by Marc Ruskin
Not wanting to leave any wiggle room at prosecution time, I pushed the envelope. I said bluntly, “You understand that no one can know of this, it is very, very important. I could go to jail in my country, if they found out I was taking bribes.”
No one would find out, I could rest assured.
They opened the account then and there. In order to bring the money-laundering angle to a logical conclusion, I would need to later transfer the $50K out of the Long Island bank. Using Janus for this maneuver would have been the smart thing to do, and Craig’s and my failure to do this was the beginning of trouble that I could not have foreseen in a thousand years. But this seemed pretty straightforward. When money laundering with subjects in prior cases, the financial whizzes at Janus would set up transfers from the United States to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands, say—all in order to make it seem to the targets that the money trail was being deliberately hidden. With Tannenbaum, all I needed was a bank account somewhere, in a fictitious name. I would provide the account information to the crooked Long Island bankers, who would later transfer my bribes (paid by Tannenbaum) into this new bank. The laundering of the bribe money would now be complete. And the indictments could be prepared. Eventually, all the money would be transferred to the Bureau’s coffers.
Craig was able to arrange for a contact in a local bank to open the account. In her office, I filled out the paperwork as Eduardo Dean, President of Cybernet USA. Unexpectedly, she requested Eduardo’s real name, and worse yet, my real Social Security number. I understood where she was coming from—she was covering herself. If there was ever to be any blowback, she wanted to be able to point the finger at the FBI, and me in particular. I hesitated, then provided the information.
The transfers went smoothly enough. Tannenbaum deposited the money into the Long Island bank account as promised, and after the AUSAs who would prosecute the case gave us the green light, I called that crooked branch president and instructed him to transfer the money to the Eduardo Dean account. Which he did. And then I forgot about it. And then, finally—close to a year after my first meet with the target—it was time for the arrests. To avoid the Long Island traffic, my case agent Dave Clark suggested that I arrange a meeting with Tannenbaum to discuss the details of my second incinerator. In the lobby of the New Rochelle Ramada. Nice touch, and a first for the squad. A quick ride down the elevator from our office to the lobby, and Dave made the arrest.
Tannenbaum didn’t drag it out. In August he pled to one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA and was sentenced to one year in jail, to be followed by three years of supervised release.
Now fast-forward two years, to mid-2000 when I was a supervisor in the Safeguard Unit at FBIHQ, with an overseas posting to a U.S. Embassy within striking distance (the situation discussed in detail in a prior chapter). After fifteen years in the Bu, my first 5-Year Re-Investigation happened to be in progress. For this purpose I had completed the 127-page SF (Standard Form) -86, which the government uses for investigating officials and contractors seeking to obtain or maintain security clearances (Secret, Top Secret, etc.). Filling out one of these forms is a major pain, requiring finding all sorts of sensitive documents and details that you would never imagine having to provide. Personal, financial, all kinds of things. This form was one of the multitude of obscure administrative annoyances that divert federal agents from productive work, unknown to a (justifiably) disinterested public, until midsummer of 2015, when it was disclosed that federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) files had been hacked in the course of two separate breaches. Details as to what exactly had been obtained by the hackers were slow to emerge, naturally enough: OPM not being eager to reveal the devastating magnitude of the breach. And then it came out. Over twenty-two million files, consisting primarily of SF-86s. In their entirety, including the one submitted by FBI Director Comey.
Any misstatement or omission when completing the SF-86 can lead, theoretically, to prosecution. More realistically, such an error will seriously jeopardize the results of the investigation. Which in the Bu means losing your job, since all special agents are required to have a Top Secret Clearance. Sitting in my office at the covert Safeguard off-site, with its picture windows facing undeveloped woodlands, Puccini playing on the CD system, I wasn’t concerned. My primary professional career-related concerns at that juncture were checking for vacancies at Legat offices at various embassies and then submitting my applications. Then the phone rang. A woman from the Security Investigations Unit was on the line. She had been assigned my re-investigation and was reviewing the SF-86 along with the volume of documents she had obtained through the numerous waivers I had been required to sign, as addendums to the 86. One of the financial reports reflected a 1997 lump-sum deposit into one of my personal checking accounts. An unexplained deposit not reflected in my 86, nor in my tax returns. A deposit for … $50,000.
