Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  I got the hell out of there, fast.

  In the second kind of establishment—strip clubs—I experienced a similar problem. These were Mob-owned dive bars stocked with naked dancers grinding to blaring music, and populated with long-haul truckers, dope dealers, manual laborers, and sketchy characters. Everyone from the bartenders, to the bouncers, to the dancers and customers were completely shit-faced most of the time, fights broke out frequently, and debauchery ran rampant in private booths, under tables, and in all corners of the parking lot.

  Because I needed to keep a clear head to takes notes, I was the only one in the joint sipping a diet soda rather than banging back beers and shots. Other dead giveaways included the fact that I never indulged in any form of depravity and sat alone. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that I was either some kind of weirdo serial killer, or undercover law enforcement.

  One night, the Notre Dame alumnus Case Agent instructed me to go to a particular strip bar and look for a fugitive. He provided me with a photo of the suspect, which I folded in half, and stashed in the inside pocket of my jacket. While a drugged-out bleached blonde gyrated to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard, I left the jacket on the back of the chair and retreated to the men’s room. When I returned the photo of the fugitive was missing.

  Oops! I’d either dropped it on my way to the table, which I know I didn’t do, or someone in the joint had taken it out of my jacket. Suddenly, I felt more naked than the dancers. I was lucky I didn’t get the shit beaten out of me, or worse.

  I’m not being overdramatic. Agents and cops have been killed working undercover. Less than three months earlier, on March 22, 1996, a colleague of mine, Philadelphia FBI Special Agent Chuck Reed—forty-five years old and married with three small sons, and a highly respected investigator—was shot and killed while negotiating a cocaine transaction during an undercover operation. I distinctly remember the inconsolable grief of Chuck’s family, and the pall his death cast over the Philadelphia office.

  Chuck went down a hero. Although mortally wounded, he managed to shoot and kill the prick that blasted him. Two of Chuck’s sons, Josh and Todd, went on to become FBI Agents. God bless ’em.

  Knowing all this, and green and unskilled, I was still completely hooked on undercover work. Maybe I needed to have my head examined. Criminal psychology and the characters populating the underbelly of society have always fascinated me.

  During my youth in Haverhill, I spent endless hours on street corners and dive bars listening to local hoods and observing criminal behavior. It was part of the environment. Guys I knew and played ball with were always getting into trouble. Once, in the middle of an eighth-grade baseball game, the police hauled away our first baseman for armed robbery. Another brain surgeon I knew who didn’t like sitting in class had a habit of calling in bomb threats so we’d be dismissed. To this day he’s known as “Boom-Boom.”

  I was also intrigued by the psychological challenge. Consider this for a moment. You’re a guy who has spent his entire life on the straight and narrow to become an FBI Agent, and now, it’s your job to convince real bad guys that you, a good guy, are a bad guy just like them. You’re hanging with them for hours and they’re watching your every move. Not easy to do, and unlike in the movies, there’s no “take two.”

  Years later after I’d completed many UCOs, a federal prosecutor told me I was “one chromosome away from the other side.” I’m not sure if he meant that as an insult or a compliment. For me, it’s served as a reminder of how close to the line you get as an undercover—a line that has to be crystal clear in your mind and never crossed.

  In 1996, I wanted to play in the major leagues of law enforcement and give undercover work another shot. Since my wife wanted to move back to Boston where we had friends and family, I started looking for an undercover assignment in the Boston area. A month later, I heard that the Boston office wanted someone to work undercover in a case targeting Russian Organized Crime.

  The FBI, at the time, was focusing most of its attention on the far more established Italian LCN Mob, and were just beginning to investigate Russian OC, which was involved in various types of sophisticated financial fraud schemes, including money laundering and daisy-chain gasoline tax schemes. Our New York office had recently launched a case against the Russian Mob that some of my friends were involved in. So I checked in with them to get a sense of what I would be going up against, swallowed hard, and threw my hat in the ring.

  In the fall of ’96 I traveled up to Boston to be interviewed for Operation Full Service. The Case Agent, Shawn Bartlett—a quiet, scholarly type—hoped to develop a criminal case against a Kazakhstan-based businessman and former rocket scientist named Zhalgas Amanbayev, who now headed a sophisticated criminal gang mostly involved in financial crimes.

  “Can you start now?” Bartlett asked.

  “Yeah. But how long to you expect the case to last?”

  “Six months,” Bartlett answered.

  “Where is Amanbayev now?” I asked.

  “He’s in Russia, but he’ll be back in Boston in a couple of months.”

  After my disastrous early forays into undercover work, I wanted ample time to prepare, but the Boston office told me to remain in Philadelphia until Amanbayev returned. New Year’s Day 1997, I was in my living room watching football when the phone rang. It was Bartlett.

  He said, “Amanbayev’s here. Can you come up tomorrow and meet him?”

  I sensed this was coming. I said, “Shawn, tell your bosses that I knew this was going to happen. You want me to meet this guy tomorrow and I’m not ready. This isn’t the best way to start.”

  The managers sitting in the various FBI offices rarely understood the challenges of undercover work. If they did, they wouldn’t have asked a UCA to prepare to go up against a major criminal on one day’s notice.

