The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Despite the widespread belief that the Mafia bosses wouldn’t sanction drug dealing on supposedly moral grounds—a myth perpetuated in films like The Godfather—Mob bosses going back to Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein and Charles “Lucky” Luciano trafficked in heroin in the 1920s and 1930s. Luciano once famously described heroin as “a million dollars in a suitcase.”

  It’s a long-standing truism: Wherever there are drugs, there’s organized crime. The Bureau of Narcotics almost by default was in the vanguard of interdiction, seizures, and arrests. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the big money was in smack. Horse. H. Cases involving the notorious French Connection—the Corsican importers, the Sicilian manufacturers—were all handled by the precursor of the DEA, task forces comprised of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics alongside local cops from the New York State Police and New York Police Department detectives.

  The Drug Enforcement Administration, established by President Nixon in 1973, melded the Treasury’s Bureau of Narcotics and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Before I came on the job, the DEA headquarters was located at 1405 I Street NW in Washington. With the growth of the agency due to the explosion of illicit narcotics flowing into the country, by 1989 the headquarters had expanded and relocated to Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia. The DEA was established to spearhead the original “War on Drugs.” As I was to see during my years on the street, there could hardly be a greater misnomer than a “War on Drugs.” The only “war”—if we insist on that military term—consists of battles targeting individual drug traffickers. For me, the idea of a War on Drugs was irrational; no matter how good a federal agent you are, no matter how big your cases, you could never simply seize enough narcotics to make any appreciable difference.

  Even early on, fresh out of the academy, I realized that the only difference you could ever make was by pursuing a tactic of decapitation: Taking out the actual kingpins. Decimating the organizations themselves not by working your way up the ladder but by going straight at the leadership. If you wanted to win, you had to take out the bosses directly.

  • • •

  It was in those early days in Group Four—barely two weeks on the job—that I learned the nitty-gritty of undercover narcotics operations firsthand. The task force included DEA agents like José and Rogelio, but also a group of special agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

  One was a hard-charging North Carolinian who everyone called Billy-Boy: Special Agent William Queen of the ATF. At the time, Billy was becoming an expert undercover, working one-percenter biker gangs throughout the Southwest; a decade later, he’d chronicle his undercover journey inside the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club in his New York Times bestseller, Under and Alone.*

  I was a baby the first time I went undercover on a heroin deal. We were going out to buy a pound of smack at this hotel. The traffickers were independent Mexican wholesalers—midlevel distributors connected to one of the cartels south of the border, known as the Riveras organization.

  They dealt in a form of black-tar heroin called chiva. Supposedly, they had some of the best quality chiva in California. I’d learned to talk the talk by now: We had to refer to weights such as “eightballs” and “Mexican ounces.” (Mexicans, like much of the rest of the world, use the metric system. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds; there are 35.2 ounces in a kilo. A standard ounce on the decimal scale is 28.35 grams. Rounding down for convenience, a Mexican ounce is actually 25 grams.)

  I was going on the set as an undercover alone, but with me that day I had one hell of a backup team: my DEA partner, José, and a few of the ATF boys as well. Billy Queen was there, as was Mike Dawkins—both as seasoned as I was green. Like me, Billy wasn’t tall, but he was a fearsome presence, known for his expertise with any kind of firearm; Dawkins was more physically imposing, standing six-foot-five—a special agent you would never want to get on the wrong side of.

  The operation started off by the playbook; I was being vouched for by our informant, Miguel Green Eyes, who was already inside the Holiday Inn. I was wearing my dark-blue business suit. Before I went in, Billy Queen kept whispering in my ear:

  “Be cool, Eddie. Just be cool.”

  The hotel room was on the ground floor, with open windows facing the street. The curtains were drawn tight. When I knocked, the bad guy wouldn’t open the hotel door. And then this nauseating waft hit my nostrils: The room smelled like shit.

