Zero fail, p.36
Zero Fail, page 36
All three agents were assigned to CAT, a group that had developed something of a reputation over the years. Most members kept physically and mentally honed for the mission, spending hours each month on the range and in the gym. Many had impressive physiques. Some also rated as expert marksmen. Team members likened themselves to a Special Forces unit and often adopted an alpha-male swagger to match. In the thirty-plus years since CAT was formed, however, they had never once been called upon to fire on an armed attack. And during that time, they’d also become synonymous with some of the most determined partying and skirt chasing in the Service. Some younger female White House staffers coyly discussed who among them had “earned a CAT shirt.” If they had the shirt, it meant they’d slept with someone on CAT.
These three members of the team were ready to hit the town and party as soon as they touched down at the resort. After their pregame drinks in Bongino’s room, they went to a steakhouse for dinner a few blocks from the hotel, returning to Bongino’s room for a few more shots of Grey Goose around 10 p.m. Bratz then suggested they go to a club at the entrance to the old walled section of the city: Tu Candela, or Your Flame. The cave-like venue drew locals, tourists, and also some pretty, more discreet escorts. Once inside, the CAT guys ran into some Secret Service agents from the New York field office, and together they formed a knot at one end of the bar.
Dania Londono Suarez, a lithe twenty-four-year-old with golden highlights in her long brown hair, had come to Tu Candela with three other working girls sometime after 11:30 p.m. Suarez, a single mom with a toddler son at home, paid the bills by visiting the clubs a couple of nights a week. She prided herself on being an escort, not a puta—a prostitute or common streetwalker. She dressed well, controlled where and when she worked, and had higher-paying clients. With so many Americans in town, Suarez surmised it was a good night to work.
Suarez was part of a foursome that grabbed a table off the dance floor. Mariela, who worked as Suarez’s pimp, and two other escorts, who went by the names Luciana and Vanessa, joined her. The women couldn’t help but notice a group of ten raucous Americans who seemed to be friends, ordering round after round of drinks for one another at the bar. One of them, who appeared more drunk than the rest, was swaying and dancing on top of the bar. He grabbed a pole and mimicked the bump and grind of a stripper.
Bratz, a single guy who spoke more Spanish than his comrades, approached the women. Mariela decided to translate. She turned back to the escorts and explained in Spanish that the men were offering to buy a bottle of vodka for their table and hoped to join them. Mariela suggested Bratz bring his friends over so everyone could dance. Huntington and Bongino joined Bratz. Huntington homed in on Suarez. They paired up to dance.
Huntington didn’t know then that Suarez was a professional escort. He was used to meeting women he could charm into sex the first night. And Suarez didn’t know then that Huntington was a Secret Service agent. She didn’t understand most of what her clients said about their work anyway.
The American men kept ordering more vodka. Suarez noticed they were downing the clear liquid “like it was water.” She thought Huntington was handsome and polite, but also “full of himself.” They danced, and she giggled as he repeatedly lifted his shirt to show her his taut stomach muscles.
Bongino, who was also married, danced with Luciana. As the night progressed, Luciana told Suarez she “was in a love story” with the handsome, wide-faced American. She planned to treat this as a normal date. She wasn’t going to charge him.
At about 1:30 a.m., after a lot of dancing, Suarez told Huntington she had to go home. He pleaded with her to stay, as she fully expected. Suarez called over to her pimp to explain things to Huntington, again using Bratz as a translator. “If he gives me a ‘little gift,’ I will leave with him to the hotel,” she relayed.
Suarez thought she had hooked herself a big spender. During the evening, Huntington had given her a 50,000-peso note—worth about $30—to buy some cigarettes during the night and never asked for change. He and his friends whipped out credit cards and cash to buy the women at least three bottles of vodka and various other drinks. Suarez usually charged $200 to $500 for an overnight with an American—they simply paid better than locals. But she guessed Huntington might pay even more. Before they left, Suarez mentioned her “gift” one more time.
“How much?” Huntington asked.
