The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  There was no way I was going to do a surprise flash in the backseat or trunk of a car. That’s precisely what had gone bad in 1988 with Paul Seema, George Montoya, and José Martinez. The flash-roll was still in the trunk, and the killers knew it. They shot Paul, George, and José and stole the flash.

  His broad smile and warm hug notwithstanding, Sam certainly could try to kill me and rip off the million dollars. After the Pasadena murders, the DEA always tries to instantly distance the flash-roll from the dealers; the money needs to get off the set immediately. The best technique is to do a “rolling” or “engineered” flash. We let the criminals see the money, touch the money, then get it the hell out of there. Rogelio and José were the best at this—better than me—strolling up, opening a bag full of tens of thousands, saying, “You see that, man? That could be yours.”

  Then, boom, they’d get the flash-roll off the set. The threat of a rip is neutralized.

  I suggested to my bosses that we try a “sky flash,” and the DEA obtained a Beechcraft King Air private plane wired up for audio and video. Of course, you’re not truly safe anywhere you’re carrying a million bucks cash, but a US airport, with its magnetometers and surveillance cameras, is probably as locked down as it gets.

  I had the duffel bags stashed behind the seats on the King Air. Sam and Christian were both dressed in business suits, sitting across from me in plush leather chairs, thinking they were on a routine sightseeing plane ride up the Pacific Coast. Then, nonchalantly, I turned around.

  “I wanna show you guys something,” I said.

  I pulled out the duffel bag, unzipped it, and showed them the $1 million in bundles of US currency that I was moving for my Mob bosses out in Vegas.

  Their eyes opened wide. They couldn’t stop grinning.

  A flash-roll reveal is like a sexual tease. You want to get them overaroused, so excited that they can’t think straight.

  As soon as we landed at Riverside Airport, Sam and Christian saw the bag with the million bucks leave the King Air and get carried—by other undercover DEA agents—into the trunk of a Ford.

  The million dollars—their million dollars—was gone.

  But Christian and Sam were still grinning as we went out to a nearby restaurant for lunch and a few beers. They soon got tipsy, loose, and jovial on Budweisers.

  “They were really still drunk on the money,” I said later.

  • • •

  Christian seemed to know everyone in the Southern California underworld. If he’d applied his networking skills to a legit life, I often thought, he could have been a successful businessman.

  He first introduced me to an ex-con named Harvey Franklin. Even across the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Century Boulevard, where we first met, Harvey was intimidating. He looked about forty years old, had the swagger of a life spent in the South Central streets and a broad back, chest, and fire-hydrant neck reminiscent of Mike Tyson. As we greeted each other, his powerful right-hand grip felt rough as sandpaper.

  “Look, I’m not dealing in horse now,” he said. “How about I set you up in stolen bearer bonds? You interested?”

  One of Harvey’s confederates down in South Central had heisted half a mil in bearer bonds. Not something you come across every day—even in the most sophisticated organized crime circles.

  In addition to selling me the bearer bonds, Harvey told me he had access to counterfeit US currency—untraceable, he claimed—supernotes made using a “brand-new system of printing.”

  Now I had to bring in Paul Lipscomb, a US Secret Service agent. Paul is six-five, 240 pounds, a former college basketball star. Counterfeiting and other Treasury Department violations fall under the jurisdiction of the US Secret Service.

  Paul and I pulled Franklin’s pedigree: He had a heavy criminal record going back more than two decades and deep ties to the Crips gangs in South Central LA. Franklin was known for being constantly armed. His preference was for the .380 ACP Walther PPK.

  We began to meet regularly, casually, became quite friendly—he even talked to me about the details of his personal life, including the fact that he had thirteen kids by a variety of girlfriends. But no matter how cordial, on every meet we had members of the DEA surveillance team, at a range of a couple of hundred yards—their M-14s with Leupold scopes offering me a sense of security. Given Harvey’s penchant for violence, for the final takedown we assembled a multijurisdictional team: DEA, Secret Service, LAPD, and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officers all on surveillance. Harvey was bringing me the $500,000 in stolen bearer bonds, boxes of illegal steroids, and, most importantly, three sample supernotes, with more counterfeit currency to follow.

