Colombian Gold

JOHN SCACCIA, a New York City police detec­tive with a long pony­tail, five ear­rings, and a gold neck­lace, who goes by the nick­name Scazz, is a vet­er­an of the drug war. In Decem­ber, 1989, he and anoth­er under­cov­er cop met with two cocaine deal­ers on New Lots Avenue in East New York to make a pur­chase. Instead, two armed rob­bers work­ing in league with the coke deal­ers tried to kill Scazz and his part­ner and take their mon­ey. “Boom, boom, boom! It was like fire­works,” Scazz recalls. “When the smoke cleared, there were thir­ty-five rounds fired by all four of us—me and my part­ner and these two mutts.” The oth­er cop was hit in the leg and per­ma­nent­ly dis­abled, but Scazz escaped harm, and today he con­tin­ues to fight in the drug war, but on a dif­fer­ent front—one that is less dan­ger­ous and may be a good deal more effec­tive.
     On a recent Fri­day after­noon, Scazz, act­ing on a tip, drove his unmarked car around a peace­ful neigh­bor­hood in Queens, tail­ing a hus­band and wife in an old Toy­ota. As the cou­ple, who were both in their fifties, pulled up to their apart­ment house, Scazz jumped out of his car, approached them, and asked for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, on the pre­text that the Toy­ota had a bro­ken tail-light and a cracked mir­ror. The woman, vis­i­bly ner­vous, opened a leather satchel to fish for her purse. Inside the satchel, in neat stacks of twen­ties, fifties, and hun­dreds bound with rub­ber bands, was close to a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars.
     “Oh, now we got a prob­lem,” Scazz said.
     The cash belonged to drug traf­fick­ers in the city of Cali, Colom­bia, and the hus­band and wife were “smurfs,” a type of drug-mon­ey laun­der­er in pro­lif­ic use by the Cali car­tel. The sus­pects fit­ted the clas­sic profile—a mar­ried Colom­bian cou­ple, nice­ly dressed, incon­spic­u­ous. A hus­band-and-wife smurf­ing team will trav­el from bank to bank, pos­ing as strangers, each deposit­ing some of the cartel’s mon­ey under a false name, or con­vert­ing it into cashier’s checks, always in sums under ten thou­sand dol­lars. By fed­er­al law, any cash trans­ac­tion of more than ten thou­sand dol­lars must be report­ed to the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice on a form called a cur­ren­cy-trans­ac­tion report, or C.T.R., which con­tains per­son­al infor­ma­tion about the cus­tomer. The hus­band and wife Scazz was now con­fronting were old­er than most of the smurfs he had encoun­tered. The hus­band explained that the mon­ey was his life sav­ings, and that he kept it at the office dur­ing the week and took it home on week­ends. Scazz had to smile—that was orig­i­nal. Soon, sev­er­al oth­er unmarked cars pulled up, and the cou­ple were qui­et­ly sur­round­ed by police offi­cers and agents of the Unit­ed States Cus­toms Ser­vice. The cash was con­fis­cat­ed, and Scazz wrote the cou­ple a receipt. If they could prove that the mon­ey was legit­i­mate­ly theirs, they could have it back. They were nev­er heard from again; the mon­ey went into the Unit­ed States Treasury’s for­fei­ture fund.
     Detec­tive Scac­cia is assigned to a Trea­sury Depart­ment task force called El Dora­do, which was estab­lished in June, 1992, and named after the leg­endary South Amer­i­can city of gold. El Dora­do tar­gets mon­ey only—an approach to com­bat­ting the drug prob­lem that has received very lit­tle atten­tion. The pub­lic tends to see the goal of the drug war as pre­vent­ing traf­fick­ers from cross­ing our bor­ders with their nar­cotics, but in fact that is only half the sto­ry. The drug car­tels have an unusu­al problem—they sim­ply make too much money—and it takes as much inge­nu­ity to get their extra­or­di­nary cash prof­its out of the Unit­ed States as it does to get their con­tra­band in. No enter­prise under­stands this prob­lem more pro­found­ly, or ris­es to the chal­lenge more expert­ly, than the Cali car­tel, which, accord­ing to Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion esti­mates, gross­es twen­ty-five bil­lion dol­lars a year, and so qual­i­fies as the rich­est crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy in the world. The Cali has late­ly over­tak­en its prin­ci­pal Colom­bian rival, the Medel­lín car­tel; it was helped when the Medel­lín boss Pablo Esco­bar was shot and killed by the Colom­bian author­i­ties, in Decem­ber, 1993. The Caleños pro­duce per­haps eighty per cent of the world’s cocaine, and are now said to be the No. 3 sup­pli­er of hero­in, lag­ging behind only the South­east Asian traf­fick­ers. The Unit­ed States is by far the Cali’s largest export mar­ket.
