Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  Sometimes, as in the Aguilar case, SWAT raids were planned ahead of time and noted on a special bulletin board. In the case of a police shooting or similar emergency, I’d be at my desk working, when an announcement would come over the loudspeaker, “SWAT report immediately!” Five minutes later, I’d have retrieved my prepacked gear and would be flying out the door.

  One afternoon, I had my nose in some paperwork when we got a call to help thwart a suspected kidnapping. A Chinese gang had grabbed some family members from a rival gang and we were tasked with trying to intercept the getaway car.

  In the basement, I ran into The Colonel—a John Wayne look-alike, my immediate supervisor on the Colombian Drug Squad, and the SWAT coordinator—and two other members of SWAT. We piled into an FBI vehicle with The Colonel at the wheel and burned rubber. Within minutes we were speeding down a local highway and the speedometer was straining past a hundred miles per hour.

  Buildings and vehicles flew by in a blur and I was about to piss my pants for two reasons. One, I happened to be seated in the front passenger seat—aka, the Death Seat—and, two, I’d gotten to know The Colonel pretty well at this point and as much as I respected and admired him I knew that he had several screws loose. He was currently on his fifth marriage.

  I was about to mouth a few words of warning, when he turned and shot me a demented smile. It said something like: Isn’t this fucking awesome? If the smile itself didn’t freak me out, I was even more alarmed that he had taken his eyes off the road.

  Is he trying to get us killed? I asked myself.

  The answer that came back was “maybe.”

  I remember thinking that if we crashed, the car would explode on impact and our bodies would disintegrate. As we passed civilian cars at what felt like the speed of sound, I saw drivers drop their jaws in shock.

  Over the radio, we were informed that FBI surveillance had the suspect’s car in sight. The Colonel was determined to make the intercept, and ordered surveillance to back off, so we could do our thing. Felony car stops are a form of road ballet that have to be performed with great skill, precision, and timing. You not only had to prevent the stopped car from fleeing, you also had to stop civilian traffic, and you didn’t want law enforcement arriving from opposite directions and getting caught in a crossfire.

  We’d trained endless SWAT hours for scenarios like this, and now I saw a real car stop unfold before my eyes in a matter of seconds. The Colonel at the wheel zoomed up right behind the felony car, hit the siren and lights, and executed the stop in a sleepy town off the highway. With no shots fired, the victims were recovered and the suspects were in handcuffs. Amazing!

  Seconds later twenty armed-to-the teeth FBI SWAT Agents arrived to secure the scene. Before the local police could unknot the massive traffic jam, I saw one family consisting of a mother, father, and two children in a station wagon with their faces pressed against the windows, looking at us petrified as if we were some strange ferocious animals in a zoo.

  In my case SWAT turned out to be the perfect collateral duty. I worked cases during the day and spent a couple adrenaline-filled early mornings a month doing raids with a tight-knit group of guys who would do anything for one another. The camaraderie was incredible as you quickly learned to trust your life to the guys next to you.

  In the beginning, I was just one of the guys. But as I earned my stripes, I became the primary breacher—known as Slot #1 in the stack—and would take down doors with a forty-pound battering ram or something called a Halligan bar—a combination metal claw, blade, and metal pick designed by a former deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department. The guy in Slot #2 carried a fifty-pound ballistic shield, and the team leader or assistant team leader occupied Slot #3. While every job in SWAT was important, Slots #1–#3 was where the action was. If there was going to be any shooting, it would most likely be directed to the first three guys in.

  The object was to take the door down quickly, so guys could get in and avoid the doorway or what we called the funnel of death. As in the Aguilar case, most raids took place in the early morning when suspects were asleep to maximize the element of surprise. Our watchwords were “speed,” “surprise,” and “overwhelming force.”

  By the mid-’90s I was executing warrants both with SWAT and as a Drug Squad Case Agent. One raid involved a family of drug traffickers named the Mendez brothers, who were suspected of having guns in their house. It was my case, so I chose the Squad guys needed and took charge of the raid.

  I stood in Slot #2 with a shield. My job was to get in as soon as the door went down, and hurry up to a bedroom on the second floor to arrest the youngest brother and subject of the warrant, Nico Mendez (not his real name). A Philadelphia policeman who I had never met before was my partner that day.

  We had about fifteen guys total, including several other PHPD policemen. It was pitch black when we assembled outside the house minutes before 5 AM. My big, muscular SWAT buddy Will Thompson stood in first position holding a sledgehammer. I gave the signal, and everyone readied their weapons.

  I knocked and announced, “FBI! FBI!”

  Seconds later Thompson whacked the door just below the lock. The doors on most row houses were made of wood and broke open easily. But this time when Thompson hit it, the door didn’t budge. He pounded the door a second time. It still didn’t give.

  Meanwhile, I heard people moving around inside. Thompson continued pounding the door with the fifty-pound sledgehammer and was starting to exhaust himself. I was about to relieve him, when on the seventh or eighth try, the door wedged open far enough for me to squeeze a leg inside.

  I twisted my body through the narrow opening even though I knew I was an easy target to anyone inside who wanted to take a shot.