  The technology to make the supernotes had originated in Cyprus—but through Sam Essell’s transnational connections, one of the counterfeiting presses had made its way to Harvey Franklin in Los Angeles. Right there in the hardscrabble streets of South Central, they had a printing press capable of making some of the most untraceable counterfeit US hundred-dollar bills anywhere in the world.

  None of this had cost me a penny yet; Harvey gave it all to me on consignment. Now I had to come up with some cash. All told I agreed to give him $200,000—with a down payment of $70,000 to start.

  We met for the last time down in South Central. Paul and the US Secret Service agents put all the operation planning together on the tactical front; I handled the undercover planning.

  My car was a gorgeous white BMW 735—and I backed the ride up against a huge cement wall; Paul had insisted we have a solid backdrop to prevent any innocent bystanders getting hurt in the event of a shoot-out.

  As I met him in the parking lot, Harvey suddenly hugged me. He was so damn strong he nearly crushed the breath out of me. He pulled me in tight, and the Walther PPK in his shoulder holster pressed hard into my rib cage.

  “You feel that?” he said, softly.

  “You better believe I feel that.”

  “I like you, Eddie,” he said. “But if anything goes bad, you’re done.”

  We went to the trunk. I had the $70,000 in an old brown carry-on bag, but the money inside was brand-new—straight from the US Mint.

  The moment Harvey picked up the bag, in the corner of my eye I saw the figure of Paul Lipscomb dashing in—a hulking blur toting an automatic.

  Before Harvey could even flinch, Paul had the black barrel of his gun against Harvey’s temple.

  “You move, you die,” he said.

  At the same moment, the other members of the backup team were scouring the parking lot. They found a car with two Crips inside, each of whom had a loaded handgun underneath the seat. They were Harvey’s point men if anything went bad during the deal.

  My DEA backup guys were incensed, dragged these Crips out of the car by their collars and threw them roughly down to the pavement.

  “You were going to kill my friend?” Special Agent Keith Harding shouted. “You motherfucker! Were you going to kill my fucking friend?”

  • • •

  William Brumley and Mike Lancaster were two other ex-cons who Christian hired to provide security and off-load the freighter of dope. Brumley had just got out of prison and was living in a halfway house. Lancaster had also done hard time but was finished with his parole. Lancaster and Brumley were white-boy muscle-heads—each one was a rock-solid 220 or 230 pounds. They looked a lot alike, but Brumley wore his hair short, and Lancaster sported a braided ponytail even longer than mine.

  Of the two, Lancaster was definitely rougher and more menacing. One night in Riverside, in a restaurant parking lot off I-91, Lancaster agreed to sell me silencers that he’d hand-made from baffles, long metal cylinders designed with a variety of internal mechanisms to reduce the sound of firing by slowing the escaping propellant gas.

  “Yeah, I can get you thirty silencers,” he said.

  Making a detachable sound suppressor isn�
��t easy: You need to be skilled with a lathe, a drill press, a welding torch. Lancaster’s handmade silencers were high quality and reportedly very popular with Mexican cartel assassins.

  Every word of our conversations was being transmitted to my surveillance team via the Kel device I was wearing right up under my testicles. Lancaster would routinely pat me down before every meeting, run his hand along the front of my pants and between my legs, but never right under my crotch.

  He said he could get me more high-powered weapons, including an AR-15 semiauto assault rifle. Things were bristlingly tense between us. I stared at the sinews in his massive forearms. We were openly talking about crimes that carried long prison terms. Lancaster knew that and, suddenly reaching behind him, whipped around with an Uzi and put the barrel directly to my forehead.

