The next morning, Maan Singh approached Amer at his breakfast table and did not allow him to finish. “Come,” Singh ordered the obedient Amer, who got up and followed, feeling like a puppy at his master’s heels.
Singh drove them in silence once again and parked in front of a women’s clothing boutique specializing in saris. What were Indian women doing in Ecuador, thought Amer to himself. Again the puppy followed the master into the boutique, through the racks of clothes, where a woman by the name of Margarita seemed to be overseeing sales. She followed the pair through a back door into a large room, equipped with numerous fax machines and telephones. For some reason, she hung around observing Singh and Amer. Three Indians seemed to be waiting for Singh. Amer assumed they were clients in transit. This woman, Margarita, also seemed to be attending to these clients. What else could this place be but Mann Singh’s headquarters, his nerve center and command post? Was Margarita his lieutenant?
“Sir,” one of the clients stood up and addressed Singh, “when is it that we shall be leaving?”
Singh approached the man and whispered a few sentences to him and then sent the trio away.
Turning to Amer for the first time with full regard for his pilot, he said, “Sultan, this is what the largest smuggling operation in the world looks like. I got started in the ’80s and my business now extends from South Asia to Moscow to London to Cuba, Belize, the Bahamas . . . you name it. We’re here in Ecuador because there are no visa requirements, and a little money goes a long way with the authorities here. My business exists, and it thrives because we are smart and we’re judicious in what we say and to whom we say it. As long as we do smart things, they’ll never find us, these Keystone Cops, they have been working the borders. . . .
“Young man, listen, if you’re going to fly for me, it’s only for me. You will be exclusively MY pilot. But I promise you this: I will personally screen each passenger, to make sure he’s legitimate, and that he’s not some undercover agent for the Americans.
“I know everyone in the world, all the smuggling business from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back. Once they know you have a clean, safe, comfortable airplane, you . . . we will have more business than we can handle, and at top prices.”
The final instruction from the tight-lipped Singh was that Amer’s contact would be Surinder Singh, the boss’ son who was based in London.
With that, the interview was over, and once again Singh led the way in silence to his car and then to the Quito airport to speed Amer back to America.
But unknown to Singh, Amer immediately broke the first condition of his verbal contract—of exclusivity—and flew to San José, Costa Rica, to meet with Gloria Canales.
Gloria Canales was at San José’s modernistic airport, dressed to the nines. She was pretty and welcoming and chauffeured him to a high-end restaurant. The experience was turning out to be a radical departure from his sojourn with Maan Singh. Gloria ordered food that was healthy: a fish fillet and a salad. Amer followed suit.
After dinner, Gloria arranged for some of her male friends to take Amer around to some of the best night spots in San José. Amer was not really into clubbing, but he went along and enjoyed himself. After club-hopping, they ended up at Gloria’s house in the wee hours of the morning. It was a mansion, decorated with taste, paintings on the walls and lovely flowers in vases throughout. Gloria’s hospitality knew no end. She even introduced Amer to her teenage daughter.
Gloria took Amer aside and sat him down to face her in the living room.
“Dear Amer, I hope you do not distrust the familiarity. I feel I know you already.”
“I am very comfortable here, Madam Gloria.”
“I’m so glad. My dear Amer, you come very highly recommended, and I know you are a professional . . . and a man that can be trusted. I would love for you to be an important link in my operation.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The only thing I ask is that you work exclusively for me, that you fly for no one else.”
In his mind, Amer was hopping with joy. Calculating the business from both sources, Maan Singh’s passengers and Gloria Canales’, it would take Amer no time to accumulate enough hours to qualify as a commercial pilot.
“Yes, yes, yes, Miss Gloria. We have a deal.”
Amer spent the night at Gloria’s in glory, so to say, remembering the ratty hostel where Singh had lodged him. And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and business arrangement. Amer was beginning to live high, teaching more advanced courses in flight school and making trips for both Singh and Canales.
