Missing Man Read online

  During his seminars for young FBI agents, he talked about his experiences and showed PowerPoint slides. He discussed the types of personality traits found in people willing to become informants. They tended to be independent thinkers, he said, rather than rule followers and were often empathetic, imaginative, and social. A variety of motives might cause them to open up; some even saw cooperation with the cops as a way to eliminate or take revenge against a rival. Other informants were thrill seekers or wannabe cops. Bob sprinkled his presentation with references to espionage and true crime books, quoting passages from authors such as David Ignatius, a journalist who wrote spy thrillers, and Robert Baer, a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who chronicled his experiences as an operative in the Middle East. “‘Soon recruiting agents became as natural as ordering a pizza over the telephone. It’s all a matter of listening to what people are really saying,’” read one of Bob’s slides quoting Baer. He warned agents about the pitfalls of dealings with informants and urged them not to get too close to a source or consider one a friend. Another slide read:

  When you are trying to recruit a member of a criminal organization or terrorist group, remember one thing—you are, in effect

  • Selling suicide

  • If that person is discovered cooperating with the FBI or law enforcement, the penalty is usually death

  * * *

  Bob knew from the age of eight what he wanted to be. His inspiration came from a movie called The House on 92nd Street, released in 1945, three years before he was born. The film was a B-grade thriller about a college student who goes undercover for the FBI during World War II to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring trying to steal secrets about the atomic bomb. The FBI officially sanctioned the movie, and it contained a brief introduction by Director J. Edgar Hoover extolling the agency’s mission. After Bob saw it, he was all law-and-order. While other teenagers played sports, he hung out with friends in the attic of his parents’ home in New Hyde Park, a Long Island suburb, acting out courtroom dramas. For dialogue they used transcripts from real trials that his mother typed up for lawyers to make extra money. He attended the City College of New York and worked during summers as an aide in the New York City Department of Investigations, an agency that ferrets out municipal corruption. When he graduated from college in 1970 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he didn’t attend the ceremony because he was training to be a DEA agent. The FBI required five years of law enforcement experience to qualify for a job and the DEA was the place where he would cut his teeth.

  One evening two years later, he went to TGI Friday’s, then a popular singles bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. An attractive twenty-two-year-old office worker, Christine Gorman, was there with a girlfriend. Chris, who was short and had dark hair, was convinced that Bob was interested in her friend. He was interested in her. Before leaving the bar, he got Chris’s phone number, and they soon began seeing each other. The only obstacle to their romance was his parents. Chris, who had grown up on Long Island in a large Catholic family, wanted to raise her children Catholic. Bob couldn’t have cared less about religion, but his family was Jewish, and when he and Chris got married in 1973, Bob’s father cut him off and sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual for the dead.

  The DEA transferred Bob to Denver, and it was there in 1976 that he got the call he had been waiting for—the FBI wanted to hire him. He went to the bureau’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned to its office in Los Angeles. It was a short-lived posting. Chris, who had already given birth to the couple’s first child, was again pregnant and wanted to return to the East Coast to be close to her family. In 1978, she and Bob got their wish; he was offered a plum assignment in New York working on organized crime cases.

  In the early 1980s, one of those Mafia cases captured the country’s attention. It involved President Ronald Reagan’s choice for secretary of labor, Raymond Donovan, and allegations that his New Jersey construction company had Mafia ties. Donovan, a top executive of Schiavone Construction, denied the rumors, and FBI officials testified during his Senate confirmation hearings that a bureau investigation had found nothing to suggest connections between Donovan’s company and the mob. But after the new secretary of labor assumed his post, Time magazine published a bombshell—during an investigation in the late 1970s, the FBI had secretly recorded members of the Genovese crime family discussing Donovan, Schiavone, and a scheme to use minority-owned firms as fronts to win public construction contracts. To Bob, the revelation wasn’t news. He had headed the investigation that produced those recordings, and a bitter dispute within the bureau over his handling of the informant in the case had nearly destroyed his young FBI career.

