The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  “He’s got a student visa and everything.”

  I told Jimmy about the gumshoe detective work I’d done so far.

  “I pulled the luds and tolls—you can’t believe the fucking communications and logistics operations he’s running out of his place in Huntington Beach.”

  At the time it was impossible to make direct calls between Pakistan and Lebanon; by scrutinizing Kayed’s phone records, I saw how he had made himself the daily communications hub required to run a massive international drug-trafficking organization. Every night, Kayed would conduct conference calls, using various long-distance lines to patch in the Reef Star mastermind Muhammad Khan in Pakistan, Kayed’s father in Israel, and his brother Ali Berro, the operational chief of their organization, who was living in hiding somewhere in Egypt.

  All the other players were essentially untouchable to me, but not Kayed Berro. Kayed was a thirty-minute drive away from Garden Grove on the 405 freeway.

  “Look, Jimmy. I need an introduction.”

  There was a long pause and a squelch on the line to the Paris office. Jimmy laughed. Then he sighed.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve got the guy for you. He’s my best stool. The Armenian.”

  “The Armenian?”

  “Philip the Armenian. I might be able to talk him into making the intro.”

  • • •

  Now Philip the Armenian, one of Jimmy’s most valued informants in Paris, began his star turn. He’d already helped Jimmy make some substantial cases in the Middle East and Europe. A former heroin dealer based in Lebanon, Philip had been jammed up, flipped, and relocated to Paris. He was Armenian by birth, but he was a child of the world—had spent time throughout the Middle East, in Europe and the United States, all over the globe.

  Philip was not a garden-variety informant. The Armenian was a player. Nobody I’d then met—and nobody I’ve met since—had the connections, savvy, and swagger of this guy. The Armenian was highly educated, knew seven languages—all of them like a native-born speaker.

  Within a few hours, Jimmy got me on the phone with the Armenian. I didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Can you get me a face-to-face with Kayed Berro?”

  “The Berros,” he said. “Sure, I know the family well. I know the father the best. But I’ve also dealt with all his sons.”

  • • •

  Jimmy made it happen; by the end of the week, Philip the Armenian was on a flight over from Paris. I scooped him up at LAX.

  He was jowly-cheeked, pale complexion, late thirties, well dressed, thick black hair neatly swept back. My Corvette listed when he got in the passenger seat. He was only average in height, but very heavy in stature.

  He had clearly never pushed away a plate of baba ghanoush in his life.

  We went to a hotel in Orange County, only a ten-minute drive from Kayed’s house, mulling over where we could put together a first meet.

  In any undercover operation, the first meet is crucial. It lays down the tenor and tone for all future meets. You have to ask yourself: Where would you want to go if you were the crook? Where would you feel most at ease? At all costs, you want to avoid the obvious places.

  Where do criminals typically hang out? They like expensive restaurants. They go to fancy bars. Criminals hang out all night with top-shelf escorts and hookers. The guys at this level want to be impressed. They want to see Rolexes and private King Air jets.

  The Armenian and I spent hours in conversation in the hotel, trying to figure out the best way to disarm Kayed.

  “Edward, I won’t lie to you,” Philip said—always a questionable conversational gambit from an informant. “This isn’t going to be easy. How to make Kayed think that you’re really a wholesale heroin dealer and a good friend of mine . . . Yet he’s never even heard of you . . . Still, you’re big enough that you can run kilogram loads by truck and car from Los Angeles to—”

  “Las Vegas,” I said.

  The Armenian smiled wryly.

  “Las Vegas?”

  “Yes. I’m from Las Vegas.”

  There’s something magical about Las Vegas.

  Every time I’ve used Las Vegas as a hub, as the location for my undercover backstory—my fictitious illegal activities—criminals fall in love. Something hypnotic about those three Spanish syllables meaning “The Meadows”—the way they roll sensuously off your tongue . . .

  The mere mental image of that wide-open man-made desert wonderland. I’m from Las Vegas. It’s like a neon-colored key that opens up all the greed and larceny in criminals’ hearts.

