Reluctantly, A. J. allowed Matt’s secretary to escort him to the conference room. He was livid. Five minutes later, Matt popped in and handed A. J. a note and walked away. The note was summarizing Avery’s report on Babaco’s activities. A few minutes later, Matt showed up again, with more noted activities of Babaco, all of which was familiar to A. J., who had his own report handy.
The next time, Matt came in, A. J. announced, “Matt, Avery’s guy, he’s ‘George,’ he’s Kaddafi. And I’ve reported in-depth about Kaddafi’s activities and the Syrians. It’s right here in black and white in my own report.”
“Are you sure?” asked Matt.
“Of course. Here, take my reports in there.”
Matt took a few minutes to read the reports and then said, “Those stupid motherfuckers!” And then, “Thank you, A. J., I knew all along you’d figure this out and come through for us.”
Matt turned around and left the conference room with the reports under his arm.
“What the fuck were you guys thinking?” asked Matt as he entered.
“Wha . . . what d’you mean,” asked Ryan.
Matt proceeded to chew Avery and Ryan out royally for creating evidence that Matt would be obligated to turn over to the defense. Plus, Kaddafi was going to get a free pass, having been hired as a C.I. by Avery, even if the hiring was unauthorized. And Matt, regretfully, had to remove Kaddafi from the indictment that was being prepared.
Matt looked Avery in the eye and said, “Turn all the material you have over to A. J. Henceforth, George or Kaddafi or whatever other name he’s using is going to be A. J.’s C. I. And get your ass back to Quito. I don’t want to hear from you again unless it’s about your retirement party.”
Crestfallen, Avery and Ryan pushed themselves up from their chairs, hesitantly offering to shake hands with Poli and Matt, a gesture that was wasted as they ignored the culprits and went into the hall to meet A. J.
Avery kept his eyes to the ground as he left the meeting and refused to look at Poli as he quickly went down the hall with his tail between his legs.
Matt, came up to A. J., laughing, and said, “The shit you get me involved in, A. J. . . . ”
“But, Matt, don’t you remember? You’re the one who asked for me to get on this case.”
“Yeah, yeah . . . ”
“But I tell you what. Those two guys better not go down any dark alleys if I’m anywhere in the neighborhood,” warned A. J.
“Down, boy, down.”
Poli and A. J. thought that was the end of it: Kaddafi and the Syrians, that was enough. The task force took the case down and arrested all of the perpetrators within reach. While preparing for the trial, the group had to make a sudden stop. It seems that Mike Ryan had run into Henry Astor Jacobs, A. J.’s supervisor, at LaGuardia Airport in New York and took the opportunity to inform him that A. J. had erased certain recording tapes from the wiretap he had conducted and, that these tapes revealed that some of the Syrians in the undercover operation were terrorists. If the terrorism was known, the operation would have been shut down. Jacobs then mentioned this to an underling, George Smith, someone who had lost an EEOC complaint to A. J., and was still smarting from being outed as a racist. Smith contacted Internal Affairs and made a formal allegation. He even marched into Rose Romero’s office, Chief of the Criminal Division for the U.S. Attorney in the northern district of Texas, and demanded to conduct the Internal Affairs interviews and investigations themselves, which was completely illegal, because they “could not trust anybody, that there was a cover-up.” After getting nowhere with Ms. Romero, they approached Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s office and they referred the allegation to the Department of Justice. At the DOJ, it was obvious that the allegation was spurious as the wiretap specialists reviewed it. But the smear had legs of its own and would come to surface once again during the case.
Because of the initial referral to Internal Affairs, A. J. was forced to undergo six telephone interviews with Internal Affairs, followed by another face-to-face interview in the regional director’s office. Because the investigator for Internal Affairs had never worked a wiretap before, A. J. spent two hours detailing how they were conducted and what the chain of custody had to be, including sealing the tapes with evidence tape and delivering them to the federal judge for safe keeping. Even more ludicrous was that the investigator did not know how to work the tape recorder to interview A. J., messed the tape up and A. J. had to go back down to the task force office to get a clean tape, sort of providing a rope for his own lynching. Finally with A. J. working the tape for his own interview, he explained that some 30,000 phone calls had been tapped during the operation and that more than 95% of them were spoken in Gujurati, Punjab and other languages that were completely unknown to him. Even if he had wanted to pick out tapes to erase, he would not have known which ones. After the interview, the allegation lingered for a month and a half and, finally, the investigator called A. J. to report to him that the case had been closed.
