I was assigned working Eurasian organized crime, Russian organized crime. You know, one day your supervisor comes in and just says, hey, you're the expert. Become an expert in organized crime. We had to start a new squad and that was it, and that was my entree.
In January two thousand and two, FBI Special Agent Mark Pinto had a lead that some Romanians were running a credit card fraud operation in Las Vegas. They'd steal credit cards and get cash advances, always moving from casino to casino to avoid suspicion. A lot of stolen cards, a lot of Romanian runners, a lot of casinos. In other words, a lot of money in play.
We didn't know who's who, We didn't know names. We just had like a thunbnail sketch of what we thought was going on.
But Mark eventually got a big lead. He learned that all the important players among the Romanians were gathering for a private event at an Italian restaurant in Vegas. Mark knew there was no way he could get into the restaurant, and he didn't have an informant in the organization, so he needed a clever way to collect the names of the Romanians who were there. The solution an old FBI trick.
So i did the old homeless routine where I'm hanging out where the kitchen cafe was cold concrete, you know, and you're just sitting there.
Mark, dressed like a homeless guy, sat outside the restaurant for several hours, radioing in license plates.
And they're riding down the lice plate information so we get an idea of who's coming in, who's going out, get an eye on them.
Eventually, he and his FBI colleagues had enough they called it a night. An hour after they left, there was a shooting at the restaurant.
An argument ensued and random shots were fired and one of the Romanians get hit.
A Romanian took a bullet and a leg, but the guy refused to go to the hospital.
He winds up dying. So now it's sort of like, Hey, we've got this credit card fraud case we're working, and some dude just get shot in a credit card fraud case. It's like, that's not supposed to happen.
Mark had no idea what was going on. He was on the outside and he really needed a way in. But the FBI had a new source, a guy with inside information, a Romanian guy, a connected guy, a guy who said he knew all the players in Las Vegas.
Guys said sure, in your country. As soon as you come, any fourth of entry stays. You see something, you say something.
I'm Trevor Aronson from Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. This is Alphabet Boys, Episode three, Code Name card Member. As you probably know, Las Vegas has a long storied history with organized crime. The mafia turned this patch of desert into a city of casinos and showgirl theaters to entertain the men building the nearby Hoover Dam, and from there, Las Vegas expanded into a global entertainment capital, all while funneling millions back to organize crime families in other cities.
Vegas has always been with the mafia, calls and open city. It's a big place to make loads of money. Different groups that might kill each other for infringing on territories and say New York or Chicago, will work together in a place like Vegas. It's a place where rivals can become partners.
So it was like the old days in LCNA Coast and Ustra where they come here where this is an open city.
This is Mark pinto the FBI agent again.
And so you'll have some crossover for groups that don't agree with each other. They were kind of working together on the QT to commit crimes in Las Vegas because it's so easy and you don't have to worry about getting shot in the back, you know, because you're in the wrong neighborhood.
Now, what you probably don't know about Vegas is that when the old East Coast and Midwest crime families started to klient in the eighties and nineties, the Eastern Europeans moved in. Today, in Vegas you're more likely to find Russian, Armenian, Bulgarian and Romanian criminal syndicates. But surprisingly Vegas, as an open city, has remained. The money in Vegas is still just too good.
So someone from one group may come here and do a little extortion. Someone from another group may do some medicaid fraud. But you'll find that if they have some common interests here in Las Vegas, that sort of sidesteps they're loyalties in Los Angeles because the bosses don't know what's going on, so it's an opportunity to make money, kind of freelancy.
This became Marx beeat for the FBI the nexus of these various Eastern European organized crime groups.
And so you have these weird, weird mix and one of the oddest mixes were the Romanian Armenian connection.
Mark had a hunch he suspected Romanian and Armenian organized crime groups, despite being rivals in cities like New York and Los Angeles, had partnered in Las Vegas to make money using stolen credit cards. But Mark didn't have much concrete information, and he didn't have anyone providing him with eyes and ears on the inside. He needed an inn, and that's when he first heard the name Flavio George Escu.
