The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  As the new kid on the team, one of my jobs was to xerox all the serial numbers of the cash we were bringing as part of the flash. Any time you’re doing a deal for drugs, weapons, or any kind of contraband, all the money is categorized as OGF—official government funds—and must be accounted for with serial number representation.

  Technically, it’s against the law to photocopy US currency, but we would xerox all the bills, and then we’d transfer all the data to the 6-A. The official DEA report on an ongoing investigation is known as a six, and the second page (6-A) is known as the Money List. I always called it the Cheese List. “Cheese” was the latest street slang among LA dealers for cash.

  Dragan was going to give us seventy units of heroin, but he didn’t want a dime in cash; he simply he wanted our heavy-duty armaments. So I documented all the serial numbers and specs of the weapons on the Cheese List.

  When it came time for the meet, Billy and I were the ones tasked with picking up the “good doctor.”

  Billy, Mike Dawkins, and I were playing the roles of arms dealers. We didn’t have to sell ourselves; our flash spoke for itself: How else could we have got our hands on surface-to-air missiles?

  Billy Queen always had a heavy undercover presence. Billy had the heavy weapons on him, too. I was just carrying my .38 snub-nose. Something small and concealable. Everybody else on the team carried cannons. I was a good enough shot that as long as I could see you, I could pop you in the head. That was always my philosophy: If you’re a good enough shot from a distance, you don’t have to carry anything heavy. Billy was a great shot, too, but he was known for his Colt .45 and shotguns. Honestly, Billy carried whatever the hell he wanted. By comparison, I was a Boy Scout. I kept quiet, with my little .38 tucked in the front of my pants, right against the hip bone.

  I never felt the need to carry anything heavy. When I got to the DEA, I was proficient with both handguns and rifles from my time in the Marines. In the DEA we qualify regularly with a handgun, shotgun, assault rifle, and submachine gun. Since my Marine Corps days I’ve been known as a good marksman, but only with smaller guns. My friends used to jokingly call me Eddie Pistolero. In my academy class, I finished number one in all the firearms tests, and graduated with an average of 99 percent with all four weapons.

  The handgun testing was particularly interesting: There’s a rich history and mystique. If you graduate with an aggregate score of 95 percent on the different qualifications in the seventeen-week training, then you are eligible to attempt—three occasions, on the same day—to fire upon a paper silhouette target that is the size of a slender man, at distances of 50 yards, 25 yards, 15 yards, 10 yards, 5 yards, then back to 10 yards.

  You fire exactly fifty rounds each time; each of the distance stages is timed—alternating from standing to prone positions, between positions on top of a barricade and on its right and left sides. If all fifty rounds strike within the outline of the silhouette target, then you are inducted into a select fraternity known as the Possible Club.

  The Possible Club—essentially a Hall of Fame of federal agent marksmen—dates back to the 1930s, when an FBI firearms instructor named Bill Nitschke devised a target testing system based on the silhouette of an actual special agent.*

  • • •

  When we went to pick up the “good doctor,” all of us UCs were professionally dressed—befitting men capable of trafficking in military armaments. We weren’t street dealers; we were international arms merchants.

  I had on that same dark-blue business suit—my only good suit at the time; Dawkins looked similar, but with a suit in charcoal gray. All of us had on ties, except Billy Queen. Billy wore a sports jacket, but with jeans.

  We pulled up in our undercover car: a new blue Firebird. I was the driver, Dawkins next to me. Dragan stepped outside; he was wearing the most gorgeous hand-tailored suit, with Italian loafers, striped silk tie. The doctor got into the backseat next to Billy.

  His demeanor remained ice-cold; he didn’t say shit. Didn’t so much as nod. And he damn sure didn’t smile. I don’t think he was a white supremacist, but to me, he had an almost neo-Nazi appearance; he held your gaze for too long, and those blue eyes were chilling. I’ve learned with guys who look like that, guys who think they’re badasses, you don’t keep your distance from them. You move in closer.