     Though the Cali car­tel has a rep­u­ta­tion for being less vio­lent than the Medel­lín, it is alleged that José San­tacruz Lon­doño, who is reput­ed­ly one of its lead­ers, ordered the mur­der, in 1992, of Manuel de Dios Unanue, a for­mer edi­tor of El Diario, New York’s largest Span­ish-lan­guage news­pa­per, after de Dios made it known that he was about to pub­lish a book expos­ing top mem­bers of the car­tel. And there is not much doubt that Cali oper­a­tives in the Unit­ed States, who num­ber in the hun­dreds, fear the boss­es in Colom­bia. When such oper­a­tives are arrest­ed and offered a chance to coop­er­ate with the gov­ern­ment, many refuse, because, they say, their fam­i­ly mem­bers in Colom­bia will be killed.
     The Cali is run in some respects like a multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion and in oth­er respects like an espi­onage ring. Its Unit­ed States oper­a­tives work in small, self-con­tained enter­pris­es that are called cells. The drug cells han­dle the drugs, the mon­ey cells han­dle the mon­ey, and the two enter­pris­es are kept entire­ly sep­a­rate. Even with­in a cell, oper­a­tives may know one anoth­er only by their beep­er num­bers. (Trans­fers of cash from a drug cell to a mon­ey cell are han­dled only by the cell lead­ers.) New York has by far the heav­i­est con­cen­tra­tion of mon­ey cells in the Unit­ed States, and they tend to have their head­quar­ters in the sec­tions of Queens near Shea Sta­di­um that have large Colom­bian pop­u­la­tions, notably Jack­son Heights and Coro­na (which are called Lit­tle Colom­bia), and also Rego Park, Wood­side, Elmhurst, and Flush­ing. A bee­hive of activ­i­ty in any mon­ey cell is the “stash house,” a house or an apart­ment in which cash is secret­ed, often in the mil­lions of dol­lars. A stash house may also be the repos­i­to­ry of the cell’s ledgers, which reflect the cor­po­rate aspect of the car­tel. Every dol­lar of rev­enue is account­ed for—one steals from the car­tel at con­sid­er­able risk—and so is every expen­di­ture, no mat­ter how picayune. One set of records seized by El Dora­do con­tained a ledger item that gave an indi­ca­tion of the enor­mous sums the cell had han­dled: two hun­dred dol­lars a week spent on rub­ber bands.
     The goal of the mon­ey cell is a sim­ple one: to get large amounts of cash into the bank­ing sys­tem. Smurf­ing the cash direct­ly into a Unit­ed States bank account is only one method, and is by no means the most effec­tive. Since the pas­sage, in 1992, of the Annun­zio-Wylie Act, which makes will­ful blind­ness on the part of a finan­cial insti­tu­tion a pun­ish­able offense, Unit­ed States banks have tend­ed to report more depos­i­tors who appear to be smurfs. (The banks’ coop­er­a­tion in detect­ing drug-mon­ey laun­der­ers is “excel­lent,” Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Lloyd Bentsen says.) Smurfs can also take cash to a mon­ey trans­mit­ter and wire the mon­ey out of the coun­try. When it comes to sheer vol­ume, how­ev­er, the most effi­cient means of get­ting cash into the bank­ing sys­tem is to smug­gle it to Colom­bia, or to some oth­er coun­try with less strin­gent bank­ing laws than ours, such as Pana­ma. Once the dol­lars are deposit­ed in a for­eign bank, some of them come back elec­tron­i­cal­ly to accounts in the Unit­ed States. Colom­bian drug deal­ers need to main­tain large bank bal­ances here to pro­vide work­ing cap­i­tal for their Unit­ed States operations—for salaries, rent­ed hous­es, cars, cel­lu­lar phones, mon­ey-count­ing machines, lawyers.
