Ghost Read online

  Seeing that it was getting close to lunchtime, I headed up to the Evidence Room Vault, which occupied more than half of the entire eighth floor. Since seized in October 1992, the forty-six kilograms sat among boxes of other FBI evidence including seized drugs, guns, knives, suitcases, computers, backpacks, and phones.

  I told the vault support employee on duty that I wanted to review, mark, and prepare the drug evidence for transport to court. She asked me to sign in and write down the case file number.

  As I entered the caged vault, I noticed a man in a white shirt and tie standing with another support person. He wasn’t someone I recognized from our Division, and had FBIHQ written all over him. Strange, but none of my business.

  While I started looking for the Pakistani heroin, two more support people entered the vault, walked over to the stranger without acknowledging me, and whispered something in his ear. Their behavior struck me as odd and alerting. An unpleasant feeling started to spread through my body.

  The stranger turned to me and asked in an aggressive manner, “What are you looking for?”

  I didn’t know him from Adam and he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. So I responded with my usual curt, “Who the fuck are you?”

  He replied simply, “You need to go see your SAC”—meaning the Special Agent in Charge, or Big Boss, or top guy in the entire office.

  It had the effect of a slap to the face. Staggered and pissed off, I asked myself: Why is a complete stranger telling me to leave the evidence vault and go see the Big Boss? Then I noticed that one of the boxes he was examining had my case file number written on it.

  What the hell is going on? I asked myself. Why is he looking at the evidence in my case?

  Alarms sounded in my head. Rather than standing there and arguing, I returned to the Squad area to look for The Colonel, but he wasn’t there. My mind racing a thousand miles an hour, I went down to Mahogany Row, where all Executive Management sat, and proceeded directly to the SAC’s office, skipping two levels in the chain of command, my supervisor and the ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge).

  Our SAC was an outstanding leader who made a point of showing up at your desk on a regular basis and asking you what was going on with your various cases. He made it clear that if you worked hard, you had nothing to fear. On the other hand, if you were lazy, he would make your life miserable.

  He and I had an excellent working relationship. So upon entering his office, I started ranting that there was some guy from HQ up in the evidence vault dicking around with my evidence. I reminded the SAC that I had an important trial coming up and didn’t need some pencil pusher auditing some bullshit compliance issue when I had more important things to do.

  The SAC looked me dead in the eye and said, “Mike, the trial is the least of your worries.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  He stared at me with steely eyes of a medieval executioner, causing a chill to course through my body. I’d never seen this side of him before.

  “Mike,” he started, “we have reason to believe that drug evidence is missing from the evidence vault. It’s a very serious matter. An internal FBI investigation is underway. I want you to return to your Squad area now. You’re not to discuss this matter with anyone including your wife, unless and until directed by me. You understand?”

  I could barely get the words out. “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  I felt like I was going to either faint or throw up. I had no idea what had happened, but the SAC had made it clear that there was a huge problem and somehow I had ended up in the middle of it.

  I literally couldn’t think straight. Fragments of thoughts passed through my head and somehow, I don’t remember how, I was back in the Squad area. But since I couldn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t want to be there. So I hurried outside.

  All the while I kept telling myself to calm down and try to think straight, but it was impossible. My blood pressure had shot so high it felt like my head was about to explode.

  Am I a suspect? I asked myself. Does the SAC really think that after all the work I did to make the case, I stole the Pakistani heroin?

  To my rational mind that didn’t seem possible.

  But his words kept repeating in my head: The trial is the least of your worries.

  Clearly, he does regard me as a suspect. Why?

  Starting to panic, I got in my car and started driving aimlessly around the city. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t discuss the situation with other Agents, and I didn’t want to upset my wife and kids. How could I go home and say, “Hi, honey. You know the case I worked on for two years around the clock? Well, the evidence was stolen, and the FBI thinks I did it?”

  In the days that followed, the pressure grew. FBI internal investigators read me my Miranda rights and took my fingerprints. Incredibly, my own employer, the agency I had worked like a dog and risked my life for, was now accusing me of stealing almost $200 million in heroin and cocaine, and reselling it on the street like a common dope dealer.

  How was this possible? Not only was my perfect life over, and the reputation I had worked so hard to establish in the toilet. If I couldn’t find a way to prove my innocence, there was a strong possibility I’d end up in federal prison hanging with some of the asshole drug dealers I’d put away! I was in the fight of my life.

  2

  RUB SOME DIRT ON IT

  I grew up in a hardscrabble city in northeastern Massachusetts, the son of an Irish cop. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Haverhill had been a thriving industrial hive of shipbuilding, woolen mills, tanneries, and shoe-making. Crowned the “Queen Slipper City” of the world in the early 1900s, factories on the Merrimack River once produced one-tenth of all shoes sold in the United States.

  When I lived there in the sixties, the Merrimack River was a heavily polluted body of rust-colored sludge unsuitable for fishing or swimming. Most of the industrial plants were closed. Haverhill had transformed into a tough-fisted decaying mill town with way too many boarded-up businesses and stores, and a seemingly equal number of neighborhood bars with names like Ray & Arlene’s, The Huddle, and The Chit Chat Lounge where troubled and defeated people went to drown their sorrows. Haverhill was, and remains, the definition of blue-collar existence.

