The Pretender Read online

  So there was a third party. Bad news, but I allowed them to smooth my ruffled feathers and said I understood that they had to check this out, even though it was an absurd mistake. I said I’d be back in their office first thing Monday morning. I’d invested so much time and money to get my trader’s license, we had to get this straight. Considering the circumstances, the meeting came to a close on as positive a note as possible. Both the general counsel and the executive vice president were apologizing profusely. Again, in the underground mall, I did my dry-cleaning, then called Craig. I still thought I might be able to bluff it out. The issue was simple: Did they know my real name? If they didn’t, if someone just knew me vaguely and thought they recognized me, I might be able to play it through. If they did have my name, COMMCORR was finished, because any kind of investigation would quickly confirm that H. Marc Renard and Marc Ruskin were the same person. But we had to play it out, see what happened.

  Again, Craig agreed. We might as well keep up the bluff. This wasn’t his squad’s only case, but it was by far the biggest and most important one, requiring the two supervisors, the two full-time case agents, and a few other part-timers, and the six UC agents. Craig wasn’t going to toss a few million dollars and eighteen months of hard, careful work down the toilet unless he absolutely had to. The five UC agents still working at COMEX weren’t getting anything done and had no prospects, but they were still there, still working as clerks. As long as I was making progress at NYMEX, Craig didn’t want to pull them. If he did, someone might make the connection between them and me. And, who knows, if they stayed in place, my dream scenario would come true and I could open doors for some of them down the road.

  What was the worst that could happen on Monday? Johnson would call the gendarmes, who would show that wily fox Marc Renard the door. Or would they grill the FBI’s uncovered undercover agent? Craig and I couldn’t see that happening. They’d want me out of there in the worst way. But if they did start—or try to start—an interrogation on the spot, I would play an outraged H. Marc Renard, call my attorney, and have him rush over. Mary Jane would have one on stand-by, a private attorney and “Friend of the Bureau,” who would lend a hand without asking questions. Craig and I hung up. I wasn’t in panic mode. I really wasn’t. Neither was he. We could ride this out. Then, a few hours later, Craig called my apartment. I knew immediately the he had some terrible news. His voice was different. He’d gotten a phone call from the registrar, where I’d set up the fake transcript as Marc Renard. A woman from NYMEX had called and asked if a Marc Renard had attended the school—and if a Marc Ruskin had also attended.

  So they had both names.

  Then, almost immediately, Craig had received a second call from the head of Human Resources in the Brooklyn DA’s office. A woman from NYMEX—my accuser, no doubt, pressed to corroborate her claims—had called to ask whether a former assistant DA by the name of Marc Ruskin had joined the FBI. Pressed, the caller identified herself by name. She had to, because she was calling in an official capacity. The HR chief provided the correct answer—that policy forbade him from even confirming that someone had been a prosecutor in the office—but the quick thinking didn’t really matter. NYMEX had both of my names. I’d been officially fingered.

  I begged Craig to let me go in Monday morning and play this out to the bitter end, but he said no. They said no. The situation had reached the corner offices in Washington—the Bureau and the Department of Justice and the Postal Inspection Service—and their decision was final. Pull H. Marc Renard from the COMMCORR investigation. I was bitterly disappointed. Eighteen months invested, and zero to show for it. Okay, some great training in living a lie, some great lessons learned, but no indictments, no perp walks, no headlines, no glory. What a long weekend. No need to study butterfly trades. Instead, I met with Craig and Mary Jane to plan my exit strategy. And in the evening drank a wee bit more than my usual dose of Jameson’s.

  On Monday morning, in a phone booth near my real apartment, I picked up the handset, dropped a quarter in the slot (last operational expense for COMCORR), and called Johnson, the NYMEX executive VP, and explained that I had to go to Puerto Rico on short notice because of a serious illness in the family. Not only would I miss the meeting with him and Ms. Hendriks, much to my disappointment, but with deep regret I was withdrawing my application for a seat on the exchange. What a charade. I kept a straight face on my end of the line, and Johnson played along on his end. He said he understood. He was sorry that it had turned out this way. We wished each other well.

