To Darryl, Anibal, Mike, Mark, Pat, John, Ron, Mark, and Mark, and our great RCMP friends, Steph and Eddie—thanks for the ride of a lifetime—we done good.
I resigned from NDURE for the second time the next day. Not one Undercover Unit leadership member had the balls to respond. Let the record show that after every possible allegation was thrown our way, not one NDURE member was ever found to have engaged in any improper or inappropriate FBI conduct, and no disciplinary action was ever taken.
Three months later, on March 25, 2013, the Undercover Unit’s NDURE Supervisory Special Agent, and the only one who supported us until the bitter end, and the sole member of the Unit who had operational success as a UCA, sent out the following memo:
OBITUARY: National Dedicated Undercover Response Element: (fondly known to those that knew it as NDURE)
Born: June 2007
Murdered: March 25, 2013 (after months of torture)
On March 25, 2013, NDURE was finally killed with one final stake driven through the heart of its illustrious and storied existence. The new regime, ever so risk-adverse, could not tolerate this new concept and success in UCOs, so they set out one by one to destroy the individuals and finally, the institution. The men who started this worthy endeavor will go down in the annals of FBI undercover history as pioneers of a new and very successful technique, which was long overdue in the history of this storied program. They put in many hours on great cases. They started a new wave of interest in being better at this thing we do, even for those who never had the privilege of being associated with this great program. They were the light to the modern UCO and technique utilizing multiple UCAs to get the job done by saving numerous man-hours and thousands of dollars. But alas …
… Then came the final blow, with the wisp of a risk-adverse, frightened decision, the once most prolific and successful group of UCAs in the history of the FBI were thrown out with no respect, no accolades for a job well done, no thank you. Just one more cold-hearted and cowardly executive decision that is today’s FBI.
This is to all the great warriors who fought the good fight and went down with the ship. Just know my friends, and never forget, you are all true heroes and we who know the truth will never let any of this history be forgotten. Sail on.…
For speaking the truth, this SSA was removed and transferred from the Criminal Investigative Division the very next day.
Thanks, Don. Back at you.
FBI bureaucratic politics remained as odious to me as ever. I spent the majority of 2013 on other cases, including the Boston Marathon bombings. On August 8, 2014, I would be celebrating my fifty-seventh birthday and also be reaching mandatory FBI retirement age.
After what I considered a great career and a long list of accomplishments, I started to prepare myself psychologically for retirement. In the past, when I ended one UCO, I started searching for the next one. Now, I began packing boxes in my office, and going through paperwork and names from cases I’d worked twenty-five years ago in Philadelphia that I couldn’t remember.
I still had duties to fulfill as Boston’s UC Coordinator, but besides that all that was on my plate were the Sinaloa Cartel trials in October. It was common practice for Agents to be called back to testify in court after they retired. Weeks before my retirement date in August, the FBI pushed my retirement back one year so I could help prepare exhibits and testimony for the upcoming trials.
Then a month before going to court, three of the defendants in the Sinaloa case pled guilty. Not wanting to hang around with little to do, I drafted my retirement papers, and started planning for the future.
In September 2014, I was sitting in my office counting down my last days when several members of one of the Boston Counter-Terrorism Squads asked for my advice about a potential undercover operation. They were concerned about a longtime criminal named Joseph Burke, who the Bureau of Prisons had designated as an international terrorist.
I knew Burke’s reputation and the fact that he had been raised in the notoriously tough Charlestown section of Boston—a breeding ground for violent offenders depicted in the Ben Affleck movie The Town.
A week later, the Organized Crime Squad unit came to me with a different UC proposal targeting the same individual—Joe Burke. My job was to analyze both proposals and make recommendations to Executive Management.
Burke, I learned, had spent the last seventeen years in prison for a series of armed robberies and other violent crimes. He had also been convicted of drug trafficking in prison. He was scheduled to be released at the end of December 2014, and we knew from informants that he was plotting more violent crimes once he got out.
