• • •
I snuck out one night—again, completely solo. I decided I’d go to Lebanon on a ferryboat. For federal agents, Lebanon had been declared an off-limits country due to the raging civil war. But I wanted to see firsthand the Berro clan’s homeland.
I went to Tyre, the ancient biblical city; even read the passages about Tyre and the building of the Temple in Jerusalem in my Bible by my night-light.
Now Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and timber of cedars, with masons and carpenters, to build him an house.
And David perceived that the LORD had confirmed him king over Israel, for his kingdom was lifted up on high, because of his people Israel . . .
I already had an affinity for the Bekaa Valley; I’d been studying it so hard. I’d been learning the distinctions between the opium grown in the Golden Crescent versus the Golden Triangle. Now I was doing personal intel: mingling, absorbing the milieu; I never actually entered the Bekaa Valley, just skirted the border of the Bekaa outside Tyre.
I’ve always wanted to personally understand any culture I was investigating. I stayed in a cheap hostel, then took the ferry straight back to Cyprus, told Mike Hurley that I had stayed with a girl in Nicosia the night before. I was scheduled to leave for Egypt to meet with our Egyptian country attaché, Danny Habib.
• • •
After that thirty-day sojourn in Cyprus, I flew to Cairo, stayed in a spare bedroom at the house of Danny Habib. I ended up living in Cairo for about forty-five days. I was there during Ramadan, and I lived like an Arab, didn’t eat a bite during daylight hours. In the 110-degree heat, it was like a waking dream, finding myself—a midwestern former altar boy—working deep cover in Egypt . . . riding on horseback through the desert, seeing the sunrise over the Pyramids of Giza.
I kept calling Kayed in Los Angeles every few days, telling him I was in Cairo. First, if he got wind of my being in the Middle East, I’d already have explained myself; second, I wanted him to know that, just like him, I was a global player.
My first week in Egypt, I also went on board the freighter that had started it all. I got authorization from ANGA to board the Reef Star. As you traveled down the Suez Canal, if you looked to one side, you saw bullet holes in the buildings; the other side of the canal, formerly Israeli-controlled, was all new, fresh, painted over. The Egyptians had left their side of the canal bullet-pocked as a reminder of what the Israeli Defense Forces had done back during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
My boss back in the LA Division—Michael Holm, the ASAC—was a drug enforcement figure of some repute in the Middle East.
In 1975, Holm had been stationed in Beirut—when the civil war was tearing the nation apart—driving an official government vehicle (OGV) in which a previous DEA agent had been kidnapped; the car was later destroyed during a firefight between two rival militias as it was parked in front of the US Embassy. Holm was assigned to the embassy’s Internal Defense Force; he helped to evacuate three thousand Americans from Lebanon. During his time in the war zone, he was shot at three times, twice by snipers and once in an attempted kidnapping as he was driving to the airport to pick up an embassy officer. Later that year, two embassy officers were kidnapped and killed in that same car.
While stationed in Beirut, Mike Holm worked undercover in Egypt and made a five-hundred-kilogram hashish case, delivering the consignment from Damascus to Cairo. Working with ANGA officers, Holm also made a twenty-ton hash bust. Twenty tons—no small-time seizure. The hash was being traded for 105 howitzers to be used by Christian militia in Lebanon.
At the request of the Egyptian government, Holm opened the DEA office in Cairo; he made another major heroin seizure from a ship making passage through the Suez Canal. On one of my free days, I went to the ANGA museum in Cairo; there’s a whole display paying tribute to the work and diligence of DEA Special Agent Michael Holm.
• • •
I was now making plans to leave Cairo and travel to Israel; I had a meet set up with members of the Berro organization in the north of Israel, not far from Haifa.
Mohammad Berro, the family patriarch, owned a successful hotel and resort on the Israeli-Lebanese border. He was already being held in lockup by the Israeli authorities.
But while I was in Cairo, the DEA learned that the Israelis were working the Berro clan as major intel assets. Israeli intelligence had intercepted activity on my case. When they found out I was coming to Israel, working undercover, it created some serious static.
