Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  It was no accident that Forbes and McDonald were chosen to attend the meeting. After Wellesley had introduced the financial task force concept to McMaster, he began perusing his personnel records, working late in his office in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to identify candidates among his eighty or so staff members who could lead this type of investigation. Few names jumped to the top of the list. Many IRS investigators, Wellesley says, were content to make routine tax cases. Only a handful possessed enough ambition to tackle more complicated cases in which tax evasion would be among the least offensive of a suspect’s crimes.

  To sniff out sophisticated criminals and their hidden fortunes, “You have to have a very special agent,” says Wellesley. “The agent has to be very, very creative.”

  Frustrated with the shortage of intrepid investigators, his mind turned to Forbes, whom someone had mentioned to him as an agent with an impressive record and experience in drug-related cases. Wellesley arranged to meet with Forbes in South Carolina and explained the task force concept to him in a bar. Wellesley says Forbes was initially noncommitted, but did mention McDonald as an agent in U.S. Customs who he worked well with. Wellesley said he could direct Forbes’s supervisor to shift his caseload to other agents if he participated in the task force.

  At the meeting in the U.S. attorney’s office, McMaster addressed the men assembled before him. It was no secret that illegal drugs were coming into South Carolina. Everyone at the table knew that, as was the case in most of the country, law enforcement was only intercepting a small percentage of the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin being smuggled into the Palmetto State. When a bust was made, they knew, too, it was only the small fish being caught. McMaster said he wanted to change that. He wanted to nab kingpins.

  To do this he pointed to the new law enforcement model recently debuted in California and how agents could conduct a financial investigation of suspected drug kingpins. Instead of sitting in marshes at midnight with a nightscope trying to catch smugglers red-handed, investigators would sift through public records and build a financial case against the men. Ideally any financial crimes, such as income tax evasion, would be just the tip of the iceberg and could be used as leverage to produce additional drug-related charges and construct a history of drug-related misdeeds. The first step, in any case, would be finding out who these kingpins were.

  Forbes and McDonald left the meeting scratching their heads. The proposal was certainly novel, but there were so many uncertainties surrounding its premise. First, the conventional wisdom was that the country’s major drug kingpins operated out of coastal metropolises like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, not the backwaters of South Carolina. Second, who knew if Forbes’s and McDonald’s bosses, as well as supervisors in the South Carolina offices of the FBI, DEA, and Customs Patrol, would even play ball with McMaster’s idea? When it came to drug enforcement, each of those agencies was notorious for its competitiveness and lack of cooperation. Finally, and most perplexing to Forbes and McDonald, was the question of how to begin to find kingpins you don’t even know exist.

  Nonetheless, Forbes and McDonald shared McMaster’s suspicion that there were homegrown crooks to find in South Carolina, even if many of their colleagues believed the smugglers they occasionally snared were part of syndicates based outside of South Carolina.

  Yet the pair of agents had received enough cryptic tips over the years regarding smuggling to believe locals were sneaking tons of drugs into the state, right under their noses. But these were only suspicions, and the men lacked hard proof of local smuggling networks. Driving together soon after the meeting, Forbes and McDonald turned to each other in the car and voiced their mutual concerns: What in the world are we going to do?

  “We had nothing, absolutely nothing to work on except for our memories,” says McDonald. “Remembering some of the things that had been going on.”

  If McMaster’s idea to identify and pursue drug smugglers seemed comparable to finding a needle in a haystack, it was a feat McDonald had accomplished before. He had come to Charleston to work for the Naval Investigative Service in 1967, anticipating performing background checks for the Navy and Marine Corps. Instead, McDonald’s superiors noticed his aptitude for problem solving and assigned him some criminal cases to investigate. He resolved them all. His superiors were particularly impressed with his handling of a case involving the USS Tattnall and two other destroyers, which were docked at the Charleston Navy Base. Shortly before their planned deployment to the Mediterranean, someone called a duty officer and reported sabotage aboard one of the destroyers, prompting searches of the boats from top to bottom. No sabotage was found, but the Navy was eager to catch the hoaxster, dumping the case in the hands of McDonald and another junior agent.

  McDonald’s only lead was that the call was made from a Charleston pay phone. He and his partner traveled to the phone and began questioning residents in the immediate area about whom they had seen at the time the call was made. Eventually, they got a tip that a man using the phone had been picked up by a taxi. Whether or not that man was the prankster was anyone’s guess.

  McDonald next went to the various cab companies in Charleston and began questioning drivers. Eventually he met a cabbie who remembered picking up a man at that pay phone who looked like he was in the military and was acting strangely. Eager to make an identification, McDonald showed the cabbie the cruise books from the destroyers, which featured pictures of the crew and were similar to a high school yearbook. Out of the hundreds of sailors’ photos, the cabbie picked out his passenger. McDonald interrogated the suspect, who admitted to the prank call as a way to delay his deployment so he could see his girlfriend. For his persistence McDonald received a commendation from the director of the Naval Investigative Service and was asked to continue conducting criminal investigations.

