Before I got up to pay Salesman the bribe money he’d earned so far, I offered him a chance to back out. In order to avoid a later entrapment defense, I literally pointed to the door and told him to leave if he was uncomfortable with accepting a bribe.
Salesman responded with his peculiar philosophy of right and wrong. “I’m not interested in right or wrong in the world,” he explained, “because right or wrong can be perceived, depending on who you ask. It’s a perception. My greatest concern is what works. There’s no right or wrong in the world. We’re not talking about going out and murdering a child.”
No, we weren’t. But we were talking about Public Corruption.
Following his little speech, I stood up, and slowly counted out three stacks of hundred-dollar bills, amounting to $1,000 each, and set them on a table next to him. I intentionally didn’t hand him the money. Salesman picked up the stacks one by one without hesitation, and slipped them in his pocket. All of this was captured on videotape.
Five minutes later, Salesman left my room $3,000 richer. At the same time FBI paperwork was being drafted for his federal indictment. After an eight-day trial in which I testified for two days, a jury found him guilty of two counts each of bribery and extortion.
At his sentencing, Salesman made a teary appeal to the judge. “I will never, ever be the same. It doesn’t matter what I do. If I could give my life to reverse it, I would.”
He was sentenced to three years and four months in federal prison, a major hit for a Public Corruption conviction, which usually involved a slap-on-the-wrist and little, if any, prison time.
Concurrent with impersonating different versions of Michael Moretti with Salesman and The Cheese Man during 2006 and 2007, I was also playing the role of a long-distance trucker in a Boston UCO called “Road Kill.”
The FBI investigation into the notorious Outlaws Motorcycle Club began in November 2005, when an FBI UCA (who I’ll call Pete Smith) infiltrated the Taunton, Massachusetts, chapter of the gang posing as the owner of a trucking company in Texas who visited Massachusetts on a monthly basis, and was willing to bend the law to make a buck.
The Outlaws were a rough bunch. According to a Department of Justice report, the most violent motorcycle gang in the country with more than ninety chapters worldwide, and three Massachusetts chapters headquartered in Brockton, Taunton, and East Boston. Their logo, which they referred to as Charlie, featured a skull and crossed pistons. The FBI and local law enforcement were targeting them because of their known involvement in drug trafficking, firearms violations, and other criminal activity in the Boston area.
Starting in 2006, Smith began purchasing cars, trucks, and motorcycles from members of the Taunton chapter of the Outlaws as part of an insurance fraud scheme. The Outlaws or their associates would either steal the vehicles outright, or report the vehicles stolen, collect the insurance settlement, and pocket a portion of the money when Smith purportedly resold the vehicles in Mexico.
In support of Smith, a longtime UCA buddy named Gonzo and I played the role of long-distance truckers, who worked for Smith, and used an FBI big rig to transport the vehicles to Mexico. Gonzo, a licensed CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) operator, drove a monstrous eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer, and I was his trusted passenger sidekick “Pancho,” pretending to speak Spanish, handing out sandwiches and drinks, and working the radio. We both wore baggy canvas shorts and wife-beater T-shirts topped off with huge floppy Panamanian straw hats. Geriatric versions of Cheech & Chong complete with huge handlebar mustaches and tanned skin.
One Agent drily commented that when together we looked like “walking probable cause”—meaning we appeared to be up to no good. Gonzo and I took that as a compliment.
We were working an undercover biker gang case, and I could barely ride a bicycle, let alone a motorcycle. I figured as long as we gave the bad guys what they wanted, we’d be fine.
Gonzo hailed from Puerto Rico, had served honorably as a U.S. Army Captain, and was the second funniest guy I knew in the FBI after Jarhead, which is saying a lot given the cast of FBI misfits I tended to associate with. He had the ability to make the most hardened criminals laugh their ass off within minutes of meeting him. He was also a merciless mimic of FBI management officials. We’d met in Miami twenty years earlier and had both cut our undercover teeth under Chris Brady’s astute tutelage.
