Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  The night before our formal graduation, friends and family members, and FBI instructors and officials gathered for a formal dinner and celebration. Sam and Russell flew in for the occasion. After awards were handed out and we heard from several guest speakers, classmates turned to me and urged me to take the mike. Fortified with a couple of beers, I walked to the dais and did an impromptu set of impersonations of classmates and instructors complete with walks, body language, and voices.

  All I remember were the howls of laughter from the audience and the feeling that I was on a roll. Sam’s mortification eased slightly when at the end my classmates gave me a standing ovation.

  It was all in good fun, but not apparently to some Quantico bureaucrat who lambasted me the next day as I stood in line to be sworn in by the FBI Director. According to him, I had offended some very important people and had failed to conduct myself properly.

  Fuck you for not being able to take a joke, I thought, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

  An hour later, I received my official credentials and embarked on my FBI adventure. Luckily, I was assigned to one of the “Top Twelve”—meaning the FBI’s twelve largest field offices, in my case, Philadelphia. Part of that had to do with my experience as a policeman. Other less experienced Agents were dispatched to smaller outposts. My accountant roommate was sent to Shreveport, Louisiana, and had to work his way up.

  The downside of being assigned to one of the Top Twelve was that like all new Agents I was put on the Applicant Squad, which meant spending endless hours at a desk calling and interviewing people who had been listed as references on government employment applications. Bored out of my skull, I amused myself by observing the guys in the adjacent Squad who were members of the Bank Robbery/Fugitive Squad. They’d arrive in the morning, insult each other mercilessly, and then hit the streets looking for bad guys.

  After several months of grunt work, I was moved to Public Corruption, where my first assignment was to investigate police malfeasance in connection with the infamous MOVE bombing of May 13, 1985, when during an armed standoff with members of the black liberation group MOVE, Philadelphia police dropped two bombs on a MOVE-occupied row house in West Philly. The resulting fire incinerated an entire block, killing 11 people and leaving more than 250 homeless. It was heady stuff for a former cop who had previously been serving warrants and arresting drunk drivers.

  After that I was assigned to a police corruption case where I interviewed witnesses who claimed that Philadelphia narcotics cops had ripped them off. Most of the accusers turned out to be drug traffickers. As a former cop who had handled drug cases, I was skeptical of their testimony at first. But mounting evidence convinced me that members of the Narcotics Unit were guilty of serious wrongdoing.

  It shattered some of my idealism about law enforcement but taught me how to build a complex RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) case in federal court. After two lengthy trials, all but one of six former members of the Narcotics Unit were convicted or pled guilty, and sentenced to time in prison.

  After a year on the Public Corruption Squad, I was given an opportunity to request a transfer. My first choice, the Bank Robbery/Fugitive Squad was staffed with heavy-hitting senior Agents and rarely accepted junior guys like me. Next in order of preference were the two Drug Squads in the Philadelphia office. One handled domestic drug trafficking, and the other Squad worked international, which in 1988 meant the Colombian drug cartels. I chose the latter: Squad 3—aka, the Colombian Drug Squad.

  These were the early days of the FBI’s involvement in investigating major international trafficking. Following the brutal drug wars of the early 1980s in Southern Florida, the FBI had been given concurrent jurisdiction with the DEA to work drug cases. The Squad I joined was relatively new and staffed with young, aggressive Agents.

  I loved it from the get-go. No longer was I stuck behind a desk working the phones. Now I got to spend most of my time out on the streets, either doing surveillance, executing search warrants, or making arrests. The hours were long, stretching into most nights, and practically every weekend. But I didn’t mind.

  My partners were excellent—a very respected senior Agent, pulled me in immediately and mentored me, before leaving for his final assignment. When the senior Agent moved on I teamed up with his former partner, a young Agent I’ll call Saul Johnson, aka “the Counselor,” who had four years more experience than me and went on later to become the right-hand man of FBI Director Robert Mueller and the SAC of several major offices.

