Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  The main house's covered porch was encircled by a six-inch-wide railing, and all along the railing were small bowls, at least twenty of them, filled with steaming, half-eaten chicken soup. There was a large black cooking pot nearby, with a fire still smoldering.

  “Frank,” Gagne whispered to his team leader, “look at all those bowls.” They triggered his memories of military drills in the mountains. “This is the army. It's soldiers.”

  “All right,” Fernandez said gravely. He instructed the team to start looking for caletas, hiding places. Gagne signaled to Lucho.

  “Listen, let's split up—I'm going this way.” He pointed toward a small sentry post off in a cleared field. “You go that way, and we'll meet in the middle.”

  “Sí, sí. En medio,” Lucho said.

  It was one hundred degrees and humid. Gagne felt as if a thousand eyes were on him as he stalked the perimeter. As he reached the sentry shack he heard the sound of AK-47 fire—heavy and hollow, like a steel bar banging on a fifty-five-gallon drum. Enemy fire. He should have been hearing his teammates’ M4s, like steel on a tin can. Gagne hit the ground in the middle of the open field, then began to run low, back toward his team. He heard screams and more gunfire. He found Special Forces agent Carlos Cruz and they both ran up a hill, toward the sound of the bullets. It was a sixty-degree grade, steep and slippery, and they had to huff it up on all fours. At the top of the embankment, Gagne nearly stumbled on Lucho's body, slumped over in a muddy pool of blood. They dragged him down the hill while Fernandez screamed for them on the radio. Gagne never heard him; his radio was accidentally switched off. When Fernandez finally caught sight of the agents, he motioned them to a ten-foot safe spot between the two houses.

  “Where is everybody?” Gagne yelled.

  Fernandez pointed down. Homes in the jungle were often raised about eighteen inches on stilts to prevent flood damage. When Gagne peered under the house, the first thing he saw was the fiscal's .38 pointed at the sky.

  “Get that thing out of my face!” Gagne screamed at the judge.

  The judge and the Peruvian street cops refused to come out of hiding. Gagne was still holding Lucho. He was bleeding profusely from three bullets, one to the head. His body felt like a loose rag doll. There was no point in administering CPR. Gagne turned to Agent Cruz. They both wanted to fight, and they took off again, running back up the embankment to face whatever was on the other side. Stopping at a small perch, they started arguing about whether to lob grenades at the enemy or rake them with gunfire. Gagne noticed Cruz was only carrying a shotgun. Fernandez was shouting: “Get off the hill!” The helicopter pilots had taken off in fear. Everything was happening too fast. It was chaos.

  The mission was aborted. The cocaine, the cash, and the traffickers remained untouched. Fernandez convinced the pilots to circle back to pick them up and everyone scrambled into the Hueys. As the big birds pulled up, the agents ripped the surrounding forest with M60s, grenades, and high explosives. Gagne drained his light machine gun, burning through two 100-round drums, before pulling out his Glock. The CIA agent was shooting a gun inches from Gagne's aching eardrums. Dark blood from Lucho's head pooled on the helicopter floor.

  Gagne couldn't figure out why Lucho had climbed up the hill on his own. He must have heard something and wanted to chase after it, to prove his mettle.

  A local newspaper reported that Shining Path assassins were claiming victory in Lucho's killing because they had believed he was a DEA agent. Gagne was haunted by thoughts of Lucho's last moments, alone on the hill, being watched by assassins who saw their prize in a DEA vest. His body was flown back to his family in Jalima, Colombia, where his wife and children laid him to rest in el cementerio El Angel.

  It was just three weeks into a three-month tour of duty, and the team was spooked. Team leader Fernandez started having premonitions about his death. He stopped eating.

  Gagne decided to put the incident out of his mind, turn it into a game. It's not real. Because if he let the fear consume him, he would lose his concentration, and there was no room for error in the jungle. “Adapt, improvise, and overcome” is the motto of many American soldiers, and it was a motto that Gagne lived by.

  “I'm not dying in this country,” Gagne boasted to Fernandez. “I'll be going home soon, Frankie. You can be with me or go do what you gotta do, but there's nothing here that I need to die for.”

  Fernandez liked the young agent's bravado. He told him, “You're my good-luck charm.”

  A month later, Gagne was on R&R in Lima when he was knocked out by food poisoning—bad ceviche. He suffered sweats, chills, a 103-degree fever, and dysentery. By Friday he had recovered and was well enough to take part in a flight with his team on Saturday, but then he got an invitation to a birthday party in Lima from a pretty girl. Fernandez agreed to let him extend his R&R just one more day. They spoke Saturday morning, August 27, for the last time.

  “Are you eating?” Gagne asked.

  “Yeah, I'm eating,” Fernandez said.

  “You're so full of it. If I'm here in Lima and you're there at the base, I know you're not eating.”