  That informant, Michael Orlando, was a onetime schoolteacher who had turned to theft and armed robbery. Another FBI agent, Larry Sweeney, initially recruited Orlando as a source, and after he learned Orlando was close to Genovese family members, he introduced him to Bob. Orlando, who was being paid $500 a week by the FBI to be a top, or “high-echelon,” informant, told Bob he was willing to infiltrate a Bronx meatpacking warehouse, run by a Genovese lieutenant named William Masselli, that served as a drop-off point for hijacked trucks and other criminal activities. In return, Bob reiterated Larry Sweeney’s earlier promise to Orlando not to disclose his identity as a bureau source even to other FBI agents working on the case, for fear it might leak out and get him killed.

  In 1978, Bob wrote a fourteen-page memo to FBI headquarters based on information picked up by bureau listening devices planted inside the Bronx warehouse. In it, he said the material being gathered had “excellent prosecutive potential” for cases of political corruption, fraud, labor racketeering, police corruption, and narcotics trafficking. But the inquiry ran into trouble when other bureau agents, unaware of Orlando’s role as an informant, started reporting that he was taking part in truck hijackings and other crimes. When Bob and Sweeney confronted Orlando, he offered the informant’s perfect excuse—fellow gangsters would quickly finger him as a stoolie, he said, if he walked away whenever a crime was going down. He promised to behave, but some FBI managers viewed Orlando as an informant run amok, and before long it wasn’t clear who was playing whom. In addition, William Masselli was heard on an FBI bug telling a fellow gangster that Orlando had carried out multiple contract killings for the mob. “This kid Mike … When I say he’s a bad kid … Forget about it … He knows it,” Masselli said. “This guy’s got about ten under his belt already.”

  Bob and Sweeney hadn’t seen any evidence connecting Orlando to mob hits, and they argued that arresting him for truck hijackings would prematurely end the Bronx investigation, expose him as an informant, and violate their pledge to him. Supervisors overruled them, and when Orlando was arrested, Sweeney filed a complaint with FBI headquarters. A subsequent internal FBI review largely supported how Bob and Sweeney had handled Orlando, but by then the episode had resulted in too much bad blood inside the bureau’s New York office. Bob’s supervisors took him off organized crime and assigned him to foreign counterintelligence, an effective demotion. When a job opened in the FBI’s Miami office in 1984, he jumped at it, eager to make a fresh start.

  Bob’s arrival in South Florida was perfectly timed. In the mid-1980s, the world of organized crime was undergoing a sea change. It was the era of Miami Vice, as Colombian drug cartels smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States by the plane- and shipload. Bob, who spoke some Spanish, jumped right in and soon found a new informant, a Colombian-born fashion photographer, Baruch Vega, who shot assignments with top models such as Lauren Hutton and Christie Brinkley. During those years, it was almost impossible for law enforcement agencies to get information about the cartels because arrested gang members knew they would be killed if they squealed. So Bob and Vega concocted an off-the-wall strategy to try to trick cartel leaders into letting their subordinates cooperate.

  The plan revolved around a fictional character they created—a corrupt FBI agent named “Bob Roberts” who was willin
g, if paid off, to get arrested gang members out of jail by telling his bureau bosses they had agreed to become informants. Vega told cartel leaders, with whom he hobnobbed while on photo assignments in Central and South America, about Roberts and how gang members only needed to pretend they were cooperating to be freed. Cartel heads liked the deal, so they gave Vega bribes meant for Roberts and told underlings about him. After Vega pocketed the cash, Bob or another agent, pretending to be “Bob Roberts,” visited a gang member and said they could get out of jail but only by sharing real information about drug running.

