Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

Several times, Lee Ross answered the red phone by mistake and would have to explain that his cousin Paz was out on other business. Once, the red phone rang when Paz was on another phone yacking with one of his relatives. I got his attention, pointed to the red phone, and indicated that he should answer it promptly.

  Paz, being an arrogant little prick, responded with a dismissive wave of his hand and turned his back to me. He continued to gab with his relative and ignore the ringing phone.

  My world turned red. I’d never laid a hand on an informant before, and never have since. But this time, after months of putting up with Paz’s constant complaints about how stupid we were and how he was being treated unfairly, I grabbed him by the collar, lifted him out of his chair, and threw him across the room like a human Frisbee as the other Agents froze in shock.

  A dazed Paz pulled himself up and proceeded to answer the phone. When the conversation with Malik ended, he turned to me and with indignation in his voice asked, “Are you fucking insane, man? You are a crazy man.… What the fuck … you could have killed me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  I came right back at him, still boiling hot. “You ever blow me off again when I tell you to do something, you midget motherfucker, maybe I will kill you. When I tell you to answer the phone, answer the phone!” I was all ready for Round Two.

  Paz backed away shouting, “You can’t treat me like this. I quit! I’m afraid to talk to you. I want to talk to the judge.”

  “Listen to me, Paz, and listen clearly,” I said getting in his face. “Next time the phone rings, you’ve got three seconds to pick it up before you piss me off. You haven’t seen me pissed off yet. What just happened, is nothing.”

  Paz always answered the Malik phone promptly after that.

  Starting in February 1992, we listened in on approximately 135 calls between Paz and Malik. At the beginning, the odds of the operation’s success had been infinitesimal, but they slowly increased as we persevered through one obstacle after another and inched forward.

  In a conversation in April, Malik said, “Listen to me carefully.… I have something really big. I’m waiting on a signal from you. I’m almost ready … and I can do any damn thing.…”

  In a fax sent in June, he boasted, “Let me educate you about my product.… This product contains between 85 and 90 percent, which means you can cut it four to six times.”

  He wasn’t talking about apples. Heroin of the purity he referred to was unheard of in the United States at the time and if injected would be lethal. The amounts he talked about were unprecedented as well. In the early ’90s, an exchange involving one or two kilograms of heroin was considered a huge deal in the United States. Now, we were overhearing Malik and Paz discuss the importation of up to five hundred kilograms of heroin worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  The amounts Paz and Malik discussed were so staggering that the DEA suggested the entire scheme was “not credible.” Between managing the undercover operation and stealing time to spend with my family, I studied Malik and his native Pakistan. I learned that Pakistan was part of the “Golden Crescent,” and shared a long border with the country of Afghanistan—the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin—and that the majority of Afghan heroin passed through Pakistan before it was distributed to Iran, Russia, Europe, and North America. So the quantities Malik was talking about weren’t outside the realm of possibility.

  The initial trade had remained the same one they had outlined in prison—an exchange of a hundred kilos of cocaine for fifty kilos of heroin. Heroin was more expensive. One day Malik upped the ante.

  He said to Paz over the phone, “I need 150 pair of shoes of your best merchandize.”

  “Then how many marbles will you send to me?” Paz asked.

  “Fifty.”

  “No way,” Paz answered. “If we do it that way you’re screwing me on the deal.”

  Like most drug traffickers, Paz couldn’t add two and two together, but was phenomenally skilled at negotiating dope deals. The purity of the drugs proved to be a complicating factor. Five kilos of heroin at 90 percent purity was more valuable than ten kilos at 20 percent.

  Both Malik and Paz also struggled to solve the dilemma of how the exchange would take place. Once one of them sent their drugs, what would prevent the second guy from screwing him?

  On the FBI side, we also faced a conundrum. Legal restrictions prevented us from sending illegal drugs to Malik in Pakistan. Nor could we front the millions of dollars required to purchase heroin from him. In 1992, one kilo of heroin had a street value of about $200,000, and Malik was offering to send a first shipment of fifty kilos. All we needed to legally charge him was a few ounces.

