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  FOR ELLEN AND LILY

  Prologue

  November 13, 2010, Gulf Breeze, Florida

  Rain splattered against the windshield of her silver-gray BMW as Sonya Dobbs pulled up to a security gate blocking the street. It wasn’t much of a gate, at least by Florida standards, just a long, rolling fence stretching across a road. She punched a code into the gate’s keypad. After two unsuccessful tries, she used her cell phone to call her boss, David McGee, who opened the gate from inside his house. It slid back and Sonya drove through, a laptop resting on the passenger seat.

  Sonya’s Saturday night had started very differently. She had planned to spend it sorting through photographs. Sonya worked as Dave’s paralegal at a large law firm called Beggs & Lane located in Pensacola, a city at the western end of Florida’s Panhandle, the narrow, two-hundred-mile-long coastal strip tucked between the Gulf of Mexico and the states of Alabama and Georgia. Sonya wanted to carve out a second career as a photographer, and she had been on a chase boat the previous day in Pensacola Bay, snapping pictures of a new oceangoing tugboat, christened Freedom, as it went through test maneuvers. The photos showed the big black and gray tug slicing through the foamy water under a blue sky filled with white, puffy clouds. A maker of some of the boat’s parts had ordered pictures, and Sonya was happily spending her Saturday evening playing with different ways to crop the images.

  Then the phone rang, and she heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line. Over the past three years, she had spoken to Ira Silverman hundreds of times, if she had to guess. Most days, the retired television newsman phoned Dave at least once. Their conversations were always about a mutual friend, Robert Levinson, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned private investigator. Sonya had never met him, though she felt as if she had.

  Bob disappeared in 2007 while on a trip to Iran. Dave and Ira, who had both known Bob for years, were trying to help his desperate family find him. Months after the investigator went missing, Dave convinced Bob’s wife, Christine, to ship his work files to Beggs & Lane. Sonya had read through them and organized the reports. She was a natural snoop, at ease with computers. Before long, she had tracked down Bob’s email accounts and figured out the passwords. As she walked through the record of his life, she learned a secret that Dave, Ira, and Chris already knew: the explanation that U.S. government officials were giving out publicly to explain Bob’s reason for visiting Iran wasn’t true, at least not the part that really mattered.

  Since the investigator’s disappearance, there had been reported sightings of him in Tehran’s Evin Prison, the notorious jail where political dissidents are tortured or killed. Some tipsters had come forward to claim that the Revolutionary Guards, the elite military force aligned with Iran’s Islamic religious leaders, were holding him at a secret detention center. His family had made public pleas for information about him, and the FBI had assigned agents to the search. But the hunt for the missing man had gone nowhere.

  Ira’s call was about an email he had gotten earlier that Saturday containing a message that read like a ransom note. He had received similar emails before and had passed them on to the FBI. But this one wasn’t like the others. This email had a file attached to it. Ira told Sonya he couldn’t figure out how to open the attachment and was forwarding it to her to see if she could. The email read:

  This is a serious message

  Until this time we have prepared a good situation for Bob and he is in good health. we announce for the last ultimatum that his life is based on and related to you

  You should pay 3000000$ (in cash) and release our friends: Salem Mohamad Ahmad Ghasem, Ahmad Ali Alarzagh, Ebrahim Ali Ahmad.

  We are waiting for your positive answer without any preconditions. We would announce our way to receive the money.

  Sonya clicked on the email’s attachment, but nothing happened. She didn’t recognize the file’s extension, the three-letter code that tells a computer which program is needed to open a file. She suspected the extension—.flv—signified it was a video file, and she hunted around on the Internet for information about a recommended player. Finding one, she downloaded the software and clicked again on the attachment. This time, the file launched and a man’s gaunt face appeared, seemingly staring out at her. He had closely shorn gray hair, a moustache, and sunken cheeks covered by stubble. He started speaking in a deep, raspy voice. Strange music played in the background, rhythmic instruments accompanied by a singer’s droning call. After a few seconds, the camera pulled back and Sonya could see that the man was sitting in front of a gray stone wall in what appeared to be a stark prison cell. The polo shirt he wore looked threadbare and hung on his frame as though it was several sizes too big for him. Part of the shirt’s right sleeve was gone. There was nothing immediately threatening about the video. Masked jihadists weren’t standing over the man brandishing guns or swords, and there wasn’t a black political banner hanging behind him. Still, the video was disquieting. The man’s arms didn’t move as he spoke, suggesting that his hands, which couldn’t be seen in the video, might be lying manacled in his lap. He struggled to stay calm and to keep his words measured. Occasionally, his voice came close to breaking and he would briefly close his eyes, pause, or gesture by turning his head. He said:

  For my beau— my beautiful, my loving, my loyal wife, Christine … and my children … and my grandson … and also for the United States government … I have been held here for three and a half years … I am not in very good health … I am running … very quickly out of diabetes medicine … I have been treated … well … but I need the help of the United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held me for three and a half years … And please help me … get home … Thirty-three years of service to the United States deserves something … Please help me.