“Thank you not only for your cooperation, but also for being a gentleman during the process,” he said.
“Does that mean I can go and kick Smith’s ass now?” A. J. joked.
“Um, I’ll leave that to your better judgment.”
It is no wonder that Ryan allowed himself to be pulled into the spurious allegations against Poli and A. J. Ryan, generally, did not focus on anything except his own need for survival and advancement at the agency. The very person who supposedly was reading and had, in fact, signed off on Poli’s and A. J.’s, reports, which were filled with details about “Fernando” and “Andrés,” on another occasion set off alarms that were false.
Sitting in his office, preparing another report, A. J. looked up surprised as Ryan burst in and said, “We gotta go see Jim Bailey, right now, down in Intelligence.”
“What’s it about, Mike?”
“I can’t tell you right now. It’s hot . . . and it’s sensitive. We need to get down there right now, to Intelligence.”
Ryan turned and started a trot to the elevator and was followed by a curious A. J. Without a doubt, he thought he was going to break Seek and Keep again. They went up to the sixth floor, and there was Jim Bailey waiting for them at the door.
Jim shook their hands, looked up and down the hallway to make sure no one was watching. He turned and headed to his office, saying, “Come on in, guys.”
On entering his filthy office, he stuck his head out before closing the door to make sure they weren’t followed. Piles of paper, six or seven dirty coffee cups, nothing in its rightful place. Mike and A. J. sat down on the couch facing Jim’s desk and could barely see him over the stacks of paper.
Bailey put his reading glasses on and peered over them at the agents and said, “This is the goddamnest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s fresh intel. I just got it and I immediately called you, Mike, and briefed you.”
“Yessir,” said Mike.
Jim started digging through the refuse on his desk and seemed to misplace what he was looking for. Finally, he announced, “I’ve got it!”
He reached over his desk and handed two pages to Ryan, where upon Mike read beyond all the names listed on the memo and read the meaningful paragraph. “This is good shit,” Ryan judged. “This is right where we’re working. This is going to blow our case wide open.” Ryan next handed the memo to A. J.
So A. J. turned to Ryan and then to Bailey and said, “Am I cleared to read this, ’cause I don’t want you fuckers blowing me into Internal Affairs again.”
Ryan laughed but Bailey yelled, “Just read the damn thing!”
“A trustworthy source indicates that an alien smuggling organization run by Fernando, last name unknown, and Andrés, possibly Martínez, are operating a smuggling scheme using American Airlines from Quito, Ecuador, to Miami, Florida. Fernando is Mexican, possibly from the border area; Andrés may have ties to Dallas,” stated to memo.
A wide smile appeared on A. J.’s face, he lifted his eyes and said, “Is
this a joke?”
Both Bailey and Ryan stared at A. J. with a scowl. They were dead serious and definitely not joking.
“Don’t you even know what’s going on in your own back yard?” Bailey asked A. J.
Mike next asked, “Have we received any telephone calls on our wiretap talking about Fernando or Andrés?”
Sitting up erect on the couch, almost jumping out of his pants, A. J. said, “Mike, Poli is Fernando, and I’m Andrés. That’s our operation they’re talking about!!!”
So Jim chastised, “Pay attention, A. J.! This is from the goddamn C.I.A.”
“Pay attention, Jim: Poli is Fernando and I’m Andrés . . . and this is our operation targeting Mann Singh. This is Seek and Keep.”
They both sat back and sighed, and Ryan stood up and said, “Thank you, sir, I’m glad to know that our intelligence agencies are staying on top of this.”
