Our “clientele” was likely to be largely Hispanic, so we wanted native-Spanish speakers. At the time, the only Agents in our office who spoke fluent Spanish happened to be white. While working the Bacalao case I had gotten to know a number of New Jersey State Troopers, who had helped us execute stops, arrests, and huge drug seizures on Route 95 between New York City and Philadelphia. I picked two excellent, aggressive Hispanic NJ State Troopers to be our undercovers. They jumped at the opportunity to get out of uniform into plain clothes with plenty of nice jewelry and watches courtesy of the FBI.
In November 1990, five months after stopping Nestor’s car and after spending $250,000 of FBI money in start-up costs to create MRK Services, we were ready to launch Eastload. Given the financial investment from the FBI, the pressure to succeed was high.
Armed with a pocketful of freshly printed business cards, Nestor went out into the drug-trafficking community and spread the word about our services. They included the five vehicles with hides and the first brick-sized cell phones.
Nestor acted as our recruiter, vetter, and salesman, and handed out business cards to major dealers only. We didn’t want this to be a walk-in-off-the-street kind of business. If you didn’t have a business card from Nestor, you didn’t get in.
He did his job so well that when we got ready to open our doors one morning at 9 AM, there was a line of people waiting to get in. Once in the showroom, drug traffickers checked out our vehicles and phones. Then just like in a legitimate car dealership one of the undercovers would saunter over and discuss price and terms.
A typical conversation went like this:
UNDERCOVER: “How many pairs of shoes do you have?” (Undercovers never used the terms of cocaine or kilos.)
“Four hundred,” a customer answered.
“Then you’re going to need the van. Right this way.”
Our sparkling white Econoline van had a hide that could accommodate five hundred kilos and rented for $500 a day. We never let a conveyance leave without having a positive identification on the renter as a predicated drug trafficker, and a valid legal reason to initiate an investigation. All our vehicles were equipped with trackers, and everything that went on in the showroom was video and audiotaped.
Within weeks, we became the Hertz of drug dealers in the Philadelphia/southern New Jersey/New York City area. Demand for our services was so high that we had to order five more vehicles. The vans and trucks were by far the most popular, and they were being used to move large loads.
Even with ten vehicles in our arsenal, we had to be extremely selective. There were only so many vans and trucks we could follow and arrests we could make. It got to the point where we were turning down eight out of ten requests for our products.
Additionally, we were running Title III intercepts on the cell phones we leased out. Swamped with paperwork and the logistics of tracking vehicles and phones, we started to narrow our focus to only the big suppliers. At the same time, we had to be strategic in order to hide our hand.
Say we followed a car to a stash house. Instead of hitting the car, we might raid the stash house days later and with legal warrants. Next time around, we might do the opposite. The point was to confuse the bad guys and wall off our New Jersey operation. We didn’t want the dealers to suspect that the FBI was running the car and cell phone rental scheme, and they never did.
We learned that most major Colombian suppliers were located in New York City, and made them our priority. When local Philadelphia dealers used our vehicles to travel to New York City, we assumed they were carrying money. And when they returned to Philadelphia, we figured they were transporting dope. Sometimes we’d let the money go and seized the dope. Other times, working with the New York FBI or New Jersey Police, we seized the money.
Once we followed one of our vans to a drug house in the Badlands and watched guys fill the hide with hockey bags. When we stopped the van on the Jersey Turnpike, we discovered the hockey bags were packed with a half million dollars in cash—a good day’s haul.
Sophisticated and experienced drug-trafficking organizations like the Colombians built losing dope in law enforcement seizures into their business model. They moved so damn much of it that forfeiting some was no big deal. But hitting their money really pissed them off. The recorded conversations at MRK were hilarious, with dopers complaining to our undercovers that they were having a run of bad luck, and us encouraging them to push harder to make up the losses, and when they did, whacking them again.
In the spring of 1991, Eastload became so successful that word about our rental operation had spread from the streets into far away federal prisons. A pint-sized Cuban dealer named Cristobal Paz, serving a ten-year sentence for distribution of cocaine at a federal prison in Kentucky, learned about us through a business associate in Philadelphia named Theodore Santiago.
Paz’s sentence was about to expire and once out, he wanted to make fast money. We first heard Paz’s name when he reached out to Nestor through Santiago and inquired about our hide cars and phones. When we ran Paz’s name through NADDIS, it showed up in connection with more than twenty drug investigations. Come on down!!
Literally days after Paz’s release from prison, he strutted into our showroom with Santiago like he was the real-life Scarface. As I listened the arrogant little fuck demanded one of our hide cars immediately. Trouble was we didn’t have any available.
Paz puffed out his chest at one of our undercovers and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
Minutes later, he held up one of our brick-sized cell phones and said, “Give me two of these. You know the FBI can’t record these.”
He was mistaken. We not only had federal court authority to listen on the cell phone he rented from us for ninety days, we also subpoenaed his phone records from prison. They revealed that Paz was communicating with major Colombian suppliers in New York and talking with them about setting up windfall future deals.
