Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent

by Tim Wood

  “Not lately,” I said.

  “Let’s divert to Malmstrom and spend the night in Montana…Big sky country!”

  “Sure, why not?”

  It was late October and when we left El Toro that Friday morning it was seventy-five degrees…neither of us even brought our winter flight jackets with us; we’d submitted our cross-country request to RON at Mather AFB in Sacramento on Friday and RON at Luke AFB, Arizona, on Saturday night, warm weather spots.

  We landed at sunset at Malmstrom and we were the only plane on the transient line. It was a beautiful evening. The sunset was awesome with a hint of red clouds and a sky bluer than Vegas. It was breathtaking. We checked into the BOQ and headed to the O Club for a steak and a few beers.

  I woke early Saturday morning. The sun was just lighting the eastern horizon. I pulled back the curtains to look out the window and saw a blizzard in the streetlights of the BOQ parking lot. Holy Shit! I ran down the hall to Bronco’s room and pounded on the door. “Time to go, buddy…the skipper thinks we are in Sacramento and if we get stuck in Montana—well, that ain’t good!”

  By the time we hightailed it over to base ops the snow had stopped. That was the good news; the bad news was there was eight inches of fresh snow covering the ground. “Yes the airfield is open,” the duty officer told us, “but the runway has not been plowed and it won’t be until fourteen hundred hours or later.” I guess the air force doesn’t work on Saturday mornings.

  We filed our IFR flight plan—to head south to warmer temperatures and got the weather briefing from the metrological section. Heavy overcast at two thousand feet AGL with the tops at six thousand feet AGL. We had about a sixty-minute window before the next blizzard was scheduled to be rolling in. Winds were out of the southeast at twenty mph, gusting to forty-five mph. Great! A crosswind on takeoff! What else could go wrong?

  Well, that “what else” was our Intruder covered in snow. I asked the transient line mechanic for a broom and Bronco and I climbed up onto each wing and brushed off as much of the snow as possible. Bronco fired her up and we got clearance to taxi—through eight inches of snow. The air force airmen stood watching us with their mouths agape…crazy marines, crazy, crazy marines.

  We roared down that runway with a contrail of snow behind us—it was awesome; we looked like the Blue Angels with their smoke on! Well, maybe not the Blue Angels, but it was pretty cool.

  “Speaking of the Blue Angels,” I continued, “I was flying with Boots—he was another great pilot in our squadron. We were at the Chocolate Mountains bombing range out by El Centro, California. The Blue Angels spend the winter months practicing at El Centro Naval Air Station, and as Boots and I were cruising around the desert at about three hundred feet AGL and four hundred knots—whoosh! Two of those Blue Angel bastards buzzed us. Passed us on our left, about fifty feet below and seventy-five to eighty knots faster. After they passed us they pulled up into the vertical and did a victory roll…Show-offs.”

  I was getting ready to tell him about the time Bronco and I almost hit the side of a vertical canyon wall when Musigbe showed himself. He walked out to his car, retrieved something, and walked back in the house. It was time for the mailman. The postal inspector drove up in a white mail delivery truck, the ones with the driver’s side on the right and walked up to the door. The PI did a great job of engaging Musigbe in conversation, on tape of course, about the package from Lagos.

  “Oh yeah, I’ve been waiting for this. It’s from my brother in Nigeria,” he said.

  “Great!” replied the postal inspector. “Thanks and have a good day.”

  We waited a few minutes for the PI to clear the area and I made the call to execute the warrant. And in we went. Musigbe was a little surprised to find himself in handcuffs. We searched the house and recovered numerous false and counterfeit drivers’ licenses, and blank checks from various banks in Atlanta, Houston, and Las Vegas, along with a few MasterCard and Visa credit cards.