CHAPTER 9
Following reports by the task force, headquarters decided that a plan had to be developed for arresting the entire group of smugglers and money launderers. All of the evidence, including transcripts of wiretaps and video tapes, were re-analyzed, and some 35,000 intercepted calls were to be studied as well. Next was finalizing the indictments and, as they were drawn up, a plan was outlined for arresting each individual and figuring out where they were located and if they could be expelled from a friendly country, etc. The task force also had to locate every single alien they had smuggled in through the undercover operation, as promised to the Undercover Committee. Each alien would represent a count in the indictment and would lead, potentially, to greater time being served by those found guilty. But more than anything, the aliens were needed in order to convict the smugglers. The aliens were the evidence. Also, in the initial plan, the employers of the aliens were to be identified and they would be subject to criminal violations and civil penalties. The plan would be far-reaching, because more than thirty individuals had been identified as potential defendants.
First up on the agenda was taking down Nick Díaz, the Caribbean kingpin. The arrogant Nittin Shetty, aka Nick Díaz, had pulled himself up from humble beginnings. Born in Bombay, India, in 1969, he left his family at the age of fourteen and migrated to Syria, where he got a job as a dishwasher on a Greek freighter. During his three eleven-month tours on the ship, he became fluent in Greek and rose to the position of navigator. This talent for learning languages, now including Arabic and Greek, would serve him well in his rise in “international trade.” The ambitious Shetty became dissatisfied with the low pay as a seaman without credentials and by 1989 became involved with some cousins in smuggling gold in India and the Middle East. By 1992, Shetty had developed his own specialty in counterfeiting visas and smuggling Indians to New York via cruise ships. In 1993, under an attempted murder accusation and his putative involvement in Muslim terrorist activities, despite Shetty being a Hindu, Shetty forged an Indian passport for himself to get out of the country. He chose the name of “Nick Díaz,” purportedly because of the Portuguese influence in East India. Nick Díaz left India and toured the Caribbean islands, from Cuba to Curaçao, hoping to eventually make his way into the United States. In Curaçao, he met a woman who directed him to a smuggler in Quito, Ecuador: Gloria Canales. And that was when Nick Díaz became involved in the smuggling of South Asians, as Canales needed someone knowledgeable in the languages of India who could facilitate the travel of her clients through Ecuador and Colombia to points north. Díaz became intimately acquainted with the routes used by human traffickers up through all of Central America and Mexico, developing fluency in Spanish along the way. At one point, he was even apprehended by the Border Patrol in Arizona. By 1995, Díaz had learned of the existence in Quito, Ecuador, of a large operation smuggling South Asians. He traveled to Quito, refreshed his relationship with Gloria Canales and consciously studied the human trafficking business from there. By 1996, Díaz had discovered he could smuggle South Asians from Quito to the Bahamas, because they did not need a visa to enter the Bahamas, and from there to the United States. Soon, Díaz developed contacts in Cuba as well as with a host of corrupt customs officials and immigration officers all along the route he was to develop, including into South Florida. Practically overnight, many of these officials were receiving regular bribes from Díaz. His entrepreneurship practically knew no limits. By 1997, his web of contacts and routes expanded from a network of agents in India to Russia, Cuba, South and Central America, even Canada, in transporting aliens to the United States. Because of his business acumen, Díaz also began moving aliens for Maan Singh. By 1998, the business had grown so large that transferring money became a problem, and Díaz enlisted the services of Gunvantla Shah in North Bergen, New Jersey, in order to pay the agents in India and elsewhere. It was in 1998 that an acquaintance from India, Abdul Farooqi (aka “Gulu”), who was originally a passenger to be smuggled into the United States and who spoke Hindi and English fluently, offered to help Díaz and soon became his right-hand-man.
To effect the arrest of Díaz and his lieutenant Gulu, the duo had to be expelled from the Bahamas, foreign soil, and arrested in the United States or some other friendly territory. The Bahamas itself, while being a popular U.S. tourist destination, was not “friendly” in that the Bahamian police and other authorities were riddled with corruption and, without a doubt, figured prominently on Díaz’s pay-off list. The other difficulty in working on foreign soil for the INS was that any such expulsion of criminals would have to be arranged with permission from and through the national and local authorities, as well as approved by the U.S. embassy.
