To put it mildly, I wasn’t thrilled when Morse was named supervisor of Squad #3. I was four months into the new UCO and regularly putting in sixteen-hour days when he called me at our undercover apartment.
He said, “Mike, this is Morse. I need you to come in.”
“What for?” I asked.
“I need you to update me on the case.”
“Fine. I can do that over the phone.”
“No, I need you to come into the office.”
“But I’ve got a ton of shit to do here. I’m sorry, but I don’t have time.”
“Be here Tuesday morning, eight AM,” Morse ordered.
Great. It was our first conversation and we were already banging heads. Tuesday morning, I reported to the office and sat down opposite my new boss. He started peppering me with dumb questions about things he could have easily answered himself if he read the file.
I sat through forty minutes of his bullshit, then got to my feet and said, “Bill, I really don’t have time for this. The SAC has signed off on the UCO. Other than coming in to sign my work sheet, I have shit to do.”
Throughout the spring and summer of ’95, all of us working the UCO were engaged in difficult, long-distance negotiations. Every month or so Rizvi would return to the States and relay the latest offer from Afridi and Babu Khan. In June, he handed Brady a four-gram sample of Pakistani heroin and offered to send five hundred jackets (kilos of heroin) to the United States by sea as an initial shipment. The problem was that the Khans wanted a $1 million deposit first.
Unlike in the Malik case, we weren’t negotiating an exchange of drugs. Nor was the FBI going to send any money to the Khans for heroin. So we had to convince the Khans to front us kilos that Brady could use to establish a distribution network in the United States.
The Pakistanis were tough negotiators. Back and forth we went over prices and amounts as they weighed the risks against what we presented as a sure financial windfall. Rizvi served as conduit and messenger. Every time he visited the United States, the pace of negotiations moved quickly. But when Rizvi returned to Pakistan and made his way to Landi Kotal for a sit-down with Afridi and Babu Khan, we waited weeks.
Thinking ahead, Brady and I had serious doubts that the Khans would be willing to risk sending heroin directly to the United States. Yes, the United States represented the largest market in the world, but it was also the only country at the time actively seeking to lock up foreign drug suppliers, and the Khans knew that.
We developed an alternate plan to ship the heroin to Italy first, where Brady claimed to have organized crime connections who would then be responsible for smuggling it into the United States. I contacted the Italian State Police (Polizia di Stato) to solicit their help and ask if they had a port we could use. They suggested a place called Pescara—a small port on the Adriatic coast.
The last week of September ’95, Brady and I traveled there with AUSA Shane Thomas to survey the port and coordinate with Italian police officials. We arrived at a picturesque, vibrant, and ancient coastal town at the mouth of the Atreno-Pescara river with beautiful wide beaches set against the backdrop of the Appennine Mountains. Its origins dated to before the Roman conquest.
The Italian cops couldn’t have been more generous hosts. On the first afternoon, five of them took the three of us to lunch at a scenic seaside restaurant. One of the Italians went in to talk to the owner, while we waited. Soon we saw people streaming out of the establishment as they though were escaping a fire.
Then the charming Italian policeman appeared in the doorway and waved us in. He explained that the owner had cleared the restaurant so that we could enjoy what turned into a three-hour lunch by ourselves.
We left Italy a week later with all the logistics of the heroin shipment plan worked out. But it turned out it wasn’t needed. Two months later when Rizvi arrived in Philadelphia to finalize the heroin deal, he explained that he, the Khans, and others had decided to transport 150 kilograms by air instead of by sea from Pakistan to Miami. The heroin would be sent via an associate of the Khans’ and Rizvi’s named Javed Ahmed, and the proceeds of the sale of the heroin were to be forwarded to Ahmed’s company bank account in Karachi.
On January 18, 1996, Rizvi faxed us an invoice from Ahmed’s company stating that twenty-five cartons of leather jackets, leather shoes, and onyx household goods would be arriving at Miami International Airport four days later on a Lufthansa cargo flight from Karachi. We weren’t sure if we were receiving a dummy shipment to see if it passed through U.S. Customs—as Malik had done initially—or were actually getting sample drugs.
