Read this over at Weedtracker and thought it was intresting pretty long but check it out:
"Gentlemen, in this business, you're only as good as your rats." --
Lecture on the Handling of Criminal Informants (CIs) from U.S. Treasury
Law Enforcement Academy, August, 1965
"I'm looking for **** Levine, ex-DEA," said the man's voice.
"How'd you get this number?" I said. It was close to midnight and my
wife and I were in a San Francisco hotel on business.
"Man, you don't know what I went through to find you."
The voice belonged to a well known California defense attorney who said
that he'd tracked me through my publisher.
"I'm in the middle of trying a case," he said. "I need you to testify as
an expert witness. The judge gave me over the weekend to find you and
bring you here."
"Whoa! Whoa!" I said. "Back up. I'm not a legal consultant "
"But you're a court qualified expert. I checked you out. I read your
books."
"You read them?"
"Well, I just got them. . . "
"When you get around to reading them, you'll know I don't work for
dopers. Nothing personal counselor."
"Don't give me that," he said. "I read some interview you did. Didn't
you call the drug war a fraud?"
"A huge fraud," I said. "But because I talk about thieves, crooks and
dopers inside the government doesn't mean I'm gonna work for them on the
outside."
Days before this phone call I had turned down a six figure offer to work
as a consultant for a Bolivian drug king pin whom I'd spent half my life
trying to put in jail. I was a firm believer in if you can't do jail,
don't do the sale.
"Look, I'm defending the guy for expenses," snapped the attorney,
annoyed. "The guy's been working sixty hours a week for the last three
years parking cars does that sound like a Class One, ****ing cocaine
dealer to you?"
Class One was DEA's top rating for drug dealers. You had to be the head
of a criminal organization and dealing with tens of millions of dollars
in drugs each month to qualify as a Class One Pablo Escobar and the
fabled Roberto Suarez were Ones.
He had my curiosity.
"You can prove your guy's a parking lot attendant?"
"I'll Fedex you his time sheets. Better yet, I'll send you everything
undercover video-tapes and DEA's own reports. You tell me if the guy's a
Class one."
"Why me?" I asked.
"DEA couldn't get any dope from Miguel (not his true name) not even a
sample. So they charge the poor bastard with a no-dope Conspiracy did
you ever hear of anything like that? A parking lot attendant on a no-
dope Conspiracy? Then they bring in a DEA expert from Washington to
testify that a true Class One doper doesn't give samples. You and I both
know that's bullshit, don't we?"
His words flashed me back to an incident I described in The Big White
Lie. It was July 4, 1980, and I was in a suite at the Buenos Aires
Sheraton, sitting across a table from one of the biggest dopers alive,
Hugo Hurtado Candia, as he handed me a one ounce sample of his
merchandise ninety-nine percent pure cocaine as a prelude to a huge
cocaine deal. The man was part of a cartel that was two weeks away from
taking over his whole country.
The lawyer was right: it was pure bullshit, but it was the kind of
bullshit I had always been aware of. There's enormous career pressure on
street agents to make as many Class One cases as they can, for a simple
reason: Federal agencies justify their budgets with statistical reports
to Congress and Congress loves to see Class Ones. The agents with the
highest percentage of Class Ones are the guys who get money awards and
promotions. And over the years the professional rats, who originate more
than 95 percent of all drug cases, had learned that selling a Class One
to the government was worth a much bigger "reward" payment. A lot of
them knew the DEA Agents Manual criteria for a One better than a lot of
the agents.
Unfortunately in DEA and other Federal agencies where agents are trained
to be duplicitous to begin with and then exposed to deceitful, lying,
scumbag politicians and bureaucrats who want results that make them look
good and don't give a damn how you get them as long as you don't
embarrass them by getting caught there were agents who would bend the
facts in their own favor. They'd write up a mid-level doper, or
sometimes a street dealer as a Class One based on "evidence supplied by
a previously reliable informant," without corroborating the rat's
information. If it got by the reviewing process the worst that happened
was that some mid or low level doper was called a Class One.
To me that kind of bullshit was no different than all the Federal
prosecutors with an eye on public office who exaggerated the importance
of their cases to a media that will swallow just about anything, as long
as it sold papers and got ratings, and downright harmless compared to
some drug czar facing 20 million Americans on Larry King Live and saying
"We've turned the corner on the drug war," to further his political
career. If you put all the dopers whom the press had reported as "linked
to the Medellin or Cali Cartels" hand-in-hand, they'd circle the ****ing
earth.
But DEA flying an expert witness across country to make a parking lot
attendant look like a Class One coke dealer in a Federal trial, was
something I'd never heard of unless things had changed drastically and I
had good reason to suspect they had. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
"You didn't answer me. What do you think I can do for you?"
"When I cross-examined the DEA expert he named your book Deep Cover as
one of the books he read to qualify as am expert. Now I want you to
testify that he's full of shit."
"There's gotta be something your not telling me."
"If I'm telling you the truth, will you be here on Monday?"
Just the thought of me going head-to-head against a small elite agency
that I'd been a part of for almost a quarter of a century put knots in
my stomach. Outsiders only hear about the blue of wall silence, but no
description I've ever heard ever really did it justice. To most guys in
narcotic enforcement the scummy bottom of life's barrel is the CI, the
criminal informant the rat. There's only one thing lower: a cop who
turns rat on his own. And to me, going to work for a doper was exactly
that.
"How did the thing get started?" I asked.
"A CI approaches DEA with a deal. He's wanted in Argentina and Bolivia.
He says, 'If I get you a Class One arrest here, will you get the charges
dropped against me over there?'"
"How much did they pay him?"
"Over thirty thousand, ****ing dollars. And they admitted that he's
gonna get more when the trial is over."
Thirty thousand was not all that much for a Class One, but I wasn't
going to say anything to him.
"And Mr. Car-parker, what kind of rap sheet does he have?"
"Nothing!" shouted the attorney. I held the phone away from my ear.
"This is his first, ****ing arrest."
"What kind of rap sheet does the rat have?"
He laughed. "This guy's been busted all over South America for every
kind of con job in the book. He even tried to sell his wife's vital
organs while she was in a coma dying."
"Come on, counselor," I said.
"If I'm telling the truth, will you be here Monday?"
"I listened this far," I said. "If you want to send me your stuff, I'll
look at it."
The telephone woke me early the next morning. It was a retired DEA agent
with whom I'd worked the street for two different Federal agencies.
"People called me, ****" he said. "And I said, 'No way, not ****
Levine.' You ain't gonna testify for some ****ing dirtbag."
"I'm not doing anything yet" I said, marvelling at the speed of the
Federal grapevine. "I just agreed to look at the case file."
"The guy's a scumbag, piece-of-shit, dope lawyer. He's like all these
guys every time his mouth moves he's lying. The case was righteous,
****. Don't fall for it not you. "
When I hung up my sweet wife and partner, Laura, was studying me.
"You're as pale as a ghost."
"He's someone I really respected. Did I sound as mealy-mouthed as I
think?"
"No, just really shaken."
The Fedex package was delivered to my room on Saturday morning. I opened
it to find a stack of reports, including "Miguel's" work records, the
transcripts of audio-tapes, the rat's file (much of it blacked out, as I
expected) and a video-casette DEA's whole case.
The work records were straight forward. Miguel worked for a large
parking lot chain punching a time clock for an average of sixty-plus
hours a week for the past three years, at minimum wage. He also had a
little side business of delivering lunches to workers in the area. And,
as the attorney had claimed, he had no prior criminal record.
The CI, whom I'll call "Cariculo Snakeface" on the other hand was wanted
in both Bolivia and Argentina for bad checks, petty theft and every kind
of con job in the book. He had a total of seventeen charges outstanding
against him. His favorite scam was selling cars he didn't own. His other
part-time source of income during the last four years, was selling drug
cases to DEA.
Snakeface first comes to Washington,D.C. from Bolivia, bringing with him
a wife and a couple of kids whom he promptly abandons and returns to
South America. Things don't go too well and in a short time he's back in
the U.S. on the lam from police and scam victims in two countries.
Miguel, a family friend and fellow Bolivian, tries to help out by giving
Snakeface part of his lunch delivery business.
In the meantime, Snakeface's wife suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and
falls into a coma. While she lays dying her "grieving" husband just as
the attorney said tries to sell her vital organs. When the sale of his
dying wife's heart, lungs and kidneys doesn't work out, Snakeface
decides to sell Miguel, organs and all, to DEA, as a Class One cocaine
dealer.
Snakeface's first move showed me that he was no novice in playing the
Federal rat system. Instead of calling the local Washington, D.C. office
of DEA or the FBI where he and Miguel lived he called DEA in California.
He described Miguel to the California DEA agents as someone called
"Chama," the "east coast distributor for a huge South American cartel
dealing in shipments of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the U.S." and
"the head of his own criminal organization" a description that just
happened to fit the criteria for a DEA Class One violator.
The reason Snakeface approached a DEA office in Southern California, as
far away from Washington, D.C. as he could get, is a thing of sheer
conman beauty. His experience as professional Federal rat had taught him
about the insane competition for headlines, budget and glory between the
myriad of American Federal enforcement, spy and military agencies 53 at
last count involved in some form of narcotic enforcement or another. He
knew that the California agents, afraid that the East Coast agents or
some other agency would steal their case, would keep Chama King of
Cocaine a secret.
California DEA reacted exactly as Snakeface had predicted. Instead of
calling the Washington, D.C. office and asking them to check out the
information, they sent Snakeface airline tickets and money to fly to
California from where they could get their first "evidence" a recorded
telephone conversation locking the case in as a "California case."
