The Last Undercover (20 page)
On October 10, two months after the initial telephone call, my “wife” and I made our way to Todd’s estate, a beautiful home set on a large piece of land surrounded by the houses of actors and professional athletes. I had my wife stay in the car as I approached the residence. I politely knocked on the door several times with no response. I then pounded. As I began to question whether the target suspected an undercover sting and decided to cancel our meeting, the door opened.
Before me, stood a five-foot-eight-inch, forty-year-old man with a protruding paunch. He was barefoot, shirtless, and sported earrings, pierced nipples, and tattoos. Todd wasn’t exactly the picture of professional competence I might have expected should I truly be seeking someone to perform such a delicate procedure on my daughters.
It was late in the afternoon and he excused his appearance by stating that he had performed a procedure that lasted all night and was just now awakening. I signaled for my wife to join us and we followed Todd into his expansive kitchen, almost as large as my first house. As the three of us sat at the kitchen table, a female who appeared to be in her early twenties entered the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator, almost at a parade-rest position, her arms folded behind her back. She was extremely thin but reminded me of the actress Jennifer Garner.
Todd was not the least bit hesitant in discussing his activities and readily answered our questions. My biggest problem was controlling my wife, who peppered him with queries, often interrupting him as he was about to make incriminating statements. She was a perfect undercover wife, and her sincere inquiries added to our overall credibility. However, I needed evidence: verbal admissions that he performed the procedures in the past and was willing to perform them on our underage daughters. Todd, however, was careful and skated around the law in his explanation of the procedures he performed. He agreed to do the procedures on our daughters but would not acknowledge having done them on juveniles in the past.
I was shocked when Todd interrupted one of my questions by loudly snapping his fingers and demanding a soft drink. Robyn, the pretty female standing near the refrigerator, grabbed a can of soda and marched over to the table. She squatted down, kissed the can, and ceremoniously presented the can to him using both hands. She then rose, took one step backward, executed an about-face, and returned to her position guarding the refrigerator.
Did I just see what I thought I saw? I wanted to snap my fingers and see if I could instigate a repeat performance, but I was too stunned to move.
Within a few minutes, Todd demanded that Robyn “bring the notebooks.” She returned with four huge notebooks crammed with hundreds of eight-by-ten photos of procedures he had done, including male and female circumcisions, piercings, and genital modifications. Every photo was of an adult and Todd, who only admitted to “dabbling in college” and didn’t claim to be a licensed medical professional, was not violating federal law by performing the procedures. His patients were consenting adults and the FBI had no desire to legislate morality. Had he refused to perform the surgery on our “daughters,” we would have thanked him and moved on—but the afternoon was far from over.
I expressed concern for my daughters’ safety, trying to elicit an admission that he had safely performed surgery on underage females in the past. I even suggested a child’s anatomy was different from an adult’s. Todd skillfully avoided answering the question with any criminal admission and once again emphasized the illegality of the procedure. He assured us, however, that his methods were safe. To reinforce his emphasis that no harm would come to our daughters, he asked us to accompany him to the downstairs bedroom. As the three of us got up, Robyn meekly asked permission to sit at the kitchen table, now that we were leaving. He granted her request. But the theater of the absurd was only beginning.
Todd walked us toward a large bedroom with a king-size, four-poster bed. He matter-of-factly explained that this was where he performed his procedures. He tied patients to each of the four posters, restraining them as he operated. He then escorted us into the bathroom. On the bathroom vanity, I immediately noticed several sanitary napkins soaked in blood, but as I turned the corner I was confronted by a scene few would ever believe: two people sitting naked in a bathtub of bloody water!
I had no idea how to react and there is no way any undercover school could have ever prepared me for such a sight. Before me was a large white woman in her late thirties wearing glasses. She had purple hair, the largest breasts I have ever seen—not intended as a compliment, by the way—and both her nipples were pierced. The other person was a thin white man in his mid-thirties, tapping away on his laptop computer.
I managed to hang on to my composure as Todd explained that he had performed procedures on both of them throughout the night. They were sitting in an herbal preparation that encouraged rapid healing. Rather than bandaging the incisions, his patients were allowed to bleed into the herbal bath. By now my curiosity took over and I inquired about what procedures were performed. The female had circumcision, the same procedure I wanted for my daughters, he said, and the male had his urethra re-routed so he could urinate out an opening in his scrotum. The naked male, calmly working on his laptop computer while bathing in blood, told us he reasoned that if sperm and urine came out of the same orifice, the sperm might be contaminated, thus creating the possibility of diseased or disabled children.
I am not making this up.
The fact that men have been siring children since Cain and Abel by means of a single, multipurpose opening didn’t seem to enter his calculations. I suppose the moral of the tableau is that a fool and his money are, indeed, soon parted.
As our meeting ended, I thanked Todd for his hospitality and promised him my wife and I would discuss everything. I told him I was certain we would be speaking again. After all, who knew what sort of sideshow he might provide next time around?
A
fter my initial, failed overture to the gay travel agency in 2001, I decided to make one more try. I called the travel agent and apologized for the misunderstanding. We spoke briefly and apparently my mea culpa worked. I must have come across as a naïve pedophile. By the end of the conversation, he said he could “satisfy” all my needs, but I could not talk about such matters over the phone or put my requests in writing. Such statements became evidence for inquiring law enforcement officials, he warned. We agreed to meet in the near future.
He had plans for the next week or so, and although I couldn’t say anything, I anticipated being tied up in court on the Eddie Nash case. I was the FBI representative on a four-person task force that spent years investigating Nash, an infamous Los Angeles criminal who made Hollywood fame when his story was depicted in the movies
Boogie Nights
and
Wonderland.