  “If you fuck me, boy, I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

  When you think you’re about to take a round to the head, you learn that you’re not as tough as you think. Doesn’t matter how well trained or experienced you are as an undercover, you can’t mask the fear.

  My voice jumped up about an octave, and though I couldn’t see it, I knew that the backup team would be instantaneously rushing in. Everyone in the DEA—especially within Group Four—had learned the lesson from the black day in Pasadena when Montoya and Seema were murdered. Hearing the change in my voice on the Kel, they were poised to pounce.

  But no backup team can move as fast as a trigger finger. I was the only one who could save my ass now, and I started firing back with my only weapon: a verbal barrage.

  “What are you talkin’ about, Mike? Think I’m a fuckin’ cop or something? With all the shit I’ve already done with Sam? Everything I’ve done with Christian? How could I be a cop? Listen, man, I’d be in fuckin’ jail for what I’ve done with you so far.”

  That made sense to him. He half nodded, and I could almost feel my surveillance team backing away.

  “All right . . .”

  He slowly lowered the barrel of the Uzi from between my eyes.

  • • •

  Having allayed—at least temporarily—Lancaster and Brumley’s suspicions of me being an undercover cop, we consummated a few more firearms deals. I met them at Coco’s restaurant in Riverside and purchased a Heckler & Koch Model 91 .308 Winchester, two handguns, and the promised AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle. Lancaster also gave me, on consignment, his Shelby Mustang, a fast muscle car with a big-block engine, but I couldn’t figure out how to shift this six-speed standard transmission. I had to drive it to DEA headquarters downtown, couldn’t get it out of third gear, comically doing about twenty-five miles an hour the whole way in the far-right lane of the freeway.

  By early April the freighter Ivangrad had left Lagos, making passage through the Panama Canal, arriving at Long Beach Port just near LA.

  Easter Sunday, with the Ivangrad docked, we all came down to the Long Beach Container Terminal near Pier F. It was going according to our ops plan—we would bust them only after they’d off-loaded the drug bales. We had DEA agents in a small room, hidden behind a pane of one-way glass; although I was alone in the warehouse, we had eyeballs on me the whole time.

  But there was a new variable, always an ominous sign during an undercover op: four fresh faces on the set. Lancaster and Brumley had insisted on a total of six off-loaders—it would take a lot of manpower to get those bales of marijuana and heroin off the Ivangrad swiftly and into our white van parked outside. They’d brought two other huge bodybuilder types, a middle-aged guy, and some new young kid. As soon as they entered the warehouse, they all spread out, glancing at the entrances and exits.

  The least threatening-looking of the off-loaders turned out to be the most dangerous. He was about twenty-one, slightly built, seemed like a typical college kid; I didn’t have a clue who he was, how to manipulate him, how to interpret or maneuver his actions. I’d completely lost control of the set—the worst scenario for an undercover—as the six of them dispersed around the warehouse. Brumley and Lancaster were poking around in various corners, and then suddenly the new kid piped up:

  “Hey, there’s something wrong.”

  I turned quickly. His hand was cupped over his eyebrows, and he was staring hard at our pane of one-way glass. He was stroking the glass, kept gazing in, squinting hard. Our takedown team of agents was three feet from his face.

  “This is one-way glass.”

  “What?”

  “This glass is only for one-way viewing.”

  Like stirred-up hornets, the six off-loaders converged around me. Lancaster pushed a .22 semiautomatic into my rib cage.

  The .22 may be a small-caliber pistol, but it’s the perfect weapon for discreet murder. If you take a shot from a .22 to the back of the head, the bullet will squirrel around inside your cranium, and you’ll never make it to the emergency room alive.

  I was certain now that they were going to try to whack me and take the drugs as soon as the Ivangrad was off-loaded. Lancaster growled.

  “Move and I’ll fuckin’ kill you!”