Next Snakeface tells Miguel, "Look, I've got this American Mafiosi in
California who is dumber than a guava. The guy's so dumb he's even sent
me airplane tickets to fly out there and set up a cocaine deal. I'll
tell him you're the capo de tutti frutti of all Bolivian drug dealers.
You tell this boludo that you can deliver all the cocaine he wants.
He'll give you a couple of hundred thousand dollars out front. Then you
and me take off back to Bolivia rich men and open up a chain of drive-in
theaters."
So Miguel-the-Car-Parker went along with the deal. He had failed the
U.S. government financed test of his honesty, a test that, according to
my training, was called Entrapment.
Now we cut to Snakeface in Southern California making his first phone
call to "Chama King of Cocaine" with DEA agents listening in and tape-
recording the call. He makes the call to the parking lot where Miguel
works and is supposed to be waiting, prepared to play the role of Chama
King of Cocaine for some capo di tutti dummo who he knows will be
listening in, only Miguel isn't there.
"He's home sick," says the woman who answers the parking lot phone.
Do the DEA agents stop here and say, What the hell is the east coast
distributor of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine, and the
head of his own criminal organization doing parking cars all day long?
No. They call his house and tape-record the call.
Miguel answers. He's in a bad way. He apologizes to Snakeface explaining
that he's home with a terrible hangover. Then he tells this long,
confused story about some friend of his getting drunk in his room,
stealing his pants and then wrecking his car.
"Shit," says Chama King of Cocaine, "in the morning I come out and I
didn't see my car. Man!. 'That son-of-a-bitch' I said. 'Shit! Where's my
car?' Shit! I was sad. . . .Shit! It's like the only one I have to go to
work."
Snakeface, with some effort and doing all the talking finally steered
the conversation into some garbled code-talk, that sounded more like
Roberto Duran trying to explain the Monroe Doctorine to Mario Cuomo than
a drug deal:
Snakeface: "Yeah, what I'm trying to is, since it's a matter which is
quite serious, big, and from the other things that I've seen like this,
when we can't be playing with, with unclear words and. . .that's why
what I, what you did, and I asked you if you'd spoken with him, because
I know that he has the financial capacity and after all he's, he's a
partner of, of, of, [name of major drug cartel leader] and, and in the
end anything will yield a profit if we're hanging on to a big stick
that's on a big branch and, and we won't have any problems. right?"
Chama King of Cocaine: "Of course."
That was about as clear as it ever got. If it was a dope conversation,
the fact that he was talking across three thousand miles of telephone
wires from his home telephone something a high-school crack dealer
wouldn't do didn't seem to bother Chama or the agents in the least.
At the end of this conversation, did these experienced, highly trained
agents say: "Hey this guy doesn't even sound smart enough to be a
Washington Heights steerer?, or, "Hey let's pull the autopsy report on
the rat's wife?" Nope! They opened a Class One investigation targeting
Miguel the parking lot attendant, and paid the rat his first thousand
dollars. And there was plenty more to follow.
The packet of reports indicated that the "investigation" lasted about
eight months during which time Snakeface successfully pimped the DEA
agents about "Chama King of Cocaine" and at the same time pimped Miguel
about "Tony," (a DEA undercover agent), whom he described as the Dumb-
and-Dumber of the Mafia. During that time California DEA did no
investigation of Miguel whatsoever.
The record showed: No telephone investigation to ascertain whether
Miguel was making telephone calls to any real drug dealers, no financial
investigation to see what he was doing with his drug millions, no
surveillance that would have revealed that Chama King of Coke was a
working stiff who lived in a one-room apartment. They did nothing but
write down whatever their rat told them as "fact."
For eight months Snakeface stalled the California agents reporting that
Chama was in the process of putting together a major shipment of
cocaine, and the agents continued to pay him. In all,he received another
$29,000 in "rat fees" plus expenses, which included periodic trips back
to California from Washington to be "debriefed" on his "progress." For
eight months the agents nagged Snakeface into trying to get Miguel to
deliver a sample of cocaine, any amount. Just something to prove that he
was really in the business.
The sample never came. Miguel surprizing for any Bolivian didn't know
anyone in the business to even buy a small amount. And even if he did,
he didn't have the money. And Snakeface was afraid that if he paid for
the sample even these California agents might get wise to him, so he
came up with a clever solution: he told the agents, Hey, Class One
dealers don't give samples, only small dealers give samples. When, to
his astonishment, they believed him, he took it one step further:
Miguel, he said, was not going to do the deal unless the agents put part
of the money out front $300,000 another sign that he was a "true Class
One dealer."
Snakeface had enough experience selling cases to the Feds to know that
they would never front that kind of money. He also knew that the Fed's
indecision and the slow moving bureaucracy, plus agents who didn't
really know what they were doing, could give him quite a few months on
salary which is exactly what happened.
After eight months, the California agents finally decided that, since
"Chama" wouldn't deliver drugs to them without front money, they 'd get
him on video-tape promising them cocaine and accepting the money all
they'd need to prove him guilty of Conspiracy to possess and distribute
cocaine and bust his ass. Miguel would face enough charges to make him a
guest of the American taxpayers for more years than he had left on this
earth. The no-dope conspiracy arrest would also give them the agents
their Class One stat and maybe a headline from the ever gullible press.
By this time Snakeface had not only received $30,000 in "Informant Fees"
but all charges against him in South America had been "disappeared."
What a country!
Now Snakeface had two final duties to perform for his masters: bring
Miguel to California for his arrest and then testify in court. More
money was even promised after his conviction. How much? We'll never
know.
Now the stage was set for the final act the video-taping of the "crime."
Only there was still one remaining snag. Miguel didn't have the money to
come to California for his own arrest. In a final irony, the California
DEA agents had to pay for his trip.
Finally, dressed up in his best Sears casuals and prepared to play the
role of a Class One cocaine dealer for a live audience of Mafia retards.
Miguel was on his way to California like a big Bolivian turkey on his
way to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.
It was close to midnight when I keyed the video-tape of the climactic
undercover meeting between Chama King of Cocaine and "Tony" capo of the
Three Stooges Mafia family.
The screen flickered to life.
A hotel had been rigged with hidden video cameras. Center screen was
"Chama" and "Tony" facing each other across a table. Between them was a
piece of hand luggage containing $300,000 in hundreds and fifties.
There were several problems that were immediately apparent. First, they
hardly shared a language in common. Tony's Spanish was rudimentary at
best and Miguel spoke only a few words of English. Tony for example kept
referring over and over to the "Percento" until Miguel finally figured
out he was trying to say "purity" a word anyone who did drug deals in
Spanish should have known in his sleep.
Second, neither man knew his role. It was like Peewee Herman and Gnewt
Gingrich playing dress-up and pretending to do a drug deal. "Chama" was
dressed like the hotel maintenance man, and "Tony" was dressed like an
Elvis impersonator.
Neither knew the mechanics of a real Class One drug deal, or any real
drug deal for that matter. There was no discussion of specific amounts,
prices, weights, meeting places, delivery dates, provisions for testing
the merchandise before delivery , methods of delivery or prearranged
trouble signals. Nothing happened that even resembled a real drug deal,
which is typically paranoid event that is all about specifics. What the
agents had on video wasn't authentic enough for a Stallone movie.
The only thing clear was that "Tony" was asking Miguel to promise him
that, if he was allowed to leave the room with the $300,000 he would,
within 20 to 30 days, deliver an unspecific amount of cocaine, to an
unspecified location pretty good for a parking lot attendant.
Miguel eagerly assured his new benefactor that he would make said
delivery. He was then allowed to examine the money, which he eagerly
did, after which the undercover DEA agent asked him if he was "happy,"
with what he saw. Miguel, thinking that America truly was a land of gold
paved streets guarded by idiots and that his friend Snakeface was a
genius to be compared with Einstein, or at least Howard Stern, assured
"Tony" that he was very happy.
With all the elements to the crime of Conspiracy recorded on video-tape
Tony concluded by saying "...Whew! Thank you very much and I'll wait for
your call."
"O.K.," said Miguel, his eyes bugged out with disbelief as he got to his
feet holding the money.
"Hey! Dude," said Tony, "I'll be here a little while. I have to make a
few calls. Bye."
Miguel's look as he started to leave with the money only lacked the
line: Feet, don't fail me now. His feet didn't have far to go only about
a half dozen steps before he was arrested.
I clicked off the video. If DEA stood for the Dumb Enforcement
Administration, then Miguel undoubtedly was a Class One violator but a
drug dealer he was definitely not.
Had the agents responsible for this case been working for me during the
seventeen years I was a supervisory agent, I would have jerked them into
my office for a private conference. "There are a million ****ing real
drug dealers in this country," I would have told them. "There's probably
a couple of hundred working within a square mile of the office. If
you've gotta go 3,000 miles to D.C. and spend a quarter of a million in
taxpayer bucks to turn a ****ing parking lot attendant into a Class One
doper, you oughta be working for the CIA, or Congress, or wherever else
you can convert bullshit to money."
I would have put them on probation and moved to fire them if they
couldn't do the job. I had done it before. It wouldn't have been
anything new to me. But was that any of my business now that I was
retired? If Miguel wasn't a doper he was certainly a thief, wasn't he?
"What are you going to do?" asked Laura.
"I wish I knew," I said. "It's pure entrapment, but the idiot did his
best to sound like a doper. If I'm gonna go against DEA, I don't want to
lose."
But there were things happening to me and in the news, that had been on
my mind during the days leading up to this phone call that would keep me
up for the rest of the night.