The miracle was that this sweet woman hadn’t referred this little situation directly to the dreaded Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). The Bu’s equivalent to Internal Affairs. Had she done so, a formal investigation would have been a certainty, with my career frozen in place for a couple of years awaiting its outcome. And even when, at the end of the day, OPR found nothing, I would probably have still received a Letter of Censure (their minimum penalty), based on the theory that you must have done something, otherwise there wouldn’t have been an investigation in the first place. And a censure is accompanied by an additional three years without career movement (other than down). Altogether then, this snafu could have dragged on until I was eligible for retirement, at which time I would have become a highly uncompetitive candidate for a first assignment at a Legal Attaché Office in a U.S. Embassy. (Although eligible to retire at fifty, I had no intention of doing so.)
I had lost track of how many money-laundering transactions I had been involved with over the years, but this dollar amount rang familiar. I assured my lifesaver from Security Investigations that it was all a mistake. I would get back to her forthwith, with a written explanation and documentation to back it up. Next came an emergency call to Craig Dotlo, who was still in New Rochelle. In addition to heading up C-21, he was now boss of bosses for the office. The dollar amount also rang bells for Craig. This must be the 50K payoff to Alex Perez in the Tannenbaum caper. A call from him to the branch manager at the bank in New Rochelle revealed the problem. The clerk who had created the checking account for me as Eduardo Dean, the one who was supposed to have input alias Eduardo Dean’s various ID numbers, instead had input mine—Marc Ruskin’s Social Security number. When Craig told me what had happened, I instantly remembered my misgivings before providing my true name and numbers in the first place.
Craig prepared a letter of explanation, backed by documentation from the bank, and sent it to the Security woman. The 50K was not a bribe paid to Marc Ruskin by the mob but an honest mistake by a bank officer in New Rochelle. The case of FBI v. Marc Ruskin was hereby circumvented. But it came within a hair’s breadth of effectively destroying my FBI career.
15
Shalom
In 2010 and 2011, as I approached the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, I was nevertheless just about as busy as ever (though not as intensely busy as in the days of COMMCORR and RUN-DMV and INFRACEL and SUNBLOCK). My newest (and last) alias was Alejandro Pierre Marconi, Director General de Consultora Marconi, an Argentine national living in Buenos Aires, with an additional business office in Miami. I had access to vast sums of investment capital, monies that Argentina’s wealthiest sought to place in large-scale projects. From Miami, I and my younger partner, UC agent Ricardo Dominguez, flew to San Juan every month or two. In our legend, Dominguez was a Cuban American and the only son of Marconi’s former partner, and knowledgeable in commercial real estate. Together, we were seeking to build a shopping mall and/or luxury resort in the San Juan area. Of course, we understood that the requisite “commissions” must be paid to senior officials. Such bribes would be required at every stage. They
were a given for every approval of zoning variances, waiver of environmental regulations, registration of contracts and deeds, multitudinous authorizations, official seals and stamps. And over the course of numerous cocktail hours and dinners in San Juan’s finest restaurants, at the El San Juan, the Condado Plaza, the St. Regis Bahia Beach, and the Ritz-Carlton—anywhere, really, including the offices of these same senior officials—my partner and I made it very clear that we were willing and able to do so.
