Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  I had arrived in L.A. the night before and reported into the ATSAIC of the Counterfeit Squad early that morning. Due to campaign staffing we only had eleven agents to work the surveillance; five two-man G-rides and one poor soul inside the surveillance van. Luckily, that wasn’t me.

  We started the surveillance at the paper distributor and Audie Stanton showed up when they opened at nine in the morning. We watched him load that green Ford station wagon with so many reams of paper, the rear end was riding low. Looked like Audie needed some new shocks on that Ford. We followed him to his print shop in South Central L.A. and watched him unload it all and take it in the back door of the printing business.

  The L.A. Counterfeit Squad was very familiar with Audie. He’d been arrested five or six times by the LAFO for counterfeiting. And it looked like he was up to it again. Audie had a print shop on Crenshaw Boulevard in South Central L.A. near the intersection of Florence and Crenshaw—an intersection that would become very famous during the Rodney King riots a few years later.

  We watched him lock up and leave that evening; we followed him home and put him to bed. Once he left we had some of the guys check the trash Dumpster in the back of the print shop, hoping to find some evidence of counterfeiting, but we came up empty.

  This routine went on for a few days, and it wasn’t long before every swinging dick in South Central L.A. knew the cops were hanging out in the neighborhood. Those folks were pretty attuned to spotting white guys sitting in cars day-in and day-out in one general area around Crenshaw and Florence. Everybody except Audie…he didn’t have a clue. We had the surveillance van parked across the street and down about a half of a block from Audie’s print shop with a great view of the front door. Sitting in that surveillance van for twelve hours or more was uncomfortable, to say the least. Thank God I didn’t get that assignment.

  Some of the citizens of South Central L.A. were not shy about walking right up to our cars and asking us who we were looking for. The crack cocaine epidemic was at its peak back in 1988 and they all figured we were LAPD or the DEA waiting to bust a drug dealer. We had to wrap this investigation up real soon or risk Audie finally figuring out he was our target.

  We were stuck and getting nowhere. We had no snitch on this case. We had no undercover agent in on this one. We were flying blind and needed a break to develop probable cause for an arrest. It didn’t help that President Reagan was scheduled to go to his ranch in Santa Barbara for a few days the next week. The Protection Operations agent in L.A. would be pulling more than seven of the agents, including me, from the surveillance to stand post at the ranch. Continuing this surveillance with four agents wasn’t going to work.

  The case agent finally decided that if Audie loaded any boxes into the station wagon and started to leave, we would do a traffic stop on him and hopefully get a consent search or enough for a search warrant. His hope was Audie would be transporting counterfeit notes in the Ford station wagon. It wasn’t much, but it was all we had. If we could just develop some good probable cause for a search warrant on the print shop, we’d be set! We knew Audie was printing counterfeit inside the shop, but how were we going to prove that?

  If we could just get a peek inside the shop that might just be all we’d need.

  We’d been on this surveillance for four or five days by now, living off fast food, and most of us hadn’t shaved during that time. We were all looking pretty haggard. It was hot in L.A. that summer, and Audie had a screen door on the front door to his shop. We noticed that he kept the front door open and the screen door closed during business hours. The place wasn’t air-conditioned and running an AB Dick 1200 generates some heat.

  One of the guys came up with a pretty good idea; why not have one of our guys pretend to be a street bum, a drunk and wander on over to Audie’s front door? Street bums were common in L.A., as in any big city, and our “bum” might be able to see the press and some counterfeit notes without raising any suspicions.

  One of the agents from the LAFO was a tall, skinny, lanky guy, he always reminded me of the actor Vincent Schiuvelli. The agent should have won an Academy Award for his performance that day, or at least, he should have been nominated. If anybody looked like a homeless street guy, it was Rob. And Rob really got into his character. He bought two pints of cheap bourbon and poured one bottle all over his clothes and gargled with it. He jumped in to a Dumpster behind a restaurant and rolled around in the garbage. He stunk to high heaven.