  Johnson was a soft-spoken, studious former attorney who had the ability to remain calm in any situation and taught me to lead with my head. Our first major case was Operation Bacalao—Spanish for codfish, and named that because the suspects sometimes transported cocaine in refrigerated trucks.

  Our main targets were the Aguilar family—a drug-trafficking organization led by husband (Julio Cesar) and his wife (Edith Guiterrez), and including his sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and others. On the surface Julio and Edith appeared to be a normal middle-class couple from Colombia in their midthirties, residing and working in the United States on green cards. They lived in a modest Philadelphia row house, and drove an unflashy Nissan Pathfinder.

  The Aguilars were being supplied with cocaine from Colombia through New York City. FBI New York was running a parallel drug investigation on the NYC supplier, a kindly fifty-year-old Colombian woman named Stella Mercado.

  Initially I was put on physical surveillance, which involved sitting in a car for twelve hours at a stretch, following Julio Aguilar as he moved around town, and keeping track of what he was doing and with whom he was meeting. In the late ’80s, U.S. law enforcement often assumed women didn’t play a major role in drug trafficking. So while we were following Julio around, his wife, Edith, was doing most of the real work.

  We became aware of the extent of Edith’s involvement once we obtained Title III approval to conduct electronic surveillance, and listen to the Aguilars’ phones. This was my first Title III application, which turned out to be a time-consuming process that involved getting approval from a federal judge. While I collected the evidence and put it in sequence, the Counselor wrote the affidavits. Then the two of us met with a federal judge in his chambers, and answered his questions. It was by no means automatic that the application would be approved.

  Once signed by a federal judge, the Title III had to be renewed every thirty days, which meant assembling new evidence and writing another affidavit. The Title III intercept turned out to be worth the trouble, because once we started listening to the Aguilar’s phones, we quickly developed a clear and comprehensive picture of how their operation worked. Every month or so, Julio would call his supplier in Medellín, Colombia, and say something like, “We need a hundred pillows.” Or he might fly to Colombia to deliver the message in person.

  A week later a shipment of cocaine would arrive by boat or plane, usually in Miami, and we would track it from there to New York City and into the hands of Julio Aguilar’s boss, the aforementioned Stella Mercado. Mercado would then make arrangements to truck the cocaine to Philadelphia, or sometimes sent it via couriers on Amtrak trains. She might call ahead and say, “Tomorrow we’re going to be at First Street. Meet us there at three PM.”

  We would try to cover the meet and photograph or video the transfer. Once Julio and his family got their hands on the cocaine, they would have people on their staff cut it, bag it, and distribute it to hundreds of smaller dealers, couriers, and kids who would sell it on the streets.

  Back in Burlington, I’d been a cop busting small-time dope dealers on street corners. I’d arrest some and watch others take their place the next day. Now as a federal Agent I was trying to build cases against the heads of the organization, so as to dismantle the entire criminal enterprise. The Aguilars, as harmless as they appeared, were major players in an international drug organization moving hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine a year, and destroying countless lives.r />
  Since these were the early days working international narcotic cases we had little or no liaison with officials in Colombia, which meant we had no effective way of going after the big boss in Medellín. Our focus was Stella Mercado in New York and the Aguilar family itself.

  In July 1989, after months of collecting evidence, Saul Johnson and I returned to federal court and obtained arrest warrants. In those days, FBI SWAT (which I later joined) conducted the raids and made the arrests. Most of the time they did this at between three and five in morning when the suspects were asleep.

  The morning in question, Saul and I parked a few doors down from the Aguilars’ house on North Front Street and observed Julio’s Pathfinder parked in the driveway, and assumed that the suspects were inside. Then we made the call, “Let’s hit the house.”

  We watched while SWAT moved in, smashed through the front door, and rushed in, weapons ready. Usually, arrests were over in a few minutes, but on this occasion, it was taking more time. We weren’t allowed to enter until SWAT said, “Clear.” So we waited nervously, hands in our pockets, wondering what the hell was going on.

