The Hunt for Maan Singh

by Hipólito Acosta

  “I accept your plea of guilty. I find that a factual basis exists for this guilty plea, and I’m scheduling your sentencing for sixty days to give Probation time to do a pre-sentence investigation.”

  Then, the marshals escorted Nick out of the court room as he raised his head, looked around and stared at A. J., Poli, Susan and Marc as he was removed. He would be sentenced to ten years, because he also was convicted of money laundering. This was the longest sentence of the smugglers arrested in the scheme.

  Much information was gleaned from the interviews that could apply to future investigations. But one bit of info was not forthcoming: A. J. asked every defendant, including Nick Díaz, whether he or she knew where Maan Singh was. To a person they denied such knowledge. No one would give up Maan Singh.

  Among the intelligence that was supposed to be derived from the interviews were two objectives: identify money laundering operations and identify the businesses that were paying for the South Asians to be smuggled. These businesses were underwriting the smuggling to gain access to cheap labor, ie., servitude. The team started analyzing all of the pertinent phone calls and the statements given by all of the smuggled aliens and the evidence to achieve these objectives. It took about forty-five days for the task force to assemble lists of perpetrators, under the leadership of Mike Ryan and A. J.

  In a meeting with Mark Reed, Ryan boasted, “We have a thousand businesses we’ve identified. We’ll start sending collateral leads to the other districts immediately.”

  Somehow reading A. J.’s body language or facial expression, Reed asked, “A. J., do you agree with this number?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How many viable leads can we send to these other districts that they can follow-up on?”

  “About one hundred fifty, maybe one hundred seventy-five.”

  “What’s your response, Mike?”

  “Uh, hmm, Mr. Irwin is not privy to the same information as I am. ’Cause I talk to management around the country. Plus, while A. J. was running around South America, I was holed up in the wire room reviewing phone calls and transcripts.”

  This, A. J. knew, was a bald-faced lie.

  “I suggest you two get together,” said Reed, “and come up with a reasonable number. My boss is waiting.”

  On that note, they left the Regional Director’s conference room and silently went down together on the elevator. They each returned to their respective offices without saying a word. But Ryan was red faced, about to split a gasket.

  An hour later, Ryan went to A. J.’s office and calmly asked him to come down the hall to speak to him in his own office.

  “Close the door,” he told A. J., who by now was expecting an ass-chewing.

  “A. J., you’re one of the best agents I’ve ever come across. I’m grateful how you helped me restart my career, BUT, now I understand why no one likes you here in the Dallas office. You’re just not a team player.”

  “Mike, I can’t lie. I promised Mark Reed in the very beginning of this case that I would do it right. I am not going to send a thousand piece-of-shit leads to the field, because you know damn well that when these offices receive leads that don’t pan out, they’re not gonna take our real leads seriously, and the case is gonna fall apart.”

  “Well, you got a point. Okay, then, I need a list on my desk by the end of the week.”

  With that, A.J said, “Okay,” turned and returned to his office.

  Shortly thereafter, the national work-site case was shut down. Ryan led A. J. to believe that it was because the leads were not fresh, and that since A. J. had undermined him in front of the regional director, the agency had “doubts.”

  Sometime later, A. J. was going through the Seek and Keep files and discovered the memo shutting down the operation to pursue businesses. The true reason had been that Mike Ryan and the Dallas management wanted the Dallas office to shine when the press conferences were conducted, so he ordered the field agents in the Dallas region to go out and pick up “wets” at Indian restaurants—aliens who were not subjects of the Seek and Keep operation. When Mike Pearson, the number three man at the INS realized this was “racial profiling,” he ordered a stop to the work-site enforcement. The Keystone Cops had once again made their presence felt. The hundred fifty or so business owners were scott-free and the thousands of aliens they employed or had employed were given a pass.

  Poli and A. J. could not overcome this barrier. Pearson was right, it was racial profiling.

