbery Squad, or, heaven forbid, another Special Operations Squad, would elicit a smile and “I’ll do what I can.” Then they’d find themselves working the worst possible shifts until the transfer came through—and not to the squad they had asked for, but to their worst-nightmare squad, such as working applicants.

  My big break came in 1990. At the SO-13 off-site, sitting in our large kitchen snack room before a shift, I was leafing through the NYO internal announcements (yes … this was before email). A posting caught my eye: a job working UC on a new large-scale operation targeting commodities exchanges on Wall Street. Wow. I called one of the case agents, Ed Cugell, who scheduled an interview for the next day at his office in downtown Manhattan. As Thom was out of town, I did not have to use a pretext for a trip downtown. (The standard excuse was “need to stop by Health Services,” but you can’t use it too often, obviously.)

  It was clear at the interview that this was a major operation. Sitting in the conference room with Ed Cugell were two SSAs (Supervisory Special Agents), Ed’s co-case agent, and several others supporting the nascent investigation. C-1 SSA Mary Jane Bocra explained that her squad and C-21 SSA Craig Dotlo’s squad would have joint responsibility for the op, which would require six UCs. After an hour’s worth of questions about my background, Craig
laid down the primary ground rule. This was a deep-cover op, working and living my UC role day in, day out, contact with family and friends infrequent. The case could be expected to run at least one or two years, but could go on for who knows how long. So the commitment was open-ended, but once in I would stay in. Was I still interested?

  It would be a gross understatement to say that I was eager to be selected. A couple of years earlier, I had sat one weekend in my parents’ apartment reading the New York Times coverage of the arrest of nearly fifty commodities brokers in Chicago following an FBI sting against that famous exchange. I had thought, now that would be one fascinating job. And here was the possibility, the glimmer of a possibility, for that fanciful dream to be realized.

  The next day, at the off-site, I was caught off guard in our kitchen by Thom, who was suddenly back in town.

  “Hey Marc, were you in the office yesterday interviewing for a transfer to another squad?”

  Busted.

  “Well, er, I was, I did go to the office, actually, I was, I did, well it wasn’t exactly…” Then—and if I had seen this scene in a film, I would not have believed it—the phone rang. After a very short exchange, Thom hung up and turned toward me, his mounting anger replaced by an expression of confusion, of pure befuddlement.

  “You’ve been transferred to C-1. Effective immediately.”

  That was the commodities UC job. I actually got it, with zero UC experience? How had this happened? I was ecstatic! And to my surprise, Thom was anything but a sore loser. He knew what fights to pick. He even organized a Transfer Pizza Party. I received another plaque for my collection and was out of there. Later, I learned that Mary Jane Bocra had gone straight from my interview to the office of the big boss, Jim Esposito, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York office—and my boss in San Juan five years earlier.

  “You want Marc, he’s yours.”

  * * *

  The New York sting was designed to follow up on the big success at the commodities exchange in Chicago that I had read about in the Times. That one had started three years earlier, in the mid-eighties, with FBI agents posing as traders and infiltrating the trading floor. The first subpoenas were issued in early 1989, with the indictments coming down eight months later. The main scam of the indicted brokers and traders was using advance knowledge of customers’ orders to aid their own trades. This illegal “front-running” necessarily entailed other crimes, including racketeering, mail fraud, commodities fraud, skimming profits, filing false tax returns, lying to federal agents, conspiring to defraud the IRS, and probably more, but the front-running was the primary crime.

  Despite the wide publicity that accompanied the Chicago case, the FBI and other agencies had every reason to believe that the same practices were still rampant on the two commodities exchanges on Wall Street. Of course, the bosses must also have understood that the Chicago publicity would now make a successful infiltration of the closed world in New York a much more difficult task. By their natures, these exchanges rely on trust among the traders, many of whom have known each other from their school days. It’s a club, and not an easy one to join, but the Bureau decided to give it a try on the biggest financial stage of all—Wall Street. This would be another “Group I” investigation, that is, highest priority, with major resources in time and money allocated. (At any given time, the Bureau is engaged nationwide in about fifty Group I ops.) Code name: COMMCORR, an elision of “commodities” and “corruption.” I liked the ring of it.

  I was now one of what ultimately would be six UC agents who would try to obtain membership on the COMEX exchange after being inserted onto the floor working as clerks, the support employees who make up the bulk of the personnel buzzing around the vast halls. The hope was to obtain membership as traders within a year. All of us were rookies in this clandestine netherworld of undercover. I don’t know this for a fact, but the all-rookie lineup could have been a first for the FBI. Highly unusual, that’s for sure, and for obvious reasons: it was the blind leading the blind. Today, with a formalized UC training and certification program in place, new guys (and gals) are usually mixed with veterans. I have participated in hundreds of UC meets while accompanied by a rookie in the role of sidekick or maybe girlfriend, getting acclimated to the dark side. In the early days, there simply weren’t enough UCs to go around.

