by Marc Ruskin
I was looking at a forced interruption of my UC activities. While in rehab at the Rusk Institute in Manhattan, there were many visits from fellow UCs and other agents. Not one to miss an opportunity, the case agent I was working with on the double-agent “dangle” brought a camera to my hospital room.
For my lawsuit?
Very funny. We’re going to have the CI show these to Victor [the target’s code name]. Tell him you got worked over by the shylocks. It’ll be great!
Seriously?
Seriously.
To no avail. The sweet relationship with the foreign agent, perhaps on the verge of yielding real fruit, had withered on the vine. There’s always a timeliness factor in these matters—foreign intelligence officers and criminals are time-sensitive, to say the least. Unexplained delays are always red flags for them. Then one day Victor was gone, just like that. Can’t blame him.
In my absence from the field, Richard Bistrong fielded all of the communications in ALTERNATE BREACH, responding to the targets’ emails as Pascal Latour. As to the phone calls, he answered the voice messages and missed calls himself, on grounds that his man Pascal had delegated the nuts-and-bolts work. The squad sent me a get-well card, assuring me that I would soon be back in the saddle. They meant well. However, if they were referring to a motorcycle saddle—not in this lifetime. As to the generic interpretation of their message, I was none too eager to resume my role as Ali Bongo’s moneyman.
With two months to go before Health Services would clear me to return to duty, Chris and Dave were on the phone, wanting me to go to D.C. for a large UC meet, a cocktail reception with most of the subjects attending. My arms are in casts! My right knee can’t bend. I can’t carry a gun or maneuver at all. What if something goes wrong? Who would try to gun me down at a cocktail party? Nobody. But I would have to arrive, and leave, and not have my cover blown in the process. Never in history has an undercover agent gone into a meet with, almost literally, both hands tied behind his back. Not carrying a firearm wasn’t really the problem; I hadn’t been armed throughout BREACH. Not being able to use my arms at all was an issue. Barely able to open a door, I would be truly, unacceptably, vulnerable. Surveillance and cover are fine, but not enough. It was also a matter of cardinal principles: even if it was highly unlikely anyone would try anything under such circumstances, no UC in his or her right mind would do it, period. The request was absurd, and I said so, and I didn’t go to D.C.
The coup de théâtre for ALTERNATE BREACH was going to be a large outdoor luncheon to celebrate the successful closing of all the arms sales to Gabon, with all the subjects in attendance. Also in attendance, for dessert, would be a number of SWAT teams. And when all was secure, at an appropriate distance, the media. The entire squad thought it was a great finale, an entirely appropriate conclusion consistent with their cinematic perception of the case. Not to be missed. (As was later revealed, they were already exchanging texts speculating as to the identity of the actors who would play them in the inevitable film.) I thought all of this was needlessly theatrical, and I arranged to be unavailable. Chris and Dave were mystified as to my lack of enthusiasm, but I had always been loath to be present at the arrest in UC ops. It had always felt inappropriate to me—rubbing salt into the wound—and I was highly unlikely to make an exception for this surreal parody of a Mission Impossible closing sequence. The arrestees were not the World’s Top Narco-Terrorist Ring Leaders, cleverly lured to a neutral location. They could just as reliably have been called and asked to surrender themselves by appointment at the FBI’s Washington field office. And between the caterers and flying in a half-dozen SWAT teams, how much did this shindig cost, by the way?
My enthusiasm (or lack of it) must have communicated itself effectively. Something less than two years had passed, in spring of 2011, when I was not called to testify at the first trial in ALTERNATE BREACH. Chris, Richard, and the others all took the stand and were excoriated by the defense attorneys. The trial lasted three months, ending in a mistrial after Judge Richard Leon dismissed key charges and the jury could not agree on a verdict on the remaining charges. Sometimes prosecutors drop a case after such a debacle. Not this time.