  When they think they’re bad, make sure they feel you.

  Dragan had assembled several millions of dollars in cash, as well as some of the purest smack from the Golden Triangle, to trade for those weapons. The Shan United Army, untouchable in their dense forest stronghold in Burma, were waiting for this arms shipment.

  Billy walked in first, and I followed. Then Dr. Dragan glanced around inside the warehouse.

  Just for a second, I thought I saw Dr. Dragan smiling. He could not believe we had all these crates full of brand-new Hawk missiles, LAW rockets, M60 machine guns. This wasn’t some routine cache you could pick up easily on the black market. He was nodding, staring, and spoke for the first time.

  “I’m impressed,” he said.

  I was, too. To my knowledge, no one in the history of US law enforcement had ever put together an armaments flash like we had that day in the warehouse.

  • • •

  With the weapons flash complete, we made plans to consummate the deal. Dr. Dragan, of course, didn’t have a million dollars in cash or seventy kilos of heroin on him personally.

  But then the transaction went suddenly, inexplicably, off the rails.

  The next day—right after we’d done the flash—Dragan showed some surprising savvy. He was sharp enough to drive downtown, and he did exactly what we would have done: He put himself inside our minds.

  He set up his own surveillance. Posted up in front of the World Trade Center on South Figueroa Street. We’d all been sitting in this local restaurant: Billy Queen, John Whelan, couple of other guys from Group Four. When we finished lunch and were leaving the restaurant, I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a tall blond guy crossing the footbridge over South Figueroa Street, connecting the Bonaventure Hotel to the World Trade Center. I saw the clean military brush cut and those cobalt-blue eyes.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Guy looks just like Dragan.”

  And those bright wolflike blue eyes locked, just for a moment, on mine.

  “I’ll be damned,” Billy said. “It is fuckin’ Dragan.”

  He’d set up outside by the Bonaventure, scoping out a restaurant where he thought a bunch of agents in the ATF and DEA would go to lunch. No doubt about it: He was looking for me and Billy Queen and Mike Dawkins.

  And from that moment when our eyes locked—that mere millisecond—we were burned.

  Dr. Dragan disappeared.

  The unprecedented arms-for-heroin deal was never consummated.

  Within days, Dragan was lost to us—he was no longer in California, had vanished somewhere in the jungles of Burma or northern Thailand. We had all these expensive missiles, MANPADS, explosives, M60s, to give straight back to the military.

  Months later, a few of our Southeast Asia–based DEA guys—along with two spooks—made entry into his empty room in Hong Kong. They discovered a letter Dr. Dragan had written to the vice president of the United States, volunteering his services as a “special liaison” to the insurgent forces within Burma. Obviously, the letter was never mailed to the White House.

  The fact that we’d come so close to consummating a major arms-for-smack deal was a blow for us. Still, even your mistakes make you smarter.

  Dr. Dragan taught me a priceless undercover lesson:

  Never underestimate the bad guy’s ability to think just like you.

  From that point forward, I never ate in any of the restaurants near DEA headquarters. I stayed in the office, brought my lunch in a brown paper bag. I’d take all kinds of different circuitous routes to work, e
ven changed cars from time to time. I operated on the assumption that I might always be under surveillance.

  And I never got burned again. Not once.

  • • •

  I proceeded with my Group Four duties throughout that summer, going undercover to take down several midlevel distributors.

  As an undercover, you’re always on the lookout for the big ones, the long-term cases, but every day or two José Martinez and I would put together a smaller deal—a quick rip, we’d call it—buying a couple of ounces of chiva from a crew of Mexican retailers. You learn something from all those smaller deals, too. It’s like moving from grade school to high school to college to graduate school to getting your PhD.