  The informant in this case was a Boston-area businessman named Matt Cowens, who did a lot work in Russia. He was one of what we called “the good Americans” who volunteer to help the FBI with no strings attached. Amanbayev had approached him recently about getting his hands on legitimate U.S. documents that would enable other Russian Mob associates to work in the United States.

  When I spoke to him for the first time, Cowens said, “I’m afraid if I don’t help him, something bad will happen.”

  The meeting with Amanbayev was scheduled to take place at a restaurant in a Marriott hotel in downtown Boston. Literally thirty minutes prior, Cowens and I worked out a plan where he would introduce me as a fellow businessman who was willing to operate outside the law and might be able to get his hands on the immigration documents Amanbayev wanted.

  My first question to Cowens was, “How do I dress?”

  “When you do business with these guys, you have to dress like them,” he answered. “They all wear business suits.”

  Bartlett, the Case Agent, suggested that I complete the outfit with a black beret, which were fashionable at the time in Moscow. I nixed that right away. No way a fucking beret is going on my head.

  Cowens and I entered the restaurant together. Waiting for us were Zhalgas Amanbayev and his brother Yuri, both dressed in expensive suits. Amanbayev, age forty-two had been born in Kazakhstan—part of the former Soviet Union—and currently maintained a residence in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He didn’t speak English. Nor did Cowens speak Russian, so Amanbayev’s brother served as the translator. It made for a very long conversation.

  Right away the arrangement proved awkward. The guy I wanted to establish eye contact with and get a fix on was Zhalgas Amanbayev. Instead I was spending most of my time focused on his brother Yuri.

  Zhalgas started by asking me a series of questions about U.S. immigration laws that I couldn’t answer since I had no time to prepare. He would speak to Yuri for five minutes, then Yuri would turn to me and say, “He says, ‘That sounds good.’”

  Yeah, sure. I didn’t have a clue what they were saying among themselves, nor could I feign to know things I
didn’t know. I said to myself: Control what you can control.

  Alright. I couldn’t pretend to speak Russian, but I could come across as a shady businessman. So when the waitress came over to our table, I grabbed her wrist and asked, “Hey, Sugar, what time do you get off?”

  Tacky as hell, I know. And not something I would ever dream about doing in my normal life. But my behavior seemed to convince Amanbayev I was a low-life businessman who might be willing to break some laws.

  The FBI had lots of knowledge about how Italian mobsters conducted themselves, but knew very little about the Russians. I learned in that first meet that the Russians didn’t like sitting around eating veal, drinking Chianti, and cracking jokes. Instead, they were as serious as a sore knee and got right down to business.

  At the end of our meeting, Amanbayev told Cowens that he wanted to sit down with me again. Great. But where, how, and under what circumstances?

  So when I saw Bartlett, I peppered him with a series of questions: Am I married, or divorced? Do I have kids? What kind of business am I involved in? Where do I live? Where do I work?

  His answer was priceless: “I figured you would figure that out.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  My prickly attitude still intact, I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but held back. I thought back to working with Brady, who did all his own backstopping well in advance of ever meeting a bad guy. I needed to do the same. I would never make that mistake again.

  Now I had to figure things out on the fly. We quickly rented a beautiful house on the beach north of Boston. It was near where I grew up, so I knew my way around and could show the targets different points of interest. We rented an office in downtown Boston, wired it for audio and sound, and brought in a female FBI Agent to play the role of my secretary.

  Amanbayev and his cohorts soon became regular visitors. Before I knew it, I was smack dab in the middle of my first full-time FBI UCA assignment, and learning something new each day.

  Cowens told us that Amanbayev was involved in more serious criminal activities than procuring documents illegally. Our plan was for me to provide him with the immigration documents initially and then try to get him to segue into more serious crimes.

  The case developed slowly because Amanbayev traveled to Russia often and was away for months at a time. That made it hard to establish rapport. He wasn’t into small talk or sports, and we didn’t seem to have common interests. An added impediment was the fact that the only way I had to communicate with Amanbayev was through his brother Yuri, who didn’t seem to like me.

  Also, I knew that members of Amanbayev’s local gang were keeping an eye on me. So I had to remain in Boston and continue living in deep cover as the businessman I was pretending to be. Meanwhile, my family was a six-hour drive away in Philadelphia. During the first three months, I snuck home one weekend to find complete chaos. The house was a mess and my son had gotten school detention after reacting poorly to another student’s barb about his parents being divorced and his father leaving home. I remember praying I hadn’t made a monumental mistake.

  It was a difficult adjustment for the entire family. My wife and I couldn’t share a bed for months at a time, and because I couldn’t reach out to friends and family in the Boston area, I was spending a lot of time alone. As a loner that was fine with me at first. But there were only so many hours I could spend at the gym, reading, or walking on the beach.

  Nor was I permitted to enter the Boston FBI office, or associate with other Agents in public. The one thing I did do was ask Jarhead in Philadelphia to call the SWAT supervisor in Boston. Being an undercover, I couldn’t go live on actual missions, but at least I could train with them. Soon, I had a new group of friends to shoot, train, hang, and bullshit with before heading back to the solitary beach house.

