The Border

by Don Winslow

  Stay tuned.

  Keller gets the writer on the phone. “Who did you talk to for this story?”

  “I can’t reveal sources.”

  “I know the feeling,” Keller says. Marisol has schooled him that the media is not the enemy and that he needs to play nice. “But I know you didn’t talk to me.”

  “I tried. You wouldn’t take my call.”

  “Well, that was a mistake,” Keller says. Or sabotage, he thinks. “Look, here’s my cell number. Next time you want to do a story about my operation, call me directly.”

  “Is there anything in the story you want to correct or comment on?”

  “Well, I don’t shoot first and ask questions later,” he says. That was Howard, he thinks, building a narrative. “And I’m not going to conduct any ‘purges.’”

  “But you would dump Howard.”

  “Denton Howard is a political appointee,” Keller says. “I couldn’t fire him if I wanted to.”

  “But you do want to.”

  “No.”

  “Can I quote you?”

  “Sure.”

  Let Howard look like the asshole.

  Keller clicks off and walks out to the reception area. “Elise, did I get an incoming call from Politico?”

  He is an old undercover guy, so the slight trace of hesitation in her eyes tells him what he needs to know.

  “Never mind,” Keller says. “I’m reassigning you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need someone I can trust,” Keller says. “Have your desk cleaned out by the end of day.”

  He can’t afford to have a Howard loyalist screening his phone calls.

  Not with Agitator going on.

  Keller has kept knowledge of, and access to, Agitator on a highly select need-to-know basis, the intelligence on which is restricted to Blair, Hidalgo, and himself.

  On the NYPD side, Mullen has laid his neck on the chopping block by running the op from his own desk, not informing his superiors or anyone else in the Narcotics Division except for one detective—Bobby Cirello, the cop who drove them around on the New York City heroin tour.

  This was part of the “top-down/bottom-up” strategy that Keller and Mullen developed over their intense discussions. Cirello would be sent out to penetrate the New York heroin connection from the lowest level and work his way up. At the same time, they’d try to find an opening at the top of the financial world and work their way toward a connection between the two.

  Agitator is a slow burn, it’s going to take months, if not years. Keller and Mullen have promised each other that they will make no premature arrests or seizures, no matter how tempting.

  “We won’t pull the string on the net,” Mullen said, “until we have all the fish.”

  Cirello is already on the street.

  Finding a target in the financial world has taken longer.

  They can’t put an undercover cop into the financial world, because the learning curve at the level they want would be too steep and it would take too long.

  That means finding a snitch.

  It’s ugly, but what they’re looking for is a victim. Like any predators, they’re scanning the herd to find the vulnerable, the injured, the weak.

  It’s no different from finding an informer in the drug world, Keller thinks; you’re looking for someone who has succumbed to weaknesses or is in trouble.

  The vulnerabilities always come in the same categories.

  Money, anger, fear, drugs, or sex.

  Money is the easiest. In the drug world, someone has received some dope on credit, then got it busted or ripped. He owes a lot of money he can’t pay. He flips in exchange for cash or refuge.

  Anger. Someone doesn’t get the bump he wanted, the deal he wanted, the respect he thinks he deserves. Or someone screws someone’s wife or girlfriend. Or, worse, someone kills someone’s brother or friend. The aggrieved doesn’t have the power to extract his own revenge, so he goes to law enforcement to do it for him.

  Fear. Someone gets word he’s on the list, his head is on the block. He has nowhere to run but to the cops. But he can’t come empty-handed, the law doesn’t give protection from the goodness of its heart. He has to come with information, he has to be willing to go back and wear a wire. Then there’s the fear of going to prison for a long stretch—one of the biggest motivations for ratting out. The feds used that particular fear to rip the guts out of the Mafia—most guys can’t deal with the fear of dying in the joint. There are the few who could—Johnny Boy Cozzo, Rafael Caro—but they’re few and far between.