     Cur­ren­cy is smug­gled out just the way drugs are smug­gled in—in any con­veyance that might escape detec­tion. Lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of dol­lars have been stuffed into air com­pres­sors, fur­ni­ture, stereo speak­ers, Nin­ten­do tapes, truck trans­mis­sions, dolls, hol­lowed-out tele­vi­sions, con­tain­ers of dried peas. In 1990, almost four­teen mil­lion dol­lars in Cali drug mon­ey was found in a ware­house on Long Island, inside spools of wire cable to be shipped to Bogotá. (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the cell’s records showed that this was to have been the two-hun­dred-and-thir­ty-fourth ship­ment of cash-laden spools.) The same year, cus­toms agents search­ing the per­ish­ables ware­house at Kennedy Air­port found twen­ty-six cans that were sup­posed to con­tain frozen bull semen but instead held six and a half mil­lion dol­lars in cash. This past May, agents of El Dora­do raid­ed a house on Long Island and found a bowl­ing-ball-man­u­fac­tur­ing shop in the base­ment; they sawed one ball in half and found that it con­tained two hun­dred and ten thou­sand dol­lars in hun­dred-dol­lar bills.
     El Dora­do is not lim­it­ed to inves­ti­gat­ing Colombians—its oth­er tar­gets include Rus­sians and Chinese—but it is lim­it­ed to mon­ey cas­es. “I get upset when we raid a house and find dope instead of mon­ey,” says Michael P. Fahy, a spe­cial agent with Cus­toms, who is a co-direc­tor of the task force. El Dora­do, which has its head­quar­ters at 6 World Trade Cen­ter, is run joint­ly by two Trea­sury agen­cies, Cus­toms and the I.R.S., but is also staffed by peo­ple from six­teen addi­tion­al fed­er­al, state, and local agen­cies. It was born of an agree­ment between Robert Van Etten and Peter Far­rell, the New York enforce­ment heads of Cus­toms and the I.R.S., respec­tive­ly, after years of inter­a­gency squab­bling over who had juris­dic­tion in Colom­bian mon­ey-laun­der­ing cas­es. Far­rell says, “One day, Van Etten and I sat down and said, ‘Why argue? Let’s join our forces and for­get about who gets the stat’”—the sta­tis­ti­cal accom­plish­ments that agen­cies get cred­it for. “Once we did that, it worked. I’m trust­ful of Van Etten, and I think he is of me.” Notably absent from the ros­ter of about two hun­dred El Dora­do employ­ees, how­ev­er, are any agents of the F.B.I. or the D.E.A. “They were invit­ed to join,” Far­rell says. “They declined.”
     In its first two years, El Dora­do has seized over six­ty mil­lion dol­lars in cash and assets. It has also made about a hun­dred and twen­ty arrests; if that fig­ure sounds low, the expla­na­tion is that mon­ey cas­es are much hard­er to make than drug cas­es. There is no law that says you can­not have five mil­lion dol­lars in your house, or in the trunk of your car. If the gov­ern­ment has prob­a­ble cause to believe that the mon­ey is ill-got­ten, though, it can be con­fis­cat­ed until you prove that it is legit­i­mate. The decep­tion prac­ticed by smurfs—breaking down large sums into small pieces to avoid hav­ing to file a C.T.R.—is called struc­tur­ing, and is a fed­er­al crime, pun­ish­able by up to ten years in prison. If it can be proved that a mon­ey laun­der­er has knowl­edge that the source of the mon­ey is drugs, he can be con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to twen­ty years or more, depend­ing on the amount of mon­ey involved.