She held up eight fingers, then said “dollars” twice. She wanted to be clear how much a full night of sex with her would cost. “Eight hundred” is what she tried to say in broken English. “No problem, baby. No problem,” he replied. “Vamonos.” Huntington may have been too drunk to understand. By this time, he had tossed down about thirteen vodka drinks.
Bongino paid the remaining bar bill, and he and Huntington and the two women piled into a cab to return to the Caribe. Bratz, still talking to a woman at the bar, stayed behind at the club.
As they entered the main lobby, the two women knew the drill. Hotel security guards posted at the entrance gave them the once-over. They walked toward the front desk to register as “overnight guests,” a polite term of art the local hotels used, and handed over their identification cards. Their “hosts” had to be present, and they were told they would be charged another $20 fee to bring this added guest inside. Bongino and Huntington stood by, looking befuddled by this odd bit of late-night bureaucracy.
When they were finished registering, the four headed toward the elevator bank and to the agents’ respective rooms on the seventh floor. Bongino carried Luciana piggyback down the hall to room 710.
* * *
—
THE FRONT DESK at Hotel Caribe called room 707 early Thursday morning, sometime around 6:30 a.m. Suarez answered the phone. The reception clerk told her it was after six—time to clear out. Suarez apologized and said she would leave immediately. She well knew the hotel policy requiring prostitutes to leave first thing in the morning.
The clerk was annoyed. When she showed up for work, she found more than a dozen prostitutes’ ID cards still in a little box at the front desk. That meant she had to make a lot of awkward reminder calls to the hotel’s American guests.
Suarez collected her clothes to get dressed. From under the sheets, Huntington asked her to stay a little longer. Suarez said she couldn’t. She said she had to take her son to “baby school.”
“My cash money, baby,” Suarez softly reminded him.
Huntington reached for his wallet on the floor. He picked through the bills inside and handed her another 50,000-peso note. Suarez grew upset. He was giving her a pathetic amount, but she could see in his wallet that he didn’t have anywhere near enough to pay her fee.
“No,” she said. “Mas dinero.”
“No dinero,” Huntington replied.
Suarez started to cry. Huntington looked at her, startled to hear her demanding what sounded like hundreds of dollars. Later, each would remember threatening to call the cops on the other. She, if he didn’t pay. He, if she didn’t leave.
“No, let’s go, bitch,” he said finally, and pushed her toward the door.
With Suarez in the hall, Huntington closed the door behind her. He watched Suarez through the peephole as she walked over to his friend Joe Bongino’s door. Huntington’s head was hurting from the night before, so he slunk back to bed. He vaguely remembered having sex with Suarez the night before, but he couldn’t remember the specifics. He also vaguely remembered her saying something as they left the club about wanting money for sex. But $800?
Across the hall in room 710, it was Bongino’s turn for a rude awakening. Suarez had been banging on the door, and Luciana, Bongino’s guest that night, had opened the door to let Suarez in. She walked into the room wailing in Spanish.
Bongino remembered having sex with the woman in front of him last night, but he couldn’t remember her name. He also recognized the agitated taller woman—Suarez—as the woman Huntington had brought back to the hotel. She grabbed a pillow from Bongino’s bed and clutched it to her chest. “He fucky fucky, he no pay!” she yelled.
Through a mix of Spanish and English, Suarez tried to impress on Bongino that she wasn’t leaving. His buddy owed her money, and she wanted Bongino’s help to get it.
Suarez grew angrier, sensing that Bongino didn’t seem concerned. She pulled out her mobile phone and pretended she was dialing the police. Bongino, who had rapidly dressed for his bizarre wake-up call, recognized he had a situation to clean up. Fast.
“No police,” he said. “Please, please, no police.”
Bongino pounded on Huntington’s door. No answer.
He called his room phone. No answer.
At 8:33 a.m., he emailed Huntington on his BlackBerry. We need to talk ASAP open the door.
No answer.
Bongino was pissed. Huntington had to be awake. Every now and again, he could see his shadow moving under his door.