I ran my recommendations by the Criminal ASAC. They basically went: Proceed with caution. This guy reeks of violence and has to be watched carefully once he’s back on the streets. If you decide to run a UC operation, you’re going to need a very experienced UCA to go against him.
My undercover strength was in Organized Crime and Drugs, not Violent Crime, so I never really thought of myself as a candidate. But two days later the ASAC called me while my wife and I were walking our dog and asked, “Mike, how do you feel about climbing into the ring one more time?”
“Really?” I asked back. “You sure you want me to go after Burke?”
“You’re the only one I trust given his background and the kind of guy he is.”
I took that as a tremendous compliment, but for the first time in my career didn’t immediately accept the challenge.
“I need to think about this,” I said. “I need to talk to my wife.”
Naturally, my wife didn’t want me to do it. Her response, bless her heart, was: “You’ve given them everything. You’re going out on a high note after El Chapo. Why would you want to go after some psychotic nut?”
The answer was simple: the thrill of the hunt. Additionally, I was honored to have been asked, and wanted this dangerous guy off the streets. Lastly, I started thinking of me against Burke, who was in his early fifties, as a battle of experienced heavyweights going to war for the last time.
When I told my wife I was going to accept the assignment, she wasn’t happy, but gave me her support.
My boss, the ASAC, was surprised when I informed him of my decision. He said, “We want you to do this, Mike, but you sure you got one last fight in you?”
Joining me on this assignment would be Tanner—the Case Agent on Dark Water. Intrigued by what he had learned during that case, he attended FBI Undercover School, passed with flying colors, and was now a certified UCA looking for his first big undercover assignment. We were excited to work together as an experienced older UCA and protégé.
One of the things that convinced me we could make a viable case was the access we had to one of Joe Burke’s associates who we had nicknamed Penis Head because of the funky-looking beanie he always wore on his head. He was a tough guy wannabe and a trust fund baby, who both Joey Merlino and Joe Burke had used previously as a human ATM. I planned to match Tanner against him.
Again, we were working with an informant, who knew both targets, and whose identify I can’t reveal. He was able to arrange a meeting between Burke, Penis Head, Tanner, and me less than a month after Burke’s release from prison on December 31, 2014. This time I was Mike Cassidy, an L.A.-based financial investor offering an entertainment industry business proposition that Burke and Penis Head could profit from both financially and in terms of publicity.
The first meeting took place in an FBI-controlled location in the Northeast valued at around $15 million and steps from the Atlantic Ocean. The place screamed money.
As soon as Burke entered, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Not only was he imposing physically—at six feet two inches, covered with tats and thickly muscled from almost two decades of weightlifting in prison—he also reeked of violence. Square-jawed and good-looking, it was his eyes that gave me the heebie-jeebies. They were the eyes of a complete sociopath.
From that moment forward, I was careful never to get within arm�
��s length of him. I’d almost never carried any kind of weapon on a UCO before, but this time knowing Burke’s reputation for violence, I concealed a military self-defense knife in my pocket, provided by my eldest son who was now a fourth-generation cop and former member of the U.S. Marines.
At fifty-eight, I wasn’t as agile and fit as I’d once been. Should Burke ever approach me in a threatening way, I planned to slit his throat before he got his hands on me. He was that intimidating.
Like I said before, we knew from the informant that Burke was planning new acts of violence. It was Tanner’s and my job as members of the FBI to try to dissuade him from doing so. I told him the business proposition we were offering would be a way for him to make money and keep his nose clean at the same time.
Burke seemed to agree and the initial meeting went well. We exchanged phone numbers and promised to keep in touch.
During a follow-up meeting at the same location in mid-February 2015, I offered Joe some start-up money to get him back on his feet. Burke said he didn’t need it, reached into his pocket, and pulled out $50,000 in cash. Tanner and I were both aghast.
