I knew that line wasn’t going to kill our deal, but I felt confident enough by now to gauge his reaction.
His gaze turned to ice. He stared at me like he was going to jab his fork between my eyes.
“I’ve never, ever had my parents involved with anything I’m doing,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’s just my brothers and myself. Not my father. Don’t ever forget it.”
Classic familial loyalty among Arabs. He would never implicate the beloved family patriarch, Mohammad.
I backed off. I hadn’t blown my cover, but I couldn’t speed up the wooing. I could see right then that Kayed was never going to implicate his father in a criminal conspiracy. That avenue of pursuit was immediately shut down.
I handed him five grand cash that night.
Again, it’s almost like when you’re dating a woman. If she gets offended—and Kayed was deeply offended by my remark—you have to do something sweet right away to make it right. You have to do something to take the sting away.
Not the memory. The memory will stay with her forever. Just the immediate sting. So I reached into my suit pocket and gave Kayed five grand.
He nodded. Nothing was sweeter to Kayed than cash. The five grand took the sting right away.
That was the first down payment on our deal, but I still had to give him the other $35,000 before we could proceed any further.
• • •
Two weeks later, I arranged to deliver the remaining $35,000. I set the meet for Monterey Park, the exact same location where George Montoya and Paul Seema had first picked up the bad guys who murdered them. We needed this interaction to be done under strict surveillance. It was a major meet, and practically the entire Group Four team was working it: Nadine Takeshta, Ralph Partridge, José Martinez, Brian Lee, John Whelan, and Jeannette Ferro.
My boss Rogelio Guevara was initially disturbed about my choice of the park.
“Ed, why are you bringing us back here? Why bring us here of all places?”
“Rogelio, this is serious business. This is a dangerous player. This is exactly the place to do it.”
“Don’t you know how much hurt there is here in Monterey Park?”
Rogelio wasn’t going to argue with me about it; he trusted my judgment enough at this point. In fact, he was going to be my right-hand man, working as a second undercover, at the handoff.
As we waited for Kayed to show up, I explained to Rogelio that I’d thought long and hard, that I’d purposely chosen Monterey Park, specifically because I wanted the team to be reminded of the hurt; I wanted everyone to feel the presence of George and Paul, wanted everyone to feel the weight of our brothers who’d paid the ultimate price. I specifically wanted that sense of import, for them to take the danger of Kayed seriously.
“I had a long talk with José about it,” I said.
“And?”
“José said he’s fine with it. José said, ‘Come on, let’s bag this motherfucker.’”
And if José Martinez, who’d been shot and nearly killed right there, was okay working surveillance in Monterey Park, how could anyone else raise objections?
Kayed arrived, and we met in a quiet section of the park—no passersby or nosy eyes. Just Rogelio standing about five feet away from me. I made no explanation at all for his presence.
“Here you go,” I said.
I had the money in a small satchel. The cash was crisp—bank bricks of hundred-dollar bills that still had the US Treasury money bands on them. Criminals always love to see those clean paper bands; it reassures them that the money isn’t counterfeit.
Kayed accepted the $35,000, slipped it into his own small bag.
I wanted the deal to go through, but I also had to give him a bit of a scare. He needed to see that I wasn’t a pussy.
“Kayed, remember: I’ve been to your house. So I’ll know where to find you if we need to discuss matters, right?”
Now Rogelio stepped forward with his utterly menacing appearance. That dark scar down the side of his face. That damaged right eye. With his fierce stare, he looked and sounded the part of a feared Mexican cartel henchman. His appearance was so hard that he could afford to speak very softly:
“You understand what he’s saying, amigo?”
Kayed nodded. The logical assumption was that I was contracting out some of my “dirty work” to one of the Mexican cartels. Tina, my “girl,” was Hispanic, too, and would occasionally speak in Spanish on the phone in front of Kayed. You have to put all these subtle, unexplained threads in their minds.
