Ghost

by Michael R. McGowan

  Two years later, in 2007, shortly before NDURE was officially approved, I got a call from the Criminal Investigative Division Assistant Director (CID AD) who was essentially the number-three official in the FBI and my former SAC in Boston. Again, he asked me to lead NDURE.

  I told him I would accept under three conditions: One, I remain assigned to Boston. Two, I got to handpick members of the undercover team with no interference from FBIHQ. And, three, they would leave us alone.

  He immediately agreed to the first two, and promised that as long as he remained the CID AD, he would adhere to my third condition as well.

  I was honored to be named NDURE’s first member, and accepted the position of Operational Senior Team Leader (STL). A good friend of mine and supervisor in the Undercover Unit, originally from the Atlanta Division, was appointed to handle the FBIHQ administrative side of NDURE, while I ran the operational end.

  My obvious first UCA pick to join the national team was none other than Gonzo. After him I selected the cream of the crop of UCAs from the Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Richmond, Seattle, San Diego, and Charlotte Divisions. It was a team of all-stars and our future seemed bright.

  Within the first two years, we did UCOs in conjunction with twenty-three different FBI field offices, and made many difficult cases, especially in the area of Public Corruption. Soon we were getting more UCO requests than we could handle, and rave reviews from SACs all over the country.

  Then we took on one of the most powerful men and criminal organizations in the world, and everything changed.

  16

  THE SINALOA CARTEL—PART ONE

  Early 2009, I was sitting in my Boston office, when I saw a young Case Agent named Hank Tanner, who I knew to be a bright, eager kid by reputation and looked like a lumberjack, peek in. The straight-arrow Mormon kid from Utah had a frightened look in his eyes. For some reason, new Agents, even those like Tanner who towered over me, regarded me as an intimidating guy. Maybe it’s because I was exacting of myself and others, or that I didn’t smile a lot, or I had no patience with bureaucratic BS.

  For whatever reason, Tanner appeared hesitant about entering my office. When he finally got up the nerve to do so, I greeted him with a simple, “What’s up, Grizzly?” Tanner wore a beard, but the reference to the dated 1970s TV character Grizzly Adams went completely over his head.

  He said, “I’m working a case with an informant.”

  “And?”

  “I think I might have something important,” Tanner said, “but I’m not sure what it is, or how to develop it. I was told you could come up with something devious.”

  “Tell me about your informant.”

  “He’s a two-time convicted federal drug dealer with ties to the Sinaloa drug cartel.”

  I’d been half-listening while leafing through some NDURE paperwork, but upon hearing the words “Sinaloa drug cartel” the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Twenty-two years on the job, I knew a good case when I heard one. He had my full attention.

  In 2009, the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel was the most powerful criminal drug organization in the world. It had been founded in the late ’60s in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and according to the U.S. Justice Department had been responsible for importing more the two hundred tons of cocaine and heroin into the United States. It also supplied the United States and other markets with massive amounts of methamphetamine, marijuana, and MDMA.

  Since the mid-’90s, the cartel had been run by pint-sized drug lord Joaquín Achivaldo Guzmán Loera, commonly known as El Chapo, or Shorty. Born the son of a poor cattle rancher, he was now worth billions and ranked by Forbes magazine as the forty-first most powerful person in the world—ahead of Steve Jobs and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was also the world’s most wanted fugitive after escaping from a Mexican prison in 2001.

  Tanner explained that his hard-to-handle informant, Gustavo (Gus) Vargas, who I later dubbed “the General,” had been a very successful Miami drug trafficker and worked with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in the 1980s. Since then he had served two terms in federal prison on drug charges, and still maintained relationships in the world of drug trafficking, including contacts high up in the Sinaloa Cartel.

  Vargas was willing to cooperate with us, Tanner said, because the U.S. government had seized some personal property that he wanted returned for sentimental reasons. I couldn’t care less about the seized property. I just wanted this guy to work with us.