DOMINO EFFECT was a well-organized and well-funded Group I Public Corruption UC op under the direction of an ambitious and dedicated case agent, Ruben Marchand-Morales. It would last a little under a year. With an age-appropriate role, regular travel to La Isla del Encanto—had it really been twenty-five years since my first posting?—along with four-star lodging and meals, this op would be a fine note upon which to close out my FBI career. And when alias Alejandro Marconi was not in San Juan, a man who looked remarkably like him, alias Alejandro Kulikov, was on the phone and email from his office in New York (that is, my BuCubicle at 26 Federal Plaza, armed with covert cell and laptop), planning his journeys to meet with the Chinese financiers who were the subjects in a San Francisco–based Public Corruption Group II op (and impressing them with his rudimentary knowledge of Mandarin). I withhold this op’s title (it was named after its primary subject) as I believe it never became public. To my knowledge the case was not destined to reach fruition, a casualty of my mandatory retirement.
And providing a fine contrast with those two high-end stings were meets at the McDonald’s in the South Bronx and on West 125th Street in South Harlem, where Alejandro Huertas Veaga met Dominica to negotiate a purchase of illegal oxycodone for the OXY BLUE UC op. As laid out in the previous chapter, that sting had started off with my procuring bogus prescriptions from culpable doctors on the East Side—fair (and safe!) enough—but, to my surprise, had soon ended up with me back on the streets, buying drugs with my partner Linda. Again, “Honey” was the most important code word. But wait a minute! I’m too old for this. I do have rocks in my head!
And I can’t forget Daniel Martinez, the international jewel thief and fence who was resuscitated five years after parting ways with the TURKEY CLUB personnel out on Long Island, with whom I had lost confidence, as we know. Daniel was now flying periodically from Miami to New York, meeting with the target in a counterintelligence Group II. (Not a False Flag sting, but just as interesting. However, I can’t discuss any of those details, at least not until twenty-five or so years have passed and they are declassified.)
So, yes, a lot was going on in 2010 and 2011. I didn’t feel that I was riding into the sunset on some broken-down burro. (Many agents—a lot of people in all walks of life—do feel that way, I have observed.) I was truly immersed in UC, but overshadowing all of this undercover chicanery were the pages of the calendar, which were flying by in my imagination, as in an old black-and-white film’s time-transition sequence. Soon just one would remain: April 30, 2011. Some in the Bu theorize that the mandatory retirement rule reflects a justifiable belief that the special agent’s profession, which necessarily entails jumping across rooftops and fast-roping from helicopters on a daily basis, is ill-suited to sexagenarians. The professional BuCynic that I had become suspected otherwise. Sure, a measure of valuable experience would be lost in the transition, but Uncle Sam can employ two brand-new agents for the price of one old agent. The bottom line rules.
Anyway, I had a plan: make myself too irreplaceable to jettison summarily on some arbitrarily designated retirement day. On April 29 I was a valued UC agent, but on April 30 I was over the hill? It was ridiculous. My five ongoing ops were too valuable to close down. They needed me. No one else could do these jobs! I therefore had applied for a one-year extension, which would require the signature of Himself: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI. And of course before the application can hit the big man’s desk it has to run the gauntlet of the entire chain of command in the New York office, including the Assistant Director, before being shipped to JEH, where it would travel from floor to floor, garnering initials, before finally arriving on the seventh floor, the executive suite. My bimonthly calls to Marie, the kindly retirement coordinator in HR at JEH—whose inbox my request currently occupied—yielded progress reports without any real intel as to what might be the final outcome. In early April—less than a month to go!—still no news. Should I be looking for a job?
While a federal pension is a wonderful thing, its size tends to be exaggerated by the media and politicians looking to cut expenditures. In just a few weeks, my income faced a 50-percent reduction while my expenses would stay at 100 percent. Then, in mid-April, Marie called me. Director Mueller had signed off. I had my reprieve. I had one more year on the federal dole. The various Alejandros out in the field would not all simultaneously vanish, leaving their subjects wondering and case agents wringing their hands and scurrying to reconfigure their respective ops. The luxury travel to San Juan for DOMINO EFFECT would continue.
Of all the cases, this was the one still destined to be my curtain call, the ideal cap to my career. Then BUREAUcratic mayhem struck once again. Ruben Marchand-Morales, the case agent, had been reassigned and “promoted” to a coordinator position, essentially a desk job overseeing a given office’s various case categories and operational functions. There are a lot of coordinators. It gets complicated. There may be a coordinator of the coordinators.