Fed up and with tears of frustration in her eyes, Suarez was about to give up. Just before 9 a.m., she clopped away down the hall in her awkward high heels. But at the elevator bank, she found a local police officer standing post. Sniffling, she told him she was a little embarrassed but needed his help. When she explained her dispute with an American customer, the officer left for the front desk to find a more senior English-speaking officer.
He found a Colombian police sergeant at the desk. “There’s a problem on the seventh floor,” the officer told his superior.
The sergeant returned with the officer and found a tall, tearful young woman complaining in the hallway with another local woman and a white American man. She said another American man in room 707 hadn’t paid her fee and had been rough with her.
“Did he hit you?” the sergeant asked.
“No,” she said. “Just tell him to give me $250 and I’ll get out of here.”
Eric Johanson, a well-respected CAT supervisor on the night shift, had heard a ruckus in the hall by this point and had stepped out of his room to see what was going on.
The hallway had gotten crowded. Two Colombian police officers in uniform and two local women were all heatedly discussing with Bongino how to get Huntington to answer his door and pay a prostitute.
The Colombian officer turned to Bongino and Johanson. “The best thing you can do is pay the woman before it gets any worse,” he said.
“What do you want to do?” Johanson asked Bongino.
“I want to pay this girl to keep Art from getting arrested,” he said.
Bongino had $60 in his wallet. Johanson offered to lend him $100. Suarez said that wasn’t enough. She wanted $250.
“If you don’t pay me now, it will cost a lot more later,” she said.
Bongino dashed to the ATM in the lobby to get more money. Confused by the exchange rate, he ended up having to insert his card again and make a second withdrawal. He returned with a wad of peso notes and gave the sergeant a mix of pesos and dollars worth $250. He stressed that he and Johanson were only helping with the money to avoid unpleasantness and that they had no connection to Suarez.
The local police sergeant then handed the wad of cash to the escort. “Is everything good?” he asked her in Spanish.
“Yes. Everything is fine,” Suarez replied, nodding.
As Suarez and her friend reached the ground floor and headed for the hotel exit, the Caribe’s director of security approached the women and scolded them. “You violated the rules here,” he said in Spanish. “You will not be allowed to return.”
Upstairs, Bongino was finally free from the tense hallway standoff and able to leave to get some breakfast. Walking quickly down the hall, he passed another CAT member, who noticed Bongino’s downcast face.
“Everything okay?” the agent asked Bongino.
Bongino kept walking, and his terse reply floated back over his shoulder: “I woke up to a nightmare.”
* * *
—
SUAREZ’S DECISION TO seek the help of local police that Thursday morning turned a hallway dispute over fees into an international incident. Diplomatic protocol required that Colombian authorities alert the U.S. embassy if their law enforcement agents had any official “contact” with a member of the U.S. delegation. The Colombian police sergeant’s hallway talk with Bongino and intervention in Suarez’s complaint against Huntington clearly qualified as contact. At 9:15 a.m. Thursday, before Suarez had even left the lobby, the hotel’s director of security was on the phone calling the U.S. embassy’s branch office in Cartagena and aides to U.S. ambassador Michael McKinley.
Over the phone, the Caribe security director told McKinley’s security officer about the local police having to intervene with a U.S. Secret Service agent in room 707. Two members of the embassy security team quickly drove over to the Hotel Caribe for a full debrief. When they got there around 10 a.m., the hotel’s director of security gave a more detailed account of the prostitute’s complaint.
Then he launched into his own much longer and more detailed list of complaints. On top of the standoff over the escort’s payment, the security director was fuming about the Americans’ general pattern of obnoxious behavior. Caribe staff had reported that K-9 officers were letting their bomb-sniffing dogs defecate on the hotel’s lawn, urinate on carpets, and even sleep in hotel beds. Some guests were complaining about the loud noise and alcohol-fueled antics at the pool—mostly caused by military servicemen. On top of that, his morning reception clerk had counted eight guests who kept prostitutes in their rooms after the cutoff hour of 6 a.m. He handed over his handwritten list of those eight names.
