by Pat Muir
Steve and I went back to the DEA office to discuss our findings and our reasoning. Drew Ryan concurred. “If you want to run a criminal enterprise surrounded by law-abiding employees, then you need to restrict its knowledge to as few people as possible. From what you say, I suspect only Swift and Arzeta know the details of the money laundering.”
“What about Bert Swanson, the Palomar South mobile home park manager? I asked.”
“He was convicted of fraud thirty years ago,” replied Ryan. “You know he’s Swift’s uncle, so his involvement is likely an aberration. He owes too much to Swift to give evidence against him. Anyway, you guys have already monitored that park and found that his home and the park office are not the drop for drug money.”
“Is it worth bringing him in for questioning?” I asked
“No,” replied Ryan. “Our questioning him would cause a cessation of the money laundering operation. Then it would start again after the hullabaloo was over. We need to show money being delivered to Swift or his employees or get some other excuse to raid his office and examine his books and his bank records. How’s your murder investigation going? Evidence of a conspiracy would help there.”
I had to report no progress there. I asked Drew if he had gotten anything on Arzeta. “Yes. We followed him to his home, an apartment in Escondido. The phone company pinged his phone, and we have since been monitoring his calls. He doesn’t use that phone much. He probably has a throwaway phone as well that he uses when he’s not at his apartment.”
“Let me have that number, please. I take it he hasn’t said anything incriminating?”
“That’s correct. He does not discuss business on the phone. He uses it mostly to order pizza. Past records show very few phone calls to Swift and none since we have been monitoring it.”
“Any phone calls to Bailey?”
“None that we know of. If he contacted Bailey, it was likely away from the office and using his throwaway phone, whose number we don’t have.”
That concluded our meeting. I phoned Angie Haigh to tell her about our progress, or lack thereof, on the investigation of Flynn’s murder. I told her we thought Bill Dollar and Alisha were not likely involved in Flynn’s murder. Instead, we were working on two additional suspects and had gotten an arrest warrant for one of them. However, we had not been able to locate him. I said nothing, of course, about the connection to money laundering. No point in another agency claiming a stake in any seized assets. Angie thanked me for keeping her abreast on the matter.
I had a uniformed deputy enter the Swift office to ask if anybody had seen the person leaving a stolen car in the parking lot. An unmarked car had been parked there two days earlier to set up the pretense.
“I was very well treated,” said the deputy. “They all acted like honest citizens, concerned that there had been a car thief nearby.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“I didn’t see the Latino man,” replied the deputy. “Swift came out from the secured portion of the office to greet me and expressed appropriate concern. The rest of the office workers were clearly acting as business or property managers. They were counting cash from their metal boxes. They were tabulating charge card receipts. They were paying invoices and handling phone calls from the business operators, suppliers, and even aggrieved customers. It was a very professional operation, with no concern that a law enforcement official was in their office. The atmosphere had no hint of evasion or criminality. I think that after the pertinent manager counted the cash funds and entered the data into his or her computer, the cash was put back into the metal container and passed through a sliding drawer…like they have at banks…between the two rooms. I didn’t actually see them do that, but I did see the sliding drawer.”
So, you’re saying that if there is any money laundering, it all takes place in the inner secure room?”
“That’s right,” replied the deputy.
CHAPTER 17
Eight weeks had passed since I had installed the surveillance camera to watch Swift’s office. The office worked a regular business week—Monday through Friday. Only occasionally did I see Swift or Arzeta come to the office during the weekend. I could never see anything that spoke of regular or even irregular deliveries of cash to that office. Deliveries by mail, FedEx and United Parcel Service were minimal. The DEA had continued to report no clandestine deliveries to the armored cars. Steve had become frustrated that his monitoring of Swift’s businesses had also not found a drop location or an involved employee. He and I began to wonder if the shady investors in Swifts businesses were merely investors and not players.
I had been looking at Swift’s office entrance exclusively for this eight-week period. In reviewing the video, I looked more closely at the peripheral view of the wide-angle lens of the monitoring camera. Previously, I had merely been impressed by the athletic ability of the man who bounded up the stairs at the end of Swift’s building, two steps at a time. The man, the operator of the photography studio on the upper floor, arrived nearly every morning carrying a large bag of photographic equipment. I didn’t initially grasp the significance of that since he went only to his studio. Only in my review did I notice that this man roughly matched the description of Mason. He had sandy-colored hair and the build and height described by Terry and others, and he had a small mustache. His studio lay directly above the secure portion of Swift’s office. I wondered if there was an internal connection between the two.
I took a still picture of the photographer from the monitoring video and incorporated it into a mug shot array. I e-mailed it to Angie Haigh in Sonoma County and asked her to get a detective to show it to John and Celeste Wellhouse in San Francisco. I had Steve drive to Riverside to show the array to Mr. and Mrs. Brown. I drove down to Chula Vista and showed the array to William Watson. He apologized that he could not help identify the photographer as Mason. Steve, on the other hand, returned with great news. Mrs. Brown was certain Mason was the man in the mug shot.