In August two thousand and one, Mark went to a hotel where Mark's partner and another agent were meeting upstairs with Flavio.
And I'm waiting down in the lobby and I get a phone call and in the background, I hear the primary agent in an animated discussion with Flavio, and all my partner says is you need to get up here.
This animated thescussion arose from a basic misunderstanding at the very beginning of Flavio's relationship with the FBI. Back in June two thousand and one, Flavio first walked into the FBI's Las Vegas office offering information about various crimes. The FBI signed him up as a confidential human source, an informant. Flavio insisted though, that he wasn't an informant, but instead
a friend of the bureau. As someone who grew up under constant threat from police informants, this language was very important to him. Now, the bureau hadn't figured out exactly what to do with Flavio and his information, So a couple of months after being signed up with the FBI, Flavio had this first meeting at the hotel.
He wanted to be known as a friend of the bureau, which is fine by me, it doesn't matter, but we still have all these regulations.
That's Robert Kleimer, the FBI agent in the room with Flavio.
You know, I was one of these agents that was you know by the book.
What happened was that Flavio had brought his friend a gift, and.
He brought I don't know, it's a few bottles of wine as a gift, and one of the rules as an FBI agent, you can't take gifts from your informants, and I was like, I can't, can't take it. And I proceeded to tell him all the rules and this, and then he didn't. That didn't bother him, and he's like, no, no, no.
By the time Mark made it from the lobby to the hotel room door, the no no nos had turned into a full throated shouting match between Flavio and Robert. Flavio was insistent the FBI agents must accept the wine. It's a gift from a friend. But Robert was just as dogmatic. He couldn't accept the wine. That's against FBI rules. Neither man would back down. Finally Mark entered the room.
Mark Pinto's there and he's like, yeah, I can take it.
Mark grabbed the wine bottles.
They're probably still sitting in some evidence vault or something. I don't know, probably aging really well.
Mark wasn't as by the books as Robert.
I would do whatever needed to be done for the good of the case that didn't violate the Constitution and didn't provide false testimony against any of the bad guys because you got to play about the rules. But it doesn't mean that on occasion I didn't skirt some administrative policy.
The FBI rule in this particular situation was in venting the agents from doing the work in Marx's estimation, so he ignored the rule, and now that the wine issue was settled, Flavio and the FBI agents could talk. Mark, dressed in a suit, took a seat on the hotel bed and listened. Flavio had brought someone with him to meet with the FBI agents.
That other person that was there was a young Romanian I believe was a waiter at a restaurant and he was being forced into stealing credit cards.
Flavio knew the FBI was trying to crack the stolen credit card fraud ring. Then he heard about this waiter, so Flavio was facilitating an information exchange.
Flavio was not involved in criminal activity at all, and what he would do is he would just talk to people in the Romaining community and hear their concerns and provide that information. The main reason he did that is because he knew that if anyone else provided that information, they would be in danger, and that's unusual. You usually don't run across people like that.
Flavio knew that Romanians providing information about organized crime in Las Vegas faced not only threats to themselves in the United States, but also threats to their family members still back in Romania.
If you think you're protected here, your sister's house will be burned down, or the government will somehow seize the land and you'll be screwed. And where can they go. You're lucky if your house just gets burned down, because they're making a point.
If you remember, when Flavio calls the CIA in twenty twelve, the response he receives is cold and detached, uninterested, almost But that's not how it went with the FBI. As it came clear that Flavio could provide information relevant to the credit card fraud ring, Mark became one of Flavio's FBI handlers.
I don't believe he was ever paid except for expenses, because he wouldn't accept money for he was a hard worker and he really believed in keeping the United States the way it was. It was such a great place.
FBI internal reports confirmed that Flavio never accepted money from the FBI, which is very uncommon for an informant, or to use Flavio's preferred language, a friend of the bureau. The FBI has more than fifteen thousand registered informants, and most of them are in the game for the money, and informants can make a lot of money, in excess of six figures a year. But Flavio, he wasn't in it for the money. Informants get paid for information friends,
they do it as a favor. Flavio is working with the FBI out of a patriotic duty, out of a desire, in Flavio's view, to defend the country. One of the earliest FBI reports about Flavio lists his code name.
