Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“I have a CI,” he tells them. A Confidential Informant.

He feels bad about lying to them, but it’s for their own protection. If this goes sick and wrong, as it almost has to, he wants to take it all on his own shoulders. If his guys know that he’s running an illegal tap, they’re obliged by regulations to inform their superiors. Otherwise, they’re concealing “guilty knowledge,” which would ruin their careers. He knows that they would never rat him out, so he makes up a confidential informant.

An imaginary friend, Art thinks. At least it’s consistent-a nonexistent source for nonexistent coke, et cetera…

“That’s great, boss,” Ernie says. “Who-”

“Sorry,” Art says. “It’s early. We’re just dating.”

They get it. A relationship with a snitch is like a relationship with the opposite sex. You flirt, you seduce, you tempt. You buy them presents, you tell them how much you need them, you can’t live without them. And if they do get in bed with you, you don’t tell, even-especially-the boys in the locker room.

At least not until it’s a done deal, and by the time it becomes common knowledge, it’s usually about over anyway.

So this becomes Art’s day: He puts in his hours at the office, goes home, leaves the house late at night to retrieve his daily tape, then comes home and listens to it in his study.

This goes on for two useless weeks.

What he hears is mostly love talk, sex talk, as Tio woos his young inamorata and gradually instructs her in the finer points of lovemaking. Art fast-forwards through most of this, but he gets the idea.

Pilar Talavera is growing up fast as Tio starts introducing some interesting grace notes into the music of love. Well, interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, which Art is decidedly not. In fact, it makes him want to puke.

You’ve been a bad girl.

Have I?

Yes, and you need to be punished.

It’s a commonplace of surveillance-you hear so much shit that you never wanted to hear.

Then, albeit rarely, the rose in the manure pile.

One night Art brings his tape home, makes himself a scotch and sips on it while he goes through that evening’s sick tedium, and hears Tio confirm the delivery of “three hundred wedding gowns” to an address in Chula Vista, a neighborhood that sits between San Diego and Tijuana.

Now that you’ve got it, Art thinks, what do you do with it?

The SOP requires that you turn the info over to your Mexican colleagues, and simultaneously to the DEA office in Mexico City, for transferral to the San Diego office. Well, if I turn it over to my Mexican counterpart it goes straight to Tio, and if I turn it in to Tim Taylor he’ll just repeat the official line that there are no “wedding gowns” moving through Mexico. And he’ll demand to know who my source is.

Which I ain’t about to give him.

They talk it over on the morning jog.

“We’re fucked,” Ernie says.

“No, we’re not,” Art answers.

Time to take the next step toward the cliff.

He leaves the office after lunch and goes to a phone booth. In the States, he thinks, it’s the criminals who have to sneak around and use pay phones. Here, it’s the cops.

He phones a guy he knows on the San Diego Police narco squad. He met Russ Dantzler at some inter-agency conference a few months ago. Seemed like a decent guy, a player.

Yeah, and what I need now is a definite player.

With a set of stones.

“Russ? Art Keller, DEA. We had a couple of beers together, what was it, last July?”

Dantzler remembers him. “What’s up, Art?”

Art tells him.

“This might be bullshit,” he finishes, “but I don’t think so. You might want to hit it.”

Hell yes, he might want to hit it. And there’s nothing the attorney gen-eral of the United States or the State Department or the entire federal government can do about it. The Feds come down on San Diego PD, San Diego PD is just going to tell them to go fuck themselves sideways with something jagged.

With a proper regard to cop etiquette, Dantzler asks, “What do you want from me?”

“You keep me out of it and you keep me in it,” Art answers. “You forget I gave you the tip, and you remember to share any intel you get with me.”

“Deal,” Dantzler says. “But I need a warrant, Art. Just in case you’ve forgotten how things work in a democracy that scrupulously protects the rights of its citizens.”

“I have a CI,” he lies.

“Gotcha.”

They don’t need to say anything more. Dantzler will take the info to one of his own guys, who will tell it to one of his CIs, who’ll then turn around and tell it to Dantzler, who will take it to a judge and presto-probable cause.

The next day Dantzler calls Art back at the phone booth at a prearranged time and screams, “Three hundred pounds of cocaine! That’s six million dollars in street value! Art, I’ll make sure you get a lot of the credit!”

“Forget I gave you anything,” Art says. “ Just remember you owe me.”

Two weeks later, the El Paso police also owe Art for the seizure of a trailer-truck full of cocaine. A month after that, Art goes back to Russ Dantzler with another tip, about a house in Lemon Grove.

The subsequent raid yields a paltry fifty pounds of cocaine.

Plus $4 million in cash, three money-counting machines, and stacks of interesting documents that include bank deposit slips. The deposit slips are so interesting that when Dantzler takes them into federal court the judge freezes an additional $15 million in assets deposited under several names in five San Diego County banks. Although none of the names is Miguel Angel Barrera, every penny of the money belongs either to him or to cartel members who are paying him a fee to keep their assets safe.

And Art can hear from the phone traffic that none of them is very happy.

Neither is Tim Taylor.

The DEA boss is looking at a faxed copy of The San Diego Union-Tribune, its headline screaming MASSIVE DRUG BUST IN LEMON GROVE,

with references to a “federacion,” and at another fax, from the AG’s office, screaming, Just what the fuck is going on? He gets on the horn to Art.

“Just what the fuck is going on?!” he yells.

“What do you mean?”

“Goddammit, I know what you’re doing!”

“Then I wish you’d share it with me.”

“You have a CI! And you’re running it through other agencies and goddamn it, Arthur, you’d better not be the one leaking this shit to the press!”

“I’m not,” Art answers truthfully. I’m leaking it to other agencies so they can leak it to the press.

“Who’s the CI?!”

“There is no CI,” Art answers. “I have nothing to do with this.”

Yeah, except three weeks later he gives the LAPD a 200-pound bust in Hacienda Heights. The Arizona state cops get a trailer-truck with 350 pounds rolling up I-10. Anaheim PD pops a house for cash and prizes totaling ten mil.

They all deny getting anything from him, but they all speak his gospel: La Federacion, La Federacion, La Federacion, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

Even the RAC Bogota comes to the altar.

Shag answers the phone one day and holds it into his chest as he tells Art, “It’s the Big Man himself. Straight from the front lines of the War on Drugs.”

Even two months ago, Chris Conti, the RAC in Colombia, wouldn’t have touched his old friend Art Keller with the proverbial ten-foot pole. But now even Conti has apparently gotten religion.

“Art,” he says, “I ran across something I think you might be interested in.”

“You coming up here?” Art asks. “Or do you want me to come down there?”

“Why don’t we split the difference? You been to Costa Rica lately?”