The first was the shooting of the wife and son of Randy Weaver by FBI
agents during a raid at Ruby Ridge. The guy was supposed to be a white
supremacist and I'm a Jew, but we both had something powerful in common
the unbelievable pain of having our children murdered
What had my head spinning in disbelief was that the case against Weaver
that provoked the raid in the first place possession of a sawed-off
shotgun had been set up by a professional rat like Snakeface and that
Weaver had been found innocent by reason of entrapment.
I kept flashing back to an incident that had happened at the beginning
of my career while I was serving with BATF, enforcing the Federal gun
laws.
The rat's name was Ray. He had a glass eye, no front teeth and a rap
sheet as long as a cheap roll of toilet paper. He was my first CI and
would be the prototype for many hundreds to follow.
"I met this guy who wantsa sell a sawed-off shotgun for sixty bucks,"
said Ray flashing me his goal post smile. "His name is Angel. He's a
black Porto-Rican. One a them Young Lords," he added, naming the Mao-
spouting Latino organization that was so popular to arrest.
"How do you know it's a violation?" I asked. A shotgun had to have a
barrel length of less than 18 inches to be a violation of the National
Firearms Act the law we enforced.
Ray winked his good eye at me. He knew the law as well as any agent. He
made a living selling drug and gun cases to the government.
"When the dude left the room to go to the john, I measured it. How much
is it worth if I duke you into the guy?"
I explained that if Angel delivered the gun in a car, we would seize it
and the "informant fee" would be raised according to the value of the
car. Or if Angel was somebody "news worthy" it would be worth a couple
of hundred. But Angel Nobody with one gun was only worth a hundred
bucks, then twice the average weekly income in the U.S.
Ray already knew all this. Like all professional stools he just wanted
the arrangement spelled out beforehand. If I didn't take the case,or he
didn't like the deal, he knew he might still be able to sell it to the
FBI or another ATF agent.
"But the dude is a Young Lord, that got to be worth something extra."
"People can say they're anything. We'll see who he is after I bust him."
Following my instructions, Ray set up a buy/bust meet. Later that night,
covered by a team of about a half dozen undercover agents, I met Angel,
a nervous eighteen year old, on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx.
The kid had the gun in a paper bag just the way Ray said he would. I
handed him the sixty bucks, took the gun and busted him.
On the way back to headquarters in lower Manhattan, something happened
that Ray didn't count on. When I told Angel that possession and sale of
a sawed-off shotgun carried a sentence of 25 years in Federal prison he
blinked a few times and turned rat himself.
Angel claimed that he had a "partner" on the deal a guy named Ray he'd
met on an unemployment line a few days earlier.
"The guy tol' me he knew a sucker who'd pay sixty bucks for an old
shotgun that he could get for ten in the pawn shop. Alls we got to do is
cut the barrel. He say if I cut it and make the delivery, he puts up the
ten for the gun and we split the profit. He was right there when I cut
it. He even marked it."
What Angel had described, without realizing it, was a crime that never
would have happened if it hadn't been provoked by a paid government rat
entrapment. In those years the rule was that simple: if the crime
wouldn't have happened without a CI or an undercover agent planting the
idea, there was no crime. The Justice Department wouldn't prosecute it.
In fact, an agent could get himself into serious trouble bringing an
entrapment case to the U.S. Attorneys office.
How things have changed.
It took me two days to corroborate Angel's version of events and get all
charges dropped against the kid. The Federal prosecutor thanked me and
told me that I had just learned the most important lesson I would ever
learn as a Fed: "Never trust a criminal informant, ****," he said. Over
the next twenty-five years I would hear those words repeated thousands
of times, by agents, cops, training instructors and prosecutors, yet I
never heard a prosecutor say them to a jury.
Everyone who's ever carried a Federal badge knew how easy it was to
convict someone who'd been entrapped on little more than an informant's
testimony, as long as the informant was clever enough to hide his
tracks, the victim gullible enough to fall for the trap and the agents
and prosecutors ambitious and immoral enough to go for the headlines,
statistics and win at any price.
Until recent years I had believed that most of us in Federal law
enforcement were people whose pride and consciences would not allow that
to happen.
I was no longer so sure.
After the Ray-Angel case, I continued on with BATF for three more years
before transferring into narcotic enforcement. During those years I
never saw another sawed-off shotgun case involving a CI, accepted for
prosecution by the two Federal courts in New York City. There was just
too much possibility of Informant Entrapment.
Yet, in the Randy Weaver case, the question, How the hell was a CI
entrapment, sawed-off shotgun case ever allowed to become a military
invasion of an American citizen's home? was not even being asked either
by our political leaders or the media. The question in my mind was, What
happened to the people of conscience in the Weaver case? You can't just
blame it on the rat a professional rat can't entrap anyone unless a
government rat with more ambition than conscience is willing to look the
other way.
The other thing going on in my life that would affect my decision was
that as a result of my books I'd been receiving letters from Federal
prisoners who claimed that they had been "set up" by lying criminal
informants working for the various, competing Federal agencies enforcing
the drug and money laundering statutes. Guys like Lon Lundy, a once
successful businessman, husband and father from Mobile Alabama, a man
with no criminal record who was set up by a CI in a no-dope Conspiracy
case and received a Life-with-no-parole sentence, or Harry Kauffman from
Cleveland, a once successful used car dealer, husband and father, who
was conned by a CI into accepting cash, alleged to be drug money, for
some cars and charged with Money Laundering, and many others. And many
others.
They were men of every race, religion and national origin in the Federal
prison system. Most had no previous criminal records, most had had their
homes, businesses and financial assets seized by the Federal government
leaving their families destitute, all had received more than twenty year
prison sentences. In many cases the rats ended up with a percentage of
the assets seized as a "reward" for their "work." These were men whose
lives and families had been destroyed. Their letters to me were
desperate cries, that affected me deeply,
My twenty-five years in the justice system had taught me that there were
plenty of bureaucrats and politicians whom, if they didn't like the way
you exercised your rights as a citizen, or if they thought they could
make headlines, political hay or a promotion by your arrest and
prosecution, would not think twice about targeting you with the
government's legions of paid belly-crawlers. Few people have the money
of a John DeLorean to adequately defend themselves against a slick rat.
The only thing, in my experience, that stopped these rats with badges
and rats in public office, were people of conscience in positions of
authority and a knowledgeable and watchful media. For several years I
had been seeing no evidence of either. And as publicly outspoken as I
had been about the phony drug war bureaucrats and politicians, I found
this all personally threatening.
Finally, the most painful issue of all was the murder of my son Keith by
a man who had two prior murder convictions in New York State; a man who
was on the street according to our political leaders because there is
just not enough money to put everyone in jail that belonged there, yet I
was looking at a file in front of me that spoke of Federal law
enforcement spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest and
convict a parking lot attendant as a Class One drug dealer.
"I'll do it," I heard myself say the next morning. "I went over all your
stuff. You've got a better entrapment defense here than John DeLorean
had."
There was a long silence on the phone. "I didn't claim entrapment as my
defense theory," said the attorney.
I started to ask him why and stopped myself. It no longer mattered. The
attorney's opening statement claimed Miguel was innocent of all charges
not that he had been entraped by a government rat working on commission,
into committing the crime. Miguel, on camera, had done his best to play
the role of Chama King of Cocaine; he had promised to deliver drugs and
accepted money on camera all the government needed to prove Conspiracy.
If a judge didn't explain to a jury what entrapment was, not even
Johnnie Cochran could get him off. And once the trial had begun no judge
would allow a change in the defense theory it was a simple matter of
law.
But Miguel's guilt or innocence no longer mattered to me. I had somehow
committed myself mentally and emotionally to go to war. I wanted to try
and make the growing power of rats those with and without badges as
public as I could. They weren't only hurting people who had failed an
honesty test they were spending billions in taxpayer dollars for nothing
but phony show trials, and filling the jails with people who were, at
worst, non-violent dupes, while our nation's streets ran with the blood
of innocents.
My testimony as a defense expert witness, lasted all day Monday and into
Tuesday morning. A couple of guys whom I used to work with sat with the
prosecution watching me with looks of disbelief. During a break one of
them came up to me, stared at me for a long moment and said: "It's a
shame you had to go that way."
I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I had known the guy for
more than twenty-five years. We had served together in two Federal
agencies. He, I was sure, was not capable of bringing a mess like Miguel
Car-parker into Federal court, but he would not violate the blue wall of
silence, he felt the need to protect people whom I thought didn't
deserve it. When you become a Fed you take two oaths, one to protect the
bureaucracy and the other to protect the Constitution and the people who
pay your salaries. No Federal agent can live up to both.
We would never speak again.
During my testimony I pointed out the dozens of places in the tapes that
both Miguel and Tony spoke and acted in ways that indicated that neither
knew what a real drug deal was like, and that in my opinion the crime
never would have happened if it were not for the CI's actions and the
agents' failure to control him and properly investigate his allegations.
I even got to testify to my opinion that "if the Federal government is
going to use suitcases full of taxpayer dollars to test the honesty of
American citizens, instead of working the parking lots of America, they
ought to be running their tests in the halls of Congress where it might
do us some good."
As soon as I got off the witness stand I headed back to New York. The
whole thing had been a traumatic, shitty experience for me. The attorney
said he'd call to let me know the verdict. The judge had refused to
instruct the jury that they could find the defendant innocent by reason
of entrapment, but the attorney was still hopeful.
In New York a message was waiting for me from another California
attorney that would quickly take my mind off, what I had begun calling
"The Beavis and Butthead case."