  By the early 1990s, Bob became one of the bureau’s resident experts on another ethnic crime wave—the flood of mobsters, thugs, and financial con men who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, arrived in the United States from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Many of the gangs set up shop in Brooklyn and Miami, and Bob was sitting in his office in 1994 when a terrified-looking man walked in. The man, Alexander Volkov, had fled to Florida from New York after learning that a feared Russian enforcer was looking for him.

  Volkov was hardly an innocent. He and a partner had operated a Wall Street investment firm called Summit International that was really a Ponzi scheme. When the scheme collapsed, a Russian bank that had invested with Summit hired a gangster named Vyacheslav Ivankov, who headed a gang based in Brighton Beach that specialized in blackmail, loan-sharking, and murder. Volkov initially hid out at the Miami home of a friend named Leonid Venjik, who convinced him that his best hope for staying alive rested with the FBI. Soon afterward, Volkov, his Summit partner, and Venjik agreed to become part of a bureau operation aimed at Ivankov. The three men told the Russian gangster they were coming to New York to strike a deal to repay the bank’s money. After Ivankov listened to their proposal, he responded with death threats, which were captured on hidden FBI video cameras. He was indicted and convicted on extortion charges, a case that marked the first successful prosecution in the United States of a major Russian criminal.

  By then, Bob’s connections in the world of intelligence gathering were deepening. He worked closely with CIA operatives on Colombian cocaine cases and traveled to Europe to represent the FBI at international law enforcement meetings about Russian organized crime. In 1992, at a conference in New Mexico about Russian crime put on by the Justice Department for FBI agents, prosecutors, and others, he met a CIA analyst named Anne Jablonski. They clicked immediately. She was a walking encyclopedia of information about Russian gangs. He entertained her with stories about the Russian mobsters he was chasing in Miami. He soon gave her a nickname. He called her “Toots.”

  * * *

  When SafirRosetti hired Bob in 2004, the firm was eager to build its product counterfeiting business. Bob brought an old client, Philip Morris, to the firm along with one of his informants, Leonid Venjik, the Russian émigré in Miami who had worked with him on the Ivankov case. Venjik had a network of sources in Eastern Europe, and Bob used him on product counterfeiting investigations. Soon, Venjik started sending in reports warning that Philip Morris had a mole within its ranks.

  The informant said his sources had spotted an executive from the company’s Richmond, Virginia, headquarters selling technical expertise and equipment to cigarette counterfeiters in Bosnia. That information included Philip Morris’s most closely guarded secret, the “recipe” of tobacco varieties and additives used to produce a Marlboro’s distinctive taste. As a result, the counterfeiters were flooding the market with fake Marlboros that looked and tasted like real ones. In a SafirRosetti report to the cigarette maker, Bob provided a description of the mole, who was called “David.”

  From conversations overheard by the source, “David” is employed by Philip Morris in a very responsible position, but not in a sales capacity—rather he is involved primarily in “technical operations” and he displays a familiarity with the equipment and machinery involved in the manufacturing of tobacco products; he also shows a technical expertise in the areas of tobacco filters and paper, along with how “production lines” are operated.

  “David” mentioned that he was going to be attending some type of “seminar” which Philip Morris was holding in the United States at the beginning of July 2004.

  While at SafirRosetti, Bob continued to hear from other old informants. In 2004, one sought his help on behalf of the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazakh president was then at the center of the biggest foreign corruption case ever brought by U.S. prosecutors. In the previous year, an American oil industry consultant, James Giffen, had been arrested and charged with paying millions in bribes to Nazarbayev and other officials in the former Soviet republic to win oil exploration contracts. Federal prosecutors froze Nazarbayev’s Swiss bank account, alleging it contained $70 million in kickbacks paid him by Giffen.

