by C. S. 96
I looked at the gun still gripped tightly in my hand and slid it across the room as if it were a pit viper ready to strike. I could never keep one with us in our bedroom again.
For now, all I could do was cry.
The clock read 12:02 A.M. Just five minutes had elapsed since I’d fallen asleep in Inez’s arms. Just a few more hours left until Tony’s reckoning.
I called Mike and asked him to make sure my house was in fact being watched front and back.
Mike sympathized with me, hyperaware of the pathos in my voice. He calmly reaffirmed that there were three teams of battle-hardened ex-Delta operators and Navy SEALs well-hidden and with clear visuals to all points of entry into my house. “No one is getting in there, Roman, and if they try they’ll be dead in seconds.” He paused. “Listen, we all know what you and Inez are going through, but I promise you this will be over tomorrow. And understand this: We won’t stop until we have this prick in cuffs. You have my word on that. He’s never getting out, and if he does he’ll be too damn old to piss straight. And trust me, Roman, I’ve found guys living in tree houses in the jungles of Guinea. There’s nowhere on Earth this man can hide from us.”
I thanked him for offering some reassurance.
“G’nite, partner,” he said.
I snapped the phone shut, walked to our bedroom, and curled up beside Inez. Knowing that the house was being guarded gave me enough comfort to drift in and out of sleep.
My alarm woke me at 4:45 A.M., and I called Tim Dowling on my way to the office, as I’d been instructed to do. He told me that a car would break off and follow me to the location. There was no need for countersurveillance on this trip to Ramona; the follow car would determine if I had a tail. He also told me that another car would replace the unit following me to base in order to help keep Inez protected. If she left the house, two cars would follow her and one would remain on the house until they returned.
As I pulled into Ramona, agents across the country were taking their places, too. Al Harding, who was coordinating and monitoring the entire operation, was pacing nervously here with me, surrounded by four other DEA agents I hadn’t met. They were there to make sure all the coms and computers were functioning properly and that all of Pedro’s phone calls were being taped and that his every move was recorded based off of the cell tower information delivered from his phone. Mike, Pete, and Tim, along with ten other agents, were tasked with “the bank” in Riverside County and there were dozens of other men, both DEA and local joint task force detectives, at each safe house in California, all armed to the teeth just in case they were met with resistance.
No one had had eyes on Tony. In fact, it had been four days since we had last seen him. That made me extremely anxious.
We waited, listening to the officers following Pedro on Interstate 80, in New Jersey, heading east toward the George Washington Bridge. The three State Police detectives following since the Pennsylvania line were maintaining excellent visual contact.
As each minute passed, the urge to consider all the ways this operation could go violently, disastrously wrong seemed harder to suppress. I reminded myself that all of the safe houses in the three states were being monitored. Everyone was in place awaiting the go signal.
I did a lot of walking and soul searching in those tense hours waiting for something to happen, wondering where I’d be had I never gotten into the drug business, but also what would happen to me and my family if Tony escaped. He’d find us, without question, and I decided then and there that if it ever came to pass, I’d find him first.
I heard Richie Fagan’s voice on the speakerphone as he set up in the Ramona basecamp. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, four in New York. Pedro had just driven over the George Washington Bridge and was heading toward Harlem River Drive South. There were three units on the truck at a safe distance. If he did somehow recognize the tail and made a call alerting the caretakers to move everything out, every team would blow the doors off the spots and start the process of arrest and seizure.
Throughout the night Pedro had made a number of calls to the safe houses, explaining there was traffic in a number of states and he was running late. When he finally arrived at his first stop it was an unexpected one, one I knew nothing about. One of Tony’s. How he hid it from me could only be explained one way: he’d just set it up.
This safe house was in DUMBO, Brooklyn, a former industrial zone that was transitioning into a high-end residential neighborhood, boasting incredible views of the East River, the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and Manhattan’s financial district. Amidst DUMBO’s bustling cobblestone streets was a nineteenth-century docking bay where Pedro was met by two forklifts.
