Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  It was getting close to six-thirty in the evening and on this hot summer night in Vegas we had about two or three hours of daylight. The Beaver and I took two cars and went out to find the residence and set up where we could see if Cargill was home yet or at least watch for him to return. Donnie went to meet Hargrove to get a written statement from him and a key to the house.

  The Beaver and I stopped at strip mall near North Nellis Boulevard and East Lake Mead Boulevard, and he jumped into my Camaro. We drove east on Lake Mead Boulevard to find a couple of good spots to set up on the place. The house sat a couple of hundred yards south of Lake Mead Boulevard, in a large parcel of desert. It looked like a farmhouse that was at least fifty years old. While it had once sat all by itself way out in the middle of nowhere, now Las Vegas was slowly growing toward it. The house was surrounded by big cottonwood trees and bushes, it looked like a nice shady oasis in the desert.

  The Beaver got out my binoculars and peered at the house. “I can’t see shit,” he told me. “It’s impossible to see if anybody’s home; too much vegetation.” It was obvious we were going to need to do surveillance from two different angles, so we went back to get the Beaver’s car; I set up west of the property on Lake Mead Boulevard and the Beaver went east a few blocks.

  About an hour later Donnie hit us up on the radio and said to meet him to discuss Hargrove’s statement and put together a plan. I told him to meet me back at the strip mall at Nellis and Lake Mead. The Beaver stayed put to watch the property.

  Donnie said he got a good written statement from Hargrove; the living room had no furniture and it had been converted into a print shop. Hargrove said there was a table in the dining room with a paper cutter and scraps of paper all over the floor. And cats. Hargrove figured there were a dozen cats in the house and there was cat shit everywhere. “Oh boy,” I said, “Fucking cat shit. This gonna be fun.”

  The Secret Service classifies all counterfeit notes by the Federal Reserve Bank, the faceplate, the check letter/quadrant number, and the back plate; these are those small letters and numbers you’ll find on the notes. The serial numbers on an offset printed counterfeit are not relevant. A counterfeiter takes a photograph of a genuine Federal Reserve note, develops a negative from the film and burns that negative on to an offset plate. He has to make a minimum of three runs through the press: The first run to print black ink on the front of the note, the second, applies green ink to the back of the note and the third run to print green ink for the front serial number and Treasury seal.

  Some counterfeiters used a fourth and fifth pass through the printer to simulate the red and blue fibers that were imbedded in genuine notes. Counterfeiters could easily change the serial number on a new run, by making a plate with just the serial number and Treasury Seal and changing to the serial number plate every so often. At least, that’s the way it was done before digital printing, computers, and color copiers. In the old days, to print money you had to be skilled at the craft. Nowadays any knucklehead with a computer can try to counterfeit currency with the onset of this new technology.

  In the 1990s we saw a dramatic increase in printer notes and Treasury responded by redesigning FRNs with hard to reproduce security features. But in the eighties when we ran across “printer” notes, we consider them junk and didn’t put a lot of time into investigating them. We called them reproductions and most were impossible to pass on the public. That would change as the printing technology improved.

  Every counterfeit note passed eventually ends up on the desk of a Secret Service agent, theoretically anyway, if the note finds its way to a bank, or merchant, or the Federal Reserve. New counterfeits are checked against known counterfeits for an internally assigned circular number. A new note required a forensic examination at our lab in Washington, DC, and new circular number would be assigned if it wasn’t linked to a known counterfeit. Whenever we got a new note in our district we investigated the shit out of it, because that meant we had a new counterfeiter in operation. Donnie and I knew we hadn’t had any new counterfeits lately, so that meant Cargill wasn’t finished printing and he wasn’t ready to get them into circulation. Looks like we got a lucky break on this case; we stopped it before it even got started.

