“There are a lot of people out there who are dying,” the judge responded, “but that’s no justification for violating the law. These acts were done by someone who was in a position of the highest degree of trust. Now the defendant must pay the penalty.”
I couldn’t have agreed more. Fuck him and throw away the key.
9
REDEMPTION
Being accused of stealing $200 million worth of heroin and cocaine by the FBI had turned my whole life upside down. Now that my name was cleared, the sense of betrayal and emotional devastation I’d felt didn’t just magically disappear.
I simply couldn’t get over the fact that FBI management had turned on me in a second when I’d been an honest, hardworking Agent who busted his ass to make big cases. I now had a chip on my shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore. My options were to either walk away from the FBI, which I couldn’t afford to do, or to rub it in the faces of the bastards who had humiliated me.
My Dad had taught me that when you’re knocked down, you get back up and fight harder, and that’s exactly what I planned to do. The truth was I enjoyed running undercover operations and had been successful. So I stopped interacting with most of the people in the office, and searched for a way to turn my resentment into something positive.
During the fall of ’94, I came up with a plan that involved flipping Malik and using him to catch bigger fish in Pakistan, the same way I had used Nestor to bag Paz, and Paz to bag Malik. Since the FBI heroin theft had been widely reported, it would be easy enough to circulate the fabricated story that Malik had been released because of the missing evidence. Since the internet and digital news were in their infant stages in the mid-’90s, chances were remote that the real story would ever reach Pakistan.
The first person I pitched the idea to was my good friend, Assistant U.S. Attorney Shane Thomas.
Thomas—a complete gentleman—looked at me like I was trying to sell him week-old fish. “Are you fucking out of your mind, Mike?” he responded. “You just got out of this mess, now you want to jump back into it?”
I had expected that response, and calmly explained, “Why not capitalize on what really happened? The heroin evidence actually was stolen. Everybody and his sister knows that. Why not put out the word that Malik had to be released, and then use him?”
I could see the prosecutor’s gears turning in Thomas’s head. “I don’t know,” he said rubbing his forehead. “What do your FBI people say?”
“I haven’t broached it to them. I want to get your blessing first.”
“Alright,” said Thomas. “Let me think about it.”
He got back to me a week later. “You’re nuts. But if you can get your people on board, I’ll work with you on this.”
I went to see The Colonel, who responded with similar reticence, “Jesus Christ, Mike. That case has caused enough misery already. No one here wants anything else to do with that nightmare.”
“Why not make something good out of it?”
Like Thomas, he looked at me with disbelief and a little pity. Under normal circumstance, The Colonel would have had no problem telling me to work on something else. But since Kent’s arrest, people in the office were treating me with kid gloves.
“Alright,” The Colonel relented. “If you can get the prosecutors on board, you can give it a try.”
I’d already gotten the go-ahead from Thomas. The next step was to ask the court to release Malik into our custody. A week later, Thomas and I made our pitch to an understandably skeptical Judge Bert Harvest. The judge listened with concern and spelled out the guidelines we would have to follow.
Next up was Malik and his defense attorney. The latter wasn’t excited, but agreed to arrange a conference with his client.
At the time Malik was in his late sixties and not in good health. Before the heroin theft, he had indicated that he was going to plead guilty to the two charges against him: (1) “Conspiring to import approximately 500 kilograms from Pakistan to the United States,” and (2) “aiding and abetting and willfully causing the importation into the United States from Pakistan of approximately 44.6 kilograms of a substance containing a detectable amount of heroin, a Schedule I narcotic drug controlled substance.”
Following the theft, and after prosecutors informed his attorney about the missing evidence, Malik had withdrawn his guilty plea. Now that most of the missing evidence had been retrieved, we had sufficient evidence to convict him, and he knew it. Malik also understood that because of his previous federal trafficking conviction, if found guilty this time, he would probably die in a U.S. prison, and never see his homeland again.
Malik, his attorney, Thomas, and I met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office under the guise of a status hearing on the evidence issue and did so to not raise the suspicions of the prisoners living with Malik. The polite, diminutive five-foot-two-inch Pakistani man in the orange prison jumpsuit was fluent in English and spoke it with a hint of a British accent. He was calm and focused, and far more intelligent than your average dope dealer.
I quickly laid out how the plan would work, his role and responsibilities and the possible future court consideration to his current case. If Malik agreed to cooperate, be would be released into FBI custody and put up in a suburban apartment where he would be guarded and electronically monitored 24/7. From that location, he would reach out to his drug contacts in Pakistan and tell them that he had been released from prison because the evidence in his case had been stolen. Malik could also explain that he still hadn’t been legally cleared to return to Pakistan, which his lawyer told him could take many months. In the meantime, he needed to support himself by doing what he knew best—negotiating a drug deal.
Malik expressed his appreciation for the professional way we had treated him. He also applauded the way we had set up the undercover operation with Paz and said he had never suspected that U.S. law enforcement was behind it until Pakistani cops arrested him in his office in January 1993. For this and other reasons, he indicated that he was inclined to cooperate with Uncle Sam.
