The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Along with my HASP liaison duties, I was simultaneously assigned to the city and county of Honolulu’s prosecutor’s office, detailed to the Organized Crime Strike Force, which was headed by Don Carstensen.

  Working in the OC Strike Force, I was suddenly out of my Marine Corps spit and polish; it was the first glimmerings of an undercover life to come. I wore regular “soft” clothes to work every day, let my Marine haircut get shaggy and my reddish beard grow in. Every morning, I rolled with Don and his team.

  Don was tall, weighed about 260; he was a black belt in karate, so for such a big guy, he could move remarkably quickly. He was in charge of fifteen investigators, most of whom were in prosecutorial support duties—ranging from child abuse to robbery and murder. But he had six guys—including me—who were detailed exclusively to the Organized Crime Strike Force.

  • • •

  Mainlanders may visualize the pristine beaches and curling waves of Waikiki, or the mist-cloaked peaks of Mauna Loa and Kilauea, but Hawaii is also a hotbed of organized crime, much of it drug-related. In fact, the organized crime groups based in Hawaii are some of the most ruthless throughout the Pacific region.

  When I first arrived at the Strike Force, Don Carstensen was working a murder investigation that had been unsolved for years. In 1975, Charles F. Marsland—later the chief prosecuting attorney in Honolulu—suffered a devastating personal loss. Marsland’s nineteen-year-old son, Charles “Chuckers” Marsland III, was brutally killed. Chuckers was working as the assistant manager of the Infinity disco downtown the night he was killed. Investigative theories swirled: The elder Marsland had been fearless about going after major crime figures in Honolulu.

  Though it was now essentially a cold case, Don had committed his life to finding the murderer of Marsland’s son.

  Meanwhile, I was kick-starting a few of my own cases, almost always involving US military personnel—everything from domestic violence to assault to murder. Within a few weeks of my arrival, I launched the Deserter Retrieval Program. Don and I arrested nine Vietnam-era deserters, guys who’d gone AWOL and found a nice quiet corner of paradise to lay low, let their beards grow gray, and hang out for decades. Most of them weren’t bad dudes, but we still brought them in. It was the first time I’d taken the initiative to step up and develop my own investigative program, something I would later become known for in my years with the DEA.

  I played a very minor role on the Marsland murder case, only worked the military angles, talking to guys from the various service branches stationed on the island. I didn’t think any of them were potential triggermen—I was simply asking if they’d heard word on the street. Eventually, working my military contacts and informants, I was able to gather some useful leads that helped Don in his investigation.

  • • •

  The primary investigative theory of the case was that the elder Marsland was getting too close to taking down Larry Mehau, allegedly the godfather of organized crime in Hawaii. Described in the press as the most powerful Mob figure on the islands, Mehau was a state sumo wrestler and a former Honolulu cop turned multimillionaire rancher, a power broker in the political scene of Hawaii. Mehau owned vast cattle ranches on the island, and unlike a legit business mogul, he liked to surround himself with a fierce criminal crew, hulking Samoan and Japanese guys, all expert martial artists.

  For years, Marsland was a thorn in the side of the island’s organized crime underworld. In 1975, Marsland’s son Chuckers was killed by Ronnie Ching, one of the island’s most notorious killers.

  When I first started on the OC Strike Force, Don was working Ronnie Ching relentlessly—until he established that Ronnie was indeed responsible for the Chuckers Marsland murder.

  In the end, Ronnie Ching would go down in the annals of Hawaiian crime as one of the most feared hit men ever to work in the Pacific. Don ultimately got him for fourteen murders; he admitted to killing state senator Larry Kuriyama in his own Aiea carport, burying a DEA informant alive at Maili Beach, riddling another informant named Bobby Fukumoto with bullets from an M16 at the Brass Door Lounge on Kapiolani Boulevard, and murdering Chuckers Marsland on a Waimanalo roadside.

  Ching finally admitted to Don where all the bodies were buried. He’d personally dug a graveyard on the North Shore—right in sight of the famous pipeline waves, a beach the world’s best surfers hold as one of their meccas. Don’s investigators went up there and did a series of exhumations, dug up dozens of skeletons and decomposed corpses.

