Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  Hanes claimed he was in Atlanta and he would arrive in Seattle later that night. “Bob” apologized to Hanes and explained that with Sherry’s quick departure from the office, he had dropped the ball and didn’t get the ticket to Federal Express in time for a delivery today. “Bob” said he was extremely embarrassed about his faux pas and he would personally take the package to the FedEx office to ensure delivery for tomorrow morning to the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. “Oh, and one more thing Mr. Hanes…please accept two free upgrade certificates on United Airlines as compensation for any pain and suffering you may have experienced due to this delay.”

  During the conversation, I was sitting next to Beaver and I had an earpiece so I could hear every word. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth because I was dying laughing at Beaver’s Mr. Peabody voice. The Beaver looked at me, winked, and asked Hanes if he could possibly trouble him to please verify the credit account number the ticket should be charged to, “I sure don’t want any more foul-ups on your travel plans.” Hanes gave the Beaver the account number and “Bob” ended the call. The Beaver came through with an awesome performance; I called him Bob for the rest of the week.

  Bowery gave me the fraudulently purchased airline ticket so I could overnight it to Seattle, and the Beaver and I headed back to the office with the incriminating tape. On the way, we stopped at a neighborhood casino near Nellis Boulevard and East Desert Inn Road to try out their cheeseburger. Just as we were digging into lunch, my pager went off. I looked at the number on the display and saw it was the boss’s extension, so I went to the pay phone and called in. The boss said he spoke with the Seattle FO and I should call Agent Jim Henderson in Seattle to fill him in.

  Back at the office I called Jim in Seattle. He was a little hesitant about the controlled delivery; he kept telling me he would have to run it by the US Attorney’s office in Seattle. He said the US Attorney in Seattle was not a big proponent of probable cause (PC) arrests. I stressed the urgency of the matter. “Jim, if we are going to catch this guy, we have to act on it tomorrow.” Jim said he’d call the duty AUSA in Seattle and get back to me.

  I was just a young agent, with just over three years on the job, and the US Attorney in Las Vegas had completely spoiled the agents in the Las Vegas RA. We were blessed with an extremely aggressive Chief of the Criminal Division at the US Attorney’s office in Las Vegas. He never turned down our requests for a PC arrest. His staff in the Criminal Division was just as aggressive and it made our job that much more fun, knowing that when we rolled out at zero-dark thirty for a duty call on the Strip, we could count on the duty AUSA to back us up and put the bad guys in jail. After my first few years in Vegas, the chief told us we had carte blanche to make PC arrests. “Don’t even bother waking up my duty AUSA,” he said. “Just make the arrest and call us first thing in the morning.”

  When I look back on those days at the Las Vegas RA, especially after my career moved on and I worked criminal cases in other states with other US Attorneys, I’m awed at the cooperation the US Attorney gave us in Vegas. Donnie, the Beaver, and I made so many PC arrests; I took it for granted that I could arrest anyone if I had the PC. But Vegas was different in that respect; the vast majority of US Attorney’s offices would not allow an agent to make a PC arrest. I had to hope Jim could convince the Seattle AUSA to approve Hanes’s arrest.

  Jim finally called me back and said his duty AUSA had turned down the request for a PC arrest. No fraud had been committed in Seattle and they refused to prosecute the case. Or some such bullshit. “No problem,” I told Jim. “I’ll get a John Doe arrest warrant here in Vegas.” I told Jim the ticket was already on its way to Seattle and was guaranteed delivery to his attention by ten thirty the next morning. I told him I would fax the arrest warrant to him in Seattle later that day. I hoped anyway. I called T.J., the criminal chief at the US Attorney’s office. “Bring your case file and come on over.”