  Rob came stumbling down Crenshaw Blvd, staggering back a forth on the sidewalk. The pedestrians were aghast. When Rob got to Audie’s print shop, he collapsed against the wall, just inches from the front screen door. He’d lift that paper bag and take a sip of whiskey every now and then and mumble incoherently. The agent in the surveillance van was dying laughing as he described the scene to the rest of us on the radio. It was classic! Every few minutes, Rob would get up and try to peek into the shop, and then sit back down with his back against the storefront wall. Finally, Audie came out to see who and what this guy was. Just because he was a counterfeiter didn’t mean old Audie wasn’t a compassionate guy. Audie kept trying to talk Rob into getting on the next bus that would stop just down the block and head north. There weren’t very many white homeless drunks on Crenshaw in South Central and it seemed like Audie was worried for Rob’s safety. “You’re gonna get killed around here, white boy; get outta here!” he told Rob. Finally, Rob got what he needed and staggered north on Crenshaw.

  Rob was able to see inside the shop and he saw the AB Dick behind the counter running a mile a minute. He couldn’t really see any counterfeit notes, the cylinder of the printer was spinning to fast, but he could see green spinning by and the undeniable sounds of the cha-chunk of the printer. The case agent was able to take that information, along with all the other evidence we’d gathered about Audie’s operation, and got a US magistrate to sign the warrant.

  We hit the place as soon as the judge signed the warrant. When we burst into the shop, Audie had the press running full speed, and he was printing one-hundred-dollar bills. We found stacks of uncut sheets with four images per sheet of counterfeit one hundreds. The printer paper trough was full of paper. And son of a bitch, it ran out of paper before we could find the off switch and shut her down.

  Once we had all the evidence inventoried and secured at the LAFO, I drove three hours back to Las Vegas. When I got home I kissed the Redhead hello and good-bye, packed, and drove five hours west for an assignment in Santa Barbara. I loved standing post at President Reagan’s ranch.

  Chapter 8

  A Biker Gang Reject

  Ranch del Cielo was one beautiful place. It was located just north of the city of Santa Barbara, high up in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Most of us young agents from L.A. (and Las Vegas was part of the LAFO) were assigned an eight-hour shift as resident security during the President’s extended visits. We worked the middle security perimeter around the main part of the ranch. This meant long hours outside, in the elements, and you were lucky to get thirty minutes of downtime in the Security Room to eat a sub sandwich and wash it down with Diet Coke. But I’m an outdoorsy type and that suited me just fine. I still had my eye on an assignment to PPD when I finished my tour in the desert and I was young enough to still be inspired working alongside those PPD agents.

  One sunny afternoon, as I was standing a security post on the middle perimeter of the ranch, the Command Post alerted all of us that President and Mrs. Reagan were commencing a horseback ride. It wasn’t long after the radio call that I saw them in the pasture just below my position, riding horses from my left (back toward the barn) to my right and the beautiful green hills dotted with scrub oak trees. I looked back to my left and saw a group of about five agents keeping their horses a respectable distance behind the President. As I watched the PPD agents riding horses with President Reagan, little did I know that in less than six years I’d be riding horses with a different President of the United S
tates…

  * * *

  Campaign or no campaign, in Las Vegas the crime never stopped. We were getting a lot of raised notes in the office lately. A raised note is an altered genuine note “raised” to a higher denomination. This is done by cutting the corners off a higher valued bill and taping or gluing them over the original notes corners, thereby “raising the value.” Genuine US currency is considered acceptable if the note has more than 50 percent still intact. So a crook could cut the corners off one side of a one-hundred-dollar bill, then make the one hundred look like it had been torn at the edges, take it to a bank and the bank would give you a replacement one hundred dollar bill. The ripped currency was shipped to the Federal Reserve to be destroyed as mutilated currency. This type of counterfeit note, and it was considered counterfeit by the statute, was hard to pass. If the recipient took the time to actually look at the altered raised note, they might realize George Washington is on the one-dollar bill, not the one hundred dollar bill.