I had an undercover deputy visit the studio to ask its owner what services he offered. The owner, name of Andy Collins, primarily took photographs of real estate, indoors and outdoors, but he also took photographs of weddings, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs. Andy gave the deputy a pricing schedule for his services. The deputy reported the front of the studio was set up for photographing commercial products. Easy chairs and a sofa sat nearby. He saw a changing room and a toilet at the rear, plus an office room whose door was closed. He saw it had a keyed entryway. He picked up Collins’s business card and said he would check back when he knew the exact date of his celebration event. Collins told the deputy to use his cell phone number…on the business card…since he was out in the field so much.
I wondered if Andy Collins, the owner of the photo studio, was related to the Collins Real Estate Brokers at the end of the upper floor of the Swift office building. I went to the Department of Real Estate’s website and located the pertinent realty. It listed Wayne John Collins as the broker of record and four other sales agents, one of whom was Andrew Mason Collins. My heart thumped. We had made the connection with certainty. Collins was Mason, the partner of the murderous Bailey.
I did a background check on Andy Collins. Thirty-two years old, unmarried, he lived in an apartment in Oceanside ten miles to the west of San Marcos. He had been sent to juvenile hall when he was sixteen for a vicious assault at school. Since then, he had been a model citizen except for five traffic citations in the fourteen years since getting his driving license. I wondered how he had been recruited into the money laundering business.
I made an official request for Andy Collins’s phone records for the past six months, and I prepared an affidavit to a warrant for a wiretap on his phone and also to cover a transponder on his car, a blue Honda Civic. After Robert Neill’s approval, I went to the courthouse to get a signature where the judge asked me about my probable cause. “So, you suspect Mr. Collins in the murder of the missing Mr. Flynn. Why are you asking for approval to follow and liste
n to him instead of asking for an arrest warrant?”
I had deliberately not mentioned the money laundering aspect in my affidavit since I felt it important to keep that secret, so I responded carefully. “We don’t fully understand the motivation for the murder of Mr. Flynn and need to determine which associates of Collins are involved. We are especially hoping he will lead us to Joseph Bailey, for whom there is an outstanding arrest warrant.”
The judge harrumphed, but he issued the warrant. I understood. He had once issued an arrest warrant based on slight evidence for which he had been rebuked by the defendant’s attorney and the press. He did not want to repeat the experience.
I had a specialist follow up on the wiretap while I acquired a transponder. I then drove to Oceanside in the late afternoon, to Collins’s apartment, a modern complex that lay in the eastern part of this California beach town. The heavy traffic going north on Highway Five had made my drive longer and my patience thinner; this was amplified by not seeing my suspect’s blue Honda in the parking lot.
I parked at an inconspicuous spot and waited for Collins to come home. I was doing this task myself rather than using a specialist to conform with Thompson’s request for expenditure restraint. Waiting for a suspect to show is a boring part of a detective’s life, and this wait seemed especially boring. Around eight o’clock, I left to get food and relieve myself. I returned an hour later to find the Honda in the parking lot at an assigned space. With nobody in the darkened lot, I sneaked in and attached the transponder under the right rear wheel well of Collins’s car. I felt very pleased that my patience had been rewarded. I went home singing along with a tune on the radio and looking forward to a Saturday night out with friends.
I arranged for a surveillance team on the following Monday to watch Andy Collins leave his apartment at 7:05 a.m. carrying his photographic bag. The transponder signal guided the team as it tailed well behind his blue car. Collins’s car stopped for five minutes and was observed in the drive-through lane of a McDonalds.
“Not very convenient for picking up the laundry,” remarked Steve to me at the communications center. “It would have been easier if he went inside.”
From there, the team tailed Collins’s car until it stopped on a residential street in Carmel Valley, a community north of San Diego, where I also live. The surveillance team drove by the Honda, parked in front of a house listed for sale, and noted the absence of its driver. “He must have gone in the house,” they said. In less than five minutes, they notified us at the communications center that the Honda was moving again.
Steve immediately remarked: “That guy didn’t have time enough to photograph the interior or exterior of the house. That’s probably where he picks up the money if our suspicions are correct.”
I agreed. “There’s no point in arresting him at this point, or even if he makes the delivery, as we suspect. Drew Ryan will want us to arrest the person who dropped the money as well as those who process it at Swift’s office.”
The transponder signal indicated Collins was driving directly back to the office complex. Once there, the surveillance team, from afar, watched him leave his car and climb the stairs to his studio.