  “Sounds like you might have a tiger by the tail,” I offered as I felt adrenaline pump into my system.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Tanner that the odds of us making a case against the Sinaloa Cartel and Chapo Guzmán from our Boston office were astronomically low. Since Boston wasn’t a major drug supply or distribution city, we were going to have to come up with a scenario to convince the cartel that we were operating somewhere else. And since the FBI was prohibited from operating in Mexico, and Mexican government officials couldn’t be trusted, we would have to rely on his informant, Vargas, in a big way.

  Before I even considered those issues, there was another bureaucratic one I had to address. As NDURE’s Operational STL, I knew every UCO we had underway. The truth was that we usually didn’t take on drug cases, because they weren’t considered the highest priorities. This would be the exception. If we were going up against Chapo and his cartel, we needed our absolute best UCAs.

  So, begrudgingly, I traveled to FBIHQ to make a formal request to take on this unique drug case, which was going to require a good deal of time and money. Before the critical meeting, I made it a point to “accidently” bump into the CID AD and let him know the purpose of my visit to headquarters. It proved fortuitous, and to my great satisfaction and amazement, my request to pit NDURE against the Sinaloa Cartel was approved and Operation Dark Water was underway!

  I had no doubt that we were embarking on a high-stakes gamble, and any chance we had to succeed in indicting El Chapo and his associates depended on meticulous planning, impeccable execution, and good luck.

  Since Mexico was outside of the FBI jurisdiction and we couldn’t even enter Mexico, we were going to have to depend on the Cuban-born drug trafficker informant to travel to Sinaloa, Mexico, and initiate discussions with leaders of the cartel. The first thing I did was to check him out myself.

  Tanner—the young Mormon serving as the Case Agent—set up a meeting between Gus Vargas, other Agents, and me. My fellow Agents dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts. I deliberately wore a suit, sat to the side of the room and watched, and never said a word. My behavior clearly unnerved Vargas—which is exactly what I set out to accomplish.

  As soon as the meeting was over and I left without speaking, Vargas turned to Tanner and asked, “Who was that asshole in the suit?” Perfect.

  I wanted to see what kind of person we would be depending on. Gus Vargas fit the profile of most of the better informants I had met in the past—he was in possession of a massive ego. Despite the fact that he had been arrested twice and had served a total of seventeen years in federal prison, he considered himself the smartest guy in the room, and a major player in the drug world.

  Given Vargas’s criminal resume, which included working with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in the ’80s, I didn’t doubt that he knew his way around. At the same time, I understood that we were going to have to watch this guy like a hawk for any sign of betrayal. If at any point during the case he thought he could make a better deal for himself on the other side of the fence, he wouldn’t hesitate to jump.

  Not only did we need to be brutally realistic in terms of who we were working with, we also had to come up with a reasonable plan. The United States provided an enormous market for the cartel’s product. Also, our law enforcement agencies (including the DEA and FBI) vigorously pursued drug traffickers, and the traffickers were aware of that. So we couldn’t expect the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel to do business directly with a U.S. criminal organization because of
their fear of being arrested.

  So how were we going to lure them into doing business with us? After weeks of brainstorming we came up with a plan to impersonate an Italian organized crime group headquartered in Sicily interested in opening a pipeline for illegal drugs into Europe. We were going to need a team of our best UCAs to pull this off.

  I immediately recruited Gonzo and another Italian-looking, Spanish-speaking member of NDURE named Patricio. From the Boston office, I selected a third Hispanic Agent, Antonio, who had worked international undercover cases. To portray the head of the fictitious Italian crime organization, I tapped a good friend of mine from the Newark office who had done organized crime UCs in the past, spoke fluent Sicilian, and looked as intimidating as Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

  It was a strong and very capable team. I would remain in the background, setting the stage with elaborate scenarios, defining and redefining the UCA’s roles and responsibilities, pulling the undercover strings as the puppet master who remained out of sight.