  After fifteen minutes, Saul went into the house. He exited minutes later and said, “They found Edith and the others. But where the fuck is Julio Cesar?”

  “I don’t know,” I responded. “His car is here. He has to be here.”

  “Well, he isn’t. We checked the house a number of times and can’t find him.”

  Meanwhile, Edith Guiterrez was in custody and insisting that we take her to the station right away and book her so she could hire a lawyer to contest the charges.

  Saul and I entered the residence—a standard row house with four floors—basement, main floor with living room and kitchen, bedrooms on the second and top floors. We started at the top and descended, searching under beds and inside closets. Julio Cesar happened to be on the heavy side, so there were only a limited number of spaces he could squeeze his big body into. We checked all of them, carefully. No sign of Julio.

  We went through the house four more times, methodically. I was starting to panic, thinking, It’s my first big arrest and I screwed up.

  Maybe Julio Cesar had been tipped off and had fled. When I reached the basement the third time, I saw an old, grizzled SWAT officer named McQueen standing and measuring one of the walls with his hands.

  He turned to me and said, “The dimensions are off.”

  “What?” I asked, thinking that maybe he had flipped his lid.

  “See how this part of the wall sticks out?”

  I looked at it again and realized he was right, but still wasn’t sure what it meant. The SWAT officer put his ear to the drywall, smiled, then gestured to me to do the same. I heard someone breathing inside.

  “Holy shit!”

  “That’s him,” McQueen exclaimed. “Almost outsmarted us.”

  Speaking through the wall, I said, “Julio, you sneaky bastard, we know you’re in there.”

  McQueen pointed to an opening above that Julio had slipped through. We waited for one of the SWAT guys to bring a sledgehammer and bust through the wall. Then we slapped the cuffs on Julio Cesar.

  According to the story that ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 21, 1989, “Ten Colombia citizens and three Philadelphians have been named in a thirty-nine count cocaine-trafficking indictment released yesterday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  All told, we ended up arresting more than forty suspects, including Stella Mercado in New York. Our search of the Aguilars’ house didn’t yield drugs, but we hadn’t expected it to either as drugs were normally kept in separate stash houses. What we did seize were stacks of cash and ledgers that contained coded, handwritten records of all the Aguilars’ drug transactions.

  Even though we had an open-and-shut case, we now began the laborious job of assembling all the evidence, including surveillance logs, ledgers, and phone transcripts, and building a case brick by brick against each suspect to present to the judge and jury. The Aguilars and their associates were charged with multiple serious federal drug offenses to include conspiracy and conspiracy with intent to distribute.

  The Counselor and I had actually started working with the federal prosecutors for more than two years before the arrests. Now we coordinated with them on a daily basis for nearly another year before the cases went to trial, making sure every piece in the evidence chain fit tightly together, and leaving no room for a defense attorney to raise doubts.

  In the end, most of the suspects pleaded guilty. Julio Cesar, Edith, and Stella were all sentenced to more than twenty years in federal prison.

  Under federal forfeiture law, we had seized Julio Cesar’s Nissan Pathfinder. After the case wrapped up, the government assigned the Pathfinder to me for my official use. Now, ironically, I was driving the same vehicle I had tailed for almost a year. It turned out to be a real nice car, which my kids aptly named “Julio’s Ride.”

  5

  FBI SWAT

  In 1990, I’d been an FBI Special Agent for three years when a member of FBI PH SWAT walked over to my desk and handed me a schedule, a 10mm Glock, an old bulletproof vest, and other used gear, and said, “We’re meeting at the Fort Dix range nine AM this Thursday. Be there.”

  I looked up at the FBI Special Agent affectionately known as “Stonehead”—because his head was shaped like that of a Cro-Magnon man—and said, “Thanks.”

  “Just keep your mouth shut and do whatever shit jobs we give you,” Stonehead said as he left.

  I felt honored. Being asked to join FBI SWAT was the military equivalent of becoming a Navy SEAL. They were the thirty hand-picked studs of the office and had a reputation for training hard, executing the toughest warrants, arresting the nastiest criminals, and having a good time.