  On the money-laundering front, when permission had been obtained for wire-tapping, the task force had also been given permission for asset forfeiture. Two companies identified in the wiretaps seemed to be important in Gunvantla’s “hawala” set-up. One was called Jack Filled Trading in Canada and the A.R.Y. International in Dubai. The latter had a Bank of America account in New York. Just as the task force had proceeded in the work-site enforcement, it assembled the evidence from the taps and interviews. They also had taken possession of Gunvantla’s ledgers and paperwork when they arrested him. Part of the problem was that much of his scribbling was illegible to the agents, except for the initials “A.R.Y,” scribbled numerous times on the ledgers. After talking to the Canadian Mounties, the task force came to the decision that they could not do much about Jack Filled Trading except give the Mounties the leads. A. J., however, knew that the missing link was Gunvantla Shah. So he had to be interviewed again—this time in prison.

  Therefore, A. J. and Tim “Rico” Tubbs got on a flight to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then drove to Williamsport, where Gunvantla was a guest of the federal penal system. In a small interview room at the prison, A. J. was antsy while waiting for the guards to bring Gunvantla down, when he heard a commotion. He looked down the hallway and saw that Gunvantla, in his mid-sixties and in leg irons, had gotten away from the guards and was running in his direction. Just before reaching A. J., Gunvantla took a dive and embraced A. J.’s legs and kissed his feet.

  “You are my god, you are my god.”

  The guards ran up and stopped. Gunvantla looked up to them and said, “This is my god. It’s him.”

  One of the guards looked at A. J. and said, with a smirk, “So, you’re the god he’s been talking about?”

  All A. J. could do was shrug his shoulders in wonder. Then he bent over and helped Gunvantla up and led him into the interview room.

  After Gunvantla babbled repeatedly, A. J. finally got him to focus. Gunvantla swore to do whatever A. J., his “god,” requested.

  “Gunvantla, I’d like to know about the hawala . . . and how A.R.Y. is involved.”

  Gunvantla started reciting everything that he had written down. He gave account numbers and minute details right off the top of his head. He took his ledger and deciphered wherever A. J. pointed. He explained that A. R. Y. was a gold-trading company in Dubai, and that it was where all of the hawala brokers on the East Coast deposited their money.

  “Millions and millions of dollars go through that account every day.”

  The interview took about three hours, and A. J. and Tubbs left after Gunvantla profusely thanked A. J. for saving him from a life of crime. He also asked that A. J. pray for him and do him a favor: to locate and return some gold jewelry that was part of his daughter’s dowry for her wedding. A. J. acceded and eventually was able to have it returned.

  The next day back in Dallas, A. J. and Tubbs worked with Marc Sanders on a grand jury subpoena for the account at the Bank of America in New York. Within a week’s time they had obtained the account records for the previous twelve months. Gunvantla had been right: there were millions of dollars in the account. The records confirmed that every day the bank was emptied. So at the appropriate time, the task force was going to be able to seize millions of dollars. Matt Yarbrough contacted the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and gave A. J. the go-ahead to draw up the seizure warrant for the bank account. It was done in a couple of days, and Matt faxed it to New York. The following week, Marc Sanders, Matt and A. J. flew to New York, because
A. J. as the affiant had to swear to the warrant.

  All went as planned and four o’clock was too late to serve the warrant. The team decided to wait until the next morning, so they could get all the money before the account was dumped. Over dinner and drinks, Marc and Matt convinced A. J that the best time to serve the warrant would be at 10 am, when the account had the most money, according to the records. A. J. agreed, with millions of dollar signs in his eyes. That night, they called the corporate security office and set up a meeting at the main branch on Fifth Avenue at 9:30 am.

  The next morning, the security officer was late and it took time to explain everything to him.

  “Give me a minute,” he said, “I’ve got to take it to the bank manager and to legal.”

  “How long? ” A. J asked getting impatient.

  “Not long. They see these all the time. It won’t take them long to approve it.”