  In L.A. we might have conducted this investigation a little differently. We might have started a twenty-four-hour surveillance of Cargill to see who else was in on the printing. We might have tried to get a snitch into him and introduce an undercover agent. All the fun stuff. But this was Vegas; we had three agents and forty cases apiece. Donnie and I figured we’d just take this guy down and move on. The way to approach this situation: Walk up to the house, knock on the door and arrest the bastard.

  I called the Beaver on the radio and told him to meet Donnie and me at the strip mall. The three of us jumped into Donnie’s sedan. As we drove down the long gravel driveway, the house gradually exposed itself. We were approaching the house from the front and we could see a large backyard with no out buildings. There were no cars on the property. The driveway led to the back of the house, though the large trees. I jumped out of the car and walked around to cover the front of the house, in case Cargill was home and he bolted out the front door. The front of the house faced to the north, toward Lake Mead Boulevard. The grass was sparse and rusty beer cans littered the yard. The front door looked like it hadn’t been opened since 1960. Donnie and the Beaver went to knock on the back door, adjacent to the gravel parking area at the end of the driveway. It was very obvious that the back door was used as the main entrance into the dwelling.

  A few minutes later I could hear someone trying to open the front door and then a lot of pounding. What the fuck? Is Cargill trying to escape? Finally, I saw curtains part on the window to the side of the door. It was the Beaver and he was giving me the all-clear sign, which was him pantomiming the words “It’s all clear.”

  I went around to the back and walked into the house. The stench made me want to gag. A couple of cats ran out the door as I entered the living room. It was dark and the one overhead light on the ceiling was blinking rapidly. There was an AB Dick 1200 offset printing press, the choice of all fine counterfeiters, sitting in the middle of the living room, along with two cameras, a camera tripod, negatives, printing plates, printed sheets of currency, and that big plate burner. The dining room table had printed sheets of counterfeit notes, some with three notes per page and some with four. Might as well optimize your production, Lucky! We saw one hundreds, fifties, twenties, and tens. Stacks of them in uncut sheets.

  Donnie wanted to call the LVMPD evidence team to photograph the inside of the house. The Beaver and I exchanged glances, “Come on man,” said the Beaver. “We’ve got cameras in our car.”

  “No. This is too big,” said Donnie. The next thing I knew, Donnie was sitting in his G-ride on the LVMPD frequency of the radio and calling for help. I looked at the Beaver and just rolled my eyes. But Donnie is Donnie; he’s the GS-13 here. The Beaver walked away and shook his head. Donnie always seemed to make a big deal out of everything.

  As we waited for the PD evidence team, we did a search of the rooms. We found more stacks of counterfeit notes cut and bound with rubber bands in shoeboxes in a closet. The fifty-dollar counterfeits struck me as odd. The fifty was probably the least counterfeited note. A counterfeiter wants to make a note that is easily passed and the twenty was the number one counterfeited note, because they were plentiful and people used them all the time to make purchases at stores. Using a fifty-dollar bill might cause a store clerk to look at it a little closer; plus, fifties were consider bad luck in Las Vegas. “Never bet a fifty-dollar bill at a casino” was the Vegas lore. A sure way to jinx yourself and lose. Looked like Lucky Cargill jinxed himself all right, three Secret Service agents were standing in the middle of his printing operation.

  By the time we finished searching the house and the evidence team got done lighting the inside up like a baseball stadium to photograph the plant, it
was very late. Now what do we do? We’d just seized a big counterfeiting plant operation, but our printer was nowhere to be found. We decided we needed to set up a surveillance on the place and wait for him to come home. An LVMPD detective volunteered to stay and help us out. Great! Now we have four guys, which is better than three. We decided the best place to watch the property was right there in the backyard. Anybody approaching wouldn’t see our cars until they were almost in the yard. The detective said he would set up on Lake Mead Boulevard to watch for cars turning into the driveway. We went to the strip mall and got the other two cars. We were in for a long night.

  It was a clear and hot night in Vegas. From the backyard we good see the glow of Las Vegas, the Strip, and Glitter Gulch to the south. The moon was almost full and the darkened house took on a surreal look. I was expecting to see Lucky Cargill ride up in the moonlight on a horse with a pack mule behind him, an old gold miner returning to his claim and his paper gold.