With great anticipation, I arrived in Miami and met Brady at the airport. With the help of about twenty local FBI Agents, we moved the wooden crates that had arrived from Pakistan to a parking lot at the rear of the Miami office. On January 25 at 8 AM, the temperature was already pushing past ninety.
As the Case Agent, I was again given the honor of opening the first crate. With my heart pounding, and the Miami Agents watching, Brady handed me a box cutter and a crowbar and I tore into the first crate. I reached in and started pulling out expensive leather jackets and shoes and throwing them to the pavement.
Brady tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Slow down, Mike. Slow down. You’ve got to check the pockets and inside the shoes.”
Finding no heroin in the first crate or its contents, I started to get the heebie-jeebies as I flashed back to the embarrassing incident with the Pakistani phone books. The other Agents pitched in, removing the objects and piling them on the pavement, and throwing the broken wood from the crates against a fence that separated the parking lot from a car dealership next door. By the fifth crate, I was breathing hard, sweating like a pig, and starting to panic.
By the fifteenth crate with still no heroin, I was beside myself. Adding to my distress was the fact that for the first time in the case, we couldn’t reach Rizvi. Both Malik and Brady had been calling all his numbers in Pakistan and leaving messages, and Rizvi wasn’t returning their calls.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked Brady.
“Don’t know,” he answered as calm as ever. “But it’s strange.”
By 7 PM we finished going through the last crate. Nada. Then we started the tedious process of rechecking every shoe and jacket—ripping out linings, heels, and pockets. No heroin. Not a trace.
Darkness had fallen, literally, and so had our mood. All of us who had searched the crates were bone-tired, and Brady and I sent the other Agents home.
Then I turned to him and asked, “What was the point of sending all this expensive shit and no heroin? And why send twenty-five fucking crates if it’s just a dummy load?”
“Good question. Let’s call it a day.”
We were so exhausted that we didn’t want to eat. Instead, Brady dropped me off at my hotel. I reached for the six-pack I had stashed in the fridge and started downing beers. I remember drinking one in the shower.
After the beer calmed me down enough to forget the fact that the day had ended in total failure, I stretched out on the bed and immediately fell into a deep sleep. An hour later, I bolted awake.
“It’s in the wood!” my subconscious told me.
I called Brady and woke him.
“What the fuck, Mike? Can’t we talk about this in the morning?” He sounded pissed.
“Chris, it’s in the wood!”
“What’s in the wood?”
“The fucking heroin!”
“What wood? The wood from the crates that we threw against the fence?”
“Exactly. We better go retrieve it before some garbage truck picks it up.”
“Goddammit,” said Chris. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
On his way to pick me up, he called the Metro Dade County K-9 unit, which is something we should have done before. As we sped off, Brady and I worried that the wood had already been carted off. It was 4 AM by the time we reached the parking lot. As we burned rubber around the corner of the FBI buil
ding, I almost didn’t want to look toward the fence. How was I going to explain to my new boss that a load of Pakistan heroin had been tossed into the sea or disappeared at a garbage dump?
I tensed up, and thank God, a hug pile of wood still rested against the fence. Two minutes later the K-9 unit arrived and we explained the situation.
“You mean you just threw the wood away?” the Dade County policeman asked, looking at us funny.
“Yup,” I answered.
He let the German shepherd off its leash and the dog bolted straight to the pile of wood. The big dog was so excited it climbed on top of the wood and started jumping in circles.
I picked up one of the four-by-four posts and examined it closely. The center of the beam had been expertly doweled out and sausage-shaped bags of heroin had been stuffed inside. Brady and I started pulling out the bags and forming a pile.
We figured the wood from each crate contained about two kilos of heroin. Since each crate had been doweled out the same way that meant a total of about fifty kilograms of heroin.
“We’ve hit the motherlode!” Brady exclaimed.
“Why didn’t Rizvi tell us?”
“Who gives a shit. Look at all this heroin!”
