Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  I remember feeling relieved and saying to myself, Thank God.

  The first thing they did was read me my Miranda rights. I’d done the same thing to hundreds of suspects myself. Now I felt all the anger and frustration I was holding rising up inside me.

  I said, “Guys, I kind of know what it says.”

  “Do you understand your rights as they’ve been read to you? Are you willing to waive those rights now?” the investigators asked.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I shot back as weeks of bottled up emotion spilled forth. “Yes, I understand my fucking rights. I’m an FBI Agent and this is absolute bullshit. I can’t believe the FBI thinks I could have done this.”

  They asked if I wanted to consult a lawyer. I declined even though I probably shouldn’t have. Fuck them—I didn’t do anything wrong.

  Then they asked me to sign my name and initial each paragraph of the Miranda Warnings. It felt like an out-of-body experience. I really was the main subject of a massive FBI investigation into a vile crime. Unbelievable!

  I signed the document and threw it back across the table.

  Courtney asked, “What Squad are you assigned to?”

  “Squad #3. The Colombia Drug Squad. But you know that already.”

  “What’s your current investigation?”

  “Knock off the bullshit, guys,” I responded. “I can’t believe you really believe that I took that shit. You motherfuckers, I worked my ass off to get that heroin, and you think I stole it? Fuck you!”

  Allen looked up and asked without emotion, “Are you done?”

  “Fuck you!”

  I was ready for a brawl, or what was known in law enforcement as a “confrontational interview.” They proceeded to walk me through the case, step by step.

  “When was the dope seized?”

  “October 15, 1992.”

  “Did you secure it in the FBI evidence vault that day?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Would your fingerprints be on it?”

  “Fuck, yeah. I touched every single brick. That’s kind of how it works when you’re the Case Agent and you make the seizure.”

  “What do you think happened to the missing evidence?”

  “How the fuck would I know?”

  Even in my highly agitated state, I said to myself: If these guys are real investigators, if they do their job the right way, maybe this will work out.

  After all, it wasn’t a difficult crime to solve. Only someone with access to the FBI evidence vault could have stolen the heroin. That narrowed the list of suspects considerably.

  Toward the end of the three-hour interview, one of the investigators asked, “Are you willing to take a polygraph test?”

  “Fuck, yeah. Hook me up right now. I didn’t fucking do it.”

  “Will you consent to another interview?”

  “Fuck, yes. Any time.”

  “Will you need to have an attorney present?”

  “No. How many times do I have to tell you motherfuckers I didn’t do it? I didn’t steal that shit. Are you done?”

  Afterward, I felt somewhat relieved, and drove home with the car windows open and slept through the night for the first time in a week.

  Next day when I arrived at work, I was summoned to the interview room again. Bill Courtney and Steve Allen sat waiting in freshly pressed suits and looking like a million bucks, and me feeling like dog shit.

  Courtney said, “We need to take your prints. Major case prints.”

  I swallowed hard. “You want me to provide you with major case prints?”

  “Yes. Will you consent voluntarily?”

  “Yes.”

  Dark thoughts filtered through my head as they led me down a corridor to our mug room, where I had fingerprinted and photographed Malik, Khawaja, Paz, Gonzalez-Rivera, and other suspected criminals. Major case prints were usually taken only in serious felony offenses. With the door open so the entire office could see what they were doing, Courtney and Allen took my finger and palm prints one at a time. Squad members, clerks, and secretaries peered in the door to see what was going on.

  Next I expected the investigators to slap handcuffs on me and arrest me. Instead they marched me back to the interview room and started grilling me again.

  A dozen more days of interviews followed. Courtney and Allen kept going over and over the same sequence of events. Maybe they were trying to catch me in a lie. Or maybe they were starting to believe I was telling the truth.

  “When did you seize the heroin?”

  “October 15, 1992. You asked me that already. Why are you guys busting my balls?”

  “You drove the heroin straight from the Philadelphia airport to this office to put it in the evidence vault?”

  “That’s correct. If I was planning to steal it, I would have done it that night and no one would have seen the heroin in the first place. But I didn’t. I loaded it into the evidence vault. Other Agents were with me the entire time.”

  The interviews were long and mentally exhausting. One morning I was sitting at my desk in the Squad room, when I saw Jarhead approach. I considered the former Marine a close friend, mentor, and role model.

  I steeled myself for more abuse from someone that everyone in the office looked up to. With the whole Squad watching, Jarhead leaned across my desk, looked me in the eye, and in a booming voice said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know one thing for sure, Mike, you didn’t have anything to do with this bullshit. So fuck them!”

  He shook my hand and walked away. The moment was electric.

  I was so moved, I started to well up inside, and will never forget his complete support.

  At around the same time, word leaked out that a second Agent assigned to Drug Squad #3 and a close friend of mine named Will Thompson was also being investigated in connection to the heroin theft. It made no sense because he was even more of a straight arrow than I was. The two of us sometimes worked out together. I remembered that a month or so earlier, Thompson and I had snuck out early from work one day to play a round of golf.

