by C. S. 96
I explained how Tony got away with coming up short again and again. He had a million excuses, unforeseen contingencies he was forced to pay—he had to bribe someone or there was always extra security he had to pay for. He didn’t seem to realize how my attention to detail—what had helped his operation run so well—would never allow me to overlook his thievery.
Davis asked, in as close to a civil tone as he could, “Is that why you’re here, your motivation—revenge? To fuck Tony for fucking you over all these years?”
“No. Revenge doesn’t fit into it, not the type of revenge that question implies anyway. I don’t want to overcomplicate this, but money has nothing to do with this.” I said I was doing this because I never should’ve been in this business to begin with, to find some redemption for everything wrong I’d done in the past ten years, for all the people I’d directly and indirectly hurt by bringing in so much filth into this country.
Tim Dowling said, “Okay, so what are we waiting for? Let’s hammer out a plan of action and let’s get this son of a bitch.”
Capella laughed, “Well, it’s about time, boss. I was actually starting to think you was going soft on us.”
Tim smiled and pointed to the board. “Not at those prices I’m not.”
I wrote out all of the addresses, escape routes, and, to the best of my knowledge, where the money and drugs were stashed in these apartments and homes. The planning then shifted to manpower. They had to choose the best men in these states that could work quickly, had exemplary careers, were beyond suspicion of any type of wrongdoing and without even the hint of corruptibility, but men who could also carry out this mission with precise timing and skill.
The next piece of business was to get the local agents, police departments, and district attorneys to draw up warrants based on my information, whose authentication in the minor seizure the night before would go a long way. Without that seizure, Tim explained to me, the district attorneys would never allow a first timer to coordinate such a large undertaking.
The good news was that all four men had worked in each of the cities containing Tony’s safe houses at one point in their careers and they still had excellent contacts within the local DEA offices, customs, and police departments. They each divided and conquered. Whichever agent had the better contacts in each city, that was their responsibility; they pulled the men together, got the DA’s office onboard and up to speed while disseminating the information on the spots I’d given to them, as well as having those ADAs find a judge who would sign off on multiple no-knock warrants—warrants that would allow these men to breach the premises or building with rams or even low-grade explosives to get into the more fortified locations.
It was decided that in New York they’d only use local detectives because the NYPD had the largest working police department in the country with narcotics or organized crime units built primarily for takedowns like this one.
Detroit would be garrisoned by DEA and Customs, Los Angeles and San Diego by DEA and local detectives working hand in hand in joint federal task forces. The plans were being formed.
When I left Tony’s organization, I’d vowed to not just leave the drug pusher’s life. I was going to burn the path behind me.
I prepared and detailed everything for Capella and called him back in twenty minutes. What I gave him was something no one knew I had up to this point, something that would, if coordinated properly, bury Tony even before any of these spots were hit.
I’d talked with Tony recently and found out that one of our tractor-trailers was heading to New York with close to a thousand pounds of marijuana. Once in New York, the driver would make stops at several safe houses, drop off a certain amount of the load at each one, pick up cash owed, and move on to the next location and so on till the driver had delivered all the weed, secured all the money, and would then head back to San Diego to drop it off at the safe house we called the bank. I even had this driver’s telephone number—I was, after all, his boss.
The beauty about this was that the driver could be followed state to state, because he was driving my routes, rest stops, even motels if he chose to stop. He’d get handed off between state police at each state line until he finally made it to New York. The whole time, his phone would be tapped, and we would hear him plan his every move. Once inside New York City, the NYPD—led by a first grade detective named Richie Fagan, who had organized some of the force’s biggest busts—would take control, allowing the driver to make his first delivery and pickup.
And that’s when the driver would get jacked and the spot would get taken out. Afterward, when he needed to make one call, I’m quite sure Richie, who knew the driver’s phone was tapped, was going to be lenient: he could make as many calls as he liked.
Tony’s safe houses were an assortment of spots that together paid tribute to the transient life he led and the damage he did to those who came into contact with him. One spot was an apartment on a tree-lined block in the northern Bronx. Tony kept a safe inside a wall behind a rather expensive Picasso he bartered in exchange for cash owed to him. Tony knew nothing about art, and when he was thinking of just whacking the poor fool offering the painting as a barter, I’d held Tony off until I had it authenticated. (Since it was worth three times what the man owed to Tony, I was able to talk him down from murder.) Tony also had a safe house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with spectacular views of the Hudson River; the apartment itself was stunning and in a landmark building. The keeper of this location was just another one of the Fellini-esque troops of oddballs that surrounded Tony’s life. Her name was Heidi. Tony would also use her spot to store coke or heroin for the many clients we had in New York City. At the moment I knew she was sitting on two hundred pounds of weed and at least ten kilos of coke, two kilos of pure heroin, and $500,000 in cash she owed Tony. Tony and I had discussed me organizing a trip to bring it all back to San Diego just before my arrest in Utah.
