The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Throughout the South Pacific islands, on down into Australia and New Zealand, you can easily see the grim impact on the population.

  North Korea’s links with Chinese organized crime networks outside Asia were discovered during two federal operations, code-named Smoking Dragon and Royal Charm. Fifty-nine members of a Chinese organized crime gang were arrested in Atlantic City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Philadelphia; the DEA and FBI seized half a kilogram of crystal meth, 36,000 Ecstasy pills, and counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, as well as $4.5 million in supernotes—all produced in North Korea.

  If you want to understand how an isolated rogue state like North Korea actually survives today economically, it’s important to recognize that a vast swath of the North Korean economy is financed by illegal drugs—a meth pipeline originating north of the 38th parallel and ending in the hands of addicts in the democracies of the South Pacific and the United States, particularly our little archipelago paradise of Hawaii.

  • • •

  At this point in Hawaii I was almost like a predator in the Serengeti: always looking for my next target. The other DEA agents in Honolulu were well known to the criminal underworld: It was next to impossible for any of them to successfully infiltrate a criminal organization. But I was a fresh face in Hawaii. The criminals never saw me coming.

  A few short weeks after the Nanoy bust, I was working another deep-cover case with some Jamaican ganja wholesalers.

  I was rolling with a Honolulu PD detective named Janice—gorgeous young Hawaiian woman—assigned to our DEA task force. She was in love with one of my old partners back in LA. Janice was an exotic mix, Portuguese and Hawaiian, and like my girl Desiree, she was a tita—a tough-as-nails island girl.

  We were out one night working undercover; Janice was playing the role of my girlfriend, as usual. We went to this restaurant right outside of the University of Hawaii and hooked up with these Jamaican weed wholesalers.

  When I got to Hawaii, the weed scene was changing fast. Back when I was an MP, the best grass used to be called “Maui Wowie.” But we started to get aerial images—known as FLIR (forward-looking infrared)—from various aircraft. From high altitude, FLIR could differentiate shades of green, and the DEA could zero in on where fields of marijuana were being cultivated.

  The eradication was so successful that the heavy weed growers soon moved into “volcano tubes”—actually lava caves. These were sprawling operations. We couldn’t catch them on the electrical grid; all the electricity was being produced by diesel-powered generators. The local island growers were savvy; they knew that inside those volcano tubes our FLIR planes could not grab their aerial signature.

  Our DEA guys did one raid in which we found twenty thousand plants—all produced with grow lights. It was brilliant science: These lava caves absorbed all the energy of the grow lights. We’d never have caught them except for an interpersonal spat; we broke the case because one of the growers got mad at his lover, came in and turned informant, and gave up the whole volcano tube weed-growing operation.

  • • •

  It was a balmy midsummer island evening, and Janice and I had had a few meetings undercover on these Jamaican weed wholesalers.

  “Let’s go do it,” Janice said, as we pulled up at the set.

  Yes, she was fearless: Diminutive, very feminine, but she was a tita—a little island-girl badass.

  We went inside this nondescript pizza shop; for some reason, a lot of major wholesale deals get consummated inside cheap little pizza shops. We ordered a pie, some sodas and beers, just shooting the shit with the Jamaicans—all tough-looking, dreadlocked guys.

  We were sitting there, eating our pizza, when a DEA special agent I knew very well—Marty Dundas—came barreling in, loud as all hell, shouting and laughing. Dundas was a desk agent and, frankly, not the sharpest blade in the drawer.

  “Hey, Ed!” Dundas shouted when he spotted me.

  I ignored him entirely.

  “Ed, think you’re such a big badass coming into my office?”

  I stared daggers.

  “Eddie!”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Dundas was so dense, so obtuse—he didn’t understand that I was working with Janice as a UC.

  He pressed into our table.

  “Hey, shove over, let me sit with you guys.”

  I had to do something—anything—or the Jamaicans would figure out in an instant that I was a DEA agent.

  I didn’t want to punch Dundas. Instead, I put both palms on his chest and shoved him so hard that he fell out of the booth. I’d learned that is a very effective fighting and self-defense technique. One of the best points of leverage on the human body is dead center of the chest.

  He fell to the linoleum floor. I dragged Dundas a few feet away, got right down in his face, whispering, spittle flying into his face.

  “You fucker. You stupid ass. Get out of here. Can’t you see I’m on the job?”

  Janice was a badass little girl; she was ready to jump in and kick Marty’s ass, too. I was dumbfounded: This idiot was going to blow weeks’ worth of our undercover operation?

  He was so dazed from my blow to his chest that he didn’t know what day of the week it was.

  Meanwhile, the Jamaicans were staring, concerned but mostly confused. At last they smiled. My actions proved to the wholesalers that I was legit. They assumed that no cop would beat the crap out of another cop like that in public.

  Dundas was dazed, but now he finally got the message, and he dragged his ass up and went away.

  Later on, he almost got fired for this whole incident: He was such a pendejo.

  I sat back down calmly with the Jamaicans as if nothing had happened.