  Billy Queen used to call me the office sheepdog—tenacious, loyal, sometimes overeager. He was sure I was going to get my ass shot. Within a few weeks in Group Four, I’d developed my own style and reputation. I was always the guy who’d schedule a meet for a Friday or Saturday night. I don’t care if you’re in California, Ohio, Georgia, or New York: No cop wants to work on Friday or Saturday night; they just don’t do it. And criminals all know this.

  But to my way of thinking, this gave me a psychological edge. How better to put the criminal at ease? It became one of my undercover rules: Always schedule your meets for times when cops don’t work. On weekends, cops normally take care of the yard work and home repairs, the kids and long-suffering wife—unhappy because a cop’s life is generally so miserable, underpaid, and thankless.

  I had no family, just my auntie, and she didn’t care whether I came home to sleep in her spare bedroom. I’d schedule all my meets for those Friday and Saturday nights, and right away I’d allay a lot of the traffickers’ suspicions.

  Didn’t make me very popular with the group. Guys had to give up their weekends to work backup and surveillance. It’s mandatory: If your case goes to trial, you need them as corroborating witnesses. And if, God forbid, your case goes bad and the guns come out, you need them to step in and have your back.

  • • •

  Group Four had a special chemistry, one I never saw again in nearly thirty years on the job. We were a “multicultural” group before anyone used that term: We had two Japanese agents, a Chinese guy, a Cambodian guy, a Mexican guy, and me—lily-white Irish boy Eddie from St. Louis.

  Group Four had been forged in the fire; they’d learned a hard lesson—paid the ultimate price with the lives of two good men. Even today, a lot of the Group Four guys are still suffering with guilt and trauma, feeling that they could have done more to save their brothers.

  I believe it’s one of the reasons why, more than a decade later, we were so successful when I was sent over as DEA country attaché in Afghanistan. Rather than coming into the country with a hard-charging military mind-set, I wanted my men to meld into the streets of Kabul as I’d done in LA, mimicking our targets, subtly penetrating their mosques and homes and inner sanctums . . .

  I took all the undercover tradecraft I’d learned in Group Four and transplanted it to Kabul and then the outlying Afghan provinces. I wasn’t looking at that war-torn terrain as foreign soil: To me it was really no different than working the streets of LA with my brothers and sisters in Group Four.

  CHAPTER 2

  MY FAVORITE PHOENICIAN

  How can you say, “I am not unclean, I have not gone after the Baals”? Look at your way in the valley; know what you have done—a restless young camel running here and there . . .

  JEREMIAH 2:23

  My time in the Group Four Heroin Task Force was life-altering in another sense: It turned my outlook global. Barely six months out of the academy, completely green, I got a career-defining opportunity, working the Kayed Berro case.

  The Berro investigation was to become emblematic of the way the Drug Enforcement Administration was changing its outlook and operational methods. From a local undercover assignment out of the Los Angeles Division office, the case quickly evolved into a geopolitical investigation taking me over to France and Cyprus, from Egypt to Israel.

  In the early ’90s, the Berro family may not have had the name recognition of Italian-American gangland clans like Gambino or Genovese, but from a global perspective, they had a more ominous footprint. And as we would see in the years ahead, they were also to emerge as players on the Middle Eastern narco-terrorism scene. From their base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the Berro clan produced some of the purest and most potent heroin on the planet.

  The Bekaa is a fertile valley east of Beirut on the northernmost tip of the Jordan rift. Since Roman times, it’s been a locus of Middle Eastern agriculture. Even today, it remains Lebanon’s most important farming region; hidden among the legal crops, Lebanese traffickers also produce enormous amounts of heroin and hashish.

  Three years earlier, in 1988, while I was still a Marine sergeant serving in Hawaii, the Berro family had been embroiled in the infamous Reef Star incident. The Reef Star was an 878-ton freighter registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

  The mastermind of the deal, the man who put together the consortium of drug traffickers, was a Pakistani heroin kingpin named Muhammad Khan. Khan was widely known and feared, but nobody seemed to have met him—a bit like the Keyser Soze character in The Usual Suspects. His name inspired terror in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. Our DEA intel people never once got a clear photograph of him.