  The Armenian apparently didn’t like the look of cockiness in my eyes.

  “Let me assure you, Edward,” Philip said, “Kayed is smarter than you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Kayed is smarter than anyone around him.”

  “Is Kayed smarter than you, Philip?”

  “No.” The Armenian smiled again.

  “Then we should be fine,” I said. “Stay focused. Where would he want to go on a free weekend?”

  There was complete silence in the bare hotel room. The ice machine halfway down the hall let out a rumbling clatter.

  What the Armenian said next had me hooting with laughter.

  “Disneyland!” he blurted out.

  For a second, I thought he might be suffering from Tourette’s.

  “What the fuck did you say? Disneyland?”

  “Disneyland. We meet at the parking lot of Disneyland.”

  “What are you talking about? I can’t set up a surveillance operation at Disneyland on such short notice.”

  “Listen to me carefully. This is perfect. We take him to Disneyland. He’ll feel completely secure. That’s where I introduce you. No cops go to Disneyland—at least not to work on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Name me one. I’ve been there many times. There’s never cops working there. Only those foolish-looking guards.”

  “Those aren’t even cops actually. They’re paid security.”

  “Precisely.”

  I let the Armenian’s idea sink in for a while. He was arrogant as hell, but maybe not completely crazy.

  “So then,” he said loudly, slapping his hand on the cheap coffee table with finality, “we’re agreed. No cops would plan a meeting at Disneyland.”

  “Yeah. We’re agreed.”

  • • •

  I brought no backup. Disneyland turned into another favorite stage for one of my increasingly common solo operations. I set the whole thing up on my own. Just me and the Armenian. I had no idea if the scheme had a chance of working, so I didn’t even tell my boss Rogelio. Didn’t tell my partner, José. Wouldn’t have mattered if I did. No one in Group Four had any interest in giving up Sunday afternoons to do a boring-ass surveillance detail in the Magic Kingdom of Anaheim.

  Nobody in Group Four shared my obsession for Kayed Berro—they all thought it would be too hard a case to make stick. The chances of a payoff were far too remote. They wanted me to focus my obsessiveness on our typical LA cases: Colombians and Mexicans. But to me those were routine singles. They weren’t grand slams. Those types of cases— Well, you could hit those all day long.

  My undercover identity was well honed now. Despite the Armenian’s skepticism, I knew I could match Kayed Berro’s smarts and sophistication, with a dose of my own street swagger. I had long hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I drove that beautiful candy-red Corvette. The car had been seized from a major heroin trafficker. Driving it at high speeds on the freeway made me feel like a major trafficker.

  I looked, felt, and believed myself to be a wholesale heroin dealer and money-launderer. That’s one of the unbending rules of undercover: Never try to portray yourself as someone you’re not comfortable playing. It never works. You slip up.

  I was an LA whol
esaler and money-transporter working out of Vegas. The cherry on the cake was that I had a fine Latina-American girlfriend named Tina—she was actually another DEA special agent. Another key to your persona as a drug dealer. You have to have the fast car, flashy jewelry, and the most gorgeous girl on your arm all the time.

  • • •

  I drove out to Orange County, right near the Angels’ stadium, and parked my Corvette. I sat there for a while and got my mental state ready. Out in front of Disneyland I met the three of them: the Armenian, some friend/bodyguard named Marco, and Kayed Berro.

  The first thing I noticed: Every one of these three guys was so fat he could barely get through the turnstiles. Kayed was about my height, maybe an inch shorter, about five-seven, but he weighed a good 250 pounds.

  “Mar’ haba, keefak.”

  Those were the first words I heard out of Kayed Berro’s mouth. It’s the traditional warm Lebanese-Arabic hello.

  I saw immediately the sophistication and intellect at work behind his coal-black eyes. The Armenian was right. This was no ordinary drug trafficker.