What! Why? Soledad Colon, DOMINO EFFECT’s new case agent in San Juan, had no answers, or at least none that she would share with the two UCs from the mainland. Initially, Soledad had been one of the agents assigned to support DOMINO EFFECT. After her promotion, I found her enthusiasm at the enhanced responsibility—and increased workload—was not exactly boundless. The squad supervisor, Chris Starrett, seemed to be the only one with any interest in moving forward, but his interest was not enough. Alejandro and Ricardo’s four-day stays at the Condado Hilton continued for purposes of evaluating project sites and negotiations, but there was not real movement forward. No contracts were being signed. No applications being processed. The invaluable sources on the ground (that is, confidential informants) grew distant, less sure of their intel, equivocal in their statements regarding the targets (senior officials) whose compliance they had virtually guaranteed just a few months earlier. What was wrong? The answer provides us with more reasons why informants have “handlers” rather than managers or partners or directors or supervisors or bosses. They need to be carefully evaluated, developed, reassured, all while being directed, gently but firmly, toward accomplishing defined tasks. If rapport is not maintained and the informant loses confidence in the handler’s ability or commitment to provide a safety net¸ the work product deteriorates along with the relationship. In almost all of my previous long-term ops, I had generally developed my own relationship with the informants, maintaining contact between meets to discuss strategy, sometimes simply chatting with them. (Gil Sandoval in SUNBLOCK, imprisoned at Lewisburg, is a prime example of the fruits of such an approach.) Here, in DOMINO EFFECT, Ricardo Dominguez and I did not even have the phone numbers for the informants. We were discouraged from maintaining any independent contact with them, preventing us from developing rapport. And from moving the case along. As seemed to be occurring with increasing frequency in the New-Era FBI (first in TURKEY CLUB, then ALTERNATE BREACH, now here), the case agents believed they knew better than the UCs, to the general detriment of the ops.
Over the next five or six trips to the Isla, the only progress was with our suntans. Predictably, when the case came up for mandatory review and renewal after six months, it was denied by the Undercover Operations Review Committee at JEH, and I don’t blame them. On the ground in San Juan, Marconi and Dominguez disappeared without a trace, presumably seeking other venues for their large-scale investments.
The Alejandro Marconi AFID had been so meticulously backstopped it would have been a shame to put it to rest, but four months into my one-year extension—with lit
tle likelihood of yet another grace period—it seemed to me unlikely that Marconi would ever again see the light of day. But when I sent all the IDs and wallet stuffers back to Janus, I asked Val to hold onto them—just in case. An old friend, she humored me. She also put me in touch with an agent in San Antonio who was starting up a Group I targeting Mexican drug cartels. The UC would be a crooked high-stakes financier who, after gaining the confidence of the cartel bosses, would engage with them in a variety of illegal enterprises. The role called for someone with a touch of gray and credible Hispanic background. Sounded exiting. I asked for a week to give it some thought.
Paul Benoit, like myself a native of Paris, sat across from my cubicle at 26 Federal Plaza and overheard that phone call. He suggested I read a recent New Yorker piece on the cartels, which he happened to have in his satchel. He had come to know me fairly well over the past five years and had chosen a subtle approach—chosen wisely, and having the desired result. I read the long piece. The Mexican cartels of the 2010s were not those of the 1990s. Their appetite for killing competitors, witnesses, judges, prosecuters, lawmen—anyone who looked at them sideways—was unquenchable. As the reflective Marc Ruskin approached fifty-eight, maybe his accustomed response—“Well, somebody’s going to have to do it, can’t let an inexperienced UC take the risks”—was no longer appropriate. And it was not lost on me that once I retired, should the cartel cutthroats come looking for me, I’d be on my own, for all practical purposes. Do I have rocks in my head? Not anymore! I’m too old for this—for the cartels. I didn’t need a week to decide. Et bien, peut-être tu a raison, I told Paul the following day. I’m outta here.