  Dave McGee opened his front door and ushered Sonya out of the rain. They went into the kitchen, where the lawyer’s wife, Joyce, was waiting. Sonya put her laptop on the table, opened it, and launched the video. Dave wasn’t positive that Bob was the man on the tape. The last time he had seen the former FBI agent, he resembled a big, overweight teddy bear with a mop of hair. The man on the tape was so thin that the skin on his throat sagged. Dave realized that the only way to know for sure was to call Christine. Sonya dialed her number, and when Chris answered, she put her cell phone next to the computer and clicked on the video. A few moments passed.

  “That’s Bob’s voice,” Chris said. “That’s Bob.”

  1

  The House on Ninety-Second Street

  When they were teenagers, Bob Levinson’s oldest sons thought the greatest way to spend a Sunday afternoon was to sprawl out on the living room couch with a bag of Famous Amos cookies and watch Mafia movies. Dan and Dave were big fans of Goodfellas, and Dave had memorized nearly every line spoken by Ray Liotta, who portrayed Henry Hill, a mobster in the federal witness protection program. The boys would crack up as
Dave reeled off dialogue. Their father liked to sit nearby, at the kitchen table reading a book. But sooner or later, he would get up and walk over to his sons with a disapproving look. “I used to put guys like this away for a living,” he would remark, and tell them again he thought movies like Goodfellas romanticized thugs. Dan and Dave knew it came with the turf when your father was an FBI agent. “That’s cool, Dad,” they responded before going back to the movie.

  Bob and Chris had seven children. The three oldest were girls, Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah, followed by Dan and Dave, then Samantha, and finally, Douglas. Their children had been born over sixteen years and they were all brought up to revere the FBI; they liked having an agent for a father. As kids, they would race to the front door when they heard it open in the evening because the first one to greet him got to pull off his shoes. He always came back from FBI trips with presents. One time, he handed out tee shirts decorated with pictures of pineapples, a reference to “Old Pineapple Face,” the name coined by Panamanians for Manuel Noriega, their pockmark-faced president who was arrested by the United States on drug trafficking charges. The kids helped him keep his files organized by stapling his expense receipts into them. None of them realized some of the receipts were records of cash that their father had paid to criminals and other sources for information.

  For Bob and Chris, raising a big family on a $90,000 FBI salary wasn’t easy. The couple’s first home in Coral Springs, Florida, where they moved in 1984 after Bob transferred to the bureau’s office in Miami from New York, was tiny. The three oldest girls shared a bedroom outfitted with bunk beds and a trundle underneath that was pulled out at night. When a new baby arrived, Bob created a nursery by cordoning off part of the dining room with a curtain. Chris never went food shopping without filling her purse with coupons, and a big family night out meant going to McDonald’s on days when two hamburgers were on sale for the price of one. No one minded and the kids were happy and thriving.

  By the late 1990s, the family needed more money. Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah were in college or about to start, and soon there would be four more college tuitions to pay. Bob also wanted Chris to have a bigger home and a more comfortable life. During their long marriage they had never gone away alone together for a weekend. In 1998, when he was fifty, Bob decided to leave the FBI, seven years before mandatory retirement age. After three decades as a federal agent, he joined the exodus of graying government detectives into the private sector, where he could triple his salary. But leaving the FBI behind would prove far harder than he imagined.

  When Bob started in law enforcement in the 1970s, private investigators were regarded as sleazy snoops hired to catch cheating spouses or find runaway teenagers. By the 1990s a new corporate investigations industry was feeding a growing demand for information from companies, Wall Street firms, lawyers, and others. Manufacturers making pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, and high-fashion handbags needed investigators to track down criminals producing counterfeit versions of their products. Hedge funds and private equity firms were hungry for secrets about investment targets. American companies and banks doing deals with businessmen in Russia and Eastern Europe wanted to know if they were corrupt or had criminal ties.

  The big investigative firms were staffed by former prosecutors, retired agents from the FBI and other agencies, and ex–newspaper reporters. They adopted the veneer of law firms and charged clients similar rates. One of the largest, Kroll Associates, employed dozens of investigators and had offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was a highly competitive industry in which firms won contracts by convincing clients they had the connections to deliver valuable “strategic” information. Often, they produced high-priced smoke—reports that blended fact, rumor, and speculation. Their tactics could also be as bare-knuckled as those of the old-time private eyes who spied on love nests. In the late 1990s, one major new source of work for corporate investigative firms came from Russian oligarchs, financial and industrial magnates who had gained astronomical wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. The oligarchs liked to depict themselves as a new breed of Russian entrepreneurs, Western-style capitalists who succeeded through shrewd dealings and risk-taking, rather than payoffs and political corruption. That often wasn’t the case, and some oligarchs hired investigative firms to dig up dirt that could be used to blackmail a critic into silence, a technique known in the trade as a “hard shoulder.”