With that formal in-person notification, the Service’s sordid little secret spread rapidly. The two military agents conferred with Perry Holloway, Ambassador McKinley’s right-hand man as the deputy chief of mission. They all agreed: They had to notify the Secret Service. Just after 11:30 a.m., the embassy security officer drove to the Hilton and found Lonn Kalama, a supervisory agent based in Bogotá whom he knew.
“We have a problem,” the officer told him.
Kalama then raced to find the senior agent with overall responsibility for the Secret Service team in Cartagena—Paula Reid. It was easy for him to find the five-foot-six, ramrod-straight supervisor in a crowd of Secret Service agents in the Hilton lobby—she was an African American woman in a sea of white men. While Reid listened in shock, Holloway, McKinley’s deputy chief of mission, walked up to Reid with a furrowed brow.
“This is very, very serious,” he warned. Any news about multiple agents hiring prostitutes would severely embarrass President Obama and the U.S. government, he said.
Reid nodded and frowned, and pledged she was going to get to the bottom of this.
Holloway continued. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was going to be livid, he said. She was scheduled to arrive the next day. Secretary Clinton considered this kind of bad-boy misconduct one of her top concerns about U.S. personnel working overseas, he said. “If State Department employees did this,” Holloway declared, “they would be shipped home immediately.”
Reid had weathered a lot in her two decades on the job, but nothing that would compare to this mess. She quickly called a huddle with her staff, asking them to summon the two other senior supervisors on the trip to join. At 12:30 p.m., she briefed them on the Huntington incident and the list of agents who possibly brought prostitutes to their rooms. She asked a staff member of her team to confirm the Caribe’s guest records, checking which agents had been in which rooms.
Reid wasn’t shocked that agents would hook up with women on a work trip, but she was taken aback at the toxic combination of so many people boozing it up and carousing with prostitutes, and the carelessness that had allowed the incident to become public. She took a deep breath and called her boss in Washington. There was no way to sugarcoat the brewing scandal. Reid’s boss, also a woman, heard the first few facts and quickly concluded that this was above even her pay grade. She told Reid to call David O’Connor, an assistant director over all the field offices.
O’Connor listened to Reid’s account. “What the hell were these guys thinking?” O’Connor said.
Reid said she planned to begin interviewing agents and would get back to him when she had a fuller picture.
O’Connor hung up. He walked down the hall to get Mickey Nelson, the assistant director over protection. Together they would break the bad news to the director, Mark Sullivan.
* * *
—
DIRECTOR SULLIVAN CALLED Reid after learning what was going on from his assistants. She repeated the facts she had in hand. This was a diplomatic nightmare, but so far it was one that hadn’t gone public and that the Service hoped to contain. Reid explained to the director that the biggest threat right now was the embassy’s anger. Ambassador McKinley’s number two had warned her that the agents should be shipped out. Sullivan listened, saying that that might be necessary. Reid said she was about to start interviewing the men involved, and they agreed she would pass along updates on what she found.
At roughly the same time, Chaney and Stokes both received an email telling them to report “ASAP” to Reid at the command center at the Hilton. They suspected, based on the rumors going around about a CAT guy getting into a dispute with a prostitute, that they might be asked about the incident. Neither man was that concerned about getting in trouble with the Service over their own one-night stands, a common event on such trips. Still, Chaney hoped Reid wouldn’t find out about his prostitute. He didn’t want his wife, who had been his rock through some difficult years on the job, to have to learn any of this.
Reid called Chaney first into room 819, a suite the Service had converted into a makeshift office. A former supervisor on President Obama’s detail, Reid had a reputation as a standoffish agent and a rigid boss. One of her colleagues said she “read the Secret Service manual like fundamentalists read the Bible.” But Reid had a soft spot for Chaney. They were close friends from the Secret Service training academy. She had greeted Chaney with a warm hello when they first crossed paths on the Cartagena trip, earlier that same morning.