The attorney represented a forty-five year old executive for a Fortune
500 computer company named Donald Carlson. A Federal task force of
Customs, DEA, BATF and Border Patrol agents, just graduated from a
paramilitary assault school the week before, wearing black ninja
outfits, helmets and flack vests, using flash-bang grenades and
automatic weapons had invaded Mr. Carlson's upscale, suburban, San Diego
home, shooting the corporate executive three times and leaving him in
critical condition. They were executing a search warrant based on the
uncorroborated, uninvestigated word of a professional rat.
Miraculously, despite the best efforts of the this newly formed,
suburban assault squad one of the invading feds did a Rambo-roll, firing
fifteen rounds from his submachine-gun hitting everything in Mr.
Carlson's foyer, but Mr. Carlson Mr. Carlson was going to survive and
wanted to sue the government.
"We'd like to retain you as our consultant," said the attorney, a soft-
spoken, thoughtful man with an impeccable reputation for integrity.
"How did this happen?" I said.
"That's what we'd like you to tell us. It seems that this task force had
a search warrant seeking for 5000 pounds of cocaine and four armed and
dangerous Colombians in Mr. Carlson's garage. The warrant was apparently
based on the word of a criminal informant."
I immediately started pouring over the reports and statements. Dawn had
begun to light the sky before I realized that I had read the whole night
through. It was one of the most frightening examples of an out-of-
control, almost comically inept Federal law enforcement that I had ever
seen or heard of in my twenty-five year career if it weren't for the
fact that these guys carried real guns and badges.
In short, a low-level professional rat/petty thief/druggie who'd been
selling street-level dope cases to a local south Florida police
department, convinced a team of California Federal agents representing
four Federal agencies, that he had become a trusted member of a major
South American drug cartel.
They overlooked the fact that the rat spoke no Spanish and seemed to
have a hard time putting together an intelligible sentence in English;
that most of the people he was implicating as "members" of this
Colombian drug ring weren't even Spanish speakers; that the rat's credit
was so bad that the phone company refused to furnish him with a
telephone (the agents had to give him a cellular phone, which they took
back when he started making unauthorized phone calls); that a local cop
had called the rat a liar. Even the rat's story, that he was doing
pushups in a California park when he was first approached by a stranger
to join one of the notoriously paranoid, Colombian Cartels, would have
been dissed at a UFO abduction convention.
But none of this bothered these feds.
For three months the agents put the CI on the payroll, accepted
everything he said as "fact," implicated dozens of innocent people in
government files and computers as "drug traffickers," belonging to a
drug trafficking organization that didn't even exist, and even obtained
four search warrants including the Carlson warrant on nothing more than
the rat's uncorroborated words. And then, ignoring the words of a San
diego cop who called the rat a liar, they "Ramboed" the suburban home of
a computer company executive like it was Desert Storm, only to find that
the Colombian Cartel didn't even exist.
Holy shit! I thought. What is going on here?
The Federal grapevine must have been buzzing. I was contacted by cops
and agents who wanted to see some of these guys go to jail. A San Diego
cop who had taken part in the investigation but not the raid was quoted
as saying that the feds shouldn't be carrying guns and badges. A lot of
feds felt the same way, but they weren't going to break the blue wall of
silence. One did, however, send me a copy of Congressional Report of
hearings chaired by Congressman John Conyers Jr. that he thought "might
be helpful."
The title of the report tells its story: Serious Mismanagement and
Misconduct in the Treasury Department, Customs Service and Other Federal
Agencies and the Adequacy of Efforts to Hold Agency Officials
Accountable.
The hearings not only found evidence of all of the above, they also
found there was "a perception of cover-up" in these Federal agencies for
all their misdeeds. In spite of this report being issued within months
of the Carlson shooting, the killings at Ruby Ridge and the massacre at
Waco, Texas, it went virtually ignored by the media.
I had served part of my career as an Operations Inspector and began
doing what I used to do for the government documenting violations of
rules, regulations and Federal law on the part of agents. I began what
would become two reports (160,000 words) noting hundreds of instances
where these feds violated their own rules, dozens of indications of
federal felonies false statements, perjury, illegal tampering with
evidence and coercion of witnesses and violations of the U.S.
Constitution. I also found and noted in my reports just as Congressman
Conyer's report noted powerful indications of cover-up going right to
top level management of DEA, Customs and the Justice Department.
Powerful people wanted the Carlson incident to "disappear." I was not
going to let that happen.
Or so I thought.
A couple of days into my work on the Carlson case I got a call from
Miguel's attorney. The jury had found him guilty of "attempted
possession of cocaine." The charge carried a mandatory minimum of twenty
years in Federal prison.
"The jury said they weren't very impressed with either your testimony or
the government's" he said. "They voted on what they thought was the law.
Miguel promised he'd deliver the coke for the money, so he's guilty."
The attorney said he was appealing the conviction. The CI, in the
meantime, was paid whatever he'd been promised and was probably off
selling more cases. I mean, even I had to admit, it was a good living. I
hung up feeling like shit.
Weeks later, after I had submitted the Carlson shooting report,
recommending that the agents and prosecutors involved in the case be
fired and prosecuted. I was full of hope. A rat cannot be king unless
the people who are supposed to control him become as immoral and corrupt
as he is and I was going for their throats. The Carlson case would be
the example that all Americans should see of what was going wrong all
across this country.
I looked forward to the civil trial and testifying publicly to my
reports. It wouldn't be a congressional hearing, where facts the facts
testified to are usually the ones the politicians want to hear, so that
they could comfortably reach the "conclusion" they'd already agreed upon
long before the hearings began. I was even going to call Court T.V.
I was at war.
Miguel's attorney called me again. "The judge reversed himself. He's
granted a new trial on the basis that Miguel should have had an
entrapment defense. Will you be available to testify?"
"Sure," I said."I'd love to."
It would be months before I learned that the attorney and the Federal
prosecutor had worked out a plea bargaining deal. I'm not sure what
Miguel pled guilty to, but he ended up with a ten year prison sentence.
I suppose it could have been a lot worse.
It would be more than a year before I would learn that the U.S.
government in the person of San Diego U.S. Attorney Allan Bersin, had
decided to settle with Mr. Carlson, avoiding a trial and the public
revelations of my reports. Mr. Carlson's attorney made a public
statement that by settling without a trial the misdeeds of the
government were being covered up. The government paid Mr. Carlson 2.75
million. Part of the final agreement was that the government's reports
of its own actions, be classified.
The U.S. Attorney of San Diego, made a public statement exonerating the
agents and prosecutors of all wrongdoing. He said that "the system"
failed Mr. Carlson, but that the agents and prosecutors were to be
commended for having done their jobs.
Within weeks the government would also settle with Randy Weaver, paying
him $3.1 million. Once again the legality and morality of the
government's actions in entraping Weaver in the first place were never
even questioned.
This was also the year that Quibillah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter
would be charged with conspiracy to murder Louis Farrakhan, the man who
was alleged to be behind the murder of her father. The young woman,
according to the press, had been set up by her fiance, who also happened
to be a long time professional rat for the FBI and who was reportedly
paid $25,000 for his "services."
It seems though that once the prosecutor and the FBI got their headlines
they lost all stomach for their case against Ms Shabazz and agreed to a
plea bargaining deal that freed her. My long experience told me that
allowing a woman whom they had publicly charged, with great media
fanfare, with conspiracy to murder and spent an enormous amount of
taxpayer dollars to bring to "justice," to simply go free without a
trial was not out of any pity for her they were protecting their own
butts and covering up perhaps one of the ugliest cases of rat entrapment
on record.
I flashed on another professional rat I knew in DEA who had turned every
friend and relative he'd ever had into government cash as if they were
deposit bottles. One day he came crying to me, actually bawling big wet
tears, that he'd met a woman and for the first time in his life was in
love. She lived in California and he was broke. He needed enough money
to get him there. "I'm a piece of shit he said. Please don't deny me a
chance to turn my life around, Levine." I bought him a one-way ticket.
He was there a week when I got a call from a Los Angeles DEA agent
checking on the guy's record. The rat was trying to broker a deal on his
fiance.
I watched the Senate hearings into the Federal government's actions in
both Waco and Ruby Ridge and heard, for the first time in my life,
liberal Democrats and the liberal press, who for decades were
criticizing the tactics of Federal law enforcement suddenly referring to
them, as "our Federal agents," and defending their actions. It was clear
that their real interest was to protect the President and Attorney
General for their actions in two of the worst screw-ups in law
enforcement history. At the same time the conservatives and Republicans,
who for decades had defended Federal law enforcement, no matter what
they did, were now attacking the Feds as racists and "jackbooted
stormtroopers."
And somewhere in the middle of this political shit-storm the truth was
lost and, as usual, all the rats those with badges, those in appointed
and political office came out smelling like roses, while the walking
around, taxpaying, hard-working American and his Constitution took it up
the ass.
The other day I read an interview of Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, who, in
payment for turning rat against his lifelong partners in crime, was
"forgiven" for the murders of nineteen human beings (that we know about)
and an uncountable number of felonies. He was allowed to keep the
millions he had earned as a murdering thug plus a pile of taxpayer
dollars for "expenses," and received a taxpayer-paid ride in the Federal
Witness Protection program for life. Gravano, speaking from what he
described as a "nice little apartment complex" said he was enjoying his
new life as a bachelor millionaire.
"There's a pool, racquetball courts, gym, tennis courts and a lot of
single women who don't have the slightest idea who I am," he said. "It's
nice. I sit down and relax under some trees."