  We consummated the weed deal in that greasy little pizza shop.

  Three days later they delivered ten pounds of weed in a park in Honolulu, for which I paid them $50,000. Not a big case, but it was a good undercover buy-and-bust.

  After that, we got search warrants, nailed the Jamaican with more than forty pounds of high-potency weed.

  I never saw the Jamaicans again.

  No question of going to trial. We had them dead to rights. All three pleaded out to possession with intent to distribute, violation of US Code 841. All got some heavy prison time.

  • • •

  Talk about burning the candles at both ends. In the midst of doing all this undercover work, I had another major commitment: I was about to get married to Desiree England. Desiree was part Portuguese, part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part white. In Hawaii they irreverently call that the “Chinese menu,” meaning a person of mixed ethnicity. We’d planned an idyllic ceremony, on an orchid farm that her grandfather owned. The view was surreal—the volcanoes in the backdrop, the intoxicating smell of the orchids: It was like a tropical dream.

  But even as we were planning the wedding, the job completely overtook my life. I was about to have two permanent changes of duty station in one year—pretty much unheard of for a young DEA man.

  First, I was going to language training school in Arlington, Virginia, for nearly a year; then I’d put in for a posting overseas.

  She said, “If this is the life I gotta live, Eddie, I can’t do it.”

  • • •

  I felt—and still feel—that I let Desiree down. We were deeply in love, and she expected me to be her husband. Instead, I was flying off to the mainland and then God knows where, and the whole time that I was in Honolulu, living with her, I was barely home at night, going undercover almost every waking hour to make meth and weed cases.

  But she was right, in the end. It would have been impossible to make a marriage work under those terms. You ask the majority of cops—whether federal, state, or local—and you’ll find one constant: Almost all of them have been divorced, separated, or had some very tough times in their marriage.


  The demands of the job and the requirements of being an attentive and loving spouse—especially when you’re working undercover—just don’t go hand in hand.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE

  A month after my last major bust in Hawaii, I was back in LA, testifying in the series of trials surrounding the Essell case, when I received an unexpected call from overseas.

  On the line was Special Agent Mike Bansmer, a GS-14 over in Thailand. I knew Mike’s name and reputation: He was the resident agent in charge in Songkhla, in the south of Thailand, and had been working the Shan United Army over there since 1980.

  Mike had done his research. He knew I’d spent about six months making decent cases in Hawaii—all meth and weed. He’d also heard about the scope of the Essell heroin-importation takedown. More importantly, he knew that I’d been in Thailand, albeit briefly, doing the money-courier mission in Bangkok with Rudy Barang that helped bring down Ling Ching Pan, the chief logistician for the Shan United Army.

  I was prepping for a long day of direct testimony and cross-examination in what I called the “pantheon” of Essell case trials when the call came in from Thailand in the Group Four office.

  “Ed,” he said, “this is Mike Bansmer. You know who I am?”

  “Yeah, Mike,” I said, “I know who you are.”

  Bansmer already had a wide reputation as a balls-to-the-wall DEA agent.

  He told me that he had seen my name on a listing of special agents requesting postings overseas. After the success of the Essell takedown, I’d received a promotion; I’d requested a posting overseas, but I’d been expecting something in the Middle East. Honestly, I wanted to go back to work with Danny Habib, learn Arabic, and be stationed in Cairo. After my month-long stay there during the Berro investigation, the Middle East seemed to be where the real action was.

  Now Mike Bansmer was throwing me for a loop.

  “Ed, how’d you like to come live in a place where you can’t order food without speaking Thai?”

  “Come again?”

  “How’d you like to live in a place where you have to constantly run away from cobras?”

  I laughed loudly.

  “Well . . . I don’t know, Mike.”

  “Listen, I’ve asked around about you. Ed, I hear you got balls.”

  “Lately they’ve been kicked in pretty hard, Mike.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’ll make it happen. I’ll call headquarters, tell them I want you, and you’ll come over. I’m living down in the south part of Thailand, in Songkhla. You’ll like it down here. But I’m telling you now—we’ll be just about the only white guys for miles.”

  • • •

  I left Desiree behind in Hawaii and relocated to headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to do the Thai language intensive. Learning Thai fluently was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s not like learning a Romance language; you struggle through Spanish or French or Italian, but at least the words are written in our standard Roman alphabet.

  To learn written Thai—rather than just some phonetic conversational phrases—you’re dealing with characters that are a blend of Pali, Sanskrit, and Cambodian as well as Chinese characters. Then there’s the issue of names. Most people in Thailand go by a nickname because formal names there can be virtually unpronounceable: fifty or sixty letters all strung together.

  My instructor was a lieutenant in the Thai military: Her name was Boonkock. She was a master Thai linguist, a PhD. Her nickname was Sya, which means tiger.

  I would call Sya and tell her I was struggling with the vocabulary. Vocabulary in Thai is called khamsap.

  “Teacher, I need help.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m struggling with our khamsap.”

  “Mai pen rai,” she would say. “Never mind. I’ll help.”