  He and everyone else at NYMEX must have been relieved—but it wasn’t over for them, because within a few months the U.S. Attorney’s office initiated an investigation into possible obstruction of justice, which would be a federal crime. Everyone involved was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. Nothing came of it, but maybe it put the fear of God into them. (But I doubt it.) When the story broke, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal took the FBI’s side and called it a “disgrace” that the government’s undercover agent had been outed by a lawyer in the regulatory arm of NYMEX, which was duty-bound to monitor and control the traders, not protect them.

  Who had betrayed me? A former colleague: Dominique Hentoff, who had started in the Brooklyn DA’s office the year after me. Now she was working in the regulatory office at NYMEX. She had seen me on the floor with my Renard nametag, and rather than approaching me and asking why I had a new name, she’d taken the information to her bosses. If she had asked me, I might have been able to bring her into the operation. She must also have remembered that I had left the DA’s office to join the FBI. When I found out her name, I conjured a vague recollection of perhaps having caught an almost unconscious glimpse of her on the floor of the exchange, but who knows. Nor did it matter. When the op unraveled, I never saw or heard from her.

  The real collateral damage was to Joseph Bernstein, my old friend from the DA’s office; Steve Weinstein, the clearinghouse owner to whom Joseph had introduced me; and Lester Goodwin, from Master Sun’s Tae Kwon Do class. All three had vouched for me, the latter two unwittingly, and they became pariahs in the exchanges. Joseph resigned. Steve’s clearinghouse lost customers and went through severe financial hard times. Lester may ultimately have been able to salvage his career; I never found out.

  The most valuable lesson for future UC ops was to never, never bring individuals with whom one has personal relationships into any kind of operational law enforcement activities. Regardless of the temptation. There are always going to be unforeseeable consequences, and attaining a successful conclusion is not worth compromising friends and acquaintances. No case is sufficiently important to justify such risks. Throughout the following years, as we’ll see, I might involve other special agents or police officers, informants, and cooperating witnesses in a case. These people knew the risks. You won’t read about my bringing in a civilian, because I never did.

  When setting up the sting, Craig Dotlo and I had understood that as a former lawyer in New York, I might be recognized. My participation was a calculated risk, and it had backfired with a bang heard throughout the Bu, I’m sure. I feared my UC career may have come to a premature demise. Wrong. Very wrong, as future developments would reveal. Still, a lesson learned. Half a dozen years later, when we set up a phony law office in Westchester for a health-care fraud Group I, I kept my name but changed the spelling to Mark, and we backstopped a completely new ID. Mark Ruskin and Marc Ruskin had different pasts, different dates of birth, different Social Security numbers, but if someone recognized me, I’d have the right name and should be able to explain my new circumstances within the legal profession. After Craig and I came up with that scheme, I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if my former colleague in Brooklyn had recognized me on the NYMEX floor, but with the right name. I think she would have approached me and said, “Hey Marc, nice to see you, I thought you’d joined the FBI.” This would have given me a fighting chance to run a line. Yeah, that didn’t work ou
t, I quit their lousy academy after two weeks … Quantico, what a dump … and those assholes expect you to follow their orders like some kind of automaton … Hey, it might have worked. But as it turned out, nothing could save COMMCORR. Craig gave me a couple of weeks to decompress, and I flew down to Key Biscayne to see my girlfriend. Back in New York, I set about closing down “The H. Marc Renard Show.” Craig pulled the remaining UC agents clerking at COMEX—but not immediately, and not all at the same time. All of us had to be reassigned to other offices, since the NY office was in the Federal Building, only a few blocks from the World Trade Center and the pits where we’d been working for a year. One very looong year.