A week or so after his first visit, Paz got the hide car he wanted and started moving dope. We followed the first car to his New York supplier. The second time he rented a hide car from us, we waited until he left and hit his stash house, which contained thirty-five kilos of cocaine he had just obtained from a Medellín kingpin in New York.
Hoping that Paz could lead us to bigger fish, we made the strategic decision not to immediately arrest him. Because of the seizure of the thirty-five kilos, he owed money to the kingpin in New York—a Colombian man named Jose Gonzalez-Rivera. We focused on Paz and Gonzalez-Rivera almost exclusively for months, tracking their daily movements and monitoring their communications and learned that Gonzalez-Rivera was dealing directly with the Pablo Escobar organization in Medellín.
Two years into Eastload and after a year of following Paz, we’d amassed an impressive amount of highly incriminating evidence against Paz, Gonzalez-Rivera, and their associates, and it was time to throw their asses in jail. On arrest day, we had the undercover troopers order five kilos of coke from Paz. The exchange took place on the Jersey side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge—not far from the location of our showroom. The cops accepted four kilos to be paid for later, and rejected one kilo by claiming it was of inferior quality, or “shit.” The whole transaction was videotaped.
When Paz drove away, I signaled a marked New Jersey State Police unit to pull him over and arrest him. Simultaneously, we grabbed Jose Gonzalez-Rivera and ten of their top associates in New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.
On February 7, 1992, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania returned a twenty-eight count indictment charging the twelve defendants with multiple federal drug offenses for conspiring to distribute in excess of 320 kilograms of cocaine valued at $6 million dollars. In the indictment, the U.S. attorney stated, “This is the first time in this district that we have brought an indictment against a Medellín, Colombia, cartel cell leader.”
Both Gonzalez-Rivera and Paz were charged with a CCE—running a Continuing Crimi
nal Enterprise, aka the federal “Kingpin” criminal statute, the heaviest federal drug hit possible. If convicted of the CCE count, they faced life in prison.
I loathed Paz at this point. To underline the point that he was being charged under the Kingpin statute, I put a paper Burger King hat on his head for his booking photo.
The little fucker was so pissed at the prospect of spending more time in prison after that he tried to chest-bump me as he got up from the chair. I read the CCE statute to him, emphasizing the life sentence potential, and I could see the gears turning in his head.
I remember thinking: I hope this asshole doesn’t have anything to offer, because I don’t want anything else to do with him.
The arrests of Paz and Gonzalez-Rivera were the culmination of an enormously time-consuming and exhausting UCO—two years of sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks with many missed birthdays and holidays. In return, we’d arrested approximately fifty drug dealers and had taken a huge amount of dope off the streets.
Over those two years, I’d tried to be a good father to our growing family, which now included five-year-old Russell, Michael born in 1987, and Paige born in 1990. I’d even signed up to coach my son Russell’s T-ball team. But because of my unpredictable work schedule, I sometimes ended up missing three or four games in a row.
Now I wanted to make it up to my wife and kids after basically being MIA for two years.
In meetings with Paz and his lawyer after his arrest but before his trial, Paz kept intimating that he possessed valuable information, which he was willing to share in exchange for favorable consideration in court. A big part of me didn’t want anything further to do with him. I was also dealing with something like thirty other defendants, some of whom were offering to cooperate and kick-start new investigations.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Shane Thomas, who was handling the case and a good friend of mine, advised, “You’re letting Paz get under your skin. It’s better to hear him out.”
“Alright,” I answered. “Tell his attorney that in our next meeting, Paz either plays his card, or we’re moving on.”
A few days later, Paz, his attorney, Shane Thomas, and I met in Shane’s office.
I looked Paz in the eye and said bluntly, “This is your last chance. Shit or get off the pot.”
He leaned back, nodded confidently, and said in heavily accented English, “You know who I can give you on a silver platter?”
“Who?”
“Mohammed Salim Malik,” he said with great importance.
I’d never heard the name before. “How do you spell that?”
Paz spelled it for me and I wrote it down.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You never heard his name before?”
“No. I don’t know who the fuck he is.”
“Go look him up, man. He’s famous. He’s one of DEA’s most wanted.”
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, but I showed no reaction. “Let’s hear what you’ve got on him first.”
Paz explained that while he was serving time in federal prison in McCreary, Kentucky, he had met Mohammed Salim Malik, who was in for ten years for trafficking hashish to the United States. The two dope dealers had discussed a wide-ranging international plan whereby Pakistani heroin would be traded for cocaine from Medellín, Colombia, with Malik and Paz serving as the intermediaries.
The scheme was brilliant in a diabolical way, as it would open huge markets for both the Colombians and Pakistanis in Europe and the Americas, respectively. And had the potential to be a huge, multimillion-dollar operation.
Paz explained that the two men had finalized the plan months before Malik finished serving his sentence. Malik had gotten out first and was now back in Pakistan and waiting to hear from Paz and put the proposal into action.
I walked away thinking, If this is real, I’ve got to pursue it. But my wife won’t be happy. I was also concerned that a year had passed since Paz had been released from prison. Maybe Malik had lost interest in the scheme in the interim.