When you’re undercover, the perception that you’re capable of posing a risk is absolutely essential. But we parted on great terms; Kayed and I warmly shook hands, and I had total confidence the deal would proceed.
We’d patiently done the wooing phase, and sold the undercover, and now successfully added a layer of menace by putting the thought that I was closely connected to Mexican killers in Kayed’s mind.
• • •
Then out of the blue I received a call from my friend Artie Scalzo, the DEA group supervisor in San Diego. Turned out that one of Artie’s informants was a high-ranking member of the Berro organization named Safur.
Safur had called Artie to check me out. Classic Arab underworld behavior: playing both sides against the middle. “Eddie, my stool says Kayed’s putting together a ten-kilogram deal, and he wants to make sure this guy Eddie is who he says he is.”
Artie didn’t sound overly concerned, but he was cautious.
“How much does he know?” I asked.
“A lot. He’s dropping all these details, about this wholesaler named Eddie, his girl Tina, and this red Corvette that they drive. He just kept asking me, ‘Is he the real deal?’”
“How’d you play it?”
“I told him you’re definitely the real deal. ‘Eddie McKenzie? Hell, yeah. He’s a top wholesale heroin guy and a money-launderer connected to some heavy people out of Vegas.’”
“Did he buy it?”
“I think so. But if Kayed’s got this guy calling me, better believe they’re doing background checks on you. Be careful, man.”
“I will.”
I didn’t go home anymore. For all I knew, Kayed had hired private eyes to tail me night and day. I started sleeping in the Corvette. I couldn’t take the chance that I’d lead them to my aunt’s house. But I couldn’t keep ducking and dodging for too long. If Kayed’s people were watching me closely enough, we had to come up with an alternate plan.
We figured the best thing for me to do was to get out of town, hide out for however many weeks it would take for the ten kilograms to get from Lebanon to Los Angeles.
It was Jimmy Soiles who suggested I come over to Paris.
Still relatively young, Jimmy already had a semilegendary rep in federal law enforcement. That reputation was to grow exponentially in the next few decades. By 2007, Jimmy had gained international fame as the agent who caught and arrested Monzer al-Kassar, the Syrian-born arms dealer and one of the masterminds of the Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985, during which Leon Klinghoffer, a retired Jewish-American, had been thrown mercilessly overboard to drown—one of the first acts of radical Islamist terror directed against US citizens.
• • •
By going abroad—though I was too stressed-out to ruminate much about it at the time—I was stepping into a history that predated me, that predated the existence of the DEA.
Back in the days of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger had been appointed its first commissioner by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. Unlike the more domestic-based branches of federal law enforcement, the main focus of the FBN was fighting opium and heroin smuggling. Anslinger realized it wasn’t enough to make seizures after the dope got into American ports and on the streets of our cities. So over time the FBN established several offices overseas in France, Ita
ly, Turkey, Lebanon, Thailand, and other hot spots of international narcotics smuggling. These agents cooperated with local drug enforcement agencies in gathering intelligence on smugglers and also made undercover busts locally.
The modern DEA inherited—and then greatly expanded—the original global interdiction strategy of the FBN.
As soon as I landed at de Gaulle, I was surprised by who picked me up at the airport: Philip the Armenian. I didn’t see Jimmy or anyone else from the DEA or the US Embassy. Jimmy was prudently waiting outside in the car. This was an important safeguard, because if anyone was watching us and saw a law enforcement agent picking me up, my cover was blown forever.
That’s the low-key style that DEA rolled overseas. Not to knock the FBI, but I’ll be honest: The FBI would have had a half dozen surveillance agents swarming all over the airport with dark shades, khaki cargo pants, and walkie-talkies.
Not us. The only guy there to meet me at the airport was Philip the Armenian. Outside in the car, I warmly greeted Jimmy. Six-foot-four, heavy Boston brogue—he was about to give me my tutorial on how to be an international undercover player:
“Are you ready to learn, son?”