God bless America, I thought. The land where the rat is king.
good ol leo
"Gentlemen, in this business, you're only as good as your rats." --
Lecture on the Handling of Criminal Informants (CIs) from U.S. Treasury
Law Enforcement Academy, August, 1965
"I'm looking for **** Levine, ex-DEA," said the man's voice.
"How'd you get this number?" I said. It was close to midnight and my
wife and I were in a San Francisco hotel on business.
"Man, you don't know what I went through to find you."
The voice belonged to a well known California defense attorney who said
that he'd tracked me through my publisher.
"I'm in the middle of trying a case," he said. "I need you to testify as
an expert witness. The judge gave me over the weekend to find you and
bring you here."
"Whoa! Whoa!" I said. "Back up. I'm not a legal consultant "
"But you're a court qualified expert. I checked you out. I read your
books."
"You read them?"
"Well, I just got them. . . "
"When you get around to reading them, you'll know I don't work for
dopers. Nothing personal counselor."
"Don't give me that," he said. "I read some interview you did. Didn't
you call the drug war a fraud?"
"A huge fraud," I said. "But because I talk about thieves, crooks and
dopers inside the government doesn't mean I'm gonna work for them on the
outside."
Days before this phone call I had turned down a six figure offer to work
as a consultant for a Bolivian drug king pin whom I'd spent half my life
trying to put in jail. I was a firm believer in if you can't do jail,
don't do the sale.
"Look, I'm defending the guy for expenses," snapped the attorney,
annoyed. "The guy's been working sixty hours a week for the last three
years parking cars does that sound like a Class One, ****ing cocaine
dealer to you?"
Class One was DEA's top rating for drug dealers. You had to be the head
of a criminal organization and dealing with tens of millions of dollars
in drugs each month to qualify as a Class One Pablo Escobar and the
fabled Roberto Suarez were Ones.
He had my curiosity.
"You can prove your guy's a parking lot attendant?"
"I'll Fedex you his time sheets. Better yet, I'll send you everything
undercover video-tapes and DEA's own reports. You tell me if the guy's a
Class one."
"Why me?" I asked.
"DEA couldn't get any dope from Miguel (not his true name) not even a
sample. So they charge the poor bastard with a no-dope Conspiracy did
you ever hear of anything like that? A parking lot attendant on a no-
dope Conspiracy? Then they bring in a DEA expert from Washington to
testify that a true Class One doper doesn't give samples. You and I both
know that's bullshit, don't we?"
His words flashed me back to an incident I described in The Big White
Lie. It was July 4, 1980, and I was in a suite at the Buenos Aires
Sheraton, sitting across a table from one of the biggest dopers alive,
Hugo Hurtado Candia, as he handed me a one ounce sample of his
merchandise ninety-nine percent pure cocaine as a prelude to a huge
cocaine deal. The man was part of a cartel that was two weeks away from
taking over his whole country.
The lawyer was right: it was pure bullshit, but it was the kind of
bullshit I had always been aware of. There's enormous career pressure on
street agents to make as many Class One cases as they can, for a simple
reason: Federal agencies justify their budgets with statistical reports
to Congress and Congress loves to see Class Ones. The agents with the
highest percentage of Class Ones are the guys who get money awards and
promotions. And over the years the professional rats, who originate more
than 95 percent of all drug cases, had learned that selling a Class One
to the government was worth a much bigger "reward" payment. A lot of
them knew the DEA Agents Manual criteria for a One better than a lot of
the agents.
Unfortunately in DEA and other Federal agencies where agents are trained
to be duplicitous to begin with and then exposed to deceitful, lying,
scumbag politicians and bureaucrats who want results that make them look
good and don't give a damn how you get them as long as you don't
embarrass them by getting caught there were agents who would bend the
facts in their own favor. They'd write up a mid-level doper, or
sometimes a street dealer as a Class One based on "evidence supplied by
a previously reliable informant," without corroborating the rat's
information. If it got by the reviewing process the worst that happened
was that some mid or low level doper was called a Class One.
To me that kind of bullshit was no different than all the Federal
prosecutors with an eye on public office who exaggerated the importance
of their cases to a media that will swallow just about anything, as long
as it sold papers and got ratings, and downright harmless compared to
some drug czar facing 20 million Americans on Larry King Live and saying
"We've turned the corner on the drug war," to further his political
career. If you put all the dopers whom the press had reported as "linked
to the Medellin or Cali Cartels" hand-in-hand, they'd circle the ****ing
earth.
But DEA flying an expert witness across country to make a parking lot
attendant look like a Class One coke dealer in a Federal trial, was
something I'd never heard of unless things had changed drastically and I
had good reason to suspect they had. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
"You didn't answer me. What do you think I can do for you?"
"When I cross-examined the DEA expert he named your book Deep Cover as
one of the books he read to qualify as am expert. Now I want you to
testify that he's full of shit."
"There's gotta be something your not telling me."
"If I'm telling you the truth, will you be here on Monday?"
Just the thought of me going head-to-head against a small elite agency
that I'd been a part of for almost a quarter of a century put knots in
my stomach. Outsiders only hear about the blue of wall silence, but no
description I've ever heard ever really did it justice. To most guys in
narcotic enforcement the scummy bottom of life's barrel is the CI, the
criminal informant the rat. There's only one thing lower: a cop who
turns rat on his own. And to me, going to work for a doper was exactly
that.
"How did the thing get started?" I asked.
"A CI approaches DEA with a deal. He's wanted in Argentina and Bolivia.
He says, 'If I get you a Class One arrest here, will you get the charges
dropped against me over there?'"
"How much did they pay him?"
"Over thirty thousand, ****ing dollars. And they admitted that he's
gonna get more when the trial is over."
Thirty thousand was not all that much for a Class One, but I wasn't
going to say anything to him.
"And Mr. Car-parker, what kind of rap sheet does he have?"
"Nothing!" shouted the attorney. I held the phone away from my ear.
"This is his first, ****ing arrest."
"What kind of rap sheet does the rat have?"
He laughed. "This guy's been busted all over South America for every
kind of con job in the book. He even tried to sell his wife's vital
organs while she was in a coma dying."
"Come on, counselor," I said.
"If I'm telling the truth, will you be here Monday?"
"I listened this far," I said. "If you want to send me your stuff, I'll
look at it."
The telephone woke me early the next morning. It was a retired DEA agent
with whom I'd worked the street for two different Federal agencies.
"People called me, ****" he said. "And I said, 'No way, not ****
Levine.' You ain't gonna testify for some ****ing dirtbag."
"I'm not doing anything yet" I said, marvelling at the speed of the
Federal grapevine. "I just agreed to look at the case file."
"The guy's a scumbag, piece-of-shit, dope lawyer. He's like all these
guys every time his mouth moves he's lying. The case was righteous,
****. Don't fall for it not you. "
When I hung up my sweet wife and partner, Laura, was studying me.
"You're as pale as a ghost."
"He's someone I really respected. Did I sound as mealy-mouthed as I
think?"
"No, just really shaken."
The Fedex package was delivered to my room on Saturday morning. I opened
it to find a stack of reports, including "Miguel's" work records, the
transcripts of audio-tapes, the rat's file (much of it blacked out, as I
expected) and a video-casette DEA's whole case.
The work records were straight forward. Miguel worked for a large
parking lot chain punching a time clock for an average of sixty-plus
hours a week for the past three years, at minimum wage. He also had a
little side business of delivering lunches to workers in the area. And,
as the attorney had claimed, he had no prior criminal record.
The CI, whom I'll call "Cariculo Snakeface" on the other hand was wanted
in both Bolivia and Argentina for bad checks, petty theft and every kind
of con job in the book. He had a total of seventeen charges outstanding
against him. His favorite scam was selling cars he didn't own. His other
part-time source of income during the last four years, was selling drug
cases to DEA.
Snakeface first comes to Washington,D.C. from Bolivia, bringing with him
a wife and a couple of kids whom he promptly abandons and returns to
South America. Things don't go too well and in a short time he's back in
the U.S. on the lam from police and scam victims in two countries.
Miguel, a family friend and fellow Bolivian, tries to help out by giving
Snakeface part of his lunch delivery business.
In the meantime, Snakeface's wife suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and
falls into a coma. While she lays dying her "grieving" husband just as
the attorney said tries to sell her vital organs. When the sale of his
dying wife's heart, lungs and kidneys doesn't work out, Snakeface
decides to sell Miguel, organs and all, to DEA, as a Class One cocaine
dealer.
Snakeface's first move showed me that he was no novice in playing the
Federal rat system. Instead of calling the local Washington, D.C. office
of DEA or the FBI where he and Miguel lived he called DEA in California.
He described Miguel to the California DEA agents as someone called
"Chama," the "east coast distributor for a huge South American cartel
dealing in shipments of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the U.S." and
"the head of his own criminal organization" a description that just
happened to fit the criteria for a DEA Class One violator.
The reason Snakeface approached a DEA office in Southern California, as
far away from Washington, D.C. as he could get, is a thing of sheer
conman beauty. His experience as professional Federal rat had taught him
about the insane competition for headlines, budget and glory between the
myriad of American Federal enforcement, spy and military agencies 53 at
last count involved in some form of narcotic enforcement or another. He
knew that the California agents, afraid that the East Coast agents or
some other agency would steal their case, would keep Chama King of
Cocaine a secret.
California DEA reacted exactly as Snakeface had predicted. Instead of
calling the Washington, D.C. office and asking them to check out the
information, they sent Snakeface airline tickets and money to fly to
California from where they could get their first "evidence" a recorded
telephone conversation locking the case in as a "California case."