I can still remember everyone by their code name because you'd referred to them by their code name when you had conversations with other investigators.
In the report, an FBI agent lists Flavio's code name as Rolls Royce, no doubt, a reference to Flavio's business of shipping high end cars from Las Vegas to Europe. But Rolls Royce is scratched out, and above it in handwriting is Flavio's final code name, a reference to the Vegas credit card ring card Member.
My partner probably changed it when he started working with Flavio, just so we could remember what code name goes with who.
And code name card member was ready to get to work more after the break.
With the AHBA, when I connect contact them the first time, first time in my life, what I wanted In Vegas.
I'm having a phone conversation with Flavio George Escu, who's in a federal prison following a failed arms deal with some Colombians. I've asked Flavio what he remembers from over a decade earlier, when he approached the FBI in Las Vegas offering information about Romanian organized crime.
They asked me, why you come to us? Why you need what you need? You need money, you need protection, you need of what you need? Do you have any charges you did something wrong? Because there's no people to come to our office and stand up and say something. I said, Sir, in your country, as soon as you come any port of entries says you see something, you say something. And I said, I'm going to be one
day American citizens. But does organized crime destroyed the financial system in the United States and makes me to be ashamed to say I am Romanian? That's why I came to your office, sir, And they said okay.
Flavio says he always wanted to live in America to be an American ever since his father caught him listening to Americans on the radio, and now that he was in the United States, he hated to see fellow Romanians committing crimes or abusing the system that was. As he says, his entire motivation for working with the FBI and naive believe that the post nine eleven slogan, if you see something, say something, we're words to live by. We're words that we Americans took seriously.
I consider just this my country right now. They acceed me over here. They gave me citizenship, they give me everything. They said. You know, I have to pay my debt back to the United.
States after a youth spent under a brutal dictatorship. Flavio tends to see the world in black and white, good and bad, and that view influenced his decision to cooperate with the FBI.
This is always just my drive to you know, under the US Romanians we taxt and myself, I participate in a revolution in nineteen eighty nine. I was in the street between the bullets and everything we take those sprout. We have a mindset to still on the side of the government and save license, save the country and fight for the country.
So, working with Mark Pinto, Flavio started helping the FBI figure out how the Romanians ran their credit card fraud ring and who inside the organization could be recruited as other informants. Flavio acted as a kind of spymaster for the FBI, putting together his own network of informants within the Romanian community and then funneling the information he received to Mark another federal agents, all while protecting the identities of his Romanian contacts.
I know that he would reach out to certain people and say, hey, what's the problem. I could help you, And of course, being an investigator, you want where'd you get that information? I want to talk to that person, and then that's now a process of getting that person to agree to take the risks that are going to be involved. And Flavio didn't like these young people taking those risks. He'd rather be the go between. The problem is he is not a criminal, and so he doesn't
talk like a criminal. He doesn't talk about the things regular criminal guys would talk about, you know, about the drinking and going to strip clubs and you know, lavishly spending their ill gotten gains. He wasn't that guy. So he was able to get some of the baseline information. But basically he had his own group of informants, if you will.
That's it.
Mark's opinion is that Flavio didn't have an angle. Unlike most informants. He didn't want money.
We didn't pay him for the information we paid for. I believe some expenses when he traveled when we directed him to travel and go somewhere and meet some people.
But that was it. But could Flavio have had an angle other than money? Mark says no. Flavio says no. But ultimately this is something that is impossible to fact check. It's a question mark, maybe not one in big boldface type, but it's there. Perhaps Flavio really was providing information to the FBI out of a sense of patriotic duty, or maybe Flavio had some other angle, an angle I can't
figure out, an angle Mark could never figure out. Because let's be clear, what Flavio did, providing information for years to the FBI for no benefit. That's unusual anyway, whatever is motivation, Flavio was helping the FBI find informants and building a list of names of the players involved in the Las Vegas crime ring but he was also helping the FBI figure out how the Romanians were stealing the credit cards. It turns out that the whole operation was huge.
