Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  The tracker system turned out to be inconsistent because of poor signal strength or atmospheric conditions or a satellite’s position, or because the God of Cops was in a lousy mood. Sometimes the system could establish the GPS coordinates of a phone to within 10 meters, but other times, the radius was 200 or 500 meters.

  Takedown Day was shaping up to be a 200-meter day. Murphy’s law—if anything can go wrong, it will—was taking hold. Early in the morning, Cindric started pinging Hunter’s smartphone with the tracker system. The phone didn’t ping back. Was it dead? The flip phone seemed to be emitting faint intermittent signals, but they emanated from the Loch Palm golf course in the middle of the island.

  “What the fuck is he doing on a golf course?” Stouch said.

  Cindric shrugged. They were pretty sure Hunter didn’t like to chase a little white ball. He spent all his spare time in the weight room, jacking up his pecs and lats. Those signals had to be gremlins—electronic malfunctions. Cindric kept pinging.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Fuck fuck,” Stouch replied.

  Cindric kept pinging. Still nothing. The tracker was giving him 200-meter hits on the Nokia, but Cindric wanted a 10-meter hit, or, at worst, a 50-meter hit.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Chokchai Varasard, the Royal Thai Police force’s best on-scene commander, and one hundred Thai cops—forty men from his own elite unit, who called themselves the Black Monkeys, plus fifty more cops from other units, plus a SWAT team—were waiting in cars and vans in the parking lot of a Buddhist temple at the bottom of the hill below Hunter’s safe house. Once they headed up the hill, secrecy would be lost. The safe house, which Hunter had bought with $450,000 of LeRoux’s money, was a comfortable two-story family vacation house and a hard target. Situated in the hills in the middle of the island, it was secluded in vegetation and located on high ground, with a long gravel and dirt road leading up to the gate. An approaching car, motorbike, or person on foot would crunch gravel and stir up dust. The house’s concrete block walls made it into a fortress.

  Chokchai wanted to hit the safe house, now. The SWAT cops were sweating in full body armor. The rest of the cops were in plain clothes, to blend in with the people on the street, but sooner or later, somebody would notice them, and their cover would be blown. With Chokchai were Jimmy Grace, the 960 Group’s supervisor for Africa, and Carol Dillon, 960’s intelligence analyst. The parking lot was so thick with adrenaline, the Americans could almost smell it.

  Just past 1 p.m., Pat Picciano, an agent who worked in the DEA Bangkok office, called Cindric from his Toyota 4Runner in the middle of the cop cars.

  “They want to hit it,” Picciano said.

  “Hold them off,” Cindric said. The satellite still wasn’t giving him a solid hit on either of Hunter’s phones.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  In a few minutes, Grace, who was riding shotgun with Picciano, called Cindric and Stouch.

  “They want to go in. They’re getting a hundred-meter hit.”

  Chokchai had his own cell phone tracking system, which worked by triangulating off cellphone towers. It was usually less accurate than the DEA satellite-based system, but at that moment, it was picking up a signal from near the safe house.

  “Stall him,” Cindric pleaded.

  In a few moments, Grace called back. “We’re going in.”

  “Fuck,” Cindric said.

  At 2:15 p.m. local time, the convoy sped up the hill and pulled up near the safe house. The SWAT team pulled up to the gate, dashed into the house’s walled courtyard, smashed the sliding doors that led from the blue-tiled pool and Jacuzzi into the interior, pounded across the white living room-dining-room-kitchen, raced up the stairs, and slammed into each of the three bedrooms and two baths.

  In a couple of minutes, Chokchai radioed Picciano.

  “He’s not here,” he said in Thai. Picciano translated for Grace, who hit speed dial to Cindric in the love nest/command center.

  “He’s not here.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not here!”

  Cindric doubled over as if somebody had slammed him in the belly. His hands gripped his knees. The element of surprise was totally lost. On an island, gossip goes viral without electronics.

