An American Gestapo

There are a great number of people who regard narcotics agents as corrupt Nazis who don't know how to open the door except with the heel of their right foot.

--John R. Bartels, Jr., Former Administrator, Drug Enforcement Administration

John Bartels used to be one of the most important cops in America. A trim man with thick black hair, he had set out on a career that could have surpassed that of the legendary J. Edgar Hoover. Bartels was Mr. Narc, head of the largest, best-equipped and theoretically the most professional anti-narcotics force in the world: the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Today the Drug Enforcement Administration is the subject of a major and still secret criminal investigation by the Attorney General. John Bartels is a private citizen. Many of his former lieutenants spent last summer squirming under the hot lights of a Senate investigation and soon after asked for early retirements or educational furloughs. How Bartels and his associates brought down this 46-year-old institution is one more of the elaborate intrigues of Watergate, a story of secret police, foreign adventure, zealous warlords and high-rolling corruption.

Bartels never liked the fact that many Americans regarded his agents as Nazis; most Americans, he used to say, don't really know who the Federal narcotics agent is, what he does or how he works. But those citizens who do know, who have seen the $10,000,000 "buy" budget in action, who have been forced to swallow their own excrement in sleek torture chambers of South America, who have had high-voltage electrodes clamped to their genitals, and those honest agents whose hands have been tied by their DEA superiors do understand all too well the cruel irony in Bartels' rhetoric.

The combination of writhing junkies and billionaire heroin dealers--as in The French Connection--has turned the hardfisted narc into a national folk hero. But the story was, in reality, a corruption conviction against the real-life hero of the actual French-connection case and the mysterious disappearance of much of the confiscated heroin. Evaluations of the Federal narcotics program by the Customs Bureau, by the State Department and, most recently, by the U. S. Senate all corroborate the conclusions of a critical, inside report solicited for the White House in 1974: Federal narcotics investigation "is the most sordid story in the annals of law enforcement." It began formally in 1930, when the Treasury Department founded its Bureau of Narcotics in the wake of a narcotics scandal. It reached its climax in 1973, when President Richard Nixon gave the bureau a massive injection of secrecy and money and changed its name to DEA. And it came to an apparent conclusion last year, when the "sordid story" could no longer be kept from the Attorney General or Congress.

The real character of the DEA was best expressed to a doctor who had dared criticize Nixon's scheme for creating a superagency called DEA by White House aide Egil Krogh: "Anyone who opposes us we'll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn't support us we'll destroy."

Forty-six years after the bureau's birth, the job of the narc is again up for examination. Senate investigations have revealed incompetence and probable corruption at the highest levels of DEA, and a Federal grand jury may be empaneled to bring indictments against the agency's officers. Despite the investigations, no one has asked what kind of narcotics-enforcement policy is best, and there is no reason to suppose that past DEA atrocities will not be re-enacted again and again. The Donald Askew family of Collinsville, Illinois, knows about DEA brutality. The family made headlines in 1973 when the door to their house was broken down by Federal narcotics agents who had the wrong address. Emotionally upset after the terrorizing raid, Askew had to quit work for several months and was briefly threatened with a $5,950,000 libel and slander suit from the very agents who illegally broke into his home.

In Massapequa, New York, carpenter John Conforti nearly had his house torn down by Federal narcotics agents. It was June 9, 1972--a muggy evening in an upper-middle-class Long Island village. John and his wife, Adele, were puttering around the kitchen when a literal phalanx of Federal narcotics agents surrounded their house: 30 agents altogether, armed not only with guns but also with hammers, crowbars and trench-digging equipment. Threatened by an agent who held a raised crowbar in his hand, Conforti was ordered to turn over $4,000,000 the bureau had decided he was hiding for an in-law recently convicted on narcotics charges. If Conforti didn't turn over the money, one agent told him, "We'll knock down the house."

To this day, no money has been found. And the agents did wreck his house, stripping it of aluminum siding, digging deep trenches in the lawn, ripping insulation out of the walls and ransacking the furnishings. By the time they were finished, the agents had spent an entire day destroying the Conforti home. Conforti sued the Government (including associate regional narcotics director Jerry Jenson, later a high official in DEA's headquarters) and won a $160,000 settlement.

Are these ill-directed attacks against citizens exceptional, as the drug-enforcement people maintain? Or are they typical of an attitude and a system of law enforcement based on comic-book bravado? The abolition of DEA and the sacking of its top officers will not provide an easy answer. A simple lateral transfer of the DEA men to the FBI--at a time when the FBI itself is under intense investigation for door smashing and dirty tricks--can hardly ensure the safety of American citizens from killer crooks or killer cops.

Defenders of the Federal narcotics program take the line advanced so graphically in French Connection II: that drug dealers are so vile and vicious that any means at all are permissible in fighting them and, in fact, only the most brutal police tactics are effective. Just such justification gave birth to the following cases:

Carlos Choy Zeballos, a Chilean clothing merchant, was forcibly abducted and held in isolation for five months by DEA agents in a case of mistaken identity. A Federal judge ordered Zeballos released in September 1974, and then told prosecutors he was "completely outraged" to find that DEA was still holding him several days later.

Julio Juventino Lujan, an Argentine citizen and suspected narcotics dealer, was tricked into going to Bolivia, then was abducted by American-sponsored agents in Bolivia and delivered onto an American airplane bound for the U. S., where he could be arrested. Although the judge ruled irrelevant Lujan's charges of illegal American conduct, he conceded that it involved "American agents kidnaping the leading perpetrators from South America to bring them to trial."

Carlos Baeza, a Chilean citizen, was arrested two months after the CIA-directed coup of September 1973 at the specific direction of DEA agents. Baeza, who had no criminal record in Chile and who was never tried for any crime there, was beaten, subjected to electric shock on his head, legs and genitals, kept unaware of any charges against him, released temporarily only through a bribe, then rearrested and held under a false name, tortured again and made to swallow feces until he vomited; finally, he was abducted from Chile with the direct cooperation of American agents and Chilean police in explicit violation of Chile's own laws of extradition.

Or take the case of Francisco Toscanino, an Italian citizen. Brought before a Federal court in New York for conspiring to import narcotics into the United States, Toscanino claimed he had been first kidnaped and then tortured by paid employees of the American embassy. Lured from his home in Montevideo, Uruguay, by a phone call on January 6, 1973, he agreed to meet a U. S.-paid Uruguayan officer at a nearby deserted bowling alley. There he was jumped by seven men, knocked unconscious, bound, blindfolded and thrown into the rear seat of the police officer's car--all in plain sight of his terrified, seven-month-pregnant wife.

What followed for Toscanino--at that time a presumably innocent defendant under American law--rivals Soviet police tactics. Dragged by his abductors across the Brazilian border, where deportations to America are easier to arrange, he was first taken to Pôrto Alegre and held incommunicado for 11 hours, then sent on to Brasilia. At no time was he allowed to consult a lawyer or to contact his family or the Italian consulate, nor was there at any time an agreement of extradition for Toscanino between the United States and Uruguay. For 17 days, he was tortured and interrogated, and reports of the interrogation were regularly dispatched to the U. S. Government. He was denied sleep, food or water for days at a time and, instead, was fed intravenously in amounts just large enough to keep him alive.