“Yeah, Jimmy, you bet I am. That’s why I’m here. I’ll go anywhere you want.”
“You ain’t gonna sleep tonight. I’ll see you in a couple of days. Go with him.”
We had to keep it low-key, couldn’t be open about the fact we were DEA.
“The Frogs”—that was how Jimmy referred to our French police counterparts—“always have an eye on me.”
But with Philip the Armenian—a confidential informant rather than a US federal agent—I could ride along under the radar.
For eighteen hours straight, the Armenian took me around Paris.
We must have hit seven or eight different spots that first night. He took me to see all of Paris’s drug underworld heavyweights. The Corsicans, the Sicilians, the Romanians, the Persians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Algerians—all these different hangouts and bars for the elite criminals of Paris. All the nightspots where dope dealers—both wholesalers and retailers—hung out.
“Don’t be obvious. Don’t make eye contact. I’m not going to be pointing. You’re going to have to listen,” he said.
From Left Bank to Right Bank. From Montparnasse to Montmartre. We rolled in taxis all over the city. He’d talk in a half-whisper at every bar. And at every bar the Armenian seemed to have a bottle of a top-shelf Scotch or vodka—there were often reserved bottles on the wall, with your name stickered on the label. He told me he had to pay a few thousand francs to have his special private bottle on reserve at all times.
From an agent’s point of view—in terms of pure bureaucracy—this was, of course, taboo. Running around a foreign capital with an informant, writing up no reports, no backup, and no surveillance agents. Back then, as a wet-behind-the-ears GS-9—damn, I could have been barbecued. No questions, no rebuttals:
Bye-bye, Eddie! Hope you find another job!
But I wanted to work the case, wanted to work the streets, so bad. I didn’t break any laws; this was just the bureaucratic bullshit protocol of the DEA.
Philip, always whispering, super casual, never making eye contact, was giving me a tutorial in the well-heeled underworld of Paris.
This is how you handle Pakistanis. This is how you handle Lebanese. This is how you handle Corsicans.
I was twenty-seven, sure, but I might as well have been a seventeen-year-old in this world of global drug players. I knew my way around Los Angeles and Honolulu, but I didn’t know anything about Europe. In my dank, poorly heated hotel room, I kept muttering under my breath:
“This is Paris?”
I was in a very expensive hotel on one of the world’s great shopping boulevards, but my bed was off-kilter and squeaked, I could barely fit my ass into the bathroom, and when I did, there was barely any water pressure. A trickle of hot water required twenty minutes of prayer. I was in a rush to meet the Armenian and found myself rinsing off in a lukewarm tub. I was paying close to $500 a night and was living in a place that looked as if it had been furnished in the days of Robespierre.
After the sleepless frenzy of my first forays into the Parisian drug underworld, Jimmy told me to take it easy for a day or two. So the Armenian and I became tourists: went to the Louvre and Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower; took a nighttime boat cruise on the Seine. Everywhere we went, the Armenian knew somebody—he had an old friend, it seemed to me, everywhere in Paris.
Finally, on the fourth day, Jimmy called me in.
The cab rumbled over bumpy side streets until we got to the US Embassy at 2 Avenue Gabriel. The embassy in Paris was the United States’ first-ever diplomatic mission, dating back to our earliest envoys like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The current building was constructed relatively recently by French standards, in 1931, with an elaborate facade that blends in with the other, much older buildings on the Place de la Concorde. It’s where the DEA kept its French office; Jimmy had a desk and a window with a view of the Fontaine des Fleuves.
Behind the well-secured walls of that facade, I met directly with Jimmy’s boss, the country attaché, a crusty old-time New York agent who had worked the Corsican mobsters in the French Connection case.
This guy was a desk boss, but he was also a badass. I walked into his office, saw the view of traffic circling down below in the Place de la Concorde.
He barely looked up at me.
The first words out of his mouth were:
“Are you one of these LA fags coming to my city thinking they know shit?”