We were happier than pigs in shit. Days later, the DEA tested the heroin and found it totaled 50.01 kilograms (110 pounds) and averaged at more than 90 percent purity. They valued it at more than $200 million.
All the time I was in Miami, my supervisor Morse had been paging me constantly. The night before, he had even called my wife at home.
“Do you know where Mike is?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“Where?”
“Working.” Then she hung up. Her disdain of the FBI was even stronger than mine.
After we finished removing the heroin from the crates, an FBI Agent came up to me and said, “You’d better call your boss.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I hear he’s writing you up for insubordination.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“No, it’s serious. He’s writing you up now.”
Knowing that a Special Agent could get fired for insubordination, I called Morse even though I had only slept an hour or two in the last three days.
He immediately started ripping into me. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You work for me! You’d better be here eight AM tomorrow.…”
If we hadn’t just seized $200 million of heroin, I might have been in deep shit. Fortunately, the Rizvi/Khan and Malik seizures turned out to be two of the top heroin busts in U.S. history, totaling nearly $400 million in value. Both had been accomplished without fronting a dime of taxpayer money.
Not only wasn’t I going to get fired, I was treated once again like an FBI Golden Boy.
But our work wasn’t over. Malik and Brady finally made contact with Rizvi in Karachi and told him that they had received the heroin.
Brady said, “Give us a couple of weeks to sell it, and then we’ll split the proceeds.”
Mid-February 1996, Rizvi arrived in Philadelphia to receive his first cut of the cash. We booked him into a corner room at the Marriott Hotel in Center City, Philadelphia. The FBI gave us permission to use a suitcase filled with $500,000 in real cash to serve as a prop.
I’d been working dope cases for several years now, and planned to simply have Brady hand Rizvi the cash and arrest him on the spot.
Brady said, “No, Mike. We’re going to bleed him dry, first.”
“Sure, Chris. How?”
“Watch and learn.”
I observed via video monitor from a nearby room as Brady entered Rizvi’s hotel room with the suitcase, set it on the desk, and opened it in front of him. Brady positioned himself between the suitcase and Rizvi and asked him if he had spoken to the other members of the Pakistani drug-trafficking operation. As Rizvi answered, his eyes never left the cash.
Once Brady had gotten Rizvi to identify every defendant and link him to the criminal conspiracy as a form of irrefutable evidence, he shook hands with Rizvi and departed. By this point Rizvi appeared to be salivating.
On the video monitor I watched as a very happy-looking Rizvi walked over to the suitcase and fondled the money as though he was making love to it. A few minutes later, he locked the huge suitcase and carried it out of the room.
I stood waiting in the hallway dressed in jeans and a rugby shirt. Morse had wanted us to bring in SWAT to arrest him.
I argued, “We want this guy’s cooperation. SWAT will stick a gun in his face and scare the shit out of him. Let me do it on my own.”
Now Rivzi saw me standing ten feet away and froze in his tracks. He looked at me like he wanted me to move.
I stared back and said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Then I walked up to him and declared, “FBI. You’re under arrest.”
He made a pained expression and groaned, “You’re making a mistake,” as I cuffed him.
I looked him in the eye and said calmly, “I don’t think so, and Babu Khan isn’t going to be happy with you.”
Rizvi winced at the name of the Landi Kotal drug baron. With the half million in my hand, I escorted him down the hallway to our operational control room. Rizvi looked like a defeated dog in a business suit and smelled like he had shit his pants, which he actually had. Once we reached the hotel room, I told him to go into the bathroom and clean himself up.
When he emerged, I started to debrief him. The stench was so overwhelming that I told him to go back in the bathroom and take a shower.
I said, “When you’re finished, wrap yourself in towels. I’ll get you some clothes.”
I was planning to take him back to the office and book him as I had with Nestor, Paz, Malik, and others.
Brady said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, Mike? Five minutes after you sit down with him, you want him to get someone else on the phone. That’s when these guys are their most vulnerable. Lock in his cooperation before he changes his mind.”