"When he could no longer stand," his lawyer, Ivan Fisher, told the court, "he was kicked and beaten but all in a manner contrived to punish without scarring. When he would not answer, his fingers were pinched with metal pliers. Alcohol was flushed into his eyes and nose and other fluids ... were forced up his anal passage. Incredibly, these agents of the United States Government attached electrodes to Toscanino's ear lobes, toes and genitals. Jarring jolts of electricity were shot throughout his body, rendering him unconscious for indeterminate periods of (continued on page 86)American Gestapo(continued from page 82) time but, again, leaving no physical scars."

Taken to Rio de Janeiro on January 25, he was drugged and placed on a plane to New York, where, upon awakening, he was arrested by U. S. agents and later placed on trial.

During Toscanino's trial, evidence of his torture was not admitted as testimony. He was convicted and only on appeal did he win the right to a hearing on the charges of torture. Further, the court quoted Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had reversed conviction in a similar case: "Applying these general considerations to the circumstances of the present case, we are compelled to conclude that the proceedings by which this conviction was obtained do more than offend some fastidious squeamishness or private sentimentalism about combating crime too energetically. This is conduct that shocks the conscience...."

•

Narcotics enforcement in America began in earnest with the 1914 Harrison Act, written in response to a set of international agreements aimed at curbing the illegal international traffic in drugs. The act specifically stated that it was not intended to limit doctors in issuing regular narcotics prescriptions; in fact, enforcement of the act was assigned to the Treasury Department only because it levied taxes on narcotics sales. But the fanaticism engendered by Prohibition and World War One, including appointment of a gentleman named Colonel L. G. Nutt (later driven from office on a drug corruption charge) to the Narcotics Division of the Prohibition Commission, gave the T-men all they needed. The few doctors willing to forget their fees and set up low-cost treatment clinics for addicts came under fire--and frequently indictment--as profiteering, if not subversive, peddlers. The American Medical Association joined the T-men in a new campaign to turn addicts into criminals.

The A.M.A.'s Committee on Narcotic Drugs proclaimed: "The shallow pretense that drug addiction is a disease which the specialist must be allowed to treat ... has been asserted and urged in volumes of literature by the self-styled specialists. The vice that causes degeneration of the moral sense, and spreads through social contacts, readily infects the entire community, saps its moral fiber and contaminates the individual members, one after another, like the rotten apples in a barrel of sound ones."

The dissenting doctors began to go to jail. Almost overnight, the black market in narcotics, like the black market in Prohibition liquor, became a billion-dollar business. T-men extracted court decisions that prohibited medicinal narcotic prescriptions for addicts. Not until 1937, however, did they find the case they most needed, in the person of a crippled young Seattle physician, Dr. Thomas P. Ratigan, Jr., who had twice before been acquitted of Federal narcotics charges brought against him for operating a low-cost-to-free addiction clinic for the city's massive skid-row population. The bureau's previous failures in their campaign to get Dr. Ratigan were not without value. Instead of simply seizing his records, as they had before, they began to accost his patients, threatening them with prison sentences if they entered his clinic.

After threats and intimidation, the agents decided to move. One October day in 1935, they burst into Ratigan's office and arrested him, three patients who were with him and 12 patients who arrived later. Establishing a method of operation that was to be a Federal narcotics hallmark ever since, the T-men had planted an addict "Government informant" who had gone regularly to the clinic for treatment and so testified, adding that he had once "bought" a three-dollar narcotics vial from the doctor. Government testimony also came from another addict informant and her three-time-loser burglar husband.

Though Ratigan was convicted and later failed to secure Supreme Court review, his trial testimony as recorded by historian Rufus King has proved among the most apt characterizations of bureau policy ever made; its predictive value could not have been more accurate:

"The only logical way of preventing more persons from becoming addicts," Ratigan told the court, "is for physicians to administer to the addicts and not permit the patients to receive any morphine for self-administration. The addicts who have morphine in their possession are the ones who create more addicts. The number of addicts will increase greatly year after year until some definite system of treating them is adopted by the entire medical profession."

To the eternal and public glee of Narcotics Bureau commissioner Harry Anslinger, Ratigan never again won the right to practice. Tragically and posthumously, his position has finally won vindication. A damning 1963 statement from the New York Academy of Medicine declared:

From the year of the Harrison Act to 1938 it is estimated that 25,000 physicians were arraigned and 3000 served penitentiary sentences on narcotics charges. About 20,000 were said to have made a financial settlement.... It is evident that the Supreme Court opinion in the Lindner case, removing restrictions on treatment of addicts, had no noticeable restraining effect on the Treasury Department in its war on physicians.... The abandoned addicts, in order to satisfy their compulsive needs, were driven to the illicit traffic.... Dictation, threats, hounding and oppression from the narcotics force over the years, and still continuing, were so indelibly fixed in physicians' minds as not to be easily forgotten or readily braved.... So thoroughly has the smear job on addicts been done, so outrageously but erroneously have they been depicted that the mere mention of their name has conjured up an image of dangerous criminals or fiends.

Almost 40 years ago, Congressman John Coffee from the state of Washington attacked the Harrison Act and its prosecution as a major stimulus to organized crime, pointing out that the law enormously reduced the legitimate importation of drugs "while developing a smuggling industry not before in existence."

"That, however, is only the beginning." Coffee said. "Through operation of the law, as interpreted, there was developed also, as counterpart to the smuggling racket, the racket of dope peddling; in a word, the whole gigantic structure of the illicit-drug racket, with direct annual turnover of upwards of a billion dollars.

"Morphine," he argued to the deaf ears of Congress, "which the peddler sells for a dollar a grain would be supplied, of pure quality, for two or three cents a grain [1938 prices]. The peddler, unable to meet such a price, would go out of business--the illicit-narcotic-drug industry, the billion-dollar racket, would automatically cease to exist."

Then a moment or so later in his speech. Congressman Coffee asked a question few politicians in America have dared ask, a question that demands to be asked still today: "Why should persons in authority wish to keep the dope peddler in business and the illicit-drug racket in possession of its billion-dollar income? It will be obvious. I think, that this is the significant question at issue.... If we, the representatives of the people, are to continue to let our narcotics authorities conduct themselves in a manner tantamount to upholding and in effect supporting the billion-dollar drug racket, we should at least be able to explain to our constituents why we do so."

•

October 20, 1969, early evening. The door banged behind him as Robert Clemons headed toward the car outside his Quincy Street home in Brooklyn. Clemons was a 34-year-old black who was beginning to learn what life was like as a snitch, a man who has turned informer.