  Bob preferred to keep his nose clean. His first job was with a firm called DSFX, in its Miami office. Construction was then under way on the American Airlines Arena, the indoor stadium that became home to the Miami Heat basketball team, and DSFX was hired to help local officials monitor possible fraud on the project. Bob also began to work with Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, trying to locate pirate factories producing counterfeits of its famous brand. At the time, drug gangs in Latin America were also doing a brisk business in kidnapping American executives and demanding large ransoms for their release, and companies used Bob to negotiate those deals. “If you do this right, it’s not like in the movies,” Bob told a reporter then writing an article about corporate kidnappings. “You don’t hear music in the background, only the sound of pens on paper.”

  With more money, Bob and Chris, like most people, found ways to spend it. They bought a big new home in a gated community in Coral Springs and two new cars. While their three older daughters had gone to Florida State University, their two older sons wanted to go to more expensive private colleges outside the state and Bob and Chris agreed to send them.

  When DSFX was sold in 2001, Bob started his own one-man shop, R. A. Levinson & Associates, which he ran out of his home. He had never operated a business before and it proved a constant hustle. He had to scramble for work, cater to clients, pay bills, collect on accounts, and make sure more money was coming in than going out. As a lone wolf, he took what he could get. His assignments were a hodgepodge, running from background investigations into Russian businessmen to counterfeit product cases. In a typical month, he might take three or four trips, including travel abroad to cities like London, Kiev, and Managua. He would book a hotel room to meet with a source and, in the evening, go to a different hotel to sleep. Before turning in, he would order room service and spend hours typing up reports to clients, responding to emails, and sending out feelers to drum up new work. The constant travel and bad eating habits took a toll. At six feet four, Bob had always been a very big man, but he soon weighed 240 pounds and had diabetes and high blood pressure.

  In 2004, another large investigations firm, SafirRosetti, hired him to open an office in Boca Raton, Florida. With a steady salary, he didn’t constantly have to scramble for clients and could provide his family financial security. But there was a problem—his head and his heart weren’t in the work. Chasing product counterfeiters didn’t compare to the thrill of an FBI agent hunting criminals for Uncle Sam. After he worked hard to investigate a case, a company’s executives might decide not to alert law enforcement officials to his findings, fearing that the resulting publicity might damage their reputation or give a competitor a leg up. He would tell friends he was working for the “rich people’s police,” and even some of his kids could see that he wasn’t happy. He tried to strike a balance by taking on assignments for public interest groups. One organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, used investigators like Bob to track down people who had committed human rights abuses in their native countries and had since moved to the United States, often under an assumed name. When Bob met one of the group’s lawyers at a Miami café, he beamed and said, “I love what you guys do.” He couldn’t imagine saying that to a corporate executive.

  When he traveled on jobs, he fed information he picked up back to friends at the FBI and other federal agencies. Every ex-cop turned private investigator does that in order to keep doors open when they need help. Bob, however, wanted more. He still wanted to be part of the action. Every few months, he traveled to FBI field offices in cities li
ke Memphis, Kansas City, and Seattle to teach seminars for young agents on techniques for identifying and recruiting informants.

  From the very start of his career, Bob was a collector of information, intelligence, and people. He cast himself as the proverbial “good cop,” a big, friendly guy who liked everybody and who wanted everybody to like him. It wasn’t an act or even a stretch. By nature, he was gregarious and possessed an instinct for knowing how people wanted to be treated and what they wanted to hear. Ten minutes after sitting down in a restaurant, he would be on a first-name basis with the waiter or waitress serving him, and he would leave a big tip behind to make sure they remembered him. He loved handing out nicknames; everybody got one, family members, friends, and new acquaintances. The names were usually corny—stuff like “Professor” or “Doctor”—but people walked away charmed, thinking that Bob had coined the name just for them. He even varied how he introduced himself, depending on the impression he wanted to create. Some people knew him as Bob. Others called him Bobby. He liked to use “Bobby” at times, he explained to one of his sons, because its boyish sound made his large stature and status as an agent seem less threatening.

  Once Bob got people talking, they often kept talking. If they were criminals, they might hope he would cut them a break. Other people might cooperate to get cash or because they wanted him to solve an immigration problem. Whatever the specifics, his relationships involved the give-and-take that binds together a cop and an informant. From the start of his law enforcement career, Bob believed he could make more cases from informants than he could from working the street. Once he ran into a Drug Enforcement Administration agent he knew outside a Manhattan courthouse. The DEA agent, who did undercover buys, was dressed for the part in jeans, a battered leather jacket, and a bulletproof vest. Bob, who worked for the DEA before joining the FBI, had on his own uniform—a suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. He looked at his friend and pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. “I’m going to put more people in jail with this than you are with all that armor,” he told him.