Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  He laughed, and then said, “Well, there might be a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  I soon found out that the FBI supervisor in the Command Post was accusing me of violating FBI policy for handing over tear gas without permission, and recommending disciplinary action.

  I hit the fucking roof and wanted to confront the supervisor directly. He did his best to avoid me, and some of my fellow Agents managed to calm me down.

  For days later, I sat at my desk stewing and waiting to be called to the front office to be interviewed. Meanwhile, I learned that other SWAT members were being questioned about my actions the night of the raid. Unable to hold my anger any longer, I marched down Mahogany Row and entered the office of the ASAC in charge of FBI SWAT.

  I barely knew the ASAC at that point. I sat in one of the leather chairs in his office and vented, trying to control my temper, and explaining in blunt language that I made the tactical decision to hand over the tear gas to the State Police without asking my supervisor’s permission, one, because I couldn’t reach him on the radio that wasn’t working, two, because it was the right thing to do under the circumstances, and, three, because I wasn’t going to wait for permission to help another cop.

  At one point during my emotional dissertation, I saw the ASAC crack a smile, but otherwise he reserved comment until I finished. At the end he simply said, “Don’t worry about it. Good job.”

  I was never disciplined and remained on FBI SWAT for ten exciting and fun-filled years. Many of my SWAT teammates remain friends for life. And I’ll be forever grateful for the honor and privilege of serving, the thrills and chills, the crazy times and stories, and most of all, the laughs. Thanks.

  But my distrust of FBI supervisors lingered. What struck me was how quickly they were willing to turn on one of their own.

  6

  EASTLOAD

  The year 1990 proved to be a turning point in my career. During the Bacalao investigation of the previous year, I’d worked as second fiddle to the Counselor, who acted as what was known in FBI lingo as the Case Agent. Now it was time for me to become a Case Agent—the captain of the investigative ship and the person who makes all operational calls, and has final authority. I was chomping at the bit.

  The opportunity came in the form of an announcement over the office PA in the spring of 1990.

  “Any Agent on a Drug Squad, pick up on line two.”

  Calls like this arrived every hour of every day to our office. Most of them came from wackos offering conspiracy theories, or misleading tips, or complaining about aliens in UFOs flying over their homes. Sometimes I would suggest that they tilt their tin foil hat a little more to the left, or cover their windows with butter to prevent X-rays from entering. But I answered, nonetheless, hoping that one of the hundreds of calls would yield a significant lead.

  On May 15, 1990, when I picked up, a Hispanic male with a heavy accent described a one-kilo drug deal that was going to take place in a drug-infested area of North Philadelphia known as the “Badlands” in an hour. The Badlands was ground zero for all drug activity in Philadelphia, and where 95 percent of our Squad’s work was concentrated.

  The man provided the full names and physical descriptions of the two drug traffickers involved, a specific address, and the fact that the car they used would be equipped with a secret compartment known as a “hide.” Before I could ask a single question, he hung up.

  Sensing this tip was real, I asked a clerk to check the names and address against a shared FBI/DEA database called NADDIS (Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System). Seconds after she entered their names, photos and lists of drug offenses appeared on the screen. I stood up in the Squad room and announced, “I’ve got a live one. Whoever is ready, let’s hit this quick!”

  Five guys followed me out the door and into the basement, where we fired up a couple cars and raced to the Badlands. We arrived at the location at 2:05 PM. The guy on the phone had said that the two dealers would be there at approximately 2:10.

  Sure enough, five minutes later the car he described pulled up to the exact address. Two Hispanic men in their midtwenties got out empty handed, and went into the house. One was the size of a moose.

  I snapped pictures of the two men and the car, and then radioed the Squad and said, “Showtime, guys. We’re going to have to stop the car.”

  It was a hot day with a lot of people out on the street. If we tried stopping and arresting the suspects in the Badlands, we ran the risk of having the neighborhood turn against us and creating a shit storm. More importantly, if we made the stop in the Badlands every dope dealer would know about it in five minutes, and any chance we had of “flipping” the suspects, or getting them to cooperate with law enforcement, would go down the drain.

  I radioed for a marked PHPD unit to set up on Roosevelt Blvd. A few minutes later the two Hispanic guys emerged from the house, carrying a gym bag. The gym bag was a tell—most dope dealers carried their product in gym bags at the time.

  We watched the two dicking around in the backseat for a while. Then they took off. They drove like old ladies, well below the speed limit and heeding every traffic sign—another giveaway. We followed at a distance, while I manned the radio and coordinated the police cars.

  A mile or so out of the Badlands, I gave the order to make the stop. The marked unit lit them up, burped their siren, and we pulled up behind it. I wanted the marked unit to make the initial stop so that the dope dealers couldn’t later argue in court that they thought the guys in the unmarked car were trying to rob them, and, therefore, opened fire first—which is exactly what happened to a couple of Squad #2 Agents years later, who were badly wounded in a ferocious firefight.

  “FBI! Get out of the car with your hands over your heads.”

  The driver was a nice-looking young man with a Florida driver’s license, who identified himself as Nestor Lopez. He appeared cooperative, but started sweating like a pig. We separated him from the passenger, the Moose, who was already eye-fucking the cops.

