C.S. 96 - Confidential Source Ninety-Six: The Making of America’s Preeminent Confidential Informant

I parked my whipa straight-from-the-showroom triple black Mercedes SEL 500at a safe distance, just in case these OG Rastafarians decided on ripping me off of the thousand pounds of weed I had stored in the cars oversized trunk: eight 125-pound, hermetically sealed bales of Mexicos finest. So I had to walk the six blocks to the initial meeting place, a big mistake. East Harlem is not the place you want to find yourself when youve got hundreds of ruthless enemies hoping to jack you.

It was one of those late August nights New York City is famous for, so hot and muggy you felt as though you were plodding through a torpid bowl of pea soup. The quicker I was off the street and back in the whip, a/c jacked to the maxor inside the hotels rooftop poolthe better.

The blazing sun slid behind a wall of decaying tenements offering little relief. The streets were teeming with people, every block, every corner; every doorway satiated with steerers, lookouts, slingers, shooters, and the occasional hooker; every one of them looked suspect to methe paranoia growing inside me threatened to subsume every other part of me.

On my walk to the meet I was hawked everything from nickels, dimes, halves, and whole grams of primo perrico, or cocaine. I was offered blow jobs for twenty, straight-up fucks for forty, and the special of the evening, a half-and-half, for fifty. Im sure if I asked any one of those street hustlers where I could buy a rocket launcher, within ten minutes Id be in some alley deciding between a Russian-and a North Koreanmade RPG. But I had no time to chat with any of these young enterprising businessmen and women; I had my own business to attend to.

Our meet for the trade-off was at my customers restaurant, Caribbean Sea Cuisine on Second Avenue. The closer I got to the restaurant the more sweat I found myself swabbing off my face and neck. I worried I was being followed but did not look back. The very last thing anyone in my position wants to do is appear nervous, because these are the type of cats who can smell fear a mile away. And fear on a first buy with $400,000 and a half ton of marijuana at risk would be the deciding factor between whether these Rastas were going to torture me until I brought them to my $90,000 whip, where theyd certainly take the weed they assumed was in the trunk and put a bullet in my head, or whether we would have a friendly transaction that would lead to bigger and better endeavorsfor me at least.

I knew exactly who and what Anthony Makey was long before I got off the jet at JFK. His reputation as a ruthless Jamaican hit man, as well as a major weed distributor and rip-off artist, was legendary all over the country. Id been introduced to him by a very reputable gang of coke dealers out of LA whom hed done business with in the past. My reputation was that of a sound, standup player with deep connections to the Beltrn Cartel based out of Sinaloa, Mexico. I, for all intents and purposes, was a responsible businessman who could deliver as much weight as needed, tons in fact, on a mere days notice.

Id studied Makey and his crew of ruthless rip-off artists and killers the way I would any other dealer or buyer before making a transaction: Id rehearsed this sale over and over in my mind. Id talked to Makey at least a dozen times, and had seen him once in Santa Barbara, California, on what wed called a meet and greet, though my real intent was the chance to look into his eyes and size him up, see if he could be the next guy Id cut a deal with. Id evaluated him as a businessman first and killer second. My first impression of the man was that he didnt kill for sport. My second was that he always seemed to wear a strap, as did his cabal of Jamaican ex-pat security goons. I may have never carried a gun, but my ace in the holeand one Makey was aware ofwas that I represented some very dangerous people with a very long reach. If anything happened to me, or the primo weed I was selling, these Jamaicans, including every one of their family members, would be tracked, caught, torturedand only afforded the luxury of a bullet through the eye.

As I approached Caribbean Sea Cuisine I noticed the restaurant was a storefront establishmentshabby in accordance with the rest of the neighborhood. It stood between two prewar four-story tenements. The lights were on, and from the street I could see no customers other than three light-skinned black men, two with dreadlocks the length of jump ropes, and the third a bespectacled man with short cropped hair whom I immediately recognized as Anthony Makey.

They appeared to be in quiet conversation, sitting at a four-top table next to the counter.

This was not how our meet was to go down. I was to meet Makey alone in his restaurant. Once he flashed me the money, I was to get my car, come back, and make the switch. It was never a good sign for a customer to be changing the rules of engagement before the meet began, but if I walked away now I was sure he wouldve gotten a call and Id have been grabbed before I made it to the corner. No, now I had to switch up and go off book just like him.

The street-side establishment looked like any other fast-food roti den. Above the counter, covered by grease-stained Plexiglas, were faded pictures of jerk chicken, oxtail, beef roti, and other Jamaican delicacies I did not recognize nor had any desire or proclivity to eat.

As I got within a couple meters of the shabby restaurant I pulled out my phone and pretended to make a call. I set my cell phone to record everything that was about to happen.

I spoke into the phone and gave the exact address and quick description of the men inside the restaurant.

Makey, like every other drug dealer on the planet, had become very paranoid behind the inception of all the new technology that law enforcement now had at its disposal. My colleagues guaranteed me that the modified phone I was using would not read as a bugin fact, they wanded the transmitter in front of me and it registered nothingfrom the outside, it appeared to be just another cell phone.