     It is impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy the impact that El Dora­do has had. While it obvi­ous­ly hurts the car­tels more to have the end prod­uct of their business—the money—taken away than to have their cocaine seized, the busi­ness remains immense­ly prof­itable. Trea­sury hopes that El Dora­do will inflict at least as much psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age as eco­nom­ic dam­age on the car­tel lead­ers. “When the peo­ple who han­dle your mon­ey start los­ing your mon­ey, that makes you very inse­cure,” Ronald K. Noble, the Treasury’s under-sec­re­tary for enforce­ment, says. “That’s what I want. I want them to be inse­cure, to be ner­vous, to be paranoid.”

ON A RECENT MORNING, one of El Dorado’s four inves­tiga­tive teams—one made up most­ly of police detec­tives and cus­toms agents, and head­ed by the N.Y.P.D.’s Lieu­tenant Ronald Rose—congregated in cars near a suspect’s apart­ment house in Queens. The sus­pect, a mid­dle-aged woman who lives with her hus­band and their Amer­i­can-born son, will be referred to here as Octavia. She and her hus­band are nat­u­ral­ized Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, and her hus­band appears to have a legit­i­mate job. Octavia’s apart­ment is a stash house. It is believed that she gets her orders direct­ly from Cali, and there­fore must be a high-rank­ing cell mem­ber. From strate­gi­cal­ly parked cars, the sur­veil­lance team has seen peo­ple pull into Octavia’s dri­ve­way both to deliv­er and to pick up suit­cas­es and box­es and duf­fel­bags. El Dora­do has more than enough prob­a­ble cause for a war­rant to search Octavia’s apart­ment, but it is too soon; by fol­low­ing the peo­ple who vis­it her, the task force can gath­er intel­li­gence about the entire cell. The team sus­pects that Octavia’s oper­a­tion involves smug­gling: some of her work­er bees have gone to post offices and exchanged cash for sev­en-hun­dred-dol­lar mon­ey orders (the max­i­mum denom­i­na­tion), which are eas­i­er to con­ceal. When oth­er cell mem­bers picked up a pack­age from Octavia and hand­ed it off to a third par­ty, the sur­veil­lance team fol­lowed the third par­ty for a while, then stopped his car and seized the mon­ey. That way, Octavia did not know that she was being watched, and the inves­ti­ga­tion was not com­pro­mised.
     Though Octavia is con­stant­ly busy at her trade, she does find time to make fre­quent vis­its to church. “She’s a very reli­gious woman, but she’s mov­ing drug mon­ey,” Sergeant Nel­son Cortés, of the N.Y.P.D., says, shak­ing his head in dis­gust. A lot of mon­ey-cell oper­a­tives do not seem to grasp the fact that they are crim­i­nals, because they don’t han­dle the pow­der. They are rarely armed, they almost nev­er resist arrest, and they are invari­ably casu­al about sur­ren­der­ing their cash to the authorities—the usu­al refrain is some form of “It’s not my mon­ey, Officer”—though the cash may be in the hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars. In most cas­es, they will allow El Dora­do task-force mem­bers to search their homes with­out a war­rant, even when the res­i­dence is teem­ing with eas­i­ly dis­cov­ered cash. All they ask for is proof that the mon­ey was con­fis­cat­ed. “The guy says, ‘It’s not my mon­ey, but will you please give me a receipt say­ing that you took it?’” Fahy says. “Because he has that piece of paper, he won’t lose his life.”
     The mon­ey laun­der­ers are so com­pla­cent about search­es and seizures that El Dora­do agents assume that han­dling such sit­u­a­tions must be part of their train­ing. They are not near­ly so coop­er­a­tive, how­ev­er, when it comes to get­ting caught in the first place. “They are the hard­est peo­ple to tail,” Detec­tive Frank Di Gre­go­rio says. The Colom­bian couri­ers keep their eyes glued to their rearview mir­rors, make unex­pect­ed stops in the mid­dle of streets, sud­den­ly accel­er­ate to dan­ger­ous speeds, jump sev­er­al lanes of traf­fic, and prac­tice a tech­nique known as “washing”—taking an absurd­ly indi­rect route from A to B. Sergeant Cortés remem­bers one pur­suit that took him and a sur­veil­lance team to Queens, Man­hat­tan, Long Island, and New Jer­sey, only to end a few blocks from where it had begun. “If they see they’re being fol­lowed, they’ll pull over on the Long Island Express­way and leave the car—just leave it and walk away,” Di Gre­go­rio says. A sur­veil­lance team tries to counter this eva­sive­ness by using a lot of cars—sometimes as many as twelve, all fol­low­ing the same sus­pect, and most of them stay­ing far back or trav­el­ling on par­al­lel roads. If the car des­ig­nat­ed as the “eye” gets spot­ted, it falls back and anoth­er takes its place. Some­times even a fleet of cars is not enough, and the team calls for a heli­copter.