He also explained that as an international businessman who happened to be in the enterprise of trafficking drugs, he operated according to a simple business model based on the laws of supply and demand. The world’s largest supply of heroin was located in the northwest tribal provinces of Pakistan and the biggest demand in the world came from the United States.
The DEA had already tagged Malik as one of the top five heroin traffickers in the world. I had no doubt that his contacts in the Pakistani supply network were deep. In the first international heroin case, we had been able to take advantage of the heroin-cocaine exchange plan Paz and Malik had concocted in prison. This one depended upon Malik’s willingness and ability to exploit his contacts in Pakistan.
In our very first Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) conference, I asked, “Who is your primary supplier in Pakistan?”
Malik named Ayub Afridi Khan, who was reported to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, drug barons in the world. Khan, he explained, rarely ventured out of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan and lived in splendor in a highly secure compound surrounded by antiaircraft missiles in the remote and grim market town of Landi Kotal. There secret labs refined opium that had been smuggled from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass into heroin, which was then shipped all over the world.
According to Malik, Khan’s tribe, the Afridi, had controlled Khyber smuggling routes for much of recorded history. Hundreds of years ago, they trafficked gold. Now they were moving the modern-day equivalent—opium and heroin.
Having never heard of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, I literally had to look it up on a map. I learned that it was a mountainous and lawless semiautonomous tribal region located in the northwest area of the country and bordering Afghanistan. It had a population of approximately 2.5 million Pashtuns from various tribes.
I also found out that Ayub Afridi Khan was virtually untouchable in his native country because of his
close ties to the Pakistani military, forged in the 1980s when he agreed to use his smuggling network to move CIA-supplied weapons to mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
In order to develop a case against Khan, we needed to identify another Pakistani drug trafficker or a relative who dealt with Khan directly. Preferably one who spoke English. Malik said he had the perfect candidate—a Pakistani businessman and journalist named Farhat Rizvi, who frequently traveled to the United States and had even been a media guest at the White House. Rizvi and Malik had worked together before on other deals involving heroin supplied by Khan through a blood relative named Babu Khan.
I spent most of the rest of ’94 securing official FBIHQ approval for the new UCO, recruiting other Agents, and getting the complex international operation on its feet.
By January 1995, Malik was living in a comfortable suburban apartment rigged with FBI cameras and listening devices, and guarded 24/7 by FBI personnel. We set up our UCO command center in the apartment next door. I sat beside Malik as he made his first call to Farhat Rizvi in Karachi.
The two men conversed in Urdu. After the call, Malik explained in English that Rizvi was willing to work with Malik again, but didn’t understand how a Pakistani man who had been convicted once and subsequently extradited from Pakistan a second time on a serious drug change could be walking around free.
We had anticipated Rizvi’s doubts and had a plan in place to address them. Malik explained that he couldn’t leave the United States until his legal situation was resolved and invited Rizvi to visit him the next time he was in the United States.
Since the FBI had no Urdu-speaking Agents or linguists on its payroll at the time, we had to hire an Urdu language specialist to translate and transcribe their call and all subsequent conversations between Malik and Rizvi to ensure that Malik wasn’t misleading us in any way. The process was tedious, time-consuming, expensive, and necessary according to FBI Informant Rule #1—never completely trust an informant.
Sometime in February, Rizvi informed Malik that he was arriving in the United States in early March. In anticipation of their meeting, I outlined the structure of the drug-trafficking scheme that we wanted Malik to sell to Rizvi. Then I arranged for Agents to watch Rizvi as he arrived at JFK airport in New York, took the train down to Philadelphia, and hailed a cab from the 30th Street Station to our apartment.
Fifty-year-old Farhat Hasan Rizvi carried himself like a sophisticated international journalist. He arrived at Malik’s apartment dressed in a business suit and smelling like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. Because we wanted to create the impression that Malik was a free man, we allowed him to leave the apartment in Rizvi’s company and stroll around the grounds. I gave Malik clear guidelines for how far he could go.
What Malik didn’t know was that we had about a dozen Agents discreetly following him to make sure he didn’t run off, and a couple of SWAT Agents ready just in case the two men tried to flee by car. No way did I want to have to explain to Judge Harvest how we had lost him after the snafu over the heroin evidence.
Malik and Rizvi were deep in conversation when they returned to the apartment. I watched through the video monitor, but couldn’t understand what they were saying. Judging from the two men’s body language it appeared as though Malik had taken charge.
The meeting stretched to four hours. After Rizvi left, I sat with Malik and debriefed him for another several hours. It became apparent right away that he hadn’t followed the outlines of my plan.
I said, “Salim, what are you doing? I told you we had to do A, B, and C in that order.”
“Well,” he responded with complete confidence. “My plan is better.”
“According to your plan, we are expected to pay several million dollars up front, which is never going to happen. Salim, I need them to front the dope, just like you did.”