  Finally, the door swung open very slowly. I squinted and recoiled from the stench. I had our “flash” at the ready—to show the dealers that I’d brought the money in good faith—but it was one of those deals where the crooks immediately got skittish and nervous, their twitchy body language impossible for me to read.

  You often get into standoffs, these dangerous games of chicken, where all it takes is for one of the players to have a yearning to shoot, be stoned out of his head, psychotic, or paranoid.

  “Where’s the dope?” I said.

  “Don’t know, primo. Where’s the money?”

  “Don’t worry about the money, where’s the fucking chiva?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s the money?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s the chiva?”

  And you go back and forth a dozen times until someone blinks and shows theirs first, and the deal can continue.

  No cop wants to be the one to show his cash first, because if you’re dealing with some bad players, as soon as you flash the money, they may get the drop on you: Pull out a piece, grab the money, and flee.

  What had happened with Paul Seema, George Montoya, and José down in Pasadena was not the typical dope deal gone wrong. Criminals don’t kill as often as they steal. They’d rather hold you at gunpoint, take the money, and split.

  There I stood, in my crisp business suit, trying not to breathe deeply in that shit-reeking hotel room—back and forth we went. Finally, I reached into my suit jacket pocket and flashed the cash, but the criminals still wouldn’t show their dope.

  Then, in the time it took me to draw a breath, the whole world went to hell.

  My backup team—Mike Dawkins, Billy Queen, Doug “Running Rabbit” DaCosta, and José Martinez—ran up to the window. Dawkins took his shotgun butt and smashed through the glass.

  We all reeled back from the sound of the smash.

  I was half frozen, in a daze; looked over and saw Billy Queen, calm as can be, using his own shotgun to clear out the jagged shards of glass and then, parting the tan curtains, stepping right through the open window into the room. Next through the bashed-in window: Dawkins, DaCosta, Martinez—all of the backup guys were shouting and charging into the hotel room, taking charge of the set. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Sure enough, something had been off, and my guys figured it out instantly after I flashed the cash. The kilogram of black-tar heroin was somewhere else; the traffickers had balked, didn’t want to bring out the smack.

  Through all the shouting and the swirl of DEA and ATF windbreakers, we did a pat-down of the criminals. After a few minutes, we found an address in Bakersfield. I jumped in my red 1989 Corvette—we’d acquired the car in a seizure and forfeiture from drug traffickers—and hauled ass out to Bakersfield. Went straight before a California State magistrate and obtained a search warrant.

  When we entered the address in Bakersfield—bingo. We found more than forty guns. In addition to being dopers, these guys were illegal gun merchants. Eventually, José and the rest of the Group Four team, through dogged interrogation, got yet another address and found the black-tar heroin.

  Turned out to be a big arrest and seizure. Made the LA papers. My first major undercover operation—didn’t go off without a hitch, but in the end we made the bust, and none of our guys got hurt. Given the fresh memories of the Pasadena tragedy, the case was a complete success.

  The rush of that first undercover job was crazy. Nothing I’d exper
ienced during my time in the Marine Corps could have prepared me for the surge of adrenaline, the smashing of glass, the newly intensified sounds and colors—almost a heightened sense of reality.

  I couldn’t get enough. From that first moment, I was hopelessly addicted to undercover.

  • • •

  Undercover work is largely intuitive, as José Martinez always told me. The skills are innate; either you’re born to it or you’re not.

  Undercover is a grand seduction. You build that trust—but it’s never reciprocal. You never reciprocate. It’s all a facade. You’re like a hologram.

  Over time, I’d find the drug dealer’s appetites, fill or partially fill them, and in short order I’d own him. It’s human frailty—universal and absolute.

  Absent discipline over our vices, everyone is always vulnerable. I’m not even sure how—maybe there was some Providence involved—but I always managed to find some trait, flaw, or weakness in the bad guy that I could tap into. Call it his “vulnerability vein.” When the time was right, I’d turn the tables. I became the pusher. I made him my junkie.