  By this point in my career, I’d stopped hundreds of drivers and dealt with hundreds of dope dealers. In any pair, one was always the alpha male. In this case, it was Moose. I didn’t speak Spanish, but I know enough to understand the Spanish words for motherfucker (hijo de puta), which was constantly coming out of Moose’s mouth, I told one of our guys to cuff him and stick him in one of the cars.

  According to the 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures is not violated when a police officer stops a suspect on the street without probable cause for arrest, if the police officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed or is about to commit a crime and has a reasonable belief that the person may be armed and dangerous.

  The fact that we had seen the suspects coming out of a known drug house and hiding a gym bag in their car gave us reasonable cause. Also, the decision by the Supreme Court in Michigan v. Long (1983) extended Terry v. Ohio to allow searches of car compartments during a stop with reasonable suspicion.

  So we were well within our rights to search the car. I calmly explained the situation to Nestor, whose shirt was now soaked with sweat and seemed ready to crack.

  His response was: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “My friend,” I replied, “we saw you come out of the drug house carrying a gym bag and fucking around in the backseat with Godzilla over there. If you don’t tell me where the gym bag is, I’m calling the dogs.”

  “I don’t have no gym bag,” Nestor contended.

  I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Forget about Moose. He’s going to jail for being stupid. I thought you might be brighter, but now you’re acting stupid, too. Do you understand the situation you’re in, or not?”

  In other words, I knew there was cocaine in that car and we weren’t going anywhere until we found it. But when I looked through the windows into the car, I couldn’t see a gy
m bag on or under the backseat.

  I turned to Nestor and said, “This is your last chance to do the right thing.”

  He continued playing dumb, saying, “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I called for the K-9 Unit. As soon as their van turned the corner and started toward us, Nestor said, “Okay, man, I’ll show you where it is.”

  He was also in handcuffs at this point. Nestor said, “Give me my car keys.”

  “Do I look stupid?” I responded. “No way that’s going to happen.”

  “You’re not getting shit without the car keys, man.”

  I looked at him hard. “Where’s the gym bag?”

  “You’re not going to find it,” he responded.

  I climbed into the car and searched every inch of the front and back. Then I popped the trunk. No bag. I asked some of the Squad guys to look. They searched under all the seats thoroughly using a flashlight. Still no gym bag.

  WTF? I was starting to wonder if my mind was playing tricks on me.

  Nestor saw the confusion on my face and said, “If you give me the keys, I’ll get it.”

  “Alright,” I responded, “but if you try to run, I’ll shoot you in the back.” I was kidding but I’m pretty sure he didn’t know that.

  I undid the cuffs and handed him the keys. Nestor got in the car, started the ignition, and punched a series of radio buttons. I heard electronic buzzing and clicking, and then something metal popped open. Nestor reached into a secret compartment between the backseat and trunk, and came out with the gym bag. Inside the bag was a kilo of cocaine. Sweet.

  The Moose and Nestor were now legally completely hosed, and charged with possession with intent to distribute one kilo of cocaine. During the early 1990s when the War on Drugs was on full throttle, both men were facing serious federal jail time.

  Back at the Squad, while processing Nestor, I learned he was a native of Cuba and had come to the United States through the famous Mariel boatlift of the early ’80s. He worked in the automobile industry when not selling dope, and knew his way around auto garages.

  Messing with Nestor’s head, I said to him, “You’re fucked, kid, which is a shame. Your life is over. By the time you get out of jail, you’re going to be an old man. No woman is ever going to look at you again.”

  After a few minutes, he looked up at me and groaned, “I gotta talk to my wife.”

  “Fuck that, my man. You’re not talking to anyone. You’re under arrest.”

  “Look … I’ll cooperate with you guys, but I have to talk to my wife first.”

  “Forget it.”

  Usually when someone who is willing to cooperate speaks to a family member, the whole neighborhood knows about it ten minutes later, which renders the potential informer useless.

  I was in the mug room taking Nestor’s mug shots, when a Squad mate poked his head in and whispered, “His wife is here.”

  “What?”

  “His wife is sitting outside.”

  That was strange because we hadn’t given Nestor a chance to call her. The only thing that made sense was that Moose—who had been processed by another Agent—must have been allowed to call his wife, and Moose’s wife called Nestor’s wife.

  Peering through the one-way window to the waiting room, I saw this well–dressed, gorgeous Hispanic woman sitting with her legs crossed. She looked like a modern-day Sofía Vergara. My first thought was: What the hell’s she doing with him?

  In those days, I often led with my mouth rather than my head. “What the fuck, Nestor. How’d you land her?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your wife. She’s here.”

  He looked surprised. Normally in a situation like this we didn’t allow suspects to talk to members of their families. But after letting them both stew awhile, I decided to make an exception.

  “My friend,” I started, “I’m going to bring your wife back here, and I’m going to sit with the two of you and I don’t want you speaking Spanish. Understand?”

  I called in a Mormon Agent who was fluent in Spanish just in case, and sure enough as soon as Nestor’s wife saw her husband, she started jabbering at him en Español.