The teams decided to hit this spot first before calling the go signal for all the other spots. Their logical reasoning was that they wanted Pedro to make a call and see who he’d alert first. Chances are that person would be, if not Tony, someone in close proximity to Tony, thus tightening the net and chances of getting Tony immediately. He was their main target and knowing where he was would make the operation easier and, above all else, safer. If Tony wasn’t at any of the safe houses, “Impact” would begin.
Richie Fagan was at the Brooklyn drop-off point, and as soon as the back of the tractor-trailer was opened he and two dozen other cops swarmed it like a heard of wild buffalo.
This was the tensest part of the operation for me because I knew Pedro sometimes carried a weapon, even though he was trained by me and I had told him to never carry a firearm due to the added charge he’d receive if the truck was ever seized in a random police stop or raid. Yet I also knew that Tony insisted behind my back that Pedro, and many of our other drivers, carry a strap on these long hauls, just in case.
Pedro was a soft-spoken, twenty-three-year-old kid who came from a hardworking family living in Chihuahua, Mexico. He sent most of his money back to his family and their little cattle ranch. Pedro was not a killer, but like everyone under Tony’s thumb he knew that if he didn’t fight for the drugs, Tony would have no mercy.
I sat with my hands almost covering my ears as I heard the cops yelling commands at him, waiting for some cop to scream: Shots fired! Man down.
It was torturous. Then I heard they had everyone in the factory, including the driver, in custody and under arrest. Pedro wasn’t able to make a call, so for now the mission was still compartmentalized. The detectives were now searching the trailer.
It took a while to unload the thirty-foot trailer using the forklifts, and to my utter surprise all they found were pallets and pallets of ball bearings.
Al looked at me nervously. He didn’t say anything though I knew what he was thinking about the deep shit he’d be in if this wasn’t, in fact, a drug run. The problem was I didn’t know which trailer Pedro took—some of them had secret compartments built into them, others, depending on the content of the truck, contained the drugs within the boxes or packaging. But ball bearings were ball bearings, and it wasn’t hard to decipher that’s all that was inside that truck.
“Have the men measure the inside of the truck and then measure the outside,” I told Al. If there was a discrepancy in the measurements that would mean a false wall was built inside.
I waited and waited, sweating through my pants, biting my nails down to their cuticles. Finally they came back to Al telling him there was a five-foot discrepancy from the inside versus the outside. I finally sat back, took a deep breath, and quietly advised Al to tear out the false wall.
Inside, they found a thousand pounds of marijuana and a million dollars in cash. That was money Tony hadn’t told me about, but I was sure this was money he was transporting back to New York to hide it from Hector and me. I practically fist-pumped the air I was so happy. The thrill and risk of the operation was being rewarded more times over than I could have imagined.
The first part of Operation Clean House was complete; but now came the hard part, executing the other spots without any injuries to the cops and in the process bringing Tony to
justice.
Richie Fagan, calculating as ever, allowed Pedro to make a call from his car and walked away to give Pedro a sense of privacy. Pedro did exactly what was expected: He called the Corona, Queens, location, told them he got hit and they needed to clean the spots. What Pedro didn’t know was that his call was tapped and as soon as Richie heard it, he called the men at the location to hit that particular spot immediately. The detectives were inside within two minutes, and no one at that location made any other alert calls, so the other caretakers were still unaware of the raid.
The Corona spot yielded forty kilos of cocaine and $3 million in cash, along with a number of defaced firearms. Tony wasn’t there, however. Assuming I was right in thinking that he was lying low in New York, I wasn’t sure where else he could be.
It was closing in on 9 P.M., and that was when Richie Fagan broadcast the call sign “Impact.”
It was on.
Every spot was hit simultaneously, from California to Detroit to New York City to Medford, Long Island.
And Medford, Long Island, was the charm.