  “Ohhhh fuuucccckkk!!!” Cindric moaned. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  Stouch stiffened in his chair. “What the fuck,” he said.

  “No! Fuck!” Cindric groaned. “I told them to wait.”

  Milione, who had been sitting quietly in a corner, saw despair and wildness in their eyes.

  “Look, we’ll figure this thing out,” he said calmly.

  Cindric and Stouch stopped cursing and settled down. They weren’t sure they’d pull this op out of its tailspin, but it helped to remember that Milione had been here before, hurtling downward, looking out into nothing, fighting gravity and groping around for a big bag of magic.

  In fact, Milione harbored more than a casual interest in magicians. As performance artists they created utterly believable, brilliantly fake illusions. Milione was fond of quoting a line from a 2005 film, The Prestige, about two ferociously competitive master magicians. The point, said one magician, played by Christian Bale, was, “Simple maybe, but not easy.”

  That was exactly what Milione and his agents needed to do. After all, what was a sting but an illusion, a bit of theater in the round? Milione knew more than any other person in the DEA about theater. His first career, before he became a lawyer and an agent, was as an actor with bright prospects.

  During his college days, electrified by Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy and Stanley Kowalski and James Dean’s Cal Trask, and determined to find a place in gritty American realism plays and films, Milione dropped out of college, took off for Manhattan, and enrolled in the Circle in the Square Theater School on Broadway. He got some choice parts—Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, a little Shakespeare, a bit part as a cadet in Tom Cruise’s 1981 film Taps, and a washed-up boxer in a summer stock production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, directed by Joanne Woodward, who sponsored him for membership in the prestigious Actor’s Studio. Most uproariously, as his buddies never let him forget, he did a full-Monty nude scene as a gay hustler hooking up with Will Smith in the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation.

  All for art, he laughed, but he was serious. He grew up in a house full of books and art. His grandfather, Louis Milione, was a noted sculptor of monuments that adorned public buildings and fountains around Philadelphia. His father, Victor Milione, was the director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, originally the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, a small but influential scholarly institution founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley and Frank Chodorov, the editor of Buckley’s groundbreaking polemic, God and Man at Yale. They and other conservatives and libertarians created the institute as a counterweight to the societal and academic upheavals of the 1960s. The ISI, now located near Wilmington, Delaware, rejected collectivism, revisionist thinking, and what is now known as political correctness. It championed classical education, traditional values, and personal responsibility. “By the time the Reagan Revolution marched into Washington, I had the troops I needed—thanks in no small measure to the work with American youth ISI had been doing since 1953,” President Reagan said.

  Milione listened politely to his father’s dinner-table discourses on his favorite philosophers, José Ortega y Gasset and John Henry Cardinal Newman, but what really inspired him were the older man’s hands, calloused by repairing furniture and restoring the woodwork in the old family house. The message was, there was honor in the blue-collar life. In Manhattan, between acting jobs, instead of waiting on tables or teaching, Milione supported himself, his wife, and child as a meat-packer and club bouncer. One day, a fellow aspiring actor and former bouncer returned to say that he’d found a dream job as a DEA agent—regular paychecks, stories you couldn’t make up, cooler guys and better health insurance than the theater and you could serve
your country. Acting! For real! At the time, Milione was appearing at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Greenwich Village, in an experimental production of Woyzeck, an obscure nineteenth-century German pre-Expressionist drama about a military barber driven to madness, mayhem, and murder by cruel superiors. It was a dreary work that appealed to an artsy crowd, not Milione. He was done with angst and yearned to extricate himself. The DEA sounded like just the ticket.

  DEA recruiters liked to see advanced academic credentials and law enforcement or military experience. Milione went back to school, earning his bachelor’s degree and then a law degree from Rutgers. He paid his way through school by playing in soaps and in 1996 was finally accepted at the DEA.