So one of the higher end gyms here you pay to go in and or you have this outrageous membership, they have those little key locks. You know the issue. You are key, and what this guy would do is you go in and he'd pay and he'd work out and then he would send out one of the guys or go outside to a van and he'd copy the key. And you're like, that's a lot of work for one key, but he would do it over the course of month a year, so you'd have a copy of just about every key that was in there.
After time, Once the Romanians had copies of keys for all the lockers, they'd systematically steal credit cards from the wallets. Well, the owners of those cards were working out in the gym. This wasn't quick and dirty, grab and go theft either. The Romanians had developed a sophisticated system.
That's what gets me. These guys work so hard at doing this stuff. If they got a legitimate job, they'd be rich. I mean, because they're willing to put in the work they I mean, they work harder at not working, you know what I mean. It would just crack me up. But yeah, one of the guys here had a little ban a key service, and that's what he would do. He'd cut the keys.
Sometimes the thief would just write down the credit card and driver's license information, and the credit card and ID would be duplicated later using special equipment. Other Times he'd take a card, but always the one in the back of the wallet, the one you're least likely to notice is missing.
Would they take that single credit card? If they're going to physically steal the credit card, then put everything back, don't take anything else. There could be ten thousand dollars in the wallet. They're not going to take it because it'll compromise it.
A lookout always, an attractive woman would be stationed on the gym floor keeping an eye out for anyone who might be headed back to the locker room too soon.
And if it looked like they were going to finish working out, they might have a pretty young thing go up to them and start chatting to help with them, to distract them so they had enough time to get a number of credit cards. This is throughout the whole country, and gym's are the favorite because that's where you leave your wallet. I mean, it's obvious.
The Romanians in Las Vegas had partnered with Armenians throughout the country in cities from Seattle to Miami. The Armenians would steal credit card information from someone in one city, and within hours, the Romanians would print a fake credit card and take that card to one of Vegas's casinos. It was quite the operation, and Flavio's assistance to the FBI was invaluable in helping agents penetrate the credit card ring, an operation that was bringing in obscene amounts of cash
using cards from across the country. That's up to the break.
He's a little bit of a strange guy. He's gregarious, he's a nice guy, but you kind of push away from a little bit because he's just strange. You don't know what he's after.
This is Mark Pinto. He's talking about Flavio George.
Escu and maybe his i'll just call it technique wasn't refined enough, but it's his person. If he wore jeans, they were obviously designer jeans. When he wore clothes, he wore a lot of linen never needed to shave. His hair is never tozzled.
Mark had a reputation for forming bonds with his informants, becoming perhaps closer than his FBI supervisors would have preferred, and he and Flavio became friendly with a common appreciation for the finer things in life.
I'd take him to restaurants once a while, nice restaurants because he knew about good food. Because he said, Hey, this place has really good foiguah. Now I don't have any kids, so we had some money and then go, hey, we're gonna I'll take you to foiguah. And it's funny because he's one of those guys that orders it then sends it back to get overcooked, you know what I mean. And that's kind of they sound like a snob, but I mean, that's disposable income. You do whatever you want
with it. But that was my entertainment and it just cracked me up because he was that's the way he was. He'd only eat organic chicken. He's one of those guys.
Well. Working together in Las Vegas, Mark and Flavia formed a bond, a kind of bond that isn't typical between an agent and informant. Friends. That's the term Flavio prefers, but I don't think that's right. They're more like colleagues, like equals.
He's just telling me to stop chewing tobacco. It's bad for your health. Stop chewing tobacco. I'm like, but I love tobacco and I'm going to be dead at fifty anyway, so what's it matter. Well, it turns out I'm not dead at fifty, and I stopped chewing tobacco, so that was it.
Normally, there's a power imbalance in the relationship between an agent and his informant. The agent, usually cold and detached, holds the power. But Mark and Flavio trusted each other, so there was a kind of mutual respect, and that
isn't common. Mark and Flavia would ultimately spend a couple of years working together to crack the credit card fraud ring, and what they discovered was that some of the credit cards that the Romanians stole came from Vegas, but most were from far away from cities like Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and that's where the Armenians came into play.