A few short weeks later, Chris relayed a demand from the DOJ attorneys to all associated with the op. Comb through all emails and texts on your workstation and Bureau BlackBerry associated with ALTERNATE BREACH, and forward. What proved to be a hugely time-consuming task for the tech-savvy young agents on the BREACH squad was no task at all for Pascal Latour. All of those items were on my overt (and covert) devices, already in appropriately labeled Outlook folders. They were all strictly business. I had no privacy concerns. Just have the IT guys mirror the folders.
A second trial commenced in September, and this time I was on call to testify. Apparently the prosecutors had decided that a new strategy was called for. Certain charges relating to money laundering had been dropped. (If called, I would testify from behind a screen: the prosecutors had already made applications with the court to conceal my identity.)
Here are the prosecutor’s first words to the jury seated in federal district court in Washington, D.C., that September:
“This is a case about international bribery and the savvy business people who seek to profit from it. Normally, corrupt deals are struck in secret. If the money is funneled quietly … sham paperwork covers the illegal nature of the deal. The result is that most corrupt deals are never discovered by law enforcement. But this time, someone was watching, listening, and recording the bribe payers: The FBI.”
Specifically, one Marc Ruskin, who was in New York City, still working OXY BLUE but also standing by to testify in Washington.
“The evidence will show that in May 2009 these defendants agreed to be part of a $15 million business deal involving the sale of weapons and other military products to a small country in Africa called Gabon. But unlike an honest business deal, the defendants didn’t get this business by offering the lowest prices or the best products. Instead, they got this business, they got this deal, by agreeing to pay a bribe … amounting to $1.5 million to Ali Bongo, the Minister of Defense of Gabon.…
“So where was the $1.5 million for Ali Bongo going to come from? The defendants weren’t going to take it out of their own pockets. Instead, they were going to take it from the people of Gabon and put it in the bank account of the minister. To do that, the defendants and their partners agreed to add $3 million to the price tag for the weapons and the military products they were selling.… The defendants and their partners would send the extra $3 million to Pascal Latour, a middleman. Pascal Latour would then funnel half of that, $1.5 million, right back to Ali Bongo for his own personal use.…
“And what would the people of Gabon get in return for paying this extra $3 million? Nothing. They would get ripped off. To understand how serious this is, it may help to think of it this way, ladies and gentlemen.… [T]he evidence will show, plain and simple, that this deal was corrupt, that these defendants knew it, and that they chose to participate in it anyway … We want American people and American businesses to export goods, not corruption. And to that end, there is a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA.”
This was only the second FCPA case that used an undercover agent. The first one had been in 1997, thirteen years earlier, and that had been my case as well. I agree with the prosecutors that the legislation is a good idea. We do want to export “goods, not corruption.” But sometimes the best intentions … well, the second trial turned out as disastrously as the first one—more so, with acquittals all around following revelations concerning overly zealous investigation and prosecution. Those emails and other communications that had been subpoenaed from everyone on the team? They revealed a lot of bad behavior. I came out clean. Others didn’t. This made all the papers, of course, which love corruption cases, and this episode had the additional media appeal provided by the DOJ’s and FBI’s apparent goof-ups.
The case was commonly referred to in the media as the �
��Africa Sting.” The Washington Post went right to the heart of the issues that brought down the case in its entirety: “In text message after text message, FBI agents and their key informant joked about sex, booty calls, prostitutes, cigars, the Village People, the informant’s wives and an agent’s girlfriend. They even pondered who might play their roles in a movie based on their sting.
“When arrests were announced by the Justice Department, the agents and informant basked in positive press. ‘It’s like an atomic mushroom cloud,’ the informant gloated in a text to his FBI handler.
“Since reaching court, however, there hasn’t been much to brag about in the Justice Department’s largest investigation of individuals accused of bribing foreign officials. In two lengthy and high-profile trials in the District’s federal court, one of which ended last month, federal prosecutors failed to win a single conviction. One reason for the courtroom setbacks can be traced to the ribald texts exchanged between the informant and his FBI handlers.