We continued butting heads. Unlike Paz, once Malik understood my legal concerns, he helped me tweak the plan until it worked for the FBI and would, hopefully, make sense in Pakistan. When the debriefing ended, I completed the unglamorous, but necessary task of writing up a summary to share with the prosecutors, who were demanding to see it right away. Additionally, I sent the audiotapes of the meeting to the Urdu translator so I could learn exactly what the two men had said.
I was now spending so much time at the UCO apartment that I was practically living there. When I received the English transcripts several days later, it became more apparent that Malik was an expert at the mechanics of making drug deals, but didn’t understand the evidentiary chain and legal protocols we had to establish in order to make a prosecutable case.
I thought we might actually pull this off, if we could find the right FBI undercover Agent to pose as Malik’s business partner and use him to negotiate the nitty-gritty details of the drug deal. That way we wouldn’t have to depend completely on Malik, who could screw us at any point. To play this role, I needed an undercover FBI Agent who could come across convincingly as a successful high-level businessman with international experience and flair.
While I was in the process of looking for someone, my SAC called and said, “I have the perfect guy.”
Because I still had a bad taste in my mouth from the heroin theft, I responded, “No, thanks. I’ll figure it out. I don’t need your help.”
“Come on, Mike,” he shot back, “stop being a dick. Let’s bury the hatchet and move on.”
“Whatever.”
“Do me a favor and meet this guy just once. He’s got a ton of experience and worked with me and Louis Freeh in New York. His name is Chris Brady. You won’t be disappointed.”
I hadn’t found anyone else, so I agreed to meet.
One week later I drove to the airport to meet Brady who was flying in from Miami. Into the arrival area walked this guy who reminded me of the Hulk with a beard and massive shoulders.
“Chris?” I asked.
Out of his mouth came a high-pitched voice completely incongruent to his tough appearance. “Mike?”
He and I hit it off immediately. One the first things, he asked was, “What’s this I hear about this heroin theft thing?”
After I relayed the story, he responded with a sharp, “Fuck that. Glad you locked his ass up.”
As a street and undercover Agent with about ten years more experience than me, he seemed to have as much disdain for FBI management as I did. When I called around to colleagues later to get a fix on Brady’s reputation, several of them responded with: “If you’ve got Brady, your case is made.”
Brady was too humble to ever speak about his accomplishments, so I learned from others that he’d been a Vietnam War veteran and had previously worked for another U.S. government intelligence agency and was a consummate expert at running undercover operations.
I said to myself, Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open, and learn from this guy. Brady became my mentor, confidant, and lifelong friend. Working with him was like having a personal tutor in FBI Undercover.
To my mind there was always one way to do something. Brady taught me differently. He’d tell me, “Mike, you’re the Case Agent. You make the decisions, but here are your options.” Then he’d outline three different approaches we could take.
My typical response was, “I never thought of the other two.”
And his comeback, “Well, get your ass in gear.”
While I was meeting Brady, Rizvi had traveled to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas to meet with Babu Khan. Because Rizvi was afraid of discussing a potential drug deal on the phone, he was returning to the United States to talk in person. Malik directed him to Miami to meet “the businessman”—Brady—who would be buying the heroin and distributing it in the United States.
Among the many things I learned from Chris Brady was that the FBI had access to a yacht that was docked in the Miami area and could be used for UCOs.
He said, “We get this guy on the yacht, Mike, and it’s done.”
I had total faith
in him at this point and instructed Malik to call Rizvi and explain that he was too ill to travel and give him the address of the marina where the meeting would take place. On the specified date and time, I watched as Rizvi got out of a Miami cab and started walking past the more modest boats docked there.
I called Malik in Philadelphia and said, “Rizvi’s on the dock, but he needs to go to Berth twenty-six.”
Minutes later, Rizvi answered his cell phone and started walking toward the bigger boats. His eyes widened as he stopped in front of an enormous yacht. Greeting him were well-dressed Colombian and Cuban American FBI undercover Agents. They helped him on board and introduced him to Brady, who wore a $5,000 suit and carried himself like John Gotti.
Brady proceeded to play Rizvi like a fiddle as the two men discussed the importation of multi-kilogram loads of heroin (or “jackets”) into the United States. Later that night, over dinner, Brady explained to me the importance of the luxurious setting and expensive suits.
“Mike,” he said, “you have to understand that I’m supposed to be a successful international businessman. If I show up driving a Toyota or wearing cheap socks, the bad guys are going to suspect something is up. You can’t half-ass it. It’s gotta look real.”
From that point on the Pakistani drug trafficker and journalist Rizvi was putty in our hands. Of course, as in any UCO, there were unforeseen complications. First, Afridi and Babu Khan back in Pakistan weren’t buying our deal and were making all kinds of financial demands. Second, I had a new boss.
The Colonel had moved onto a job in DC. Replacing him was an Agent named Bill Morse, who had been on the other Drug Squad. He and I used to sit on opposite sides of a wall of file cabinets that separated the two Squads. Day after day I would hear him talk on the phone about mundane administrative matters—the epitome of a type of Agent we referred to as a “desk-rider,” and terrified of risking his life on the streets.
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