  They paid for everything, of course. All we did was hang out in the park, strolling, chatting, and eating junk food. We walked around, didn’t go on any rides—their asses couldn’t fit on any rides. We didn’t talk much business at all—except when I casually mentioned to Kayed that his brother Ali had got mixed up in something. It was an oblique reference to the Reef Star case; Kayed simply shrugged noncommittally.

  Everything was in code. I didn’t push things. When you’re dealing with Arabs or Asians—frankly anyone except impatient Americans—you have to talk to them for thirty minutes or an hour about their families, their personal lives. It’s part of the etiquette. It’s almost sexual. There has to be that sense of courtship, of wooing, long before you even get to foreplay.

  • • •

  The smarter and cagier the crook, the more intense the courtship. All told, I would end up meeting with Kayed more than fifteen times before we ever moved forward on the money. That’s just the way things work. That’s especially the way Arabs function. We had to become friends.

  Kayed was truly a Phoenician—a descendant of the Lebanese sailors who worshipped the god Baal and who developed the first written language. In the months ahead, as I wooed him, as we became closer, as he let down his guard, that was my name for him. I used to call him “my favorite Phoenician.”

  He was always exquisitely groomed and dressed. I never saw him in anything other than crisply pressed slacks, polished black leather shoes, and a nice, well-tailored collared shirt.

  He could sit down with businessmen in Silicon Valley or Beverly Hills; he had a solid middle-class Orange County lifestyle. He was finishing up his master’s degree while at the same time masterminding the financing and the telecommunications of major international heroin deals.

  I’ve thought about it a lot in the intervening years. What I admired about him, I suppose, is that I saw a lot of me in him.

  I could hang out with bottom-feeders, buy dope in grungy motel rooms, and exploit their knowledge while moving up the food chain toward the bosses and kingpins, climbing slowly up the ladder of power. But I also did have a bit of the “academician” in me. Later in my career, I’d find myself doing one-on-one briefings with US congressmen, senators, the attorney general—even once gave a briefing face-to-face with the president of the United States.

  Kayed could operate in any environment. He could move anywhere in the drug world, could change gears back to legitimacy, without the high-performance sports car lurching. Kayed had trusted connections everywhere: Pakistan, Lebanon; most of the Mediterranean and the Middle East; California and New York. He was smooth. He didn’t have an enterprise that he celebrated; he had an enterprise he kept under the cloak.

  It amazed me how he was juggling this international drug enterprise while still writing his master’s thesis in the engineering department at USC. There were many days when I sat in my car down the block from his house, then carefully tailed him to the USC campus—it astonished me the long hours he spent in the computer sciences and engineering library. He was a Lebanese Renaissance man. He spoke flawless English, and his Arabic was about as beautiful as any Arabic I’ve ever heard.

  Kayed taught me more about Middle Eastern engagement than any expert at the DEA academy. We even chatted once or twice about his challenges in defending a graduate thesis. But he could also get down to the most abject levels—deal with uneducated street criminals—without setting off any alarms. That was a remarkable talent.

  None of the other drug dealers I’d met to that point could slide into those diverse settings so smoothly. Some would attempt it, but they’d always bring some of their other self with them. That other self would invariably trip them up. Not Kayed. He was more than slick, more than clever; he was truly a chameleon. In another life, he would have made a great undercover.

  • • •

  Took a few weeks to get the invite, but I started coming by his house. My “girlfriend” Tina gradually became friendly with his wife. Kayed’s wife was a well-spoken, college-educated Lebanese woman. I soon learned that she loved opera. She played opera CDs all the time in their house.

  I don’t know the first thing about opera, but I did some calling around. I managed to purchase excellent seats, had them sent to her—some big new production at the opera house in LA. The funds came out of my pocket—nobody in the office even knew about it. Things were different back in those days; I’d probably be sternly reprimanded as some kind of cowboy undercover if I were still on the job today.

  But how else could it be done? You want to get a PhD in global drug trafficking? There is no fucking study guide. There are no shortcuts. It’s quite simple: Spend more time with traffickers and informants than you do with your friends.