     Dur­ing a pur­suit, task-force mem­bers swap infor­ma­tion by radio, speak­ing in insid­ers’ short­hand. Short­ly after El Dora­do was found­ed, a His­pan­ic mem­ber of the task force began refer­ring to the Colom­bians as “huckaleros,” a term used for Mex­i­cans in a John Wayne movie, and it stuck. To mem­bers of the task force, Colom­bians are “hucks.” “Huck is red­balled at Eight Three and Rosey” trans­lates as “The Colom­bian sus­pect is stopped at a red light on the cor­ner of Eighty-third Street and Roo­sevelt Avenue.”
     Though every­one is dis­cour­aged from keep­ing score, there is a friend­ly rival­ry among the teams to see who can seize the most mon­ey. Lieu­tenant Rose’s team set its one-day record on Sep­tem­ber 23, 1992, when it fol­lowed a sus­pect to his house in Island Park, Long Island, after watch­ing him drop off a box in Queens that con­tained a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars. Rose recalls, “We approach the house, and the guy agrees to let us inside. He tells us there’s mon­ey in the house, and says it’s about two mil­lion. There’s mon­ey everywhere—in suit­cas­es in the liv­ing room, in clos­ets, in the boil­er room. By the time we’re done count­ing it, it’s three mil­lion two hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars. He was off by over a million.”

OF THE MONEY that is seized by El Dora­do, some goes direct­ly into the fed­er­al government’s cof­fers and helps reduce the deficit, but a cer­tain per­cent­age is allo­cat­ed to the law-enforce­ment agen­cies that par­tic­i­pate in El Dora­do (and is per­haps one rea­son there are so many par­tic­i­pants). A ques­tion that can­not be avoid­ed is whether any mon­ey ends up in the pock­ets of any of the task-force mem­bers. Law offi­cers faced with far less temp­ta­tion have gone bad; for an exam­ple, one need look no far­ther than the Thir­ti­eth Precinct, in Harlem, where this spring a dozen cops were accused of shak­ing down drug deal­ers for pro­tec­tion mon­ey, steal­ing mon­ey and drugs from deal­ers, and sell­ing drugs them­selves.
     El Dora­do has a blem­ish-free record—at least, so far there have been no alle­ga­tions of impropriety—but there is a strict rule that no one is ever to be left alone with mon­ey. In Rose’s group, either he or Sergeant Cortés must be on hand for every car stop or home entry. What can­not be known for sure is whether any­one from the group ever makes an unre­port­ed seizure on his own time, but Rose says he doubts it. “No ques­tion, it’s an unbe­liev­able amount of mon­ey, and at first you’re stag­gered by it,” he says. “You see some­one with three hun­dred thou­sand in a brief­case just walk­ing down the street, and if he feels heat he’ll aban­don it. But one thing you learn is that you nev­er know who’s watch­ing whom. We run across oth­er agen­cies all the time. The guy you stop could be an under­cov­er play­ing a role or somebody’s infor­mant. Plus, you would run into the same prob­lems they run into. What do you do with so much mon­ey? You can’t run out and spend it. Where do you put it?”
     Cortés says, “You know what hap­pens? When I first got here, I thought a mil­lion dol­lars was a lot of mon­ey, but after a while you don’t look at it that way. Let’s face it. For me to go bad, it would have to be for over ten bil­lion dol­lars, because there’s so much out there. You look at these guys in the Three Oh”—the Thir­ti­eth Precinct—“and you have to laugh. We deal with mil­lions, and we don’t touch a dime of it, and they sell them­selves for eight hun­dred dol­lars. They’re nuts. They got fam­i­ly, they got kids—how can they do that? Now they’re going to jail, and I’m glad, because they make all of us look bad. You fol­low the straight and nar­row, you sleep at night. That’s the best way.”