This day, he told his wife before leaving, was going to make it all different. This day, he said as he pulled out a large wad of cash, he was going "to work the biggest deal" of his life. This day was (continued on page 156)American Gestapo(continued from page 86) his last; the next morning, his bullet-riddled corpse lay crumpled inside a car beneath the Verrazano-Narrows bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Robert Clemons "flipped," or became an informer, after Federal narcotics agent Dennis Hart made a dope-peddling case on him. Offered the choice of informing or "going up," Clemons had apparently agreed to cooperate with Hart and began to infiltrate an organization run by two ex-Servicemen who were importing narcotics from Thailand, carrying phony military documents, travel orders, old uniforms and standard GI gear, including duffel bags packed with heroin.

Clemons' infiltration paid off. Early in February 1969, he was able to lead agent Hart to a house in the South Jamaica section of Queens where the smugglers had just landed a new shipment. Hart made his arrests, and although there has been persistent doubt whether all the drugs seized ever made it to the Federal evidence locker, the case appeared to be a credit to agent and snitch alike.

A few months later, however, the picture began to change. According to subsequent court records, Hart began to confer with one of the defendants, visiting with him in August and again early in October. By late October, the Government was ready to begin its case. But then Clemons, the star witness, was murdered. His testimony as an informer was crucial; without it, there could have been no justification for issuing search warrants against the alleged smugglers. Still, pretrial hearings went ahead. Then, on the third day of hearings, November sixth, after he had offered his own testimony. Hart was seen conferring with one of the defendants in a corridor of the Brooklyn Federal courthouse and, according to court documents, arranged a later meeting for the same day on a West Side Manhattan pier. On November eighth, the heroin-smuggling charges were dropped and replaced by a charge of failing to pay an import tax on narcotics. It is still not known if November sixth was the first date Hart met with the defendant or if he did, in fact, meet with him before Clemons' death. Police sources, however, find it hard to believe a deal could have been initiated between the agent and the defendant in the morning and a large payment made the same afternoon.

New York City police had begun a routine investigation of Clemons' murder. Initially, nothing seemed unusual about it. Clemons appeared to them to be one more of the several hundred murders that go unsolved each year. Only when they received a fingerprint report did they learn Clemons had been a Federal narcotics informant. Immediately, they contacted BNDD, and Hart, as Clemons' former controller, was assigned to assist the homicide investigation.

The police, of course, were unaware of any meetings between Hart and one of the original defendants. Initially, the possibility of any illegal activity by Hart did not occur to them. But as the investigation proceeded, they began to develop their suspicions. "[The city police and Hart] worked together for several weeks," one former New York officer has said. "And the more they got into it, the more the finger pointed to Hart as their prime suspect. Hart lived on Staten Island and there was a quantity of drugs missing from the original [Hart's] seizure. So the inference is that Hart may have been going to meet Clemons and then sell him the junk--of course, that's just a police theory of the case; maybe they were wrong. Anyway, then the cops found out Hart had a couple of extra guns and they asked [Narcotics Bureau regional director William Durkin's] office to produce the guns for ballistics tests--specifically because the gun that killed Clemons was supposed to be the same type that Hart had. The cops made the request a couple of times and to no avail. By now it was November. A month later and homicide was breathing down Hart's neck. The bureau never produced the guns. Next thing the cops knew, Hart had been transferred out of the New York bureau to another Government agency."

Robert Clemons' murder was never solved. However, several months later, Hart and his former partner, Richard Patch, were indicted for extortion. Much of the evidence for the charge grew out of the investigations made by the city homicide squad. The extortion indictment charged that Hart's November sixth rendezvous with the original drug defendants was to arrange the first third of a $60,000 payoff that resulted in a reduced drug charge. Investigators on the case point out that the key to the reduced charge was the death of Clemons, and that the defendants had no motive to murder him, since they were unaware of his role in their indictment.

The ultimate arrest of Hart and Patch was made on December 26, 1969, by BNDD agents at Goldsboro, North Carolina. The two former narcotics agents were alleged to be picking up a final $40,000 from the smugglers. The BNDD agents seized the money as evidence, but the extortion case against them was later dismissed because of a technical flaw in the prosecution.

Any agent who transfers from one Federal agency to another must be cleared by his original boss, and any pending investigations against the agent must be reported. No such reports were made on Hart when he suddenly transferred out of the narcotics bureau after the New York police asked to check his guns. An investigator in the case declared, "Everybody in that goddamned office knew Hart was under investigation. When Durkin releases Hart, giving him a clean bill, he's removing a potential problem and giving him to another Government agency." When Durkin approved the transfer, he effectively shielded Hart from any internal investigation. And he blocked the New York City police from going any further in their investigation.

The end results:

• Hart and his buddy Patch went free when a mistrial was declared.

• The smugglers took an easy rap on violation of import duties.

• Informer Robert Clemons lay dead.

• And regional bureau director William Durkin, who oversaw the whole case? He was promoted to Washington, where he eventually became assistant administrator of DEA enforcement.

In Washington, another DEA officer then tried to reopen the investigation into Clemons' death. But he received many threatening phone calls, the last advising him to prepare himself for his wife's funeral, and he stopped.

The strange, unresolved deaths of informants have become almost common in the narcotics bureau. When corruption scandals wrenched the New York office in 1968 and 1969, over 30 agents were forced to leave; only a few were indicted, but had the prosecutors checked office records, they would have found that the "disgraced officers" also maintained disgracefully high death rates for the informers they controlled.

Narcotics agents have long held a universally vicious reputation. Many modern police critics believe the narc is a special breed of cop, that narcotics squads attract men who are possessed of cold streaks of sadism. Emotionally frustrated, perhaps even sexually repressed, the argument suggests they are in search of the dirtiest game in town. Or, as in the case of a well-publicized Vermont narc, they are police failures who find prestige and gratification in the narc role. Several current and former agents, including one who held a senior position in DEA, subscribe to that theory. Asked what kind of men he looked for, former New York director Daniel P. Casey once responded: "Alley cats."

Such simple psychological explanations, however, seem inadequate. Instead of asking, "What motivates a narcotics agent to become a corrupt torturer?" it may be better to ask what alternative the narcotics agent has. As Congressman Coffee said in 1938, the entire cops-and-robbers premise underlying America's narcotics-control effort ensures that we have an underworld of organized crime. In the underworld, power and survival go to the toughest, the meanest and the most devious of men. Any cop excited by the adventure and the glamor of fighting mobsters, of infiltrating the Mob to destroy it, has got to be ready in his own mind to outshoot the fastest gun he meets. "You gotta understand, the best narcs are a lotta times the really crooked ones," one ex-agent in New York insisted. "They're the ones who know how it's done." One agent who spent only a year under cover said he had put so much energy into creating a gangster cover that at the end he no longer knew who he was when he faced the mirror each morning. Most narcs do not quit after a year but move on in search of more adventure and power--power that exists nowhere else in American law enforcement. Directing a small squad of junkies, the agent becomes his own minor godfather, given fearful respect by sick junkies and a shooting license by the Government.