  4

  The Stakes Go Up

  Once the smoke had cleared on Wall Street, my “attaboy” consolation was a transfer to the satellite office in New Rochelle, just north of the city. Maybe that sounds like a demotion to the far side of the crime world, but it was actually a coveted assignment. First, the New Rochelle beat included—for me, specifically, as a recognized undercover agent—the entire greater NYC metro area, the best terrain there is for the kind of entrepreneurial, innovative crime that provokes Bureau investigation. Second, these smaller FBI offices are, by definition, more limber, and quicker to react. There are fewer supervisors and usually no upper management positions at all. Out of sight, out of mind. With a good SSRA (Senior Supervisory Resident Agent)—and New Rochelle had one at the time—that neighborhood office is an excellent venue for creative stings and investigations, about as good as it gets, and offers the best of both worlds: big-city crime but with minimal BuHassles.

  I was assigned to C-21, a Public Corruption and Fraud squad headed by Craig Dotlo, one of my supervisors on COMMCORR. Craig was a big believer in UC cases, and for the next eight years I worked one investigation after another for him, in addition to some moonlighting elsewhere in the metropolitan area and occasionally beyond. As I had learned in COMMCORR, Craig was a really sharp, insightful guy; it was the “beginning of a beautiful friendship,” to quote an observation made to a fellow gendarme in a certain movie.

  The “public corruption” category that was our squad’s specialty affords almost unlimited possibilities for investigation and prosecution, and my first assignment targeted a crime I hadn’t thought much about, if at all. This was 1990, and FBI case agents and investigators in other agencies were reporting a troublesome development. The La Cosa Nostra wiseguys collared for whatever crime turned out to be, more often than not, equipped with well-executed but fraudulent driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, and Social Security cards. Fugitives of various sorts were also carrying these documents. So were terrorists, as I was soon to learn. (But this was not only pre-9/11, it was before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the prequel to the Al-Qaeda attack. It’s hard to comprehend now, but terrorism on American soil simply wasn’t high on the radar, and this was just twenty-plus years ago.) Armed with fraudulent documents, extremely dangerous characters could disappear in the vast reaches of the country. I’m sure they did, and no law enforcer would ever be able to track them down.

  We know that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted primary conspirator of the 1993 bombing, had claimed asylum in the States using a stolen Iraqi passport. Not so easy today. In fact, the United States probably has the world’s best system for screening passports with the help of Interpol’s database. Meanwhile, the attacks in Paris in November 2015 revealed the dangers of the European Union’s “open borders” policies, and changes are coming; some have already come. Everyone now understands that tight standards for documentation are crucial in the fight against terrorism.

  In the NYC metro area in 1990, the big problem was fraudulent documents—not stolen or fake, fraudulent. The difference is critical but often misunderstood. Fraudulent documents are the real thing, issued by government agencies, with the information on the IDs therefore available to law enforcement on the appropriate databases. The name on the documents doesn’t correspond to the arrestee’s actual name, or to anyone else, living or dead, but there’s no way any cop or investigator could know this. By contrast, a merely forged driver’s license might look like the real thing, but when the cop runs it through the databases, nothing will come up, because the license doesn’t exist in the records. Same thing with a forged Social Security card, which might be good for show, but try using it as identification for a new bank account and the bankers will find out that it’s a fake and call the police. (Yes, as I had learned in COMMCORR, the banks do have access to the databases, at least to the extent of verifying an SSAN, a Social Security Administration Number, as they are officially called).

  These fraudulent documents were big business for the bad guys. The “runners” on the street charged at least $1,000, maybe $1,500, for a driver’s license. Car registrations and Social Security cards were maybe $500. As we would learn, the collaborating clerks inside the issuing agencies were getting $25, maybe $50 for each fraudulent document created. That’s not much, but some clerks cleared a dozen frauds on some days, which was real money for someone working behind a counter: cash, tax-free, at least a car payment and, in a good week, a mortgage payment as well. In their own minds, the participating clerks could dismiss this scam as a “harmless act” or “victimless crime,” but the repercussions down the line were neither harmless nor victimless. For example, such documents would later enable a band of terrorists to elude detection long enough to fly jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

