Ray Khan drives a Rolls-Royce worth more than half a million dollars. He has the mansion, the cars, the first-class airline seats, the designer wardrobe.

Last year, he threw his son a wedding weekend that would not have looked out of place in a Bollywood film, and I was an honored guest. 

To anyone who passes him on the streets around Savannah, Georgia, Khan is just a wealthy Indian businessman living the American dream.

What they would never guess is that he is one of the most effective confidential informants in the history of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). His work produced more than 45 federal indictments and more than 1,000 crime guns seized.

I know... because I was his handler.

This is the tale of how a man charged over a stash of untaxed cigarettes became America's unlikeliest crime fighter.

It started in 2009. I was an ATF agent wrapping up an undercover storefront operation when Khan (not his real name) came through the door to buy a large quantity of untaxed cigarettes – a federal crime. 

He had also overstayed his visa and was facing deportation to India. By rights, that should have been the end of his American story.

Instead, his lawyer made me a promise: give Khan a chance and he would be the best informant I would ever have. 

I took the gamble and became his sponsor, filing out the paperwork to keep him in the country. In return, this soft-spoken businessman who had never touched a drug and knew nothing about firearms started bringing me some of the most dangerous people in Georgia.

Ask Khan how he did it and he makes it sound like nothing. 

He has an easy charisma that puts hardened criminals at ease, and he was never afraid of any of them. Bikers, street gangs, cartel men, it made no difference to him. 

One of the most successful undercover investigations in ATF history was called Operation Crossbones. It ran in and around Savannah for nearly a year and none of it would have worked without Khan.

I was running an undercover warehouse, the kind of front we used to draw criminals in to sell us guns and drugs. 

We needed dozens of dangerous, unpredictable people to show up at the same warehouse on the same day without spooking one another. So Khan told them a truck of stolen electronics had come in, dirt cheap, first come first served. 

He staggered their arrivals to the minute. Each one parked around the back and walked into the bay, where a shipping container they believed was packed with televisions and stereos was actually like a Trojan horse full of tactical officers waiting to move. 

Khan met every one of them alone, no badge and no gun, and walked them in. If even one of them had sensed a trap, he would have been the first person they turned on. He never flinched. The Marshals pulled each arrestee out the back before the next car rolled up.

Every single defendant either tried to run or fight when the doors opened. One got tackled by police dogs. One defecated on himself. 

Then there was Karl, the most unpredictable defendant of the entire operation. He shoved one of his own guys at the agents and took off running. Out of nowhere, Khan chased him and tackled him to the ground himself, nearly getting shot by the Special Response Team in the process.

By the time the operation closed, we had seized 189 firearms, several kilos of cocaine, and a variety of other drugs off the streets. More than 30 people were charged with federal crimes, and many of them were locked up for years. 

But while Khan was helping us put away cartel members and gun traffickers, the people closest to him, and the state of Georgia, were tearing his life apart.

The first betrayal came from his own family. A close relative could not stand watching him succeed. When Khan was sitting in jail on a minor state charge, this family member came to him and asked for power of attorney over his businesses. 

Trusting him, Khan signed. Soon after, his bank accounts were drained, his stores were run into the ground, and the relative took his cars, including a Cadillac that was re-registered in the relative's own name. 

Not for the last time, Khan walked out of prison with nothing and started over.

The second betrayal was official. A Georgia Department of Revenue agent became fixated on him, and over the years he was arrested again and again on charges as trivial as selling unlicensed DVDs in his stores. Never mind that these were props we had given him to hand out to the criminals he was luring to the warehouse. 

Each time, he sat in jail for months. What Khan did not know was that his relative was feeding the agent information. According to the eventual indictment, the official had been bribed with round-trip flights to Europe and a $13,000 Hublot watch to keep the heat on Khan.

Then, in 2020, the entire case collapsed. The same racketeering investigation that had been built against Khan swept up the state special agent and Khan's relative themselves. The agent was charged with bribery and led away in handcuffs. 

Khan's lawyers then found that one of the officials who had signed off on the case had lied about his credentials, and a judge threw the whole thing out. 

The agent lost his job and his pension. It had cost Khan almost $3 million in legal fees to prove his innocence.

And here’s the part that still gets to me. For all of it, the guns, the cartels, the cases that put dozens of dangerous people behind bars, Khan still can’t take living in this country for granted. 

He was promised immigration status in return for his service but that never happened. He still has to renew his visa annually.

Khan, however, he is thriving. He owns six or seven companies, operates slot machines in stores across Georgia, and he has the custom Rolls-Royce that is his pride and joy. Ask him whether he would change any of it, and he shakes his head.

If we called him to be an informant tomorrow, he would say yes. 

He knows how all of it sounds. 'Lot of ups and downs,' he says. 'If I try to tell someone, no one believes me. They say just I'm dreaming or lying or watching too much movies.'

But it is no fictional script. It is the true account of Ray Khan, the informant who gave the government two decades of his life and the country that still makes him ask, every single year, for permission to stay.

Ray Khan: The Betrayal of an Informant by Lou Valoze and Kerry Linfoot is published by Post Hill Press