  Faced with both problems, we came up with a solution, which was to ask Malik to send us a sample so we could test its purity and use it to establish a network for his product in the United States. The problem was that at the time it was practically unheard of for drug traffickers to front their product because of the possibility of being ripped off. In the scenario we came up with, we were counting on Malik to realize that the possible rewards outweighed the risk.

  As Case Agent, I directed everything through Paz and Lee. The mental concentration, the daily pressure, and the fear of making a minor mistake that would compromise everything we had worked toward weighed heavily. After the more taxing exchanges, I would be so mentally exhausted that I would lay on the hard concrete office floor and immediately fall asleep.

  It took months of daily phones calls to convince Malik to accept our plan. Now the remaining problem was the purity. In April 1992, I instructed Paz to try to set up a face-to-face meeting. During their next phone conversation, Paz said to Malik, “We have to get in the same room. This phone stuff isn’t working.”

  “I agree,” Malik responded. “Why don’t you come here, so we can talk in person?”

  Since Paz was spending his nights in a prison cell in New Jersey, there was no way he was going to Pakistan. Malik, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the country that had locked him away for ten years. I suggested another friendly country—Canada. A month later, Malik offered to send his thirty-eight-year-old nephew Shahid Hafeez Khawaja in his place. The meeting was to take place in Montreal, Canada, which Malik thought of as outside the purview of U.S. law. What he didn’t know was that Canadian and U.S. law enforcement officials had a long history of cooperation in criminal investigations.

  This case didn’t prove be an exception. Canadian authorities quickly offered to help us in any way. The next problem we encountered was that we couldn’t take Paz out of the country. We recruited my old informant Nestor instead, and Paz told Malik that he was tied up with local business and was sending a trusted lieutenant to negotiate on his behalf.

  I accompanied Nestor and Lee to Montreal in mid-May 1992, but as the Case Agent remained out of sight. Together with members of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) I watched as Nestor greeted Shahid at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Montreal. Shahid wasn’t what I had expected, and looked more like a goofy computer salesman than a drug trafficker. He spoke excellent English with a slight lisp.

  The first actual sit-down was scheduled for that evening at a local strip club. I slipped into the seedy club ahead of time and found the manager.

  With dance music blaring in the background, I said to him, “I have a business associate named Khawaja coming in later and I want you to take good care of him.” Then I greased his palm with a little green.

  The manager nodded and replied, “You got it, pal.”

  In the company of two plainclothes OPP guys, I watched from a side table as Khawaja arrived in the company of Nestor and Lee. The moment Khawaja spied the naked dancers twirling and grinding on the stage, his eyes almost popped out of his head.

  It struck me as both funny and sad. Here was a young married man with pockets full of money who had apparently never seen a nude woman before. He sat completely mesmerized by the dancers as beads of sweat dripped from his face
onto his open-collared shirt. Getting him to discuss the possible dope deal wasn’t going to be easy.

  The Canadian cops and I drank beer, and tried to look inconspicuous. At this point in my career, I’d done very little undercover work, and was looking around the joint at the various customers trying to figure out who was who—traveling salesman, undercover cop, criminal. As someone who’d always been interested in peoples’ behavior, I found the clientele fascinating.

  My intense curiosity caught the attention of a couple of hard-assed customers who walked over to me and asked roughly, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  “Sorry,” I answered. “I was daydreaming.”

  Time to focus and blend. As the hours dragged on and Khawaja kept spending money on girls and dances, I started to worry that he’d get rolled. I also wondered how I was going to explain the hundreds of dollars we were spending in the strip club to my FBI bosses.

  The next day I got Nestor to convince Khawaja to accompany him to New Jersey, so he could meet Paz in person and settle business. As in the Eastload case, Nestor played his role perfectly. But when we tried to get him back into the United States, we ran into an unexpected snafu. Because of legal issues with Nestor’s original travel documents from Cuba, he was banned from reentering the United States.