  Drugs. It used to be axiomatic in organized crime that if you do dope, you die. It makes guys too unpredictable, too talkative, too vulnerable. People do crazy, fucked-up things when they’re high or drunk. They gamble stupidly, they get into fights, they crash cars. And an addict? All you have to do to get information from an addict is to withhold the drug. The addict will talk.

  And then there’s sex. Carnal misdeeds are not such a big deal in the drug world—unless you screw someone’s wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister, or unless you’re gay—but out in the civilian world, sex is the undefeated champion of vulnerabilities.

  Men who will confess to their wives that they cheated on their taxes, embezzled millions, hell, killed somebody, won’t cop to something on the side. Guys who make sure their buddies know that they’re players—that they have girlfriends, mistresses, hookers, high-priced call girls—would practically die before letting those same buddies find out that they don the girlfriends’ lingerie, the mistresses’ makeup; that the hookers and the call girls get a bonus for spanking them or pissing on them.

  The weirder the sex, the more vulnerable the target is.

  Money, anger, fear, drugs and sex.

  What you’re really looking for is a combo plate. Mix any of the five and you have a guy who is on the fast track to being your victim.

  Hugo Hidalgo takes a cab from Penn Station to the Four Seasons Hotel.

  He spends most of his time in New York now, because that’s the new heroin hub and because, in the words often attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is.”

  Mullen is waiting for Hugo in the sitting room of a penthouse suite.

  A guy in his early thirties, Hidalgo guesses, sits on one of the upholstered chairs. His sandy hair is slicked straight back, although a little disheveled as if he’s run his hands through it. He’s wearing an expensive white shirt and black suit pants, but he’s barefoot.

  His elbows are on his knees, his face in his hands.

  Hidalgo is familiar with the posture.

  It’s someone who’s been caught.

  He looks at Mullen.

  “Chandler Claiborne,” Mullen says. “Meet Agent Hidalgo from DEA.”

  Claiborne doesn’t look up, but mumbles, “Hello.”

  “How are you?” Hidalgo says.

  “He’s had better days,” Mullen says. “Mr. Claiborne rented a suite here, brought up a thousand-dollar escort, an ounce of coke, got shall we say ‘overexcited,’ and beat the hell out of the woman. She, in turn, called a detective she knows, who came up to the room, saw the coke and had the good career sense to call me.”

  Claiborne finally looks up. Sees Hidalgo and says, “Do you know who I am? I’m a syndication broker with the Berkeley Group.”

  “Okay . . .”

  Claiborne sighs, like a twenty-year-old trying to teach his parents how to use an iPhone app. “A hedge fund. We have controlling interest in some of the largest office and residential building projects in the world, over twenty million square feet of prime property.”

  He goes on to name buildings that Hidalgo knows, and a bunch he doesn’t.

  “What I think Mr. Claiborne is trying to indicate,” Mullen says, “is that he’s an important person who has powerful business connections. Am I representing that correctly, Mr. Claiborne?”

  “I mean, if I didn’t,” Claiborne says, “I’d be in jail right now, wouldn�
��t I?”

  He’s a cocky prick, Hidalgo thinks, used to getting away with shit. “What’s a ‘syndication broker’ do?”

  Claiborne is getting comfortable now. “As you can imagine, these properties cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to finance. No single bank or lending institution is going to take that entire risk. It takes sometimes as many as fifty lenders to put together a project. That’s called a syndicate. I put syndicates together.”

  “How do you get paid?” Hidalgo asks.

  “I have a salary,” Claiborne says, “mid–seven figures, but the real money comes from bonuses. Last year it was north of twenty-eight mil.”

  “Mil would be millions?”

  Hidalgo’s DEA salary is $57,000.

  “Yeah,” Claiborne says. “Look, I’m sorry, I did get carried away. I’ll pay her whatever she wants, within reason. And if I can make some sort of contribution to a policemen’s fund, or . . .”

  “I think he’s offering us a bribe,” Mullen says.