Casey's alley cats make their reputations most often by scoring a narcotics buy. Usually, the buy starts from a very low dealer, maybe one step beyond the nodded-out corner junkie. From the first buy he makes a second and a third, trying to increase the amount in each case until he can either arrange a deal with some mythical Mr. Big or until he pulls his badge on the junkie and forces him to become an informant. Competition for good informants is intense and frequently deadly. Agents maintain success profiles by accumulating large numbers of cases, and, in a system based on buys, the informer is the indispensable human commodity. "We've developed in this country," one aging veteran of the streets said, "a special legal doctrine to be used in victimless crime. We've derived a way to manufacture a victim. It goes back to the speak-easies of the Twenties. There for the first time you find the buy. There for the first time you find law officers themselves empowered to be the complainant."

To attack the buy system in Federal narcdom is kind of like stealing the robes from the Virgin Mary. So fundamental is it to narcotics-enforcement mentality that for the fiscal year 1976, DEA has budgeted over $9,900,000, a figure that would give each of 2300 DEA agents a working capital of more than $4300. "These investigative tools," DEA said of the money, "are the cornerstone of our enforcement effort." But in the special economics of narcotics enforcement, a starting figure of $10,000,000 is eventually worth far, far more, since the flash money offered for large buys where an arrest is made is usually reclaimed. For example, when secret agent Kojak starts out on a new case, he might buy one gram of heroin for around $150 wholesale; he might stay at that quantity in the two next buys to build up confidence with his supplier, having then spent a total of $450. Then, for his fourth and fifth buys, he could escalate to two and four grams, pushing his contact to introduce him to a bigger dealer who would sell him an ounce at $4000. Until he made his final big purchase, he would have spent about $1300, none of it recoverable. But if he succeeds on his ounce purchase for $4000, he can, in most cases, instantly reclaim the money and use it again for new buys on new cases. The net result if he succeeds is that he has bought $5300 worth of heroin using only his original $1300. Or, in terms of simple high school economics, the multiplier effect of his buy money has quadrupled the demand for heroin. The bigger the quantities he tries to make and, hence, the more money he threatens to spend, the greater is the multiplication effect. According to one narcotics expert, the appropriate multiplier for the Federal buy budget is between four and five times, providing the Government with an effective buy budget of between $40,000,000 and $50,000,000.

"Buying creates a market and stimulates production," wrote one expert in the special White House report. "[It] is an input of money into the system and it generates a profit at all points beyond the point where enforcement action was taken." (It must be heartening to persons throughout the upper echelons and on back to the source that in 1976 DEA will stimulate the economy of narcotics with a subsidy of $10,000,000, DEA is not only their largest customer but often pays premium prices.)

The two big arguments DEA advances in favor of the buy system are that it removes narcotics from traffic and it offers the opportunity to arrest the seller. Yet the nature of the system inherently precludes arrest in all but the final transactions. As for the narcotics removed from illegal traffic, DEA claimed a whopping 286 pounds of heroin removed from the market in fiscal 1974, the latest year for which complete figures are available. But what about these figures? The same White House report states: "Their figures on 'Federal Drug Removals from the Domestic Market' are not that at all. They are simply the gross weight of substances seized. There is no mention that 90 or 95 percent of the substance is innocuous material"--in short, the milk sugar with which the drug has been diluted. In its own statistical summaries, DEA concedes that street heroin never reached ten percent purity, nor did wholesale heroin hit 33 percent purity. However, even increasing the purity to 60 percent (the quality usually found at the border), the total narcotic content of heroin seizures would come to less than 175 pounds--a rather poor showing for an accumulated buy budget of $50,000,000. The regular 1974 wholesale price of those same 175 pounds of heroin, based on DEA data, should have totaled less than $22,000,000. What did DEA agents do with the rest of their buy money? It would seem to have been spent on the still fanatical pursuit of marijuana and cocaine.

One such adventure was reported in The New York Times in February 1973 with full cooperation of the bureau's New York office. The writer in that report, Fred C. Shapiro, was invited along on the final bust of a case that had included several previous buys. The writer, calling the cocaine dealers Tom, Dick and Harry, described how the agents first picked up Tom, whose homosexual lover, Dick, sold cocaine. The narcs "persuaded" Tom to help them make a case against his lover by arranging several buys, all in the hope of getting to the wholesaler--Harry. At last the big day arrived and there were stake-outs all over, on both Tom and Dick and on the pizza parlor where they had arranged to meet a new "customer." "This is nothing," one agent told the writer. "Try spending 20 hours on the street with us some night. The houses jump up and down and the trees do a jig."

"He's hooked on something more than narcotics," one agent said of Tom. "He's on a cops-and-robbers trip. I think he's role playing."

"Well, if playing robber is his bag, we'll see how well he performs tonight when we start playing cops," another agent answered.

As soon as the buy was completed, Tom and Dick were pulled from the car, shoved against it and searched. "When it came to role playing," explained Shapiro, "Tom and Dick were relative amateurs; narcs, on the other hand, are professionals. Without an overt threat or even a brandished fist, they impressed a palpable menace upon their audience of two. Even the required recitation of the Miranda warnings--'You have the right not to answer questions'--became by the implication of its emphasis a direction to answer questions." And so the homosexual couple cooperated, leading the narcs to Harry's doorstep, where, when the door was opened slightly, they burst through, slamming the person at the door against the wall. "Harry was the source, all right," the writer said, adding a few lines later that only scales, a white powder that could have been used for diluting cocaine and some marijuana were found. "With his cocaine profits, he was throwing a pot party," the writer concluded.

In fact, Harry had apparently planned a party that evening and, as is probably true for half the parties in New York City, some people who came did bring some pot along. One, a New York City schoolteacher, had a half-smoked joint in his pocket. An agent said to him: "You stupid jerk. You're being busted and you'll probably lose your job and there isn't enough marijuana in this to buzz your ears."

•

Henry Caudill is not the real name of a dry, quick-witted Southerner who works for DEA. He and other agents are sensitive about their identities, among other reasons, because of what happened the last time a major investigative article was published about DEA, in Rolling Stone in December 1974. DEA's officers bought a dozen and a half copies, spread them out in the upstairs conference room at Washington headquarters and set about a painstaking, if crude, linguistic analysis to discover the writer's unnamed sources. By the time the bosses were finished, the article had more blue and red marks, complete with critical marginalia, than Rolling Stone's editors could have produced. If their exercise in sleuthing was designed to intimidate other agents from talking, it seems to have failed, for by the time word trickled all the way out to Caudill, he seemed more determined than ever to describe the techniques of DEA enforcement. The buy and informer systems are just part of what bothers him about the agency today.

"Sure, you've got to have a budget to buy evidence and pay informers. What you had [in the Fifties and early Sixties] is no money to pay informants. What they did, don't you see, is trade in law enforcement for information and trade off prosecution for information. But you get a point of diminishing returns with that. They put such pressure on the informant that, in effect, you've got him by the nuts. That's even what they call it, 'the nut,' working off the nut, or the violation. The pressure [on the informant] is so great he'll manufacture information, make up some to get off the hook. It's just a perfect example of how law enforcement is maintaining the problem."