As early as 1995 back in McAllen, Amer’s landings and take-offs were effected practically under the noses of the Border Patrol agents headquartered in the airport terminal, the same agents whose offices overlooked the runway. But unknown to Amer, his name began to surface far from the border. The Indian informant who was to meet Poli Acosta ended up spilling Amer’s name to Special Agent Jim Rayburn in Spokane, Washington. His name would have resounded again, but Amer ran into some luck, when an agent by the name of Ken May, in Oklahoma City, filed a summary report including Amer’s phone tolls, but that report just stayed in a pile of paperwork on someone’s desk and had no impact.
That December 1995, one of the local smugglers was apprehended and agreed to cooperate. The agency would now be running the informant in exchange for leniency. As a result of the agents tapping phones and recording the conversations of the coyotes and the pollos at the hotel, Amer’s activities were finally under surveillance. Early in January, agents tracked Amer’s flights to wherever he refueled in Texas. Agents began to record his travel, and knew his flight plan. By this time he was flying to San Antonio and making multiple trips in one day. He figured out he could make more money by flying to San Antonio and back instead of Dallas. Also, when the aliens were delivered to the San Antonio airport, they were safe from detection since there was no immigration check up on outbound flights.
On this occasion, at the San Antonio airport, Amer changed his routine. Instead of taking the aliens to connecting flights, he decided to save money and drive them to the bus terminal, where the aliens would catch rides to their final destinations. As Amer diverted from the expected route, the surveilling agents were ordered to take the pilot and the aliens down.
In what turned out to be a fiasco, Amer’s undoing occurred because the San Antonio agent in charge of the anti-smuggling unit, Marc Martínez, had seen Amer sporting a brand-new car and, in biblical terms, coveted it. Through the legal doctrine of asset forfeiture—otherwise known as “shopping,” among the agents—Martínez would get to drive as his official vehicle what he thought was a Lexus, instead of the clunky Ford Taurus that agents were usually issued. In one fell swoop, the painful set-up “Operation Featherless” came to a halt when Martínez arrested Amer and the aliens, and seized the car and, ironically, found out the car was a day-old Honda, not a Lexus. The entire case, what was now a global operation, was now shut down.
The INS was divided into three regions—Western, Central and Eastern—and the international office was treated as a fourth region. Each regional director and headquarters in Washington DC had blessed this undercover operation. This one supervisory agent in San Antonio, without consulting anybody, had put the kibosh on the number one investigation of the entire INS. The Keystone Cops that Maan Singh had mentioned had rushed onto the scene and bungled the operation.
Despite this incredible setback, all was not to be lost. Martínez, inside the car with Amer and the aliens, ordered one of the agents standing outside to call Enrique Flores, the case agent, back in McAllen.
Out of Marc’s earshot, the agent whispered, embarrassedly, “Enrique, look man, Marc ordered us to take ’em down. He wanted the guy’s car.”
“What the fuck! Are you pulling my leg? You better be jokin’, man!”
“No, Enrique, it’s true, we’ve got ’em right here in the car the pilot was driving when he diverted from his usual route. Should we take ’e
m and book ’em here in San Anto?”
“No, no!!! Take them to a hotel and interrogate them there. Let’s see what comes up?”
Crowded into a hotel room close to the airport, the agents formed a circle around Amer, who was now sweating profusely, imagining his future as a pilot disappearing into thin air and in fear of doing hard time. Before the agents even began to question Amer, he began spilling his guts.
“S-s-sirs, I have information . . . I have . . . I work for the biggest alien smuggler in the world! His name . . . his name . . . i-is Maan Singh.”
Enrique on the phone from McAllen instructed Martínez to ask Amer to call Maan Singh.
“My point of contact is his son, Surinder, in London. I can call him.”
All the agents said practically in unison, “Let’s make a call and let’s record it.”