Jimmy called me again from Paris:
“We have another problem, Eddie.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Kayed just talked to his younger brother.”
“Sure, Safur.” The same stool of Artie’s whose yapping had started me ducking and dodging from surveillance back in LA. “So what?”
“Well, here’s the thing. Now the brother talked to his father, Mohammad. I think that spooked him.”
There was no love lost between Mohammad Berro and Israeli authorities. But since he got jammed up with the Reef Star case, facing the death penalty in Egypt, Mohammad had been buying himself time, working with the Israelis as an informant. He contacted the Israeli authorities, asking a bunch of questions about some guy called “Eddie in LA.”
Israeli intelligence operatives made two calls, one to the DEA in Nicosia and one to headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and someone—to this day, I don’t know exactly who—blurted out:
“Sure! Eddie’s one of our guys. He’s over there right now, matter of fact, ready to close the deal.”
I flew into Tel Aviv, desperate to make things right with the Israeli intelligence people. The Israeli cops met me at Ben Gurion Airport, drove me straight up to Jerusalem. But in the blink of an eye, the damage was done. Didn’t take more than a few minutes for Kayed to learn I was in Israel, trying to set him up in an undercover sting. That one hiccup sent him into a spiral.
But here’s how slick the Berros’ operation was. Typical criminals would just flee or immediately lawyer up. But to short-circuit our investigation, Kayed’s brother Safur went straight to the DEA office in San Diego—alone—and tried to turn me in. He pretended not to know that I was a DEA agent.
“Berro was approached by this guy named Eddie who wants to purchase ten kilograms of Lebanese heroin,” he said. “He gave Kayed the money, but we don’t want anything to do with it.”
But Safur ran into a hard-ass DEA agent in our San Diego office named Gordon Taylor.
“Okay, where’s the money?” Taylor demanded.
“Already deposited it.”
“Where? Which bank?”
“It’s since been transferred overseas.”
“Oh really?”
The babe-in-the-woods act was instantly exposed.
Within a few hours, Kayed was under arrest. Honestly, we couldn’t charge him with much more than “theft of OGF”—official government funds.
But the damage was done. Our big prize, those ten kilograms of Bekaa Valley horse, never made it to LA. Nearly six months of work blown due to the unwitting incompetence of some DEA functionary who failed to do the easiest thing: feigning total ignorance.
To the brass in Israeli intelligence, a high-placed confidential source running a thriving hotel business right at the border with Lebanon is worth way more than some ten-kilogram wholesale heroin deal in LA. The Israelis saw Mohammad as a national security asset.
I’ve been to Israel on cases three times since, and every single cop and intel agent—right up to the brigadier general in their recently formed Organized Crime Unit—shakes his head: “I can’t believe you got so close to Kayed.”
I played them all the conversations I recorded undercover with Kayed in LA. Nobody could believe I’d had some forty face-to-face meets with the elusive Berro.
All told, because of those forty tapes of Kayed talk
ing about a variety of drug deals with me, always in the code of how many “Rolexes” he could front me, he had no chance beating it at trial. He took a plea and got three years in a federal prison. It wasn’t hard time—he served it in a minimum-security lockup—and it was a damn sight better than what he was looking at if we’d consummated the ten-kilo heroin deal. If those kilos had actually got to LA, he’d have been facing twenty-five years in a maximum-security federal pen.
Still, we put some hurt on him. He lost all his material possessions: his nice house in Huntington Beach, his cars. He lost his student visa and couldn’t finish his graduate degree at USC.
As usual, the DEA was looking big picture. Since we couldn’t put him in prison for a long stretch, we did the next best thing: We flipped him.
He helped out with a bunch of domestic drug cases. We worked him as an undercover informant, made a decent-sized case out of North Carolina. Then we sent him back to the Middle East. Officially, he was deported to Lebanon as an “undesirable” convicted felon. Unofficially, he was going back home as a confidential DEA informant.
In our last face-to-face meeting in LA, I dangled a carrot.