  The Mormon Agent turned to me and said, “She told him that she’s leaving him if he doesn’t cooperate. She wants him to do whatever you say.”

  That was music to my ears. Nestor later explained that another part of the reason he agreed to cooperate was I had treated him professionally and with respect from the time of the car stop. That was a practice I’d learned during my days as a cop. I dealt with suspects the same way I would want to be treated under the same circumstances. It was up to them what type of law enforcement relationship they wanted to have. If they chose to be difficult, I could also be extremely difficult, too—totally up to them.

  People usually become informants for three reasons:

  1. They face criminal charges (or are “jammed up,” in FBI parlance) and are seeking favorable treatment in court.

  2. They’re interested in eliminating their competition in the criminal world.

  3. They’re mercenaries who do it for the money.

  Types two and three are dangerous, because they can turn on you at any time. The best informers are people like Nestor, who are motivated to work with law enforcement in order to get their criminal charges reduced.

  For someone to become an FBI informant they have to meet a strict set of legal criteria and be approved by the FBI brass. They generally rule out anyone who has ever been convicted of a violent crime. Since Nestor was a drug dealer with no violent offenses on his record, he was accepted. His wife turned out to be a classy, educated woman with a good job at a utility company.

  She started cooperating with us from Day One. Nestor, meanwhile, cooled his heels in jail, but was entitled to a bail hearing every thirty days. Because the courts were filled with spies working for the various drug-trafficking organizations, we didn’t want to risk going to court and asking for his release. Instead, every thirty days at Nestor’s bail hearing his lawyer would argue to lower his bail. After three months, it dropped to a reasonable amount, which Nestor’s wife promptly paid. Once released, Nestor immediately reported for FBI informant duty, and I knew exactly what I wanted to use him for.

  In the late ’80s/early ’90s, hides were new to both dope dealers and law enforcement. In fact, before we had stopped Nestor’s car, I’d never seen one before. It got me thinking: Maybe we set up an Undercover Operation (UCO) where we offer cars with hides, and use them to catch bad guys.

  UCOs and Title III electronic surveillance were the two most complex, demanding, difficult, and effective investigative techniques in the FBI’s arsenal. I’d been part of a Title III investigation in the Bacalao case, but had never done a UCO. This seemed like the perfect time to try.

  Back in those days, the FBI was just starting to use computers. So I spent several days after Nestor’s arrest calling FBI offices all over the country. I asked each one: “Do you know anyone in the FBI or law enforcement who has run an undercover operation like this?”

  The Los Angeles Division happened to be my sixth call. Agents there described an FBI resident agency office in Santa Ana, California, that had initiated a similar and very successful undercover operation a year earlier. They called their’s “Loadtrak.” Like a good FBI Agent, I immediately “borrowed” their concept for the East Coast and dubbed ours “Eastload.”

  Then, I traveled out to Santa Ana to see how they had set theirs up. Agents in the Orange County municipality generously shared all the nuts and bolts of their UCO. They showed me the various hide cars and trucks, and introduced me to the mechanics who had built the sophisticated hides.

  Now that I could show the existence of a very successful precedent in another FBI Division, it turned out to be relatively easy to get my plan approved. Again, like a good FBI Agent, I “borrowed” all of LA’s paperwork, or “ponies” in FBI speak, and started to draft my first FBI UCO.

  The p
rocess to get an undercover operation approved required extensive preparation, research, logic, hard work, and long hours. There were multiple layers of approvals to secure from our own Division, FBIHQ, and the Department of Justice. The FBI wasn’t about to invest significant time, effort, manpower, and money on some goofy idea. It took a couple of months and gave me writer’s cramps, before we got the green light from Washington with a budget of more than $500,000 for hide buildouts and dope buys.

  Next came something we called “backstopping”—or fabricating a story with false documents to support an undercover operation. In this case, we wanted to set up a business that rented out cars with hides to drug dealers and thereby catch a lot of bad guys. We scoured the local area for an appropriate facility and found a huge warehouse in an industrial complex across the Delaware River in New Jersey big enough to accommodate twenty cars with private offices in front. Video monitors, listening devices, and one-way glass had to be installed.

  More importantly, we had to build a profile for the business by incorporating it and getting insurance, just like a real company. Everything had to look perfectly legit if scrutinized. To start our fleet, we picked out three government-seized cars, a van, and a truck and hired the same Santa Ana mechanics to build hides inside them. They had to be the best, because if I wanted to run a successful FBI UCO, every detail had to be done right.

  As the Case Agent of the UCO, I would be managing everything from behind the scenes. I also needed people to help me with logistics and the enormous amount of FBI paperwork that would be generated. From our Squad, I selected a young African American FBI Special Agent named Hank Roberts, whom I had just finished training to be my #2, and another Squad Agent named Wayne Kent, to be the admin guy. (More on Kent later.)

  Critical to the success of the operation would be the undercover guys who would actually interact with the drug dealers and sell our services. Nestor and his wife were going to be our front people. With street cred among traffickers around the Philadelphia area, they were perfect to spread the news about our business. Since they couldn’t appear to be managing the entire business themselves, they were going to need assistants to help man the showroom and do other tasks.