  On July 29, 1988, the Reef Star was making passage through the Suez Canal; neither the Berros nor Muhammad Khan realized that the ship’s captain was an informant working for ANGA, the Anti-Narcotics General Administration—counterpart of the DEA in Egypt. (ANGA, founded in 1898, is regarded as the oldest drug enforcement agency in the world.) When the Reef Star was in the locks of Suez, the Egyptian authorities stopped her, stormed on board, and seized 300 kilograms of heroin, 288 kilograms of processed hashish, and three metric tons of opium.

  It was the biggest drug bust to date in the Middle East. In June 1989, after a fast-tracked and highly publicized trial, a judge in Egypt convicted nineteen defendants of capital crimes in the Reef Star seizure case. Kayed Berro, along with his father and brothers, was sentenced to death in absentia.

  • • •

  When I first got wind that Kayed Berro was living in Southern California, I stood at my desk for minutes in disbelief. The audacity, the sheer balls of it—he wasn’t even living under an assumed name. You’d never have guessed he was walking around under a death sentence, that if he set foot anywhere near Egypt, he’d be hung—but not before undergoing “vigorous interrogation” by Egyptian authorities. Around the University of Southern California campus, Kayed was known as an intense, studious, but enigmatic twenty-eight-year-old finishing up his master’s degree in the electrical engineering department.

  I went to my boss Rogelio with the news. I heard nothing but laughter around the office.

  “The Reef Star!”

  “Are you fuckin’ kidding me, Eddie?”

  Everyone in Group Four thought I was a madman to even attempt to get mixed up with the Berros.

  The Reef Star was far too vast in scope for me to tackle as a lowly GS-9. At that rank, I was essentially a foot soldier working the streets of LA. Nobody wanted to touch the case due to its international complexity. We’d have to attempt to make a historical conspiracy case. That meant we’d have to somehow plug Kayed Berro into the Reef Star seizure of July 1988 using electronic records, or possibly flip someone in his inner circle to give testimony.

  “Nah, that’s not what we’re doing,” I said. “There’s got to be another way.”

  I took the case file to my desk, stared at it for hours; being a pugnacious twenty-seven-year-old, I just sensed—I knew—I could find some way in . . .

  In the middle of a sleepless night down in Garden Grove, I had one of those flashes of insight. I didn’t care if everyone in Group Four thought I was crazy.

  I set out to develop b
oth a historical conspiracy and a contemporaneous case on Kayed Berro—working undercover, trying to get next to Kayed, playing the part of a young up-and-coming drug wholesaler named Eddie McKenzie.

  That’s what makes the DEA a unique federal law enforcement agency. In the FBI everything is split up and delegated: One agent goes undercover, another works the conspiracy case; one agent handles the administrative work, another works all the phone taps, and the case agent coordinates with the US Attorney’s Office, writing the warrants and conspiracy documents. In the DEA—our manpower resources being a fraction of the FBI’s—it’s all you. You’re the one guy—you’re the lone wolf—doing it all.

  I would devise and execute the historical conspiracy case while planning to meet Kayed undercover personally.

  • • •

  The investigation was still mind-boggling in scope. I knew I had to develop a sound case on the one person that I could physically meet—before I could move over to the Middle East to advance the case at the levels I wanted.

  I figured if anyone could help me out it would be my friend Jimmy Soiles, a veteran DEA agent stationed in the US Embassy in Paris.

  “Got something for me, Eddie?” Jimmy said when I reached him.

  “Kayed Berro’s in Orange County.”

  “Traveling?”

  “Jimmy, he lives here with his wife.”

  “He’s living there?”

  “Yes. Got a house, two kids. Full-time grad student. You believe this shit? He’s finishing up a master’s degree at USC.”

  Jimmy went quiet; I know he found it all too hard to believe.

  “Shit. We knew he’d left Lebanon, but we had no idea he was in the US.”