Next Snakeface tells Miguel, "Look, I've got this American Mafiosi in
California who is dumber than a guava. The guy's so dumb he's even sent
me airplane tickets to fly out there and set up a cocaine deal. I'll
tell him you're the capo de tutti frutti of all Bolivian drug dealers.
You tell this boludo that you can deliver all the cocaine he wants.
He'll give you a couple of hundred thousand dollars out front. Then you
and me take off back to Bolivia rich men and open up a chain of drive-in
theaters."
So Miguel-the-Car-Parker went along with the deal. He had failed the
U.S. government financed test of his honesty, a test that, according to
my training, was called Entrapment.
Now we cut to Snakeface in Southern California making his first phone
call to "Chama King of Cocaine" with DEA agents listening in and tape-
recording the call. He makes the call to the parking lot where Miguel
works and is supposed to be waiting, prepared to play the role of Chama
King of Cocaine for some capo di tutti dummo who he knows will be
listening in, only Miguel isn't there.
"He's home sick," says the woman who answers the parking lot phone.
Do the DEA agents stop here and say, What the hell is the east coast
distributor of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine, and the
head of his own criminal organization doing parking cars all day long?
No. They call his house and tape-record the call.
Miguel answers. He's in a bad way. He apologizes to Snakeface explaining
that he's home with a terrible hangover. Then he tells this long,
confused story about some friend of his getting drunk in his room,
stealing his pants and then wrecking his car.
"Shit," says Chama King of Cocaine, "in the morning I come out and I
didn't see my car. Man!. 'That son-of-a-bitch' I said. 'Shit! Where's my
car?' Shit! I was sad. . . .Shit! It's like the only one I have to go to
work."
Snakeface, with some effort and doing all the talking finally steered
the conversation into some garbled code-talk, that sounded more like
Roberto Duran trying to explain the Monroe Doctorine to Mario Cuomo than
a drug deal:
Snakeface: "Yeah, what I'm trying to is, since it's a matter which is
quite serious, big, and from the other things that I've seen like this,
when we can't be playing with, with unclear words and. . .that's why
what I, what you did, and I asked you if you'd spoken with him, because
I know that he has the financial capacity and after all he's, he's a
partner of, of, of, [name of major drug cartel leader] and, and in the
end anything will yield a profit if we're hanging on to a big stick
that's on a big branch and, and we won't have any problems. right?"
Chama King of Cocaine: "Of course."
That was about as clear as it ever got. If it was a dope conversation,
the fact that he was talking across three thousand miles of telephone
wires from his home telephone something a high-school crack dealer
wouldn't do didn't seem to bother Chama or the agents in the least.
At the end of this conversation, did these experienced, highly trained
agents say: "Hey this guy doesn't even sound smart enough to be a
Washington Heights steerer?, or, "Hey let's pull the autopsy report on
the rat's wife?" Nope! They opened a Class One investigation targeting
Miguel the parking lot attendant, and paid the rat his first thousand
dollars. And there was plenty more to follow.
The packet of reports indicated that the "investigation" lasted about
eight months during which time Snakeface successfully pimped the DEA
agents about "Chama King of Cocaine" and at the same time pimped Miguel
about "Tony," (a DEA undercover agent), whom he described as the Dumb-
and-Dumber of the Mafia. During that time California DEA did no
investigation of Miguel whatsoever.
The record showed: No telephone investigation to ascertain whether
Miguel was making telephone calls to any real drug dealers, no financial
investigation to see what he was doing with his drug millions, no
surveillance that would have revealed that Chama King of Coke was a
working stiff who lived in a one-room apartment. They did nothing but
write down whatever their rat told them as "fact."
For eight months Snakeface stalled the California agents reporting that
Chama was in the process of putting together a major shipment of
cocaine, and the agents continued to pay him. In all,he received another
$29,000 in "rat fees" plus expenses, which included periodic trips back
to California from Washington to be "debriefed" on his "progress." For
eight months the agents nagged Snakeface into trying to get Miguel to
deliver a sample of cocaine, any amount. Just something to prove that he
was really in the business.
The sample never came. Miguel surprizing for any Bolivian didn't know
anyone in the business to even buy a small amount. And even if he did,
he didn't have the money. And Snakeface was afraid that if he paid for
the sample even these California agents might get wise to him, so he
came up with a clever solution: he told the agents, Hey, Class One
dealers don't give samples, only small dealers give samples. When, to
his astonishment, they believed him, he took it one step further:
Miguel, he said, was not going to do the deal unless the agents put part
of the money out front $300,000 another sign that he was a "true Class
One dealer."
Snakeface had enough experience selling cases to the Feds to know that
they would never front that kind of money. He also knew that the Fed's
indecision and the slow moving bureaucracy, plus agents who didn't
really know what they were doing, could give him quite a few months on
salary which is exactly what happened.
After eight months, the California agents finally decided that, since
"Chama" wouldn't deliver drugs to them without front money, they 'd get
him on video-tape promising them cocaine and accepting the money all
they'd need to prove him guilty of Conspiracy to possess and distribute
cocaine and bust his ass. Miguel would face enough charges to make him a
guest of the American taxpayers for more years than he had left on this
earth. The no-dope conspiracy arrest would also give them the agents
their Class One stat and maybe a headline from the ever gullible press.
By this time Snakeface had not only received $30,000 in "Informant Fees"
but all charges against him in South America had been "disappeared."
What a country!
Now Snakeface had two final duties to perform for his masters: bring
Miguel to California for his arrest and then testify in court. More
money was even promised after his conviction. How much? We'll never
know.
Now the stage was set for the final act the video-taping of the "crime."
Only there was still one remaining snag. Miguel didn't have the money to
come to California for his own arrest. In a final irony, the California
DEA agents had to pay for his trip.
Finally, dressed up in his best Sears casuals and prepared to play the
role of a Class One cocaine dealer for a live audience of Mafia retards.
Miguel was on his way to California like a big Bolivian turkey on his
way to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.
It was close to midnight when I keyed the video-tape of the climactic
undercover meeting between Chama King of Cocaine and "Tony" capo of the
Three Stooges Mafia family.
The screen flickered to life.
A hotel had been rigged with hidden video cameras. Center screen was
"Chama" and "Tony" facing each other across a table. Between them was a
piece of hand luggage containing $300,000 in hundreds and fifties.
There were several problems that were immediately apparent. First, they
hardly shared a language in common. Tony's Spanish was rudimentary at
best and Miguel spoke only a few words of English. Tony for example kept
referring over and over to the "Percento" until Miguel finally figured
out he was trying to say "purity" a word anyone who did drug deals in
Spanish should have known in his sleep.
Second, neither man knew his role. It was like Peewee Herman and Gnewt
Gingrich playing dress-up and pretending to do a drug deal. "Chama" was
dressed like the hotel maintenance man, and "Tony" was dressed like an
Elvis impersonator.
Neither knew the mechanics of a real Class One drug deal, or any real
drug deal for that matter. There was no discussion of specific amounts,
prices, weights, meeting places, delivery dates, provisions for testing
the merchandise before delivery , methods of delivery or prearranged
trouble signals. Nothing happened that even resembled a real drug deal,
which is typically paranoid event that is all about specifics. What the
agents had on video wasn't authentic enough for a Stallone movie.
The only thing clear was that "Tony" was asking Miguel to promise him
that, if he was allowed to leave the room with the $300,000 he would,
within 20 to 30 days, deliver an unspecific amount of cocaine, to an
unspecified location pretty good for a parking lot attendant.
Miguel eagerly assured his new benefactor that he would make said
delivery. He was then allowed to examine the money, which he eagerly
did, after which the undercover DEA agent asked him if he was "happy,"
with what he saw. Miguel, thinking that America truly was a land of gold
paved streets guarded by idiots and that his friend Snakeface was a
genius to be compared with Einstein, or at least Howard Stern, assured
"Tony" that he was very happy.
With all the elements to the crime of Conspiracy recorded on video-tape
Tony concluded by saying "...Whew! Thank you very much and I'll wait for
your call."
"O.K.," said Miguel, his eyes bugged out with disbelief as he got to his
feet holding the money.
"Hey! Dude," said Tony, "I'll be here a little while. I have to make a
few calls. Bye."
Miguel's look as he started to leave with the money only lacked the
line: Feet, don't fail me now. His feet didn't have far to go only about
a half dozen steps before he was arrested.
I clicked off the video. If DEA stood for the Dumb Enforcement
Administration, then Miguel undoubtedly was a Class One violator but a
drug dealer he was definitely not.
Had the agents responsible for this case been working for me during the
seventeen years I was a supervisory agent, I would have jerked them into
my office for a private conference. "There are a million ****ing real
drug dealers in this country," I would have told them. "There's probably
a couple of hundred working within a square mile of the office. If
you've gotta go 3,000 miles to D.C. and spend a quarter of a million in
taxpayer bucks to turn a ****ing parking lot attendant into a Class One
doper, you oughta be working for the CIA, or Congress, or wherever else
you can convert bullshit to money."
I would have put them on probation and moved to fire them if they
couldn't do the job. I had done it before. It wouldn't have been
anything new to me. But was that any of my business now that I was
retired? If Miguel wasn't a doper he was certainly a thief, wasn't he?
"What are you going to do?" asked Laura.
"I wish I knew," I said. "It's pure entrapment, but the idiot did his
best to sound like a doper. If I'm gonna go against DEA, I don't want to
lose."
But there were things happening to me and in the news, that had been on
my mind during the days leading up to this phone call that would keep me
up for the rest of the night.