  • • •

  Working the Marsland murder and other organized crime cases, I learned the essentials of police work you can never learn in a federal academy. The academy teaches you a series of “practicals”—potential street scenarios and your best and worst ways to respond. But Don taught me how to really work the streets.

  Morning, afternoon, and evening, I was the young military police puppy trailing after Don. He was the boss, in charge of the entire office. He ran all the investigators, managed the prosecutorial support. That’s a full-time day job, but he was still out in the street working cases at night.

  In later years, when I was a GS-15 in the Drug Enforcement Administration, I realized I’d modeled myself entirely on Don. Just like Don, I could never stay stapled to a desk. I always had to work the street, too.

  Through Don, I met all these veteran police officers and DEA agents. That’s also when I starting learning—firsthand, not from books—about the drug trade. There was no shortage of sizable narcotics cases on the islands.

  In my stint with the OC Strike Force I first started to go undercover. Hawaii was a fascinating place to be a UC, given the diversity and complexity of its ethnic communities. Don Carstensen would certainly have made one hell of an undercover, but he couldn’t go unnoticed or disguised on those islands. He was just too well known. I recall one news story describing Don as being as “big as a house and a black belt in karate.” Hard for a guy with that kind of profile to slip onto a drug set without drawing undue attention.

  • • •

  What Don truly taught me wasn’t just old-school gumshoe detective work or the tricks of the undercover trade. Don taught me the art of the interview.

  He always said it was his room. I would never take the lead—I’d sit back, watching, making mental notes. As soon as the door shut behind us, the first thing Don would do was get the suspect a cup of coffee or a can of Coke. Immediately he’d try to determine the guy’s ethnic and cultural orientation: Was he Filipino? Fijian? Samoan? Japanese? Chinese? A white American with roots in the South or Appalachia? Was he a military guy, an ex-con, or a straight civilian?

  Then he’d tap into his cultural knowledge—which was not insubstantial—for each interview. I watched, fascinated, as Don applied this kind of cultural filter to all his interactions.

  He never went at criminals hard. Despite his powerful presence—or perhaps because of it—Don never used physical intimidation. No matter what the crime—whether he was engaging an eyewitness or a Mob guy suspected of murder—he rarely raised his voice or lost his composure.

  He was remarkably skilled at developing a genuine rapport. Habitual criminals are not stupid; their whole lives they’ve been manipulating people: They’ve been observing the weaknesses—as well as the strengths—of those around them, looking to use the other person to best advantage.

  “Eddie,” Don told me, “you need to identify both the weaknesses and the strengths. One or the other is not enough. You need to know both. If you go too directly at their strengths or weaknesses, they’ll know exactly what you’re up to. They’ll know you’re trying to manipulate and maneuver them. They’ve been doing that same thing their whole lives.”

  Don would allow them to express themselves for a few minutes and not immediately bear down. He’d give them a measure of respect, a measure of standing—standing that they’d probably never had in their lives. But he would never do it in a
pandering manner.

  He would look for the malleable areas of the individuals, the wet clay within their personalities. Over time—minutes, hours, days—he would work that wet clay.

  If a guy was from Samoa, for example, those are some tough island men, and there are specific cultural norms and mores—rest assured that Don knew all the traditional societal expectations as well as the taboos.

  It’s not just a matter of being respectful and humane. No, that’s too simplistic, and any reasonably trained investigator can do that. What Don did was more subtle: By constantly identifying the strengths and the weaknesses, and then that third, hidden slice of the personality—that which was still malleable—he’d find those areas over which the interviewee did not have total control. These were the soft areas of the personality that were not yet hardened—by poor parenting, society, or prison time.

  As he constantly worked those malleable areas, slowly, with a sculptor’s skill and patience, the guys he was interviewing would begin to grant him trust. Sounds easy, I know, but it is a very difficult concept to master.

  Don’s first interview was always so smooth you scarcely knew it was an interview. Interviewing is a highly theatrical process, and Don saw it in exactly those terms. Maybe by the second or third act in the play, Don would start to work the wet clay.