With Gonzo as my partner, I knew this was going to be a blast, we’d have to stay in Hampton Inn hotels (don’t ask), and the bad guys would get caught.
About a year and a half into the UCO and after many successful meetings, Smith was dragged into a basement by the Outlaws one night and strip-searched. They were looking for a wire that he was in fact wearing and that, incredibly, they didn’t find. Smith walked out of the basement, quit the next day, and never returned to Massachusetts. I couldn’t blame him.
But he did agree to telephone the Outlaws and tell them his truckers (Gonzo and Pancho) would be back in the area if the Outlaws wanted to continue to do business. Gonzo replaced Smith as the lead UCA, and I played second fiddle. It was up to us to push this difficult and violent case across the finish line.
The next time Gonzo and I met the Outlaws in Taunton, Massachusetts, we let them know that we also used our semi to transport large shipments of cocaine from Mexico into the United States and Canada. That got their attention. On November 30, 2006, in a variation of the FBI drug sting we had run on Matty Guglielmetti in Rhode Island almost two years earlier, we got six Outlaw members, including the current president, to serve as a protection detail for forty kilograms of cocaine and a thousand pounds of marijuana that Gonzo and I had supposedly driven up from Mexico.
They were hired to guard it while the drugs were transferred to other trucks for transport to Canada. The cocaine and marijuana were real and provided by the FBI from other criminal cases.
As Gonzo and I drove away after delivering the drugs, a State Police cruiser pulled behind us and flashed their lights. My partner and I looked at one another and laughed. Gonzo summed up the situation with a shit-eating grin and a two-word expletive, “We’re fucked.”
Not only did our truck have Florida plates, but the trailer reeked of weed. On top of that Gonzo and I were wearing the ridiculous Panama straw hats and, not having shaved in several days, looked like a couple of burned-out hippies on a dope run. Since we were working undercover, we weren’t carrying badges or anything that identified us as FBI Agents. And, we also both had loaded guns under our seats.
Gonzo pulled to the side of the highway loudly ranting about racial profiling. In the rearview mirror, I saw the State Troopers eyes light up at the first whiff of ganja. I also noticed that the younger of the two troopers had his gun out and concealed behind his leg. He seemed very, very nervous. Not a good sign.
The senior trooper approached Gonzo’s window.
“Hi, officer, what’s the problem?” Gonzo asked in broken English, acting like a wiseass and impersonating a stereotypical Mexican.
“Your rear license plate appears to be blocked. We couldn’t read it,” the trooper responded
“Really? Don’t think so.” Gonzo was positive our license plate was highly visible and properly affixed.
The officers ordered us out of the truck and handcuffed us each, for “our own safety.”
I knew what they were doing. They were looking for an excuse to search the trailer. As a law enforcement officer myself, I understood that they couldn’t do that without producing a search warrant or getting our consent.
The younger trooper and I kept feeling each other out, and the more I chatted with him, the more fidgety he got, sometimes carelessly pointing his pistol in my direction. Meanwhile, Gonzo complained to the senior trooper about how often he was pulled over because of his Hispanic background.
All of this was taking place on the side of the highway. The traffic behind us had now slowed to a crawl and rubberneckers paused to see what was going on. I couldn’t help laughing when a yellow s
chool bus passed with schoolkids’ faces pressed against the window looking at us like animals in the zoo, not knowing we were actually on Team America.
“What’s so funny?” the junior trooper asked.
“Inside joke.”
Bad things can happen when law enforcement gets nervous. So I made a battlefield decision, got the attention of the senior trooper, and told him Gonzo and I were FBI Agents and that our guns were loaded and concealed under the front seat.
He didn’t buy the FBI part, and I couldn’t blame him. They grabbed our guns immediately. The younger trooper was now visibly shaking. I asked the senior one to call our FBI office so that someone there could identify us.
He refused.
I mentioned the name of a Massachusetts State Trooper who had assisted us earlier in the day. The senior trooper recognized the name, but when he called him, the trooper who had assisted us didn’t answer his phone.
