House of Cards

On the afternoon of June 10, five men gathered in a parking lot in
South Lake Union for a drug deal. According to court documents filed in
U.S. District Court on June 11, the broker of the deal was Marshall P.
Reinsch, who liked to brag that he “sold over a kilogram of cocaine a
day.” The customer was an undercover SPD detective going by the name
“Bryan T. Owens,” who was there to buy seven kilos of cocaine ($18,500
per kilo), three pounds of methamphetamine ($22,000 per lb), and a
silver 2001 Honda Accord coupe with hidden compartments for smuggling
drugs ($21,500). The deal had been worked out over several dinners in
March and April at Joeys Restaurant.

The three other men in the parking lot outside Joeys Restaurant and
Daniel’s Broiler on June 10 were Hondurans: Carlos A.
Zavala-
Bustillo, whom Reinsch identified as his supplier; Edwan
Porfirio Fletes, who sat in a black car; and Cesar A.
Canterero-Arteaga, who sat in a white truck with the drugs. The meeting
was tense. Owens, the undercover officer, had not been expecting anyone
else to be with Reinsch. As Zavala-Bustillo showed off the Honda, Owens
joked about the used car dying on him. No one laughed. Then Owens was
shown the drugs and asked for the money. “My guy wants out of here,”
court records say Reinsch told Owens, referring to Zavala-Bustillo.
“He’s not digging this.”

An undercover FBI agent showed up in a truck with the cash. Owens
led Reinsch to the truck, Reinsch took the cash, and Owens shook
Zavala-Bustillo’s hand. Moments later, the parking lot was filled with
armed officers. According to a bartender at Daniel’s Broiler, at least
20 plainclothes officers and a dozen more officers with rifles pulled
up in unmarked black SUVs. “It was pretty wild,” the bartender
says.

As police were rounding the men up, another man pulled up to the
scene. Rick Wilson, court records say, had come to back up Owens, a man
he believed to be his friend. Police say Wilson was carrying two
handguns when he arrived at the parking lot. Wilson had gotten to know
Owens through an underground casino Wilson allegedly helped manage. The
SPD had created “Bryan T. Owens” specifically to infiltrate the casino.
Wilson agreed to provide security for Owens during this parking-lot
drug deal, a friend said, because Wilson “was late on rent and needed
cash.”

Just after midnight on June 11, about 12 hours after the drug bust,
a group of about 20 men and women sipped beers and played poker in
Wilson’s apartment, which had become a makeshift underground casino
behind the Wildrose bar at 11th Avenue and East Pike Street. A fleet of
SPD cars and trucks blocked off the street, and then, according to
witnesses, one officer announced over a loudspeaker that police were
there to serve a warrant. Twenty other cops, including vice detectives
and SWAT officers, breached a lower-level apartment door with guns
drawn. One man arrested at the scene says everyone in the apartment was
then loaded into a modified Metro bus for holding.

Officers also swarmed other locations around the city that night.
According to two sources familiar with the raids, police showed up at a
house in Ballard and at an apartment in West Seattle, and staged a
traffic collision on Alki so officers could covertly set up containment
before raiding another home—all residences connected in some way
to the underground casino on Capitol Hill and another in Belltown. But
the raids weren’t just about late-night card games and drinking. SPD’s
investigation of the card rooms had led them to alleged large-scale
drug dealing. It was a friend of Wilson’s who introduced Owens to
Reinsch. According to regulars, Reinsch frequented the casino. Seattle
police declined to comment on the raids or the investigation.

It began in 2006, when Owens first started going to a 1930s-themed
Capitol Hill after-hours club on 14th Avenue and Pike known as Cafe
UnAmerican. “Something was weird about him,” says one club regular.
“[We] didn’t know where he came from. It seemed really strange that no
person would vouch for him.” Nevertheless, Owens worked his way into
the Cafe UnAmerican’s inner circle, passing himself off, court records
say, as a “trust fund baby who was only interested in partying and
making a quick buck.” According to one regular, Owens wasn’t very good
at poker.

Owens, a man with tattoos, a shaved head, and a body like a
linebacker, continued to build a rapport with Cafe UnAmerican’s
management, taking them out for dinners at El Gaucho, where
entrées typically run about $50. One source says Owens even paid
for several Cafe UnAmerican members to attend protests at the
Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, in
2008. Friends of Wilson’s and other card-room regulars say Owens showed
up to parties with stacks of pizzas and regaled regulars with tales of
his conservative family’s construction empire, his cocaine-addict
brother, and his own run-ins with the cops.

One evening, one source says, Owens began telling them about being
arrested at a May Day rally in 2008. “He said he came upon this protest
and was crossing the street, and the cops were hassling him,” the
source says. “He started mouthing off and they arrested him. He [said
he] never thought about being against the police until then, and then
from that point on he wanted to fuck cops up. He really played up the
‘fuck pigs’ thing,” the source says. Indeed, Seattle police bolstered
their undercover detective’s story by filing a fake report for the
incident, in case someone went looking for it.

Although the undercover officer had gained the trust of the Cafe
UnAmerican crew, the club was in danger of shutting down, a source
says, after the state gaming commission opened an investigation. Cafe
UnAmerican caught wind of the investigation from nightclub staff in the
area and began closing up shop. That is until, two club regulars say,
Owens offered to help them find a new space.

“He said he found a warehouse in Belltown… and that’s where the
next speakeasy was,” one club regular says. According to the source,
Owens showed Cafe UnAmerican’s founders a 10,000-square-foot warehouse
in Belltown and told them he’d gotten a sweetheart deal because his
father knew the building’s owner. Because of Owens, the speakeasy was
able to continue, a source says, and the group running the Cafe
UnAmerican—which became the pirate-themed Cafe Corsair—made
Owens a partner, offering him a percentage of the club’s earnings and
essentially making the SPD an investor in an illegal card room it
apparently wanted to keep investigating.

Over the next six months, Owens began prodding Wilson for sources of
drugs. That’s when a friend of Wilson’s introduced Owens to Reinsch,
and Owens made several increasingly large drug purchases, eventually
ending with the $217,000 deal in the South Lake Union parking lot.
According to a man at the club the night of the raid, Owens was present
up until he received a phone call and stepped out. Fifteen minutes
later, police stormed in.

Alleged Cafe UnAmerican founder Rick Wilson is now facing federal
drug and weapons charges for his involvement in the bust, as are
Reinsch and the three Hondurans. If convicted, all could face life in
prison. Because of the gun charges, Wilson faces a mandatory minimum of
40 years; the other men face a minimum of 10. The Hondurans, believed
to be in the country illegally, are being detained; Reinsch and Wilson
have been released from jail and put on GPS monitoring.