Here was a guy only two and a half months out of prison and on parole, and he was already flashing $50,000 in cash. He didn’t tell us where it had come from, but we suspected he had made it from some form of drug trafficking. Our FBI antenna immediately went up.
During this second meeting, Joe informed me that he was traveling to California in March to meet with Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia friends he had made in prison. Wanting to keep track of his activities, I told Burke that Tanner and I would also be in Los Angeles at that time to work out some of the details of our business proposition. I offered to introduce him to some of my business associates while we were all in L.A.
On March 7, Joe and I met in another swanky FBI location smack in the middle of the entertainment industry. As a sign of his growing trust, he told me about his relationship with the Boston mobster Whitey Bulger and other details of his criminal past. He also informed me that he was in California setting up a marijuana deal.
When the meeting ended, he walked with me outside into the Southern California sunshine and asked if he could join my fictitious company. It was another sign of our developing relationship and an indication that he had blown through the $50,000 he had shown Tanner and me three weeks earlier.
I answered, “We’ll see what we can do.”
Two weeks later on St. Patrick’s Day, I met Joe Burke again in New England. This time I scolded him because we’d heard that Penis Head had expressed suspicions that my company was really an FBI sting. I’d learned from experience that whenever a target raised any doubts about your authenticity, you had to jump down their throats immediately. That’s what I did with Joe.
He reiterated that he trusted me and wanted to work together. Then out of the blue, he told me he desperately needed money and was thinking of robbing an armored car.
I said, “Joe, that’s a dumb thing to do. You’ll end up back in jail.”
Then he asked me for $500,000 to invest in a scheme to buy marijuana grow plants. I turned him down.
Next he said, “You might know some rich people who want to get out of a marriage.… This…” He made a hand gesture indicating firing a handgun. “I’ll do this all day long.”
“Joe,” I warned, “you need to be concerned about going back to jail.”
“How they gonna know, if I’m dumping some body in L.A. or Miami? You think I’m gonna leave fingerprints?”
“Are you talking about hurting somebody or just taking their shit?” I asked.
“No, just killing them,” he answered. “You might know somebody who wants to get rid of a husband. I’ll do that all day long. For a price, all day long. Not a problem.”
Once again the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was clear that we had a ticking bomb on our hands and we couldn’t wait to develop an international terrorism or drug case against him. We had to move quickly to get him off the streets.
That’s when we caught a break. Burke’s parole officer found out he had traveled to California in violation of the rules of his probation. So for the next several months he was confined to a halfway house in the Cape Cod area.
This gave us time to plan an endgame. I suggested that since Burke had proposed doing a contract killing, we use that as a way to send him back to prison.
During the month of April, while Burke was at the halfway house, I met several times with Penis Head in New York City and got into some discussions with him about trafficking Oxycontin—a powerful synthetic opiate that had become the scourge of the Northeast. He even provided me with some sample pills for me to sell. So right away we had Penis Head’s leverage over Burke should we need it.
My next meeting with Joe Burke was on May 16 on Cape Cod. He picked up where we had left off, bringing up the home invasion and murder-for-hire propositions again.
I said, “I might be interested in pursuing that if you can guarantee that no one will be killed.”
“I can’t guarantee that,” Joe answered. “If there’s a problem, someone will have to die.”
He was hell-bent on using violence to make money, so we ramped up the investigation. A month later, on June 27, I invited Joe Burke to a fancy social event in the greater Boston area. It was actually completely staged and filled with UCAs. I selected one, who was a good friend I’ll call Vincent, to serve as the target. His sole purpose was to piss Joe off.
My UCA buddy played his role perfectly. Within five minutes of meeting Burke, Vincent had insulted two female UCAs in front of him, and soon the two men were on the verge of exchanging blows.
Burke pulled me aside and said, “I’m gonna smash his fucking head in … and slap the piss out of him.”
