Birth of an Operative
A coincidence catapulted Gordon Todd Skinner into the center of an international drug ring
Dinner conversation at Katherine Magrini’s house was a bizarre amalgam of conservative politics, business strategies, and crime busting. Her son Gordon Todd Skinner would tinker around with vials and burners and exotic compounds in the basement, then walk upstairs to hear his stepfather, U.S. Treasury agent Gary Magrini, share stories about the secretive world of drug traffickers. Federal agents dropped by for dinner routinely, and they talked openly about their investigations.
During one discussion, Skinner suggested a geometric method for the detection of Ponzi schemes. A light bulb went off in the head of one special agent for the FBI. In May 1982, that same agent asked a 17 year-old Skinner for help tracking down a Maserati-driving former Tulsa firefighter-turned-pot dealer named “Barefoot” Don Linville.
Within weeks, Skinner had Linville on the phone and arranged a meeting with him in Montego Bay, Jamaica. A federal grand jury accused Linville under a drug kingpin statute in 1986; Linville remained on the run til his arrest in Canada in 1992.
“My mother told me a guy at the FBI almost lost his job over having involvement with someone who was under 18,” said Skinner.
It was in these early encounters with federal agents that Skinner’s identity as a government operative was forged. Some of Skinner’s earliest court testimonies in cases like USA vs. Sam Merit (1983) and USA vs. Lane (1986) hint at his involvement with the feds. Although records indicate Skinner was formally activated as an informant in 1984, Skinner says that was simply a paperwork maneuver meant to save the FBI from scrutiny.
The Fraudster and the Cartel Man
Maureen Lane had a scheme. An energetic and driven businesswoman in the early 1980s, she ran a private investor’s circle out of University Club Towers that was rumored to return extraordinary dividends–66% a year. Skinner personally knew people who had written her large checks; he thought her ideas were creative, but her capital was too costly.
In Lane’s eyes, Skinner was just some rich kid who looked like a good mark. When Skinner first met her, they struck up a few small financial deals, but something didn’t feel quite right to Skinner. The more details he heard from his friends, and from Lane herself, he noticed that her investment racket bore the telltale signs of a Ponzi scheme. He notified his stepfather.
The FBI and the Treasury soon gave Skinner permission to open up a front–a business he named Financial Exchange International, Incorporated [FINEX] that operated from the same building as Lane’s office. Lane was unaware that the FINEX office was bugged from the beginning, and every conversation and transaction was being meticulously recorded.
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“She would give me a check, they'd add up to whatever they were. I had to verify the checks were real, the banks were real, and there was money in the accounts,” Skinner explained. “I would wire money to wherever Maureen wanted that money wired, and I got paid 10% for doing that clearing. Of course, the reason she's paying me so much is I'm being set up to be the fall guy.”
“He had his FINEX company which I didn't really understand exactly what they did,” said one of Skinner’s friend who visited the office. “I thought it had to do with buying and selling paper—basically money at different rates and stuff. He was just humming along, doing fabulously well.”
To Skinner, Lane’s bucket shop seemed like a common enough scam by a clever operator, until the fall of 1984, when an unexpected visitor showed up to Lane’s office with two accordion-file cases full of cash. Louis Wilder Stallings was a Tulsa airplane salesman who heard that Lane was offering serious returns on investments, and he wanted in. His cases were loaded with over a million dollars in cash.
“I remember he wasn't very tall,” Skinner said. “He was in his fifties. He was a very polite person, and looked very serious.”
Stallings was far more serious than he could imagine. Lane asked Skinner if he could get the cash into an account then wired to her immediately, and he said he could. It was a strange enough transaction that Skinner sought the advice of his stepfather after Stallings left. Magrini knew Stallings.
“I went over to dinner that night and told Gary and he made calls and the next morning my life changed forever,” recalled Skinner.
Operation Greenback and its Blowback
The next morning, Skinner received a direct call from a White House task force on international drug trafficking [OCDETF], which was overseen at the time by Vice-President George H.W. Bush. They explained Stallings was a cocaine smuggler with deep connections to Colombian drug lords. By the end of the phone call, Skinner had been ordered into Operation Greenback, a multi-agency taskforce established to combat money laundering. [Read the Boris Olarte Affidavit for more evidence]
From the point of view of the FBI agents, Skinner shot up the ranks in the intelligence world. They couldn’t figure out why a no-named rich kid from Tulsa was suddenly granted such extraordinary authority. From that point forward, Skinner delivered orders to both Treasury and the FBI.
Operation Greenback claimed control of the Maureen Lane investigation–busting it prematurely would ruin the government’s surveillance of Stallings. The investigation, arrest, and prosecution of Stallings took years–but the case would yield tremendous insights into Colombia’s increasingly problematic cocaine empire. Stallings ended up with a 75 year sentence and died in 1992. Lane was convicted of multiple counts of bank fraud, and many years later made an exemplary turnaround and became a co-director for a welfare rights organization.
FBI and Treasury didn’t know at the time that there was a perfectly good reason that Skinner was chosen for Operation Greenback. He was involved in a far more advanced and shrouded operation at the time, one involving an army general named Moise B. Seligman.