The third safe house was in the Corona section of Queens on Roosevelt Avenue, a Colombian enclave where Tony moved a lot of cocaine and marijuana. In a three-story building, this safe house consisted of two railroad apartments situated above a bogus travel agency, which was a front for a very real money-laundering operation, with money being wired from this location all around the world, supposedly for tourists.
Tony lent the two apartments to Colombians who lived there rent-free in exchange for receiving drug shipments at all hours of the night and doing most of the breakdown and packaging. The sad thing about these two apartments was they were inhabited by two families—husbands, wives, and a gaggle of kids, who I’m sure, when there was an overload of material, were utilized to help with the “family business.” These kids ranged in age from six to thirteen. They were quiet families, never fought, stayed below the radar, and were very loyal to Tony. Exactly what he needed to facilitate the sales in the state and adjoining states.
The last stash house was in Medford, on Long Island’s south shore, about a forty-minute drive from New York City.
Medford was Tony’s Italian connection, or his wiseguy/Mafiosi connects. The home belonged to some capo in one of New York’s five crime families, a man I’d never met. This was one of Tony’s private clients, of which I never saw a dollar of the profits, though I did know he was making a fortune with the New York wiseguys.
Tony had all the nationalities covered; he wasn’t prejudiced or racist when it came to picking his associates, though he did have a favorite color—green.
This Italian client lived in a mansion that doubled as a horse farm situated on dozens of acres of land. Getting him the drugs was easy because his property was gated and the home itself was not visible from any roads or highways, so we’d just drive up to the large front gates, announce ourselves, the gates would whir open, and we’d drive to one of the barns where we’d store the product and would be gone without meeting anyone from the house. This very private capo then had his workers transport the weed, coke, or heroin into the neighborhoods of Long Island or
boroughs of the city in horse trailers. It was an ingenious way of moving dope around the city. What cop is going to root through hay and horse shit looking for dope?
Tony often stayed at the house, and if we were lucky enough that Tony was in New York at the time of these raids, if he wasn’t at his Bronx condo entertaining his harem of young twenty-somethings, the chances were good he’d be at the horse farm.
There were many other locations on that list. In California alone there were four spots, one in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, that was our first location to drop off drugs brought in from Mexico. Not in the house itself, but in a warehouse we owned through a cut-out company that was close by the property. It’s where the transport vehicles, mostly trucks, would unload and store the tonnage of product we’d bring in. This warehouse was also used to house the many trucks and cars we’d use to ferry the drugs across the country, as well as to cut up the parcels into more manageable loads easier for traveling to our other safe houses. It was absolutely necessary to be in close proximity to our product once it reached American soil. Chula Vista was close to the border and the quicker we got the bulk loads off the road the better. But this house was special for one reason—the Beltrán brothers rendezvoused with us there every month to collect the money we owed. To please and impress them, we didn’t just hire a famous Spanish designer to help decorate the mansion’s interior, we also built an exact replica of the Trevi Fountain.
There were also two spots in Koreatown, a house where we also packaged the material and directly across the street a duplex condo where Tony stayed when he wasn’t in the Inland Empire with Maria or in the Chula Vista “Roman Castillo.”
Last on the list was the rather spacious home Tony shared with Maria and their two children, which was used for cutting, storing, and packaging, and counting all of the money flooding in every week. I’d sometimes be the one organizing the money—tallying the profits, dividing out money for our workers and the Beltráns, for days on end.
There were days, before we were able to transport the cash out of the house, when its rooms were jammed so tight from floor to ceiling with cash there was literally nowhere to move.
The safe house in Detroit was in a Spanish section of the city, manned by a cousin of Tony’s named Carmelo. The location was another three-story structure, the first floor an excellent taqueria, a family place where many of the neighborhood folks would eat, including the local cops, and a great cover for us. Here we used refrigerated trucks to move the dope in, packaged in every variety of food container you could imagine. We walked the dope and weed right through the front door, regardless of how many men in blue were eating the delicious enchiladas.
All the properties were now being monitored, our law enforcement partners across the country waiting for the moment to strike.
Operation Clean House
It took two days for “Operation Clean House” to gel. The NYPD OCID (Organized Crime Investigation Division) detectives had to move fast because my driver was heading out in three days at 6:00 A.M. on a run to New York. He’d be transporting a thousand pounds of weed stashed in the back of a tractor-trailer carrying ball bearings. On his return trip he was to bring back $3 million in cash from his various stops at our safe houses.
Richie Fagan, an NYPD detective who seemed to have seen it all, took control of the organization, coordinating the operational plans of the takedown with the various law enforcement components in Detroit, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Diego’s Inland Empire. He then organized, in coordination with each city’s tactical aviation units, multiple flyovers of the safe houses in order to photograph them. The objective was to locate potential ways in and out, but also to analyze anything that looked suspicious around the locations, anomalies that could be perceived from the air, like nearby subway tunnels or cars parked in close proximity for prolonged periods of time that might be used to facilitate escape or evade capture or that might contain well-armed men for an added layer of security—employed by the caretakers on their dime, as none of them wanted to find themselves in the impossible position of explaining to Tony how they were ripped off of millions of dollars in cash and drugs and yet remained still alive.