That night after I calmed Burke down, he returned to the halfway house. Four days after he was released on July 14, Joe brought up the murder for hire again. He whispered to me at one point, “I’ll make it so he’s never found.”
On September 9, I met with Burke in Boston and told him about problems Vincent was causing me with the Internal Revenue Service, including freezing my business assets. I needed him off of my back and offered to show Burke Vincent’s office in New York City. “You do whatever you gotta do,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” Burke responded.
“Are you going to do this by yourself?” I asked. “Are you going to do it with somebody?”
“Myself.”
Burke said he had no qualms about killing him. “I’m gonna shoot him in the head. Fucking gonna shoot him in the fucking derby,” he said. “Three in the derby and three in his chest. Don’t worry, he ain’t getting up.”
I said, “Joe, I can’t give you a lot up front. I’ll scrape something together.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll pay you and I’ll tell you anything you find in his office is yours.”
Burke suggested another way to make extra cash. “You just borrow money from him. And then once you get the money from him, we got that, then we got the stickup and he’s gone. That’s how the wise guys do it. When the guy gets clipped, you ain’t gotta pay it back. He’s gone.”
Ten days later we met in Manhattan so I could show him the location of Vincent’s office. Burke brought a girlfriend with him who he said would obtain the murder weapons—a Glock .40 caliber handgun with a silencer and a Škorpion submachine gun Joe said, “The Glock, I’m using on him. All you hear is the hammer being pulled back … click, click.”
That night Burke met me at my hotel room to discuss money. I told Joe that Vincent typically carried a bag with $100,000 in cash to his office every Friday night. I said, “If he doesn’t have the hundred, I’ll make up the difference because it’s gonna be close.” Then I added, “Tell me I’m not gonna go to jail.”
“You’re never gonna go to jail,” Joe assured me. “As long as you don’t tell nobody nothing you ain’t got nothing to worry about. Never.”
I handed him $2,000 as
a down payment. Then the two of us went to a nearby theater to catch a midnight showing of the movie Black Mass with Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger. As the two of us sat side by side munching on popcorn, Joe occasionally leaned into me to tell which parts of the movie were inaccurate based on his association with the Bulger gang.
After the movie and before I took him to Vincent’s office, Burke pulled me aside and asked me to procure two African American male masks that were manufactured in Hollywood. As an experienced bank robber, he even knew the store in L.A. where they were sold.
I delivered the masks to him during our last meeting on October 6. “Perfect,” he said, after he tried one on with a concealed video camera recording everything.
“You need anything else from me?” I asked at that point.
“Nothing. I already got the piece; I got everything.”
As I did before the arrests of the Sinaloa big shots, I reviewed with Burke all the aspects of the crime he was about to commit—time, place, weapons, etc.
He was explicit. “The first shot, I’m gonna hit him here.” He pointed to his chest. “When he goes down, he’s gonna grab his chest. And I’m gonna walk up to him. I’m gonna stick it in his mouth. I’m gonna say, ‘Listen, this is for Mike.’ Pop! And the back of his head will be all over the fucking place.”
Before he left, I gave him a chance to back out. “A couple of things…,” I said. “One, is that I’m not having any second thoughts. And maybe I should.”
“Why?” Burke asked. “He’s a piece of shit.”
“But I’m not.… So if you want to walk away, you wanna tell me to walk away, today is the day, because I’m ready.”
“Full speed ahead, my man,” Burke said.
His goose was cooked. Two days later, I called Burke to book a meeting with him for the following day, Friday, October 9, in Boston—a week before the hit was scheduled to take place. On Friday, I sat in a nearby hotel on standby, while other FBI Agents arrested Burke without incident.
He was charged with using facilities of interstate commerce in the commission of a murder-for-hire plot. Joe Burke offered to cooperate and, believing I was a bad guy, started to tell the FBI about me and my crooked business activities. In August 2016, he pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison and three years of supervised release.
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