  • • •

  What exactly is undercover? From a law enforcement perspective, undercover is the dark art of skillfully eliciting incriminating statements. From a personal and psychological standpoint, it’s the art of gaining trust—then manipulating that trust. In the simplest terms, it’s playing a chess game with the bad guy, getting him to make the moves you want him to make—but without him knowing you’re doing so.

  As I moved from case to case, I never touched an illegal drug other than during a business transaction. I’ve never been high in my life. After my first UC operation with Group Four—Mike Dawkins and Billy Queen bashing through the motel window—undercover became my drug.

  I understand this may sound rather twisted, but nothing—nothing—is more satisfying than when you can manipulate and manage someone’s actions, his very thoughts, so that you get him to behave in a way that works to your strategic advantage. There is no rush more powerful, no high more intoxicating . . .

  As an undercover agent, my mantra became:

  Just get me in the room.

  Once I was in the room, the onus was on me. That’s all I ever asked of my informants, of my managers, of my agents, of the criminals—“Get me in the room.”

  In the DEA, there are two primary kinds of agents: street agents and intel agents. I could do the intelligence work just fine. One of my closest friends and my partner throughout my years in Thailand, Mike Bansmer, likes to call me “Eddie the Academician.” I guess that’s because, more than most cops, I liked to read and write and do heavy amounts of research.

  But it was clear to me—and to everyone in Group Four—that I wasn’t an intel guy: I needed to be on the street.

  Special Agent John Whelan, on the other hand, was a stellar intelligence agent. We’d started in the DEA together; he showed up probably two months before I did, right after the Pasadena shooting. Whelan’s nickname within Group Four was Higgins, because he looked just like the character Higgins on Magnum, P.I. He talked just like him, too. His words flowed out at light speed, clipped and proper—unlike any other cop I’d ever met.

  Whelan was a Marine, like me, but he’d been an intelligence officer in the Corps, and tended to throw around nautical terms like “azimuth reading” in everyday speech. The more rough-edged agents in Group Four used to stare at Whelan like he’d gulped down Roget’s Thesaurus.

  I quickly became known within Group Four as a case maker. Johnny’s strength was intelligence. But if you ask me, both roles are of equal importance.

  • • •

  One of the strangest undercover stings I ever worked, the case of the “Good Doctor,” came to us through one of John Whelan’s informants, a Chinese-American character named Peter Chin. Peter Chin had actually been a longtime informant for another agent. The drug world is very incestuous. The players almost always know one another. And informants are almost like concubines. They’re often passed on from one agent to the other, from case to case.

  It was Peter Chin who assembled the entire deal; ironically, like me, he was born and raised in St. Louis. John Whelan was quarterbacking the operation, but this time Billy Queen was my undercover partner. Our job was to go undercover together, guarding the money and the informant. Billy brought all his ATF undercover savvy to the game; I was just some young undercover mope, trying to keep up, holding on to Billy’s belt loop.

  We were looking to do a deal with some murky figure named Dragan, this smack wholesaler who’d come out of nowhere, started to develop a heavy reputation in Southern California. He was apparently a Vietnam vet—sort of resembled a young Rutger Hauer, six-one, close-cropped blond hair and cobalt-blue eyes. The intel on Dragan was that he had an obsession—bordering on the pathological—with Southeast Asia. The food, the culture, the language, the women—everything.

  “Hell, the guy’s married to a Thai princess,” Billy explained.

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah, imagine that—a smack dealer marrying into the royal family. This princess he married, that’s how he got his connections over there.”

  Then Billy told me something that left me laughing out loud. Our Thai-loving heroin dealer had earned his doctorate.

  “A doctor of what?”

  “Shit, I don’t know—some kind of degree. All I know is that over there they all call him professor. The Good Doctor Dragan.”

  Most traffickers want to do deals strictly for cash. Dr. Dragan was unusual: His basic commodity in exchange for heroin was armaments.

  “He wants heavy-duty US military weapons to bring to Khun Sa,” Billy said.