“I’m LA, sir, but, uh, I’m no fag.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
He went back to looking at his papers for an uncomfortably long time.
“I understand you’re into Kayed Berro,” he said finally.
“Yes, I am, sir.”
He looked up, glanced at me, nodded at Jimmy.
“Look, just do everything Soiles tells you, and you’ll walk outta this town fine. You’ll knock it down, and I won’t have to call Mr. Zienter and Mr. Holm and tell ’em you’re an asshole.”
John Zienter and Michael Holm were my bosses in the LA Division, the special agent in charge (SAC) and assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) respectively.
“Yes, sir.”
That was the end of the conversation.
My ears were burning.
“Asshole” was the last word he ever said to me.
I got the hell out of his office to avoid getting another barrage of abuse.
Jimmy laughed the whole way down the hallway.
• • •
Now we were off on our own. Without the Armenian as my chaperone, Jimmy and I started prowling Paris. Very quickly, though, we hit a hitch.
The Berro organization had tentacles reaching throughout Europe—some expat Lebanese in Paris were apparently now on to my presence in the city. I called Kayed in LA a few times to tell him I was traveling abroad for a few weeks. But Jimmy felt it wasn’t prudent for me to stay in Paris any longer.
“Eddie, no choice—you’ve gotta get outta sight.”
“Where would I go, Jimmy?”
“We can get you down to Cairo. Stay out of sight until they’ve made the ten-kilo delivery to LA.”
• • •
Jimmy arranged for me to get down to Cairo. En route, I stopped off in Cyprus, settled into the capital city of Nicosia.
Our country attaché, Mike Hurley, was a huge guy—six-foot-four, 250 pounds—and had responsibility for that whole region. His assistant, Fred Ganem, was of Lebanese descent. Hurley said to me:
“Look, Ed, while you’re here, you might as well help us with an ongoing investigation.”
Hurley’s guys had an informant who specialized in hash and weed, and there was a
freighter due to pass through the Suez Canal. We assembled the intel, launched a crew of Cypriot police, who boarded the freighter and made a hash seizure of 1.5 tons.
As a reward, Hurley took me to a beach in Cyprus, Ayia Napa, where all these Greek men ogle and attempt to seduce gorgeous Scandinavian women. First time I’d ever been to a topless beach. I went snorkeling. While diving, I was surprised to see that there were no fish—the Cypriots had overfished the entire area. They had used dynamite in the waters and harvested all the fish.
I went down deep. As I surfaced, I saw two women completely naked. Crystal clear blue Mediterranean water. Nude diving girls—perfect, lithe bodies: They seemed like mermaids.
I came up, walked up the beach, and saw all the curly-haired Greeks trying to sweet-talk Swedish and Norwegian women. As I came up the hot sand, I also saw Mike Hurley’s wife sitting there completely topless. I averted my eyes, blushing with embarrassment.
• • •
Shortly thereafter we did briefings with the Cypriot cops; the Berros had been using Cyprus as a way station for their heroin transportation. For the next month an intense crash course in Mediterranean politics and the underworld ensued; I met informants, Cypriot cops, and my DEA bosses—constantly absorbing, nodding, making notes.
They briefed me all about the long-standing pipeline of drugs and counterfeit currency between Lebanon and Cyprus. Cyprus doesn’t produce the heroin, hashish, or the counterfeit “supernotes”—the island is merely a way station.
Maybe the most important lesson of that stay in Cyprus was learning about the new age of counterfeiting: the supernote, an undetectable counterfeit US hundred-dollar bill produced in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Learning about the advent of the supernote was a valuable education for my next big investigation back in Los Angeles.*
Trafficking in that upper echelon of counterfeit currency, deeply intertwined with narco-terrorism, is the financial equivalent of the worst heroin dealers. Big-time counterfeiters hold real power: If they so choose, if they’re not just out for personal financial gain, they can act as economic terrorists, potentially disrupting and defaulting a small nation’s treasury with an influx of supernotes.
The Dark Art Page 6