Nash surprised us all, however, when he pleaded guilty to violating the RICO Act on September 10, 2001. His unexpected action freed me up to concentrate on the travel agency investigation. Unfortunately, though, the next day was September 11, the day our world changed forever.
As I was heading into the office on 9/11, a call came over the Bureau radio, directing all agents to report to a secret location designated for times of national emergencies. I quickly tuned to the “happy-time” radio and learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The next several days were nonstop as we covered leads our office developed as well as those sent by other offices. No one got a lot of sleep. It was the FBI at its best, operating in crisis mode. It was an exciting time, but our other investigations didn’t just disappear.
In between covering national security leads, I found a quiet room and called my travel agent target; I feared any delay in our communications might arouse suspicion. The October trip was still a go, he told me, and even questioned why I would assume it would be canceled. He had little concern for the events happening on the other coast, he said. He viewed the attacks as an annoyance that might inconvenience his future travel plans. His cavalier attitude made it easier for me to operate. There is always a personal as well as a bureaucratic fear that undercover agents will get too close to a target. Personal feelings could interfere with effective undercover dealings; sometimes, an agent might choose to cross that thin line separating us from them. My new friend made it easy, though. Our nation was at war with terrorism, and he considered himself unaffected. I vowed to make the time to continue my contacts.
On Saturday, September 15, as the rest of the office continued working around the clock covering thousands of leads following 9/11, I had my first face-to-face meeting with the travel agent.
I had no idea what to expect and feared it was going to be difficult to pull off the boy-lover role. I thought hard, trying to come up with an appropriate cover and some type of gimmick that might throw off my target. For limited roles in the past, I have used my Hollywood makeup contacts to produce unsightly scars across my face, temporary tattoos in highly visible places, or long, greasy hair. None of these ruses seemed appropriate for this assignment, however.
An idea came to me that seemed to have at least a reasonable chance of success: I would be handicapped. A five-dollar wooden walking stick purchased at the Salvation Army store provided the perfect crutch—and a handy weapon should I need it. Add to that a few effeminate gestures and I thought I would be ready for my grand entrance. Surely no one would suspect a fifty-year-old with an exaggerated limp of being an FBI undercover agent. To complete my outfit for the day, I wore sandals, cotton shorts, a T-shirt, and no underwear.
The travel agency was located in a 1950s-vintage apartment complex just off Hollywood Boulevard. The faded stucco exterior was in need of repair and the “security” gate at the vine-covered archway was broken. As I walked down the courtyard toward the unit at the end of the complex, I noticed that families, most of whom were Hispanic, occupied the majority of the units. Children were everywhere. It made me uncomfortable having so many innocent kids in such close proximity to an establishment I suspected of catering to pedophiles.
I knocked on the wrought iron security door several times before the travel agent answered. A gray-haired, white male, tall and thin, warmly welcomed me. With all the deliberation my cover identity demanded, I made my way into the dingy, one-bedroom apartment. I did my best to make it obvious that walking was a painful activity. The apartment was being used to house his travel agency and an adult pornography distribution business. A computer was set up in the dining room area and gay porn was stacked from the floor to the ceiling. A few posters of Thailand served as the only wall decorations.
He offered me a seat in the cramped living room. The furnishings consisted of a dirty loveseat, a chair, and a glass-topped coffee table. I awkwardly made my way past the stacks of videos. It was hardly a menacing environment but neither did I find it comfortable. Of course, my cover personality never let on.
As we made small talk, I learned the travel agent would also be the host for the October 15 trip. He described himself as a gay porn actor and producer, a veteran of over five hundred films. I didn’t attempt to pretend I was familiar with his work and was glad he didn’t ask. I realized he was noticing my lack of underwear, which served to solidify my cover, but made me a bit nervous in other ways. In retrospect, my “exposure” may not have been a wise tactic, given the sexual orientation of my target, but I guessed it was distracting, lessening his chances of thinking that I could be other than who I said I was.
Still, one concern any undercover agent has is sexual advances and especially avoidance of situations that could compromise the investigation. Women are no more than a commodity with many criminals, and their offers to set up the agent with prostitutes, girlfriends, daughters, and even wives constitute an issue requiring advance preparation. On a good day I’m a three-and-a-half out of a possible ten, so when women have come on to me, their ulterior motives seem obvious. When the situation has called for it, I have been fortunate enough to find skilled and attractive female undercover agents who were willing to humble themselves enough to accompany me as my girlfriend.
But that sort of “protection” wouldn’t work on my travel agent friend. With this assignment, I had been concerned that appearing gay might place me in the position of being offered sex or having to fend off undesirable advances from my male target. At this point, my research on NAMBLA paid off. I was not gay; I was, instead, a “boy lover.” Body hair “turned me off” and I had no desire to engage in any sexual tryst with anyone past adolescence. Another benefit of this cover was that should the travel agent offer me a boy for sex, I would arrest him on the spot. Case closed, situation resolved. I doubted, however, he would be so bold, at least this early in our relationship.
ENOUGH TO GO ON?
W
hen my undercover wife and I left Todd’s house that day, we returned to the staging area to debrief with the rest of the team. I could hardly wait to tell the other agents about the weird bathtub scene we witnessed inside the house, but each attempt met with complaints. The agents had a long drive back to the office and clearly weren’t interested in the gory details of our experience inside Todd’s House of Pain. A head start on the commute home trumped the bloody bathtub story.
I returned my wife to her residence. She and I, at least, were able to laugh together and decompress from the surreal experience.
I realized as I reviewed the evidence that although I witnessed a most peculiar situation, there was no recorded evidence of my observations. The meeting was recorded, but my conversation did not include a detailed description of what I was observing. Even though I did not see evidence of a federal crime, I assumed at the very least that Todd was practicing medicine without a license, which was a violation of state law. I needed some confirmation of what I had seen.