  So we sent Khawaja ahead to New Jersey to relax while we finished some other drug business in Montreal, and asked FBIHQ to petition the State Department and other U.S. government agencies to quickly resolve Nestor’s travel problem so he could return to the States and not raise any suspicion. After three intense days of FBI lobbying, other government agencies refused to budge. By day five I started to worry that the whole undercover was going up in smoke. We had to calm down Malik, who couldn’t understand why we were spending time on a different drug deal.

  The UCO seemed to be coming apart. One afternoon, as I was commiserating with my Canadian cop friends over drinks in their police station—yes, they had a fully stocked bar in their station that worked on the honor system—they offered to help. I assumed they knew a way to cut through the bureaucratic red tape. Instead with beer suds dripping from their mustaches they drunkenly offered to load Nestor in the trunk of one of their cars and sneak him across the border. They even suggested perforating the trunk with strategically placed bullet holes so Nestor wouldn’t have trouble breathing. I got the sense this wasn’t the first time our Canadian friends had pulled this stunt.

  “You can’t be serious?” I asked with a grin.

  “We’re dead serious,” one of the Canadian cops replied.

  After laughing my ass off, I wondered how my FBI superiors would react if they found out. Not well, I decided. The next day U.S. bureaucratic common sense finally kicked in, and Nestor was granted legal permission to return to the United States.

  At our New Jersey office we produced Paz for a cameo appearance. Khawaja then called his uncle and told him what great guys we were, and asked us to take him to Atlantic City to ogle more naked dancers. He spent two days there partying. He was so distracted that we had to ask Malik to talk sense into his nephew so he could settle down long enough to work out the terms of a deal.

  After months of tense negotiations, Malik finally agreed to front us 50 kilograms of heroin, which we would supposedly distribute and sell in the United States and use to convince our clients that we were supplying the best heroin in the world. All profits would be split fifty-fifty. If we were successful, Malik agreed to ship an additional 450 kilograms of heroin to be paid for cash on delivery (COD).

  Even after securing a verbal agreement with Malik, no one in the FBI or DEA thought we could pull it off. I had one high-level FBI official tell me to “stop chasing the heroin fairy.” Since that edict was issued from somebody who sat behind a desk every day, I didn’t pay too much attention.

  We spent the next few months painstakingly building credible backstopping legends for our purported shipping and receiving companies, and negotiating the nitty-gritty of the deal. The pace of phone calls between our New Jersey office and Karachi picked up further.

  Finally in August 1992, Malik informed us that he was sending a load of heroin in steamer trunks to JFK Airport in New York. Our excitement spiked. We were finally going to get a chance to prove the skeptics wrong.

  Three of us drove up to JFK and arrived after midnight. We’d already arranged for the steamer trunks to be moved to a secure room. As Case Agent, I was given the honor of opening the first of three very bulky trunks. Recognizing Malik’s handwriting on the U.S. Customs forms, visions of bricks of heroin flashed in my head.

  My heart beating fast, I opened the lid of the first trunk and saw what looked like stacks of Pakistani Yellow Pages books inside. I figured the heroin had to be hidden in hollowed-out sections of the books—a common trafficking ploy. Instead when I picked up one of the phone books and opened it all I found were pages and pages of Pakistani names and phone numbers.

  “Fuck!”

  I frantically leafed through the other phone books. Nothing but pages.

  One of my colleagues uttered some words of encouragement. “The dope has got to be in one of the other trunks.”

  We ripped through the others. Same thing. Pakistani Yellow Pages, but no drugs. My heart sunk and my mood darkened to the point of devastation.

  The three of us rode back to Philadelphia in total silence, as my mind imagined the heaps of abuse I was about to get from my superiors. We’d spent a lot of FBI time and money and delivered nothing.

  The investigative leash squeezing tight around my neck, I asked myself, Is Malik deliberately fucking with us? Why? Does he want to do this deal, or not? My head spun in circles.

