Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  “Hey, Ray,” Gagne said.

  The dealer strutted in, all wiry limbs and crazy smile, walked straight up to Gagne, and pulled a loaded gun from his waistband.

  “What's up?” Solomon sneered as he pointed the weapon at Gagne's head.

  Every nerve in Gagne's body tensed as he trained his focus on the black steel barrel of the .25 three inches from his face. Tommy went pale.

  Gagne could feel the butt of his own gun, a point-and-shoot Glock, against the small of his back. He calculated the time it would take to get his hands on his weapon, three layers deep, past his checkered field coat, sweatshirt, and sweatpants.

  I'm just not getting to it, he thought. There's no way. He struggled to suppress the paralyzing tunnel vision that made the barrel of Solomon's gun seem to get bigger, closer.

  Easy … stay calm, he told himself. He's testing me. Keep the cover. Keep talking.

  Gagne leaned forward, looked Solomon in the eye, and smiled. “Hey, what the fuck you got there?” Gagne reached for the gun. There was an awkward pause: Gagne's hand in midair, Solomon's eyes fixed on his.

  Keep talking.

  “That's a beauty,” Gagne said.

  Solomon was listening now. He glanced at the piece, admiring its cold form, then looked back into Gagne's eyes like a stray dog looking for signs of weakness.

  “Is that a twenty-five?” Gagne put his fingers around the barrel.

  “Yeah,” Solomon said. “I just got it.”

  Solomon loosened his grip and Gagne casually took the gun from the dealer's hands.

  “No kidding?” He willed his fingers steady as the instrument traded hands. Any visible tremors would clue Solomon that he'd been bluffed.

  “Yeah, this is nice.” Gagne gauged the weapon's weight. “I'll give you three hundred bucks for it.”

  “Get outta here!”

  “No, really! I'll give you three for it right now.”

  “Nah, I'm not selling it,” Solomon said, betraying a shy, goofy smile as he accepted the gun back from Gagne and stuffed it down his waistband.

  “No?” Gagne went to the kitchen to grab a beer out of the refrigerator for Solomon. “Change your mind”—he pulled out his wallet—”I got your money right here.” There was $10 in that wallet.

  Tommy was wan and mute from watching the near-disaster unfold in his living room. Gagne figured he had probably been racking his brain, trying to come up with an explanation he could give his drug-dealing buddies about how a dead DEA agent came to be found in his apartment.

  2 BOB, MATT, AND JAY

  THERE'S AN OLD SAYING around DEA: “Our best undercovers could talk a starving dog off a meat wagon.”

  Special Agent Robert Gagne was one of the best. He knew that if a target was listening to him, he couldn't act at the same time—he couldn't pull a trigger. It was talk or perish. Agent Gagne had had a lot of practice talking his way in and out of trouble. He grew up in working-class Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the second eldest child in a competitive brood of three boys and two girls.

  Skilled undercover agents seem to fade into the scenery when sur-veilling a target. As a child, Bobby believed he had powers of invisibility. He would climb to the highest tree branch and watch the babysitter frantically search him out. He would tuck himself low on the floorboards of the green-upholstered backseat of “Old Betsy,” his father's Chevy, and quietly stare at the back of his father's neck as he drove to work. Young Bobby wanted to be closer to his French Canadian father, René, to know what kind of man he was in the moments he believed he was alone. Problem was, Bobby didn't like what he saw. René had a part-time job pumping gas and a full-time job selling meat for Tarpy's Beef. When he wasn't at work, René was coaching his children in sports, hiding out at his girlfriend's place, or warming a seat at the bar and coaxing one more beer down his throat.

  Gagne left his childhood hiding games for a life of hiding behind undercover personas and watching the “bad guys.”

  Agents and dealers share a common language. When a DEA agent says, “We had five bad guys up on a wire, scheduling loads, and then they all dropped their phones,” the five suspects whose phone lines DEA was tapping literally chucked their Motorolas. When a drug dealer is arrested, his partners will say he's “sick” or he “got his legs broken.” Sometimes he gets his legs broken by “our friends at the three letters.” And when our friends at the three letters (DEA) talk in shorthand about arrests, it's all about taking down the bad guys while making sure that no good guys—agents and civilians—get hurt in the process.

