How to Get Away With Murder in America Read Free Page B

I later asked other cops about Fisten, several reached for the same description: “asshole.” Even those who liked him used the term. They called him that for a variety of reasons: for pursuing cases that put other cops in prison, for bragging, for epic philandering, for his irritating self-righteousness. But Major Charles Nanny, head of the MDPD’s Narcotics Bureau, who served with Fisten in the past, offered a different view. “He’s one of the last true crime fighters. Fuck anybody who tells you different.”
    Fisten has a great backstory: “I’m a Jew with Irish cop blood.” As a child in Queens, New York, he became ill and needed an emergency transfusion. The neighborhood beat cop, an Irishman, donated his blood. In a family of dentists, salesmen, and merchants, Fisten got the urge to wear a badge. There was a period after his bar mitzvah when he played in a rock band, but at the age of eighteen, he says, the “Irish cop blood kicked in.” In 1978, after his father retired to Miami, Fisten, who was too short to join the NYPD, found an opening with the South Miami Police, then laterally transferred into the MDPD. Still a long-haired kid, he ended up on the decoy squad, where he impersonated drug buyers in sting operations. “It was like playing cops and robbers.”
    Fisten arrived on the streets a couple of years after Albert San Pedro, with Ricky Prado by his side, began his ascent as a crime boss. All of them rode the same wave cresting in South Florida. Thanks to its coastline, an abundance of natural landing fields, and an enterprising populace, South Florida became a smugglers’ paradise, and then a battlefront in the War on Drugs. Between 1975 and 1982, the annual murder rate in Dade County soared from about fifty to more than six hundred. Corruption was another by-product of the flood of narco-dollars. Nearly half the cops in Fisten’s academy class wound up in jail. One of the MDPD’s worst scandals involved a gang of cops who ripped off and murdered drug dealers. After Fisten turned a key witness in the case and helped send more than a dozen cops to prison, he became the department’s youngest homicide detective.
    One of his fortes was his ability to gain the confidence of suspects and flip them—in the game of good cop/bad cop, Fisten could play both roles. He was both likable and ruthless. His superiors recommended him for a Central Tactical (CENTAC) unit, a federal task force created to bypass local corruption. CENTACs recruited cops, who were sworn in as federal agents, and paired them with DEA and FBI teams to pursue drug-trafficking and RICO cases. Fisten’s CENTAC took on one of Florida’s biggest smuggling rings, the Tabraue organization (named for the family who ran it). The Tabraues had halted an earlier ATF investigation when their enforcer, a man named Miguel “El Oso”—the Bear—Ramirez, shot the ATF’s undercover informant and used a circular saw to behead him. The CENTAC brought down the Tabraue organization, and Fisten got Ramirez to confess to the murder.
    Despite the triumph, the case taught Fisten a bitter lesson. During the trial, the CIA provided a defense witness who testified that while smuggling drugs, the elder Tabraue, a Bay of Pigs veteran, had been on the CIA’s payroll as an informant. Based on this testimony, the judge suspended his sentence. Fisten vowed never again to become involved in a “doomed case.”
    But a year later, in 1990, he was assigned to a new federal task force, Organized Crime Squad–2, or OCS, which was initially created to pursue a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case against Jon Roberts’s friend, the reputed gangster Bobby Erra. The focus quickly turned, however, to San Pedro and Prado and to a series of murders they appeared to have been involved in before and after Prado entered the CIA. The investigation lasted nearly five years and resulted in racketeering convictions for several men, but not for San