  “Khun who? Who’s that?”

  I was so green—four months on the job—I didn’t have the faintest clue who Khun Sa was. Billy Queen, smiling patiently, sat me down and explained the geopolitical scope of this deal.

  • • •

  At headquarters on Figueroa Street, long after everyone had left for the day, I did all the reading I could on our Golden Triangle operations. The Shan United Army, the largest drug insurgency in history, was headed by this supposedly untouchable general known as the Opium Warlord.

  Born in 1934 to a Chinese father and a Burmese mother, he was given the Mandarin name Chang Chi Fu but went by the nom de guerre of Khun Sa, meaning “Prince of Wealth,” though among American authorities the name had by now morphed into “Prince of Death.”

  Khun Sa, known for chain-smoking American cigarettes and welcoming journalists into his forest-cloaked redoubt, saw himself not so much as a drug baron but as a guerrilla leader in the separatist movement of the Shan, a distinct ethnic group numbering about six million, living primarily in the Shan State within Burma but also in adjacent regions of China, Laos, and Thailand. He gradually built a powerful drug empire trading opium for weapons, which were used to consolidate his control over large swaths of the remote and impoverished Shan region.

  Now at the height of his power, Khun Sa controlled an estimated 70 percent of the Golden Triangle heroin trade, which enabled him to finance an army of tens of thousands of well-armed soldiers and large-scale heroin laboratories. Almost entirely due to Khun Sa’s smuggling routes, according to our intel, the share of New York street heroin coming from the Golden Triangle had skyrocketed in recent years from 5 percent to 80 percent. His product, an estimated 45 percent of the heroin entering the United States, had been tested at nearly 90 percent purity. The US government posted a $2 million bounty for his capture.

  There have been populist uprisings around the world since the dawn of civilization, of course, but Khun Sa holds the dubious distinction of leading a full-scale army of insurgents funded entirely by the production and sale of opium. The Sicilian Mafia, the Corsicans, and other organized crime groups had used drug proceeds to advance various illegal enterprises, but the Shan United Army was the fir
st to organize its entire funding structure—from grassroots logistics to the purchase of military-grade armaments—entirely on drug dealing.

  After three hours, I had to stop reading our intel reports. I felt like my irises had been burned by a subtropical glare. We were no longer looking at typical midlevel street dealers, or even high-profile international traffickers.

  The Opium Warlord was, at the present time, the most powerful illegal drug merchant on earth. Welcome to the big time, Eddie.

  What Dr. Dragan was asking us to do was completely unprecedented; it required a special joint operation by DEA and ATF, a string of official authorizations going all the way up the chain of command to the Department of Defense.

  I was stunned when Billy Queen explained the logistics.

  “What you think, Eddie? It’s not like we got all these military weapons sitting around in a warehouse in downtown LA.”

  Somehow or other, he said, we’d got access to a military base. Whelan also had managed to commandeer our own aircraft to fly the armaments to Los Angeles.

  “An airplane?”

  “How else we gonna do it? We can’t drive all that explosives and shit across the country.”

  Within a few weeks Whelan, through his bureaucratic alchemy, obtained an astonishing cache of weapons. No federal law enforcement agency—DEA, ATF, or even FBI—could pull something off like this in today’s world. We had a whole warehouse full of C-4 explosives, M60s, general-purpose machine guns, Hawk missiles, LAW rockets, even man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS). When I entered the warehouse, I stood there in disbelief: wooden cartons stacked upon wooden cartons—LAW rockets? Surface-to-air missiles? How the hell had we got our hands on these things?

  We even had the missile guidance systems—in fact, John explained, the Department of Defense was more reticent about us taking those guidance systems than the actual missiles. Guidance systems are compartmentalized independent components, which can lock in precisely on specific targets. All of the missiles and rockets to be used in our sting had been rendered inert as a precaution. Of course, we were never going to let Dragan take possession of the weapons cache.