  T.J. and I sat down and went over the case. “No problem,” he said. “Let’s get this guy.” T.J. wasn’t crazy about getting a John Doe arrest warrant without the certainty that Hanes would accept delivery of the ticket. He was worried he’d have to take up court time to get the warrant squashed if we didn’t find the guy. “Write up the affidavit, with the last paragraph saying Hanes accepted delivery of the ticket at the Four Seasons Hotel,” he said. “I’ll make an appointment with the duty US magistrate judge for late tomorrow morning and have your Seattle agents call you as soon as he takes receipt and signs for the airline ticket. Have them keep a surveillance on Hanes, we’ll get the warrant signed and then they can take him down.” What a great plan! Thank you, T.J.

  I called Jim in Seattle and told him the plan…and he was still hesitating, “Well, I don’t know if we have enough guys in the office tomorrow to do a surveillance.” Are you kidding me? Holy shit, help me out here, Jimbo! It was officially time to get the boss involved in this one.

  The boss got on the telephone with the ASAIC in Seattle and, wouldn’t you know it, Seattle suddenly had enough agents to cover the surveillance. Finally! Now, I just needed Hanes to show up at the Four Seasons Hotel.

  Jim called me the next morning and said he had the airline ticket and they were going over to the Four Seasons to make the controlled delivery. I called T.J. and went over to stand by at his office and wait for the call from Jim.

  We waited and we waited. No word from Seattle. T.J. called the US magistrate’s office and cancelled our appointment. “No problem,” T.J. said. “If they call you later today, the magistrate’s clerk said he had an open calendar this afternoon and he could see us to sign the warrant anytime before four.” So, I went back to my office to wait it out.

  Jim finally called and said Hanes had not checked into the Four Seasons last night or that day. He was sending the airline ticket back to me. Hanes had escaped the dragnet. Shit! I didn’t have much hope that I would ever identify and arrest this guy.

  A few weeks later, I happened to be on the telephone with the West Coast region agent at Fraud Division and I mentioned the Hanes caper. “Marcus Hanes,” the headquarters agent said to me. “That name sounds real familiar. Stand by a minute.” I could hear him talking to another agent in his office. He came back on the phone and said, “Call Agent Roger Hood in Indianapolis. Roger has been working a very similar airline ticket scam in Indiana.”

  I called Hood and he told me about a credit card fraud case he’d been working in Indianapolis; his suspect was a guy using the name Marcus Hanes. Whoa, excellent! He went on to say he had tentatively identified Hanes as Mark Matthews, who was an escapee from a federal penitentiary. He put me in contact with a US Probation officer (PO) in Indianapolis, who was looking for Matthews.

  The PO said Matthews had escaped from a federal facility in December of 1988 and there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. It was now February 1989; he’d been on the run for about ninety days. The PO mailed me a photograph of Matthews and I obtained a copy of the warrant through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Now I just needed to find this guy…

  * * *

  I’m listening to Missy tell me this complicated story of being ripped off by “Malcheski,” and suddenly the lightbulb went on in my head—Marcus Hanes! Holy shit. Hanes…Malcheski…It’s got to be Matthews.”

  I grabbed my Hanes case folder and drove over to see Missy at her travel agency. I obtained copies of evidence from her records documenting the credit card fraud and told her that if Martin called her again to act normal and find out what he needed. If he wanted more tickets, just take the information like you normally would. We didn’t want him to get suspicious at this point.

  I had Missy listen to the tape recording of the Beaver speaking with Hanes that I’d recorded months before. She said the caller’s voice sounded a lot like Martin, but she couldn’t say for certain it was Malcheski. I then showed her a photo spread I had prepared of six similar-looking white males. One of the
six photos was Mark Matthews. I asked her to tell me if she recognized the man she knew as Martin, the man who stayed at her house that one night a few days ago. With no hesitation she pointed directly at the photo of Matthews and said, “That’s him.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Oh yes,” she said to me. “That’s the son of a bitch!” When Missy and I were on the telephone earlier that day she had been panicky, thinking of how she had been taken advantage of and realizing “Martin” had scammed her out of tens of thousands of dollars. Now that she saw justice was around the corner, she became angry. A very typical reaction for victims of crime. I had her sign and date the photo spread.

  I jumped into my IROC-Z and broke numerous traffic laws getting back to the office. I did not run any red lights, but I came damn close.