Amer connected with his tapped call immediately and explained to Surinder that he had to change plans and take the aliens to the bus station, but that he needed his money up front, which was now $1,200 per trip. After stating he’d get back to Amer in half an hour, Surinder later called with instructions for Amer to go into the city and pick up the $1,200 from the owner of a local Indian restaurant. The San Antonio agents were once again to live up to Maan Singh’s characterization of them as Keystone Cops, because their incompetence was blatant. Not only did they drop Amer off unaccompanied and unsurveilled at the restaurant, but afterward they also dropped him off at the hotel and left him unaccompanied in his room with the tape recordings and the $1,200 in cash—thus breaking the chain of custody and putting prosecution in jeopardy. This was a pattern to be repeated during the case until Acosta and Irwin took over.
The next morning, Amer, a man of his word, borrowed his friend’s car, his own having been seized, and drove by himself to McAllen for a meeting with Enrique Flores. He transported the tape recordings and the cash and duly turned them over to Flores, who promptly stored the tainted evidence and never said anything to anyone about it. Amer entered the anti-smuggling office at the McAllen airport, observing from the office window the very same runway he had customarily used to smuggle aliens. Amer sat down and began to tell Flores his life story.
After debriefing Amer, a crestfallen Enrique Flores had to report to Jake Jacobson, regional head, and other directors that the largest air smuggling operation had come crashing down. Ironically, it was now a truly “featherless” operation. Jacobson and Poli Acosta and the entire task force, nevertheless, refused to abandon the Category 1 case. It was decided to empower Flores to strike a deal with Amer.
“Mr. Sultan, we’ve looked up your immigration file… I’m pretty sure we can make a case that you became a legal permanent resident through a fraudulent marriage.”
“No, no, I’m still married . . . I love . . . ”
“Save it! We’ve got the dope on you.”
“Wha . . . but . . . ”
“Look, Sultan, we can forget about that.”
“Yessir?” asked Amer, eyes wide open, hoping for salvation.
“But you gotta cooperate.”
“Cooperate . . . Yessir, cooperate, I want to cooperate.”
“Sultan, I’ve been given authorization to provide you with a way to save yourself from many years in federal prison, after which you’d be denaturalized and deported back to Pakistan. Here’s your get-out-of-jail card, buddy.”
“Yessir, yes?”
“If you agree to work with us on our undercover operation, to assist us in apprehending Maan Singh and testify against him and the others involved, then we are authorized not to prosecute you. You will be able to remain in the United States, live your life and pursue your career as a pilot.”
Amer had no choice. Prison and deportation loomed in front of him if the agency decided to pursue denaturalization because he had paid an americana citizen to marry him on paper only.
“Anything, sir, anything. I’ll do anything!”
They shook hands, then Flores gave him a tape recorder and an induction coil to record phone calls and sent him on his way—again unaccompanied and not surveilled.
Ironically, because of the break in the route of delivery of the aliens, the INS did not get an undercover pilot. Within a week, Maan Singh and his delegates lost confidence in Amer; he was burned as a pilot for Singh and as a confidential informant for the INS. Although Amer would not be able to serve as an undercover informant, his records and testimony would become important later on in the successful completion of the case. More importantly, it was his information that would become the foundation in the hunt for Mann Singh, for in his willingness to avoid prosecution, Amer Sultan provided secret tape recordings he had made, as well as such hard evidence as flight logs and receipts from Maan Singh himself.
CHAPTER 3
Despite any misgivings in McAllen or Dallas or anywhere else in the INS, Poli Acosta and A. J. Irwin were confident there was a way to take down Maan Singh. In August of 1997, A. J. decided to consolidate all that was known about Maan Singh. He started from scratch with Amer’s flight logs from McAllen to Oklahoma City and incorporated faxes, receipts for fuel, Amer’s oral testimony, anything and everything from whatever source to create a composite profile of the most extensive operation of smuggling aliens by air in history. He sent his report to everyone involved in the case, including the El Paso Intelligence Center. Once the report had been circulated and discussed, opinions at the INS were transformed from “we’re screwed” to “we do have a chance.” Jake Jacobson got on the horn and asked A. J. to come strategize at the regional headquarters in Dallas.