  Our family lived in a predominantly blue-collar Irish neighborhood with some Greeks and Polish mixed in, surrounded by manual laborers, kitchen workers, firefighters, and cops. There were five kids with me in the middle and a sister and brother on either side. From my limited perspective, it was a normal childhood. We didn’t have any extra money, and didn’t think much of it, because all of our neighbors seemed to be in the same boat. To supplement Dad’s income, Mom worked the midnight shift as a secretary at a local trucking company. We had no silver spoons.

  As soon as we kids were old enough to work, we were expected to pitch in. You wanted a little spending money, you pumped gas, mowed lawns, or shoveled snow. My first salaried job was at thirteen when I washed dishes at a nursing home. After that I always had some kind of employment, even when I was in school or playing sports.

  These were the days before cable, MTV, and surfing the web, and believe it or not, we survived on three channels of black-and-white. Because Dad was a cop, most of his friends were cops. In fact, police work seemed to run in our blood. My grandfather had been a policeman, and now my son continues the proud tradition that runs four generations strong.

  In the early sixties, when I was still a little kid, everyone talked about the feared Boston Strangler who was killing innocent women. According to family lore, as my mother slept during the day I guarded her by sitting by her bed holding a baseball bat. I also patrolled the neighborhood to check that the doors were locked and recorded the numbers of strange license plates on the street.

  When Dad arrived home from his shift, all of us in the fami
ly knew to avoid him until he removed his gun from its holster, set it on the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet, grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the same shelf and poured and downed two shots, one after the other. The whiskey usually had an immediate calming effect and made him pleasant, but on other occasions sent him down a dark path. We never knew which father would show up.

  I didn’t realize at first that he was a raging alcoholic. By junior high, I’d often come home and find Dad drunk and sprawled out on the sofa, reeking of stale whiskey. When he drank, he’d get physical, whacking us with his Garrison service belt, and slapping the back of our heads—which we dubbed “the clip.” He directed most of his physical abuse at my mother. As a kid, I’d watch helplessly as he hit her. By high school, even though he was still bigger than I was, there were times when I pulled him off her, tears in her eyes and mine.

  Mom never called the police, because Dad was the police, and the next day both he and she would act like nothing had happened. As hard as I’ve tried I still don’t understand the demons he carried inside.

  One beautiful summer day I was playing on the front stoop with my brothers and sisters when one of my alcoholic uncles came to visit. Dad wasn’t home yet and my mother was asleep after working through the night. Soon after Dad returned home, we heard a loud argument erupt inside. Next thing I remember was the sound of shattering glass. I looked up to see my uncle crashing headfirst through the plateglass window and landing face-first at the bottom of the stoop. Bleeding like a cut pig and with glass shards sticking in his hair and skin, my uncle got up and staggered down the street.

  We learned later that Dad had discovered him stealing money from our mother’s purse. I didn’t think a whole lot about it, because violent family incidents took place all the time. As I got older, I stopped inviting friends over and tried to hide this ugly truth.

  Naturally, I adopted this method of settling arguments myself. So did other kids I knew. I suspect now that their home environments weren’t so different from mine. Fistfights became our way of dealing with disputes about stealing someone’s sandwich, an insult, or being the butt of a joke. No knives or weapons, just bare fists and bruised skin and pride.

  If I returned home from a fight with a shiner, or bleeding from the nose, Dad’s response was always the same, “Rub some dirt on it.” That was the mantra he repeated whether you had a bone sticking out or had suffered a tough defeat on the baseball diamond. It was his way of saying: Life is tough, and there’s no point bitching about it. Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and take your best shot.

  I remember one time returning home from a beer-induced brawl and my Dad looking at my swollen eye and asking, “Who gave you that?”

  “Jimmy McDougal,” I answered.

  “Jimmy McDougal?” he responded with disgust in his voice. “He’s a fucking golfer.”

  Dad didn’t want to hear your problems. Most nights at dinnertime, Mom was asleep and he was working. So we kids made our own meals and did our homework. It was a rare occasion when the whole family sat down together for dinner and discussed the day’s events.

  Given the environment I grew up in, it seemed perfectly natural for me to take up drinking at an early age. By the time I started high school I was hanging on street corners with my buddies boozing, and handing bums a buck to go to the liquor store for us to buy Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or a pint of Southern Comfort. It didn’t take me long to see where I was headed—drowning my troubles in the same bars Dad had when I was fifty years old.

  I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen, and knew that if I wanted out of Haverhill and out of the destructive cycle, I’d have to do it on my own. Dad made it clear that there would be no money to send us to college, probably because he was spending whatever extra there was on gambling and booze. I figured the only way I could escape was via sports, which I played incessantly at every park, field, and rink in the city.

  Baseball became my primary outlet and passion. I discovered I had some physical skills passed on by my father who had been signed to a minor league with the New York Yankees in the late 1940s. I played ball whenever I could—sometimes from sunrise to sunset—and developed into a pretty good hitter. As a senior, I broke my high school’s forty-year batting record and, unknowingly, started being noticed by professional scouts.