  Once he was on the inside, Milione discovered that the agency culture was not at all the scholarly redoubt envisioned by the recruiters. It was full of ex-marines, ex-soldiers, and ex–street cops, combative, rough-edged, and sometimes dysfunctional as a fractious family. Inside the walls, agents bitched and moaned. “If they’re not bitching, they’re not breathing,” DEA supervisors liked to say. And, “If they’re complaining, they’re not conspiring.” On the outside, they circled around their own like a wolf pack. They revered their alpha wolves.

  Milione was pegged as an up-and-coming alpha. He first gained notice in the Manhattan office by starting with a single phone number and connecting dot to dot to dot until he penetrated a major, previously unknown upstate New York drug trafficking network. In 2002, his intellect and tenacity snagged him a promotion to the DEA Special Operations Division outside Washington, D.C.

  For ambitious DEA agents, a tour at SOD was an essential credential, just as the best and brightest military officers sought a master’s degree at a military war college.

  Created in 1992, SOD occupied an unmarked building in a neatly landscaped, generic cubicle farm in the far Northern Virginia suburbs, on the back side of Dulles International Airport. It was about thirty miles due west of the White House, but very few people who worked at SOD would ever see the inside of the president’s office.

  In the vestibule, seals about the size of buffet plates were mounted on the wall, representing the alphabet soup of law enforcement and intelligence agencies that made up permanent Washington’s national security establishment. These agencies posted liaison officers to SOD’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center to study information coming in from around the world about transnational organized crime as it intersected with terrorism.

  Another part of SOD consisted of DEA agents called staff coordinators. As the title implied, they coordinated complex cases that involve several domestic and overseas DEA offices. Staff coordinators networked with law enforcement, military, and intelligence officers from all over the world.

  Milione was assigned to a small, secretive investigative unit created by Joe Keefe, the chief of SOD at the time. Officially it was called the Bilateral Case Group, but the few at SOD who knew about it called it the untouchables group, DEA jargon for notorious international kingpins who couldn’t be arrested by ordinary means because of their wealth, stealth, and power.

  The untouchables group started out chasing the usual Latin drug kingpins, but its mission was transformed to national security on April 14, 2003, when U.S. Special Forces troops searching compounds near Baghdad captured Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front, an infamous 1980s terror group. Abbas and his followers had been granted safe haven by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after they hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and committed an atrocity that became a cause célèbre in the United States and Israel. Abbas and his fighters shot Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger, and tossed his body over the side.

  After Abbas was incarcerated at Camp Cropper, a U.S. Army–run detention facility outside Baghdad, FBI agents began to build a murder case against him. They realized they needed an eyewitness, so they asked DEA officials to locate and flip an Abbas friend and financial backer—Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian heroin and arms trafficker known as the “Prince of Marbella” because he lived in the glitzy Spanish resort favored by Arab millionaires. He held forth in a gaudy white marble mansion, called the Palacio de Mifadil, the Palace of My Virtue, with broad lawns, fountains, and a garage for a dozen cars.

  Milione was made case agent for Kassar. In other words, he owned the investigation. He dug into the files and saw that Kassar had been on the radar of DEA, Western intelligence, and law enforcement services for decades but never arrested on account of his money and influential friends—a textbook untouchable. Milione found hits on the Syrian’s name in no fewer than seventy-five DEA investigative files. After two years, Milione was promoted out of the untouchables unit, to a post higher in the SOD, but he was now officially obsessed with Kassar. He kept his hand in through his best friend, Wim Brown, who had moved to the untouchables team in 2005 and who had taken over from Milione as Kassar case agent.

  Though Milione and Brown talked themselves hoarse, Justice Department prosecutors refused to seek an indictment of Kassar, dismissing the evidence against him as thin and legally problematic. Retrying him for the Klinghoffer murder might be construed as double jeopardy.

  But, Milione said, what if they got fresh, damning evidence? What if the DEA caught Kassar in another conspiracy to kill more Americans? That kind of case was usually a slam dunk in American courts, provided the evidence was solid.