  It was about two in the morning and the Beaver was hungry. None of us had eaten since lunch and the Beaver volunteered to go get pizza. That’s one of the things I loved about Las Vegas. It was a twenty-four-hour town; grocery stores, restaurants; shit, everything was open 24/7! Even the dry cleaners, for Pete’s sake. Years later when the Redhead and I transferred out of Vegas back to the real world, we were shocked when we found out the local grocery store closed at ten in the evening.

  The detective drove to the house to join us for dinner, a gourmet feast of four pizzas on the hood of Donnie’s sedan. And the Beaver did the right thing by grabbing four cans of beer when he bought the pizzas. I devoured two or three slices and had just picked up a Bud and popped the top when the Beaver grabbed my arm and whispered, “There he is!”

  I looked to the east and could faintly see a lone figure walking—actually, staggering—through the sagebrush toward the house. The Beaver took off running into the desert, I glanced at the can of beer and set it on the hood and followed behind him. Lucky Cargill was in custody and he was blind-stumbling drunk.

  Donnie and I transported him to the office, while the detective and the Beaver started the long process of transporting the evidence. The LVMPD detective called for a uniformed cop to sit on the place until we could get a moving company over there to transport the large printing equipment to our evidence locker later that afternoon.

  Donnie and I were interviewing Cargill in our suspect interview room and Lucky was cooperative with our investigation and answered all of our questions. I excused myself from the interview and started running him for wants, warrants, and criminal history.

  I walked back into the interview room and tossed a rap sheet on the desk in front of Donnie. It turned out Lucky was on federal probation for counterfeiting US currency. A former Las Vegas agent, who was long transferred to Washington, DC, had arrested him for printing counterfeit currency almost six years ago. The rap sheet indicated a US district court judge had sentenced Lucky to ten years, suspended, to serve twelve months and five years probation. Wow, he’s got about three months left on his probation. With this arrest tonight his probation will be revoked and he’ll do ten years, plus any sentence imposed on this new case will run consecutively. He could be looking at twenty years.

  I pulled the old case file and put it on my desk. Then I started writing an affidavit for the arrest warrant and Cargill’s initial appearance before a US magistrate later that day.

  An initial appearance before a US magistrate is a formal hearing where the defendant is formally advised of his rights before the court, advised of the charges against him, appointed an attorney, and if he can’t afford one, have one assigned to his case…all that good legal stuff. A preliminary hearing date is set and the defendant is given a bond for his release.

  Everything was going according to the book on Lucky’s initial appearance. My AUSA was arguing for detention of the defendant as a flight risk and the assistant federal public defender was arguing for his release on bond. The typical courtroom dance. The AUSA and I knew Cargill was going to get detained without bail; he was on probation of counterfeiting currency and his US Probation officer was sitting in the front row of the courtroom. The charges he now faced were certain to get his probation revoked. And then one of the most unusual things I’ve ever heard a probation officer say happened.

  The judge was considering detaining Cargill, but the public defender was talking nonstop about how Cargill was not a flight risk, he’d always made all his court appearances on the previous case that led to his probation, and suddenly the judge was wavering; I could feel it. The judge looked at the Probation officer and asked if she was going to revoke his probation.

  “No,” she said and I almost fell out of my chair. Are you kidding me? She continued saying the current charges were based on a probable cause affidavit and she wouldn’t consider a revocation hearing until Cargill was indicted by a grand jury. The AUSA leaped right in with some good arguments about how that was then and this is now, and he was facing significant jail time on the revocation and significant jail time on these charges. He must be detained.

  But the judge wasn’t buying it. The defendant had a record of making his court appearances and he couldn’t speculate on future events; Cargill was released on his own recognizance. That meant he did not have to place a monetary bond with the court; his word was his bond and he promised to come back to court for his next appearance. I was shocked. Okay, grant him bond if you want, but at least make him come up with five thousand dollars to secure his release, please!