“Listen, Kayed. You do a few good deals for us, maybe we’ll see if we can get you back to the States.”
That’s what he really wanted, more than anything else, to resume his cushy Southern Cali lifestyle. Kayed didn’t want to live in the chaos of war-torn Lebanon again.
Working undercover, you need to get intimate with your target. You know his favorite food and drink. You recognize the scent of his wife’s perfume; you know what Verdi opera she’s dying to see. There’s no shortcut: You need to rub skin with him. And more importantly: You contribute skin. You are the collateral. You are the person he is trusting with his life.
That’s what DEA does better than anyone else.
Similarly, dealing with informants, you have to remember: You’re always dancing cheek-to-cheek. No one manages your cases or your informants like you. You can’t just turn that relationship over to your fellow agents. There’s an intimate and unique chemistry, developed face-to-face between two men.
I learned that troubling lesson following my arrest of Kayed Berro. It was one I would never repeat again.
• • •
I was no longer Kayed’s handler, and as the years passed, we gradually lost our leverage with him.
Eventually, we lost contact with him entirely.
Flash forward two decades.
The most recent intel photos of Kayed Berro, now middle-aged, show a startling transformation from the pudgy-faced USC engineering student I’d known.
He now has a long salt-and-pepper beard, dresses like a religiously observant jihadist; he has replaced his father, Mohammad, as the family patriarch.
Currently he’s considered by the DEA to be a “person of interest,” as a financier of Hezbollah.
CHAPTER 3
ENTER THE COBRA
Long before the world awoke to headlines about exploding opium production in Afghanistan, the global heroin hot spot was Southeast Asia—the Golden Triangle ruled by that infamous opium warlord Khun Sa, “Prince of Wealth.”
The Shan United Army, along with other Chinese and Thai organized crime groups, smuggled their product from Burma into Thailand and Laos and then eventually into Hong Kong, where wholesale dealers sent out big shipments—500, 600, or 700 kilograms—directly into the ports of New York. These large-scale shipments coming out of Hong Kong were received by powerful Chinese organized crime groups in New York City, who then took over the retail end of the operation.
After my long dance with Kayed Berro had ended, I was feeling more heartbroken than angry. Honestly, it was like having a girlfriend for a while; you think you’re getting serious, about to take it to the next level—then she abruptly breaks up with you.
Everyone in Group Four—especially my partner, José Martinez—heard me gripe:
“You know how bad I wanted Kayed—and the shit didn’t go down. I mean, I stayed at the other side of the planet for two and a half months. Jesus! Who knew that our own guys would screw up the deal?”
Luckily, I didn’t have too long to ruminate.
Three days after the Kayed case started to settle down, my boss Rogelio called me in. Jimmy Soiles was on the phone again from Paris.
“We have an agent in from Bangkok named Rudy Barang. You know him?”
“No, Jimmy. We never met.”
“Doesn’t matter. We have a money pickup, and we need an undercover to go with Rudy.”
“What’s the case?”
“It’s kind of complicated. Rudy’s in deep over there in Thailand. We need somebody to be the money-courier. Can you do it?”
“Who am I carrying for?”
“Ling Ching Pan.”
“Sure, Jimmy.” I laughed. “When have I ever said no to an undercover case?”
We had our briefing; as an undercover, I’d often seek out subject-matter experts. I’d get on the horn and speak to people at DEA headquarters in Virginia assigned to the heroin desk. Back then there was a heroin desk, a coke desk, a marijuana desk—agents specializing in Southeast and Southwest Asia, Mexico and Colombia. I did all the research I could, in such a limited amount of time, on the Shan United Army and Khun Sa.
“You’ll be flying over to Bangkok and meeting with one of the key lieutenants for Ling Ching Pan,” Jimmy explained. “We’re going to get you the five hundred thousand in cash. You’re going to be the courier. You’re personally giving it to the lieutenant.”
Ling Ching Pan was the chief financial officer for Khun Sa. This was no small-time operator. A top money-launderer and financier for the Shan United Army, the world’s largest drug-fueled insurgency.
