I listened to the real-time radio chatter of the FBI surveillance team. To our dismay, the team lost sight of the ransom payment. The kidnappers had called the relative who was dropping off the cash, carefully instructed him to park behind a big-box store next to a sheet metal fence, and then had him walk from his vehicle through a narrow opening in the fence to deliver the cash. Our agents not only did not have visibility behind the store, but they had absolutely no way of observing what was happening behind the fence. The subjects grabbed the cash and left the relative empty-handed. As they fled, the signal from the transmitter in the bag grew faint and quickly died, leaving the FBI and therefore me in a horrible position of telling the victim’s spouse that we lost the signal, lost the cash, and lost our best chance to rescue her husband. This definitely ranked as one of my lowest moments of being an FBI agent.
All available agents were instructed to head to the drop-off area as quickly as possible and to fan out while listening to our radios for the transponder signal. There would be a “beep” that could be heard on one of our encrypted radio channels, and as the transmitter got closer the frequency of beeps would increase. At this point there were probably twenty vehicles being driven by FBI agents who were desperately circling around the area. I knew that agents were crossing paths and had saturated a several square mile area, so I decided to take a different approach and head to roads that are directly on the border. If the kidnappers were attempting to flee the United States, I figured I might be able to pick up a signal before they could leave the country, in time to intercept them. I drove around a couple of hours on back roads that were unfamiliar. I wound up at the Border Field State Park, on the coast of California, on the border directly between San Diego and Tijuana. It was a beautiful but ominous location. There was a wall of giant metal beams erected in the sand to divide the United States and Mexico. Seeing the columns that looked like gigantic vertical jail bars was a striking and sad sight. It made me hope that one day the violence and poverty in Mexico will die down to a level at which the United States can truly embrace our neighbors to the south without fear of damaging our own country.
Although I had no luck picking up the signal, I finally heard the news come over my radio that the signal had almost miraculously been located, and that the surveillance team had determined which vehicle the signal was coming from. The surveillance team followed this vehicle and driver to various locations, including shopping malls. All of the agents stayed in the nearby vicinity of the subject’s vehicle; little did the public know that scores of FBI agents were flooding the roads in Chula Vista on that sunny afternoon.
Finally, FBI agents followed the subject’s vehicle to a residence. The subject parked the vehicle and disappeared into the house, which we hoped would contain additional kidnappers and the kidnap victim. Since there had been other kidnap victims reported under very similar circumstances, we all knew that this house could hold the key to solving a number of other unsolved kidnapping investigations. Other subjects were spotted entering and leaving the house; the FBI did not know the identities of these people, but we had to assume that they were part of the kidnapping conspiracy. We would have loved to continue surveillance for several days, which would have allowed us to identify as many parties involved with the kidnapping as possible. We could have tracked their movements, locations, and potentially, even their associations with other criminals. However, we knew that time was of the essence for the victim, assuming he was still alive, and that since the ransom had been paid, we needed to act immediately in case the kidnappers planned to kill him.
As vehicles left the house, the FBI SWAT team members, who had split into several smaller groups, pulled over and arrested the drivers when they were out of visual and audible range from the house. I assisted with one of these arrests, which was fun to watch. A couple of hulking dark Chevy Suburbans blocked the street and FBI SWAT members in full tactical gear ran up to the vehicle with assault rifles pointed at the driver. They were yelling commands and all were ready to engage in battle if needed. The driver wisely followed commands, turned off the engine, put his hands in the air, and completely surrendered to the arresting agents. This arrest occurred at an intersection in a busy street, so I popped my strobe lights on, jumped out of the car, and started directing traffic around the scene. I tried to keep a straight face but my excitement overwhelmed me, and I could not help myself from mentally replaying the Leslie Nielsen line from Naked Gun, “Nothing to see here, move along, move along,” as he ushers along onlookers who are gawking at fireworks plant exploding in the background. This was not quite a fireworks show, but it was probably more law enforcement action that these drivers had ever seen. FBI SWAT made several other arrests, which made for an unusually productive day for that group. Like a pack of dogs that have been trained and are finally released for a hunt, the SWAT team members clearly were enjoying their line of work on that occasion.
The FBI generally discourages agents from dynamically entering (or “storming”) houses. The risk to agents, victims, and subjects dramatically increases when agents must venture into an unknown structure. However, for the safety of the victim, the decision was made to proceed with dynamically entering the house. I listened breathlessly on my radio as I heard the tactical “execute” command, signaling agents to move in. As the team hit the house from the front, a subject emerged from the back of the house and took off on foot. An FBI sniper was watching this activity through his scope from several hundred yards away. Rather than allowing the subject to escape, the agent sprinted to the house, took off in the direction that the subject had gone, and ran him down. While this tactic is not encouraged by the FBI, nobody was second guessing the decision when he marched the subject in handcuffs back to the scene. With a wide grin, his pride in safely apprehending the subject was apparent. For me, this was just another example of how FBI agents risk their lives to protect others. FBI SWAT team members are no joke.