  I called T.J. and filled him in and he was as excited as I was. T.J. asked me to contact the Secret Service office in Honolulu to see if they could arrest Matthews at the Hyatt in Kona on the outstanding escape warrant. “No sweat,” I told T.J. “The boss is on the telephone with Honolulu as we speak.” T.J. wanted me to draft an affidavit for an arrest warrant on the violations we had in Las Vegas. A lot of US attorneys would have ended the case right then and there; the suspect was in custody (or would be soon) and the federal courts would sentence him on the escape charge. Case closed. But not T.J. “I’m gonna extradite Matthews to Las Vegas and we will hammer him for good.” T.J. was an agent’s attorney; he loved prosecuting criminals to the fullest extent of the law.

  Agent Chuck Stubbe, one of my old LAFO buddies was now in Honolulu, and he was more than willing to hunt down Matthews on the Big Island. He and another Honolulu agent jumped on the first plane to Kona and had a local cop pick them up at the airport.

  Chuck called me later that day and told me they were able to identify Matthews and arrest him as he sat by the hotel swimming pool drinking a piña colada. Chuck was able to get a written consent from Matthews to search his hotel room, and they recovered numerous credit card account numbers and airline ticket receipts.

  Chuck said the US magistrate in Honolulu held Matthews in custody without bail, and he also served my warrant on Matthews. He said the Honolulu AUSA was talking to T.J. about handling all the court proceedings from the District of Nevada in the US District Court of Hawaii, which legally could be done if Matthews agreed to waive extradition to Nevada, since both jurisdictions are US district courts. I called T.J. “Are you planning on letting Honolulu handle our case?”

  “Absolutely not,” said T.J. “No way will I allow Matthews to enjoy the balmy breezes of Hawaii. He scammed Las Vegas travel agents and he will face justice in a Las Vegas courtroom.” That’s why Donnie, the Beaver, and I loved this guy so much; he was a frickin’ tiger of a prosecutor.

  T.J. and I indicted Matthews for five counts of violation of Title 18 United States Code Section 1029. The hammer was about to come down on Mr. Matthews and his credit card fraud endeavors and it was coming down in the hot, dusty Great American Desert.

  About a month later, Matthews was sitting in the Clark County Jail awaiting trial on our indictment. T.J. called me one day and said Matthews’s attorney was considering accepting the government’s offer in exchange for a guilty plea; but the defense attorney wanted to try one thing to question the photo spread identification Missy had made on Matthews. It was his last hope. If Missy picked Matthews out of a police lineup, he’d recommend Matthews take the guilty plea.

  T.J. told me to make sure I let the defense attorney pick the other inmates for the lineup. “Is he that dumb?” I asked T.J.

  “Oh yeah,” T.J. laughed, “He’s that dumb.”

  I contacted the watch commander at the jail and made arrangements for a line up. The defense attorney did exactly what T.J. thought he would do and as the jailers paraded a group of inmates into the room, he starting selecting this guy, then that guy. I just stood back and let him go. That brilliant federal public defender just put the last nail in Matthews coffin; by having him pick the other five inmates for the lineup, he ruined any chance of having the line-up thrown out of court as biased toward the defendant. Any argument that the other five inmates did not resemble Matthews would be a moot point.

  Missy, the defense attorney, and I were standing behind the one-way glass in the lineup room when they opened the curtain. The sergeant had the six inmates face forward, turn to the left, and turn to the right. He then had them face forward again. Missy looked at the six inmates and without hesitation said, “Number two. That’s him. That’s the man I know as Martin Malcheski.”

  Matthews pleaded guilty to counts one through four of the indictment. He served over seventeen years in a federal penitentiary and was released in 2007.

  Chapter 5

  Lucky Cargill

  One Friday evening as I was just pulling into my driveway and thinking it would be a good night to sit in the hot tub with the Redhead and sip on a beer, my Motorola radio squawked to life. It was Donnie and he wanted to know if I could give him a phone call at the office ASAP. I turned off the ignition and headed into the house and the closest phone.