  While we were teeing off on the eighth hole, Thompson turned to me and said that he thought we were being followed. He’d formerly served on the FBI Surveillance Squad and knew the vehicles they drove and their techniques.

  “You really think the FBI sent out a surveillance team to follow us because we’re playing golf during business hours?” I asked.

  “Sure seems that way, Mike.”

  At the time, I laughed and told Thompson he was being paranoid. Looking back on the incident, that’s exactly what they had been doing. The FBI was following us because they considered us suspects. Years later, I became friends with one of the surveillance Agents who had been watching us that day, and he told me the first time he set eyes on me was through a pair of binoculars.

  The interrogations by Courtney and Allen continued but grew shorter as they narrowed their questions to specific periods of time. During a meeting in mid-May 1994, Allen asked me when I had last examined the heroin evidence.

  “Right after we seized it,” I answered. “In the fall of ’92.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. There would be no other reason to check it until right before the trial.”

  “Was it April 27, 1993?” one of them asked.

  “I don’t think so.… But let me check my dates.”

  I asked to return to my desk to get my calendar book for 1993, where as an anal retentive, I recorded the details of every day’s activities. The book showed that on April 27, 1993, I was out of the office with the entire Philadelphia FBI SWAT team at a training facility ninety miles away.

  Allen handed me a document and asked me to review it. It turned out to be the evidence vault sign-in sheet.

  He said, “Take a look at the April 27, 1993, date and verify the entry next to your file number.”

  My eyes scanned halfway down the document and stopped at my f
ile number, 281F-PH-75449. The signature beside it wasn’t mine. I looked at the entry a second time and my heart stopped as I recognized the handwriting. I knew it because I’d seen it a hundred times. The handwriting belonged to Wayne Kent, one of the Agents assigned to the Eastload case, and someone who was not involved in the Malik heroin case.

  In a split second all the pieces clicked into place.

  “That’s not my signature, it’s Kent’s,” I said. “Wayne stole your fucking heroin.” Then I handed the log back.

  “You sure?” Allen asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure. One hundred percent.”

  I was red-hot mad, not at the investigators, but at Kent, who had put me through this fucking nightmare. He was a second-tier Agent with a reputation for climbing on to good cases and letting others do the heavy lifting. During Eastload he grew his hair out and rode a motorcycle to create the impression that he was working undercover when he played no undercover role whatsoever. Instead, his duties included turning on the lights in the morning and putting on the coffee.

  Kent was a burly guy from Kentucky and was married with a young stepdaughter. He and I had served on SWAT together and had never had a problem before. Now I wanted to wring his fucking neck.

  A year earlier Kent had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease—a cancer of the lymphatic system. While he was being treated, The Colonel, against FBI policy but as a kind human gesture, had put him on restricted duty and had assigned him to listen to surveillance tapes in a room next to the evidence vault so he could continue to draw his full pay. That’s where he had cooked up his evil plan.

  Later evidence would show that he conceived it only after word leaked out that Malik was planning to plead guilty and not go to trial. Had that happened, the heroin would have been incinerated, per FBI policy. Kent took the calculated risk that no one would examine the heroin or the evidence room log before the drugs were destroyed.

  When Kent entered the evidence vault on April 27, 1993, and entered my file number in the presence of a support employee, he did so specifically to point the finger at me. Access to the vault required passing through a cipher-locked door guarded and opened by a support employee and then unlocking an interior metal cage door using a key kept by the ASAC.

  Kent must have memorized the combination to the cipher door and entered it sometime after April 27 and after office hours when no one was around. All of us knew that the key to the metal cage door, which the ASAC was supposed to keep closely guarded in a locked safe, actually sat in a coffee cup on his desk.

  * * *

  This was the same buffoon ASAC who had been pushing to have me arrested and my house searched.

  Once inside the basketball court–sized vault, Kent cut the bottom of the bags, replaced the heroin with baking soda, and sealed the bags with special FBI heat-sealing equipment. He repeated the same process with the eleven kilos of cocaine from Eastload. The only Agent connected to both cases was me.

  Then he went into the Drug Squad #2 when no one was around and wrote down the names and addresses of drug dealers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Using the alias Salvatore, he mailed solicitations to these dealers offering “unlimited quantities” of high-grade heroin at half street value prices. Included in the solicitation were one-ounce packet samples of the drugs. Dealers were instructed to call a pager number for purchase instructions and send cash—$75,000 per kilogram—to private postal boxes in southern New Jersey registered under Will Thompson’s name. That’s why Thompson had been investigated, too.

  The FBI learned about the scheme in early March from drug dealers in Philadelphia and Boston, who had received the letters from “Salvatore” and suspected they were being set up. Kent’s solicitations offered “Middle Eastern brown heroin,” which matched the cache we had seized in October ’92.

  The irony was that Kent’s scheme would have worked had the drug dealers not contacted the FBI. He had already sold $77,000 worth when they did.

