The Pretender Read online

  “When does it begin?” she then asked.

  “When does what begin?” asked Dave.

  “Please don’t play this game with me. You know what I mean. The third degree.”

  Dave still breaks into laughter when he tells the story, and I do, too. Not until her captors drove her to court and she was standing with an attorney before the magistrate did this poor suspect stop shaking. (Her apprehension isn’t so funny, but I don’t have too much sympathy; she was a fugitive, after all.)

  As a polar opposite to Dave, his co-case agent on the op was young and feisty Vicki Barnes Davis, from Huntsville, Alabama. One tough lady: as a corollary duty, she was a firearms instructor. Dave’s friendly wisecracks with Vicki, which today would qualify for EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) prosecution, elicited Southern-fried retorts served with cutting wit. Vicki could take it and dish it back with interest. She and Dave became good friends, and the chemistry binding the entire team was just right.

  Our office was on an upper floor of the local Ramada Inn in New Rochelle. Though not covert, few people knew it was there. I’d leave my desk at the Ramada around ten in the morning, hit the streets, usually returning by five or six in the afternoon. The Ramada was ideal: if any subject ever saw me enter—hey, I had a deal going down on the fifth floor. Of all the cases I’ve worked on, the handle for this investigation is my favorite: RUN-DMV, a parody of RUN-DMC, the popular hip-hop trio originally based in Hollis, Queens. I assume almost everyone knows that “DMV” is the Department of Motor Vehicles, but the broader joke might have been lost on someone living a bespoke life on, say, Park Avenue and therefore behind the hip-hop times. Their loss.

  * * *

  The dark-blue Mercedes 500SEL pulled to the curb by the storefront of Holyland Travel, on Morris Avenue in a run-down section of the Bronx. The driver, known as Bim, a burly black man with shaved head and a beard, looked like an ex-prizefighter. He got out of the car, looked deliberately up and down the avenue, then positioned himself on the sidewalk. His passenger stepped out of the sedan, gold chains reflecting the sunlight, and stretched as he closed the door. He was about half the size of the driver and clearly in charge. He looked through his Cartier-framed sunglasses at his Rolex, then appeared to give some orders to his driver, who nodded, crossed his arms, and leaned against the Mercedes. The man with the Rolex walked through the Holyland doorway, where he was approached by an attractive—very attractive—Palestinian woman, perhaps in her late twenties, with almond-shaped eyes and a stunning figure. Fortunately, no burka covered her features.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Mahmoud.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. The man standing by the door in the back nodded. No further questions asked, she pointed the new arrival toward the small office in the rear. The man by the door led the way and gestured for the new arrival to take a seat.

  “I am Mahmoud. What can I do to help you?” No small talk. His English was fluent, though heavily accented.

  “Well, I have a little problem. I was told that you might be able to help me. To solve my problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I have a car, a very nice car, that I need to get registered, that needs plates. But I don’t have a title. I don’t have any paper for the car.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Jamal. From Newark.”

  Mahmoud stared hard. For a while. The guy who had arrived in the Mercedes stared back.

  “I should be able to handle it. What’s your name?”

  “Alex.”

  Alex Perez, and this time, unlike with H. Marc Renard, my new alias for the streets was no in-joke about a fox or anything else. I just liked the sound and the feel of the two words. I wouldn’t have to think twice before I introduced myself as Alex Perez. This was good, because the stakes were now higher: my new friends in the wider world of metro NYC would be packing guns. My overall UC backstory for RUN-DMV and other investigations was simple: As Alex Perez, I had left Miami under obscure and unexplained circumstances. Maybe I’d been forced to leave. My primary car was a late-model Chrysler Imperial, legally registered to Alex, of course, with Metro-Dade plates, a small but invaluable prop, assuring instant credibility on the streets I’d be working far north of Miami. (The Mercedes from COMMCORR, which I still kept in reserve for special subjects, was a mite too upscale for the day-to-day Alex but it was perfect for Mahmoud, who would have already learned that I’d arrived in the Mercedes with a driver who also served as bodyguard.) I now had a long ponytail halfway down my back, usually a few days growth of beard, and I featured two or three gold chains and bracelets seized by the Bureau in other cases. A little gel in the hair was the finishing touch. That’s the look the job required: vulgar, and if not big-money, aspiring to big-money while still a proud denizen of the streets. I was (and still am) about five-foot-nine, slight of build, wiry, muscular, with an angular face and deep-set blue eyes that can project humor or cold cockiness, whatever is appropriate to the moment. All in all, I have an Eastern European/Semitic look crossed with French and can pass as Hispanic, blue eyes notwithstanding, when accompanied by my colloquial Spanish.