  Unlike today’s FBI SWAT, where competitive tryouts would tax even Olympic-caliber athletes, selection in the ’80s and ’90s was based on experience and reputation. Practically every member of the team was either former police or military, was a hard-working street investigator who had handled major cases, wasn’t shy around liquor, and knew when to keep their mouths shut. The selection process wasn’t scientific, but somehow it worked.

  The night before the meet, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. Being a punctuality freak, I showed up at the Fort Dix military base in central southern New Jersey, which housed a law enforcement complex for FBI SWAT’s Philadelphia and Newark Divisions, at 8:35 AM only to find out I was the last guy there. As I parked my car, I noticed that in addition to their gear all the SWAT guys were carrying coolers. And some of the coolers were huge.

  The senior team leader was the unofficial head of Bank Robbery/Fugitive Squad and a former Marine Captain named Chuck Manson, but universally known as “Jarhead.” The first thing he said when he saw me was, “In SWAT if you’re forty-five minutes early, you’re late.”

  As I pulled on my gear, these colorful characters starting busting each other’s balls.

  “Hey, Jim, you go out last night?”

  “Yeah, I was at the gym. Why?”

  “Can you do me a favor and ask your wife something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Make sure she washes my underwear before she gives it back.”

  “Fuck you.”

  At Quantico I’d been trained to shoot .357 magnum revolvers at targets while standing still and dressed in civilian clothes. Now, in SWAT, we were sprinting up to moving targets in full gear, hitting the ground or taking cover, and firing 10mm Glocks and H&K MP5s to approximate real-life pressure situations. Between the bulky gear and the adrenaline coursing through my system, I couldn’t hit the side of a barn.

  Jarhead tortured me the entire time. “Hey, kid, you ever fire a gun before?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  Guys around me snickered and laughed.

  “You point the end with the black hole and aim before you squeeze the trigger.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  More laughter.

  “You ha
d your eyes tested recently? You forget to bring your glasses?”

  Guys were howling, and I was dying from embarrassment. I was an above-average shooter, but most of the guys around me were lights-out. The more I shot, and we fired something like four hundred rounds, the better I got. Lunchtime came and the SWAT guys started reaching into the coolers and drinking beers as though they’d just returned from a week in the Sahara Desert. I enjoyed quaffing a few cold ones, too, but I’d never seen anything like this.

  As they drank they started verbally abusing one another even worse than before. As the new man, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut and enjoy the entertainment. The onslaught was brutal and any sign of weakness made you a regular target. None of us escaped unscathed.

  After lunch, we were taught how to use an electric power saw to cut through metal bars during federal prison riots, which were common in those days. The instructor fired up the nasty-looking device, its metal teeth screaming at a high pitch and gas-powered engine roaring. As soon as it made contact with metal bars, huge orange flames shot six feet into the air and black smoke began to billow out. The gnashing of metal on metal was unbearable, as was the smell.

  One of the quietist guys on the team, who happened to be married to a female Agent known for her dominant ways, said, “That’s Sally when I come home late with beer on my breath.”

  All thirty of us FBI SWAT members forgot the noise and smell and laughed our asses off.

  At the end of the day, I watched guys stumble to their cars and head home three sheets to the wind with trunks filled with gear and weapons. I had consumed less alcohol than anyone, and I still probably shouldn’t have taken the wheel of a government-owned vehicle. But this was the early ’90s and the culture of drinking in the FBI was pervasive.

  Amazingly, in my seven years assigned to Philadelphia FBI SWAT with twice-a-month training and prodigious beer consumption there was never a reported alcohol-related driving event. Don’t ask me how.

  When SWAT was called on a real mission we put all joking and drinking aside and focused intently on the task ahead, which almost always involved serious criminals and imminent danger. This usually happened three or four times a month. When the crack epidemic hit in the early ’90s, the pace picked up to the point that we were raiding drug dens as often as twice a week.