  He was gone about forty-five minutes, and A. J. and Marc were left to hang around the bank lobby.

  At about 11 am, the corporate security man returned, holding some documents, and announced, “It’s done. But the account was dumped before you served the warrant.”

  “Fuck!” There was no other way for A. J. to react.

  “How do you want your money?” the security man continued.

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “There was still $250,000 in the account.”

  “Cashier’s check,” answered A. J., composing himself somewhat.

  It was that A. J. had not factored in the time difference from New York to Dubai. He slapped himself and called it “first-world arrogance,” thinking that the whole world was on U.S. time. For the seizure to have had full impact, the warrant would have had to be served the previous day at 5 pm, when the account was full. That’s when the account would have had $4 million.

  It was an oh-well moment. They were still the first INS agents to ever seize a hawala account. They had lived up to their promise to Mark Reed to take down a money laundering scheme.

  Nonetheless, all of the objectives, except taking down Maan Singh, had been met. The task force was ended and all agents were re-assigned or returned to their usual duties.

  CHAPTER 14

  After Seek and Keep was terminated in November of 1998, Poli was promoted to district director in Mexico City, a district which included all of Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Beyond his regular duties, Poli made it his mission to follow up on the revelations that came out of Seek and Keep. Soon, alien smugglers throughout Mexico and Central America were falling so fast that the INS and the DOJ had to dedicate a prosecutor out of DC just to handle the cases generated out of the Mexico district. The U.S. attorney’s office in DC began to accept international smuggling cases from the INS for the first time in its history; they were finally going after smugglers headquartered beyond the borders of the United States. As a result, non-citizens were expelled from countries as undesirable, placed on flights destined to their countries of origin often with a stop in Miami or Puerto Rico where U.S. federal arrest warrants could be served for outstanding violations.

  By the time Poli had finished his career in Mexico City, more than one hundred human smugglers based outside the United States had been brought to justice and convicted. One of the noteworthy cases Poli spearheaded was the interdiction of a ship disembarking 200 Chinese in Guatemala in route to the United States. It was the first of such operations that would prosecute and convict in a federal court in DC smugglers and “snakeheads,” the lead smugglers, who actually had not set foot on U.S. soil. In another case, “Operation Crossroads,” Poli organized an interdiction collaborating with twelve different countries to intercept 7,981 migrants before they ever reached the U.S. border, all during a twenty-day period and costing the U.S. government a grand total of $639,000, much less than the millions of dollars it usually took to run a large operation at the border. Many of the smugglers who could not be prosecuted in the United States, were convicted in the transit countries: some 75 convictions for human smuggling and narcotics.

  As INS director of the Mexico and Central America region, Poli could remedy one of the failures of Seek and Keep. The INS had authorized bringing to Dallas Carlos Martínez, who had done so much for the case. But he was given just $5000 and left to flounder without a job. He, nevertheless, remained at the beck and call of the agency to testify in the punishment phase and as a consultant to fill in the gaps of Seek and Keep. For his service, he received some $12,000 for living expenses over a period of six months. Aware of Carlos’ problems, in 2000 Poli sent a memorandum to DC proposing a $35,000 reward to Carlos.

  Feeling like a fish out of water, Carlos decided to return to Ecuador; never having had to testify at trial because of all the guilty pleas, he felt that his cover had not been blown. It would be safe, he and his wife concluded, and the whole family returned to Quito. With the cash that Poli authorized in the family account, Carlos was able to establish an export business in Quito and even start his own soccer team.

  While still in Dallas and later in Ecuador, however, Babaco continued to serve as a confidential informant and travel undercover to Central America. Once again, he became very useful in identifying other smugglers. All the while, A. J. and Poli reminded Carlos to find the whereabouts of Maan Singh.