“It’s no secret that informants, like the one in this sting, tend to have shady pasts, traits that make them easy targets for defense attorneys. But modern communications—texts, in this case—permitted a new line of attack: Defense lawyers used the questionable messages to savage the credibility and professionalism of FBI agents, who not only seemed to share their informant’s offensive sense of humor but also appeared to like him. While close relationships sometimes develop between agents and their informants, it is rare for such communications to become public. FBI agents closely guard the details of those relationships and are generally careful about what they put into writing (emphasis added).
“In this case, the messages shocked former prosecutors, who said the texts hurt the agents’ credibility. ‘It was just foolish,’ said Steven Levin, a former federal prosecutor in Maryland. ‘Jurors are loath to convict if they feel that both the informant and the law enforcement officers have acted improperly.’
“During the most recent trial of six men and women on charges of paying a bribe to win business with a foreign government, defense attorney Steven McCool used the texts not only to attack the character of the informant but also to accuse an agent of being a bigoted, anti-gay misogynist.
“For example, McCool asked the agent if his reference to ‘da hood’ in a text was meant to have ‘racial overtones’ and if he was expressing ‘a bias against gay people’ when he texted the informant about dressing up in chaps and spms [sic] while making a reference to the Village People.
“Defense attorney Paul Calli, whose client was acquitted by a judge before his case even reached the jmy [sic], said such texts showed that ‘the FBI had established no appropriate boundaries’ with the informant.
“The agents, who declined interview requests, testified that the off-color texts were ‘operationally necessary’ to build rapport with the informant and that they were not expressing biases in the messages.
“Testimony indicates the agents never thought their colorful texts, which represented a tiny fraction of the messages exchanged during the investigation, would be made public.”
Let’s be very clear. Much earlier in my narrative, I discussed how important it is for UC agents to insinuate themselves into their targets’ often-ugly values, while taking great care that such insinuation never gets on a tape that will be heard by a jury. The same principle goes double for email. And, as was dramatically demonstrated in BREACH, applies to informants as well. Just don’t do it. If it’s absolutely necessary, do your “values bonding” in person, and when no tape is rolling.
* * *
After the mistrial, then the acquittals, the DOJ threw in the towel on ALTERNATE BREACH. As of this present writing (fall 2016), there has been just one UC operation resulting in criminal convictions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And the successful UC was not French financier Pascal Latour but the rather modest Argentine civil servant, Alejandro Perez. To tell that story in brief, I flash back to 1997, when Craig Dotlo, my supervisor and friend in the New Rochelle office, my home base at the time, inquired about my availability to develop expertise in handling garbage, pronto. When I responded that I had long experience in managing Bureau paperwork, Craig was not amused. (It was a sore point with him, no doubt.) My destination would be the Fort Lauderdale area. This was midwinter. Sign me up, Craig.
Waste Management’s incineration facility in South Florida was without a doubt the most unlikely training ground in my experience, but it had to be that way, as Craig explained. Herbert Tannenbaum, owner of Tanner Management Corp., a Long Island manufacturer of industrial-grade incinerators, had paid $50,000 in bribe money to an official in Barbados, in order to secure a $500,000 sale. A convicted co-conspirator facing eighteen months in jail had been recruited by the Bureau, and his name (I’ll call him Rick) had made its way to Craig. Of course, Long Island was quite a distance from New Rochelle, and Long Island had its own FBI presence, much of it mob-related, as we have seen in TURKEY CLUB, but Craig had never been one to let a good case slip away. A little finagling and he opened the case under the auspices of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Although the bribe had been paid overseas, to a foreign official, it was a crime here in the States. And a serious one at that, with significant consequences. Craig assigned old-timer Dave Clark (with whom I’d worked on RUN-DMV) to be case agent.