  Despite his knack for detective work, McDonald’s entry into law enforcement was a result of happenstance. After growing up in the small town of Portland, Tennessee, close to the Kentucky border, he attended East Tennessee State on a football scholarship, playing fullback and safety. His playing career was short-lived. During spring practice his freshman year, he tackled the second-string fullback, crashing into the fullback’s knee with such force it broke McDonald’s helmet apart. The collision knocked McDonald unconscious, and, after being revived with smelling salts and sitting out the rest of practice, he fainted again at dinner, prompting a visit to the hospital and a diagnosis of a bad concussion. The severity of the injury made McDonald reconsider the direction of his life. He decided to quit the team and leave school, soon getting married and working as a shipping clerk in Nashville.

  By this time it was 1958, and the military draft loomed. Seeking to forge his own destiny, he enlisted in the Army before his likely draft date and was sent to basic training camp in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for military police training. His first posting as an MP was at the Sandia Base nuclear installation outside Albuquerque. There he finished his service, earned a degree from the University of New Mexico, and became a physical education teacher. He enjoyed teaching, though the pay was paltry, forcing him to give driving lessons after hours to help support his family, which now included a baby boy. One night when he returned home, a friendly neighbor hassled him, asking him if he was going to work himself silly the rest of his life or get smart. The neighbor, an agent for the Naval Investigative Service, urged him to submit an application with his office, though he warned him he’d likely have to leave New Mexico. McDonald did, was hired, and sent to Charleston in 1967, where he made a splash investigating the supposed sabotage. He transferred to U.S. Customs in 1971 when the Naval Investigative Service proposed sending young agents onto aircraft carriers to help police the ship, taking the investigators away from their families for months at a time.

  If anyone had stopped to think about it, it might have seemed odd that the two lead agents in a potentially major drug investigation were Forbes, a former CPA, and McDonald, th
e accidental cop who entered and excelled in law enforcement only after the intervention of a serious brain injury, the draft, a nosy neighbor, and an unsophisticated saboteur. Yet conventional law enforcement officers had failed to catch, let alone identify, South Carolina’s most prominent smugglers and the worldwide drug operations they managed. Perhaps, as McMaster suggested, it would require a different approach to apprehend these elusive kingpins, whoever they were, and Forbes’s and McDonald’s unique backgrounds could produce the results the prosecutor demanded.

  Following the meeting with McMaster, Forbes and McDonald continued to work their normal caseloads, squeezing in time to try to start the fresh smuggling case. Embracing the financial investigation approach suggested by Wellesley and McMaster, the agents began following the money, figuring that real estate agents would be the most promising interviews. Visiting a slew of coastal realty offices, they asked the same question: Have you closed any unusually large cash transactions lately?

  Their questioning was a stab in the dark, though, and yielded few results. The agents were glad to keep their usual responsibilities: If they worked on looking for drug kingpins day in and day out, McDonald says, they’d be sitting around scratching their heads with nothing to do. In addition to questioning real estate agents, they reviewed old cases and tips, trying to familiarize themselves with men who had previously been partial to the excitement of pot smuggling.

  The investigation gained momentum. A man named Barry Foy, one coastal developer told them, had recently paid him $90,000 in cash for some land through a corporation named Agora, Ltd. Foy’s name jogged McDonald’s memory. He seemed to remember a tip years ago about Foy smuggling Jamaican pot into the country.

  At the same time, Forbes and McDonald followed up on two Beaufort County phone numbers that had been found inside a sunken sailboat suspected of being scuttled after a drug deal. The sailboat, the Seacomber, was found in July 1981 when a shrimper noticed a mast sticking out of the Edisto River. Had the smugglers been more competent, they would have scuttled the boat in deep water, not in a shallow section of the river—especially not in the middle of the waterway, and especially not when eight-foot tides might reveal the mast, which had been cut but was still connected to the boat by its shrouds. When the boat was pulled out of the water, investigators scoured it for clues, finding a waterlogged piece of paper in which two phone numbers were barely legible.

  As Forbes and McDonald discovered, one of those numbers belonged to a young woman who suspected her roommate’s boyfriend had written it down when he was potentially aboard the sailboat. Fearful of being questioned by the investigators, she asked for her father, a dock builder, to be present when they arrived. During the conversation the woman’s father mentioned to Forbes and McDonald that if they were looking for smugglers, they might want to examine an exceptionally large dock built on the back side of Hilton Head in the Sea Pines neighborhood. A corporation called Bahamas Leeward, Ltd. had offered to pay him cash, he said, in exchange for building it quickly and without following the proper permitting and building code requirements. He declined the job, he said, because something about the request smelled fishy.

  The dock builder checked his records and contacted the investigators. A man named Les Riley, he said, had asked him to build the dock. Forbes recalled the tip he received years ago regarding Riley and two Mercedes automobiles: “He’s living high on the hog down here and doesn’t seem to have a job.”