“A. J., I need you to fly to McAllen and write up an indictment on Maan Singh by Friday. That way I’ll be able to announce at the National Anti-Smuggling Conference in Colorado Springs in September that I’ve got an indictment for Maan Singh.”
“All right, Jake, but Enrique’s not going to be too happy.”
“I don’t give a fuck what Enrique thinks. I’ll go ahead and call him and his supervisor and tell them to help you with whatever you need to get the indictment and arrest warrant.”
“Okay, I’m on it,” A. J. said, a bright new ring to his voice.
“Talk to clerical and have them arrange the paperwork for your trip.”
That was it. It took A. J. three days, working fourteen hours a day to develop the affidavit using the material he brought with him and the paperwork he found in the McAllen office. A. J. tried to get Enrique to sign the affidavit as the affiant—Enrique was the case agent—but his answer was, “Fuck that. I ain’t putting my name on that.” On that note, A. J. drove an hour from the McAllen airport to the magistrate’s office in Brownsville. On that Thursday, the warrant for Maan Singh’s arrest was issued based on the affidavit. The INS case was sprouting legs. The INS now had an arrest warrant for the most notorious human trafficker ever, but had no plan on how to arrest him, because he was in Ecuador and beyond the reach of the U.S. government. An American arrest warrant was not enforceable in Ecuador, or most foreign countries, plus human smuggling was not an extraditable offense.
When they broke up after the September meeting in Colorado Springs, the agents were encouraged but somewhat perplexed about the relevance of an arrest warrant to extract Maan Singh from Quito. As everyone filed out of the meeting, Poli was lying in wait and approached Chief Patrol Agent Joe Garza, the most powerful Border Patrol official in the South. He convincingly asked him to join them at the hotel lounge, where Matt Yarbrough, the assistant U.S. attorney, and Jake Jacobson, the regional jefe, were expecting them. This was an extremely unconventional group, with Garza who was like an Army general at the Border Patrol, and Yarbrough, who was a wet-behind-the-ears prosecutor and without thinking about putting his career on the line, was getting involved in this risky business. Yarbrough was sticking his neck out, taking a case in the southern district of Texas and bringing it up to Dallas for a RICO prosecution and a wiretap. It just had not been done, much less by a newbie.
Poli grabbed a napkin and
began to sketch out what had been learned so far and offered to take over the investigation and run it out of Dallas.
Yarbrough, who had the authority to effect the transfer of the case, said, “I’ll authorize it, if A. J. Irwin is named the case agent to run it out of Dallas.”
Recently, A. J. had busted all of the Pappas Brothers restaurants in the Dallas area for employing unauthorized workers. A. J. had developed the leads and evidence and indicted the corporation that led to the biggest criminal fine, $1.75 million, for employing smuggled workers. This had turned out to be a very prominent feather in the brand-new assistant U.S. attorney’s cap.
Chief Joe Garza, reluctant to give up the case, answered Yarbrough’s proposal, hoping to at least be involved: “I agree it’s a great case. We’ll assist in any way we can, and I assure you that my troops will participate.”
Poli acquiesced, stating, “That’s great, Joe, as long as Enrique Flores is the case agent in South Texas, but I’ll control foreign operations.”
“That’s good, Joe,” said Yarbrough, remembering the McAllen office’s fumbling, “but A. J. will run the complex issues involved . . . you know, RICO, money-laundering . . . a potential wiretap.”
Everyone agreed and returned to their home offices. A. J. and Poli discussed how to run with the ball while keeping McAllen in the mix.
In October, A. J., Poli and Yarbrough met with Enrique Flores at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas. As the group began to apportion the responsibilities for the various parts of the investigation, Poli informed Flores, “We’re running this baby out of Dallas. You can be co-case agent from McAllen, but I’m directing foreign operations and A. J. will direct the case from Dallas.”
“You guys have fucked me royally! There’s nothing else for me to do here,” Flores announced and got up, went to the door and slammed it as he left.
The Hunt for Maan Singh Page 3