  With Brown and a third agent, John Archer, Milione began designing a circuitous sting to draw Kassar into their web. To penetrate his inner circle, they deployed an informant named Samir Houchaimi, who had been a member of the Palestinian terror group Black September in the 1970s. Houchaimi had gotten busted for heroin trafficking in Queens in 1984 and had wormed his way out of prison by going to work for the DEA. Recognizing that Kassar was too wily to fall for a direct approach, the agents sent Houchaimi into Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon in early 2006, with orders to win the trust of Kassar’s business partner, a Syrian named Tareq Mousa Al Ghazi. Milione told Houchaimi to proceed carefully, so as not to arouse Al Ghazi’s suspicions. “No problem,” Houchaimi said, “I will have him drink the poison slowly, from a spoon.”

  Houchaimi took months to put Al Ghazi at ease, but finally, in December 2006, the Syrian invited him to a hotel in Beirut, ushered him through a phalanx of guards, and introduced him to Kassar. Kassar was swanning around the city with his claque of thugs as if he owned the place, and he was probably right.

  The second act was set in Marbella. There Houchaimi introduced Kassar to two more informants—Carlos, a Guatemalan, and Luis, a Colombian, both posing as arms buyers for the FARC—Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—originally the military arm of the Colombian Communist Party, now a jungle insurgency supported by coca refining operations that produced roughly half the world’s cocaine supply, according to U.S. government estimates.

  Milione, Brown, and Archer agonized over whether to send Carlos and Luis into the Palacio de Mifadil wearing audio cables coiled around their bodies and carrying a bag concealing a video camera. If the electronics were discovered, Kassar would have them shot dead and tossed into the sea before the Spanish police could get there. But Kassar wouldn’t come out for the meeting, so Carlos and Luis insisted on taking the risk in order to get credible, incontrovertible evidence.

  On March 27, 2007, Kassar welcomed them warmly, whispering to Houchaimi, “These guys are rubes. They’re good guys but they don’t know how to do business.”

  As Milione hoped and expected, Kassar’s arrogance and avarice clouded his judgment. Kassar didn’t need the money, but he was like a gambling addict. He just couldn’t leave a $10 million deal on the table. He draped his arm around Carlos and boasted that he would produce “a thousand men to help fight against the United States.” He offered to train FARC fighters to use C-4 military-grade high explosives to make superstrong IEDs. He made a deal to sell Carlos and Luis more than 12,000 weapons, including fifteen surface-to-air missiles—SA
Ms for short—to shoot down American troops and American helicopters in Colombia helping search for jungle cocaine labs. These were compact, concealable, shoulder-fired rockets that locked in on targets via a heat-seeking guidance system.

  By agreeing to sell SAMs to the FARC, which was officially categorized as a terrorist group, Kassar sealed his fate. In 2004, the U.S. Congress had jacked up the penalty for selling SAMs to a mandatory minimum of twenty-five years in federal prison and a maximum of life behind bars. The reason was that these light, portable antiaircraft missiles were the most fearsome weapons desired by terrorists and militants around the world. As a defensive measure, a SAM was unrivaled. An armed group with one or two SAMs could prevent helicopters carrying special operations troops from landing and mounting an attack on the group’s stronghold. As an offensive weapon of terror, SAMs were uniquely effective. A ragtag band of extremists could down a single passenger airliner, inflicting mass casualties, then claim that more SAMs were hidden near major international airports. Even if this were a lie, how would anyone know? With the threat of SAMs, terrorists could paralyze travel and commerce and capture world attention indefinitely.

  The grand jury in Manhattan swiftly indicted Kassar and Al Ghazi. Milione and Brown delivered a warrant to the Spanish police, who arrested Kassar as he passed through Madrid on June 7, 2007. The same day, Romanian police arrested Al Ghazi in Bucharest and handed him over to Archer, who ushered him onto a DEA plane bound for New York. Kassar was sentenced to thirty years in prison; Al Ghazi, to twenty-five years in prison. Kassar’s palace, bank accounts, and other property were seized.