The first was the shooting of the wife and son of Randy Weaver by FBI
agents during a raid at Ruby Ridge. The guy was supposed to be a white
supremacist and I'm a Jew, but we both had something powerful in common
the unbelievable pain of having our children murdered
What had my head spinning in disbelief was that the case against Weaver
that provoked the raid in the first place possession of a sawed-off
shotgun had been set up by a professional rat like Snakeface and that
Weaver had been found innocent by reason of entrapment.
I kept flashing back to an incident that had happened at the beginning
of my career while I was serving with BATF, enforcing the Federal gun
laws.
The rat's name was Ray. He had a glass eye, no front teeth and a rap
sheet as long as a cheap roll of toilet paper. He was my first CI and
would be the prototype for many hundreds to follow.
"I met this guy who wantsa sell a sawed-off shotgun for sixty bucks,"
said Ray flashing me his goal post smile. "His name is Angel. He's a
black Porto-Rican. One a them Young Lords," he added, naming the Mao-
spouting Latino organization that was so popular to arrest.
"How do you know it's a violation?" I asked. A shotgun had to have a
barrel length of less than 18 inches to be a violation of the National
Firearms Act the law we enforced.
Ray winked his good eye at me. He knew the law as well as any agent. He
made a living selling drug and gun cases to the government.
"When the dude left the room to go to the john, I measured it. How much
is it worth if I duke you into the guy?"
I explained that if Angel delivered the gun in a car, we would seize it
and the "informant fee" would be raised according to the value of the
car. Or if Angel was somebody "news worthy" it would be worth a couple
of hundred. But Angel Nobody with one gun was only worth a hundred
bucks, then twice the average weekly income in the U.S.
Ray already knew all this. Like all professional stools he just wanted
the arrangement spelled out beforehand. If I didn't take the case,or he
didn't like the deal, he knew he might still be able to sell it to the
FBI or another ATF agent.
"But the dude is a Young Lord, that got to be worth something extra."
"People can say they're anything. We'll see who he is after I bust him."
Following my instructions, Ray set up a buy/bust meet. Later that night,
covered by a team of about a half dozen undercover agents, I met Angel,
a nervous eighteen year old, on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx.
The kid had the gun in a paper bag just the way Ray said he would. I
handed him the sixty bucks, took the gun and busted him.
On the way back to headquarters in lower Manhattan, something happened
that Ray didn't count on. When I told Angel that possession and sale of
a sawed-off shotgun carried a sentence of 25 years in Federal prison he
blinked a few times and turned rat himself.
Angel claimed that he had a "partner" on the deal a guy named Ray he'd
met on an unemployment line a few days earlier.
"The guy tol' me he knew a sucker who'd pay sixty bucks for an old
shotgun that he could get for ten in the pawn shop. Alls we got to do is
cut the barrel. He say if I cut it and make the delivery, he puts up the
ten for the gun and we split the profit. He was right there when I cut
it. He even marked it."
What Angel had described, without realizing it, was a crime that never
would have happened if it hadn't been provoked by a paid government rat
entrapment. In those years the rule was that simple: if the crime
wouldn't have happened without a CI or an undercover agent planting the
idea, there was no crime. The Justice Department wouldn't prosecute it.
In fact, an agent could get himself into serious trouble bringing an
entrapment case to the U.S. Attorneys office.
How things have changed.
It took me two days to corroborate Angel's version of events and get all
charges dropped against the kid. The Federal prosecutor thanked me and
told me that I had just learned the most important lesson I would ever
learn as a Fed: "Never trust a criminal informant, ****," he said. Over
the next twenty-five years I would hear those words repeated thousands
of times, by agents, cops, training instructors and prosecutors, yet I
never heard a prosecutor say them to a jury.
Everyone who's ever carried a Federal badge knew how easy it was to
convict someone who'd been entrapped on little more than an informant's
testimony, as long as the informant was clever enough to hide his
tracks, the victim gullible enough to fall for the trap and the agents
and prosecutors ambitious and immoral enough to go for the headlines,
statistics and win at any price.
Until recent years I had believed that most of us in Federal law
enforcement were people whose pride and consciences would not allow that
to happen.
I was no longer so sure.
After the Ray-Angel case, I continued on with BATF for three more years
before transferring into narcotic enforcement. During those years I
never saw another sawed-off shotgun case involving a CI, accepted for
prosecution by the two Federal courts in New York City. There was just
too much possibility of Informant Entrapment.
Yet, in the Randy Weaver case, the question, How the hell was a CI
entrapment, sawed-off shotgun case ever allowed to become a military
invasion of an American citizen's home? was not even being asked either
by our political leaders or the media. The question in my mind was, What
happened to the people of conscience in the Weaver case? You can't just
blame it on the rat a professional rat can't entrap anyone unless a
government rat with more ambition than conscience is willing to look the
other way.
The other thing going on in my life that would affect my decision was
that as a result of my books I'd been receiving letters from Federal
prisoners who claimed that they had been "set up" by lying criminal
informants working for the various, competing Federal agencies enforcing
the drug and money laundering statutes. Guys like Lon Lundy, a once
successful businessman, husband and father from Mobile Alabama, a man
with no criminal record who was set up by a CI in a no-dope Conspiracy
case and received a Life-with-no-parole sentence, or Harry Kauffman from
Cleveland, a once successful used car dealer, husband and father, who
was conned by a CI into accepting cash, alleged to be drug money, for
some cars and charged with Money Laundering, and many others. And many
others.
They were men of every race, religion and national origin in the Federal
prison system. Most had no previous criminal records, most had had their
homes, businesses and financial assets seized by the Federal government
leaving their families destitute, all had received more than twenty year
prison sentences. In many cases the rats ended up with a percentage of
the assets seized as a "reward" for their "work." These were men whose
lives and families had been destroyed. Their letters to me were
desperate cries, that affected me deeply,
My twenty-five years in the justice system had taught me that there were
plenty of bureaucrats and politicians whom, if they didn't like the way
you exercised your rights as a citizen, or if they thought they could
make headlines, political hay or a promotion by your arrest and
prosecution, would not think twice about targeting you with the
government's legions of paid belly-crawlers. Few people have the money
of a John DeLorean to adequately defend themselves against a slick rat.
The only thing, in my experience, that stopped these rats with badges
and rats in public office, were people of conscience in positions of
authority and a knowledgeable and watchful media. For several years I
had been seeing no evidence of either. And as publicly outspoken as I
had been about the phony drug war bureaucrats and politicians, I found
this all personally threatening.
Finally, the most painful issue of all was the murder of my son Keith by
a man who had two prior murder convictions in New York State; a man who
was on the street according to our political leaders because there is
just not enough money to put everyone in jail that belonged there, yet I
was looking at a file in front of me that spoke of Federal law
enforcement spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest and
convict a parking lot attendant as a Class One drug dealer.
"I'll do it," I heard myself say the next morning. "I went over all your
stuff. You've got a better entrapment defense here than John DeLorean
had."
There was a long silence on the phone. "I didn't claim entrapment as my
defense theory," said the attorney.
I started to ask him why and stopped myself. It no longer mattered. The
attorney's opening statement claimed Miguel was innocent of all charges
not that he had been entraped by a government rat working on commission,
into committing the crime. Miguel, on camera, had done his best to play
the role of Chama King of Cocaine; he had promised to deliver drugs and
accepted money on camera all the government needed to prove Conspiracy.
If a judge didn't explain to a jury what entrapment was, not even
Johnnie Cochran could get him off. And once the trial had begun no judge
would allow a change in the defense theory it was a simple matter of
law.
But Miguel's guilt or innocence no longer mattered to me. I had somehow
committed myself mentally and emotionally to go to war. I wanted to try
and make the growing power of rats those with and without badges as
public as I could. They weren't only hurting people who had failed an
honesty test they were spending billions in taxpayer dollars for nothing
but phony show trials, and filling the jails with people who were, at
worst, non-violent dupes, while our nation's streets ran with the blood
of innocents.
My testimony as a defense expert witness, lasted all day Monday and into
Tuesday morning. A couple of guys whom I used to work with sat with the
prosecution watching me with looks of disbelief. During a break one of
them came up to me, stared at me for a long moment and said: "It's a
shame you had to go that way."
I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I had known the guy for
more than twenty-five years. We had served together in two Federal
agencies. He, I was sure, was not capable of bringing a mess like Miguel
Car-parker into Federal court, but he would not violate the blue wall of
silence, he felt the need to protect people whom I thought didn't
deserve it. When you become a Fed you take two oaths, one to protect the
bureaucracy and the other to protect the Constitution and the people who
pay your salaries. No Federal agent can live up to both.
We would never speak again.
During my testimony I pointed out the dozens of places in the tapes that
both Miguel and Tony spoke and acted in ways that indicated that neither
knew what a real drug deal was like, and that in my opinion the crime
never would have happened if it were not for the CI's actions and the
agents' failure to control him and properly investigate his allegations.
I even got to testify to my opinion that "if the Federal government is
going to use suitcases full of taxpayer dollars to test the honesty of
American citizens, instead of working the parking lots of America, they
ought to be running their tests in the halls of Congress where it might
do us some good."
As soon as I got off the witness stand I headed back to New York. The
whole thing had been a traumatic, shitty experience for me. The attorney
said he'd call to let me know the verdict. The judge had refused to
instruct the jury that they could find the defendant innocent by reason
of entrapment, but the attorney was still hopeful.
In New York a message was waiting for me from another California
attorney that would quickly take my mind off, what I had begun calling
"The Beavis and Butthead case."
