by Joe Pistone
“One more thing,” I said. “I need to know where I can buy some ammunition for my gun.”
“What do you mean?” The sergeant almost exploded.
“Ammunition. For my gun.”
“You have a gun?”
“Sure, I couldn’t do undercover without a gun. But I only brought over the rounds in the gun. I like to have extra rounds with me just in case.”
“Agent Pistone, I must inform you that police in the U.K. are not permitted to carry guns.”
“I never go undercover without a gun,” I said.
“You’ll have ample protection. I assure you,” he said.
“Look,” I said shaking my head. “I don’t work undercover without my gun.”
The sergeant began to stammer. “But, but, but you can’t carry a gun in the U.K. It’s out of the question.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t go undercover without a gun. I’d feel naked.”
Finally the two undercovers couldn’t contain themselves any longer and exploded in laughter. I burst out laughing too, and when the sergeant saw that I was having some fun with him he joined in the laughter.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve worked undercover here before. I know the rule against guns.”
“That’s a good one on me,” the sergeant said. “Now what will you be wearing?”
Again I thought he was kidding. I said, “What I’m wearing now. A sport jacket, tie, slacks.”
“You’ve got to wear a suit.”
“Why.”
“Because they do.”
“This is all I brought with me.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” he said. “These Triads always wear a well-tailored suit. For you to pass yourself off as a high-ranking member of American Organized Crime they would expect you to be well tailored.” He hands money to my Scotland Yard contact and says, “Grahm, let’s go out and get him a good suit.”
I ended up with a Prince Charles plaid suit, a good pair of English shoes, and a couple of expensive shirts and ties. After all, this was “serious” fraud we were investigating.
In the beginning the Triads sent lower-level Chinese businessmen to meet with me, and each time I said, “I want to meet the main guy if I’m going to consummate this deal. Because of my status in the U.S. I don’t deal with guys that are that much lower than me.”
I used “Donnie” because it was a name I was comfortable with. The movie hadn’t been made yet and it was still a safe name. No last names were necessary.
Hotel lobbies are popular meeting places in London. I had two or three lower-level meetings where the Triads were feeling me out. It was a scene out of GQ. Everybody was well dressed. Finally, when I could tell I had convinced them I was the real deal, I told them I was impatient and they had to send the top guy from the Triad in England if we were to go any further with this. “If I’m going to spend millions of dollars,” I said, “I’ve got to know who I’m dealing with.”
As I taught my undercover students at Quantico, the goal of the first undercover meeting is the second meeting, and the goal of the second meeting is the third.
The final meeting was set for a fashionable golf resort. I told them I had a suite there and we would meet in my suite. Scotland Yard had everything wired up and were listening in from the room next door. Sergeant Johnson of the Serious Fraud Unit would be there listening.
Right on schedule the Triads arrived. They had the top guy with them. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I began to outline what I was interested in. How much we want to buy. How many he could supply. How long it would take to get them. The more I talked, the more he interrupted me with his own comments.
“Look, you fucker,” I said. I could almost hear Sgt. Johnson’s jaw drop next door. “I want to tell you something. Why do your sentences begin in the middle of mine? I’ve shown you respect for a half hour. Why don’t you respect me? If you interrupt me one more time when I’m talking we’re done talking.”
The head Triad, a young man in his thirties, bowed his head and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Don.”
We made the deal and I got the location of the factory. The key to getting information like that is not to seem to want it. It’s all about not being interested in what you’re interested in. I said,“I’ve never been to Hong Kong. If things work out on this deal I’d like to take a trip there and see the operation. Is it in a nice part of town?” That sort of thing. Small talk. Narrowing the area. He had no choice now but to politely answer my questions.
In the next room I later heard that the sergeant almost died. “What’s he doing? I told him to show respect.”
But since I got the factory in one meeting and they had been trying to get it for months, he was really complimentary. “You almost gave me a heart attack,” he said. “I thought it was all over. I guess you do know your stuff.”
He was a pretty good guy. I would have done just as well without the suit, but I got to keep the suit. They got the factory about a month later with my directions.
MY BLACK AND WHITE WORLD
Before I retired from my FBI world where I saw everything in black and white, I tried to cram as much into the adventure as possible. As with any job it’s not all fun and games. There was a particular adventure in a dirt-poor country in the Caribbean that I could have done without. I’ve told this story before, but never in this depth.
The country was a way station for cocaine coming into the U.S. For security reasons I can’t identify the country. The military government was riddled with corruption and stability was not a way of life down there. My partner and I were assigned to pose as American Mafia wiseguys visiting the country to set up trafficking routes. An honest anti-drug Colonel would contact us at our hotel. He was the only one who knew who we were. He would be our only contact on the island and we were not to invoke his name. There would be no one else to trust. The rest of the island would be full of barracudas as far as we would be concerned.