  They were the only contact I had with the FBI except for Shawn Bartlett, who met me once a week in local bars or at the gym to hand over my FD-302s and plot strategy.

  Turned out the green cards Amanbayev wanted could only be secured through the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which wasn’t willing to cooperate at first. The FBI had its own concerns, because it knew that once the green cards were issued to criminal associates of Amanbayev, those individuals would be operating in the United States and would be hard to track. We could end up looking really bad if people found that we allowed individuals into our country who then went on a major crime spree.

  I tap-danced with Amanbayev for almost a year, trying to learn everything he and his associates were up to, meeting other members of his gang, and convincing them that I wasn’t lily-white.

  During that same time, I got what’s known in the FBI as a “Specialty Transfer” for my family to move with me to Boston, where my wife was near her sisters and my kids could spend time with their cousins for the first time in their lives. We bought a beautiful home we could barely afford, set the kids up in new schools, and I volunteered right away to coach whatever sport was in season.

  After months of bureaucratic wrangling, we finally secured two green cards for Amanbayev’s brother Yuri and another member of his organization, which proved to them that I knew the right kind of people. As a result, the case picked up steam. Over the next several months Zhalgas, Yuri, and I met in my office, parking lots, and suburban motels and he talked about his involvement in various complicated financial schemes, many of which I couldn’t comprehend.

  Fortunately, the one thing I did understand from my old Colombian drug cases was money laundering. Every criminal organization, regardless of their choice of crime, usually faces the problem of laundering funds. Legally, the FBI can function as a money-laundering “facilitator.” In this case, we wanted Amanbayev to launder FBI funds—a practice known as “reverse money laundering.”

  Chris Brady had taught me that after a certain point in the tap dance, you had to make what he called the “awkward jab.” In other words, the UCA needed to be direct and blunt. So one day, a year and a half into the case, I told Zhalgas Amanbayev through Yuri that I made most of my income as an international heroin trafficker and asked him if he could help me launder the proceeds of drugs sales through legitimate banks. It was a difficult conversation to have in a foreign language, but I managed.

  I said, “I have tons of cash from dope deals that need to be cleaned.”

  Yuri asked, “What’s a dope?”

  This was going to take awhile.

  Knowing what I know now about being undercover, I should have had a brick of heroin in my office to use as a prop. What I did understand was that legally I had to be cagey. A crucial element of making a money-laundering case is the need to establish something called SUA (Specific Unlawful Activity). With a tape recorder running either in my office or concealed on my body, I had to make sure that Amanbayev understood clearly that the dollars I was asking him to clean for me were profits from illegal drug sales.

  I explained to him that I wanted to avoid DEA scrutiny and I didn’t want to pay taxes to the IRS. Amanbayev bit, suggesting that we draw up a dummy contract between my fake company and another he would form in Kazakhstan. Then I would start wiring small amounts of money to him and he would reroute them through various accounts he maintained overseas, and then send the money to a second company I established in the United States. If investigators started asking questions, Amanbayev would say that he had been investing my money in foreign securities and forwarding me the profits. For this service, Amanbayev would receive an 8 percent commission—the average rate for international money launderers. Pretty clever.

  He said he could launder as much as $10 million at a time. There was no way the FBI was going to allocate that amount of money. Instead, telling him it was a test run, I wire-transferred four separate payments totaling $500,000 to Amabayev between March and July of 1998, and he cleaned the money through foreign banks and financial institutions including the Royal Bank of Scotland in Nassau, the Capital Bank of Latvia, The Latvian Trade Bank 4, and the Kazakh Bank
Credit Center in Almaty. Two weeks later, minus his commission of 8 percent, the money arrived in an account set up in the name of our fictitious company. The speed with which Amabayev completed the transaction proved that he had a sophisticated system in place and had laundered serious amounts of money in the past. Every part of the process was monitored and recorded by the FBI.

  Legally, he and his associates were screwed. They knowingly took what they believed to be heroin trafficking profits and made them appear to be legitimate funds—a serious federal crime.

  In December 1998, almost two years after our initial meeting, I called Amabayev and asked him to meet me at a restaurant in New York City. This time I didn’t show. Arriving in my place were several burly FBI Agents who arrested him and charged him with immigration document fraud and money laundering. Facing a maximum sentence of twenty years in federal prison, Amabayev pled guilty. I never saw him again.

  On the FBI scorecard, the UCO was a success, but I knew that we could have accomplished a whole lot more. We should have continued getting the names of Amabayev criminal associates for green cards, and we should have penetrated deeper into his criminal organization by tracking the foreign currency transfers and accounts.

  But people high above my pay grade wanted to wrap up the case and tell the world that the FBI had infiltrated a Russian organized crime group and arrested the ringleader.

  I chalked the case up as a valuable learning experience and was eager to take on another undercover assignment. The problem I faced was that according to FBI rules, once an Agent had completed a long-term undercover (of six months or more), he or she was required to return to regular office duty, working as a Case Agent on a traditional investigation. The Amabayev UCO, which was supposed to last six months, had stretched out for more than two years.