  Luckily, my boss, Mike Holm, called out, “Compromise!” over the radio, instantly summoning the backup unit led by Group Supervisor Mark Trouville. There was a frenzy of lowered guns and DEA windbreakers. The team burst out from behind the one-way glass. I broke away from Lancaster, and he dropped the .22 with a clatter to the concrete. Our guys all had their guns out, shouting. In seconds they had all six of the off-loaders belly-down on that cement floor.

  “Both hands on the ground!”

  “Down! Down!”

  “Put your head on the ground!”

  “What, you deaf? You want to die today?”

  • • •

  “You want to die today?”

  Those five words kept bouncing around like .22 slugs inside my head. I made it through the afternoon, but by the evening, the reality hit me hard. I had no emotional support network, no outlet for my bottled-up stress. Wasn’t married, could never have talked to my family there in California—my aunt and my cousins—about the details of my undercover life.

  Everything converged on me at once.

  Sam and Christian could easily have killed me for the million dollars in cash if it hadn’t been executed as a “sky flash.” Lancaster putting the Uzi between my eyes: “If you fuck me, boy, I’ll fuckin’ kill you.” The takedown of Harvey—him bear-hugging me, his .380 against my ribs—and the two Crips in the car, their own handguns under their seats, ready to blast my ass . . .

  Around nine p.m., in my aunt’s house in Garden Grove, I got violently ill. My aunt wanted to drive me to the hospital. I kept dousing my face with cold water, gulping Gatorade. It’s visceral: the realization that you’ve barely escaped being murdered. I sweated and shivered like I had the flu, puked my guts up for almost an hour.

  • • •

  With our takedown of the Essell organization in 1990—sixteen arrests; a seizure of more than a ton of marijuana, three machine guns, thirty-two silencers, seven hand grenades, and seven vehicles, plus stolen bearer bonds valued at more than half a million dollars and some of the highest-grade counterfeit US dollar bills—the case earned me a bump up in rank, the Medal of Valor from the Federal Bar Association, and a formal commendation from the US Congress.*

  But now, I was learning, there was an imminent death threat, and I could no longer work the streets of my own town.

  You want to die today?

  We weren’t sure exactly who was planning on killing me. The case had been so wide-reaching, it could have been any number of players: most likely Nigerian organized crime figures or Harvey Franklin, who had a reputation both on the street and behind bars as a “shot caller.”

  When I got summoned into the office of John Zienter, the special agent in charge in the LA Division, he was concerned enough about the death threat that he wanted me transferred immediately out of Los Ange
les.

  Through the office grapevine, Zienter also knew that I’d been maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girl I’d first met in Hawaii when I was a Marine Corps military police officer. Her name was Desiree England. Gorgeous and sweet, Hawaiian born and raised—from a well-to-do family yet still a tita, a tough, independent island girl.

  “All right, Eddie, don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of you,” Zienter said.

  He took care of me, all right. Got me out of LA, where my life would have been at risk, but also rewarded me for my work on the Essell case by reuniting me in Hawaii with my tita girlfriend.

  • • •

  Being posted in Hawaii was a pleasant sort of homecoming.

  It was in Honolulu that I had first learned the tradecraft of detective work while serving as a Marine Corps MP. I had been lucky enough to fall under the tutelage of one of the titans of the Hawaiian law enforcement community, Don Carstensen. Little did I realize that, about five years later, in 1996, Don would save my life while I was diving in Kona . . .

  My first stint in Hawaii, I’d completed my master’s degree in criminology, then been assigned by the provost marshal to the Hawaiian Armed Services Police (HASP); all US service branches contributed personnel to form a specialized strike force. We had our headquarters in the Old Naval Station on Ala Moana Boulevard at the edge of the Honolulu business district.

  I left normal Marine Corps duties and was acting as military liaison between the police department and all the various branches of the armed forces. At any one time, there are approximately sixty thousand members of the US Armed Forces—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard—stationed on the islands.