  Generally speaking we didn’t put much time into these raised note investigations. A crook altering notes this way was usually a juvenile; plus, not many US Attorneys would consider prosecuting this type of counterfeiting. But this was Las Vegas and we had a very aggressive US Attorney’s office. Our office was getting flooded with raised notes and all of them were being passed at dimly light local bars/casinos.

  Most of these neighborhood bars had no clue as to who passed the raised note and the information we got from a bank on counterfeit wasn’t very specific as to what day and time the note was passed. Interviewing bartenders was a shot in the dark. But if you don’t ask, you’ll never find out.

  These local bars were our “cheeseburger casinos” so one day I suggested we have lunch at one of the victim bars near East Tropicana and Eastern Avenue. After finishing up a really good cheeseburger—perhaps the best one yet—I walked over to a bartender, identified myself, and asked about the counterfeit bill passed there last week.

  “Yeah, I know the guy that passed that shit. His name’s Jeff Hunt. He used to come in regularly. But I haven’t seen him in awhile,” the bartender told me. “The next time I see him, he owes me a hundred bucks. Oh, and he’s a real shithead…always bragging about his Hell’s Angels buddies. Claims he once was one.” The bartender gave me a good description of the suspect. I told him that if Hunt came back in to act like nothing was amiss and call me. I now had a suspect and a pretty good description; I just needed to find him.

  * * *

  The LVMPD had a very detailed computer database that contained basic information about folks who had been arrested or came in contact with a Vegas cop. The information in this database included just about everybody who lived in Vegas and half of the tourists who didn’t comply with the law in one-way or another. Most of these entries had an accompanying photo, copies of which we could easily access. The database also had information on anyone who applied for work at one of the many casinos in Las Vegas and Clark County, Nevada.

  To work for a casino, one had to get a card clearing them to do so from the PD. The PD would fingerprint the casino worker and run them for any wants and warrants, before issuing this work card. I guess casinos had standards. I don’t know what those standards were and they must have not been too stringent, because we arrested a few casino workers in the four years I worked in Las Vegas.

  * * *

  Donnie walked into my office one afternoon; he’d just been assigned a letter writer case. It seemed a blackjack dealer at the Landmark Hotel and Casino didn’t like President Reagan’s policies, so he wrote him a nice letter and closed with, “I’m gonna rip your lungs out and stab you in the heart…a thousand times.” Donnie said he had called the casino security office and the guy was working that afternoon, “Let’s go see what makes him tick.”

  After explaining the situation to the security manager, the security team went and pulled him off his blackjack table and brought him to us. He was a white male, mid-thirties, a nice clean-cut looking fellow. Not the average nut case we ran into who liked to make threats or write letters to the White House. Maybe he just had a beef with the President and he chose the wrong words to express his anger. He willingly took the afternoon off and we drove him to our office.

  This guy was hard to figure out. He sure seemed like your average Joe and he was extremely cooperative. He answered all our questions seemingly content with the situation—which was also very odd. If two Secret Service agents walked into my place of employment and told my boss I had written a threatening letter to the President, I’d be a little pissed off. Not Johnny Blackjack…he was calm, cool and collected. And a little happy, all smiles you know?

  We took a break and stepped into Donnie’s office. Donnie wanted to have him committed for forty-eight hours, to let the professionals evaluate his brain. “I don’t know Donnie,” I said, “He seems okay to me.” Donnie agreed but he felt there was something just not right with the guy.

  We went back in the interview room to continue our chat. Donnie mentioned something about the air force and Johnny Blackjack suddenly got excited. He went off on a tangent about spaceships flying over the desert north of Las Vegas. He said he’d climbed up Mormon Mountain and peered over the other side and he’d seen them. “Yep! Yep! Yep! I saw them spaceships!” And then, the next minute he was calm again, discussing Reagan’s policies and why he disagreed with them. We were back to having a normal conversation.