The Armenians had a nationwide network of thief teams that would travel throughout the United States and steal credit cards.
Within hours of stealing credit card information across the country, the Armenians would transfer the card information to the Romanians in Las Vegas, who would print fake IDs and cards and then go to casinos to request cash advances.
Vegas makes it easy to get your hands on money, because that's kind of how Vegas prospers.
This is Robert Climber, the Buy the Books FBI agent who was working with Flavio and Mark Pinto.
So they would go into the casinos and go right up to the cage and get cash. These casinos want your money, so they'll give you the money off the credit card, thinking you're going to stay in the casino and gamble, and you know, long and short of it is the casino gets to keep the cash, but not in this case. They'd walk right out of the casino with the cash and they were doing close to like fifty thousand dollars in a week.
In Yeah, the Romanians were making serious money.
I mean they're drinking crystal, they're waving money around, getting the best tables at places, and that's pretty amazing.
As just one example. According to these internal FBI reports, based on Flavio's information, John Badia, one of the alleged leaders of the ring, was a frequent visitor to Crazy Horse IWO, a now closed strip club that had been a favorite among mob guys since the late nineteen seventies. It was also a destination for a list celebrities visiting Vegas, with reports of Brad Pitt, Robert de Niro, James Kahn,
and Mike Tyson being among the club's patrons. But Dia would drop seven to eight thousand dollars a night at Crazy Horse two, according to FBI reports. But Dia is currently serving a federal prison sentence for an unrelated case. One of the FBI reports, based on Flavio's information, described a wild and expensive party the Romanians through. I think it was Crazy Horse. It might have been another club, but it was this Romanian band. I guess had come
from Romanian play do you know this story? And they I guess they were throwing money at the stage.
No, that's a regular thing. So what happens is it Bill go to a restaurant and usually it's a proprior to the They know and the proprietor knows, they're probably doing something sketchy because you you don't throw cash around like that. But they'd have these Romanian bands come in and they'd throw these big parties. And remember, most of
these people are not from here. They're from somewhere else, which means La or Seattle or wherever else they're hailing from to come to our fine city to commit crime. So what they would do is they would reserve the restaurant for night, whatever restaurant it is, and the band would play and you know, the food's brought out and the wine's flowing. When it was a good song, they just throw money on the ground and at the end of the night they would fill up trash bags full
of cash. And it was funny because the bands used to play on the competitive nature of the two teams, and so whoever threw out the most money, you know, at a higher position, So they just throw out more money and someone requests that saying, hey, this song is for so and so, and they just throw money. Yeah, we had that on some videotapes. It was incredible watch because they would have to take breaks to clean the
money off the floor because it was getting dangerous. People were slipping on the money when they were dancing.
So much money, so many bills that the Romanians would slip on the piles of cash beneath their feet.
Yeah, it was just it's insane. I mean, it's a huge amount of money and we only scraped the surface. There's only so many of us, and we did the best we could. But it was a good couple of years, you know, working this stuff.
But Flavio, the FBI's secret spymaster, could outwit his fellow Romanians forever. The guy in charge of the Vegas crew somehow figured out that Flavio was working with the FEDS, and he put a price on Flavio's.
Head, but not whole crime organization. They to everyone to kill me, to pay somebody to kill me, and somebody should my cart and everything. And I didn't say one word to I didn't go, I didn't try, I didn't claim, I didn't do anything.
That's in the next episode. This is up in arms, season two of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet Boys is a production of Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. The show was reported, written and hosted by me Trevor Aronson. For more information about the series or to drop as a tip, head to our website Alphabet Boys dot x y z. You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aronson. The show's instagram is Alphabet Boys dot pot. If you're enjoying Alphabet Boys, tell your friends about the show. Personal
recommendations are the best recommendations. And if you want to see an illegal arms deal from the inside again, it's Alphabet Boys do xyz. You'll find undercover recordings and documents related to Flavio's case. Finally, you can help us ride the algorithms by leaving a rating or review on your favorite podcast app that helps other people find us. And thanks for listening.