The Infiltrator, page 5
This phenomenon has created a lucrative trade in dollars from traffickers and pesos from Colombian businessmen. If a broker like Mora has an equal number of demand clients and supply clients, he simply arranges the swapping of their currencies in exchange for as much as a 10 percent fee from each party, which means a 20 percent return on a deal in which he doesn’t put up a dime of his own money. On a typical $2 million deal, that’s a $400,000 profit.
Other issues can complicate these transactions, but those who operate the BMPE generally aren’t involved in the sale of cocaine — just the purchase and sale of cocaine dollars. This kind of black-market currency trading happens around the world. In the Middle and Near East they call it hawala and hundi, but in all cases it’s really nothing more than an informal association of money brokers who disguise currency transfers through a maze of import-export transactions.
On a brisk night that December, I bought the bottle of champagne that started it all. Emir, Mora, and the informant had spent the day together, and Mora eagerly wanted to meet Musella. I arrived at the modest apartment masquerading as Emilio Dominguez’s Tampa home. Emir and I embraced, and, his arm draped around my shoulders, he led me to Mora, with whom I politely shook hands. Mora needed to know that he had to sell himself.
His short, wiry build confirmed his semi-pro soccer career, and he carried himself with the air of a low-level bank official, which confirmed his degree in business from the University of Medellín. He ran a legit business importing lima beans, but his real profits came from his career as a money broker, buying and selling dollars generated from the sale of cocaine in the U.S. As Mora himself put it, “My little business is to launder.”
Mora wasted no time telling me about his experience in the BMPE. He had been buying and selling drug dollars for two years, and he had very good contacts because several of his brothers and sisters lived in the States and distributed cocaine for fairly large drug organizations. Mora hinted that he worked his money exchanges primarily with a stockbroker in Medellín, a man he later identified as Juan Guillermo Vargas, who had excellent banking connections in Florida and California. This stockbroker worked closely with drug bosses in Medellín for whom he both laundered and invested roughly a million dollars per week earned in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.
Mora offered me a fifty-fifty partnership. He wanted my group to handle everything on the American side. We needed to pick up the dope money from representatives of the drug or money groups, get the cash into banks, and then provide him with U.S. dollar checks or wire transfers that he could give to the sellers of the cash, less my commission.
I told Mora to slow down and to enjoy a week in the States, during which he would have an opportunity to understand the potential of our relationship. As Musella, I told him that my primary function was to handle the money from my family’s U.S. operations, but they had given me the nod to expand profits by exploring South American connections. Doing business with him was only the cherry on top of a very large cake, I explained. I couldn’t afford to jeopardize my responsibility to my family, or I wouldn’t be around to enjoy the profits from the business he and I developed. He got the message.
As I tried to explain to Mora in my most serious tone that screwing up meant the end of my life, Emir the prankster stood just a few feet out of Mora’s sight, rolling his eyes and making faces. It took everything I had to keep from bursting into laughter. A dangerous move on his part, perhaps, but Emir’s antics often brought much-needed relief to business so serious that it could easily have resulted in our being kidnapped and cut into pieces.
The meeting needed to end on an optimistic note, though, so out came the chilled bottle of champagne. We held up our glasses in a toast. “I think at the end of discussing things together for a few days, we will have complete confidence in one another and we will have no reservations about speaking of everything in its entirety,” I said. In other words: once Mora proved himself and opened up, we’d do business.
In Spanish, Mora responded to Emir, “Tell him that I congratulate him on the way he handles things and I assure him that my country’s financial potential is going to give us lots of profits.” He was ravenous for a partnership, and the blindness of that hunger was going to undo him.
While Mora was in Tampa, he stayed in a condo on Clearwater Beach that he thought I owned. Emir brought him to a pier where we had lunch and then boarded what he thought was my fifty-two-foot Hatteras. Mora glanced at the boat, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “This reminds me of Miami Vice.”
Little did he know.
Undercover Customs boat handlers, acting as members of my group, piloted the boat on unfortunately choppy seas. After an hour on the water, Mora staggered into the cabin and vomited everywhere. The handlers fumed: the Hatteras was their baby, and they knew that cleaning up the mess would fall to them.
When we returned to the dock, Emir took Mora back to the condo to freshen up. That night, the three of us painted the town. We wined and dined and then hit the infamous strip clubs of Tampa. As the night wore on, Mora relaxed and enjoyed himself with a few of the girls in one of the clubs. He came back to the table with a broad smile and, his bloodshot eyes gone glassy, slurred something in Spanish to Emir and looked over his shoulder. A stunningly beautiful woman stood waiting as Emir explained to me that Mora had paid her to go into a back room and do whatever made me happy.
Panic raced through me. What would a mob man do? Many would no doubt go to the back room and enjoy the moment, but that wouldn’t play well either in a courtroom or at home. We all had to remember that, despite the importance of adhering to our roles, that need could never overshadow our true identities as federal agents, answerable to a jury for all of our actions.
