the day than waking up in the morning.
It was one of those days I dreaded. No pressing duties to perform at the office, just routine, snail-paced progress in the money-laundering cases I investigate for the U.S. Department of Justice. I forced myself not to return to bed, looking through the window at the cars passing through the Chelsea streets. New York City was unusually quiet. I felt strangely out of place. After twenty of years in the U.S., many of them right there in that apartment, I felt a pulling away. From the moment I’d landed in New York, I had considered it my home, and the U.S. my country and my future. But the dreary color outside made me long for the Israeli sun. Not the scorching rays of August that melt the asphalt, but the caressing sun of May and June that wraps you like the warmth of loving arms.
Shaking myself out of memory lane, I went to the kitchen. I took a carton of orange juice from the half- empty refrigerator- extra pulp, the way I like it-and drank it directly from the spout, flooding my chin and neck with juice.
Damn whoever designed that stupid spout, I thought.
I wiped my chin, took a deep breath, and resigned myself to going to work. Con men absconding from the U.S. beware, I thought. I was cranky, and ready to take it out on whoever’s file happened to be on my desk that day.
There has never been a shortage of new cases coming to my office from various U.S. government agencies. Major insurance fraud, telemarketing scams, banking fraud, and money laundering related to other white-collar crimes are the usual stuff. They expect us to find the perpetrator and recover the loot if either is located outside the United States. Once U.S. borders are crossed, foreign rules apply, leaving the U.S. government with little or no in de pen dent investigative and enforcement power. When a U.S. state or federal criminal case has foreign aspects, U.S. law-enforcement authorities can get police-to-police assistance from the more than 170 countries belonging to Interpol. Additionally, around forty-eight countries have bilateral MLAT, or Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, with the U.S. for helping each other obtain evidence in criminal trials. That’s the easy part.
Civil cases are even trickier than criminal cases. They are hamstrung by legal, bureaucratic, and political constraints that make it tougher for federal agents to pursue debtors for money outside the U.S. than it is for private creditors. The MLAT, limited to criminal cases, tends to be practically useless. Foreign courts take pride in their country’s sovereignty and loathe attempts by foreign governments to twist their arms. And they aren’t always eager to help the U.S. recover dirty money that might be bolstering their own country’s economy.
That’s how I got my office. The sign on the office door read TAT INTERNATIONAL TRADE, INC., intended to mask our identity as the New York extension of the Office of Asset Recovery and Money Laundering of the U.S. Department of Justice. We have the expertise and the bud get to go after white-collar crooks wherever in the world they are playing, and mostly winning, mind games designed by the culprits’ lawyers, accountants, and investment consultants to keep us from getting their clients or the money. Most of the time we outsmart them and beat them at their own game. FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is the much-larger U.S. Treasury intelligence agency that searches for assets within the United States. But they do their job from behind a computer monitor, while we go out to the streets of Geneva, Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands, and all the other locations favored by the money launderers of the world.
I like my job. It offers complete independence outside the U.S., yet affords the entire might of the U.S. behind me. That is, provided I conduct myself as a straight arrow. This only gets tricky when dealing with what I’ll call cultural differences. David expects me to operate as legally and ethically as if I’m operating within the U.S. But I’m not. I’m dealing with dubious and shady characters in off-shore tax shelters, far from the reach of U.S. law enforcement. For them the phrases comply with the law or rules of ethics are good for a laugh. They’re over there to avoid the law, so it’s a bit far-fetched to expect us all to abide by it.
Fairly early in the game, I saw the futility of convincing my superiors that we couldn’t win the war of minds against lawless targets by behaving like nineteenth-century gentlemen. Fighting international crime and terrorism effectively, recovering stolen money, and disrupting terror attacks against the U.S. can mean resorting to Machiavelli. He put it best when he wrote in The Art of War, “No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.”
“Do you expect us to apply Machiavellian methods or act like the criminals you chase?” David had once asked, hearing me air these frustrations. I’d known that he sympathized with what I was saying, but unlike me, he had clearly defined lines he would not cross.
“Of course not,” I’d said.
But we both knew damn well that insisting that I comply with each and every U.S. rule fit for U.S. domestic cases, as well as with the foreign country’s laws, was like sending a one-legged man to compete in an ass-kicking contest. Adhering to ethics is vital in intelligence gathering, because it constantly reminds you that your opponents can operate without any.
“What’s the alternative?” David had said with a sigh.
It was a rhetorical question. We both knew the State Department would be knocking on David’s door once some country started whining that I had bent the rules.
“David, there haven’t been any complaints,” I’d protested. He’d raised his eyebrows. “OK, just one. But I was exonerated, remember? I have a clean conscience.”
“No, Dan, you have a bad memory.”
But he hadn’t continued, so I went on. “There must be some places where I can have some leeway. I’m not asking for permission to break foreign countries’ laws, but this strictness is crippling me.”
“You know we can’t do that as a matter of policy,” David had said calmly. “But…”
He’d let it hang in the air. “But you’ll look the other way if it’s not egregious, and if I don’t get caught,” I’d said.
He’d smiled, and that was enough for me. I’ve always been a deeply religious follower of the eleventh commandment as it applies to intelligence agents: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.
CHAPTER THREE
That gray November day marked my introduction to the Chameleon case. Inside my Manhattan office were four newcomers that were impossible to ignore-battered brown cartons on the floor. A Post-it on the top carton read, “Dan, read these files and talk to me. David.”
The FBI had decided to take a fresh look at a universe of high-dollar bank and other fraud cases that were committed within the past fifteen-or-so years, had seen indictment, involved scamming $15 million and up, and were never prosecuted, for lack of defendants.
Why now?
I suspected the FBI was dumping these cases on us because they thought terrorist financing might be turned up. The perpetrators of these stale high-dollar cases had similar MOs, had been out of the country for a while before the scams, and had all vanished afterwards.
A single page would keep me busy for six days reading bank statements and about other fraud cases.
The computer-generated sticker label with a bar code on the first file’s front read “U.S. v. Albert C. Ward III, aka Harrington T. Whitney-Davis, case #86-981.” I pulled out a fresh yellow pad and a sharp pencil. I would get the facts first. I started with the FBI report. On its front page was Albert C. Ward III’s enlarged black-and-white photo and bio. Ward was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 27, 1959. He attended the Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School’s Evening School, and graduated in June 1977. Ward had worked at several minimum-wage jobs in the greater metropolitan area of Milwaukee until hired by a local security company. Following a two-week training session, Ward was given a patrolman’s uniform and was assigned to the North Lake Drive area.
After two uneventful years as a patrolman, Ward was promoted and became a night-shift-duty manager. His supervisors described him as a highly motivated and effective employee who sought adventure. They also indicated in his job-evaluation report that there were a few instances when he had been too aggressive toward his fellow employees, including one incident in which he’d punched a coworker. Ward had been arrested, but was later released when the employee refused to press charges. No intracompany disciplinary recommendations were made.