• • •
The very next day I was staring at more money than I could hope to earn on the job in a decade. Half a million in cash in two black duffel bags. It’s not like you’ve seen in the movies: brand-new leather attaché cash filled with neatly nestled stacks of bound hundred-dollar bills—crisp notes straight from the US Mint. Hell no. This wasn’t like the fresh bricks of money I’d fronted Kayed in Monterey Park.
These were real drug proceeds—half a million in smaller bills, well-handled twenties and tens. It’s kind of surprising when you first put your hands on it. Sure, money is paper—but you think that’s light? I challenge anybody to pick up—literally lift—half a million in small bills and carry it any distance. Money is heavy. I shouldered the two bags, which had to weigh sixty or sixty-five pounds each.
I threw the duffel bags into the trunk of a black Ford sedan. Driving at high speed on the freeway, Rudy Barang and I were shortly at LAX. A team of our DEA guys was there, and we breezed through.
We couldn’t fly nonstop to Bangkok, so we had to make a connection in Hong Kong. We had $500,000 in drug proceeds—no way I was checking those bags.
Shows you how much the times—and bureaucracy—have changed.
Today, a DEA agent could never get the okay to do an op like that. It would practically take an Act of Congress to authorize this kind of transnational operation. Carrying half a mil in cash, we were going to traverse I don’t know how many time zones and jurisdictions.
We got the money past all the airline people: Back in those more innocent, pre–9/11 days, you could still do that. We could have brought anything on a flight, and nobody would have blinked. Nobody questioned us. In fact, some security from United Airlines walked us down the boarding bridge—nobody touched us. I didn’t let the two duffel bags out of my sight for fifteen straight hours. I was watching those bags like they were my newborn twin daughters. Rudy, the quintessential narc, tough-as-nails Filipino, fell fast asleep for the entire flight. Not me. I was the young new jack too skittish to blink or let the money out of his sight.
Landed in Hong Kong, and nobody knew we were there. This op was s
o covert that our own DEA guys in Hong Kong didn’t know we’d arrived. After my Kayed experience of being burned by informants and loose-lipped DEA folks, I was incredibly wary. And even if we could trust our own DEA people in-country, what about their associates? What about the various local and federal police, who might easily have been compromised and have revealed the details of our operation, jeopardizing our lives?
When you tap into figures that high—anywhere approaching a million dollars—you cannot trust anybody.
We didn’t even have a plan in place for when we landed in Hong Kong. That’s the way DEA used to roll; we would simply engage. We were known as the most improvisational of all the federal law enforcement agencies.
And sure enough, in the course of that fifteen-hour flight, something had gone wrong. No DEA agents were at the airport to meet us, just a secretary from the embassy. She was one of these older, refined, well-spoken women who’d been in government service for some thirty years. She was our only escort, met us at the gate. The United Air crew simply smiled and waved good-bye.
The secretary from the embassy seemed in a great rush; we didn’t have to wait at the baggage carousel. My only luggage was the two duffel bags filled with half a million, as I didn’t have clothes, a change of underwear, or even a toothbrush. Figured I would have to buy a bunch of clothes when we got to Thailand.
As we hustled out of the gate, the secretary informed us in a whisper of the latest news. The Hong Kong cops had got word of our arrival and issued arrest warrants for both Rudy and myself. They wanted to detain us as wanted “international drug couriers.” Again, we couldn’t trust those cops with the details of our real mission.
We didn’t take any chances of being spotted by Hong Kong police. The secretary took us down a dark stairwell, went through a few doors, and showed us this narrow passageway. It was a half-lit labyrinth, which, luckily, she knew how to navigate.
It took me a few moments to realize that we were walking under the Hong Kong airport. We ended up at the other side without passing through any security. When we finally emerged into daylight, opening a set of baggage doors directly onto the hot and bright tarmac, I knew we were in the clear. Still humping those two back-bending bags of cash, Rudy and I boarded our connecting flight to Bangkok.
The Dark Art Page 7