The detectives hit the spot with speed and the unwieldy knowledge that they might be walking into their deaths. They burst through the large home’s front and rear doors, guns in hand, screaming, “Everyone get down,” and what they found there was not what anyone—including me—was expecting. There were fourteen women sitting around a giant TV, enjoying popcorn, soda, and beer, all watching the soap opera Melrose Place. Once I heard this, I knew Tony was in the building.
Melrose Place was Tony’s favorite TV series, and he never missed an episode. He was obsessed with the series and on so many occasions would wax on for mind-numbing hours about all the characters, their story lines, who he wanted to fuck, and also who he wanted to kill off. Fourteen women and a new episode of his favorite soap is what Tony considered his ideal party.
Tony gave up quietly—no surprise there. Yes, he was a maniac, but he wasn’t stupid. This was a battle he knew couldn’t win—twenty heavily armed, badass New York City cops. I felt liberated and sorry only for the women who had to experience the fright this bust no doubt inspired.
All of the other spots were hit with no casualties on either side. Thanks to Detective Fagan’s stellar coordination of the NYPD OCID unit and the planning of the men and women in the DEA and our partner police departments around the country, it was a flawlessly executed takedown.
The whole operation yielded close to $30 million in cash, just under a ton and a half of marijuana, sixty kilos of cocaine, twenty kilos of heroin, two hundred pounds of methamphetamine, and a combined total of thirty-six handguns, machine guns, and hunting rifles.
The NYPD Public Morals Division of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, whose main responsibility was taking out illegal after-hours clubs, gambling dens, prostitution rings, and the like, hit the illegal club Tony was running in Washington Heights. It was a place teeming with money and prostitutes, where scoring an eight-ball was as simple as flagging down a bartender and ordering it off the menu. It took the cops about forty minutes to cut through the iron door, but once they got in they went to work. Chain saws in hand, they tore the place apart.
In the pictures taken afterward, there was nothing left but broken wood, mangled furniture, ripped-out fixtures, cut pipes, cut wiring, broken glass, and open spaces where iron doors once stood. The apartment above the club netted twenty-five guests and security elements, all clambering up the ladder through the apartment’s trapdoor only to be met with as many detectives just waiting for them. All of the security men and some of the guests were carrying firearms. They were all arrested and arraigned. Each would be spending time in “the tombs,” Manhattan’s 150-year-old granite detention center that resembled ancient Egyptian tombs, then be carted off to Rikers Island, New York City’s violent and infamous jail, where perps were housed while awaiting trial, while others did short sentences and yet others waited to be transferred to state prisons.
Additionally, eighteen men were arrested in total in all of Tony’s safe houses. Neither Hector nor Raul were amongst them. The fourteen women found with Tony were cut loose.
Richie Fagan relayed to the detectives who were holding Tony to transport him to the Manhattan DA’s office before bringing him to central booking for processing. There, Richie would try to flip him, though I knew that was an act of futility.
I later learned that Richie excelled at flipping guys; in fact, he was not only the opener, but the closer as well, when the most hardened criminals or underworld gangsters were collared. He talked to them with respect, but also with the hard truths regarding the unwinnable circumstances they faced when sitting in their unenviable position. He’d slide photos of their daughters across the table to these men and say, “Twenty years away from this little girl, you’re going to miss all the milestones in her life. She’ll never forget the moments daddy was there for her—or wasn’t. Soon she’ll be dating, and without a man in the house to guide her… Well, do I really need to go there?” I’d soon get to see this firsthand, watch Richie grind the hardest guys to putty in his hands.
The problem Richie faced with Tony was that Tony was one man unto himself. He had children all over the place but no love for them. And since the friends and close family he did have were all enmeshed in the drug business, talking to Richie could only put them at risk. It was a hardscrabble rule of the drug business—and one Tony knew better than anyone—that if you talk about the trade or people you had worked with, every one of your blood relatives, friends, even acquaintances could be eviscerated. Only after every one of them were tortured and killed might the rat become the target.