Another thing about DEA enforcement techniques that bothers Caudill is what he might have called their itchy trigger fingers: "We have at least two shoot-outs every week, or at least it seemed that way last summer from reading the daily reports." The shoot-outs, he says, have picked up since the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs became DEA on July 1, 1973. "There were shoot-outs in BNDD, but not to this extent," he said.

But when agents are dealing with big dope dealers, isn't it likely that they'll run into some heavy gunplay?

"Look," he explained. "It's the way they create situations. There's no way to avoid it. They terrify [the guy they're after] into doing the only thing left to do. It's like with a cornered rat. What do you think's going to happen?

"When you have evidence of a violation, is it necessary to participate in a confrontation? Why not set up a situation you can control? If you can't work without setting up raids to get evidence, maybe you need to rethink how you're doing drug investigation."

Agents and dealers, unfortunately, are not the only people who get shot or have their lives disrupted.

• Consider the case of a U. S. Army MP killed last March at Walldorf, West Germany, by a DEA agent; an ambush-anxious agent fired away as the soldier moved out of the shadows.

• Or the case of an Edwardsville, Illinois, man, John Meiners, whose house was ransacked in the spring of 1973 by narcotics agents who drank 11 cans of his beer, stole golf clubs, a shotgun and a camera and then jailed him for three days without charges.

• Or the case of Dirk Dickenson, a 24-year-old Eureka, California, resident who was shot in the back fleeing from his house when an Army helicopter full of armed, nonuniformed men swooped down on him--along with at least five carloads of additional men. Dickenson died and the Government stood by the narcotics agent who shot him.

• Or the case of New Jersey schoolteacher Carmine Ricca, Jr.:

Shuffling down the front steps to his apartment house, Ricca was headed for his car. He was going to his mother's house to do the laundry, a Thursday-night routine. Overall, Carmine's daily routines were not unbearable. He was, he reminded himself, safely ahead of most of his New Jersey neighbors; he had a secure job and, in a deepening recession, no fear of being laid off. Schools--least of all public vocational schools--seldom cut back on teachers. Driving away, he bounced through the potholes in the street, easing up to a stop sign.

From nowhere two plain, unmarked cars abruptly cut him off. Ricca's head nearly hit the visor as his foot instantly jammed on the brake pedal. Before he could pull his head back to the side window, all but one of five drably dressed men had jumped from the two cars and were headed toward him with what seemed like an arsenal drawn. "Chump," he said, gritting his teeth silently. "The one time I have cash on me."

The street lamps shining in his eyes, Ricca could see hardly anything of the men who surrounded his car. He could tell they were yelling and banging on the car roof. Then a fleck of cold blue light caught the corner of his left eye and drew his focus up the shiny barrel of a .380 Walther PPK. Dead above the hammer hung a face whose skin seemed like a hard mold of Styrofoam. The sight on the pistol dug into the window.

Automatically, his left shoulder flinched. He jerked his body to the right. His left foot slipped from the clutch, his ears exploded and his cheek became a blood-filled light bulb. They dragged him out the door and threw him against the hood. His blood flowed down the fender crease, dripping onto the bumper.

Carmine Ricca, Jr., was not dead. He lay in the hospital for weeks. Four months passed before doctors could remove the slug from its resting spot close to the brain. Federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers admitted shortly after they shot him that they had confused him with a man 11 years older whom they had observed entering the apartment building where Ricca lived. Local Kearny, New Jersey, police officers were sickened. Had DEA bothered to consult them, the captain said, he could have prevented the shooting; he had known Ricca since he was a high school athlete ten years earlier.

At first, DEA accused Ricca of assaulting a Federal officer with "a dangerous instrumentality"--his car, which had lurched forward when his foot slipped off the clutch. Nearly two years later, no grand jury has seen fit to take action on that charge. DEA says agent James Bradley and supervisor Carlo Boccia got out of the Federal car and showed their badges. Witnesses say they saw no such display.

Ricca has never returned to Middlesex Vocational High School. Lacking tenure there, he did not win a new appointment. What parent wants a teacher around who's been "mixed up with the law"?

• Or consider the case of Scott Camil, Marine veteran of Vietnam whose political activity on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War made him a defendant in the 1973 Gainesville Eight conspiracy trial. He won acquittal then as more and more of the prosecution's evidence turned out to stem from the Watergate dirty-tricks squad at the Miami convention. To make matters worse, during all this, Florida and Federal officials stuck him with eight other raps, two for kidnaping and six for various drug charges. The kidnaping charges never made it to court, four of the drug charges were declared unconstitutional and Camil was acquitted of the last two.

On Friday, January 31, Scott answered his front door to find a buxom lady named Barbara in search of a former house resident named Randy. Scott tried to phone Randy for her, but he got no answer. Soon Barbara forgot about Randy and became much more interested in Scott. She became a regular girlfriend and began introducing him to her friends, two guys in particular, who said they were about to start a first-aid-supply shop. Scott met her friends a few more times, the last time on March 31, when he hopped into the front seat of their car to drive into downtown Gainesville on business for their new shop. The car had gone less than a dozen blocks when the friend in the back seat slung his left arm around Scott's neck and jammed a gun behind his right ear. "Move and I'll blow your head off," the man told him. Baffled, Scott tried to turn to see what was happening, found the gun jammed harder into his head. He decided to escape. As he tried to open the car door, both he and corroborative witnesses say, the man fired. The bullet hit Scott in the back, passed just under his heart, pierced his left lung and touched his kidney before it stopped just beneath the skin in his abdomen.

Scott's new friends were DEA agents, as was Barbara. DEA maintains that Scott fought the two agents after they had identified themselves, but two eyewitnesses say he was only trying to escape. When one of the witnesses, Danny Joiner, came forward at the scene to talk to Gainesville police, he says a Federal agent told him to leave. "We don't need any witnesses; we have all the witnesses we need," Joiner quoted the agent as having said. "You can come up here with as many horseshit witnesses as you want, but don't bother me with them," another DEA agent offered later. Only after he was shot and lying in the street, Scott says, did the agents show any badges. Witnesses also say they pulled out their badges once they were out of the car, an unlikely procedure if they had, in fact, displayed them while still inside.

At the time of the shooting, there was no arrest warrant out on Camil, nor had a search warrant been issued for his house. On May first, he still had not been arrested, although an indictment was issued April second charging him with two counts of "possession with intent to distribute" cocaine and two similar counts on marijuana. Since the dates on which two drug violations were alleged to have occurred were over three weeks before the shooting, both Scott and his attorney wonder why DEA had not already secured arrest warrants on him. An even stranger question for Scott is why narcotics agents in searching his house seized boxes of notes and manuscripts he had been using to write a book about his political work in Florida. And finally, Scott wonders why, as of May first, a month after the shooting, Gainesville police had been unable to find a legal registration for the weapon used by the DEA agent.

Barbara finds those questions boring. "Yeah, we set him up to bust him," she admitted before the trial. "That's our job!"

In October, DEA lost its case; Scott Camil was acquitted of the charges at his third trial in three years.