NO PLACE is more famil­iar to the task force than Roo­sevelt Avenue, a busy sev­en-mile-long thor­ough­fare in Queens that cuts through Wood­side, Jack­son Heights, and Coro­na, and makes up in pros­per­i­ty what it lacks in sun­light. (It runs direct­ly under the El.) Roo­sevelt Avenue is the Wall Street of the drug trade, with lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of estab­lish­ments that con­sti­tute a finan­cial-ser­vice indus­try for the mon­ey laun­der­ers. The sheer num­ber of casas de cam­bio, mon­ey trans­mit­ters, and trav­el agencies—all of which are used to wire mon­ey to South America—borders on the ridicu­lous. There are enough to serve ten neigh­bor­hoods of equal size but with­out a drug econ­o­my. The pros­per­i­ty has trick­led down—“right down to the guy sell­ing ices on the cor­ner,” John Kane, a cus­toms agent with El Dora­do, says. “There’s no reces­sion on Roo­sevelt Avenue. Every­one is com­fort­able.”
     Mon­ey trans­mit­ters are required to hold licens­es from the state bank­ing author­i­ty, but there are said to be at least fifty in Jack­son Heights that are unli­censed. Trans­mit­ters make a hand­some liv­ing off the car­tels, charg­ing a com­mis­sion of between six and eight per cent to wire mon­ey to accounts in South Amer­i­ca. (Smurfs, by com­par­i­son, earn one or two per cent of the mon­ey they han­dle.) Like banks, mon­ey trans­mit­ters must file a C.T.R. for any trans­ac­tion greater than ten thou­sand dol­lars, and, also like banks, they are for­bid­den to turn a blind eye to mon­ey laun­der­ers, but most of them appear to be lax, and some are con­sid­er­ably worse than lax.
     One of the biggest licensed mon­ey trans­mit­ters in the Unit­ed States is the Vigo Remit­tance Cor­po­ra­tion, which has its head­quar­ters in mid­town Man­hat­tan and has about a hun­dred and twen­ty-five branch­es in the New York City area alone, many of them in Jack­son Heights and Coro­na. Vigo col­lects and trans­mits hun­dreds of mil­lions each year. El Dora­do has long sus­pect­ed Vigo of being among the dirt­i­est of the trans­mit­ters, and last year it mount­ed a sting oper­a­tion against the com­pa­ny, using three con­vict­ed drug traf­fick­ers as under­cov­er mon­ey laun­der­ers. Wear­ing con­cealed micro­phones, the three vis­it­ed Vigo man­agers at branch­es in Queens, the Bronx, and Westch­ester, and, accord­ing to crim­i­nal com­plaints, caught eight man­agers not only struc­tur­ing to avoid fil­ing a C.T.R. but know­ing­ly laun­der­ing drug mon­ey. At a Vigo branch in Yonkers, for exam­ple, one of the three gave the man­ag­er, José Car­los Dos San­tos, a total of sev­en­ty-five thou­sand dol­lars to trans­mit, telling him it was drug mon­ey. Dos San­tos is alleged to have bro­ken the mon­ey down into sev­er­al small trans­ac­tions, each bear­ing a fic­ti­tious sender’s name, after explain­ing to the under­cov­er oper­a­tive that “the gov­ern­ment will nev­er catch us…because this is called laun­der­ing,” and adding, “The Colom­bians send a lot of mon­ey with me, and they always have a good sys­tem for this.” On June 1st of this year, at three o’clock in the after­noon, mem­bers of El Dora­do arrest­ed Dos San­tos and sev­en oth­er Vigo man­agers and led them away in hand­cuffs. The next day, look­ing stunned, the man­agers were arraigned before a mag­is­trate in Brook­lyn fed­er­al court and were informed that they each could face up to twen­ty years. One of the defen­dants, Mer­cedes Car­pio, was sev­er­al months preg­nant. All have since plead­ed not guilty; the Vigo Remit­tance Cor­po­ra­tion is still under investigation.

