Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “A Peek Under the Hood: Heroin, Hope and Operation Tune-Up” by Michael Pevarnik. Pevarnik, a retired DEA supervisory special agent and former New Jersey police officer, details a history-making, true crime investigative adventure that travels from the streets to the jungle in the quest to reclaim an inner-city neighborhood’s stolen quality of life.
Chapter 1: Operation Tune-Up — Worcester, Massachusetts, August/September 1994
The Canadian controller insisted he be the one to set up a meet with his informant. Kept calling him the “little guy,” a nickname that conveyed a hint of fondness, saying his relocated source only trusted one person to make the arrangements, and it wasn’t the DEA agent on the other end of the line.
“Too many people want him dead,” the controller whispered as if delivering a line in a film noir. “Calls me every day at the same time to tell me what’s going on down there.”
I waited for the part about synchronized watches, but it never came. A rendezvous site was agreed upon and a physical description good enough to make the ID given: Vietnamese male, late twenties, thin build, tattoos on both arms, and long, dark hair that fell over the collar.
“You can’t miss him,” the controller said in parting. “He stands out in a crowd.”
But when I turned into the Dunkin’ Donuts in the Main South neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts, the only thing that stood out was the irony of his assurance. There had to be a dozen Vietnamese men in front of the place, all of them squatting in a straight-line formation as though sitting on a low-rise, invisible bench. Each smoked a cigarette and sipped a cup of coffee while remaining perfectly balanced in their alley cat pose.
None had long hair.
It was a beautiful late-summer day with clear blue skies and bright sunshine, but the non-conforming New England weather was too chilly for the date. So cool that everybody in the lot wore a long-sleeved shirt or jacket. If any of them sported tattoos on their arms, they were not to be seen.
I went inside the Dunkin’ Donuts and took my place in a long, snaking line, a wait I’d normally grumble about, but today it gave me time to consider my dilemma. Ten minutes later, armed with my own cup of coffee and a plan, I emerged from the building, leaned up against its brick façade, and flipped open the perforated wedge of plastic on the cup’s lid. Steam plumed into the crisp morning air, fogging the dark sunglasses sitting on the bridge of my nose. Here I was, a six-foot four, clean-cut, white male propped up against the wall with twelve crouching Vietnamese men.
Since I couldn’t pick the little guy out of a line-up, I was hoping the informant would pick me out of one.
He did.
Nonchalantly, the little guy approached and said my first name in a soft voice. I nodded and whispered for him to start walking along Main Street, then announced in a voice loud enough for the others to hear, “Sorry, no change.” I hung around to finish my coffee and reinforce the lack of association before departing in my G-car, a Lexus seized and forfeited from a South Boston associate of Irish mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger.
I caught up with the informant as he traipsed along the city’s central thoroughfare, still sipping what had to by then be a cold cup of coffee. As I pulled to the curb just beyond his deliberate stroll, he casually approached the car, looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then quickly got into the backseat, and lay down so as not to be seen. His laid back demeanor suddenly changed as he snapped, “Go! Go!”
It was obvious he’d done this before.
***
My meeting with “Lanh,” a Vietnamese national with recently shorn hair, was the result of being the DEA duty agent that week. It’s a dreaded assignment that can’t pass fast enough, as investigations take a backseat to administrative tasks and distasteful grunt work. All day long you’re tethered to the office while fielding a flow of inquiries ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. It seems that every duty agent week, a former CIA operative visits or calls with deep concerns about a massive governmental conspiracy with aliens.
Nighttime and weekend hours bring a new element. Whether it’s something as serious as a death threat to an undercover agent or simply the drunken tomfoolery of a barfly, every incoming call fielded by an answering service is forwarded to the duty agent beeper — the communicative device of choice just prior to the era of the ubiquitous cell phone — which required an immediate response. The assignment is akin to pitching “mop-up” in a baseball game your team is losing by a mile — somebody has to do it, but you can’t wait for the game to be over.
At the time, DEA’s New England Field Division office was based in a professional building just up the street from the Boston Garden. The building’s mostly medical offices served the health needs of the elderly. It was an odd location for a federal law enforcement agency, making for incongruent scenes of armed agents escorting handcuffed prisoners in shared elevator space with geriatric patients guiding their walkers. However, it was an improvement over the prior DEA location: rodent infested, basement accommodations in the low-rise section of the JFK Federal Building.