  I note that fraudulent U.S. passports, specifically, were much more difficult to obtain with the same mechanism because it was harder for the “runners” to set up accomplices in the offices of the State Department. On the other hand, it was not difficult for runners to bribe local hires in certain Third World consulates, and that’s what usually happened. Fraudulent green cards were also difficult to buy on the street because it was tough for the runners to penetrate the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). I did have one green-card case, a subject with corrupt and, as it turned out, widespread INS contacts. The runner in this case, a target named Jabes Ortega, was a very sharp Dominican with a criminal history as a “coyote,” smuggling aliens across the border from Mexico. (Technically, a “target” becomes a “subject” once some evidence has been developed, but the terms are often used synonymously, as I did above: both terms for the same guy in the same paragraph.) The resourceful Ortega was even bribing the security guards at 26 Federal Plaza, the Federal Building. They waved me and my Walther PPK undercover pistol right on through. I was in there with Ortega a half-dozen times. On every occasion, I murmured to myself: Memo to FBI agents: Please don’t speak to Marc if you see him at 26 Fed. Ortega charged ten to fifteen thousand for one green card, and he had no lack of clientele. Six months after a sale, his INS accomplices would delete the illegal files from the computers, thus destroying any evidence of their wrongdoing, while also creating some unpleasant surprises down the line for the aliens who had purchased them.

  In the beginning, Craig and his case agents had some idea about some of the players in the fraudulent ID business, but they didn’t know how the system worked. Nor did they know how to penetrate the closed circles of targets and emerge with the necessary prosecutable detail. That was the big catch—it always is—but we got the answers with a Group I op that ran for almost three years and resulted in fifty arrests, with widespread media coverage.

  Before we could get going, however, we needed the formal proposal, always the first step with any Group I undercover operation. This document is as long as a novel, outlining the crime problem, known targets, personnel requirements, budget, and modus operandi, all in excruciating detail. Once this proposal is written, generally by the case agent, and has been appropriately reviewed and approved at the local level by the Chief Division Counsel and mid-level management, it goes to the regional level—in our case, Headquarters City, the New York office at Federal Plaza in downtown NYC. If it passes muster there, it is shipped to headquarters in Washing
ton, known as JEH to those who work there. (Clue: The building is named after the Bu’s slightly controversial founder.) At JEH, it is subjected to the final evaluation by a committee comprised of high-level managers from both the Bureau and the Justice Department.

  As onerous as this procedural mechanism sounds, it still doesn’t convey the difficulties that major proposals face or the number of acronyms that have to be explained and questions satisfied. Sometimes they aren’t satisfied, and if the proposal makes it all the way to JEH only to be skewered at this last stop, that can mean six months of fieldwork down the drain. More likely, JEH will require changes and attach conditions and stipulations. Additionally, the powers at JEH require a Renewal Proposal to be submitted and approved every six months.

  Regardless what you might have heard or read, there are no rogue Black UC Ops in today’s twenty-first-century FBI. Nor were there any when I was starting on the mean streets in the last decade of the twentieth century. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. The mechanism to hide such an op has never existed. Within the Bureau, there aren’t that many secrets.

  Craig was prepared to devote significant resources to this op. There would be two full-time case agents—a big commitment right there, because the C-21 squad had fewer than a dozen agents altogether. There would be a part-time financial analyst to handle the bookkeeping and a full-time UC guy—me, tasked with infiltrating the world of the “runners” whose fraudulent documents made them much money and caused law enforcement a great deal of trouble.

  Dave Clark was selected as one of the case agents. An “Old Bureau” special agent from New England, Dave had been hired during the Hoover era. One of his favorite stories—one of my favorite stories—was the day he arrested a Weather Underground fugitive in the late seventies. He and his partner brought this very frightened young lady back to the office in New Rochelle, printed and photographed her, completed their paperwork, then packed up and prepared to take her to court for arraignment.