  Gagne saw his job in simple terms: arrest the bad guys. But sometimes, like in Ray Solomon's case, someone else gets there first. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents arrested Solomon a few weeks later on gun charges. (The crooked longshoreman was also later nabbed and pleaded guilty to weapons charges.) Gagne decided to pay Solomon a visit in his holding cell.

  “I knew it!” Solomon said, shaking his head at Gagne's shiny badge.

  “Ray, if you knew,” Gagne replied, “you woulda shot me that day.”

  “You got me!” Solomon said, laughing. “You son of a bitch, you got me.”

  “The guys are gonna go get McDonald's, Ray. What do you want?”

  Gagne felt like he owed Solomon a parting meal. He knew the dealer already had two prior felony convictions, which made him a three-time loser, facing a mandatory life sentence. Gagne had empathy for a lot of his targets.

  Agents and the men they chase often have the same start in life. They are creative problem solvers, natural leaders with street smarts and an ability to anticipate their adversary's next ten moves. Somewhere along the way, guys like Gagne choose the law, and guys like Solomon choose crime. Gagne understood that there is a fine line between them, and he believed deeply in sticking to his side of the line.

  Still, he knew his risk-taking nature irked his bosses. If Solomon had shot him that day in Brooklyn, Gagne would have preferred death to injury, because if he'd been shot and survived, his integrity would forever be in question. Even if DEA had let him keep his job, he'd be reassigned to special agent in charge of handing out batteries.

  “Are you fucking cartooning me?” Germanowski had said when he learned about his partner's off-the-books meeting with Solomon. “Gags, you could have been killed—or worse, fired. That's really fucked up.”

  Gagne was always pushing the boundaries and pushing his luck. It irritated his partners. But it was what made him such a standout member of DEA New York's Group D-35.

  DEA agents are typically assigned to groups based on their knowledge of a specific drug, their language capabilities, or their interest in a particular trafficking organization. Division 35 emerged in the early 1990s out of a thirty-four-agent-strong group known as D-31, which focused on money-laundering cases. The agents of D-31 slowly self-segregated into “inside” and “outside” teams. Inside agents wrote subpoenas and studied bank records and intelligence—the kind of work that gave them nine-to-five security and a clean shot at getting home in time to be with their families. The outside agents were a small corps of meat eaters—men who wanted to be on the streets, doing surveillance, putting their hands on people. They weren't afraid to get dirty, stay out late, work weekends.

  When the front office decided D-31 was too large, they pulled a half-dozen meat eaters out of D-31 and formed Group D-35—an elite team of aggressive case makers. Special agents Matthew Germanowski and Jay Flaherty were Gagne's closest colleagues in D-35.

  Jay Flaherty, twenty-eight, had wispy dark hair, gentle eyes, and an accounting background. He began his law enforcement career in 1988 as a special agent with the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. A year later the IRS rookie was assigned to work money-laundering cases with DEA agents. Flaherty liked the camaraderie and the field-work at DEA. He switched gears, entered DEA Academy at Quan-tico, and soon was chasing drug dealers alongside Gagne and Germanowski.

  Matt Germanowski was twenty-six, tall, and barrel-chested, with biceps like bocce
balls. He had an easy charm and a warm voice; he was the kind of guy who likes his beer from the bottle but always offers others a glass. Gagne called him “G.”

  Germanowski grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Polish steel mill workers. A college baseball scholarship was his ticket out of a dreary life in the mills, and he even had a couple of tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds. But when a shoulder injury sidelined his sports-star dreams, he took an internship with the Pittsburgh police department and played on the police softball team for kicks. The drug agents on an opposing team convinced Germanowski to fill out an application for DEA, but he didn't give it much thought—he was determined to become a Pennsylvania state trooper. In early 1992, about a week before Germanowski was to report to duty as a state trooper, DEA called—his application was approved. He was torn, so he turned to his trooper friends for advice. For the next five years you'll work the highways, they told him. You'll give moving-violation tickets, and with any luck, you'll work your way into a criminal investigator position.

