Fat Leonard by Craig Whitlock

Author:Craig Whitlock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

After nightfall, 1,500 miles away in Tampa, Florida, a large team of federal agents swarmed the Camden Preserve apartments. A manager had given them the passcode to the gate. They climbed the exterior stairway to the third floor of a stucco building and banged hard on the door to Unit #605.

The local time was 8:50 p.m.: about an hour after Misiewicz’s interrogation ended in Colorado and twenty-two minutes before Francis would be tackled to the ground in his San Diego hotel suite.

Commander Jose Luis Sanchez answered the knock. He had just finished gulping down takeout from Steak ’n Shake, anticipating a quiet evening alone. One agent waved a warrant to search the premises. Two others ordered him to step outside.

After completing his unofficial tour of duty as Francis’s chief eavesdropper at the Fleet Logistics Center in Yokosuka, Sanchez had spent the past three months working at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa.

Now forty years old, the beady-eyed officer was losing his hair, gaining weight, and—like Misiewicz—taking a beating from a divorce that had left him marooned in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom walkup. But he was smarter than he looked. Before the agents could ask a question or get him to incriminate himself, he said, “I want to talk to an attorney.”

Sanchez stood in the third-floor breezeway while the agents from DCIS and NCIS picked through his flat. He knew Francis was in San Diego for a big meeting. The Boss had texted him earlier to say his visit was going well.

Unlike the others, Sanchez was not under arrest. The warrant authorized the agents only to search his apartment and seize certain items. For some reason, his two cell phones were not on the list. He had left them inside, and now the Samsung was ringing almost nonstop. One number, listed as “Baby,” kept calling from Japan. Another was from New York. A third was Sanchez’s estranged wife, Priscilla, who lived three and a half hours away in Jacksonville. Agents were banging on her door too, with a subpoena for the couple’s bank records.

The agents searched for two hours. Once they left, Sanchez rushed inside and picked up a phone to warn Francis on Viber, an encrypted app.

“Emergency, apartment raided by 15 federal agents tonight… had me on the ground with guns pointed at me,” he tapped with his thumbs. “Working with my lawyer Mo… Confiscated computer and other papers… shud I throw away this phone… some reason this was not taken.”

It was too late. He never heard from Francis again.

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