  Excited to have received these leads, Forbes and McDonald started pulling deeds and tax records at coastal courthouses for property in the name of Bahamas Leeward, Ltd. and Agora, Ltd. They discovered a number of properties, and a pattern: A majority of the records listed real estate agent Wally Butler and lawyer Andy Pracht. They confronted Pracht, but he was evasive and nervous, refusing to cooperate with the investigators. Nonetheless, Forbes and McDonald knew they had made a breakthrough. They drove to Columbia and met again with McMaster, updating him on their progress. We need help, they told him.

  Encouraged by Forbes and McDonald’s progress, McMaster persuaded agencies to help establish a formal task force in the spring of 1982. An office was cleared for the agents on the third floor of the U.S. Custom House in downtown Charleston, and the IRS and U.S. Customs agreed to allow Forbes and McDonald to work on the drug investigation full-time. McMaster also secured the help of three other full-time agents: Mark Goodwin of the FBI, Dewey Greager of the DEA, and Mike Lemnah of U.S. Customs Patrol. An assistant U.S. attorney, it was decided, would coordinate the task force.

  There was little fanfare regarding the start of the investigation, and no press releases; those would come later. Within the DEA, FBI, and other agencies, information regarding Operation Jackpot was on a need-to-know basis. The task force agents, however, were not shy about introducing themselves to potential suspects and their associates, knocking on doors, asking them questions, and, if necessary, advising them to get a lawyer. The tactics flew in the face of conventional drug enforcement techniques, which relied heavily on stakeouts, undercover agents, and electronic surveillance.

  “We threw out the damn book and decided to be innovative. We weren’t covert at all,” says Forbes. “We flashed our badges in their faces and said, ‘Here we are.’ ”

  Among the first to cooperate with the government was fireman Hank Strickland, who acted as a caretaker of Riley’s property, supplied Riley with local law enforcement radio codes, and operated communications equipment during drug off-loads. After hearing that the investigators were making inquiries about the Rileys, Strickland’s ex-wife, who had babysat for the couple, shared information with Forbes regarding her ex-husband’s participation, including the fact that he kept radio equipment in a locker behind a couch. In the locker, she said, she’d also seen $10,000 cash and a brick of hashish. Forbes and his colleagues paid Strickland a visit at his home, intimating that they knew all about his misdeeds and it was time to ’fess up.

  “Before we left his house, I said, ‘By the way, Hank, those radios in that footlocker are evidence,’ ” says Forbes. “He was white as a sheet. He didn’t know what to do.”

  Soon thereafter, an attorney hired by Strickland negotiated a deal: information in exchange for lenient punishment. The government cut a similar deal with suspect Wayne McDonald, a friend of Riley who worked for the kingpin as a money courier and caretaker. Suddenly, with these men’s and others’ cooperation, the agents were given a glimpse into a world they only guessed had existed. The amount of money and drugs discussed by Strickland, McDonald, and others was staggering. Furthermore, given the limited role Strickland and McDonald had in the smuggling organizations, the agents knew they were only scratching the surface.

  After talking with Strickland, the task force had enough information to obtain a search warrant for the law office of Pracht, the man whose name appeared on records for both Riley and Foy and their offshore corporations. As investigators raided his office, Pracht cooperated, helping agents map out his clients’ property holdings.

  Forbes began working longer hours, trying to organize the flood of information the task force was receiving. He and the other agents started creating files for each person they interviewed. It was an archive that would soon be hundreds of folders thick. Forbes took on a coordinating role among the agents, and some of his colleagues and a few assistant U.S. attorneys nicknamed him “Captain America” for his devotion to sorting out the leads and assembling a case. Forbes considered the case a puzzle, and it could be exasperating trying to piece it all together.

  “I had a tiger by the tail,” says Forbes, “and I said, uh, I ain’t turning this thing loose. I got something here. I ain’t too sure what, but I got it.”

  Despite the investigation’s fast start and McMaster’s success in obtaining five full-time agents for the task force, obstacles regularly threatened to derail Operation Jackpot, or at least significantly stall it. One of the biggest hurdles the task force faced was achieving cooperation among its own members. Despi
te each man’s personal commitment to teamwork, the task force was routinely hampered by protocol differences between the various federal law enforcement agencies and the tendencies of each agency to hoard information rather than share it. The investigators were often torn between loyalties to the task force and their home agency.

  Historically there had been little sharing of information between the FBI and DEA, and each was used to being in charge of investigations. When it came to the IRS, past tax investigations by the agency had been politicized. When these scandals came to light, the IRS was restricted from sharing much information with other law enforcement agencies in an effort to reduce abuse of the agency’s deep-reaching powers.

  Lemnah, the task force agent assigned from the U.S. Customs Patrol, remembers having frustrating discussions about the case with Goodwin, the investigator assigned from the FBI.

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” Goodwin told his colleagues, “because I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Then you can’t be part of the task force, because we share,” was Lemnah’s and the others’ consistent reply.

  Eventually each of the men conceded that the walls between the agencies were hindering the investigation. Their jobs protected, to some extent, by the autonomous structure of the task force, they began pooling information and sharing old tips and files collected by their home agencies, even if it didn’t sit well with superiors. Lemnah was happy to see Goodwin embrace the task force wholeheartedly.