  Mahmoud Noubani was Palestinian, and a true believer in the cause, as I came to learn. And as I had learned from intel provided by John Sultan, a new CW, he had no reluctance in applying violence as a business tool. His expertise was providing people with false IDs—his potential client pool from the Middle East, even pre-first WTC bombing, was food for chilling speculation. Going in “cold” as I did with Mahmoud is the most difficult type of initial UC meet, the most prone to failure. The vast majority of meets are bolstered by an introduction from an informant who already has the subject’s trust. With a strong introduction, such as “Alex is my cousin’s ex, we’ve been friends, and we’ve been doing business for over ten years,” all of that trust is transferred to the UC. With Mahmoud, we’d didn’t have this introduction. He had come across our radar indirectly, when Vicki had found a complaint report submitted to the New York Attorney General’s office by a young contractor from Queens, named John Sultan, a scrawny twenty-year-old from Bangladesh. This contactor had accompanied a Greek business acquaintance to Holyland to act as an interpreter, and he had been present when his companion paid for a fraudulent driver’s license and Social Security card from Mahmoud. John had made some disparaging comments at the time about the cost of the documents, and he later returned to Holyland seeking a partial refund for his acquaintance. Instead, one of the young Arabs who worked at Holyland slammed John’s head into the counter, and Mahmoud himself aimed his pistol at John’s head. John considered himself lucky to have walked out alive. He then made the formal complaint to the AG’s office, which came to nothing until it worked its way to us, thanks to Vicki’s diligence.

  After reading the report, Vicki and I interviewed him at his home in Astoria, Queens. Vicki had done her due diligence on John’s construction company: it was a going concern. He owned a lot of heavy equipment. He was a Muslim—and his cute blond wife was not. Hard as it was for me and Vicki to believe initially, John was genuinely outraged by what he had witnessed with Mahmoud and Holyland—not just the gun at his head, also the fraudulent documents being channeled onto the streets. What a straight shooter. The details he provided served as RUN-DMV’s legal basis—probable cause—for targeting Holyland.

  Over the next few days, I would think further about John Sultan: an immigrant, multilingual, speaking Urdu, English, and a fair bit of Arabic; a secular Muslim who would look at home in any mosque in the Middle East. Clearly very bright, unusually entrepreneurial, and with a profound sense of integrity. Perfect. After talking to Craig Dotlo, I went back to Astoria.

  “Hey, John, how would you like to do some work for the FBI? It won’t pay much, but I guarantee it will be interesting.”

  Once the paperwork was processed, John was officially a CW: a “cooperating witness.” (Or “confidential witness,” the term preferred by pros
ecutors and the press.) In addition to the innumerable RUN-DMV meets that we worked on over the next several years, we also worked some IT (international terrorism) cases, both gathering intelligence and working undercover, as we will see later. Along with special agents working the International Terrorism Squads, John did UC work targeting Hezbollah and other jihadist organizations, which were active domestically in the mid-nineties, and still are. John was trusted by the targets to the point that at a jihadi conference attended by a rogue’s gallery of IT subjects, John worked security. Today, John has changed his name and is an executive in the computer business. He is one of my best friends. According to the book, this is a violation of an FBI truism: Never become friends with a confidential informant or cooperating witness. Hammered home at the FBI Academy and reiterated in in-service training. But first things first with John: Mahmoud and Holyland.

