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surveillance reports on Baer: He had started attending synagogue. “I decided,” says Fisten, “hey, we’re both Jews, both about the same age. He’s never met me, so he doesn’t know I’m a cop. I’ll go to his temple and see what happens.”
    Higher-ups balked at authorizing an undercover operation in a place of worship, so Fisten went on his own time. “Mark and I really clicked,” he says. “A couple weeks after we met, we go out to coffee one morning, and Mark told me he had anxiety. I said, ‘Buddy, I understand how stressed you must be, because I’m a cop, and we’ve been investigating you, and we’re going to put your ass in prison for the rest of your life unless you help us get Bobby Erra.’ ”
    Thrown by Fisten’s revelation, Baer fell to the floor of the Denny’s where they had met and began flopping uncontrollably. “Fortunately,” Fisten says, “it was just a grand mal seizure.” Fisten accompanied Baer in the ambulance to the hospital, and Baer agreed to enter witness protection and cooperate. Days later, Baer’s mother was hospitalized after Erra and another man allegedly entered her apartment and beat her with her walker. But Baer had already begun spilling his secrets. By his account, he had been an all-purpose attorney, representing Erra in drug deals, carrying bags of cash for him to launder in Bahamian banks, and even unloading coke from smugglers’ planes. Most important, Baer explained that Erra had run his operations with Albert San Pedro and his bodyguard Carlos Redondo until Albert’s arrest in 1986.
    Having learned of the connection between Albert and Bobby Erra, Hinman notified federal prosecutors that Operation RHABDO was now targeting Albert and Redondo. The prosecutors approved, unaware of the immunity deal their boss had granted Albert.
    To minimize leaks, the OCS investigators rented an apartment in West Miami to use as an undercover office. They moved a truckload of evidence from the 1985 investigation of Albert into the apartment, filling a bedroom. As they opened the boxes, they were stunned to find that no one had ever listened to hundreds of hours of audiotapes. The U.S. military lent the OCS linguists to help transcribe recordings that were in Spanish. As the investigators logged the tapes, they were astonished: Not only did the tapes implicate Albert and Erra in a vast drug-trafficking and money-laundering operation, but they also appeared to implicate Albert in at least two murders. Says Fisten, “The fact that 1,100 hours of this tape had sat unlistened to in a storage room for nearly five years was the biggest debacle of justice I had ever seen.”
    During the six-month period during which the tapes were recorded, Albert and Erra’s operation appeared to have taken in about $70 million from drug trafficking and some $3 million from illegal gambling. They apparently laundered at least $9 million in Bahamian banks. The tapes also revealed a separate laundering scheme that involved a corrupt lottery official in Puerto Rico who sold Albert and Erra unclaimed winning tickets in exchange for drug cash. (Notably, Marsha Ludwig would admit to federal prosecutors that around the time she sent her note requesting a pardon for Albert to Governor Graham, she cashed in a winning Puerto Rican lottery ticket for a quarter of a million dollars, though she insisted it was not a payoff but a legitimately purchased ticket.)
    To help guide his squad through Albert’s world, Hinman recruited Detective McGruff, from the 1985 investigation case. “I went to work with those guys under protest,” McGruff says. “I wanted nothing to do with San Pedro.” One of the first questions OCS investigators asked McGruff was how his squad had managed to disregard so much evidence in the state case. He answered, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’ll see.”
    And soon they did.
    A few days before Christmas 1990, the federal prosecutors supervising Operation RHABDO