So it began—a four-day odyssey of unparalleled anxiety, dread, and fear of the unknown.
As planned, my best driver and courier, Pedro, left promptly at 6:00 A.M. on the planned morning. Like many of his past runs, it would take him four days and some odd hours, all depending on the traffic patterns, to get within New York City’s limits. We expected him to arrive about 12:00 P.M. or thereabouts. In the meantime, warrants were secured for every location while three teams of cops and agents watched the spots in every city around the clock to make certain that no product was suddenly moved.
A net now hung above, just waiting for the “go signal”—“ Impact”—to be transmitted to so many point-to-point radios across three different states. Once that tight net of American justice was dropped, Tony would be one of the many prizes caught up in its inescapable webbing. If not—if something went wrong and he remained at large—my days left on God’s green Earth would be numbered.
For an agonizing four days, we didn’t see Tony, and I was starting to wonder if he’d been tipped off. There were many ways that cops or agents could’ve inadvertently given away this information. For instance, the telephone game: One cop tells a buddy about the raid over a few beers and a game of darts, and that friend tells another buddy who doesn’t realize the significance of the case and he might quizzically ask one of his CIs, or street stools, if they had heard anything about this big raid about to happen in his or her hood. That CI, who might be double-dealing, or looking to curry favor with one of these caretakers or a friend of the caretaker, might know about the spots and tip them off. Another scenario could be as simple as two cops talking at a local gin mill that might not be so aboveboard and are overheard talking about the upcoming hit. With so many people planning the bust, the possibility of a leak kept me up at night.
I stayed in my house the entire time, the company phone glued to my hand as I counted down the hours until the operation.
I slept downstairs in my family room, well-fortified with water, guns, and ammunition, though sleep isn’t really a proper description. Catnaps is closer to reality and they lasted all of about twenty minutes at a clip, and then I’d be on guard for another few hours, dozing for another twenty minutes to a half hour. It was a continuous battle of sleep versus vigilance. The yin versus yang my life had become.
On the third night, with barely ten hours of sleep in all, I could no longer keep my eyes open. I remember being for a time suspended in that wondrous, precious space between consciousness and sleep, completely aware of the magic your totally relaxed mind and exhausted body offer you.
I was there in that netherworld, numb, lifeless, floating on a velvety blanket of warm fragrant air. In the distance I heard the pulsating rhythmic sound of water cascading off a mountain cliff, sluicing through a slow-moving stream. I drifted closer and closer to this waterfall, floating—not on the glistening water, but above it. It was a magical experience. As I neared this waterfall I could feel its cool mist on my face, the air, abundant with sweet honeysuckle, and oddly, as I moved closer and closer to the falls, its pulsating rhythm drifted further and further away. I could feel I was very close to it now, spinning, riding on the pockets of air just above the roiling waters below me. The honeysuckle mixed with the clean aroma of ozone, and then I started rocking up and down, faster and faster.
I snapped up searching for my gun. It was gone—someone had removed it from my chest. I opened my eyes in a panic—and there he was, standing above me, alone.
“Tony?”
He was holding my Glock firmly, without the slightest tremor, indicating no remorse for what he was about to do, or what he had already done to me over the course of so many years. The gun was inches from my face, so close I could smell the oil I’d used to clean it not two hours before.
He spoke ca
lmly, without animus. He said, “I knew you’d fuck me eventually, puta.” He grinned.
How the hell did he get in? Where are the cops who were supposedly watching my house? Inez, the kids, are they all right? A million thoughts ran through my mind in the blink of an eye.
That’s when I noticed his hands, covered in blood—dried blood.
The inside of my mouth flared with that familiar coppery taste of fear and dread; I felt my heart pounding in my ears, heard the blood rushing through my veins.
I tried to move but he jammed the big heavy Glock harder into my forehead, pushing me with all his might deeper into the cushions of the couch.
As he pulled the trigger, I kicked away, falling onto the thick carpet. I rolled over, quickly aligning my first shot at Tony, and then I’d take out the other hitter who had suddenly appeared in the room. My sweat-damp hands were shaking wildly, sweat stinging my eyes making it impossible to see clearly. I couldn’t tell if the other man had a weapon, but I figured he’d have fired it if he did. I grabbed the Glock from where Tony had dropped it on the floor and began squeezing the trigger, and I heard my name clearly, someone was screaming, ROMAN! ROMAN! And through the sight of the gun I finally saw who I was face-to-face with.
Inez!
It took me about half a minute to return to consciousness and fully understand what I’d done. I was soaked in sweat, hyperventilating.
And then it all became clear to me. There was no one in the dimly lit great room other than Inez and me. She was wearing a bathrobe, crying, shaking uncontrollable at the foot of the couch. Her hands and arms covering her face and body in a defensive position as though she were waiting for the shot that would certainly kill her.