Still highly suspicious of who we really were and what we were up to, the nervous troopers instructed us to proceed slowly to the next exit and pull over.
We did as instructed. Over Gonzo’s continuing complaints about being a victim of ethnic profiling, I heard sirens approaching. Three marked units and an unmarked cruiser surrounded our truck when we stopped. Passersby continued to gawk.
“Hey, Gonzo,” I remarked. “Look on the bright side. We must be real convincing as drug dealers.”
He didn’t find that funny, which made me laugh harder.
Several cops were now conferring in front of our cab. Some had their guns drawn. An aggressive plainclothes detective walked to the driver’s side window and started throwing FBI and State Police names at us.
“You know Sergeant McCloskey?” the detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Bob.”
“What department does Doug Kinzer work for?”
“FBI—Squad C-3.”
I answered all his questions correctly. Finally, he mentioned the name of a good friend of mine, a State Police undercover named Pete Davidson.
“Sure, I know Davidson. He thinks he’s a comedian. He tries his lousy jokes out on me every time I see him.”
The detective smiled. Turned out Davidson and he had been roommates at the police academy. The detective got Davidson on the phone, and after Davidson identified me by my signature bushy walrus mustache, the detective and I took turns busting his balls.
After an hour standoff, Gonzo and I were free to go. From the expression on the face of the senior trooper, I could tell that he was still having trouble believing that we two extremely shady-looking characters were actually FBI Agents.
To fuck with the trooper’s head a little more, Gonzo led him back to the back of the trailer to show him what he had wanted to get a look at for more than an hour. The trailer, reeking of ganja, was empty.
“Tough shit,” said Gonzo, still fuming. “Go catch a real dope dealer.” Then he fired up the diesel engine, blasted the air horn, and drove off with me beside him bouncing up and down on the seat with laughter.
Another time in a different UCO in Providence, Rhode Island, Gonzo and I were negotiating a drug deal with a Latin Kings gang member who went by the name Lucky, and had it tattooed across his neck.
I’d never seen a neck tattoo at that point, and stared at it fascinated by the intricate ink artwork.
Gonzo was trying to negotiate the particulars of the drug deal we were trying to make, but I kept interrupting him, pointing to Lucky’s tattoo and asking questions. “You get that around here?”
“Yeah, Central Falls. Why?”
“It hurt?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Think I should get one?”
Lucky took one look at my white Irish skin and said, “Nah … I don’t think so…,” while Gonzo just shook his head at my lack of focus.
It turned out that Lucky didn’t live up to his name. He was shot and killed the night before we were scheduled to conclude the drug deal.
In May 2007, Gonzo and I were getting ready to drive a second haul of stolen Outlaw vehicles to Mexico, when Outlaws former president Timothy Silvia, fresh out of prison, asked whether we could provide him with marijuana or cocaine. It was an unusually brazen move in the drug world, but Gonzo had been so convincing, and charming, that the Outlaws were completely comfortable talking flat dirty to him.
“Sure,” I said. “How much?”
“At least ten kilograms.”
“That’s all?” I complained, trying to make Silvia feel like a small fry. “We usually only do fifty or a hundred at a time.”
His eyes widened. Then he said, “I’m just getting back on my feet,” trying to save face.
I paused as if I was trying to decide, made eye contact with Gonzo who shot me a silent signal, and finally said, “Fuck it … why not? It’s a quick score. We’ll take care of you.”
Silvia breathed a sigh of relief, and Gonzo and I slapped on our Panama hats and told him we’d be in touch.
On June 15, 2007, I met with Silvia in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Westgate Mall in Brockton to discuss the specifics of the drug deal. Silvia showed up driving a brand-new gray Hummer with Massachusetts plates and fit the profile of your typical biker—shaved head, all tatted up, and stocky, more fat than muscle.
He immediately got in my face and challenged me about being a cop. I countered by asking him, “How do I know that you’re not a cop?”