At the last second, an alibi flashed into my head. I looked Mora in the eye and, translating through Emir, told him that his kind gesture was an honor, but I wanted to share with him that I was madly in love with a woman I intended to marry and that he must have recalled those feelings when he first met his wife. I explained that it was my intention to get married in the next couple of years and that I hoped he would honor me with his presence at the ceremony. It was a fateful lie for all of us.
“Entiendo, Roberto, entiendo,” he said with a smile. For all his faults, Mora really was a gentleman. He didn’t push the issue, and we enjoyed the rest of the evening joking together and stuffing bills in G-strings.
The next day, Emir and the informant brought Mora to another of my undercover offices — this one near the St. Petersburg–Clearwater Airport. There, thanks to Dominic, I held the title of director of international finance at Sunbird Airlines, an air-charter service that handled reservations for a forty-four-seat commuter jet ferrying passengers and cargo to the Bahamas. Mora also thought I used this charter service to transport money out of the country and into offshore accounts.
While he was there, I arranged for an undercover agent to stage a delivery of $200,000 in cash. We stuffed the money into my briefcase, and Emir, Mora, the informant, and I went to a local bank. They stayed in the car while I went inside and passed the cash to a bank employee. The ease with which I unloaded the cash impressed Mora. I told him that, as part of our cover, we managed high-volume, cash-generating businesses — like the jewelry-store chain I operated with Eric Wellman.
What Mora didn’t know was that the bank officer who accepted the cash was Rita Rozanski, whom I’d met five years earlier when I and other members of the Greenback task force were working another laundering case. With the permission of the CEO of the bank, Rita helped me establish accounts, loans, and credit cards in undercover names, including those for Robert Musella.
The next morning, Emir, Mora, and I flew on a commercial airline to New York City. We checked into the Vista Hotel in the World Trade Center and visited the headquarters of Merrill Lynch to see one of my best friends from college, Craig Jantz, an institutional bond trader. He had agreed to provide some window dressing by allowing me to engage him in what appeared to be a serious business discussion while Mora watched. Emir and Mora stood at the edge of the trading floor as I went over to Craig, embraced him, and spoke privately for a few minutes. Mora didn’t know that this sideshow was going to lead to a much bigger performance when we made our next visit to the Financial District.
Emir, Mora, and I then walked to Bruno Securities, Frankie’s brokerage firm near Broadway and Wall Street. The office treated me like royalty. One by one, about a dozen of the forty employees came up to me and either hugged me or shook my hand while they said, “Hey, Bobby, it’s so great you’re back from Florida. We really need you here.” They did everything but kiss my ring.
Frankie took us to the office of his uncle Carmine, the president of the firm. As discussed before the visit, Carmine, Frankie, and I talked about a few new companies they were taking public and how they wanted me to help. I introduced Gonzalo — first name only — and explained that I expected that he and some of his clients from Colombia would soon be doing business with us. Frankie emphasized to Mora that no one other than me could handle our family’s financial affairs with him. When Frankie walked us over to the floor of the NYSE, Mora’s eyes went wide as pumpkins. He never imagined that he would be among mafia gangsters so powerful that they had a seat on the Stock Exchange. Through Emir, Frankie explained how the exchange operated, and Mora hung on every word.
At a nearby restaurant, the three of us had drinks. I explained that I had to return to the Stock Exchange to attend an investment seminar about the promotion of a public start-up involved in the exploration of gold and silver mines and the buying and selling of precious metals. Mora needed to know that he wasn’t the only act in town and that our venture wasn’t going to overshadow my other duties for the mythical crime family. Playing hard to get enticed Mora to open up in order to win me over. It also indicated that I had higher priorities than just keeping him happy.
I told Mora, “You have to understand that I have responsibilities to the organization, and my family’s firm has an obligation to put our resources together in a way that preserves the safety of the organization’s capital. This gold-and-silver venture is being put together by my family’s firm, and I have an obligation to see that everything runs safely. I’ve been given permission to work with you, but that’s just a side venture. My primary job is to clean the cash from our own operations here in the States.”
Mora jumped at the chance to attend the seminar with me. We went back to the Stock Exchange dinner club and sat through a truly boring presentation that reinforced for Mora that my family and I were the real deal. Frankie himself spoke at the gathering, which added solid credibility to my cover story. During the post-seminar meet-and-greet, the champagne and caviar were flowing, and Mora worked the crowd like a foreign dignitary, asking questions while swallowing appetizers — and our bait.
The next morning, while Emir and I met with Mora in my room, the tape player was rolling, and Mora couldn’t stop talking. Visions of grandeur were dancing in his head, and he threw out any detail that might tantalize me into doing business with him. As we say in the law-enforcement community, he dropped his pants. He didn’t have many secrets by the time we left New York: he admitted that 80 percent of the money he could bring to the table came from drug traffickers, and he gave us details about most of his contacts.