•

The 1974 report on DEA solicited by the White House speaks of civil rights problems, specifying the "My Lai syndrome." "Internal narcotics enforcement must work in the Bill of Rights area," the report reads. "Perforce it must proceed on the basis of warrants and the technique of raids. It appears that in the stress, strain and pressures of working with the dregs of society in the lower levels of the traffic, a number of agents develop a Calleylike attitude--the whole town is wrong and should be wiped out--à la Collinsville. The Federal Government must ask itself why the Federal narcotics effort consists so much of kicking doors down, attacking the protected threshold and failing to defend to its utmost the sovereign threshold which only it can protect." About the time that report was made--14 months ago--DEA was making headlines, demonstrating just such a My Lai syndrome in Aspen, Colorado.

Aspen people are notorious for wanting to go their own way and be left alone, even if some are a little pretentious in viewing themselves as guarding a Tibetan retreat. The mellowed-out pleasure seekers of Aspen seemed to gnaw at the side of DEA planners, especially in the not very busy world of the Denver DEA substation, and Operation Snowflake was born.

As Dr. Peter Bourne sees it. Snowflake was the natural culmination of a historically irrational drug policy combined with a band of overfinanced police fanatics. Dr. Bourne, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist, was until 1974 assistant director of the White House Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Protection. He believes Snowflake is an important focal point for examining DEA policy, because it was an all-out assault on an entire community undertaken without the consent of the community's authorities. And it was a drive directed at a drug that he says is not dangerous--cocaine.

DEA described Snowflake as an attack on "one of the largest cocaine distribution rings in the United States." Twenty-seven people were arrested and many of the cases are still in litigation. The arrests came after several months of undercover work by DEA agents, work so undercover that Aspen police were not advised of the program until after it was well under way. James Moore, a deputy district attorney for Aspen, is especially upset about DEA's behavior there:

"I think they have had no beneficial impact on this community in terms of controlling drug abuse or the sale and distribution of illegal drugs of whatever kind. I think it's made a lot of people paranoid who are not criminal types and who are not actually involved in any sort of illegal drug deal."

Police detective David Garms, who went to the Aspen Police Department four years ago to work under cover on narcotics, is even more upset about what DEA did to his town:

"The primary impression I get from almost every BNDD, and subsequently DEA, agent is that they have far more materials, far more money and far more manpower than their expertise dictates.

"Their investigations seem to be based on the premise that you can buy anybody, and if you offer an informer enough money and give him an easy way out, he'll do what you want him to do and he'll introduce you to somebody, anybody. Say if I walk in here and I say, 'I want to buy a pound of coke from you.' You say, 'Gosh, Dave, you know, I don't even know anybody who deals in coke.' Well, I hit you up two or three times and I walk in and open this briefcase and it's filled with $100 bills and I say, 'See if you can turn me on to a pound of coke.' You're gonna get out and hustle around, you're gonna look and see just what the possibilities are of coming up with a portion of that money. They use money for everything."

Garms was asked if DEA had made his job any easier.

"Tougher," he answered, explaining how all his contacts freeze up when the DEA men ride into town. Sometimes it has taken him months to rebuild confidence destroyed by DEA operations. "I'm not speaking just about narcotics intelligence. I'm speaking about burglary intelligence, auto-theft intelligence, ski-theft intelligence. I'm talking about every kind of undercover intelligence that comes from people who are on the street."

He was asked if any fast-spending DEA agents had been involved in entrapment cases.

"You could find yourself an atomic bomb and sell it to me if you had the time and resources," he said simply.

Aspen mayor Stacy Standley--a skimountain planner who believes there are "so many kicks in Aspen you don't need chemical kicks"--turns practically livid when he talks about DEA's forays into his town:

"I didn't even know the goddamned thing [Operation Snowflake] took place till I heard it on the news. I get goddamned uptight when people come in here and think they know what our problems are.... I'm not in favor of using drugs, but I don't feel we ought to run a vendetta against them. Snowflake destroyed a lot of credibility of the people in the police department who had developed street contacts. Our department had to start all over again rebuilding contacts, convincing them they didn't have anything to do with Snowflake."

Aspen police chief Martin Hershey will not discuss DEA tactics publicly, but it is widely known and reported--even by Mayor Standley--that he has told the Federal narcs not to come back until they are invited. Detective Garms has an even more vivid memory of two DEA inspectors who appeared to interview him after he complained that a DEA agent had stolen a gun during a drug bust. The inspectors left no doubt that they considered Garms a troublemaker and then issued a thinly veiled threat if their questions weren't answered in an acceptable manner. "The impression I got was that they had the means, the facilities and the people to follow me from now on--the rest of my life," Garms says of the interview.

"By all appearances, it seems that over a six-month period, using many thousands of taxpayers' dollars, DEA may have magnified cocaine traffic in Aspen, inducing some trusting and gullible individuals who had not previously been involved in anything but the private use of cocaine to participate in the sale of the drug," wrote Peter Bourne of the ordeal. Bourne also discovered that DEA had spent some $80,000 in buy money alone in Aspen, paying as much as $300 or $400 over the regular per-ounce price of cocaine. Moreover, as Bourne and numerous other doctors have pointed out, cocaine is not physically addicting; it is, he wrote, "probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use."

Such subtleties are, of course, irrelevant to DEA. Even marijuana, whose use in many states draws only a citation, can whip these Federal gunmen into a rage. DEA agents operating out of San Diego last April swooped down in a helicopter and opened fire on a cabin cruiser off the Mexican coast, killing one of the passengers. U. S. Customs officials had been following the craft; later, a large quantity of marijuana was discovered on board. But at the time of the shooting, Customs had not requested DEA fire, there was no warrant for anyone aboard the boat, since their identities were unknown, and there was no fire coming from the boat.

•

California Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark has held hearings to demand U. S. State Department investigations of complaints from more than 300 Americans held in Mexico, many of whom claim they were interrogated and beaten in the presence of American agents. No one else's story has equaled Mark Sorelli's. however.

To protect his life and many other people still in Mexico, Mark would not allow his real name to be used in this article. Whether he is guilty or innocent of selling marijuana is not the point of his story. He swears he has never dealt in drugs and that, in fact, American and Mexican agents tortured him only to extract statements about his friends in the Mexican mountains, where both marijuana and opium poppies are grown. Even locating the town where he was held could imperil some of those friends, he says. If he can clear his name, he expects to return to Mexico.

Mark's story begins in a pale-colored Winnebago camper about dusk one day in the summer of 1974. He and several others had been arrested by Mexican police in a mountain village and were being driven over back-country roads to a larger town, where they would be interrogated. As the camper pulled in past the elegant wrought-iron gates of a large, comfortable suburban house, Mark spotted a handful of U. S. agents waiting there. The house included quarters for several servants and the bedrooms had been transformed into offices for the Mexican soldiers who would stand guard over him and his friends. Both the U. S. and the Mexican secret police stayed in a deluxe hotel not far away, returning each morning to begin their work. The first evening, as Mark and his friends were pulled from the camper, they were marched over to a large pile of marijuana and photographed. Then Mark was separated from the others and taken into a private room.