I was sitting at my desk when the group secretary yelled across the cavernous room, “Duty agent...line 2!” Grimacing, I lifted the receiver and greeted the caller with a curt but very official, “DEA.” The response from the other end was just as official.
“Corporal Larison, RCMP, Kitchener Detachment.” After proffering my name and title, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal galloped on an explanatory path, first stride saying he had an informant now living in “the States” who was willing to assist DEA. He outlined an impressive resume, rather effusively, about several successful investigations Lanh worked at his direction in Ontario. But after too much regional exposure, he had to be moved out of the province.
“Ottawa decided he was too good a resource to give up and shipped him around to other detachments,” Larison said, referring to RCMP’s National Headquarters by its geographic location. “He continued making cases for the Crown, but when the death threats piled up, the little guy was relocated to a city in your state called Worcester.”
The corporal butchered the pronunciation of the Central Massachusetts city.
“Go on.”
“I kept in touch with him, or I should say he kept in touch with me. He doesn’t want to stop working. Calls every day and says there’s a lot going on down there. A lot of drug stuff. When I told him there’s nothing I can do in another country, he said, ‘then find someone for me.’ That’s why I called DEA.”
“Give me his name and number and I’ll see what he has to offer.”
“He wants me to set up a meet,” Larison insisted. “Nothing personal. It’s simply a matter of not trusting someone he doesn’t know.”
I understood. I felt the same way about Corporal Larison. After hanging up the phone and getting the main number for the RCMP in Kitchener, Ontario, I asked for the corporal’s extension. When the same voice answered, I was satisfied this wasn’t a set-up or crank call and continued the conversation without missing a beat.
“So, how’d this guy become an informant?”
“He came to our attention during a homicide investigation.”
Here we go...duty agent call.
But my cynicism was unfounded. Lanh was never considered a suspect in the case; he was only interviewed as a matter of course because the victim was his roommate. A drug-dealing gang member was eventually charged with the murder — an unintended result of the little guy’s roomie getting caught in the crossfire of a drug feud. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“We have a major problem with violent Vietnamese organizations up here, but no way to infiltrate them ... no Vietnamese snitches. Ottawa encouraged us to recruit whenever we had the opportunity.”
“What’s his motivation for working? Money?”
“Yes ... well, that and something else he told me.” With a sympathetic undertone, Cpl. Larison explained that after Lanh settled into the Crown’s territory, the little guy began to feel the same kind of anguish he thought he’d left behind in Vietnam. But instead of the pain and suffering caused by an incoming brutal regime, it was heroin, crack and ecstasy that were killing people and destroying lives. Then when his roommate got murdered because of drugs, it was the proverbial last straw.
“So, he became a source to seek out moral justice for others?”
“Never thought of it that way, but I guess you could say that.”
“What’s his criminal history like?”
“He has none, he’s clean.”
“Nothing in Vietnam?”
Larison paused to reflect. After gathering his thoughts, he said that Lanh had lived a tough life. Seen a lot of horror from the war. When he was a kid, his father put him on a packed boat, the last space available, leaving both parents behind to escape the army that had overtaken Saigon. It was a rickety vessel, by the corporal’s account barely seaworthy, that drifted for days until a cargo ship saw it and brought them all to Hong Kong, only then to be caged in a refugee camp with an unsafe atmosphere and deplorable living conditions. They were the lucky ones, though. Other boats never made it that far and those people died at sea. There was a worldwide humanitarian outcry about the treatment of these so-called “boat people,” and several countries, including Canada, granted a select few asylum and citizenship.
Lanh was one of them.
“Set it up,” I said.
***
Lanh’s hardships in life and high marks by the RCMP may have gotten him a debriefing, but the information he provided was not that impressive. His only viable target was a low-level crack dealer who failed to pop up on any of DEA’s intelligence screens. That’s not enough to open a federal drug investigation. After getting back to the office in Boston, I gave Cpl. Larison a courtesy call.
“Hi Bill, I met your guy.”
“I know. He told me. How did it go?”
“Well, he doesn’t have much. Only an auto body shop owner selling small amounts of crack. Might be able to get him a gun, too. I think we’ll pass, but I’ll refer him to the Mass State Police and see if ATF is interested in the gun angle. They handle federal firearms violations.”
Cpl. Larison was not pleased, and his reaction surprised me. This Mountie wasn’t going to be satisfied until DEA got his man.
“That won’t work. He won’t trust them. I told him your agency is the one he wants to work for. I told him you’re the best.”