  “I think he is,” says Hidalgo.

  Mullen says, “See, Chandler . . . may I call you Chandler?”

  “Sure.”

  “See, Chandler,” Mullen says, “money isn’t going to do it this time. Cash isn’t the coin of my realm.”

  “What is the ‘coin of your realm’?” Claiborne says. Because he’s confident that there’s some kind of coin—there always is.

  “This idiot’s getting snarky with us,” Mullen says. “I don’t think he’s used to taking crap from a mick or a Mexican. That isn’t the way you want to go here, Chandler.”

  Claiborne says, “If I call certain people . . . I can get John Dennison on his private cell right now.”

  Mullen looks at Hidalgo. “He can get John Dennison on his private cell.”

  “Right now,” Hidalgo says.

  Mullen offers him his phone. “Call him. And then here’s what’s going to happen: We take you right down to Central Booking, charge you with felony possession of a Class One drug, soliciting, aggravated assault, and attempted bribery. Your lawyer will probably bail you before we can get you to Rikers, but you never know. In any case, you can read all about it in the Post and the Daily News. The Times will take another day but they’ll get to it. So call.”

  Claiborne doesn’t take the phone. “What are my other options?”

  Because Claiborne is basically right, Hidalgo thinks. If he was your basic Johnny Jerkoff, he’d be downtown already. He knows he has options—rich people always have options, that’s how it works.

  “Agent Hidalgo is up from Washington,” Mullen explains. “He’s very interested in how drug money makes its way through the banking system. So am I. If you could help us with that, we might be willing to forestall arrest and prosecution.”

  Hidalgo thinks that Claiborne is already about as white as white gets, but now he turns whiter.

  Like ghost white.

  Pay dirt.

  “I think I’ll take my chances,” Claiborne says.

  Hidalgo hears what Claiborne didn’t say. He didn’t say, I don’t know anything about drug money. He didn’t say, We don’t do that. What he did say was that he would take his chances, meaning that he does know people who deal in dope money, and he’s more scared of them than he is of the cops.

  “Really?” Mullen asks. “Okay. Maybe your money people get to the hooker and she drops the assault charges. Then you hire a seven-figure lawyer and maybe, maybe he keeps you out of jail on the coke charge. But by then it’s too late, because by that time your career is fucked, your marriage is fucked and you are fucked.”

  “I’ll sue you for malicious prosecution,” Claiborne says. “I’ll destroy your career.”

  “Here’s the bad news for you,” Mullen says. “I don’t care about my career. I’ve got kids dying on my watch. I only care about stopping the drugs. So sue me. I have a house in Long Island City, you can have it—the roof leaks, by the way, full disclosure.

  “Now, here’s what’s going to happen—I’m going to have a DA up here in about thirty minutes. She can take your statement, which will be composed of a full and forthright confession, and write a memorandum of agreement for your cooperation, the details of which you will work out with Agent Hidalgo here. Or she can charge you with the full monty and we’ll all go to the precinct together and get this war started. But, son? I’m telling you this right now, and I beg you to believe me, I am not the guy you want to go to war with. Because I will fly the last kamikaze mission right into your ship. So you have a half hour to think about it.”

  Hidalgo and Mullen step out into the hallway.

  “I’m impressed,” Hidalgo says.

  “Ahhhh,” Mullen says. “It’s an old routine. I have it down.”

  “Do you know what we’re taking on here?”

  Because Claiborne’s not entirely wrong. You start fucking with people who control billions of dollars, they fuck back. And a John Dennison could do a lot of fucking back.

  “Your boss said he was willing to go the whole way,” Mullen says. “If that was bullshit, I need to know now, so I can kick this asshole.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  Mullen goes back in to babysit.

  Hidalgo gets on the phone to Keller and fills him in. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Oh, yeah.

  Keller is sure.

  It’s time to start agitating.

  Keller testifies in front of Ben O’Brien’s committee to brief them on his strategy for combatting the heroin epidemic. He started by dismissing the so-called kingpin strategy.