  Mahmoud didn’t know about the complaint John had filed, but he would certainly have remembered the request for a partial refund—and drawing his gun. So John couldn’t provide a direct introduction. I had to go in cold. It was John’s suggestion that I use the “Jamal in Newark” introduction. “Newark has a huge Arab population,” he explained. “Mohamed and Jamal are the most common names. Mohamed’s too obvious. Jamal’s best. Mahmoud’s got to know a bunch of Jamals.”

  He did, or at least he accepted the indirect introduction. After making the decision to accept me as a client, he was all business. Details concerning the car, timeline, and price ($500 seemed reasonable) went smoothly. Crooks haggle and an undercover operative always haggles, always acts like he is willing to walk away from a transaction if he’s not getting a good price. Some haggling is mandatory, but I kept it to a minimum at this first cold call. Is that the best you can do? Such a token pro forma effort to negotiate would be expected, but our nascent relationship was too fragile for me to push beyond it. Back in the Mercedes, I turned off the mini-Nagra recorder concealed in my fanny pack and said to Bim, “I was just waiting for him to tell me to get the fuck out of his office.” Instead, RUN-DMV now had the first subject to agree with FBI UC Alex Perez to participate in criminal activity.

  The cold call at Holyland had worked, thanks to the intel provided by John. Thanks also to the preparation that went into creating the first impression. Years later, as we’ll see, I would make a number of cold calls, often in False Flag operations—cases in which I was posing as an intelligence officer, a spy, from another country—and all such cases depend on the success of the initial contact. When you go in cold, if you are not completely convincing, if the person you’re dealing with isn’t fully persuaded, well, like they say, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. The recipe for success is lots of preparation followed by some combination of appearance and attitude. I turned out to be good at this and had a great cold-call batting average, but it’s hardly ideal; fortunately, the RUN-DMV investigation didn’t have to rely on them.

  Vicki and Dave had unearthed an unlikely confidential informant (CI) from central casting named Timmy, who would be key to the long path that followed. Skinny and rodent-like, Timmy was a runner for the used-car dealers. In fact, it was one of those dealers who introduced him to Vicki and Dave. Every morning, Timmy would make the rounds of his dealers and pick up the paperwork for cars sold the previous day (around a dozen on average) and drop everything off at Yonkers DMV. At the DMV, Timmy would either hang out until the registrations and plates were ready, or he’d return later. His wife, Debbie, worked as a clerk behind one of the DMV windows. Very handy for our investigation. From this happily married couple we learned that many, if not most, of the runners were primarily processing “no-ID” paperwork, that is, registrations with fictitious names submitted with no identification. Of course, identification is technically required, so these applications were processed by certain of Debbie’s colleagues who would overlook the missing corroboration—for a price. Debbie didn’t know exactly which of her fellow clerks were on the take, and her husband didn’t know exactly how the runners got it done, just that at the end of the day, they had the “no-ID” registrations and license plates in hand.

  Timmy had been recommended as a reliable and generally honest fellow who could perhaps shed some light on the details of the process. With a little financial encouragement, he agreed to take on a partner, Alex Perez, whom he would present to the DMV world as an old friend from Miami who needed some cash after a hasty departure northward. Timmy was Italian American and had never quite become one of the boys, as most of the runners were Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Alex might be just what he needed—and Timmy was just what Alex needed. He’s the guy who indirectly provided me with opportunity to learn the nuts-and-bolts of how the fraudulent registrations were being obtained.

  For the first few days of our partnership, I accompanied Timmy on his rounds at the dealerships and DMV. Once I had the routine down, and my face had become familiar to those Timmy dealt with, I started on my own. However, with the runners at the DMV, asking questions was out of the question. This is usually the case, of course. People operating outside the law are highly suspicious of direct questions. As a good crook, therefore, I was obliged to appear totally disinterested in the activities of all new acquaintances. Discreet indirection was called for. Learn from patient observation what kinds of small talk the subjects engage in, then start to participate in the conversations, always on the lookout for opportunities to offer a humorous anecdote. All I could do in Yonkers was hang out, wait for Timmy’s work to get done, and pay careful attention to the unguarded conversation around me.