He backed off and we started talking. During our forty-five-minute conversation captured by the body recorder I was wearing, we negotiated a price of $180,000 cash on delivery for ten kilograms of cocaine. Silvia told me that he had served twenty years in prison and had recently been released.
“I’m done with that for the rest of my life,” he explained at one point. Next time he was arrested he said, “I’m shooting it out with them. I’m going out in a blaze of glory. I can’t do twenty more.”
I made sure to mention that to the SWAT team that was going to make the arrest.
During our confab in the parking lot, Silvia also claimed to have killed someone in a bar fight, beat two witnesses with baseballs bats, shot another individual, and conducted home invasions of area drug dealers. I assumed some of it was true, since his rap sheet consisted of 106 pages with 220 entries.
Silvia also discussed his involvement in stealing vehicles and his profiting financially from fraudulent insurance claims filed for other cars. He boasted that he had paid $100,000 for the Hummer he’d arrived in, and owned two additional Hummers, which he said he was willing to report stolen for resale in Mexico.
Timothy Silvia wasn’t lucky, either. On July 30, 2007, six weeks after I recorded our conversation in the Holiday Inn parking lot, Silvia and his partner Todd Donofrio returned to the same parking lot to meet Gonzo and me and collect their ten kilograms of cocaine. After giving us $55,000 in cash as an initial payment, Gonzo lured Silvia into the back of the truck to show him the cocaine, while I lowered the electric door gate to prevent Silvia from escaping. Seeing my visual signal, the SWAT team did their thing.
Silvia never saw it coming and never had a chance to reach for the gun he had hidden in Donofrio’s car. Instead, he was indicted for federal drug trafficking, possession of illegal firearms, armed carjacking, insurance fraud, and other charges. Nearly two hundred law enforcement officers from the FBI, State Police, Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department, and the Taunton and Brockton police departments participated in the arrests. A raid of the Outlaws’ Taunton headquarters resulted in the seizure of more drugs, $100,000 in cash, and more than a dozen firearms, including an AR-15 automatic assault rifle.
They went off to jail, while Gonzo and I hung up our Panama hats at his favorite restaurant, The 99, and dined on steak tips and drank beers.
Silvia, instead of going down in a blaze of gunfire as he had promised, instead ended up pleading guilty and was sentenced to twenty-one-and-a-half years in prison. Fourteen
other Outlaws were convicted by trial or guilty pleas, and all received double-digit prison sentences, effectively obliterating the Taunton Chapter of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club.
The year 2007 turned out to be very busy for me. I traveled to Florida to make the $3,000 bribe payment to Salesman on July 28, and quickly returned to Boston, put on my shorts and hat, and teamed with Gonzo to snatch Silvia and Donofrio two days later.
My seventeen-year-old daughter had accompanied me to Florida to visit colleges. While I was paying off Salesman in an upstairs room at the Westin Diplomat, she was sunning herself downstairs beside the majestic pool. An hour after paying a cash bribe to a public official on videotape, my daughter and I went to tour a nearby college like normal families did, except I had a .40 caliber Baby Glock stuffed into the rear waistband of my pants.
* * *
Back in 2007, the United States was the only civilized nation in the world that didn’t have a national law enforcement undercover team. All the countries in Europe, Canada, and most of South America deployed national teams with specific expertise in organizing, planning, and executing undercover operations to fight their most dangerous criminals and criminal organizations. Instead, in the United States, the FBI had fifty-six field offices running their own undercover operations.
Change was past due and finally came in June 2007 when the FBI formed its first national undercover team known as NDURE (National Dedicated Undercover Response Element). Don’t ask me where they came up with that name.
Experienced UCAs like Brady, Gonzo, me, and others had been lobbying for a national team for more than twenty years. To our minds it made absolute sense to find a way to match our best UCAs and other assets against our nation’s most complex, dangerous, and challenging criminal targets.
In 2005, FBIHQ’s Undercover Unit Chief had summoned me to Washington to brief me on his plan for a national undercover team. I agreed with everything he had to say, even when he asked me to run it. When he told me I had to transfer to Washington and work out of FBIHQ, I passed.
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