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Chapter 15
JARED AND THE FIFTY-TON FLAMINGO
Chicago’s Federal Plaza appeared dark and morose against the late-November sky—except for
two specks of color that punctured the gloominess. There was the red-white-and-blue
American flag, rattling voraciously in the wind. And the massive bright red sculpture, called the
Flamingo, that stood motionless in the center of the plaza’s black pavement.
That fifty-ton Flamingo, with its abstract steel arches, was the first thing many people saw as
they exited the L train onto the plaza, with most wandering past or below it as they headed into one of
the adjacent federal buildings, including the post office, the courthouse, or the most intimidating of
all, the thirty-story black tower at 219 South Dearborn Street known as the Dirksen Federal Building.
On a late-November morning in 2011, two men with the last name Der-Yeghiayan were inside
the Dirksen Federal Building. On the nineteenth floor, fifty-nine-year-old Samuel Der-Yeghiayan
adjusted his robes and court documents as he prepared for the cases he would hear later that day as a
U.S. federal judge. Sixteen floors below Samuel’s chambers his thirty-one-year-old son, Jared, was
walking through the halls of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, his giant backpack over his shoulder, which
was bulging with laptops, a Rubik’s Cube, and folders with pictures of evidence inside. In his hands
he carried a large white mail-room tub filled with thirty or so envelopes of all shapes and sizes.
Young Jared Der-Yeghiayan’s nerves were frayed as he made his way toward what would be the
most important meeting of his career. It wasn’t lost on him that if he screwed this up, the story of his
fuckup would make its way up all those flights of stairs to his father’s office.
Jared had traded the baggy street clothes he wore at O’Hare for an oversize black suit and a
crisp white shirt. His group supervisor from HSI followed behind at a leisurely pace. The two men
arrived at the office of the assistant U.S. attorney for narcotics, who oversaw all prosecutions of
drug-related cases in the state of Illinois.
After a few introductions Jared dropped the mail tub in his hands onto the office floor with a
thud. The attorney looked down at the container, then back at Jared, noticeably confused. This wasn’t
exactly what the attorney had expected to see when he agreed to this meeting about drug smuggling
through the Internet. A picture of a couple of big bricks of heroin? Sure. Some salty white kilos of
cocaine? Yeah. Pounds of marijuana? You betcha. But a box of empty envelopes in a mail carton? Not
so much. Still, the attorney sat back to see what this was all about.