  I could never have been a carbon copy or clone of Don Carstensen. It wouldn’t have worked for me. But much later in my career, I found myself transferring many of those skills he taught me as an interviewer directly into my undercover work.

  That was Don’s personal gift: teaching me how to interview, and then amalgamating and tailoring those skills to undercover.

  Years later, when I was undercover working major Mexican, Thai, and Afghan drug players, I would instinctively fall back on those first principles of engagement and human response, how to elicit from your target what you need, what you want, and do so in a manner that’s so smooth and subtle they don’t even realize that it’s happening . . .

  • • •

  And now I was back in those islands, not as a twenty-one-year-old military policeman but as a DEA special agent, GS-11—I had been bumped up in rank due to the success of the Essell investigation. I was answering to a new boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Joe Penda down at the federal building in downtown Honolulu.

  The good news—from an investigative perspective—was that I was a fresh face. I knew Hawaii well, but the bad guys didn’t know me. I could still play the part of Eddie McKenzie, a drug wholesaler and money-transporter working out of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

  In Hawaii I quickly began to make solid cases: never smack or blow, mostly crystal meth and marijuana. All my targets reflected the cosmopolitan nature of Hawaii itself: Filipinos, Samoans, Fijians, Hawaiian islanders, and Jamaicans. For some strange reason—it wasn’t premeditated—I worked undercover within every major ethnic community on the islands except white people.

  • • •

  My first undercover case in Honolulu also happened to be my first big meth case. I was assigned to the Ice Task Force—a group of DEA special agents strictly working on the exploding crystal meth crisis.

  Working ice for the first time was disturbing. I felt—and still feel to this day—that methamphetamine is the dirtiest of all the drug businesses.

  Weed is a party drug. Honestly, I could give a damn if the government legalized marijuana in every single state. But meth and heroin—their effects on users are a different order of magnitude.

  Those two drugs steal souls.

  • • •

  Just a few weeks into my Hawaii posting, I was deep into this meth dealer named Nanoy. He was a Filipino kid: bone-skinny, gaunt, about twenty-five years old. He’d agreed to sell me a pound of pure crystal.

  Of course, working undercover on a buy-and-bust, I had a standard backup team from the DEA office: most of the Ice Task Force team on surveillance.

  We went out to the set—the parking lot of a strip mall—where I was to consummate the deal with Nanoy: $40,000 for a pound of crystal. Nanoy casually came to my Acura. He had the pound of meth in a small bag.

  You always establish an arrest signal before you go out on a buy-and-bust case. The arrest signal for the surveillance team was the moment I opened the trunk of my white Acura.

  I opened the trunk, but when I closed it, my backup team didn’t move.

  I closed and opened the trunk again.

  Again.

  Five times I kept opening and closing the trunk, muttering excuses to Nanoy.

  Nothing.

  No raid. No windbreakers, no drawn guns: Freeze, motherfucker.

  Just me opening and closing the trunk, like a jackass.

  It’s the scariest feeling undercover: the moment when you realize that your backup team has lost you. The phrase we use is “eyes on.” I realized, with an icy chill, that they no longer had eyes on me.

  Once again, I was on my own.

  I ran through various scenarios. We’d exchanged the $40,000 for the pound, but what if he resisted? I figured I might need to get rough to make an arrest.

  Nanoy was this little Filipino kid, all eaten up by meth, bad teeth, his pupils tiny black pinpoints—could not have weighed more than 130 pounds.

  I’d boxed in the Marine Corps, wasn’t the most technical pugilist but I do have a strong overhand right. One right-hand punch from me—if he resisted arrest—might have taken his head off. What were my other options?

  I thought of my old mentor Don Carstensen. I thought of how Don wouldn’t use his size or strength for intimidation, never used excessive force when making a bust. I thought long and hard about the ethical ramifications of how best to make this arrest.

  Also, as Don had taught me, I’d established a genuine rapport: I knew this guy Nanoy; I’d been undercover working him for almost a month. We weren’t friends, but we had a human relationship—no way I was going to punch him senseless.