“I’m sorry, Bill, but our resources are limited. We have to target the highest-level organizations that’ll result in the greatest local impact. I’m sure you can appreciate that. I’m not going to abandon the little guy. The state police are a good agency.”
“No good. You have to give him a chance. He’s the hardest working source I’ve ever had. He will develop a case that’s worthy of your federal standards. The Crown holds him in the highest regard ... I’d rather not go over your head.”
I’d exercised due diligence with Cpl. Larison; given him the courtesy of fully exploring what his informant had to offer and responded back with honesty and diplomacy. The heavy-handed threat left me inclined to say, ‘do what you have to do,’ or even, ‘go fuck yourself,’ and hang up the phone.
But I didn’t.
Fact was, this Canadian cop only wanted to get as many bad guys off the street as possible, no matter what country that street lay in. He felt strongly that Lanh was an effective law enforcement tool whose instincts and acquired skills shouldn’t go to waste. Though his dedication to duty was brusquely worn upon his hash-marked sleeve, he only wanted to convince another cop to do the right thing.
I liked that.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
***
Worcester (locally pronounced “Wuss-tah”) is a blue-collar city with a prosperous past. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Worcester & Boston Railroad transformed the city into a transportation hub during the economic boom of the American Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing plants producing items such as shoes, clothing, wire products and machinery parts sprouted up and flourished. The good times attracted a sea of immigrants from all over the world, a swelling population that settled into the burgeoning number of triple-deckers being built in the city.
But like so many other once thriving New England mill towns, as manufacturing shifted overseas, Worcester’s industrial area gave way to drugs and crime. The old textile and loom manufacturing plants, once symbols of success, had become extinct, lumbering behemoths — graffiti-streaked buildings with windows shattered by neighborhood youth or the strung-out.
One of the city’s many neighborhoods is Main South, a small but thickly-settled square mile of urban decay that abuts downtown Worcester. Its busy Main Street bustles with the business of blight, as drug dealers, users, prostitutes, and other criminally-inclined characters, along with the surviving stores, some of which perpetuate the illegal activities, keep the area alive. Roving gangs of thugs and stationary dregs of society had commandeered its public parks and gathering spaces, littering these once safe, inner-city sanctuaries with hypodermic needles, broken booze bottles and used condoms.
With a population approaching two-hundred thousand in the mid-1990s, Worcester was in dire need of some federal drug enforcement attention. At the time, DEA had twelve offices strategically situated throughout the six states of New England, in areas most affected by drug distribution and its related violent crime. Yet the region’s second most-populated city with one of its highest crime rates wasn’t one of them. Several attempts were made to open an office in the central Mass city known as the “Heart of the Commonwealth,” but each ended in failure, successfully blocked by a territorially-obsessed Worcester County District Attorney’s Office.
The district attorney, a man who’d been in power for almost twenty years, bristled at the perception of usurped authority whenever DEA attempted to conduct an investigation in the city, or for that matter, any other community in Worcester County. Some of that animosity derived from the seizure of drug-related assets— as though the feds were coming in and stealing illegally gotten gains that rightfully belonged to him.
Under federal law, the vast majority of forfeited net proceeds from drug seizures augment the budgets of other law enforcement agencies participating in a DEA investigation. Typically, it’s a greater percentage than those shares received had the seizure been processed through the state system. These were boons to local departments that the DA couldn’t control. He wanted to be the one who decided how much money was being divvied out.
The district attorney’s iron-fisted management style had an intimidating effect on the state police unit attached to his office—known then as a Crime Prevention and Control Unit (CPAC)—who were careful not to tread on his overbearing psyche while conducting drug investigations he discretionarily decided whether to prosecute or not. But the fear factor had an even greater effect on the local police departments operating within the county, some of whom fretted about losing state funding overseen by the DA if they got on his bad side.
And they all knew one way of doing that was to work with DEA.
DEA agents deciding to follow promising leads and make the fifty-mile plus trip from the nearest office in Boston or Springfield quickly felt the chill. It deterred most from doing drug cases in Worcester County, opting instead to conduct investigations in closer, more accommodating communities. Few federal pioneers dared to venture into the hostile territory often referred to as the “Wild West.”
About the author
Michael Pevarnik is a retired DEA supervisory special agent. During his 30-year career, he led the New England Field Division’s Mobile Enforcement Team (MET), an elite Boston-based group that deployed to fight drug-related violent crime in communities throughout the six-state region. Visit his website, www.michaelpevarnik.com, to learn more.