ON THE MORNING of June 24, 1994—it’s already a hot day—John Kane and a fel­low cus­toms agent, Chris Ammi­rati, are sit­ting in a car with tint­ed win­dows parked across from a fast-food restau­rant in Flush­ing, Queens, wait­ing. Ammi­rati and Kane are run­ning an under­cov­er case for El Dora­do, and their under­cov­er agent, Tony, is sup­posed to pick up a vehi­cle con­tain­ing a suit­case full of cash this morn­ing from a “bad guy” (the term Ammi­rati prefers to “huck”). Dur­ing the past sev­er­al months, Tony has made a num­ber of pick­ups from couri­ers work­ing for a Cali cell, and the cell has not yet caught on, because the mon­ey has in fact reached its des­ti­na­tion in Colom­bia. The mon­ey has been wire-trans­ferred by none oth­er than the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment. El Dora­do is assist­ing in a nation­al sting oper­a­tion being run by Cus­toms, which has set up a bogus mon­ey trans­mit­ter in Atlanta called M&M Inter­na­tion­al World Wide, and M&M has attract­ed a group of six Colom­bian mon­ey bro­kers who are said to work direct­ly for two men iden­ti­fied as top peo­ple in the Cali cartel—Miguel Rodríguez Ore­juela and Ivan Urdi­nol a Gra­jales. Mon­ey bro­kers are a curi­ous vari­ety of prof­i­teer in the drug trade: for a fee, they assist the cells in mov­ing mon­ey and guar­an­tee its deliv­ery with their own cap­i­tal. The bro­kers may be in con­sid­er­able trou­ble if they can­not come up with six hun­dred grand, because that is how much Tony is sup­posed to pick up today, and this time Trea­sury will get to keep it. The sting oper­a­tion has come to an end.
     At pre­cise­ly eleven o’clock, in accor­dance with arrange­ments made by beep­er and tele­phone, the Colom­bian couri­er dri­ves up in a blue Nis­san. Tony is inside the restau­rant; he has been informed that the couri­er, whom he has nev­er met, will be wear­ing a white Guess T‑shirt. Kane and Ammi­rati noti­fy six oth­er mem­bers of the sur­veil­lance team in near­by cars that Bad Guy, which is now the suspect’s unof­fi­cial name, has arrived on time, and Kane notes the Nissan’s license num­ber through a pair of binoc­u­lars. Bad Guy gives Tony the keys to the Nis­san, and Tony dri­ves it a few blocks—to his car. He opens the trunk of the Nis­san, removes a suit­case, and locks it in his own trunk.
     Kane calls the under­cov­er on a mobile phone: “Tony, how’s it going? Did you search the car, Tony? Park­ing tick­ets? Any reg­is­tra­tion? Did you take a look at the bag? It’s very heavy? All right.” He hangs up.
     Tony returns in the Nis­san and re-enters the restau­rant. Moments lat­er, the sus­pect emerges alone. “All units, be advised, Bad Guy’s almost to his car,” Kane announces over the radio. “He’s back­ing out now. Looks like he’s gonna be com­ing out onto North­ern. Bruce, can you get him? He’s red­balled. Couldn’t you pick him up, Nick? Tom­my M., do you have him?”
     The sur­veil­lance team hopes that Bad Guy has anoth­er deliv­ery to make today. If so, he will first have to stop at a stash house to pick up more cash, since the Nis­san, accord­ing to Tony, is now emp­ty of pack­ages. As the Nis­san heads south toward Shea Sta­di­um, Ammi­rati and Kane are encour­aged: for once, the sub­ject of a pur­suit seems relaxed and not over­ly eva­sive. Soon, Bad Guy stops at a trav­el agency to make a phone call—probably to a boss in Colom­bia, to con­firm that a deliv­ery has been made. He stops again, at a bak­ery, and then pulls into the dri­ve­way of an apart­ment house in Jack­son Heights. It is now around one o’clock. The sur­veil­lance team looks for incon­spic­u­ous park­ing spaces, but no one is able to get close enough to the dri­ve­way to keep an eye on the Nis­san while it’s parked. The team set­tles in and pre­pares for the usu­al tedi­um of sur­veil­lance; it could be hours before the suspect’s car emerges from the dri­ve­way. For­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, the car pulls out after about nine­ty min­utes. No one on the team can say whether the Nis­san con­tains a new pack­age, but the sus­pect is now trav­el­ling with two chil­dren, and that’s an inaus­pi­cious sign. As the sus­pect dri­ves over the Queens­boro Bridge into Man­hat­tan, Ammi­rati groans; sur­veil­lance in Man­hat­tan is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult, because of the heavy traf­fic. The Nis­san heads up Third Avenue, and Kane won­ders aloud if Bad Guy is tak­ing his two kids to see “The Lion King.” But then, at the cor­ner of Six­ty-ninth and Third, the car comes to a stop.