First thing I had to do was check to see if Malik really was as important as Paz claimed he was. When I looked him up on NADDIS, all these alarm bells went off instructing us to notify DEA immediately. Malik was a prized target and considered one of the top five heroin distributors in Pakistan.
Shane and I spoke to the DEA and they said they had open cases on Malik. But the reality was that he was walking around free in the city of Karachi, Paz was offering to cooperate with us, and the DEA and FBI shared jurisdiction in drug cases, including international investigations.
We responded to the DEA diplomatically, “Great. We’re here to help. We’re going to take a shot at him ourselves.”
My gut told me that Malik could be a major win. Other Agents on our Squad were more skeptical, asking, “How are you going to get in touch with him?” And, “Why are you bothering?”
“I’m bothering,” I answered, “because he’s one of the top heroin distributors in the world, and he needs to be locked up—again.”
I’d already been lucky once with the tip that led me to Nestor. I wasn’t going to let the excuses of my exhaustion, or the added workload, or the possible consequences at home cause me to turn my back on this opportunity either.
It was time to saddle up again.
7
PAKISTANI GOLD
Again, we had to jump through hoops before FBIHQ and the Justice Department approved our new undercover operation in March 1992. It helped enormously that this time I had “made my bones” (FBI-speak) in the Bacalao and Eastload investigations. In other words, I had successfully investigated and prosecuted major cases from start to finish. My FBI boss assigned three other Special Agents to help me work the new Pakistani UCO.
From the get-go, we ran into difficulties, including the fact that handling Cristobal Paz as an informant was a logistical nightmare. Because of the seriousness of the charges against him, no federal judge was willing to release him into our long-term custody. So every time we needed Paz to communicate with Mohammed Salim Malik, we had to seek permission from the court to take him from prison.
During the time Paz was in our custody, it was our responsibility to guard him 24/7. We assigned two older guys in the office who didn’t mind spending hours sitting in our undercover office to serve as his security team. Their duties included escorting Paz back and forth from prison to our off-site undercover office, feeding him, and dealing with his bullshit. Every time we picked him up, he arrived with another litany of requests and complaints. He wanted a steak sandwich, he needed a more comfortable bed, because the one in prison didn’t meet his standards, he didn’t like the way we were running the case.
Another challenge involved the time difference between southern New Jersey and Karachi—Karachi is ten hours ahead. From our undercover office located in an office park in southern New Jersey, Paz initiated contact with Malik via phone and fax. He explained to Malik that he had recently been released from prison and was anxious to get the drug exchange scheme moving. The Pakistani drug trafficker seemed interested.
My mother once told me, “If you want to do something right, do it yourself.” At the start of the operation, I requested a fax machine that we could use exclusively for communications with Malik. When I tested the machine that the FBI supplied by sending a sample message to our office machine, the fax went out with an FBI header—not a good idea when running an undercover operation. I made it a practice to double- and triple-check everything.
Paz was born in Cuba, and like Nestor, had come to the United States in the summer of 1980 during the infamous Mariel boatlift when Cuban leader Fidel Castro permitted 125,000 Cubans to leave the country and head to Florida. A number of those released were mental patients and criminals—Paz among the latter. Over the dozen or so years Paz had resided in the United States, he had spent most of it in prison or engaged in some form of criminal activity.
Paz had never developed a proficiency in English. Meanwhile, Malik’s faxes were carefully
worded and sounded as though they had been written by an English professor.
After a month or two of at least seventy electronic messages between southern New Jersey and Pakistan, the two drug traffickers started speaking directly over the phone. Now the language barrier between Paz, a native-Spanish speaker, and Malik, a native-Urdu speaker, became a more serious issue. The former worried that his English wasn’t good enough to negotiate the complexities of an international drug swap.
He needed help. I requested and got a fourth Agent named Lee Ross, who looked about twelve years old and spoke fluent Spanish. Despite the fact that Lee was a new recruit and new recruits usually got the shit assignments, I immediately designated him Paz’s “cousin,” and used him as the English translator between Paz and Malik.
* * *
Malik claimed to be running a travel agency in Karachi. The two principals, fearful that the DEA was listening in on their communications, spoke in code, referring to heroin and cocaine as “friend,” “marbles,” or “carpets.”
“I need rugs. Lots of rugs,” Paz said during one conversation.
“How many?” Malik asked.
“Hundreds at a time. Good quality rugs.”
“I can arrange that. The rugs are the best you can find—the highest quality rugs in all of Pakistan.”
The Paz-Malik talks might have sounded casual, but were actually carefully worked out on our end. Two days before Paz was scheduled to come to our undercover office, I’d start writing the outlines of a script for him to follow. Over the weeks and months, I got pretty good at thinking and talking like a dope dealer.
At the end of one conversation with Malik, Paz would set up the time of their next communication. Sometimes Malik would call unexpectedly. A special red phone in the office was dedicated exclusively to Malik. Everyone had instructions not to pick it up when it rang.
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