  Unfortunately, every one of the counterfeit identifications had his picture, so I was not into a gang of Nigerians as I’d hoped, but at least the names on the counterfeit driver’s licenses and passports from Nigeria matched. He claimed his real name was John Alitio. In keeping with the grand tradition of the Nigerian fraudster, he didn’t know anything and wanted to speak to an attorney. Probably a smart move. US Immigration discovered he’d entered the United States on a student visa and, once again, decided to stay. Great system, those student visas, really great system.

  I’ve arrested numerous Nigerians over the years, and not one of them has ever taken the case to trial. And this guy was no different, he pleaded guilty, but not before creating quite a scene in the US district court at sentencing. Musigbe/Alitio got on his hands and knees before the Judge and begged for mercy. He had his hands clasped before him and tears streaming down his cheeks, as the US district court judge ordered him to prison to be followed by deportation back to his homeland.

  Chapter 11

  The Boston Patriot

  Las Vegas is a gambling town. The Redhead and I were not really into gambling. As a matter of fact, the Redhead hated casinos. She hated the Strip. She hated the hot, windy desert. She hated Vegas. She missed her beach and her cool ocean breezes. For my next assignment I still had my sights on PPD in Washington, DC; hot, muggy Washington, DC…Boy, is she going to love that climate!

  Sometime during my tour of duty in Las Vegas, the state of California started a lottery. Buying a ticket cost one dollar and you had a chance to win a million-dollar jackpot. It was big news in Las Vegas. All the TV stations and the newspaper were decrying the lotto as the end to casino gambling in Vegas. It was doom and gloom…they declared tourists wouldn’t come to Las Vegas to gamble if they could play the lotto right at home! Really? Really. I used to just shake my head at the stupidity of the local news anchors and reporters, sensationalizing everything.

  One night we were watching the local newscast and they had another doom-and-gloom report on how the California lottery was going to kill Las Vegas tourism. Not a report on how the California lottery might, maybe, adversely affect tourism; nope! Tourism was as good as dead in Vegas.

  One of the blonde talking heads was reporting from the field in a small town off of I-15 just across the California state line with Nevada. This was a one-horse desert town with nothing there except a small gas station quick stop—a “stop and rob,” as the Beaver used to call them. People were lined up in the hot desert sun for over a mile, waiting to buy a California lottery ticket. It was proof. Visual proof, Vegas was going to take its last breath any day now. Call an undertaker!

  After her breathless report on the sad situation, the reporter cut to an interview with a major casino’s bookmaker. This was the guy who set the odds at the sports book. He was the guru of gambling…he was the authority. Blondie interviews the bookmaker; he is sitting at a cluttered desk and the camera angle is from the side and a looking down at him. He looks to be in his sixties, and his crown, indicating male-pattern baldness, shines brightly in the television lights. He has a stogie between his teeth that he politely takes out of his mouth before answering the interviewer’s questions. He is lambasting the ignorant fools for buying lottery tickets.

  “It’s a sucker bet,” he says. “Your odds are much better at the craps table, the blackjack table, heck, even in the sports book, your odds of winning in Vegas are much, much better than buying a lottery ticket. You like to play the numbers? Come to Vegas, that’s exactly what Keno is—you pick the numbers. And with Keno, you get many, many choices of combinations to complete a winning Keno card. With that scam of a California lottery, you have to pick six, for Pete’s sake. It’s a sucker bet!”

  Blondie smiles. Oh yeah, she’s just confirmed for all Las Vegans that standing in line to buy a lottery ticket is a waste of time—get down to the local casino, hit the tables. One last question for Mr. Bookmaker. “Would you buy a dollar Califo
rnia lottery ticket?”

  He looks straight at her and with out missing a beat says, “For a buck? Heck, yeah! It’s worth a buck.”

  I still laugh about that interview when I think about it. Uh, and guess what? Been to Vegas lately? It’s still hopping and it always will be, because it’s Vegas, baby…it’s Vegas.

  My old SAIC was right about one thing—gambling has ruined many a man. Las Vegas was full of folks who would spend their last dime on a bet and then rob the kid’s piggy bank for one more bet, just one more. They’d also rob a real bank…with or without a gun.

