DEA drives off the old guard

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 17, 1998 | by Jamie Dettmer

Changing times brought on by Janet Reno have forced many of The agency's most experienced, toughest agents into early retirement. Their departure may be great news for drug cartels.

They call themselves the "Jurassic narcs" -- a fitting description for such an endangered species. Most of them came to law enforcement after service in Vietnam, where they'd witnessed not only the stunning defeat inflicted on the United States but had watched helplessly as heroin, LSD and marijuana attacked the moral fiber of the military. The images fixed in their memories of comrades transformed into drug zombies and friends dead from overdoses prompted hundreds of veterans to enlist in the war on drugs, to join Lyndon Johnson's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and later Richard Nixon's replacement superagency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.

"We had a mission and we were out to fulfill it" remarks a 20-year DEA veteran. "Sure it beat the tedium of an ordinary 9-to-5 job. There was, I suppose, a selfishness about what we were doing--wives, families, suffered. But we were serious about it, really committed."

For those who had seen service in Indochina, such as Celerino Castillo, fighting drug dealers and traffickers amounted to a cause. Writing in his memoir Powderburns, after he left the DEA in 1990, the Texas native and son of a World War II veteran recalled having learned to "hate the OJs (marijuana joints soaked in opium) and needles as much as I hated the enemy." The Viet Cong didn't kill the first GI he watched die, he says; heroin did. "His death scene gave me a purpose. If ever I left Vietnam, I would put all my energy into fighting America's drug habit" Castillo wrote.

Two, three decades later, the Jurassic narcs -- Vietnam vets and their contemporaries in the DEA who adopted a no-nonsense, crusading style to drug-busting -- are a dwindling band. For some, ill health and death have intervened. Others were exhausted by the fight and grabbed pensions early. But in the last five years the march of time has been given a sharp shove by DEA chief Tom Constantine -- who with little fanfare or notice from Congress or the media has been presiding over a shake-out and a changing of the guard at America's leading agency in the war on drugs. Or so say internal agency critics -- people who use the word purge.

Constantine, who was plucked in 1993 from his post as superintendent of the New York State Police by Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh to head the DEA, has engineered a revolution by stealth. Veteran agents charge that through harassment, administrative leaves, constant transfers and a hair-trigger readiness to believe the worst of any of his older agents, unleashing prolonged internal-affairs probes against them, Constantine has forced out many of the remaining Jurassic narcs. Those encouraged to leave include some of the DEA's most successful and experienced agents -- people whose names might appear on a roll call of honor or an index to a chronicle of the agency's most significant busts.

Among the casualties whose careers read like movie scripts: Ed Heath, the former DEA attache in Mexico who moved heaven and earth to identify those behind the 1985 Guadalajara murder of agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena; Phil Jordan, a former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center; Don Ferrarone, the Houston special agent in charge, or SAC, who at the time of his forced departure last year from the DEA was hot on the trail of drug linked Mexican politicians; Hector Berrellez, a bulldog of a man who kidnapped a Mexican doctor suspected of involvement in the Camarena murder; Billy Mockler, who in the 1980s in Colombia slipped a transmitter into a batch of precursor chemicals, tracked it, and busted a vast Medellin-cartel jungle cocaine lab; and the legendary Frank White, who when asked during a trial why he'd shot a notorious Florida drug-dealer nine times, responded: "Nine? Because I ran out of bullets."

And that's just scratching the surface. A top list also would include Ken Cloud, Tommy Burn, John O'Neil, Glen Cooper and Frank Rodriguez, the DEA attache in Mexico City last year who was made the scapegoat, sources say, for a Washington intelligence snafu that embarrassed U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey. "We've lost the best," laments a veteran U.S. lawman. "The DEA ain't ever going to be the same."

That would seem to be Constantine's aim. All the current SACs except for one are Constantine appointees. To hasten a generational change, there's been fast-track promotion of younger agents. Most first-line supervisors now have less than eight years of DEA experience, compared with an average 15 to 20 years' experience for supervisors a decade ago.

No one has written an elegy for the Jurassic narcs. Their passing, though, deserves one -- they were the DEA equivalent of the FBI's famous Eliot Ness generation, the Untouchables. And any obituary for them should raise questions about the effectiveness of the culture that's replacing them. It also should prompt the query: Why has Constantine been so eager to rip out the agency's past? According to the old guard, the Jurassic narcs just don't fit the Constantine DEA where, they say, individual initiative is now frowned upon. The agency's traditional rebellious streak has been scrubbed. "Bureaucracy rules the roost," remarks one of the vets. Others lament the loss of a can-do energy, of a sense of a crusade that was exhibited to the nth degree by the Jurassic narcs. "Them used to be an old law-enforcement saying about the DEA and FBI," remarks a drug warrior who left the agency two years ago because he says he had fought his war and needed rest. "The FBI is an outstanding institution with mediocre people; the DEA is a mediocre institution with outstanding people. It is the outstanding who're leaving and only time will tell whether the new bunch will compare"