The next day we all met at San Diego’s field office at 9:00 A.M. to discuss all the after-action reports. The team leaders in every city were patched in via a conference line. I wanted to know what Tony was saying: What was his demeanor? Did he snap telling these detectives he knew who rolled on him? If so, I’d know he was trying to send me a message and that I’d need to do more to protect my family from him.
The detectives’ work had only begun. The tasks now before us all were to determine who was who in the organization—something I could help with—and then the daunting challenge of trying to flip these guys upward, trying to help the detectives get an undercover into one of the Mexican cartels or at the very least get a man who could observe the cartel’s actions from a trading partner’s organization. It is a never-ending game of collecting intelligence, corroborating it, and disseminating it amongst the various agencies that help to keep drugs off our streets.
When asked if Tony talked, Richie said something interesting. He said that Tony actually looked defeated, almost like he had given up. He was a total gentleman with Richie, and after Richie brought him a sandwich, soda, and a pack of cigarettes, they launched a cordial interview. Every question was carefully thought out—not too hard, not too soft, easy ones at first—but Richie never made it anywhere. In fact, he struck out.
Tony said to him, “All due respect, detective, let me ask you a question. If you got caught doing something that jeopardized your job, your livelihood, a job you were born to do and loved with all of your heart, and your bosses came to you and told you, ‘Hey, detective, we’ll let you keep your job, but you have to give us all of your relatives to answer for your crimes and they’ll be tortured and killed,’ would you give them up? Would you do that to save your job?” What Tony wasn’t thinking about, however, was the harm these people he was protecting had done. If your family hadn’t done anything wrong, your job as an informant wasn’t to jail them. It was to find bigger and bigger fish at the periphery of your one-time drug trading network, and by taking them off the streets, you forged a safer world for everyone else.
But Richie knew exactly what Tony was saying: he was not going to say a word about his work. Tony capped off the conversation by saying, “Listen, I appreciate you treating me fairly, but the longer I’m in here the more suspect I become, because if you don’t think that the boss of al
l my bosses doesn’t know the exact time I was brought here as opposed straight to lockup, you’re wrong. The longer I spend in this room, the easier it will be for them to assume I’m talking to you. So I’d appreciate it if you could wrap this up and let me get to the booking process so there can be no misunderstandings with my people.”
Richie could’ve kept Tony at the DA’s office all night if he wanted, solidifying the man’s demise. But Richie’s street currency was that of an excellent cop, and beyond that he was a truly decent human being. He agreed with Tony’s logic and got him out of the building and into booking in less than ten minutes. He also made a show of the fact that Tony didn’t talk. “This was a tough cookie,” he said to the cops stationed in central booking. “Don’t bother bringing him to the DA’s to talk.”
In the end, Tony received seventeen years without the chance of parole on a plea bargain deal. Tony wouldn’t be out in the street till he was well into his late sixties, and that’s only if he were a model prisoner, which I knew he would not be. A team of forensic accountants was analyzing his bank accounts, and already his overseas accounts were frozen. The State Department would be called in and they’d barter and deal with the foreign entities that were the holders of his millions. Tony would never see a dime of that money, and once the accountants figured out who the powers of attorney on his stateside accounts were, those lawyers would be arrested and those accounts forfeited, too. Tony would be broke.
After hearing there were warrants out for his arrest, Hector did what he had to do: he fled. Now that his friend, bodyguard, and benefactor was behind bars, there was no one who could protect him from the Beltrán brothers, who were no doubt eager to collect the $2 million he owed them. Hector would stay underground for as long as he could survive, and as long as he was still outside I had to remain vigilant.
I worked a deal out with my guys to keep Raul out on the street. He was small time and meant nothing to anyone other than me. If he got caught outside in a buy-and-bust operation or was caught with anything illegal, he was told he was going away for a very long time and could end up in the very prison where Tony was housed, which would probably be a death sentence.