  One of the things I learned early on at the LAFO working check forgery cases was that the sweetest, nicest little old lady, one who wouldn’t even think about shoplifting a pack of gum from the neighborhood 7-Eleven, would cash a government check without blinking an eye. It’s what I called the Great Depression syndrome. The government’s got plenty of money; it’s mine for the taking. The husband’s dead? Been dead for years, but the bumbling idiots in the bureaucracy of the Social Security Administration (SSA) keeps mailing those monthly checks to Grandpa Jones. And Grandma Jones keeps signing his name and depositing them in her account.

  Inevitably, Grandma would claim she notified the SSA…twice, that the old man was dead. But the checks keep coming, so Grandma keeps cashing them. They didn’t think they were stealing money, they thought the government was giving them money. That’s what Mr. Roosevelt did right? He gave you money.

  What they didn’t realize was the government doesn’t lose money on anything. When the bureaucracy catches up with the paperwork, they take it back from you…or at least, they take it back from your bank. And the next thing you know, Grandma Jones owes First National Bank forty grand.

  The Redhead had a quite a few collateral duties at her small Las Vegas bank. One of those duties was loss prevention. She told me about a bank employee they suspected was embezzling money. And when confronted, she lied about it. They always lie. They always minimize. “I was gonna redeposit the money, I just needed to make my mortgage payment this month!” But when the bank dug deeper, they found thousands of dollars, ten’s of thousands of dollars missing. Why? Because she was addicted to gambling.

  I wanted to work that case in the worst way, mainly because I wanted to work any case I could, but there was no credit card fraud in this one, just plain old embezzlement. So I reluctantly had to tell the Redhead to call my friends over at Freddie, Bernie, and Irving. Embezzlement, that’s right up their alley. Besides, I had more than enough fraud cases to work.

  Years later, toward the end of my career, I was sent to the one-man office of the Anchorage, Alaska, RA for a thirty-day temporary assignment. I got a telephone call from a local hospital administrator. She told me one of their bookkeepers was using a hospital MasterCard to get cash advances. I opened an investigation and uncovered one $120,000 worth of fraudulent transactions by the bookkeeper. This was also embezzlement, but it was credit card fraud—my criminal jurisdiction.

  I was digging into the suspect’s background and obtaining the evidence I needed to arrest her when the hospital administrator called the office. She wanted to drop the charges, the bookkeeper wrote the hospital a check for $120,000 and paid them back. Are you kidding me? I told her I had two problems with this: first, the federal system does not require a victim to press charges like local judicial systems, and secondly how many people do you know who have $120,000 in their checking account? “Oh!” she said. “I guess you are right.”

  Sure enough, as I got further into the investigation I found two previous employers from whom she had embezzled for close to two hundred grand. Both employers fired her and did not file a police report. I was shocked! But I’m a law and order guy and I just can’t imagine not calling the police on something like that. You have to remember the Donnie’s undeniable fact of fraudsters: “It’s not the first time they’ve done it and they are not who they say they are.”

  * * *

  We worked very closely with the bank loss prevention guys, and some of them were really good about putting a solid case together before they called us. I loved those; they were easy arrests, easy cases to work to the finish line. I was just the anchor leg in the mile relay. I just had to complete the last lap.

  Stan Fleck was one of those investigators at Valley Bank in Las Vegas. He’d been in the loss prevention, fraud business a long time and he always brought us a nice, neat package of an investigation…when Sally, our administrative aide said Stan was on line two; Donnie, the Beaver and me would climb all over each other to get to line two. And on that day I won the race to the telephone.

  Stan told me he was working a credit card fraud case that was a thirteen-hundred-dollar loss to Valley Bank. He had three Valley Bank MasterCards issued to three different people and the actual people whose name was used to open the accounts had not applied for the credit cards. Two were employees of America West Airlines and the other was an employee of the Nevada Department of Transportation. Identity theft before identity theft was a buzzword.