  But just as we were getting started, Murphy’s law kicked in, and my friend from Newark was offered a lucrative private sector job, which he felt he couldn’t turn down. I accepted his profuse apologies, wished him well, and started to look around for someone else to play the role of the leader of the ersatz international criminal organization. I racked my brain for candidates, interviewed several, and in the end, chose … myself.

  I know, I don’t speak Sicilian, Italian, or Spanish, and sometimes have trouble communicating in English. But the honest truth was, I was itching to get back into the action of another UCA assignment and knew I could pull it off.

  Going forward and for the remainder of Dark Water, I would be known as El Viejo—The Old Man—a mature, successful, and sometimes irascible Italian crime boss, who wanted to make international dope deals and money and didn’t give a shit about who he might offend in the process.

  With our all-star UCA team in place, we spent the next six months doing the requisite tedious but essential backstopping. In this case, the UCAs were supported by other Agents like Mike Sullivan from Double Sessions; an anal-retentive but highly respected Agent we called the Stork; and a Boston PD detective we dubbed Tattoo because of his close resemblance to the diminutive greeter on the ’70s and ’80s TV hit Fantasy Island.

  Those three, working with us UCAs, Case Agent Tanner, our supervisor Harry Wilson, and our ASAC Frank Johnson, set out to create the profile of a highly successful and sophisticated international criminal organization headquartered in Sicily. With help from international law enforcement friends from around the world, and some domestic FBI private sector friends, we developed international shipping companies and business entities to give the outward appearance of a legitimate international business, with absolutely no nexus in any way to the United States. We deliberately erased any connection between us and the United States so as not to scare the cartel away.

  In July 2009, Gus Vargas traveled to the Mexican city of Agua Prieta on the U.S.–State of Sonora border and adjacent to the town of Douglas, Arizona. What he saw around him was a dusty town of roughly eighty thousand and home to several maquiladoras, including Velcro, Levolor, and the Commercial Vehicle Group, which built cab systems for heavy-duty trucks and was headquartered in New Albany, Ohio.

  In the lobby of one of the town’s upscale hotels, he met with a former Mexican minor league baseball player with short dark hair named Alvaro Rivera-Pedrego—a representative of the Sinaloa Cartel. The two men discussed drug trafficking. When Vargas mentioned that he was working with an Italian crime family that was interested in importing cocaine and other drugs into Europe, Rivera-Pedrego’s attention perked up. He said his boss, El Chapo, was interested in expanding into new markets in Europe and he thought he could arrange a meeting with Vargas and the drug kingpin himself.

  This was music to our ears in Boston. Three months later, in late October, Vargas returned to Mexico and traveled farther south to the capital city of Sonora, Hermosillo. In this desert city of 800,000, Vargas met again with Alvaro Rivera-Pedrego, who introduced him to El Chapo’s first cousin and business representative Jesus Manuel Gutierrez-Guzman—a good-looking man in his early fifties with bushy eyebrows and a perpetual scowl.

  Again, Vargas talked about his connections to our fictitious Italian crime organization and his interest in brokering a deal between it and a major drug supplier like the Sinaloa Cartel. The United States was never mentioned. Gutierrez-Guzman asked him how much cocaine the Italians were interested in purchasing. This was the opening we were looking for. Vargas answered that the cartel would have to negotiate the amount directly with the Italians and suggested that the Sinaloans send someone who could make decisions on behalf of El Chapo. As a blood relative of El Chapo’s, Gutierrez-Guzman represented that he had that authority.

  That’s when the real work started on our end. We knew there was virtually no chance El Chapo would leave his safe haven in Mexico, where many U.S. officials believed he was quietly protected and supported by the government of Mexico. The FBI, and especially us in Boston, had fought vigorously against any notification to the Mexican government of our UCO, and we ultimately prevailed.

  Under the best of circumstances, we were walking a daily tight rope, where one mistake could have fatal results. We didn’t need some official in Mexico spilling the beans about our UCO to Chapo.

  Communicating with the cartel through Vargas, we told them we didn’t want to meet in Europe because there were too many law enforcement eyes on us there and we didn’t want to expose the cartel to any new cop eyes. They appreciated our concern. We subtly suggested a location in Miami instead, where we weren’t widely known, and where El Viejo could bring some of his Italian associates for some relaxation and fun in the sun.