  “As you know,” Keller says, “I was one of the chief supporters of the kingpin strategy—the focus on arresting or otherwise disposing of the cartel leaders. It roughly parallels our strategy in the war on terror. In coordination with the Mexican marines, we did an extraordinary job of it, lopping off the heads of the Gulf, Zeta, and Sinaloa cartels along with dozens of other plaza bosses and other high-ranking members. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked.”

  He tells them that marijuana exports from Mexico are down by almost 40 percent, but satellite photos and other intelligence show that the Sinaloans are converting thousands of acres from marijuana to poppy cultivation.

  “You just said that you decapitated the major cartels,” one of the senators says.

  “Exactly,” Keller says. “And what was the result? An increase in drug exports into the United States. In modeling the war against terrorists, we’ve been following the wrong model. Terrorists are reluctant to take over the top spots of their dead comrades—but the profits from drug trafficking are so great that there is always someone willing to step up. So all we’ve really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for.”

  The other major strategy of interdiction—the effort to prevent drugs from coming across the border—also hasn’t worked, he explains to them. The agency estimates that, at best, they seize about 15 percent of the illicit drugs coming across the border, even though, in their business plans, the cartels plan for a 30 percent loss.

  “Why can’t we do better than that?” a senator asks.

  “Because your predecessors passed NAFTA,” Keller says. “Three-quarters of the drugs come in on tractor-trailer trucks through legal crossings—San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—the busiest commercial crossings in the world. Thousands of trucks every day, and if we thoroughly searched every truck and car, we’d shut down commerce.”

  “You’ve told us what doesn’t work,” O’Brien says. “So what will work?”

  “For fifty years our primary effort has been stopping the flow of drugs from south to north,” Keller says. “My idea is to reverse that priority and focus on shutting down the flow of money from north to south. If money stops flowing south, the motivation to send drugs north will diminish. We can’t destroy the cartels in Mexico, but maybe we can starve them from the United States.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re surrendering,” one says.

  “No one is s
urrendering,” Keller says.

  It’s a closed hearing but he wants to keep this on the broadest possible terms. He sure as hell doesn’t tell them about Agitator, because if you sneeze in DC someone on Wall Street says gesundheit. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the senators, but he doesn’t trust the senators. A campaign year is coming up, two of the guys sitting in front of him have set up “exploratory committees” and PACs, and they’re going to be looking for campaign contributions. And like me, Keller thinks, they’re going to go where the money is.

  New York.

  Blair has already tipped him that Denton Howard is crawling into bed with John Dennison.

  “They had dinner together at one of Dennison’s golf clubs down in Florida,” Blair said.

  Keller guesses he was on the menu.

  Dennison, still flirting with running, tweeted, DEA boss wants to let drug dealers out of prison! A disgrace!

  Well, Keller thinks, I do want to let some drug dealers out of prison. But he doesn’t need Howard talking out of school. After the hearing, he collars O’Brien in the hallway and tells him he wants Howard out.

  “You can’t fire him,” O’Brien says.

  “You can.”

  “No, I can’t,” O’Brien says. “He’s a Tea Party favorite and I’m facing a revolt from the right in the next election. I can’t win the general if I lose in the primary. You’re stuck with him.”

  “He’s stabbing me in the back.”

  “No shit,” O’Brien says. “That’s what we do in this town. The best way for you to deal with it is to get results.”

  The man is right, Keller thinks.

  He goes back to the office and calls Hidalgo in.

  “How are we doing with Claiborne?”

  “He’s given us shit,” Hidalgo says. “‘This broker does coke, this hedge fund manager is heavy into tree . . .’”

  “Not good enough,” Keller says. “Lean on him.”

  “Will do.”

  The “bottom-up” half of Agitator is going well—Cirello is climbing the ladder. But the “top-down” half is stalled—this cute piece of shit Claiborne thinks he can play them by giving them bits and pieces.