  Stan found that all three credit cards had the same address. The address was a commercial mail drop business, one of those places you could rent a mailbox and buy a greeting card or have your Christmas packages sent out via UPS. A legitimate business, but a haven for fraudsters. I would venture to say of all the credit card cases I investigated, the suspect was using a commercial mail drop as his address 75 percent of the time.

  Stan had contacted the mail drop and found the address was listed as the “America West Employees Anniversary Committee, Chuck Wright, chairman.” Stan was handing me the baton and all I had to do was run the final lap.

  The Beaver and I went to the real address of the Nevada Department of Transportation employee to see if he had any insight into who was using his identity to open credit card accounts. Mr. Pontsler was more than willing to help, and he had some good information. Right off the bat, he suspected a fellow office worker at the department named Ingrid.

  “Do you know where she lives?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “No idea where she lives, but I’ve heard her say her roommate is a flight attendant with America West Airlines.” Thank you, Mr. Pontsler. And good luck cleaning up your credit report, because it’s going to be a nightmare.

  I made a telephone call to the America West Airlines security manager and he was able to dig around a little for me. He called back a few days later and said the airlines had recently terminated a flight attendant, and her coworkers remembered she lived with a roommate named Ingrid. The former employee was Roberta Bellefontaine.

  Stan checked in with me a few days later and reported he’d found that one of the credit cards had been used as a reference at a Las Vegas furniture store to open a line of credit.

  I got a photo of Roberta from America West and put together a photo spread and headed over to the furniture store. I walked the store manager through the transaction. I always liked to do this with a witness to get them thinking about the event; it helps them remember details about the incident you are investigating. “Oh yeah, I remember that purchase,” he told me, “The woman’s name was Eugenia something. She was a talker, and she said she worked as a flight attendant for an airline.”

  “Do you recognize Eugenia in any of these six pictures?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “Number four, that’s her…I remember that name Eugenia; never heard that name before and she said she was a flight attendant. You don’t run into those everyday…interesting job, flight attendant.”

  The Beaver and I found Bellefontaine at the address listed for her in the telephone book. Ingrid had unfortunately been fired from the Department of Transportation, and according to Roberta, she’d left Las Vegas for parts unknown. It was just as well because T.J. declined to prosecute Ingrid as part of the conspiracy—the evidence against her was too thin.

  Roberta was a nice young lady with a serious gambli
ng problem. She was very cooperative and gave a full written confession to applying for and receiving twenty-four different credit cards in the names of various America West employees and one Nevada Department of Transportation employee. This gal would have never even thought about robbing a bank, but she didn’t even think twice about stealing from an entity like a bank. A bank? The government? What’s the difference, it is a victimless crime, right? Tell Mr. Pontsler and those twenty-three other real people who just had their credit ruined that it is a victimless crime. I don’t think they’d agree.

  * * *

  I wish all cases were that simple and quick. Some were, but most weren’t. Especially the Boston Patriot investigation; he was a tough nut to crack.

  I think just about every federal law enforcement agency in New England was after the Boston Patriot. He was a prolific fraudster; he was full-time and made his living off of credit card fraud. Either that, or he was working for a large criminal enterprise and he was just a small cog in the wheel. Either way, the Boston Patriot was into several East Coast banks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. It was only a matter of time before he came to Las Vegas…at some point, all criminals come to Las Vegas, either to spend their ill-gotten goods or to continue the scam.

  In the eighties and nineties obtaining a cash advance at a casino involved a paper check called a Comchek. The system was very common in roadside truck stops as a way for a traveling truck driver to get cash from his trucking line while he was on the road. There were various ways for the employer to get the cash to Comchek, just as with Western Union. But at a casino, the customer used a Comchek machine that was sort of like an ATM. The customer would insert their credit card, select an amount, and then go to the casino cage to get the check. The customer would present the credit card and his identification to the cashier, who would retrieve the printed Comchek from the printer, and have the customer endorse the back. It was a great system, because it created a nice paper trail and all paper trails will lead you to a suspect.