  Okay. He’s nuts; must be bipolar: up and down, up and down.

  It took us forever to convince him that we needed to take him to the hospital to have a doctor examine him. He was not going. It wasn’t like he was physically refusing to go, he continued to be very cordial, but he just insisted his health—physical and mental health—were fine. Two hours later, we finally got him in the car and to the hospital.

  He sat on the examination table, still not quite realizing what was happening to him. All those iron barred doors that kept opening for us and then closing behind us were meant to keep him there. As we escorted him into the psychiatric examination room, Johnny Blackjack just kind of looked around in bewilderment, not saying much except, “Come on guys, do we have to do this?” We could tell he was scared.

  The doctor asked him a few questions and then said to us, “Okay, fellas, thank you.” As we started to walk out, retracing our steps through the iron barred doors, we could hear Johnny Blackjack down the hall yelling, “Hey, come on, guys. Don’t leave me here! Please don’t leave me here with all these nuts! Come on, guys! This is chicken shit.”

  Donnie and I didn’t say a word until we got into his sedan. I looked over at him and he looked at me. Donnie let out a big sigh. “Holy shit,” he said. “What would you do if two Secret Service agents dropped you off at a psychiatric hospital and left you there? What would your reaction be?”

  “I would have said the exact same thing he just said to us,” I replied. “I would have begged you not to leave me there.” That poor guy, what if he’s not really nuts? If he’s not, he’s going to have a fun two days!

  The next day the doctor from the psychiatric hospital called Donnie to thank us for bringing him in. “He’s been admitted before and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, with bipolar tendencies,” he said.

  Donnie came running into my office, “Thank God.” He laughed, “He’s nuts!”

  * * *

  I got to work on trying to identify my raised note suspect. I found two guys in the LVMPD database with the exact name, description and about the correct age. I got photos from the PD and made up two separate photos spreads, one with one Jeff Hunt and five similar looking males and the other with the other Jeff Hunt, and five similar looking white males. The bartender who’d told me his name had no problem picking out the suspect from one of the photo spreads. “That’s him,” he said as he pointed to the picture of Jeff Hunt.

  The LVMPD database didn’t list an address for my Jeff Hunt an
d finding him would not be easy. But I got lucky one morning when the LVMPD dispatcher called our office to report a motel manager called 9-1-1. A maid found “counterfeit money” in room 203 of the No-Tell Motel out by the airport. A guest named Jeff Hunt was registered to the room.

  The three of us went to the motel, knocked on the door to room 203 and woke him up. We got him handcuffed and sat him on the bed. He was cussing up a storm; threatening to kill us…this guy was fucking mean. I asked him for a consent search of the room.

  “Fuck you!” he said. That seemed to be his favorite response to our questions. Between the cussing and spitting, we decided it was time for this guy to go. The Beaver called LVMPD for assistance and we loaded him in the back of a black-and-white for the trip to the Clark County Jail. The Beaver rode with the cop and Donnie and I did a plain view search of the room. X-Acto knives and Scotch tape were sitting on the dresser. Bingo! I called T.J. and he said, “Let’s get a search warrant.”

  After I got the search warrant signed we went back to the secured room (we put a “Clam-shell” lock on the room door and advised the motel manager to keep all his employees away from the room) and executed the search warrant. Tucked away in a dresser drawer we found two one-hundred-dollar bills with the corners shaved off at an angle, and a bunch of one-dollar bills. But that was about it. With the X-Acto knife and Scotch tape, I had my guy. “Hey, Donnie,” I said, “Do you think this qualifies for a seizure of a counterfeit plant?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said to me. “It’s all in how you write it up!”

  Hunt decided to go to trial on the three-count indictment for passing counterfeit notes. I guess I couldn’t blame him; he had a rap sheet as long as my arm—violent crimes, armed robbery, biker gang stuff. I had located three really good eyewitnesses who were willing to testify. All three were bartenders who remembered Hunt clearly; two were women and the other was the guy from the bar on East Tropicana.