For this op, which we’ll call INCINERATORS (I’ve forgotten the actual title of the case), I needed to become a foreign official with the buying power to seek a bribe from a manufacturer of industrial grade incinerators. I decided on Alejandro aka “Alex” Perez (no surprise there), now a purchasing agent for the Municipalidad de Buenos Aires. The Perez AFID was uncompromised. The papers had never disclosed it—not in RUN-DMV or any of the other ops starring Alex. In that pre-Internet environment, there was minimal likelihood of court records surfacing with any of my fictitious names. Media reports generally refer in the last paragraph, to “an undercover sting” and leave out names, both true and fictitious. The one exception in twenty years: Pascal Latour, from ALTERNATE BREACH. Those newspaper stories fingered me.
Will Godoy, my old friend from San Juan and fellow babysitter in the Papo Cancel witness-protection job, was now Legat Buenos Aires. A few phone calls in that direction resulted in a backstopped phone number and mailing address for my business card. For this one-off op, good enough. This one would be a cakewalk, I figured, featuring a week in Florida, with scheduled (by me) beach time, followed by a few meets with an unsuspecting businessman. Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men …
Rick the CI, based in California, took a measured approach, planting the seeds in the course of spaced-out phone calls with Tannenbaum over the next few months. Finally, on a bright, cool afternoon in early June, at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Rick introduced me to Tannenbaum, the target. He and I had had a couple of preliminary and carefully recorded telephone conversations. As we sat in plush armchairs off the main lobby, Tannenbaum announced that he would be more than happy to negotiate the sale of incinerators for Ezeiza and Aeroparque airports, the Buenos Aires equivalents of JFK and LaGuardia. And, of course, to sweeten the pot for me. Undisturbed by Alejandro the Argentine civil servant’s poor grasp of English grammar, Tannenbaum took pains to assure that I fully understood the size of the bribes I would be receiving. The two incinerating units sold for a million dollars total. Tannenbaum would inflate each invoice by $50,000, which would be directed back to me. His demeanor was nearly avuncular.
However, Tannenbaum did catch me somewhat off guard one afternoon not long thereafter, while riding in his car from his offices to his factory. I had no surveillance or backup—as usual, in the Old-Era FBI, but on this job not necessary anyway. True, riding in his car was a violation of a cardinal principle, but this guy just wasn’t a thug. Wasn’t armed. We were chatting about the merits of Argentine filet mignon as compared to U.S. prime rib, when he glanced over and said, “How do I know you’re not an FBI agent?”
I scoffed. �
�Me…! An FBI agent? Do you realize what you’re saying? I’m the one who has to worry. Do you have any idea what the prisons are like in Argentina? If I get caught, they’ll throw away the key.”
That answer was totally illogical, a non sequitur, but it must have seemed irrefutable to my target, because he dropped the subject without further comment and a couple of weeks later we signed the contract for the first incinerator at a sale price of $550,000, with $50,000 of that total to be transferred to me. The second purchase would follow shortly. Uncertain as to Tannenbaum’s preferred method of transferring the illegal funds, I went fishing. The answer was an important part of the sting, of course. The dilemma, as I explained to him after signing, was how to handle my newfound wealth, because these payoffs far exceeded the petty bribes I routinely accepted back in Argentina. Not a problem, he assured me. First, he would create for my benefit a shell corporation registered in New York State. The corporate name I came up with was “Cybernet USA.” (If only I—as Marc Ruskin, not Alejandro—had registered that name back at the dawn of the Internet in 1997. By now I could have sold it and retired on the profits.) As president of Cybernet, I provided alias Eduardo Dean (one of the several AFIDs I maintained in my desk in New Rochelle). Dean would never have to appear in person; all that was necessary was a valid Social Security number for the paperwork.
Tannenbaum would then introduce me to the branch president and a senior VP at a certain bank on Long Island. Which he did. In the bank’s conference room, the four of us spoke confidentially. My tape was rolling. Tannenbaum explained to the banker my need for an account to be opened with discretion. Initial deposit: $50,000, to be followed soon by one of equal size. The two bank officers warned me that large cash deposits would attract unwelcome attention from regulators, then they explained how best to structure the deposits, with Tannenbaum placing the commission money into his own various corporate accounts, then arranging for a series of transfers into the Cybernet account.