We met with the honest Colonel and he gave me a pearl-handled pistola. Through his contacts he had scheduled a pre-arranged very private meeting for us the next day with a man suspected of being the main drug trafficker on the island. This suspected drug trafficker was also a very high-ranking military officer, and we were going to meet with him at his legitimate military hacienda without a lot of goons with submachine guns guarding him. The honest Colonel assured us that he had taken care of our exit strategy. No one would bother us.
Our job, posing as potential buyers, was to assist the honest Colonel in confirming his suspicions that the target was a drug trafficker. Once it was confirmed they would convince the trafficker to retire from his wicked lifestyle. My partner spoke the language, but the suspected drug lord spoke fluent English.
We paid our scheduled visit to the suspected main drug trafficker. Those who were secretly listening in had their suspicions confirmed. They stepped in to convince the drug lord to go straight, and things got a little out of hand. We slipped out quietly and returned to our downtown hotel.
While my partner was downstairs in the lobby, five soldiers busted the door in, beat me with gun butts and handcuffed me from behind. When my partner came in they did the same to him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said. “We’re American tourists.”
The leader of the squad put a key of cocaine in my travel bag and said, “You are drug dealers and assassins. There is cocaine in your luggage.”
“We’re American tourists,” my partner and I said at the same time.
“You are American drug traffickers and you have assassinated” so-and-so. Apparently, they had already discovered that the military drug dealer we had just visited was gone. I had slipped the honest Colonel’s gun under the mattress, but they found it and waved it to silence us when we tried to repeat that we were American tourists.
Now without communicating to each other, we knew we had to be in the grasp of the crew of the supposedly assassinated so-and-so. But why didn’t they wh
ack us on the spot? Instead they took us out of the hotel and into two jeeps. We got out in front of police headquarters. But that was not necessarily a good sign.
They brought us into a room on the fifth floor and began the accusations again. “You shot” so-and-so. “You are cocaine traffickers.” Then they would smack us around. This was followed by our denials. “We’re American tourists.”
After a long while of this, a big fat Colonel walked in. I guess he was a colonel. They all seemed to be either privates or colonels. By now it was about one in the morning. The big fat Colonel gave the signal and two of the soldiers brought me to the balcony and hoisted me over the side, holding on to my belt.
“We’re going to drop you,” one of them said.
“You’d better drop me,” I said. “Because I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You killed” so-and-so.
“I never killed anybody in my life,” I said. I tried to stay frozen so they didn’t lose their grips. “I’m an American tourist.”
We had been well-trained to gut it out, and here it literally was the belt around my gut that was keeping me alive.
The big fat Colonel gave another signal and they hoisted me back inside. My partner and I were standing there when the big fat Colonel looked us up and down and said, “Take them into the jungle and shoot them.”
Now I knew why they didn’t kill us sooner. In the jungle they would not have to concern themselves about a body. The jungle animals would handle our carcasses.
My partner looked at me and said, “Let’s use his name.” I nodded in agreement and we invoked the honest Colonel’s name. Like the coin in the air—would it be heads, would it be tails—we had a 50-50 chance that these were not enemies of the honest Colonel. But I’m not sure I had any adrenaline left in me while that coin was in the air.
They called the honest Colonel. Bingo, bingo, bingo, they took our cuffs off and drove us back to the hotel as if nothing had happened. We got out of that country on our scheduled flight without sticking around for any sightseeing.
Our honest Colonel was a decent guy. He was trying to do the right thing for his country. We helped him do justice and we never saw him again. He loved pumpkin soup. Two weeks after we flew out of there, they poisoned his pumpkin soup and killed him.
Each country seems to have its own favorite criminal activity. The U.S. is the capital of the world’s narcotics consumption. Mexico had a lot of kidnapping for ransom. Newly emerging countries from the former Soviet Union have a lot of street scams.
The Bureau provides a National Academy for American cops where they come to Quantico and get a certificate in advanced police techniques. The Bureau provides the same service for cops from the former Soviet Union. The Academy is in Budapest, Hungary and cops come to it from places like Russia, Estonia, Slovenia, and Moldova.
I made several trips to Hungary to lecture at the Academy. Budapest is a beautiful city and the food at the restaurants is top notch. The scam in the streets involves money changing. All money changing must be done at banks or legal money changing establishments. The rates are set continually. However, the streets are full of illicit money changers who will give a tourist a better rate. I didn’t know how some of them got to deliver a better rate, but they certainly didn’t have the overhead of office space,
One evening on a street in Budapest three Hungarian gentlemen stopped another agent and me. They blocked our path.
“Let us examine your money,” one of them said.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“We just want to look at it.”
“You’re not getting it,” I said.
“We’re police. We need to examine your money.”
“What for?” I said.
“We saw you exchanging money with people down the street.”
“No way,” I laughed. “We just left that restaurant down the street. We haven’t even talked to anyone.”
“Don’t lie. We saw you. We need to check your money for markings.”