  End of my senior year, a picture appeared in the local Haverhill paper of me being awarded a trophy while standing next to a scout from the New York Mets. Years later, I learned that the Mets had offered me a minor league contract, which my father turned down without ever telling me. He never explained why.

  My plan at the end of senior year was to join the Marines under a buddy system that would allow me and a friend to remain together through basic training. My friend suggested that we hitchhike cross-country instead and figure out our futures along the way.

  That summer of 1975, while I was debating which route to take, I worked as a playground instructor for neighborhood kids. One afternoon as I was supervising a whiffle ball match, I saw a police cruiser pull up to the park and my father get out. My first thought was that I was in some kind of trouble. Then I noticed he was carrying a letter.

  The letter turned out to be from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and it said that they were offering me a scholarship to play baseball. What? I read it a second time. The fact that I had never heard of Rollins College and hadn’t applied, led me to believe that the letter was some kind of joke. But my father’s serious expression revealed it wasn’t.

  He said, “This is the opportunity of a lifetime, son, and one you shouldn’t pass up.”

  “Of course,” I stammered back, feeling like I’d just been hit by lightning.

  That letter came out of the blue and literally changed my life. To my dying day I’ll always be grateful to Rollins College for offering me an opportunity to do the thing I loved most—play baseball—and attend college for almost free! All because I was pretty good at hitting a curveball. I felt like the luckiest kid on earth.

  I left Haverhill at the end of the summer of 1975 with a steamer trunk packed with my scant belongings including my beloved Rawlings A2000 glove, freshly oiled and placed on top. I’d never been outside of New England and I’d never flown on a plane. I landed three hours later at Orlando International Airport with less than $20 in my pocket and with no idea how to get to the school.

  Hours later, a graduate assistant showed up to drive me to Rollins College. As I looked out the window at the swaying palm trees and brilliant sunshine, the landscape was so foreign to me I might as well have been in Russia. After twenty minutes, we arrived at the town of Winter Park and entered an oasis of handsome buildings, trees, and manicured lawns on the banks of Lake Virginia.

  “Welcome to Rollins College,” the graduate assistant announced.

  It was love at first sight.

  Rollins, the graduate assistant explained, was a Division II powerhouse baseball school and also a place where wealthy families sent their beautiful daughters. Team upperclassmen arrived to greet me and show me the ropes—where my dorm was situated, when and where to get my meals, where the kegs were, and the best places to meet the beautiful girls.

  They treated me like gold, and I quickly learned what it was like to be part of a team that worked toward a common goal—a skill that later became extremely useful in law enforcement. All the players on the team, whether African American, white, or Hispanic were brothers and we all had each other’s backs.

  During an exhibition game my freshman year, I remember an opposing runner spiking our second baseman, and me and the other twenty-five guys on our team jumping into the fray without considering the consequences.

  As a young man away from home for the first time, I cut loose and quickly developed a rep for being a jokester. The order of my priorities became baseball, girls, beer, parties, and finally classes. Teammates nicknamed me “Scoop,” not because of my prowess on the baseball field, but because of my ability to woo the ladies.

/>   After practice, a group of us would usually stroll over to the local convenience store where we’d buy six-packs of Busch beer at ninety-nine cents a pop, and spend whatever we had left over on a cheap flavored wine called “Mad Dog” 20/20. One night with an ample amount of Busch and Mad Dog in my system, I wandered into the laundromat next door and challenged my friends to climb into one of the industrial-sized dryers and see how long they could tumble inside before getting sick or banging on the little round glass door and begging us to let them out.

  This gave birth to a Rollins phenomenon known as the Industrial Dryer Races, which eventually attracted big crowds and all kinds of insane shenanigans. One brave and foolish friend stayed in the dryer so long, he had a permanent scar seared into his forearm.

  On the baseball field, I had trouble locating fly balls in the high Florida sky. I also struggled at the plate, but eventually got on a solid hitting streak that had the coaches talking about promoting me to varsity. Toward the end of exhibition season, I slumped again, and was assigned to the lowly freshman squad.

  Instead of working harder, I copped an attitude, acting like I was more interested in girls and staying up late and drinking than baseball. When I started showing up at practice late or hung over, the older guys on the team pulled me aside and told me to clean up my act. Then, I ripped up my ankle pushing off to make a catch.

  Beginning of sophomore year I had to return to Massachusetts for major surgery and ending up wearing a cast from my foot to my hip for six months. I spent most of that time sitting on the beach in Florida drinking beer and stuffing beer tabs inside my cast. You should have seen the surprised looks on the faces on the doctors when they removed the cast and dozens of aluminum tabs spilled out.

  * * *

  During the grueling rehab process, I started to realize that my dreams of playing professional baseball weren’t likely to come true. Sure, I could hit the hell out of a baseball and had been a phenom in cold New England, but Florida baseball involved a whole different level of competition. Now that I walked with a limp I probably wasn’t ever going to become a five-tool player like some guys on our team. One of them named John Castino went on to become a professional baseball player for the Minnesota Twins and was named AL Rookie of the Year in 1979, my senior year.