  Our first task was establishing new identities that would withstand the close scrutiny they’d be subjected to after starting our first jobs as humble clerks, followed by intense scrutiny when we applied for our broker’s licenses and actual seats on the exchange. A new identity is rooted in a new name, of course. For major operations, UC agents select their own names, for the good reason that we need to be completely comfortable with that name. In my career, I used about a dozen aliases. This one, following the French theme set in San Juan with Jean-Marc Haddock, was H. Marc Renard. My new last name means “fox” in French—an inside joke for my benefit only: the fox set loose among the hares. When asked by brokers on the floor of the exchange about the initial “H,” I would respond, “—for Henri, which no one here can pronounce, not correctly.” A small touch, but the sort of comment that built on my image as a guy of European origin, and simply not the kind of detail one would expect from a lawman.

  From the garage of available UC vehicles, I scrounged a dark-blue, late-model Mercedes 500SEL seized from some narcotics dealer, in all likelihood. (Later, to go along with the enviable wheels, I rented an enviable upscale techno-furnished apartment on 10th Street and University Place.) I flew to San Juan to set up prior employments and residences down there. The whole process of setting up the new identity is called “backstopping” a legend, and in those days we UC agents did the work almost on our own, and without guidance. It was all OJT, on-the-job training, and it requires great diligence and attention to detail, and a fair amount of specialized and arcane know-how. Which I didn’t have at first. This is one reason that in the early nineties the Bureau set up a specialized, dedicated backstopping unit codenamed Janus (destined to play a major role in my story soon enough). But backstopping H. Marc Renard was my problem—a full-time job for a full six months. I assumed my fellow UC rookies on Wall Street were doing the same thing with the same laborious, even obsessive attention to detail, but we were all operating more or less independently—not as a team.

  Let’s get specific. What would I need to have? There was no manual, no checklist of items necessary to establish one’s footprint in the world of real people. Some were obvious, like a real driver’s license and Social Security card. Those were also easy enough, because the Bureau already had established the necessary contacts in those state and federal agencies. However, once our contacts put our paperwork into their systems, it would be processed by clerks who did not know it was fictitious, and thus the documents could not be expedited, or given any priority.

  Other requirements were not so easy, and many were fraught with unexpected obstacles. Credit cards? Everyone has them, but take a look at an application, and the task is daunting when the answers are all lies. Rent an apartment? Again, lots of questions to answer and lies required, and the landlord might check some of those bogus answers, especially concerning finances. So a bank checking account would be mandatory. Why not include a savings account as well? Armed with my new driver’s license, my Social Security card, and a new Renard P.O. box (thanks to a kindly Upper East Side postmaster), I walked into a Chase branch in Lower Manhattan. Sitting across from the bank officer, I confidently filled out the forms, listing as my physical (not mailing) address a large apartment complex on 86th and Second. The paperwork completed, he carried it off, along with my identification documents. After a disconcertingly long absence, he reappeared.

  “Your Social Security number was issued a month ago, Mr. Renard.” It was a statement, but, from his expression, it was clearly also a question. When the agent who provided the contact at Social Security gave me the card, he failed to mention, and I hadn’t thought about the not-in
significant vulnerability imposed by the fact that the card would be real, but it would not be backdated. Nor would I have thought that a bank officer performing such a routine task would have the capacity to unearth such a detail so easily.

  “Oh, I had a very messy divorce,” I replied totally off the cuff, with what I thought was reasonable aplomb. It was the best I could come up with on short notice. “My ex abused my credit cards for all sorts of things to get back at me, destroying my credit, to the point where my lawyer had to obtain a new Social Security number for me.”

  He looked at me—to my somewhat agitated mind, it seemed close to an outright glare—for a few seconds and left again. Then he returned with temporary checks and a bankbook. His final look and final words conveyed his suspicion, “Okay, but…” I clearly needed more history in my life as Henri. Having lived in San Juan for three years, it seemed an obvious choice. But those three years had to be expanded to account for eleven years, covering my entire life as an adult. (I had already subtracted five years from my true age, which was thirty-five. Clerks on the exchanges were on the youngish side. The fictitious age of thirty was already pushing the envelope.) So this became the new big lie: I, Henri Marc Renard, had moved to San Juan from Buenos Aires when I was nineteen. My French dad and Argentine-bred mom had moved there from Paris when I was in grade school. Good luck to anyone trying to corroborate my overseas upbringing. The backstopping had to be done on the ground. Should the fictitious identity come under close scrutiny—and it probably would, in this instance—the trail had to appear as real as possible. Anyone associated with my new history would, if interviewed (probably by phone from New York), need to speak of me with a credible degree of familiarity. So I had to return to San Juan, an unexpected fringe benefit. At Banco Popular, my old friend Deputy Chief Security Officer Carlos Guzman and his boss readily agreed to open a fictitious account for me. More importantly, they agreed to backdate this account (sometimes I learn fast) in their computer system. I later learned that it took their software engineer two full days to override their operating system. Taking the challenge seriously, the Banco Popular team even created a worn bankbook, with deposits and withdrawals dating back a decade. Beautiful craftsmanship.