“Okay,” I said. “Show us your badges and let’s all head to the police station together and we’ll look at all the money you want to look at.”
All three backed up at once and let us pass. If those con artists had checked our Hungarian money we would have never seen it again.A tourist who had actually exchanged money illegally on the street would have been happy to surrender the money to these phony cops rather than get arrested for it.
Then I realized how some of them got to be able to deliver a better rate of exchange. They stole the money in the first place and re-sold it for American dollars. It was just a form of recycling.
Speaking of recycling, I was working another case for Scotland Yard. There was a pub in a neighborhood outside of London that the woman owner was suspected of running guns out of. These weapons were being smuggled to Ireland.
A U.K. undercover brought me around to the bar and introduced me as a New York wiseguy. I hung around the pub the way I had done in New York in 1975 posing as a jewel thief to get noticed. I struck up an acquaintance with the frumpy woman who owned and ran the place. She was pale from spending too much time indoors and she relished my company. I sat at the bar and drank draft beer. She would draw a good head on the beer and scrape it off at the top. It was delicious and it made sitting there with the old biddy a lot easier to do.
Finally, after I had expressed an interest in the building a number of times, she took me upstairs to show it off. I hoped I would see some signs that guns were there or had been there, perhaps an odor of gun oil. She showed me the rooms where she housed illegal aliens. The illegals were from Ireland and they worked for her for a pittance and for food and for part of a room. Maybe all she was smuggling was illegal aliens because I saw no sign of guns upstairs.
In a few days I got her to show me the downstairs. Like the upstairs, there were no signs of gun running.
But she was very proud of the downstairs cellar. It was there that she recycled her beer. She had constructed a tube in the drain underneath from where she would draw the drafts of beer for her customers. Any spillage or any beer from the head that she would scrape off would go into the tube. The tube was connected to a keg. She would fill the keg with the spilled beer and sell it as fresh brew. All that time I sat there, who knows what I was drinking. They say your stomach can handle more beer if it’s slightly flat because there is less gas content to bloat your belly. So she not only recycled but she sold more of her beer that way. I have to admit, though, it tasted good.
Unfortunately, our effort fell as flat as her beer and I moved on.
SIBERIA
Following my second and final retirement I continued to respond to the Bureau’s requests for my unique perspective. I would lecture around the world and advise in general and on specific cases.
But who could have ever thought when it all began in dingy taverns in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1975 that thirty years later I’d be giving instruction on undercover operations in Siberia?
A couple of years ago I found myself lecturing at a military installation in the natural gas capital of Russia. I had a Russian-born FBI analyst named Nick who translated for me. I also had a “minder” assigned to me named Dimitri. Even today with communism all but gone they still make you travel with a “minder” to keep an eye on your activities.
There were 150 men in uniform in the auditorium. They were a great audience. They sat up straight and hung on every word as if I were lecturing on something they were each about to undertake. Their leader and our main contact was a colonel in the Russian army.
Off to one side there were five guys who were obviously out of place and quite striking in appearance. They were big and tough looking. Hard in every way. They were not in uniform. They wore long black leather coats. They didn’t associate with anybody but themselves. And nobody in uniform attempted to talk to them either. They never came to the mess hall for lunch.
Following the second day of instruction, the head guy of the fi
ve in black leather coats came up to Nick and me and to my surprise all he wanted was to invite us to dinner.
“Fine,” I said through Nick, “We’ve got to check with the colonel.”
“Don’t worry about the colonel,” the head guy said. “I’ll take care of the colonel.”
He walked over to the colonel and said a few words and walked back to us. You could tell that the colonel was disappointed, but he appeared to accept the reality that he obviously had no power over this hard case in black.
I called out to my “minder” Dimitri and he started over to join us. But the head guy grunted a word or two in Russian and Dimitri did an about face and did not attempt to join us.
These guys had their own cars out front, two of those little pieces of junk they drive over there. The FBI contingent got in and we drove off. The black leather jackets pulled up in front of the best restaurant in the Siberian city, but only one guy made a move to get out. The rest of us sat there in the two cars while he went into the restaurant.
Soon we began to see an unusual volume of people coming out of the restaurant. We got out of the cars and went into the restaurant and they locked the doors behind us. The restaurant was empty. People had been in the restaurant eating their dinners and they had been cleared out. That was spooky.
We sat at a big round table and were introduced to each guy by his first name only. We were told none of their ranks. I do remember the head guy’s name but it is not something I am free to reveal.
It turned out from talking to them that these guys were all decorated veterans of the war in Chechnya. They were selected for their current assignment on the basis of their courage and toughness. These five guys in black leather were part of an anti-Mafia unit that reports directly to the President of Russia through some minister. They have unlimited authority and can go anywhere in Russia in pursuit of the Russian Mafia.
We were the first Americans they had ever had contact with.
After dinner they took us to an old military base that they were having rebuilt for their special needs. We saw their arsenal of weapons; it was enough to take over a Third World country.