Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (12 page)

The execution of warrants in New York never seemed to end, and the process was dangerous not only to the agents serving the warrants but to the people on the other side of the door. Whenever law enforcement executes any type of warrant, there is usually a lot of confusion at the target location, depending on how many persons are there. Sometimes events can come close to spinning out of control even with the most highly disciplined teams. On one occasion, an innocent was almost killed.

The entry of the day was another blue-box case. Over time I had come to dislike these cases immensely—the violation didn’t amount to anything, and people could get hurt. The target this day was, as had come to be the norm, a bad section of the Bronx.

The team formed up close to the target location, but not close enough to be detected by any possible countersurveillance, and waited for the phone company to call, telling us the line was up. Finally the call came, and we moved out to the target location. We stacked outside the door, and on the signal from the team leader, the door was breached and in we went.

I was on point with the shotgun, as had become the norm. Being one of the few single agents in New York, I usually volunteered for the shotgun assignment because of the hazards associated with being among the first two agents through the door. My volunteering had nothing to do with bravery but rather logic and expendability. Single agents were considered more expendable than married agents with children, and many of the husbands and dads were more than happy to let me have the assignment. If I got blown away there would be no widow or orphans, just two grieving parents who wished that their son had played it safe and become a banker.

We had become pretty smooth with these entries, as we had done so many; we were quickly moving from room to room, clearing the area and finding surprised people who were totally taken off guard by our presence. We had almost finished clearing the small apartment when we came to a room with a locked door.

The battering-ram agent and I smashed the lock and made our entry. A boy of about sixteen lay in bed with his right hand under a pillow. I pointed my Remington 12-gauge shotgun at his head and chambered a round, safety off, while I shouted the standard command “police, don’t move,” followed by “show me your hands.” He did not look the least bit frightened, but just stared with a blank expression. As I repeated the command for the young man to show me his hands, he began to move his right hand as if edging it toward something, but he did not bring it out from under the pillow. As I held the most dangerous weapon in the world for close combat at this boy’s head, I could feel my right index finger move inside the trigger guard. Action is quicker than reaction, and if this boy came out with a gun—which at this point I had to assume he was about to—there would be no time to do anything other than kill him.

Maintaining my scan to avoid tunnel vision while simultaneously watching the boy, I was now conscious of my breaching partner next to me, pointing his revolver at this young man who seemed determined to die on this particular day. Propped up on his left elbow, the boy began to slowly move his hand out from under the pillow. I pulled the stock tighter into my shoulder and prepared to fire. I remember moving my point of aim from his head down to his chest. For some reason, I thought that there would be less gore if I hit him center of mass rather than in the head.

Then the hand came out. There was nothing in it and nothing under the pillow. As I lowered my shotgun, I exclaimed an expletive and let out a heavy sigh of relief. The young man had been asleep when we entered, with his hand under the pillow. When we breached the door, he was frozen stiff with fear, he later said to one of our Spanish-speaking agents. As it turned out, the kid was from a South American slum and spoke no English. He had no idea what I was saying, only that two Americans were pointing large guns at him, and he was too terrified to move.

We finished securing the apartment and began the search, where we found two blue boxes—one that was up and running and another one hidden. This incident reminded me of what I already knew: these chicken shit blue-box seizures were not worth a person’s life, including that of the boy I had come within a delicate trigger pull of killing. My breaching partner said to me later that he nearly pulled the trigger on his revolver, which he had cocked into single-action mode. I don’t know what became of this kid. I just know that he came within a gnat’s ass of dying that day.

I went home and had a few beers, thinking of how I had come as close as a person can come to killing another human being without its having happened, and then I put it behind me and moved on. It was just another day in New York, where anything could happen at any time; and in the world of law enforcement, this incident was nothing special. What made it unique was that while uniformed street cops run into this type of thing almost daily, Secret Service agents run into such situations just frequently enough to scare the total hell out of them.

Other than the drive to and from work, not every day in NYFO was full of stress. It was actually quite the opposite. NYFO was in all probability the mecca of Secret Service practical jokers, and, like all things in New York, these jokes were huge, some on such a grand scale they would rival anything concocted by the best comedy writers in Hollywood. These practical jokes were viewed as a necessity given the environment of the city and of the office. They could be benign and subtle, carried out by one person, or in some cases grand productions that required a cast of many.

For example, years earlier the NYFO had an SAIC who always wore a hat. In the mornings after arriving, he would remove it and hang it on a hat rack just outside his office door. One day an agent replaced the SAIC’s hat on the rack with an identical yet smaller-sized hat. The following day this bold agent who obviously cared nothing about his evaluation, replaced that hat with one too large. The next day he would replace it with the original hat. For quite some time the SAIC could not understand why his hat never fit the same two days in a row. This type of subtle humor was designed to help break the stress that was always present in New York, and although the boss may have been aware of the harmless prank, he never let on.

One day I became the object of such a joke, and at the end of it I stood in awe of the pranksters. Not long after arriving in New York I was assigned a case that involved an arrest warrant for a man named Juan Ferrer. I decided that I would try to find and arrest Mr. Ferrer with the help of the rest of the forgery squad. I dutifully prepared briefing sheets that provided all known information on him, including all known residences or other likely places he might be. I divided the squad up into two-man teams and assigned each an address.

At 6:00 a.m. the following morning we all hit our locations searching for Ferrer. No Juan. We all left our business cards with telephone numbers at the various locations and instructed the recipients, all of whom we had awakened, that it would be better for Ferrer to turn himself in than for us to have to keep looking for him. We always said that at search locations, but seldom did anyone call or turn himself or herself in.

One day not long after, I had just returned from lunch when I noticed on the message board under my name a note that said that Ferrer had called and wanted to talk to me. Juan had left a number, and I dutifully performed a cross-check linking it to an address in midtown Manhattan. Once again I gathered the boys together and briefed them.