  Bob’s source said that he and one of Nazarbayev’s closest associates had been secretly meeting for months with FBI agents in New York in an attempt to cut a deal on behalf of the Kazakh president. In exchange for unfreezing his Swiss bank account, Nazarbayev was willing to help the United States track down Al Qaeda terrorists and identify traffickers in chemical and biological weapons. They hadn’t made any headway, so Bob’s informant asked him to contact his government sources. Bob drafted a memo and apparently sent it to several agencies, including the CIA. He wrote that the Kazakh president was willing to help the U.S. government by:

  1. Identifying and locating leadership, membership and associates of Al Qaeda, utilizing the full cooperation and resources of the Kazakhstan government’s special services, including the country’s intelligence organization.

  2. Identifying and locating traffickers in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as chemical, biological and nuclear devices or materials.

  3. Any and all counter-terrorism targets as identified by the USG.

  In the memo, Bob suggested setting up a meeting between a top U.S. official and an emissary of the Kazakh president. “This may, in fact, be the last opportunity to engage in dialogue along these lines as credibility has been lost because of the time and effort already invested” by representatives of Nazarbayev, he wrote.

  Right around that time, two Miami-based FBI agents visited Bob at his SafirRosetti office. For months, he had been passing along to the bureau information Leonid Venjik was giving him about counterfeiters selling fake Marlboros. As was his practice, Bob hadn’t revealed Venjik’s identity in the memos, referring to him simply as his “source.” The FBI agents told Bob they were interested in the information and were hoping he might give them his source’s name or set up a meeting with him. Bob smiled. He replied that he had never given up an informant during all the years he spent in their shoes and he wasn’t about to start.

  The visit hadn’t been a friendly call. It was a test and Bob had failed. The DEA already knew that Leonid Venjik was Bob’s informant because the drug agency, along with police officials in Austria, were investigating him for trafficking in counterfeit Marlboros and cocaine. Venjik had even bragged to an undercover DEA agent that he was playing Bob by feeding him dribs of information in order to use his role as an informant to collect money from SafirRosetti and shield his crimes. Bob had been totally in the dark, and if he had given up Venjik’s name to the FBI, the episode might have ended there. But by refusing to do so, he heightened the suspicions of some DEA and Austrian investigators that he had known about Venjik’s activities. He then dug himself a deeper hole. After Venjik’s arrest in Austria, Bob flew there in December 2004 to visit him in prison and gave Austrian authorities a sworn affidavit attesting to his honesty. He was doing exactly what he warned young agents not to do for an informant, and, with each well-meaning step, he made things worse for himself.

  In early 2005, he learned that a federal prosecutor in Miami was asking questions about him, a sign that he might soon face charges. Chris urged him not to worry; everyone knew he was honest, she said, and they would come to their senses. But as the months passed, the federal prosecutor handling the
inquiry, Joseph Cooley, let Bob twist in the wind. When Bob tried contacting Cooley, his calls weren’t returned. It was a tactic he had seen prosecutors use when they wanted to make a target sweat.

  Bob became so gripped by anxiety that he called David McGee, the lawyer in Pensacola. Dave had spent twenty years as a federal prosecutor before going into private practice, and he knew Bob from his days as an FBI agent. Bob asked Dave to represent him as his lawyer. “I’m going to get eaten alive by the knowledge that my life, my livelihood, my reputation will be in ruins by the time that people find out this is a big mistake,” Bob said in a note. “I did not spend a lifetime in law enforcement and investigations … to go over to the other side.”

  On that same day, Bob sent a letter to Joseph Cooley from Panama, where he was working on a case for the Center for Justice and Accountability, the human rights organization.

  I am writing this letter from Panama City, Panama where I am trying to locate and bring about the apprehension of an international fugitive wanted by the Government of Spain for torture and human rights violations. I believe that I’m getting close to getting this guy, utilizing 35 years of experience in this business and the assistance of sources I recruited and directed.

  A horrible tragedy is about to happen to me and it is in your power to do something about it. A miscarriage of justice and colossal error is about to take place, in effect ruining my life, my reputation, in effect, all that I have built over a career spanning more than thirty-five years.

  It is very tough to be able to concentrate my efforts on catching bad guys when you hear the kinds of things that I am now hearing.