  Once in the house, I shouted, “FBI. FBI! Search warrant!”

  With my gun ready, I tore up the steps with the PHPD officer fast on my heels. On the second floor, I hung a sharp left and hurried down a narrow hallway to the back bedroom where we knew Nico slept.

  As I ran, I noticed that dawn was breaking outside. I was also aware of the potential danger I faced from anyone who decided to pop out of the rooms I passed. Downstairs, other Agents and cops had entered the house and were spreading to their designated positions.

  I reached the bedroom and peeked in the open door. Squinting into the dark, I picked out a silhouette against the closed curtain and a naked woman on the bed.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get the fuck out! This is private property! Get out!”

  I glanced at her, then back at the silhouette, recognizing it as belonging to Mendez. In the blink of an eye, he started rolling toward me and into a closet along the right wall. The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention.

  My sixth sense told me that Mendez was going for some kind of weapon, probably a gun. Sure enough, a split second later, he reached into the closet, and pulled out a nasty-looking Mossberg shotgun.

  I was in the room now. The light was murky at best. I had my pistol clutched in my hand and pointed center mass at Mendez’s chest.

  Time slowed. Despite the girlfriend’s screams reverberating in my ears, I was laser focused on Mendez. Instead of firing, I sprung with every ounce of strength and slammed into him like an NFL linebacker as the black barrel bore started turning into my face. Bang! Both of us flew into the rear of the closet and hit the wall hard. I managed to land on top of him, knocking the air out of his lungs. With Mendez dazed, I quickly ripped the shotgun out of his hands, and banged him down to the floor so I could handcuff him. I wasn’t gentle.

  Now my heart was pounding so hard and so fast that I thought I was about to have a heart attack. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the fear I’d felt, or the massive amount of adrenaline that had slammed into my system. FBI colleagues arrived to help me up and deal with the suspect. Others escorted me downstairs.

  I’d come within nanoseconds of having my face obliterated with a shotgun. Outside I gulped fresh air, which helped
me calm down. Concerned FBI guys came over to see if I was okay.

  “Mike, you need us to take you to the hospital?” one of them asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine. I’m just a little shaken up.”

  The PHPD cop who had accompanied me to the bedroom came over and patted me on the shoulder in what I first thought was a gesture of sympathy. I was wrong. He was fucking pissed!

  He asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you? You should have shot that son of a bitch. You know that? You fucked up. He would have shot you and he would have shot me, too!”

  “I know,” I responded.

  “He nearly killed us both.”

  “You’re right.” I felt bad for letting a policeman down. I should have shot the bastard and had every legal right to do so. I don’t know why I didn’t.

  Other cops and FBI Special Agents came out escorting a handcuffed Mendez.

  “Guess what we found in the closet?” one of the Agents asked.

  “What?” I asked back.

  “A bag filled with cocaine.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit,” the FBI Special Agent echoed back. “When we pulled Nico up off the floor to take him in, he had no pants on. So I asked him, ‘Hey, Nico, where’s your jeans?’ And the stupid motherfucker says, ‘On the top shelf, under the motorcycle helmet.’ So one of the cops reaches up to get the jeans and inside the motorcycle helmet he found a bag of coke.”

  You can’t make this stuff up.

  For days after, I remained shaken up, and kept asking myself over and over: If I had been killed, what would have happened to my family?

  I took the next day off and took my sons Russell (four) and Michael (two) to the park. It was a beautiful spring day. As I pushed them on the swings, I thought, Why the hell am I doing this? I’m making chump change and risking my life, for what?

  I already knew the answer. It was somewhat corny, but true: There’s real value to what I’m doing. I’m getting bad people off the streets, and protecting the public. I love my job. It’s what generations of my family did before me. But this isn’t playing cops and robbers with toy guns. It’s real, and it means I’ve always got to be at the top of my game.

  If I knew all that before, now I felt it to the depth of my being. As I explained before, my wife and I had made a pact not to talk about what I did at work. But this time she could tell from my demeanor that something was wrong.

  That night after she put the kids to bed, she turned to me and asked, “What happened yesterday?”

  I lied. “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you stay home today?”

  “It was beautiful outside so I decided to take the boys to the park.”

  She knew I was protecting her, and I knew she knew. That was the deal we’d struck and I was sticking to it.

  In our case it worked. But it made me appreciate why spouses who have law enforcement husbands or wives reach a point where they say: If the job is more important than your family, I don’t see how this marriage can continue.

  There are other pressures beside the danger. When you’re an FBI Agent you quickly realize that every move you make is scrutinized by your superiors and peers. They’re watching to see if you’re aggressive or passive, lazy or proactive, self-reliant or lean too much on others. Part of it is internal competition among a group with a lot of Type A personalities, and another part is the bureaucracy watching its ass.

  I’d been on SWAT for five years and promoted to assistant team leader when I heard the call over the office PA, “Code Red, all SWAT to conference.”

  Normally FBI SWAT wasn’t called unless there was some kind of federal jurisdiction. But in this case, the New Jersey State Police needed our help. Immediately my adrenaline started racing.