  One warm March evening, we went to an exquisite Lebanese restaurant in Anaheim Hills. That night, I was wearing a Kel transmitter, and I had DEA guys from Group Four outside on surveillance. I spent about $400 that Friday night on the meal while my friends were outside eating greasy In-N-Out hamburgers.

  After all that wooing, all that careful prep work, I sensed it was now time. While we were enjoying that expensive Lebanese meal of roasted lamb and couscous, we settled on the terms of the deal. Ten kilograms. Ten “Rolexes,” we called them, using Kayed’s favored code. That’s where we decided on the amount I’d pay for the ten kilograms and the $40,000 I’d have to front for his travel and logistical expenses.

  • • •

  Back then, cops—certainly rank-and-file local guys—didn’t front big money. That’s what started to differentiate the DEA from local police forces, even from the FBI and ATF—it took some red tape, but I could get authorization to front amounts as high as $50,000 or $100,000 to criminals. With Lebanese and other Arabs—just as I would later learn with Chinese traffickers—you almost always have to lay some serious cheese on the table.

  Kayed Berro agreed to sell me the ten kilos of 95-percent-pure heroin at $25,000 per key—great wholesale price at that time.

  The economics work like this. One kilogram of 95-percent-pure Lebanese can be cut into sixteen kilos of 6 percent purity and still maintain its efficacy. That means that sixteen times the diacetylmorphine hydrochloride can be cut—adulterated—and still induce the desired narcotic effect on the user.

  The street language for the adulteration is “stepping” on it—cutting the heroin with bulking agents like powdered lactose and vitamin B; mannitol, an artificial sweetener used by diabetics; Procaine, a topical dental anesthetic; and especially various baby laxatives. Heroin is a powerful analgesic, and users tend to become constipated. Not only does the baby laxative help with the constipation, it looks like and has the consistency of refined heroin.

  One half-gram packet is a typical street-user quantity. By that time, the 95-percent-pure Lebanese heroin from the Bekaa Va
lley has been adulterated down to 5 to 7 percent street-sale packets.

  For those ten kilos of Kayed’s heroin, I was going to outlay $250,000. Obviously I wasn’t really going to step on it—I was a wholesale dealer—but by the terms of our deal, my $250,000 investment would have a potential street retail value of $2.5 million. More than a couple million in profit on one deal—any wonder why guys risk going to prison for the rest of their lives?

  But here’s the rub: Retail sales are very risky. A typical retail heroin boss would have, say, thirty dealers out there selling glassine bags. Thirty guys who are constantly risking arrest for felony-weight sale of H. You lose the product, there’s always the chance one or more of those thirty becomes a loose cannon, gets flipped by the feds, turning informant.

  That’s why all the top-echelon organized crime groups will not mess with retail. They deal in kilograms—sometimes tons—and walk away. They could give a shit what happens to the product on the street. That full retail value—even that possible tenfold profit—carries too much risk. The street is not their environment anyway; that’s not their jungle.

  Make no mistake—there have been some highly successful retail heroin dealers, of course, like Frank Lucas of American Gangster fame and his rival Nicky Barnes, the self-styled “Mr. Untouchable” smack king of Harlem. But I always said that the distinction between a retail and wholesale doper is the difference between a guy who sells used Chevrolets and a Bentley dealer.

  All Kayed wanted from me was $40,000 cash—covering his travel expenses—and he was to have ten kilograms of pure Lebanese heroin brought into LA. I’d assume the transportation risk overland to my people in Las Vegas.

  I felt by now that there’d been sufficient foreplay. I’d put in my time, and I could push the envelope with Kayed. I wanted to have him on tape admitting to being the guy who facilitated the movement of the money and ran the logistics from America in those massive Middle Eastern heroin deals like the Reef Star.

  “Listen,” I said, casually sipping my red wine, “I understand that your dad and brother got jammed up over there in Egypt with a boatload of shit.”