  Germanowski knew that with DEA, he'd start as a federal investigator right out of the gate, with opportunities to travel to country offices around the world. In most federal law enforcement agencies, such as CIA or FBI, the positions are task-specific. But in DEA, agents are expected to take part in every aspect of a case: surveillance, undercover, intelligence, wiretaps, tactical operations, chemical analysis, trial testimony. Germanowski chose DEA.

  Gagne was a handsome twenty-nine-year-old with hazel eyes, dark curly hair, and a faint scar that curled up the left side of his lip like a trigger—a painful reminder of his father. Like his partners, Gagne had gravitated toward law enforcement growing up, but he scoffed at the small-town cop beat. He wanted out of Pawtucket. He joined the Army National Guard at nineteen, and by twenty-two he was commissioned a second lieutenant, Military Intelligence, specializing in cryptologic tactical operations—conducting electronic warfare, intercepting transmissions, decoding conversations.

  When Gagne wasn't training he was studying. He attended Southeastern Massachusetts University, dropped out because he felt the program was too liberal, and considered becoming a fireman. He took one EMT class at Rhode Island Community College and stayed on to earn his associate's degree in business administration with a concentration in law enforcement. At twenty-three, he enrolled at Northeastern University and majored in criminal justice.

  When he wasn't training or studying, Gagne was working—sometimes holding two or three jobs at once. He taught martial arts, waited tables, caddied at a country club, and drove an ambulance. One spring, he invested in a meat truck with a friend and sold cheesesteaks on Friday and Saturday nights to the tipplers who stumbled out of Providence nightclubs. He would study in the ambulance when it was slow, hop the train to Boston to school, study more on the train, come home in time for dinner, and then work the meat truck until 3:00 a.m.

  But selling meat like his dad was just a sideline. What Gagne dreamed of most was jumping out of planes, flying helicopters, and chasing the sound of bullets. He considered a path toward Special Forces, but that would mean more living in the woods, role-playing against a Cold War enemy, and another twenty years of hanging out with soldiers. His father hated the military, and as much as it would have pleased Gagne to pick a path that disappointed René, he didn't see himself as a soldier either, another cog in the wheel. He wanted to set himself apart.

  Gagne earned his bachelor's degree from Northeastern just a few months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday and went straight into DEA Academy. He was assigned to DEA's New York Field Division upon graduation. Two years later he volunteered for a tour of duty in Honduras. By the following year, at twenty-eight, Gagne was on the front lines of the cocaine wars.

  3 JULY 1994: PERU

  OPERATION SNOWCAP, developed in 1987 by DEA and the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, was based on the first Bush administration's “Andean Strategy,” a plan that provided Andean governments with counterdrug assistance by increasing military, law enforcement, and economic aid. Snowcap operations were established in twelve countries, with a heavy focus on Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, where coca processing prevailed.

  While DEA's main goal in Snowcap was to dismantle and disrupt cocaine trafficking operations, because drugs and terrorism are so intricately linked, the United States’ counterdrug assistance often extended into counterinsurgency assistance. Peru, for instance, was reeling from the terrorist bloodlust of the notorious Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, known for hacking victims limb from limb with machetes. Shining Path's main rival was the Cuban-inspired Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Both insurgency groups sought to topple the Peruvian government and install Communist regimes. To fund their terrorist aims, they taxed cocaine traffickers and also provided security in exchange for weapons and money.

  Snowcap was a coveted foreign operation, considered one of the most dangerous and demanding of DEA assignments. Street agents who successfully completed Spanish-language classes, intensive U.S. Army Ranger school, and Navy SEAL riverine training were dressed in camo and combat gear and dropped into the dusty villages and steamy jungles of Latin America.

  Gagne's three-month tour of duty with Snowcap began in Peru. He was the youngest man on Mongoose, a team of three women and nine men. Mongoose was set up like a regular Special Forces A-team, which meant they had recruits from outside DEA—a communications officer who was former Special Forces, a medic, a heavy-weapons specialist, a demolition expert. The agents were also cross-trained on every specialty.

  Snowcap had fifteen forward operating bases and a guarded safe house in Lima where the agents would take R&R breaks. Gagne and his Mongoose team were stationed at the Santa Lucia base in the Upper Huallaga Valley, where the Andes Mountains slope down to the Amazon River basin. It was a region almost entirely controlled by drug traffickers and insurgent terrorist groups.