  One day, runner Manuel said to runner Julio Dominguez, in Spanish, “I’ve got a no-ID, but I need someone to do it and I need it today.”

  “Well … all right, but you’ll have to wait. I’ve got two, and my girl can’t go on the line again right away, the supervisor’s on the floor.”

  Julio’s girl was waiting on the line with all the paperwork, minus proof of ID. Approaching the front, she waited for the right cashier to be free, careful not to attract attention. Passing the title and forms to the cashier, she murmured in a low voice, “This is for Julio.” Standing in the background, Julio caught the teller’s eye and nodded. Or attached to the paperwork there might be an ID: Julio’s driver’s license.

  Months later Julio Dominguez said to me, “Debbie used to do no-IDs. She was doing them like crazy to pay for her honeymoon, then she stopped.” This news flabbergasted me. Debbie was Timmy’s wife.

  “Debbie did no-IDs? Now she’s so stuck-up. Did Timmy know?”

  “What do you think? Of course. She was getting them from him and everybody else.”

  When I mentioned this revelation to Craig, he just shrugged. Vicki shook her head and smiled. I mentioned it in my 302 report, but there was no point in taking it any further. A renewed lesson about how far to trust any informant: Just as far as you need to. That’s it. With CIs and CWs, cooperating witnesses, one ought still exercise a healthy skepticism. Though with CWs, knowing they will be testifying one day, they are less likely to massage the truth.

  Our increasing understanding of what was going down with the fraudulent documents still didn’t tell us how we could get in on the scam and prosecute these felons whose craft was causing so many problems for law enforcement at all levels. Assuming I could get the nuances down pat and develop the trust required to get a registration processed illegally without ID—I thought I could—I would still need to provide the crooked DMV clerk with the car title and insurance card, along with the completed DMV forms. Providing titles meant buying real cars. Or so we thought. Following up on this loose end, Craig teamed us up with Jack Wright, the DMV Inspector General in Albany, a retired BuAgent. Jack provided the solution. He had his people at DMV print up titles for nonexistent cars which were being sold by the nonexistent people whose name appeared on the title. So we would use fraudulent titles produced by the good guys to obtain other fraudulent titles produced by the bad guys. These, along with blank insur
ance cards, and DMV registration forms, would be my tools to make cases. I would complete the forms and insurance cards with invented names and addresses and—of course—for which no form of ID would be presented. We would thus have irrefutable, hard evidence demonstrating that the corrupt DMV employees had issued registrations in names that were demonstrably false. And had accepted bribes directly from FBI agents or cooperating witnesses.

  We approached the RUN-DMV objectives from every angle we could come up with. First was Holyland, then Timmy, then came Oscar Cascillo, who became an important cooperating witness, in the same category as John Sultan. The difference between a CW and an informant is significant, as it directly affects how much evidence we will need to develop for a prosecution. A CW agrees to testify if necessary. Hence the name, cooperating witness. With an informant, the agreement from the outset is that he/she (as referred to in reports, to hide the gender) will never testify and his/her identity will never be released (unless a deal to testify is reached at a later time). As the informant will not be testifying, other evidence has to be found to replace what he/she would have testified to, if he/she was a CW.

  I write the following claim without hesitation: The FBI is the only federal law enforcement agency that keeps its word to informants, and this is one of the most important legacies of J. Edgar. This ironclad agreement is known on the streets, and it is responsible in no small measure for the Bureau’s reputation on the streets. This agreement holds for narcotics investigations, terrorism, everything, and it is this credibility with informants that has allowed the FBI to consistently develop outstanding sources, and it accounts for much of the Bureau’s success overall. There are, no doubt, state and local agencies scattered about with equivalent credibility on the street. But they are, by definition, operating on a different level.