  She would take time out of her busy schedule and meet me in various coffee shops in Georgetown.

  She disciplined me by only allowing immersion in Thai.

  “Khun Ed, I will never ever speak to you in English again.”

  In weeks, my vocabulary improved immensely. True immersion whenever I was with Sya. No English allowed.

  Ironically, I became so fluent in Thai that, later, when I was working undercover in Juárez, Mexico, I would inadvertently start speaking in Thai with these Mexican cartel heavyweights.

  Luckily the Mexican criminals didn’t know shit about Thai. For all they knew, I was just some loco gringo speaking in tongues.

  The language intensive lasted thirteen months, but I graduated in seven. As tough as the course was, I just desperately wanted to get back onto the street, fly over to Thailand and work with Mike Bansmer to go after Khun Sa.

  I flew immediately back to Bangkok to be stationed with Bansmer down in Songkhla.

  • • •

  I’d been at Don Mueang Airport before, of course, during that $500,000 money-courier case with Rudy Barang, so when I landed in Bangkok, I recognized the airport from the Ling Ching Pan case. It made me feel slightly less disoriented.

  My new boss, Mike Bansmer, was there to pick me up personally in a Land Cruiser. Even at first glance, I realized Mike was everything I thought he was going to be.

  He took me straight to our DEA office at the US Embassy in Bangkok, and we met with the country attaché, Don Ferrarone, and the assistant country attaché, Don Sturn. Admin had just purchased a brand-new SUV vehicle for us: a mint Toyota Land Cruiser. But of course, in Thailand, they drive on the other side of the road like the British. The driver’s seat was on the right side, Mike was at the wheel.

  We had 450 kilometers to drive from Bangkok down south to Songkhla. I was waiting for my trusted .38 Smith & Wesson to arrive from headquarters, and the moment I got in the car, Mike stared at me. He pulled out a 9mm Beretta Model 92 and shoved it in my face.

  “You don’t go anywhere without this—you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Suddenly, everything was a bright green blur. We were driving along, moving fast. I soon learned that Mike was a fast and skilled driver. Bangkok driving is mad. The years I was there, thousands would die or be gravely injured in traffic accidents.

  They have vehicles in Thailand called sip-laas—ten-wheel trucks, like our eighteen-wheelers. Mike explained that almost all the sip-laa drivers were on meth, called jaa-maa—literally “crazy medicine”—which kept them awake for hours.

  As long as I live on this planet, I’ll never forget what happened next. Mike was passing one of the sip-laas when another sip-laa came barreling down the middle of the narrow highway, straddling the center line, straight at us. Mike managed to swerve and avoid a head-on collision, but with a bump and a loud crunch, the driver in the oncoming sip-laa knocked our side mirror clean off.

  I got quite a glimpse of the oncoming driver’s face: sparse goatee, looked about twenty-one, smiling, eyes wide, totally high on crazy medicine.

  For his part, Mike didn’t even flinch; he’d been in-country for a decade, and already knew that every time you got behind the wheel in Thailand, you were taking your life into your hands.

  • • •

  We didn’t stop to look at the damage to the Land Cruiser; we were halfway to Hat Yai, and I was nodding off, when Mike pulled up behind two minivans.

  “Ed,” he said, “these two guys are wrong.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s a wrong car.”

  He meant that one of the vans was loaded up with dope. We followed these two minivans for about one hundred kilometers. Mike kept insisting that the gray minivan was a load car. As I was to see over the months ahead, Mike had a sixth sense about Thai criminals.

  “You wait,” he said. “I guarantee you that this guy’s wrong.”

  We didn’t do anything further but called the van in to o
ur Thai counterparts from the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB).

  Sure enough, within twenty-four hours, the Thai police made a raid and discovered a hundred units of heroin. Right inside that same little gray minivan Mike said was wrong.

  • • •

  Finally we made it all the way down to Songkhla. Mike often liked to joke that I was “Eddie the Academician.” I had read everything I could find about Songkhla. Songkhla is one of the southern provinces—or changwat. It’s perfect heroin-smuggling territory, right on the ocean; to the south it borders on Kedah and Perlis in Malaysia.

  Soon as we got to Songkhla, I went over to find my house. Wiped out, I got undressed and immediately ate a bowl of noodles that my maid whipped up. My living quarters were nice; I was staying in this decent two-story house. As soon as I entered, a green snake slithered across the tiled floor. Nothing to worry about: they’re not venomous.

  I was jet-lagged, confused, on edge. I fell asleep with Mike’s 9mm Beretta pistol in my hand. I had my Cold Steel push knife in my other.

  Suddenly, at sunrise, I looked up.

  Mike was in my bedroom. I could see his hairy shoulders silhouetted against the sun. Mike’s one of those guys whose entire body is covered in thick hair. But I didn’t even realize it was Mike at first. I flipped. Sat straight up, bare-chested. I leveled the Beretta and was on the verge of shooting—I was so frightened.

  “Eddie, it’s me—it’s Mike.”

  “What the fuck?” I said, coming out of the haze.