  Gagne's Snowcap duties were unpredictable. One day he'd have to fix the generator so they could take hot showers; the next he and his team would be raiding stash houses and blowing holes in the illegal landing strips that dotted the remote mountaintops and lower flat-lands. Small twin-engine Piper Navajos and Beechcraft Barons were regularly flying into Peru from Colombia, landing at unregistered airstrips, refueling, and loading dope. Gagne and his colleagues would spot the airstrips during routine flyover missions. They'd touch down and blow giant craters, twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep, into the strips. The agents would fly from one strip to the next, blasting holes until the airstrips looked like pockmarked battlegrounds. The smugglers would refill the holes days later. It was a constant cycle.

  The most dangerous aspect of Snowcap was trying to determine who the bad guys were. Agents minimized the amount of information they gave to local cops. Aid them, work with them, but trust no one. Corruption among the Peruvian forces was so widespread that the police officers assigned to work with their American counterparts had to take monthly polygraphs to ensure they weren't playing both sides of the drug war.

  Gagne was particularly fond of one officer named Luis Antonio Chilque Regalado, or “Lucho.” Gagne bunked with Lucho for two weeks when he first arrived in Peru. Lucho liked to talk about his young wife and children in Lima. He seemed a little green and wide-eyed, but he was loyal and hardworking, and he never complained about their camp-style living. They slept in bunks and cooked meals on a small outdoor burner hooked up to a propane tank. Lucho's favorite meal was white bread slathered in butter and topped with pickles, washed down with thick espresso. He called it his version of pizza. It made Gagne nauseous. One day Gagne walked to town to buy groceries to show Lucho what a real Italian meal could be. He boiled pasta on the tiny burner and crushed tomatoes with his bare hands, throwing them in a pot with some olive oil, onions, and ground beef rolled in bread crumbs.

  “Es bueno.” Lucho inhaled the spaghetti and meatballs. It would be his last home-cooked meal.

  On July 27, 1994, DEA was tipped
off by a CIA informant about the location of the base operations of the Cachique Rivera brothers, a notorious band of cocaine traffickers who had filled the vacuum left by Pablo Escobar's death the previous December. The brothers were sending roughly 1,000 kilos of pure cocaine hydrochloride and 20,000 kilos of its precursor, cocaine paste, every month to the Cali cartel in Colombia. Intel reports indicated that $2 million and 2,000 kilos of cocaine were sitting at the Cachique Rivera ranch in the jungles of Oxapampa. Their mission was to seize the cash, destroy the coke, and capture the Cachique Rivera brothers. They would be joined by a CIA agent, a Special Forces officer, a fiscal (judge), and a small team of Peruvian street cops, including Lucho. They would head out by daybreak.

  Mongoose team supervisor Frank Fernandez Jr., thirty-eight, was apprehensive about the operation. They had only a crude hand-drawn map from the informant to guide them, and the place would be heavily guarded. Lucho seemed fidgety too. He hardly understood a word of English. But he had heard the name Abelardo Cachique Rivera, aka “the Lieutenant.”

  “El Teniente es muy peligroso”—dangerous, Lucho told Gagne later that night. He sheepishly revealed that he had never worked a jungle operation before. Gagne tried to calm the street cop's nerves. Lucho had only a small .38 pistol as a sidearm, so Gagne gave him his M4 assault rifle, a Special Forces version of the M16, but shorter and lighter.

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  “Sí, sí.”

  “This is auto, this is semi …”

  “No, no, I understand,” Lucho said confidently.

  Gagne found one of his black-and-orange police vests—the kind DEA agents wore—and presented it to his friend. Lucho beamed with pride when he put it on. Gagne wanted Lucho to know that he depended on him.

  At 5:00 a.m., the team scrambled into four Huey UH-1 helicopters and headed to the district of San Pedro de Longui. They flew for an hour over rivers and lush ground—the thunderous chopper blades announcing their approach—until they discovered a sprawling ranch house built into a carved-out mountain. A second home was under construction next to it. The Hueys set down on a small plateau and the agents quickly spread out, searching the two houses. Nothing. The place was deserted. The first thing Gagne noticed was the steam.