  The following day, our guys fetched Paz from prison. When I told him about the phone books, he seemed as stunned as I was.

  Surprisingly, Malik was unapologetic and businesslike when Paz spoke to him on the phone. He asked, “Did you receive the trunks?”

  “Yes, we did,” Paz answered. “But—”

  “Where?”

  “JFK Airport.”

  “Good. Read me the labels.”

  “What labels?” Paz asked.

  “The labels that were on the trunks.”

  “You mean the shipping labels?”

  “No, the labels put on by the U.S. Customs inspectors.”

  As they spoke, it slowly dawned on me that Malik wasn’t playing games. He’d sent the load of phone books to test if a shipment from a new business address in Pakistan would pass through U.S. Customs and arrive safely at our undercover office. As an experienced international trafficker, Malik knew that any first-time delivery from a source of supply country such as Pakistan would be red-flagged and probably searched by U.S. Customs. He was being smart, not stupid, and intentionally didn’t tell us that he was sending a test shipment so that we didn’t do anything unusual.

  My FBI bosses and Squad mates didn’t see it that way. From their perspective, we’d spent six months of time, energy, and FBI money for several trunk loads of Pakistani phone books. We quickly became the laughingstock of our local office and FBIHQ.

  In typical FBI fashion, the comments from the Drug Squads were brutal.

  “Hey, Mike. Nice work on nabbing those Pakistani Yellow Pages—how many years they going to get?”

  “Yeah, next time I need to look up a car repair place in Karachi I know who to ask.”

  The many jokes made at my expense rattled my waning confidence. The person in the Squad most supportive was my immediate boss, The Colonel, who pulled me aside and told me to keep my head down and keep working the case.

  Determined to rally the team, I told them that every day we remained in the hunt was a good day. Malik was still talking to us and didn’t seem suspicious. By this point, I had listened to hours of conversations, and felt I could detect even the subtlest change in his tone and manner.

  We inched forward. Finally, on October 12, Malik informed us that six pieces of luggage would be departing Karachi, Pakis
tan, for Philadelphia on Swiss Air flight #395 the following day. Three of the pieces would contain jogging suits and the other three pieces of luggage would hold the “requirements” that had been discussed.

  All of us remained low-key this time. When I told my bosses the news, they seemed unimpressed.

  The shipment was scheduled to land on October 15, 1992, at Philadelphia International Airport. If we seized it as law enforcement, we risked tipping off Malik and his associates. So we arranged to receive the boxes in our current role as UCAs (Undercover Agents).

  Once we confirmed with Customs officials that the “six pieces of luggage” had arrived for our covert company, we had them moved to a private and secure area. We arrived at the airport around 3 AM when very few people were around.

  My heart rate rising, I led the way into the secure backroom and saw the luggage—three suitcases and three large boxes wrapped in layers of thick plastic and burlap. Recognizing Malik’s handwriting on the Customs forms, my mind raced to dozens of possible outcomes, some good, some awful.

  We set the suitcases aside, and then as professional courtesy as the Case Agent, I was given the privilege to open the first box. Lee handed me a box cutter and I struggled and cut through the thick plastic and burlap. Holding my breath, I reached inside the first box and removed … a handful of cotton bathrobes.

  “Not again!” It felt like my heart had stopped beating. A huge cloud of doom filled the quiet room.

  Issuing a stream of curses, I threw a handful of robes to the floor in disgust. Then I reached my arm deeper into the box. Under another layer of robes, I felt something hard and rectangular. Holding my breath, I moved my hand to the right and grazed another brick-like object, then another, and another.

  “Pay dirt, guys!” I shouted. “I think we got something!”

  Time seemed to stand still as we tore through the boxes and removed one brick after another. Each brick we assumed held one kilogram of heroin and was worth about $200,000 in the United States. As they kept coming, we beamed at one another like kids on Christmas morning. I was smiling so much, I must have looked like a complete idiot.