Family Affairs

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 29, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

U.S. lawmen say billionaire power broker Carlos Hank Gonzalez and sons protect narcotraffickers. A secret probe is under way, but details have leaked.

They've dubbed the federal operation "White Tiger" -- a tart reference to the nonchalant attempt by one of the targets to smuggle into Mexico through Southern California a rare Siberian cub seven years ago. But trafficking in exotic animals isn't the focus of the audacious Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, probe. Its goal, indeed, is to catch "big cats" but of the human narcosmuggling, money-laundering variety.

San Diego-based agents drawn from several federal agencies believed their operation was shrouded in secrecy. And well it should have been, as Operation White Tiger is a hugely ambitious effort to expose the key relationship underpinning Mexico's narcotrafficking -- the association between drug barons, such as Tijuana's Arellano Felix brothers and the Juarez-based Vicente Carillo Fuentes and Rafael Munoz Talavera, and top Mexican politicians. Particular targets are some stalwarts of Mexico's long-standing governing party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which some federal lawmen long have regarded as a shadowy cartel behind the cartels.

Fearful that sharing any information with Mexican authorities automatically would result in the subjects of the probe being forewarned and, therefore, forearmed, federal agents from the DEA, the U.S. Customs Service, the FBI and the IRS have done their best to keep the thrust and principal targets of the investigation secret from their leaky counterparts south of the Rio Grande. But when it comes to the Southwest border -- or any major probe of Mexican politicos suspected of being the padrinos, or patrons, of the country's drug kingpins who are responsible for 70 percent of the cocaine sold on U.S. streets and 18 percent of heroin buys -- little can be kept under wraps for long.

And so it is with White Tiger -- the targets being too illustrious, too significant, for leaks not to occur. A comparison? "It would be like the Mexicans having tried to indict LBJ or Nelson Rockefeller, or both at the same time, and keeping it from us" says a DEA agent.

When the stealthy operation was launched in late 1997 security was tight, but recently senior law-enforcement circles in Mexico City have been abuzz with talk that the United States proactively is investigating one of Mexico's most prominent political leaders, who also happens to be one of the country's richest men -- the elegantly dressed, charismatic 72-year-old Carlos Hank Gonzalez. With his two sons, Carlos Hank Rhon, 51, and Jorge Hank Rhon, 46, the lanky billionaire politician presides over a complex and diverse commercial empire that boasts vast holdings in Mexico and overseas as well as in the United States in the fields of telecommunications, brokerage, transport, manufacturing, construction, energy and gaming. Federal investigators insist these holdings serve drug-smuggling operations and launder millions of narcodollars.

For the last two decades Hank has enjoyed almost unparalleled political influence in Mexico. Denied the presidency himself -- his father was a German emigre and the country's constitution requires both parents of a presidential candidate to be Mexican-born -- Hank has been the compadre to successive Mexican heads of state, stretching back to Jose Lopez Portillo in the 1970s.

In the turbulent wake of the 1994 assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Colosio, Hank was the power broker behind the selection of Ernesto Zedillo as the country's current president -- even signing his electoral nomination papers. Hank also was considered by many to be the eminence grise of the 1990-94 Carlos Salinas presidency and well could be the crucial figure in determining who succeeds Zedillo in the year 2000 -- especially if the run-up to the PRI's pick is messy, enhancing the strength of the billionaire politician and his so-called reform-opposed, dinosaur faction in the party.

Over the years Hank has been mayor of both Toluca and Mexico City, governor of Mexico state and secretary of tourism as well as agriculture. But his formal posts don't even begin to reflect the spidery influence Hank exerts in the web of Mexican politics. Described by former Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid as the "master of gratitudes" Hank is the Cardinal Richelieu of his generation, an Armani-suited political godfather armed with an easy smile and a ready handshake and steeped in the ways of developing and keeping power through the art of dispensing favors. Other entrepreneurs who have dealt with him say generosity is his trademark -- "If it rains in my land, I will make sure some of the water also makes your land wet" he likes to declare in his deep baritone.

"He has loyalists all over -- in the bureaucracy, in the PRI -- the gratitude he generates is amazing," says Adolfo Aguilar Zinzer, an opposition politician who headed an inconclusive Mexican corruption probe into Hank. "He moves like a fish in water without leaving a sign of his presence."