So when Rizvi emerged, I said, “Get me one of your guys on the phone.”
Rizvi responded like a puppy dog, “I’m supposed to deliver this money to someone in New York.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Tariq Jawed.”
“Alright. Get him on the phone.”
From that day forward, I always had a phone recording kit with me whenever I made an arrest. Later in my career, I became known around the office as “Telephone Mike.”
A few days later, we arrested Tariq Jawed in New York, who turned out to be part of a Hawala money broker network employed by Afridi and Babu Khan. He told us that he had been instructed to forward the money to another member of the network in London. We arrested that gentleman, too, and a fourth member of the drug-trafficking ring during a trip to London with the help of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
Ayub Afridi Khan remained out of reach in the tribal area of Pakistan, but based on information we got from Rizvi, we managed to seize another twenty-one kilogram heroin shipment of his, this time on a Pakistani ship named the MV Craigmore bound for England. Eleven members of the crew were arrested.
Rizvi, Babu Khan, Javed Ahmed, Tariq Jawed, and one other Pakistani defendant were indicted in U.S. federal court on conspiracy to import heroin, importation of heroin, and eight other counts. All faced mandatory minimum sentences of twenty years to life.
A $180 million heroin seizure in ’92 had resulted in the FBI accusing me of being a despicable drug dealer in March ’94. The anguish I had gone through before I was exculpated had motivated me to prove my detractors wrong. Two years and two heroin seizures later, I had won back my reputation.
I’d gone from FBI Golden Boy, to Public Enemy#1, back to Golden Boy. The amounts of heroin we’d taken off the streets were unprecedented—over $400 million worth—and probably would never be matched again!
To the FBI big shots and the others who accused me back then, I silently salute them with a big middle finger. Yo
u can’t make this shit up.
10
THE RUSSIAN MOB
By mid-1996 it was time for a change. For the past ten years I’d been a successful FBI Case Agent in four major undercover drug cases. Yet, two years after being accused of stealing heroin, I was still getting funny looks from people in the Philadelphia office. Most of the managers who had accused me of making off with the drugs were still in place, and I couldn’t stand being in the same room with them.
Additionally, I wanted to spend more time with my wife and three children, who were now ten, eight, and six. Running a UCO as a Case Agent involved working twelve hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. That didn’t leave much time or energy for anything else. My wife wasn’t complaining, but she made it clear I was missing the unique experience of seeing our kids grow up.
I’d been fascinated watching Chris Brady work as an undercover Agent in the Rizvi/Khan case, and wanted to try taking on a major undercover role myself.
I’d actually done some undercover work earlier in my career and I knew I liked it. A few years out of Quantico, I was assigned to go undercover and frequent clubs owned and operated by members of Italian Organized Crime (hereafter called the Mob or LCN—“La Cosa Nostra”—this Thing of Ours). The Case Agent, a former national championship football player from Notre Dame, gave me very specific instructions: Go “hang around these joints and find shit out.”
Sure, Boss. I was clueless and unprepared. Today, an FBI UCA about to go on an undercover assignment would receive a five-page written Operations Order clearly defining the specific goals, objectives, and targets. But in the late ’80s, there was no formalized FBI undercover training. I’m lucky I didn’t get killed.
The Case Agent had two kinds of clubs in mind—illegal gambling joints and strip clubs. The first usually featured video poker machines, horse race simulcasts, card games, and sports betting. The people who frequented them were middle-aged or older, and all of their last names ended in a vowel. I was in my early thirties at the time and I immediately stood out. Problem #1.
Problem #2: Even though I had the street smarts to talk myself into the clubs, my lifelong aversion to gambling due to my father’s problems in that area, meant that I had never wagered money or understood the games. Over the course of a couple of weeks, this caught the attention of other gamblers, who were watching me like a hawk and would stop speaking to each other whenever I approached. One night while guys were placing bets and throwing dice, a kind gentleman of around eighty came up to me, patted me gently on the back and asked the obvious question: “You’re a nice kid, but what the fuck are you doing here, son?”
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