  The prosecution phase of Seek and Keep lasted until July of 1999, and A. J. and Susan continued to work out of the task force office in Dallas, closing reports, inventorying and sealing all the evidence and following up with the Federal Records Center. While organizing and sifting through the evidence that had been generated, A. J. and Susan had an unwelcome surprise: there were funds in the Seek and Keep account that had not been accounted for. The supervisory special agent in charge of funds seized from smuggling operations began investigating A. J. for fraudulently seizing money that should not have been taken by Seek and Keep. When she reported her accusation to the higher-ups, a six-month investigation ensued that, however, concluded that A. J. had nothing to do with the “fraudulent” seizure, that in fact it had been Mike Ryan who authorized recovering the money from the earlier “Operation Featherless” and placing it in the Seek and Keep account in order to inflate statistics of success for his group’s part of the operation. Regardless of this finding, Ryan received a promotion to assistant district director out of a major city, while A. J. was pegged for the rest of his career at the INS as having mishandled that money.

  Otherwise, in the year 2000, A. J. was promoted to anti-smuggling coordinator for the Central Region of the United States. A. J. had become the acknowledged expert in running undercover operations and was able to assist Poli in all of his international smuggling cases. A. J. would help Poli’s agents write their requests for undercover operations and otherwise serve as a consultant. A. J. was repeatedly sent to headquarters as an advisor, but inevitably ended up running the operations. Such was A. J.’s life until September 11, 2001. That’s when he became the Joint Terrorism Task Force Coordinator for the central United States. He set up the command center in the regional office and worked directly with headquarters’ National Security Unit. On a daily basis, he received classified leads and intelligence and would send FBI and other agents to follow up the leads throughout the region. The job responsibilities grew so that A. J. was on the road most of the time working to maintain the communications that were non-existent among agencies leading up to 9/11. A. J. was involved in most of the significant arrests that came out of the 9/11 investigations. Among the duties that befell him was the writing of the counter-terrorism operational plan for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002.

  In May of 2000, A. J. gave Poli a call to ask advice on his current quandary, dealing with Isan Chaudry, Nick Díaz’s right-hand man. After a prison term of eighteen months, he had been turned over to the INS for deportation to his native India. Despite having his wife and children in India, he had no interest in returning there; he wanted Ecuador to be his home. Stuck in the long deportation proces
s, he began speaking to A. J. who, as anti-smuggling coordinator for the region, could help him.

  “Hey, Poli, Isan Chaudry keeps calling me, wanting to tell me things. He’s in the detention camp in El Paso. Maybe he’s got some good info.”

  “Why don’t you call the anti-smuggling unit in El Paso?”

  “I did, and they’re a bunch of lazy motherfuckers, and they’d screw it up anyway.”

  “Look, I’m gonna be there in a couple of days for my son’s graduation from the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit. I can go over to see Isan.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  At the detention camp, Poli easily got access to Chaudry. He walked into the secured area of the camp with cans of soda for both. On seeing Poli, Chaudry wanted to hug Poli.

  “Oh, Mr. Poli, how are you? Thank you so much for coming!”

  Seeing Chaudry advance, the guards quickly moved to protect Poli, a high-level director. But Poli waved them off, saying, “It’s okay, no worries.”

  “Mr. Poli, I need your help. I can’t go back to India. If I go there, I will be killed.”

  “Really?!”

  “If you help me go back to Ecuador, I will work for you and Mr. A. J. forever.”

  “I’ll speak to A. J., and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Please, please, please, help me, and I will do anything.”

  “Can you find Maan Singh?”

  “Yes, I will, and many more.”

  As soon as he could, Poli called A. J. to report on the meeting.

  “A. J., the guy wants to go back to Ecuador. He wants to help us out.”

  “Well, why not? It can’t hurt us. He knows everybody. Let’s see what he can do for us.”

  The next day, Poli contacted the director of deportations and started the paperwork to get Chaudry back to Ecuador. That’s when “007” was born, the undercover code A. J. gave Chaudry.

  With Chaudry in place as an undercover agent in Ecuador, A. J. began working with Carlos Martínez on Margarita, who had recently been released from serving seven months in a California prison.