  I was the duty agent during this particular week and I’d been hoping all day the frickin’ telephone wouldn’t ring that night. It had been a busy week, lots of middle-of-the-night duty calls, and I just wanted to relax, watch a little baseball, and sleep all weekend. We didn’t have cell phones in those days. They might have existed, but the Secret Service, at least the Secret Service in Las Vegas, sure didn’t have any! We had pagers that would send out an audible beep when you were getting a message. They didn’t even vibrate; they just beeped. Therefore, we referred to them as our “beepers.” As I walked toward the kitchen phone, I looked at my beeper to see if I’d missed a call. Nothing. That was a good sign.

  I was a little on the defensive side when I called Donnie at the office. I thought he must have gotten a duty call that I’d missed and I figured he’d be pissed off. We only had three agents in Las Vegas (and the boss) and we rotated the duty agent assignment from Monday morning to Monday morning; so every third week you were the duty agent for the office. It was a huge pain in the ass; the unwritten rule was, “Don’t make any plans” during your turn on duty—not dinner plans, not going-to-the-movies plans, not friends or family in town so let’s do something fun plans. If you did, you were guaranteed they would be disrupted.

  The duty agent usually caught all new cases when it was their turn. The damn telephone was constantly ringing, it was unusual to make it through the night without a call, and not all calls were important. But you had to answer them. It didn’t bother me so much, because I loved rolling out in the middle of the night to a casino with one in custody. That was too much fun! But the Redhead wasn’t so crazy about getting woken up every night by the ringing of the telephone. You can’t blame her, she had a regular job, what I called a “real people job.” Me, I was just a Secret Service agent doing my part to clean up the streets of Vegas.

  Casinos would call at all hours of the night to get us to verify a note as counterfeit. And usually the note would be counterfeit, but they wouldn’t have a suspect…an unknown passer. We’d tell them to hold on to the counterfeit note and we’d swing by the casino in the morning on the way to the office and pick it up.

  Donnie said he was sitting at his desk wrapping up a report before he headed home when the telephone rang. It was LVMPD calling to report a landlord had called and said one of his tenants was printing money in his rental house. Donnie needed me to come back to the office so we could go check it out. I told Donnie to call the Beaver and see if he could meet us at the office. Taking down a printing operation will probably take more than the two of us.

  I gave the Redhead a kiss hello. “How was your day?” And I gave her a kiss good-bye. “I’ll see you when I see you.” She gave me the frown and asked when I would be back. “Some guy printing counterfeit.” I said, “I’ll be lucky i
f I’m home tomorrow night.”

  “Be careful,” she said, and off I went.

  I sat down in Donnie’s office and he was wound up. The Beaver walked in and took a seat. He looked unhappy; he had that look on his face like he’d just started to pop the top on a cold beer when Donnie called him back to the office. Donnie said the LVMPD called the office at about five forty-five, just as he was getting ready to “roll” the office telephone over to our after-hours answering service. The PD said a Mr. Hargrove had reported his tenant was printing money in a rental house.

  Donnie said he’d called Hargrove, who said he was renting his old family house to an older guy named Lucky Cargill. The rental house was located out in the desert on the northeast side of town, off of East Lake Mead Boulevard. Cargill had not paid rent for over six months and Hargrove had gone out to the property earlier that day to evict the tenant. When Cargill did not answer the door, Hargrove entered the house looking for him. What he found instead surprised him.

  Inside the living room Hargrove saw a large printing press, cameras on tripods, and a big machine with a heat lamp in it. “I’m sure that’s a plate burner,” Donnie said. Hargrove also saw money printed on sheets of paper. Stacks and stacks of paper with printed money on them.

  Donnie said he’d already spoke with T.J. over at the US Attorney’s office and ran the scenario by him. T.J. told Donnie that we didn’t need a search warrant for the house…if he hadn’t paid rent in six months and the landlord was evicting him, he has no expectation to privacy in that residence.