  Lucky Cargill walked out of that courtroom a free man. And he knew he would be indicted and he knew he was going to prison for violating the conditions of his probation. Lucky Cargill knew he would be found guilty on my new charges of counterfeiting US currency and he would be sentenced to more prison time for these charges, and the sentences would more than like run consecutively. He was looking at some serious federal time. So he did what any crook with a few brains would do. He vanished into thin air and it would be a long, long time before he surfaced.

  I spent a lot of time in the next few years looking for him. The US Marshals issued wanted posters, I requested that agents interview his known family members in Montana, I got subpoenas for telephone records…all that stuff. I even tried to talk headquarters in putting his story on a new television series that was very popular in the late eighties—America’s Most Wanted. But the Secret Service had not been featured on the television show yet and headquarters turned down my request. The Counterfeit Division agent told me they were looking to get a Secret Service fugitive case to submit to the producers of the show, but they felt the Cargill case lacked enough pizzazz. I couldn’t have disagreed more.

  So, Lucky faded away into the desert. He obviously changed his habits and quit counterfeiting money and he was never arrested again for committing any crime. I did indict him, for so many counts of manufacturing and possession of counterfeit currency that my grand jury testimony took half the day. And the Probation officer finally revoked his probation…two warrants out there in, what we would call today, cyberspace. But Lucky never had another encounter with a police officer until the winter of the year 2000, about twelve years later.

  Lucky Cargill was in Reno, Nevada. He was one of those homeless guys you see on the freeway off-ramp with a cup and a sign. Late one winter night the Reno Police Department responded to a call about an unresponsive man in a city park. Lucky Cargill was transported to the local hospital and was diagnosed with dementia and kidney failure. He passed away shortly thereafter.

  I often thought about Lucky over the years and wondered, where did he go and what did he do? Donnie used to goad the shit out of me about him…every once in a while, I would get a letter in the mail or a telephone call. It was always Donnie, with a crayon written note or in a gravely voice on the phone and the message was always the same, “You’ll never catch me, copper!”

  Lucky was about fifty-five yea
rs old on that moonlit summer night when he walked through the desert toward his house. As we wrapped up our interview of Lucky and prepared to take him to the Clark County Jail, I asked him why he came back to the house. I mean, he knew we were there searching the place. He knew he was on probation for counterfeiting US currency. He knew he’d be going to jail. He could have just disappeared right then and there. “Why come back to the house and face immediate arrest Lucky?”

  “I was sitting in a bar up on Lake Mead Boulevard,” he said to me, “And could see all the commotion down there about midnight. The inside of the house was lit up like Christmas.”

  I looked at Lucky and I could see his pale blue eyes tearing up. “Why’d you come home Lucky?” I repeated.

  Lucky paused for a few seconds with his head down and his elbows on the arms of the chair, his hands were clasps on his lap. He rubbed his eyes. A teardrop fell on his pant leg. “I…” he was struggling for the words. “I, well…I had to feed my cats.”

  Chapter 6

  Joe the Cubs Fan

  Every now and then—like most Fridays after work—the three of us would stop by a tucked away bar/restaurant across the street from the federal building in Las Vegas. It was the destination of choice for most federal law enforcement agents, probation officers, AUSAs and the occasional assistant federal public defender. It was an Irish pub-style joint and it was a great place to enjoy a cocktail without worrying you’d run into some low-life you’d once arrested.

  The Beaver and I were having a beer at the pub one Friday evening with a couple of buddies from ATF, when one of the ATF agent’s beeper went off and he excused himself to find the pay phone. After the agent made his way back to our table, he leaned in to my ear and asked if I was interested in talking to an informant about a guy with some counterfeit. He said he was working a reliable informant on some illegal gun cases and his guy just called. “You available tomorrow afternoon to meet this guy?” Me? Available tomorrow? Saturday? You bet I am!