     “He picked up some­body,” Kane says excit­ed­ly over his radio. “Male with a blue shirt and tan pants.” The sus­pects dri­ve a few blocks far­ther and stop again. “Come out, baby! Pull a bag out­ta the trunk. They pull a bag out, we’ll lock him to this fuck­ing guy’s bumper.”
     The man with the blue shirt steps out of the Nis­san and begins walk­ing up Third Avenue, car­ry­ing a box for a large elec­tric fan—a per­fect­ly nat­ur­al object for a man to be car­ry­ing on an eighty-degree day.
     “All right,” Kane says. “We’ll take him.”
     Kane and Ammi­rati jump out of their car at Sev­en­ty-fifth and Third and stop the new sus­pect in front of Rodi­er Paris, a cloth­ing bou­tique. He is a Colom­bian in his mid-thir­ties, of medi­um build, dressed like a prep­pie, and equipped with a cel­lu­lar phone, a black leather-bound book, and a beep­er. With­in sec­onds, four more task-force mem­bers arrive on the scene, and one of them, with the suspect’s per­mis­sion, opens the fan box. It is brim­ming with cash. Kane and Ammi­rati load the sus­pect into the back seat of their car and begin to ques­tion him while the oth­er task-force mem­bers check out his car, a Hon­da parked near­by; they dis­cov­er that it is reg­is­tered to a post-office box—a clas­sic mon­ey-cell ploy. The sus­pect, who gives his name as Gabriel, is extreme­ly calm. He says that he has no idea how much mon­ey is in the box, and that he has nev­er done this before.
     Ammi­rati rolls his eyes: Gabriel is obvi­ous­ly an expe­ri­enced smurf. “This can’t be your first time,” Ammi­rati tells him. “You got a mobile phone, a beep­er, and your car comes back to a post-office box. Come on—you’re a play­er.”
     “You wan­na come down­town and talk to us?” Kane says, putting a flash­ing light on the top of his car and turn­ing on a siren.
     In the mean­time, part of the sur­veil­lance team has con­tin­ued to fol­low Bad Guy, but his work is fin­ished for the day, and for the time being he is not arrest­ed. The six Colom­bian mon­ey bro­kers who are the prime tar­get of the M&M sting oper­a­tion are less for­tu­nate: with the oper­a­tion at an end, they will be prompt­ly indict­ed by the Atlanta Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office. (Three have been arrest­ed, and three remain fugi­tives.) M&M ulti­mate­ly laun­dered twelve mil­lion dol­lars for the Cali car­tel, which Atlanta fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor Wilmer Park­er says is regret­table but nec­es­sary; more­over, the oper­a­tion led to seizures of fif­teen mil­lion dol­lars.
     Includ­ed in that fig­ure are the two loads of cash seized today. In the base­ment of the Cus­toms Build­ing, at 6 World Trade Cen­ter, Gabriel’s mon­ey is count­ed; it comes to two hun­dred grand—ten thou­sand twen­ty-dol­lar bills. Bad Guy’s suit­case has long since arrived, weigh­ing in at eighty-eight pounds, and, as was expect­ed, it con­tains about six hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars. Tom Lore­to, a spe­cial agent of Cus­toms, who super­vis­es Kane and Ammi­rati, stands by, smil­ing broad­ly. “Great job,” he says. “Con­grat­u­la­tions.” ♦