  Our plan from Day One was to mimic El Chapo’s and his gang’s practices. Since we knew Chapo Guzmán treated his employees well, El Viejo did, too. We also wanted to send him the subtle message that while he was stuck in Mexico with an international warrant over his head, El Viejo was free to travel anywhere he wanted.

  The cartel agreed to meet us in Miami for two reasons: One, it was close to Mexico. And, two, we weren’t going to discuss importing drugs into the United States, so they felt safe.

  With the upcoming 2009 holiday season, we pushed the date back to early 2010, to give us more time to prepare for this critical first meeting. In addition to the other three UCAs, I recruited a very attractive female UCA I had worked with before to play my glamorous girlfriend, Liquita. The Agent who played her was not only very pleasing to look at, she was also brilliant and in possession of a Ph.D.

  Figuring that the cartel would be interested in our ethnic backgrounds and roles, we cast Gonzo as my Spanish-English translator and main Hispanic drug associate, responsible for our transportation needs. Antonio would act as our international business advisor and expert in port facilities in Spain. Patricio, who looked Italian but spoke fluent Spanish, would be my most trusted Italian advisor who was being groomed to take over my position.

  The meeting of February 24, 2010, was set to take place in a luxury thirty-story oceanfront Florida condo rented by the FBI. Naturally we had it wired for video and sound. The bar was stocked and ready. The joint was staged with fresh flowers, photos, and clothes in the closet. Liquita sashayed around in a bikini, covered by one of El Viejo’s opened white dress shirts, with a diet soda in hand. Our informant Gus Vargas stood ready to make the introductions. It was game time.

  As we did a last-minute check of everything, I noticed that the other UCAs appeared nervous. This was natural going into a first undercover meeting. I had butterflies in my stomach, too. I always did, but I had never seen my friends this uptight.

  Hoping to lighten the mood, I went to the bathroom, removed my clothes and replaced them with a loud purple velour bathrobe that I found hanging there. It barely tied around my ample waist. Then I slicked my hair back with water, checked my reflection in the mirror—I looked
like a complete jackass, in my opinion, a smart-ass Marlon Brando godfather type, but perfect for the role.

  I waddled into the living room where Vargas and the UCAs were nervously waiting with my hairy chest exposed and strutted around like a peacock. With the audio and video running, they all burst into raucous laughter.

  “What’s so funny? What’s so fucking funny? You want a piece of this? You know who I am? I’m fucking El Viejo!”

  The tension lightened considerably and for years later, prosecutors referred to this simply as “The Bathrobe Meeting.”

  El Chapo’s first cousin Jesus Manuel Gutierrez-Guzman arrived minutes later, appearing scared to death. What we didn’t know and quickly found out was that he was petrified of high places. After making a big show of how we had swept the apartment for listening devices, we tried to escort him out onto the balcony to show him the panoramic view. Even with the beautiful Liquita sprawled out on a chaise lounge, Gutierrez-Guzman looked like a man who was imagining what it would feel like to fall thirty stories and hit the ground.

  He huddled in a corner as far away from the ledge as possible. We calmed him down by bringing him inside and sitting him on one of the sofas facing the FBI cameras.

  We spent the next three hours discussing the possibility of transporting cocaine from Mexico to Europe like we were talking about importing potato chips. Gutierrez-Guzman maintained that the Sinaloa Cartel had the capacity of transporting up to twenty tons via cargo containers. Twenty tons! I sat trying to imagine the damage that could do to people’s lives. The amount was absolutely stunning, but completely realistic in terms of the intelligence we had on the cartel’s capacity to produce cocaine.

  We told Gutierrez-Guzman we would be more comfortable starting with 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms—the exact opposite of what most cops would do. We knew that real dope dealers never complete a multi-ton deal the first time. If we had even entertained a multi-ton deal, we probably would have never seen the cartel again.