"They had me lying on the floor at this time," he says, and the American agents were in full command, taking names, identification, wallets, everything. It was just getting dark and the Americans made a point of saying they were going "out to lunch." They returned about 11 P.M.

"I had to lay flat on my back and I couldn't talk or raise my legs," Mark says. He is a big man, tough, well into his 30s. More than once as he spoke, he paused, to stop from breaking down as he recreated the tiny details of his ordeal. "Then they proceeded with the torture.

"About six were American and then four Mexicans came in. They asked me to undress and they took all my clothes away. They put a plastic poncho liner underneath me. I had to stand on top of it.

"Two of them held me and they started out simply by slapping and intimidating me. They asked me a lot of questions I had no answer for, and I told them so. Then they proceeded to get rougher.

"They made me stand on tiptoes, bent at the knees, leaning way back. One little Mexican guy started working on my solar plexus while a guy in back, every time I would bend down, would ram a rifle butt in my back.

"The Americans were simply asking the questions at this time. They thought I was some kind of a kingpin and they wanted answers to all sorts of absurd questions. So after they got enough sweat on the plastic liner on the floor, they laid me down on it. Sweat--literally a gallon of it. This is a two-hour duration and it gets pretty painful after a while. The Americans joined in.

"I can remember a specific American agent kicking me in the balls. Very specifically. When I told him that what he was doing was crazy, he walked straight up while I was in this weird position with the two guys holding my arms and kicked me right in the balls, straight on. By this time, I could hear the guy in the other room screaming bloody murder. I mean, he was just screaming at the top of his lungs. And they said that this is what's going to happen to me. They said they wanted me to give a full confession and they told me all the things they knew I'd done, which was preposterous. I told them they were mistaken and that I was not signing anything.

"They laid me down on the sweaty plastic and plugged this thing into the wall and stood on my hair--I had long hair.

"Ten of them held me by my legs, arms and both sides of my hair and held a rag over my mouth. Then they took the wires....

"The Americans were the honchos that were given some strange reverence. The Mexicans were nothing but nitpick thieves. They asked me if I knew what it was and they made it spark. I could see [the wires] between my legs. The wire went right straight down the middle of my legs and was plugged into the wall. It was far enough to reach probably my belly button but no farther.

" 'See the thing spark,' they said. 'You're lying in water and you know what happens.' They touched me with it on my leg and it shocked--right above my knee, just to show me that it was alive and well. It wasn't enough to knock me out, but it was enough to put your body in rigors. Then they started asking me questions like, 'Are you going to talk?'

"Well, they kept that up until I wasn't even there anymore--I mean, you can only go so long. You can't take it; it gets you sick. That whole period there lasted about three hours with all the beating involved.

"The worst was yet to come. I mean, the electricity you can live through. You don't think you can live through it, but when they take it away, your body is just so pleased that you can live through it and are willing to tell them anything. They put the shock to my balls and held it there until I convulsed and just couldn't do anything anymore. You get to the point where you can hardly even talk.

"Then they said I'd better think about it for a while. They walked off and left me there and I couldn't even move. I was just lying there on the floor. I didn't need a guard, I couldn't have gotten up if I had to."

The American agents had left him while his friend in the next room still screamed. By then, it was three A.M.

"Then they came in with a real wing-ding. They said the other guy had confessed. I told them I didn't know what he could have confessed--he can confess about himself, but he can't confess about me, because I haven't done a goddamned thing. So then they said, 'OK, partner, you asked for it.'

"They got this duct tape. Then they held my head and taped my mouth shut. I saw what they were going to do and it was something I'd always been afraid of--drowning. They held my head back. One guy had my hair and another guy forced my head back and kept his hand over the tape so I couldn't breathe and they poured water and soda pop down my nose. They were all trying to hold me, because I was fighting like hell. They poured that down my nose and I'll tell you, that is the one that got me. They do that until you can't struggle anymore. You're dying. You're drowning. You're trying to cough and you can't.

"They poured that down my nose and they fucked with me for about three bottles' worth but only got about one bottle's worth down. I was struggling and then I was unconscious."

Mark was held nine more days. As the days bore on, the Americans took a greater hand in his torture, shucking their interrogator roles to physically take control of the electrodes and the cattle prods themselves.

DEA administrators deny that their agents have ever used torture or any other illegal tactics in their raids. Yet a four-month series of diplomatic cables--some of them signed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--leaves no doubts about DEA's behavior abroad. At a meeting of DEA regional directors in Mexico City in the fall of 1974, agents were specifically directed not to mention tortures and interrogations in their teletype messages, because cable security could not be guaranteed. By early January 1975, a handful of American Ambassadors were complaining directly to Washington about DEA's Gestapo operations. And by January 21, Henry Kissinger had sent a long cable to 80 foreign missions declaring in the firmest diplomatic language that DEA agents were not to participate in any further narcotics raids and interrogations without specific ambassadorial approval. Like the CIA, DEA agents were a virtual free force abroad, attaching themselves to foreign police units as clandestine squads of sharpshooters and advisors who would disappear instantly and anonymously as soon as an operation was complete.

A DEA-directed operation in Colombia took that country's customs officials against their own military orders up into the mountains aboard an airplane that was later caught in an hourlong cross fire from Colombian secret police. The American Ambassador to Colombia reported in a cable addressed to Kissinger and to DEA that the incident had raised Colombian "hackles up to the presidential level." He added that "to operate in the same manner as before ... would place in jeopardy" the entire DEA program in Colombia. So extreme had the situation become in Mexico that the American Ambassador there had to issue a "guidelines" cable in April 1975 ordering DEA agents not to become any further involved in kidnaping "violators" to the United States. Earlier, in February, the American Ambassador met Mexico's attorney general for breakfast to discuss a DEA request for 31 more agents in Mexico. After brief chitchat in which the attorney general said CIA operations seemed to be his biggest preoccupation, he told the U. S. diplomat he "was not at ease with what he interpreted as a 'watchdog' role for DEA agents," according to a cable report of the meeting. Confirming what DEA denies, the Mexican attorney general "brought up the matter of DEA agents operating in high mountains and at forward bases," complaining to the Ambassador that this was a "misallocation of U. S. resources." "He said their presence was too obvious in the mountains and could cause political trouble."

•

"This is dirty, scummy work," declared Myles J. Ambrose, the man first designated to head DEA in 1973. "You see these vermin selling drugs and what they do to people and our cities and you get sickened and angry and perhaps you take your hostilities and frustration out on some guy's bookcase. It's not right. But how are you going to prevent it?" Shortly after his statement. Ambrose left the Government, knocked from power by the revelation of his pleasure trip to the spread of a Texas rancher under indictment for narcotics and gun smuggling.

"You've got to remember what kind of people these are," New York attorney Ivan Fisher insisted. "You're looking for corruption; sure, you can find it. They had to clean out a third of the office between 1966 and 1968. I represent a lot of people who know everything there is to know about narcotics; they'll tell you how narcotics agents were bought. But that's not the real corruption, at least here inside the United States. The really important corruption--the corruption that profoundly threatens our society--is an almost classically protofascist corruption. It's a corruption of the law and of the very idea of justice, the perversion of ends and means. I've seen a lot of these agents in action, and let me tell you, the only difference between them and the crooks they chase is, in many instances, who wears the badge."

