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When Ken Bell heard that the FBI wanted to see him, he thought little of it. After all, visits like that were a familiar part of his job. As a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bell was often handling cases that involved the agency. But what he'd been working on in the spring of 1999 was a cigarette-smuggling case that seemed fairly routine. In fact, his office was ready to file an indictment and make some arrests when the FBI said they wanted to talk to him about it.Something was up. Bell knew it as soon as the agents arrived at his office and handed him a document to sign. It was an acknowledgment that he was about to hear classified information, and could be prosecuted for sharing it. This is going to be good, Bell thought. The FBI agents set up a projector, and a PowerPoint presentation flashed onto the screen. The first slides summarized the smuggling ring -- nothing new there. Then came one with a startling word: Hezbollah.
From the news, Bell knew this was an organization of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and that no group, at the time, had murdered more Americans. But what did these killers have to do with cigarette smuggling in North Carolina?
Up next on the screen was an image of eight men -- all of whom Bell recognized as part of the smuggling ring. He glanced at the agent across the table. "You've got a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte," the man said.
The first hints of something suspicious had come four years earlier, in April 1995. An off-duty deputy sheriff named Bob Fromme was working as a security guard at JR Discount, a retail outlet and cigarette wholesaler in sleepy Statesville, North Carolina. His main job was to track and catch shoplifters, but one day he noticed that four olive-skinned young men were buying huge numbers of cigarettes. There was nothing so wrong with that, except each of the men was buying exactly 299 cartons at a time, one less than the number that would require legal paperwork. Stranger still, one man paid for everything in cash. Fromme watched as he pulled thick wads of bills bound by rubber bands from a plastic bag. The entire transaction cost close to $30,000.
Fromme, a stocky man with thick glasses, followed the men out to the parking lot, where they talked into cell phones, looking around warily as they loaded the cigarettes into a van. Then they drove off. On his next shift at JR's, Fromme saw them again. Soon it was a regular pattern. The group varied, but several faces became familiar.
Fromme decided to run license-plate checks on their vehicles, which led to rental agencies in Charlotte. Later that spring, he tailed the vans to the state line and watched as the drivers crossed north into Virginia, or west into Tennessee. Where they went from there, he hadn't a clue.
It was time to take this higher, so Fromme called a buddy, John Lorick, at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The friend knew immediately what was happening: Those guys, he said, are smuggling cigarettes. It was a familiar scheme. You buy cheap cigarettes in a state with low tobacco taxes, like North Carolina, and sell them someplace where taxes are high. The difference is pure profit. It's also illegal. In the fall of 1996 the ATF opened an official investigation, later code-named Operation Smokescreen, and Fromme was assigned to it by the sheriff's department.
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