Upon entering the house, the SWAT team located a young man wearing handcuffs; he claimed to be a kidnap victim. After further searching the house, the team found another person in handcuffs in a closet; he appeared to be in worse physical condition than the original victim they had encountered. After interviewing both people, agents determined that the first one found was actually the primary kidnapper, who was only pretending to be a victim in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. This cowardly act and blatant lie did not surprise anyone; agents are trained always to question what they are told. I put my set of handcuffs on the kidnapping subject, and removed the other set of handcuffs that belonged to the kidnapper, to be held as evidence. A search revealed cash in his pocket, and a later comparison of serial numbers revealed a match to one of the photos I had taken of the ransom money. There was no doubt that this was the kidnapper.
As the sun went down and evening began, I saw exhaustion on the faces of the agents at the scene. I knew that all of us had a long night ahead of us for gathering evidence, conducting interviews, and handling the arrested subjects. For several hours I was responsible for the custody of the kidnapper. While radioing back to personnel in the office, I learned that he was believed to be responsible for numerous other kidnappings and killings, including gruesome murders which had resulted in discovery of bodies with severed heads found in trunks. These were killings that we were aware of in the United States; we had no idea how many other victims had died at his hands in Mexico. I was disgusted with this person, but I attempted some conversation with him, hoping he would open up and admit to his crimes. He pretended that he had no idea what was going on; he claimed to be completely puzzled about why he had been arrested. I merely responded with, “Ok, good luck with that line of defense.” He later asked if I could remove his handcuffs, which I had used to restrain him with his hands behind his back per FBI policy, and allow him to be re-cuffed with his hands in front so he would be more comfortable. I did not even respond to his question. I was tem
pted to tighten up the cuffs and ask him how it felt, but I maintained my professionalism. But the fact that many deaths were on his hands and that he had just held and tortured a kidnapped man for over a week never strayed from my mind. I looked forward to seeing the wheels of justice crush this sick, evil individual.
The subjects and victim were all finally taken to the San Diego Police Department headquarters. I got to spend many hours with the victim at SDPD, and despite his history of criminal involvement, he seemed like a relatively ordinary guy. We found that we shared a common love of off-road motor sports; he was a former Baja trophy truck driver and had previously raced motocross. As I had seen before, being able to establish a normal conversation with this person paid off. After a couple of hours he opened up to me that he had been involved with some illegal dealings that were what ultimately put him in this position, and he vowed to come clean and help the FBI to understand more about how the criminal organizations, or drug cartels, that he was aware of operate. He was truly grateful for his life being saved and at that moment I believe that he was sincere in his comments, although I did not expect him to incriminate himself or further elaborate on illegal activities that he was directly involved in.
Part of the evening’s duties were to photograph and document the injuries that the victim had sustained while being held. He not only had painful marks where handcuffs had restrained him, but also he had a number of bruises and scratch marks from being repeatedly hit with an electric stun-gun. There was no question that he had effectively been tortured by the kidnappers. This further showed me how lucky he was just to be alive, let alone able to walk and with all of his limbs and fingers intact. But I also knew that even if the damage to his skin healed in a few weeks, the mental toll of being captured and tortured could stay with him for life.
In the meantime, the victim’s wife was notified that her husband was alive and safe, but that he was still being held at SDPD to be questioned about the kidnapping events. The victim and his wife owned a restaurant in Mexico, and that night someone fired into the building with a machine gun. I would later learn that two people had been killed at the restaurant, and somebody left barrels of acid that had been used to get rid of dead bodies. The victim wound up having to shut down his restaurant. My brain conjured images of another horrible scene that would have fit right into the movie Traffic. The risk of violence and retaliation against the victim for working with the FBI was so dangerous that the San Diego Police Department stationed officers with machine guns around the San Diego Police Department building. There was a great possibility of retaliation from the drug cartel members against the victim and his associates, and United States law enforcement was now in a position to be caught right in the middle of that violence. Around that time, I would typically see an article about once per week with a horrible story about Mexican law enforcement officials being shot and killed in gun battles. Suddenly, the likelihood of a similar scenario playing out on our side of the border seemed to be a real possibility.
Finally, as of that Sunday morning around 7:00 a.m., we were finally finished with interviewing the victim, and we were ready to head to a hotel at an undisclosed location for the victim to be reunited with his wife. My partner and I drove out of the SDPD building garage with the victim in the back seat. We had our eyes open and were ready to draw our guns in an instant if we were attacked, but luckily we never had to remove our guns from our holsters. But every car that drove by us caused me to have concern, and I kept imagining armed men rolling down their windows and opening fire on us. We arrived safely at the hotel, and walked with the victim into the lobby. After saying our goodbyes and hearing a final round of sincere thanks from the victim and his family, we departed and finally were heading back to our homes to get some much needed sleep.
Over the next couple of days, starting with later that Sunday afternoon, we worked with other agents to piece together what had happened and to write our reports. We found out that the victim had been lured to a house by a young and attractive woman, but instead of finding her there alone, he found himself in a nest of kidnappers. The kidnapping group had used the same method to capture dozens of others, and most of those victims had ultimately been tortured and killed. In another life-imitating-art style twist, the primary kidnapper, whom I had to babysit after his arrest turned out to be gay, just like the assassin in the movie Traffic. He was thin, healthy, and at times even personable. Yet he was a cold-blooded killer operating on United States soil. As previously mentioned, the Mexican drug war has claimed tens of thousands of lives. If the United States does not invest significant resources to combat similar drug related violence here in our country, I fear that we will eventually suffer a fate similar to Mexico’s.