After he spilled his guts, I leaned back and acted as though I wasn’t sure. After a long, dramatic pause, I told Mora, “I’m willing to do business with you, provided you meet certain terms.” I’d continue to work with him for forty-five days, but unless the volume of business dramatically increased by the end of those forty-five days, our marriage was over. I told him that his offer of a fifty-fifty split was unacceptable and that I would do it only for 60 percent. He would have limited time to educate his clients about the importance of getting them to empower me to invest some of their money because simply laundering was far too risky. I needed to hide behind the appearance of being an investment adviser for South American clients, I explained, or the feds would easily figure out what I was doing.
That afternoon, Mora, Emir, and I had lunch at Jeremy’s Ale House near the Brooklyn Bridge. When I left the table, on cue, Emir leaned toward Mora and told him that I had my doubts that his contacts in the drug and money world were worth the risks. It was up to Mora to win me over, so he shouldn’t hold back. As Emir put it, “If you convince the boss that you’re for real, it’s going to help you get a bigger piece of the pie.” Emir played him like a Stradivarius.
When I returned, Mora couldn’t wait to impress me with more details about whom he knew and worked with in the drug world. He spewed more information about the role his brothers and sisters played in the distribution of cocaine in L.A. and Miami. He gave us the names of their bosses and details about the loads of dope that the feds had seized from them. He even gave us details about cops in Miami whom his sister had greased for protection.
That night, in Little Italy, we three had dinner at Casa Bella on Mulberry Street and then cappuccinos and cannolis a few blocks away at Ferrara’s. As we strolled the streets, we passed Umberto’s Clam Bar, where Crazy Joe Gallo had been whacked in 1972.
I told Mora the story in a somber tone: Gallo had tried to wrest control of the Profaci-Colombo crime family — one of the Five Families, who have controlled organized crime in New York City since the 1930s — from patriarch Joseph Colombo. Gallo had been celebrating his forty-third birthday when two gunmen rushed in and opened fire. Gallo sustained five bullet wounds as he tried to escape, then collapsed in the street. At his funeral, Gallo’s sister famously cried over his coffin, “The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!”
“Is there really a mafia in the U.S.?” Mora asked through Emir.
“The mafia is only for television,” I replied with a half smile. “We don’t want publicity — only power.”
Emir translated for Mora, who looked at a loss for what to say or do. My laughter triggered his, and his eyes indicated that our arrangement satisfied him.
Emir and I dropped Mora back off at the Vista and hit a local watering hole. Over a few beers, we speculated about where the operation might take us. Mora was about to give us access to the big boys in Colombia, and there was no telling how far we could take it after they accepted us.
Emir and I wandered back to my room and ordered two huge burgers from room service, hardly paying attention to the bellman as he delivered our late-night munchies. We devoured the burgers and then, sated, tried to roll the room-service cart through the hotel-room door. But somehow it was too wide. Our beer goggles firmly in place, we angled the table in every direction, laughing about what a magician the bellman had been to get the table in the room. Totally frustrated, we cleared the cart of everything but the tablecloth, turned it sideways, and angled it into the hall. As we set it down, the tablecloth slid off, and we realized that the table had wings that, with the push of a bolt, dropped the extension leaf. In our beer-soaked haze, we couldn’t stop laughing that, although we could engineer secret recording equipment and drug money–laundering stings, we couldn’t operate a simple delivery cart!
The next morning we all returned to Tampa and had one last planning meeting before Mora returned to Medellín.
First we established codes to use on the phone for arranging pickups of cash in the U.S. Each city had its own code name. La Playa (“the beach”) meant Miami; Los Torres (“the towers”) indicated New York City; and La Tia (“the aunt”) meant L.A. — the standard industry codes in the BMPE. We confirmed similar codes for Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Philadelphia.
Mora told us that he would never explain over the phone that he needed a pickup of cash in a particular amount. Instead, he would explain that an invoice — the cash — would be delivered for liquidation in a given location. The invoice number itself would indicate the amount, less the last three digits, which were, of course, always zeros.
Mora explained that he would try to provide Emir with the beeper or cell phone number of the person in the U.S. who had the money that needed laundering — “try” because sometimes Mora’s clients in Colombia refused to disclose that information. In addition, he would provide Emir’s beeper number to his client — that is, the doper — in Colombia, who owned the money being held for him in the States. That doper would then pass Emir’s number to the representative in America who was holding the money, with the strict instruction that the representative put the code “55” after his own number when paging Emir. That code would alert Emir that Mora represented the caller who was reaching out to coordinate a drop-off.
Mora gave his own code name as Bruno and asked me to pick one. I chose Maximo. Therefore, Mora explained, if he wanted to let us know that a $500,000 pickup was ready in Miami, he would call Emir and say, “Invoice 500 in La Playa needs liquidation on behalf of Bruno to Maximo.” Not long after, Emir would receive a page followed by the code 55. When he returned the call, the person who had paged him would verify the city, amount of money, and the code — “the delivery was for Maximo and on behalf of Bruno.” Emir would then determine the time and place where he or another undercover agent would meet the caller to receive the cash.