The attorney represented a forty-five year old executive for a Fortune
500 computer company named Donald Carlson. A Federal task force of
Customs, DEA, BATF and Border Patrol agents, just graduated from a
paramilitary assault school the week before, wearing black ninja
outfits, helmets and flack vests, using flash-bang grenades and
automatic weapons had invaded Mr. Carlson's upscale, suburban, San Diego
home, shooting the corporate executive three times and leaving him in
critical condition. They were executing a search warrant based on the
uncorroborated, uninvestigated word of a professional rat.
Miraculously, despite the best efforts of the this newly formed,
suburban assault squad one of the invading feds did a Rambo-roll, firing
fifteen rounds from his submachine-gun hitting everything in Mr.
Carlson's foyer, but Mr. Carlson Mr. Carlson was going to survive and
wanted to sue the government.
"We'd like to retain you as our consultant," said the attorney, a soft-
spoken, thoughtful man with an impeccable reputation for integrity.
"How did this happen?" I said.
"That's what we'd like you to tell us. It seems that this task force had
a search warrant seeking for 5000 pounds of cocaine and four armed and
dangerous Colombians in Mr. Carlson's garage. The warrant was apparently
based on the word of a criminal informant."
I immediately started pouring over the reports and statements. Dawn had
begun to light the sky before I realized that I had read the whole night
through. It was one of the most frightening examples of an out-of-
control, almost comically inept Federal law enforcement that I had ever
seen or heard of in my twenty-five year career if it weren't for the
fact that these guys carried real guns and badges.
In short, a low-level professional rat/petty thief/druggie who'd been
selling street-level dope cases to a local south Florida police
department, convinced a team of California Federal agents representing
four Federal agencies, that he had become a trusted member of a major
South American drug cartel.
They overlooked the fact that the rat spoke no Spanish and seemed to
have a hard time putting together an intelligible sentence in English;
that most of the people he was implicating as "members" of this
Colombian drug ring weren't even Spanish speakers; that the rat's credit
was so bad that the phone company refused to furnish him with a
telephone (the agents had to give him a cellular phone, which they took
back when he started making unauthorized phone calls); that a local cop
had called the rat a liar. Even the rat's story, that he was doing
pushups in a California park when he was first approached by a stranger
to join one of the notoriously paranoid, Colombian Cartels, would have
been dissed at a UFO abduction convention.
But none of this bothered these feds.
For three months the agents put the CI on the payroll, accepted
everything he said as "fact," implicated dozens of innocent people in
government files and computers as "drug traffickers," belonging to a
drug trafficking organization that didn't even exist, and even obtained
four search warrants including the Carlson warrant on nothing more than
the rat's uncorroborated words. And then, ignoring the words of a San
diego cop who called the rat a liar, they "Ramboed" the suburban home of
a computer company executive like it was Desert Storm, only to find that
the Colombian Cartel didn't even exist.
Holy shit! I thought. What is going on here?
The Federal grapevine must have been buzzing. I was contacted by cops
and agents who wanted to see some of these guys go to jail. A San Diego
cop who had taken part in the investigation but not the raid was quoted
as saying that the feds shouldn't be carrying guns and badges. A lot of
feds felt the same way, but they weren't going to break the blue wall of
silence. One did, however, send me a copy of Congressional Report of
hearings chaired by Congressman John Conyers Jr. that he thought "might
be helpful."
The title of the report tells its story: Serious Mismanagement and
Misconduct in the Treasury Department, Customs Service and Other Federal
Agencies and the Adequacy of Efforts to Hold Agency Officials
Accountable.
The hearings not only found evidence of all of the above, they also
found there was "a perception of cover-up" in these Federal agencies for
all their misdeeds. In spite of this report being issued within months
of the Carlson shooting, the killings at Ruby Ridge and the massacre at
Waco, Texas, it went virtually ignored by the media.
I had served part of my career as an Operations Inspector and began
doing what I used to do for the government documenting violations of
rules, regulations and Federal law on the part of agents. I began what
would become two reports (160,000 words) noting hundreds of instances
where these feds violated their own rules, dozens of indications of
federal felonies false statements, perjury, illegal tampering with
evidence and coercion of witnesses and violations of the U.S.
Constitution. I also found and noted in my reports just as Congressman
Conyer's report noted powerful indications of cover-up going right to
top level management of DEA, Customs and the Justice Department.
Powerful people wanted the Carlson incident to "disappear." I was not
going to let that happen.
Or so I thought.
A couple of days into my work on the Carlson case I got a call from
Miguel's attorney. The jury had found him guilty of "attempted
possession of cocaine." The charge carried a mandatory minimum of twenty
years in Federal prison.
"The jury said they weren't very impressed with either your testimony or
the government's" he said. "They voted on what they thought was the law.
Miguel promised he'd deliver the coke for the money, so he's guilty."
The attorney said he was appealing the conviction. The CI, in the
meantime, was paid whatever he'd been promised and was probably off
selling more cases. I mean, even I had to admit, it was a good living. I
hung up feeling like shit.
Weeks later, after I had submitted the Carlson shooting report,
recommending that the agents and prosecutors involved in the case be
fired and prosecuted. I was full of hope. A rat cannot be king unless
the people who are supposed to control him become as immoral and corrupt
as he is and I was going for their throats. The Carlson case would be
the example that all Americans should see of what was going wrong all
across this country.
I looked forward to the civil trial and testifying publicly to my
reports. It wouldn't be a congressional hearing, where facts the facts
testified to are usually the ones the politicians want to hear, so that
they could comfortably reach the "conclusion" they'd already agreed upon
long before the hearings began. I was even going to call Court T.V.
I was at war.
Miguel's attorney called me again. "The judge reversed himself. He's
granted a new trial on the basis that Miguel should have had an
entrapment defense. Will you be available to testify?"
"Sure," I said."I'd love to."
It would be months before I learned that the attorney and the Federal
prosecutor had worked out a plea bargaining deal. I'm not sure what
Miguel pled guilty to, but he ended up with a ten year prison sentence.
I suppose it could have been a lot worse.
It would be more than a year before I would learn that the U.S.
government in the person of San Diego U.S. Attorney Allan Bersin, had
decided to settle with Mr. Carlson, avoiding a trial and the public
revelations of my reports. Mr. Carlson's attorney made a public
statement that by settling without a trial the misdeeds of the
government were being covered up. The government paid Mr. Carlson 2.75
million. Part of the final agreement was that the government's reports
of its own actions, be classified.
The U.S. Attorney of San Diego, made a public statement exonerating the
agents and prosecutors of all wrongdoing. He said that "the system"
failed Mr. Carlson, but that the agents and prosecutors were to be
commended for having done their jobs.
Within weeks the government would also settle with Randy Weaver, paying
him $3.1 million. Once again the legality and morality of the
government's actions in entraping Weaver in the first place were never
even questioned.
This was also the year that Quibillah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter
would be charged with conspiracy to murder Louis Farrakhan, the man who
was alleged to be behind the murder of her father. The young woman,
according to the press, had been set up by her fiance, who also happened
to be a long time professional rat for the FBI and who was reportedly
paid $25,000 for his "services."
It seems though that once the prosecutor and the FBI got their headlines
they lost all stomach for their case against Ms Shabazz and agreed to a
plea bargaining deal that freed her. My long experience told me that
allowing a woman whom they had publicly charged, with great media
fanfare, with conspiracy to murder and spent an enormous amount of
taxpayer dollars to bring to "justice," to simply go free without a
trial was not out of any pity for her they were protecting their own
butts and covering up perhaps one of the ugliest cases of rat entrapment
on record.
I flashed on another professional rat I knew in DEA who had turned every
friend and relative he'd ever had into government cash as if they were
deposit bottles. One day he came crying to me, actually bawling big wet
tears, that he'd met a woman and for the first time in his life was in
love. She lived in California and he was broke. He needed enough money
to get him there. "I'm a piece of shit he said. Please don't deny me a
chance to turn my life around, Levine." I bought him a one-way ticket.
He was there a week when I got a call from a Los Angeles DEA agent
checking on the guy's record. The rat was trying to broker a deal on his
fiance.
I watched the Senate hearings into the Federal government's actions in
both Waco and Ruby Ridge and heard, for the first time in my life,
liberal Democrats and the liberal press, who for decades were
criticizing the tactics of Federal law enforcement suddenly referring to
them, as "our Federal agents," and defending their actions. It was clear
that their real interest was to protect the President and Attorney
General for their actions in two of the worst screw-ups in law
enforcement history. At the same time the conservatives and Republicans,
who for decades had defended Federal law enforcement, no matter what
they did, were now attacking the Feds as racists and "jackbooted
stormtroopers."
And somewhere in the middle of this political shit-storm the truth was
lost and, as usual, all the rats those with badges, those in appointed
and political office came out smelling like roses, while the walking
around, taxpaying, hard-working American and his Constitution took it up
the ass.
The other day I read an interview of Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, who, in
payment for turning rat against his lifelong partners in crime, was
"forgiven" for the murders of nineteen human beings (that we know about)
and an uncountable number of felonies. He was allowed to keep the
millions he had earned as a murdering thug plus a pile of taxpayer
dollars for "expenses," and received a taxpayer-paid ride in the Federal
Witness Protection program for life. Gravano, speaking from what he
described as a "nice little apartment complex" said he was enjoying his
new life as a bachelor millionaire.
"There's a pool, racquetball courts, gym, tennis courts and a lot of
single women who don't have the slightest idea who I am," he said. "It's
nice. I sit down and relax under some trees."
God bless America, I thought. The land where the rat is king.
good ol leo
It would be sufficient to shred the credibility of "law enforcement via snitches".