  I pulled out my .38, told him he was under arrest, spun him gently around, put him in handcuffs.

  I had no choice but to violate one of the cardinal undercover rules: As the UC, you never make the arrest.

  Why?

  Because emotionally and personally you are not prepared to do it. You are too invested, too wrapped up on a human level with the guy you’ve been working. The defense attorneys will question your credibility later during the judicial process.

  By now I had little Nanoy in cuffs in the Acura. We drove a short distance, to a neighborhood of nondescript single-family houses in a suburb of Honolulu—a small pocket of Filipinos living right near Pearl Harbor—to Nanoy’s known stash house.

  The Honolulu Ice Task Force was made up of solid agents, but that night—for whatever reason—they were behaving like the Keystone Cops.

  They’d lost eyes on me—already a huge screwup. And now, when they stormed onto the scene to get inside the stash house—honest to God, they hit the wrong address.

  Making a warrantless entry—based on my engagements with Nanoy—they hit the house next door to Nanoy’s stash house.

  I went crazy.

  “What the fuck—over! That’s not the house! It’s the house next door! Shit! The dope is in the house next door! That’s the house right there, not that one!”

  But when they stormed into the wrong house, they stumbled upon this strange Filipino cockfighting festival. There was cash and blood and feathers all over the floor. They froze the house—technically it was a crime scene as well. They simply called in the Honolulu Police Department, who locked all these guys up for illegal gambling and animal cruelty. All the fighting cocks had these vicious razor-sharp spurs, and possession of spurs is classified as a third-degree misdemeanor.

  I was so pissed off, I could hardly speak coherently.

  “Are you fucking shitting me? You guys hit the wrong house?”<
br />
  I’d just purchased a pound of meth. I had to take Nanoy down myself, and didn’t hurt a hair on his head. Luckily, there were felonies occurring in the wrong house, and in the right house, we found even more meth than we’d bargained for. It was a very successful undercover buy-and-bust. Little Nanoy got locked up, copped a plea, and was sentenced to a decade in federal prison.

  • • •

  Years later, Americans would see this kind of super-pure meth in the hit show Breaking Bad. But the meth Nanoy sold me wasn’t made in America. Wasn’t made in Hawaii. He was dealing in pure North Korean–manufactured methamphetamine.

  At this stage, we were just on the cusp of one of the biggest drug crises in our new age of narco-terrorism. Yes, the nuclear threat of North Korea is, of course, well known; few people understand how this rogue dictatorship became one the largest methamphetamine producers on earth. These aren’t the rudimentary Sudafed-cooking operations for which outlaw biker gangs are frequently arrested in the United States, nor the sophisticated test-tube alchemy that Walter White manages to pull off in Breaking Bad.

  Today, North Korea is unlike anywhere else on earth: full-bore government-controlled industrial production of the highest-quality ice. They’ve got the perfect cover: normal-looking pharmaceutical plants making supposedly legitimate drugs. But what they’re secretly doing is mass-producing highly powerful meth to pump out into Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos, Japan, and Australia.

  Recently, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which provides briefing papers for members of the US Congress, published a fourteen-page report titled “North Korean Crime-for-Profit Activities.” The report alleges that North Korea is producing and smuggling major amounts of methamphetamine—along with heroin, counterfeit currency, and cigarettes: “North Korea’s maximum methamphetamine production capacity is estimated to be 10 to 15 metric tons of the highest quality product for export.”

  Due to draconian penalties for its own citizens, North Korea’s drugs are destined for export. In March 2002, Kim Jong-il announced—with typical over-the-top bravado—that all North Koreans found using illegal drugs would be “executed by firing squad.” The most profitable destination for North Korean drugs is Japan, where the abuse of amphetamines and methamphetamines has been widespread since the end of World War II. Though heroin use is comparatively low, Japan has an estimated 600,000 amphetamine and methamphetamine addicts and more than two million casual users. Japanese mafiosi work closely with the North Korean government to smuggle and distribute this top-quality crystal meth in Japan.