Everyone in the squad came along, including the boss. It was all by the book as we parked the cars away from Ferrer’s apartment and then moved to the building and up the steps. Another agent and I banged on the door while I identified myself in my best Fernando Lamas accent as “Servicio de Secreto and open el puerto.” From the other side there came Spanish gibberish that sounded something like Bill Dana doing his José Jiménez routine. “Sorry, señor, no hablo ingles.” I banged on the door again and it opened just enough for a face to appear. The face belonged not to Juan Ferrer but to an agent and friend, who slammed the door. It took at least three seconds for me to realize that the whole thing had been a setup and that the apartment belonged to several agents in the office who lived together. Behind me were about ten agents, my boss included, laughing so hard some were rolling in the hallway. One produced an SS-issued Polaroid camera to record the event and my expression. The door opened again with my friend on the other side beet-red from laughing and from oxygen starvation, gasping, “Servicio de Secreto??????!!!!!.” He was laughing so hard he could not breathe.

This was a practical joke, New York–style and it was done with such planning, preparation, and precision one could not help be impressed. I often thought that if only we had spent as much time devoted to our actual jobs as we did with practical jokes, we could have cleaned the entire city of New York of all crime, even those cases not assigned to us.

In spite of the working conditions in New York, we always managed to make the best of things. One very hot summer day I was relegated to the surveillance of a residence in the Bronx from the inside of a surveillance van. This van was essentially the responsibility of the office support technician (OST) who was in charge of all electronic and vehicular surveillance equipment assigned to the office. Joe, our OST, was in his fifties and a native of China but had been a US citizen and a native of New York for many decades. Joe was compact in stature, and, while one of the nicest men I had ever known, he was a genuine badass, with about a million black belts in various martial arts. If he so wished, Joe could kill a man in seconds using nothing but his hands and feet. In addition to working for the Secret Service, Joe was also part owner of the best Chinese restaurant in New York.

With Joe driving the van and me in the back and the curtain behind Joe drawn, he skillfully parked the van across the street from the target location. He exited the van, locked the doors, and walked down the street so as not to draw attention to himself or the van while I watched the house in question through a side porthole. As the time passed and I continued my vigil, the temperature in the van climbed well past 100 degrees. I was now shirtless and soaked, wearing nothing but jeans and a shoulder holster that housed an unauthorized Beretta 9 mm pistol. Every ten minutes or so Joe would call me on the radio to check on my status. I casually mentioned to him that it was getting rather hot in the van, and he promised he would bring me something to drink. Another ten minutes passed, and the driver’s door unlocked and Joe appeared with a paper bag containing what I assumed was water. As I thanked him, I looked into the bag to find not water but a six-pack of Heineken. I respectfully reminded Joe that we were on duty and that as good as the beer looked I probably should not have one. With one look and no words Joe reminded me that, in his culture, refusing such an offer was an insult. Realizing my error, I thanked Joe, opened a beer, and drank deeply from the green can, enjoying the best-tasting beer in my life.

After a few more hours, and having received the discontinue signal from the case agent, at Joe’s insistence we departed the Bronx for his restaurant in Chinatown. Joe parked in the alley behind the restaurant and we entered through the back door, where Joe was greeted as royalty. He introduced me to his staff in Chinese and we were shown to the best table in the house. I was noticeably the only Caucasian in the place. Joe ordered for me, and it was the best-tasting food imaginable. I learned later that to be invited to Joe’s restaurant as his guest was a great honor, afforded to few. That day will always stand out in memory as my best day in New York.

CAT SCHOOL AT LAST

Two years had passed since my arrival in New York in 1986. For that period of time I had been up to my knees in cockroaches, rats, and the general New York field office experience. I was growing weary of the inability of an indifferent management to offer an intelligent assessment of when I could expect to move on to a new assignment. In the old days of New York, meaning just a few years prior to my arrival, an out-of-district agent like myself had a twenty-four-month date of service. Being assigned to the New York office in the 1980s, however, was much like serving time in a foreign prison with an open-ended sentence; one never knew when the sentence would end, as there was no expiration of New York service date stamped on anyone’s orders. Things were becoming more depressing by the day, not only for me but also for the many who wanted out. Then one day a miracle of sorts happened.

While sitting at my desk on a Thursday, going through my investigative notes from an uneventful interview of a potential suspect on Coney Island, the assistant to the special agent in charge (ATSAIC) called me into his office. He told me that the Counter Assault Team school that was to start on the following Monday at the Secret Service training center in Beltsville, Maryland, was one agent short. It seemed that at the last minute, a candidate had backed out, leaving an open slot. They needed to fill it now, and he asked me if I wanted to go. “Yes,” I replied instantly, “I can go.”

All of my future classmates had the advantage of having attended the preselection course a few weeks earlier and had been working out in preparation for the selection course. With no advance warning, I would be attending the most physically demanding school in the Secret Service. My boss was concerned that I might not be up to the challenge. Most marines, whether current or former, exist in a perpetual state of physical readiness. While I had not trained specifically for CAT school, I was certain that my normal physical fitness regimen would be more than sufficient.

I assured my boss that I would have no problem.

“Fine,” he said, “go home and pack.” By the way, he added; if you fail, don’t come back. I had no intention of failing, because if I did, I knew I would be coming back, probably for many years.

On a Sunday, August 21, 1988, I checked into the Greenbelt Holiday Inn just outside of the James J. Rowley Training Center in Laurel, Maryland. Here my classmates and I would reside for the following three weeks unless we failed to make the cut. After everything I had endured to make it to this school, I was determined I would not be going home early. Short of a compound fracture or being killed, I would succeed.