CHAPTER 44
White Collar, Cyber, and Violent Crime
While I tended to violent criminal matters on a daily basis, I did my best to supplement my FBI experience with white-collar and cyber-crime, exposure which I thoroughly enjoyed. One of the white-collar crime cases that I was exposed to began in the form of a phone call to me at 4:00 a.m. on an early Saturday morning. I had just began a weekly cycle of being the designated after-hours duty agent, which meant that for a week I would receive all after-hours calls to the FBI in San Diego. The call began as a reported kidnapping, which was my area of expertise. However, the core elements of the crime wound up being linked to a group of criminals who were performing mortgage fraud. A disagreement over unpaid money between criminal partners had resulted in a kidnapping; the victim (who was also involved with fraudulent mortgage schemes) was taken to Mexico, but he had escaped. However, attempting to enter the United States, he had been caught by the Customs and Border Patrol agents, at which point the FBI was called in. Although it was not even 5:00 a.m., I began to get dressed and headed towards the border to start piecing together the details.
After a whirlwind of interviews and arrests related to the kidnapping, I was able to piece together an elaborate criminal conspiracy that involved getting straw buyers to purchase flipped houses at prices that were greatly over the actual home value. These phony buyers would take out fraudulent loans for the entire inflated home value amount and purchase the home from crooked sellers. The sellers would then have a gigantic amount of cash from the sale that they would split with the buyers. These homes would then be abandoned, and the straw buyers would just take a hit on their credit; this downside did not outweigh the tens of thousands of dollars they would gain on one fraudulent real estate transaction. The crooked sellers would not have appeared to have broken any laws, which provided a relatively low-risk and high-reward scheme. It was obvious that these criminals had performed this scam multiple times, easily resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of fraud. On a national level, this type of fraud was likely in the billions annually, and played a part in the financial crisis that plagued the United States around that time. However, after talking with a white collar crime supervisor in the FBI, I learned that if I did not have direct evidence that clearly showed a crime of seven figures, the FBI did not have the resources to investigate. This was infuriating, although I understood the limited resources constraint all too well. A criminal could rob a bank and nab $800 in cash and have dozens of agents and police hunting him down, but $800,000 in mortgage fraud did not even merit the opening of a formal investigation. This was frustrating and eye-opening, and helped me to see that the grass would not be much greener (or more satisfying) working white collar or cybercrime.
The subjects, including an older “wise guy” from the East Coast who seemed straight out of The Sopranos, spent eight months in jail awaiting trial. Since I was the case agent and had been present during most of the events that made the case, I wound up testifying at length in preliminary hearings, which were held prior to the actual trial. The preliminary hearing allowed attorneys to learn more about the opposing side’s case and often would help both sides reach a plea agreement
and avoid the expense and uncertainty of a full trial.
I found testifying to be one of the most taxing duties that I had during my time in the FBI. For this case, I had to testify for approximately two hours straight, covering elements of the crime, which spanned multiple locations, multiple subjects, and multiple storylines, in laborious detail. Trying to keep all of the facts straight while being scrutinized by the defense attorneys was unpleasant and demanding. Naturally, they attempted to rattle me and challenged me every step of the way. Adding to the complexity, since the case had gone to the State of California for prosecution, as opposed the Federal court system, there were different rules for testifying that I had to be aware of and take into consideration. This made for exhausting days and sleepless nights. My testimony wound up being sufficient for the case to proceed with a full trial.
But after spending a number of weeks working with the San Diego District Attorney’s Office preparing for the case, right before the trial, a key witness refused to testify. Although he had been subpoenaed, the subpoena was issued by the State of California and did not technically hold any legal ground in Missouri, where this criminal had relocated. I strongly suspected that he was still in communication with the subjects who would soon be on trial, and surmised that possibly he had been provided financial incentives not to cooperate. Other witnesses suddenly could not be located. It was as if all parties with any knowledge of the crimes fell off the face of the earth, except for the criminals who were in prison. Unfortunately, we knew that the witness testimony would be critical in obtaining a guilty verdict, so after unsuccessfully sending out leads to other FBI field offices to locate witnesses, the DA decided to drop the case. So from the standpoint of the criminals, the entire enterprise could pick back up with their mortgage fraud scheme relatively unscathed. I was outraged, because I could see that even with an exhaustive knowledge of their crimes, the government was not in a position to stop them. I felt particularly bad for the bright, energetic lawyers from the DA’s office who had spent countless hours on the case, only to have it dismissed. As I would learn on numerous occasions, the cards in the legal system are greatly stacked in favor of the accused. The system is far from perfect; there are rare incidents of innocent people being convicted of a crime that they did not commit, which is a horrible crime in itself. But on the flip side, I know that for every criminal behind bars, there are probably hundreds still on the streets committing crimes.
[2014] Eyes Pried Open: Rookie FBI Agent Page 23