  Using a device called a “clone beeper,” which extracts phone numbers from a telephone pager, investigators obtained a kilo of heroin from “Salvatore” without paying any money upfront. Coincidentally, Salvatore’s drugs matched the color, purity, and consistency of the seized Pakistani heroin. Also, the drugs were sent in distinctive packaging used to protect a type of military binoculars purchased by FBI SWAT three years earlier. Finally, Kent’s fingerprints were found on the tape that was used to reseal the heroin packages in the evidence room.

  Shortly after my last interview with Courtney and Allen, word started to leak out that Kent was the real culprit in the heroin theft. Because the investigators were still building their case, Kent wasn’t arrested right away, which created a strange and somewhat dangerous situation. We all knew that Kent was a SWAT firearms instructor and therefore armed to the teeth.

  One day, a week or so after my last interview, a very senior Agent went out to the FBI firing range and saw Kent working the line. Fearful that Kent could snap and shoot everyone at the range from behind, the senior Agent immediately left, returned to our office and told the bosses there what he’d seen and refused to go back to the range until Kent was gone.

  A few days later, Philadelphia Executive Management—the same guys who previously wanted to arrest me—summoned me to a conference room and said, “We’re going to arrest Kent and need your help.”

  “Why?” I asked dumbfounded.

  “Because you’ve worked with him on SWAT and Eastload, and we need your advice.”

  “You people are unreal,” I answered.

  A few days later, the SAC called me to his office and said, “We’re arresting Kent on Friday. Don’t come to work that day under any circumstances.”

  I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Don’t come to work on Friday.”

  “I’ve never been told not to come to work,” I responded. Apparently, they were afraid I would use the opportunity to punch Kent in the mouth.

  Seven o’clock Friday evening, June 3, Kent was summoned to the interview room, confronted with the evidence, fired, and arrested. He confessed to stealing the drugs from the evidence vault and said that he had acted alone. Simultaneously, Agents in Kentucky raided the home of his grandparents. In the basement, they found twenty-eight kilograms of the missing Pakistani heroin, an electronic scale, and $65,000 in cash hidden in his grandmother’s washing machine.

  That same night, I told my wife what had happened. She was even more pissed than I was.

  Her exact words: “I knew something was going on. From the way you were acting, I was worried you were going to do something crazy. To hell with the FBI. You should quit.”

  The following Monday morning, people started coming up to me in the office and acting like they were my best friends again. To those who had turned against me, I said, “Fuck you. Leave me alone.” To this day, I still refuse to speak to them.

  In the afternoon, the SAC called me to his office. He said, “I hear you’re still upset. What can I do to make things better?”

  “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” I asked, still smoking hot. “You arrested Kent. How about making an announcement to the whole office that Thompson and I had nothing to do with the theft.”

  The next day, the SAC called everyone together. In front of three hundred people he made a statement about Kent’s arrest but never mentioned Thompson or me by name, or that fact that we were completely innocent.

  I went up to him afterward and expressed my disappointment in less than pleasant terms, whereupon he told me to return to my desk and cool down.

  Fuck him.

  Three weeks later, the SAC called and said, “Be here tomorrow morning at seven sharp. You and I have to report to the Director in DC.”

  “Good. I can’t wait.”

  “Keep your mouth shut,” he warned.

  “I’ll try.”

  The next morning as we rode the Amtrak train to DC together, the SAC started babbling
about the Phillies and the weather. I turned to him and said, “Boss, let’s stop pretending. We’re never going to be the same again.”

  In June ’94, Louis Freeh was the FBI Director, appointed by President Bill Clinton in September 1993. Earlier in his career he’d served as a Special Agent in New York and DC, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and a federal judge. He still is the only FBI Special Agent to be named Director, and is highly respected within the agency. Ironically, my SAC had been Freeh’s supervisor when he was a rookie Agent in New York.

  It took a lot for me to be intimidated, but Director Freeh scared the shit out of me as I sat in his office and he went through the entire Pakistan drug case and theft, and asked me pointed questions regarding both. It was clear that he had studied it thoroughly. After forty minutes, he stood, looked me square in the eye and said, “Special Agent McGowan, on behalf of the FBI, I want to apologize to you personally.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I understand that you’re a little upset and I understand.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I said, “I think it’s a little more than upset, sir. They wanted to lock me up.”

  The Director’s apology was classy and impressive. During the train ride back to Philadelphia, the SAC turned to me and asked, “Are you satisfied now?”

  “Boss,” I said, “you don’t get it. You guys really fucked Thompson and me, and I’ll never be the same. I’m a big boy, and I understand—the FBI monster always wins.”

  When I got back to my desk I wrote a letter of thanks to the two investigators, Courtney and Allen. It ended with the sentence: “Apparently in the FBI you’re guilty until you can prove your innocence.”

  On February 14, 1995, eight months after his arrest, Wayne Kent pleaded guilty to theft of government property and trafficking in heroin and cocaine, and was sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison without parole. His attorney had asked U.S. District Judge Clarence Newcomer to show leniency on the grounds of “diminished mental capacity” resulting from the pressure of undercover narcotics work and the fear of dying of cancer. Judge Newcomer didn’t buy it.