  On April 20, 1995, three police officers were shot and two killed as they attempted to serve an arrest warrant on a transgender female named Leslie Nelson in the sleepy hamlet of Haddon Heights, New Jersey. Ms. Nelson had been a male named Glenn the first thirty-five years of her life and had spent the next two as a transgender female following a sex change operation. She also happened to have committed a felony ten years ago while still male.

  The morning of the shooting, the three local police officers had gone to her parents’ house in the small town of Haddon Heights, New Jersey, to question Ms. Nelson about allegations that she fondled her three-year-old niece and threatened her with a shotgun. Ms. Nelson had been cooperative during the course of the interrogation and revealed that she kept a loaded firearm in the house. That was a problem, because the law prohibited a felon from owning a gun.

  So the police officers obtained an arrest warrant and returned to the house at 2 PM that afternoon. This time Ms. Nelson’s elderly mother, Jean, let two of the officers in. When the officers reached the upstairs hallway, they encountered Leslie Nelson holding an AK-47 automatic rifle.

  “Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!” a Camden County cop ordered.

  Instead Ms. Nelson opened fired and hit the thirty-eight-year-old county officer with a hail of bullets. He died immediately. A Haddon Heights detective, who stood behind him, was struck in the chest, hand, arm, and leg. When Ms. Nelson’s mother jumped between him and her daughter, Ms. Nelson stopped shooting and the detective managed to stumble out the front door and collapse on the lawn. He was later rescued by other cops and transported to a local hospital.

  A third officer, and brother of the wounded detective was shot in the head and killed minutes later as he tried to evacuate families from houses across the street. It turned out that in addition to once being a man, Ms. Nelson was also an expert marksman.

  By this point, Ms. Nelson’s elderly parents had fled the house. She pushed the dead Camden County cop onto the front porch, and then donned a bulletproof vest and gas mask and barricaded herself on the top floor.

  Other cops arrived, escorted neighborhood residents to a local church, and set up an armed perimeter. We arrived shortly thereafter geared up and ready to find more than one hundred police officers from twenty-seven different jurisdictions on the scene and in a state of chaos. This wasn’t unexpected as crisis training for events of this nature were rudimentary at the time. Adding a horrible, ghoulish twist was the fact that the dead Camden County cop lay on the front porch where he couldn’t be retrieved without exposing law enforcement to more automatic weapons fire.

  Due to the large number of police officers from various jurisdictions and the strong emotions everyone was feeling over the fallen officers, it took longer than it should have to establish a Command Post with the New Jersey State Police in charge. We in FBI PH SWAT accepted that we would play a tactical support role.

  We also understood that since the shooter was well-armed, had barricaded herself in her house, and wasn’t responding to law enforcement, the standoff was likely to continue for a while. With guidance from the Command Post we worked out a schedule where we would rotate every twelve hours with the State Police and include an hour overlap to communicate new developments.

  As anticipated, the standoff lasted through the first night and into the second day. As time dragged on and the media glare heightened, pressure to resolve the situation mounted. We were scheduled to take the midnight shift.

  As an assistant FBI SWAT team leader, part of my job was to coordinate with the FBI supervisor in the Command Post. The supervisor had been one of my former bosses. He and I had never had a problem. But since supervisors and Agents generally traveled in separate social circles, I didn’t know him well.

  When I stopped by the Command Post before midnight to be briefed on recent developments, this supervisor had very little to say. But I sensed from the mood inside that something was about to break.

  From the Command Post, I walked to our SWAT van and grabbed whatever I thought we might need during our shift, including extra tear gas canisters. From there I reported to the inside perimeter—fifteen yards from the front of house and partially hidden by large trees—to coordinate with my State Police coun
terpart.

  The night was eerily quiet. Every so often we could see Ms. Nelson looking down at us from the second-floor window. An hour passed and my State Police counterpart didn’t leave as I expected him to. Then I noticed increased radio traffic on State Police channels. When I tried to reach our FBI supervisor in the Command Post to find out what was going on, I discovered that our radios weren’t working.

  I turned to my New Jersey State Police counterpart and said, “I know something is about to happen. What the fuck is it?”

  “We’re getting ready to gas him out,” he answered. “Time to earn our pay.”

  Minutes later, I heard the distinctive whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of a tear gas assault followed by the sound of shattering glass. The State Police attack continued for the next ten minutes, but didn’t seem to be having the desired effect, because we continued to catch glimpses of Ms. Nelson wearing a gas mask through the second-story window.

  At one point the State Police guy turned to me and asked, “You have any tear gas canisters on you? We’re running out of gas.”

  Without hesitation, I answered, “Sure,” and handed him the ones I had taken from the SWAT van.

  The additional tear gas was fired and several hours later at around 4 AM, Leslie Nelson emerged from the house with her hands over her head and was quickly taken into custody.

  The tragic ordeal was over. As State Police detectives and forensic experts examined the crime scene, I returned to my car. On the way, I passed one of our SWAT team leaders and mentioned that I had given the State Police some of our tear gas canisters.

  Several days later, one of the senior guys in our office asked me about the tear gas. I answered in a wise-ass way, “Yeah, I gave it to them, and I wish I’d given them more.”