When Poli, A. J. and Susan returned to the Bahamas to arrange for the expulsion of Díaz and Gulu, it was imperative that Poli as “Fernando” and his girlfriend continue meeting with Díaz to discuss business. Under no circumstances was Poli or Susan to be seen anywhere near the American or Bahamian authorities in order to not blow their cover. That only left A. J. to carry out the diplomacy necessary to enlist the service of the U.S. ambassador and the highest official within reach in the Bahamian hierarchy.
The self-deprecating A. J., who had never moved among the elite of any country, thus set up a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Sydney Williams, who introduced his Deputy Chief of Mission, a beautiful African American woman by the name of Pamela Bridgewater to assist him in meeting the Bahamian minister of foreign affairs and other authorities to state his case. Bridgewater hit the phones and was successful at setting up an appointment, and soon the couple was on their way to meet her. A. J. called Poli at the hotel to update him. All Poli said was, “Don’t fuck it up!”
On the way over to the palace of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the DCM gave A. J. a crash course on diplomatic protocol. All A. J. could think of during the briefing was, “Don’t give her a big kiss, no tongue, and don’t drop any ‘f’ bombs.” Luckily, A. J. had shaved and showered and was wearing a tie and dress shirt he had bought locally, once his diplomatic role had been set. He, nevertheless, was worried that he did not have a dark suit to wear to meet the third most important official in the Bahamian government, not to mention his recent interview with the U.S. ambassador.
As they approached the palace, their embassy car passed through security gates guarded by armed military personnel and then headed up a long drive. The car stopped in front of a long set of marble stairs and guards examined the underside of the vehicle using an extended pole with a mirror on the end of it. A. J. and the DCM exited the car and began climbing the stairs of a building that seemed to A. J. like Graceland, but more British, more palatial. They were greeted at the top by a gentleman who was very proper and neatly dressed. He escorted them to a beautiful receiving room and, of course, he asked if they would like a refreshment. This was one of those moments A. J. had been briefed on: “Don’t ask for a Bud Light. Don’t ask for a Bud Light,” kept echoing in his mind. He was wise enough to follow the lead of the DCM and politely said no, thank you, even though he really did want a cup of coffee or a glass of water. The D
CM continued to brief A. J. on etiquette and protocol, and within minutes the same gentleman appeared and escorted them to another room, which was similar but bigger. He announced that the minister would be with them in a few minutes. Sure enough, in a few minutes, she appeared. She was a short elegant lady, probably in her late fifties, and to A. J. her demeanor seemed regal and very confident. The DCM introduced A. J. and told the minister a little bit about why she had asked for the meeting. She then turned to A. J. Despite his discomfort, the story he told just flowed out. The minister gave A. J. her undivided attention, asked for details without rushing him. She seemed sincere and truly caring about the criminal activities marring her country’s reputation. A. J. mentioned Nick Díaz and Gulu by name, explaining that they were two of the biggest human traffickers operating in the Western Hemisphere.
All was going better than expected until the minister threw A. J. a big slow curve ball when she asked why the smugglers decided to operate in the Bahamas. A. J. could see the DCM rolling her eyes in warning.
“Well, Minister, ma’am, the Bahamas is perfectly located to get the aliens into Florida,” A. J. responded to avoid mentioning the official corruption that protected criminal activity.
But the minister was too savvy and asked, “Are any Bahamian officials complicit in the scheme?”
“Well, Madame Minister, someone in the government has to know about it, may be assisting Nick Díaz. It’d be hard for someone like him to operate here completely unnoticed.”
“Hmm, not good.”
“My team will give you a full report, when this is all done,” promised A. J.
“Thank you so much for your work, and that of your whole team. I’m so glad you came to me. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
“Madame Minister, in fact, there is something. . . . We need to arrange for their expulsion and rendition to the United States.”
The Hunt for Maan Singh Page 10