“I’m ready to believe he’s carrying drug money in that bag of his,” said Steve. He and I then drove to the Carmel Valley house and looked through a front window to see the complete absence of furniture. We made a note of the address of the house and its listing agent before we returned to the office.
“Since we know Flynn discovered money being picked up at a vacant mobile home, it suggests a pattern of using a vacant house as the drop location,” I said. “They have an early morning drop-off and pickup so there is no interference from other real estate agents.”
“Since it would look odd for a photographer to come back to the same house daily, they probably use a different vacant house each time. Clever of them to use a drop location that always changes from one time to another and so can’t be monitored,” remarked Steve. “By going early in the morning as a house photographer, Collins has a perfect cover.”
I called Drew Ryan at the DEA to say we had a good lead on how the money was delivered for laundering. I gave him a quick summary of the details. Delighted, he said he would talk to his boss.
I now felt certain Collins and Bailey had been sent to the Russian River camp to kill Flynn. I indulged in speculation. They’d probably planned to overpower him and drown him in the river, and then throw his fishing rods in after him so it might look like an accidental death. I reckoned he’d fought them outside his tent…that was why there had been no blood in the tent or on his belongings…and they’d finished him off and put him inside the trunk of his car. But that didn’t make sense. The noise of the attempt on Flynn’s life would have woken other campers. They more likely had held him down and chloroformed him. If they’d done that and then drowned him, the chloroform would be discovered in an autopsy. Perhaps he had recovered when they’d opened the trunk of the car and had been killed at that point. We needed to have his body to find out how it had been done.
Jackson called me half an hour later and asked to be briefed. I put him, Drew Ryan, Thompson, and Steve on a conference call. “We think a vacant listed house is used as a drop,” I told them. We suspect more than one house is used. We need to find out when the money is dropped at the vacant house. We need to find out how Collins knows which house the money is dropped at, where inside it is hidden, and when he is to pick it up. It is obvious that the time between drop and pickup has to be short in case somebody else comes by. The advantage of using a listed house is that only real estate agents and the owner have access to the house since it is lockbox controlled. Furthermore, real estate agents do not generally show houses for sale at eight in the morning, so the chances of a stranger or a law enforcement officer finding the money are remote.”
“I guess that Andy Collins got lockbox access from his brother, the realtor. Wayne Collins must surely be aware of the money laundering operation,” volunteered Steve.
“Possibly, but not relevant,” I said. “I don’t think Andy Collins is notified of the drop house by e-mail. I feel sure he’s notified by phone so there’s minimal record of detail. We’ll review his phone records, which we already have, to check that out.”
Thompson said, “You’ll need to tap his phones so you can determine the drop location in advance.”
“It’s being monitored as we speak,” Steve responded.
“It all makes sense,” said Ryan. “I’ll bet Collins had a problem with his car or a major traffic delay the one day when he had to go to Flynn’s listing in the Palomar South Park. The money had already been dropped, so they sent Bert Swanson to get it instead.” He congratulated me and Steve before continuing. “We want to root out the whole drug money laundering gang, the delivery man and his source, Collins, any associates he has, Swift, Arzeta, and any of their criminal partners. The key is Collins, and we need to do this without anybody in the group realizing we are on to them.”
Thompson remarked, “Do we want to catch the man delivering the cash to the drop house after he has just done so, or do we want to follow him to his source?”
Ryan responded, “If we catch him, we can interrogate him, and he might give up his source. On the other hand, he’s more likely not to respond, since he could be killed for snitching.”
“But there’s the possibility that he waits around the corner afterwards to see if the package of money is picked up safely and then calls his contact to let him know. That would make it difficult for us to arrest Collins as he emerges from the house with the money,” I pointed out.
“In the grand scheme of things, we need to disrupt the money laundering business. If we act precipitously on the guy delivering to the house, then somebody might notify Swift and Arzeta, and they can hide evidence and deny everything,” said Jackson.
“We could detain the delivery man inside the drop house as long as we know in advance where it is,” I said.
“Kn
owing the drop house in advance is the key before we do anything,” said Ryan. “Look over the telephone data, and then we can decide how to proceed.”
Jackson then congratulated all of us in moving the case along, doing so in a longwinded manner intended to make it clear he was in charge of the joint task force. I felt sorry for Drew Ryan and his task force officers, who were doing all the DEA legwork.
We broke up at that point, and I returned to my desk to find an e-mail had arrived with Collins’s phone records. Like many modern real estate agents, Collins had no house phone, only a cell phone. I wished the records had come in a simple digital format that I could turn over to one of the smart software guys in forensics for analysis. I labored over them by hand, a total of seventeen hundred records for the six-month period, to see if I could find repetitious calling or receiving. I had no success.
Angie Haigh called late in the day to say her unit detective had shown mug shots to John Wellhouse and his wife. Both were able to positively identify Collins as Bailey’s companion.