There is evidence that DEA's executives prefer not to pursue Mafia drug traffickers. It comes from a DEA agent whose name cannot be used: A team of intelligence specialists working at DEA headquarters in the winter of 1974 discovered a surprising report that showed Chicago-office telephone toll calls from a small Chicago grocer and convicted heroin dealer to a San Diego warehouse operator who has been known for many years as a fence. The San Diego operator had appeared on the periphery of several organized-crime investigations, but he had so far escaped indictment. He had even told one undercover agent that the warehouse business was a scam for his real business as a fence for stolen goods going south--cars, jewelry, TVs, liquor--and his drug business going north. After months of carefully compiling old and new police reports from a half-dozen cities, the intelligence agents were nearly ready to go to a grand jury asking indictments on "a major narcotics operation between New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego and Tijuana involving some very prominent criminals." Included was a Las Vegas associate of Joseph Colombo.

By April 1974, the intelligence team had prepared elaborate flip charts describing the narcotics operation and its principals. The charts were to be used as a presentation for the regular monthly meeting of top DEA management. The intelligence team was "up," confident over the work already done and eager to proceed with the last remaining bits of the investigation. They completed their presentation in DEA's conference room and sat down, anxious for what they were sure would be supportive suggestions from the brass--and maybe even a commendation.

Instead, before he had completely gotten to his feet, the agent in charge barked out a sharp dozen words or so and ordered the project dropped. "He informed us that he didn't want us wasting our time on organized-crime probes, that the real problem was the Mexicans and we were to drop this. We were to work with Mexican violators and their extensions abroad. Can you believe it? Fucking wetbacks!" one agent who received a report of the meeting said.

Certain that the agent in charge had misunderstood their presentation and its importance, one of the intelligence specialists started to explain the charts anew.

"Drop it!" the senior agent yelled at him. "Forget it! I don't want any more time spent on this. Work the Mexicans!"

So ended the second major DEA investigation in 18 months on interstate Mafia narcotics traffic. The members of the intelligence team retreated to their offices and prepared a final written report to the intelligence chief. As one agent said, "It never left intelligence. It was just buried."

•

An organization with such a proven record of disrespect for human rights at least ought to produce results. With the guns, extra CIA specialists assigned to it in 1973--1974 and a $10,000,000 buy budget, DEA could fairly be expected to haul in tons and tons of mind-corroding heroin. Ironically, the opposite has been true. To understand what has happened requires a brief look at DEA's ancestors:

Originally, the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics worked under the Secretary of the Treasury. Then, in the aftermath of the 1968 New York scandals, Attorney General Ramsey Clark helped transfer the bureau to Justice, where it became the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, encompassing responsibility for nonnarcotic pharmaceuticals previously handled by HEW. A new man, John Ingersoll, was hired to run BNDD, but the real power remained with the bureau's old-timers. Nonetheless, Ingersoll's operation, joined in highly competitive cooperation with the U. S. Customs Service, deserved real credit for moving boldly against the major international traffickers in heroin. Whether the primary responsibility belonged to Customs or to Ingersoll's men was a point of hot contention. Probably the fairest division of credit would show Customs developing most of the intelligence for individual cases along with some foreign governments and BNDD picking up the final, critical stages, including arrest. In any case, the results of both agencies' work were extraordinary, described by every knowledgeable specialist as the most effective years in the nation's half century of narcotics enforcement. Seizures of heroin and other so-called hard drugs skyrocketed, as did apprehension by BNDD of major traffickers.

Total seizures at the end of 1968 and 1969 were under 200 pounds. By December 31, 1970, the figure had jumped, with foreign cooperation, to nearly 600 pounds. But 1971 brought the dramatic leap, when total drug seizures hit the unprecedented total of 1600 pounds. And in 1972, the peak ran even higher, topping out at 2700 pounds seized. But in 1973, the Federal seizure record plummeted even more dramatically than it had risen in the three years before. Seizures in 1973 dropped by two thirds from 1972, down to some 900 pounds, and in the following year they fell even further, below 600 pounds.

What happened between December 31, 1972, and December 31, 1973? DEA was formed. Right at the peak of the most effective era ever in narcotics-law enforcement, the Nixon Administration ordered a thorough reorganization. BNDD director Ingersoll finally resigned on June 29, 1973, charging the White House with intervention in his agency.

The reorganization did two things. It first merged the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE)--created in early 1972 officially as part of Nixon's war on junkies but more likely as an intermediate organization from which the final consolidation could be effected--with BNDD. Second, it stripped Customs of all of its intelligence and investigative officers and transferred them to DEA. Not only did that latter move emasculate Customs of any drug-enforcement capability but it also gave the White House its own carefully groomed outfit within the rapidly mushrooming police superstructure at the Justice Department. And it did so at a time when the other domestic police force, the FBI, was considered unreliable if not hostile to the White House. Yet more important than anything else, the White House nearly got rights to an absolute secret police; for in the transfer from Customs, it asked that all DEA agents be given Customs' sole right of warrantless search and seizure. The Customs Service is the single police authority authorized by the Constitution to undertake search-and-seizure operations without prior court approval: it was given that authority by virtue of its job as protector of the border. What Nixon wanted was to give all 2300 DEA agents, operating anywhere in America, that unconstitutional authority--the right to smash through doors and confiscate private property. Nixon and DEA did not succeed in their total request, due to Congressional opposition and resistance from the Customs Service: yet they did win such "cross designation" authorization for more than 300 DEA agents stationed along the border.

(A little-noted footnote to the whole fight over DEA formation is the embarrassing likelihood that the whole shop is illegal, formed in blatant disregard of Federal statutes governing executive reorganization, opening the so-far-untested legal possibility that narcotics violators could win acquittal on the grounds that they were arrested by illegally chartered police.)

Few of DEA's sharpest critics want to consider the implications of why the Federal narcotics reorganization came at a time that (1) undermined a record of unparalleled success and (2) coincided with a massive underworld scheme to reorganize domestic heroin traffic. Some agents within DEA advise that the chances for health and a long life are better if you don't ask those questions. But nearly all the honest men and women who work for DEA do so under the growing weight of cynicism. Last winter, an anonymous Xerographer slipped up to an unwatched machine and produced a couple of score of the following quotation. Within hours, all the copies were taken, tacked up on personal bulletin boards:

We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized.... I was to learn in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.

--Petronius Arbiter

Why is it always this way? Why is any effective system always the victim of what can only be described as high-level bureaucratic sabotage? A few weeks later, another Xeroxed message was left on the machine, a single pencil mark drawn on it highlighting a statement by former Chief Justice Earl Warren. It read:

The narcotics traffic of today, which is destroying the equilibrium of our society, could never be as pervasive and open as it is unless there was connivance between authorities and criminals.