  Fernandez laughed and told Gagne he didn't like going out that day without his good-luck charm at his side. It was a routine flyover mission in the Upper Huallaga Valley, looking for clandestine airstrips to blow up. Agents Juan “Carlos” Vars, thirty-two, and Frank Wallace Jr., thirty-seven, were in the pilot seats of the Casa twin-engine plane. Agent Meredith Thompson, thirty-three, sat between them in the jump seat. Team leader Fernandez and Agent Jay Seale, thirty-one, rounded out the group.

  The morning canyon fog cleared as the afternoon winds picked up and whipped through the steep mountainsides. Air traffic control lost contact with the agents shortly after 1:00 p.m.

  Gagne was trashed on Peruvian moonshine and dancing with pretty Peruvian girls when he got the call that his teammates were missing. He sobered instantly and rushed back to Santa Lucia to join the search. The Peruvian Air Force later spotted the crash site from the air, but heavy rains slowed the recovery efforts, and it took two days to reach the wreckage under the layered canopy jungle. The dead agents were still buckled into their seats.

  Gagne was in a shaky Russian-made helicopter, four feet above the ground on a cushion of thin air and hovering on maximum power. He felt like the bird was on the edge of falling out of the sky. He lifted five black zippered body bags into the helicopter. The smell of gas mingled with the overpowering stench of decomposing flesh. His hands shook as he unzipped one bag and saw the face of his team leader, Frankie Fernandez. The heavy chopper blades vibrated his bones and were so deafening that even if he had screamed it would have sounded like a whisper.

  Operation Snowcap saw two more teams of agents, the last two tours of duty, before it was officially terminated. The program had been on the chopping block since Bill Clinton took over the White House, but the plane crash was the nail in the coffin. More DEA agents died in that crash than in any other incident up to that point in the agency's history. An investigation would later determine that the plane had been flying too low and too slow. The hot summer air in the jungle, with its low density, didn't give the propeller blades enough to bite into. It was simple pilot error. The black box revealed that the agents knew they were going down.

  Gagne lost six friends to a senseless mission. For a time, he wanted to quit DEA. He went back home to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to try to clear his mind. But after a couple of weeks he missed the work, the streets, the rush of his job. He decided he would return to New York. But he never wanted to do another cocaine investigation again if he could help it. It was too painful. DEA was obsessed with cocaine interdiction in the mid-1990s, but Gagne made a vow to himself that he would seek out a new battle in the drug war. He would follow his instincts and carve out a different path.

  4 THE NEW YORK FIELD DIVISION

  IN 1973, President Richard Nixon declared “an all-out global war on the drug menace,” pushing legislation in Congress that gave bi
rth to the Drug Enforcement Administration. This “superagency” would put a single administrator—appointed by the president and approved by Congress—in charge of federal drug law enforcement, maximizing the coordination between investigators and prosecutors.

  The phrase “war on drugs” has lost favor with top brass because it denotes a battle that has a beginning and an end—and that can be won or lost. Experienced drug cops know that the war is ongoing and involves more than just locking up dealers. It also involves treatment, education, and an evolving dialogue with youth about the dangers of drug use—issues that are the primary concern of a number of different agencies that have come into being since 1973.

  DEA, however, is the nation's only single-mission agency, and that mission is to enforce the federal drug laws. To this end, DEA works with the United Nations, Interpol, and other international organizations on matters of worldwide drug control. Its agents are stationed in eighty-seven foreign offices in sixty-three countries. In the States, DEA has 227 offices that are overseen by twenty-one field divisions nationwide. After headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia, the New York Field Division, or NYFD, is the largest DEA office in the world. In 1995—when Gagne returned to New York from Snowcap—the total cash and assets DEA seized in drug busts across all fifty states was about $244 million. Seizures in the New York Field Division alone accounted for $29 million (or 12 percent) of the nationwide total.

  Any challenge faced by an agent in small-town America has already been dealt with by the agents of New York. The technology advances, legal strategies, and group problem-solving skills put in practice by the New York Field Division are copied by other divisions. NYFD evolved into DEA's most innovative division because New York has a long history as a drug trafficking epicenter, owing to its busy seaports and airports, diverse populations, and thriving cultural and financial centers. Just as legal products are brought into New York from around the globe, so it goes with illicit commodities. New York City is often the first stop from the source countries. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy—and a wide range of illicit drugs—is imported to New York, stored and sold in New York, and then smuggled from New York to D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, and destinations beyond. A long list of organized crime networks—be they Dominican, Colombian, Jamaican, Pakistani, Afghani, Italian, Chinese—live among the densely populated neighborhoods of New York's five boroughs without ever appearing out of place.

  “There's no better city, from a drug enforcement standpoint, than New York, because it has it all. If you want to work cocaine cases, they're here. Heroin cases, they're here. Traditional organized crime? It's here. Money laundering? You got it. It's all here,” says DEA New York Special Agent in Charge John Gilbride. “You don't have that in other cities. In Miami, you'll have tremendous cocaine cases, but you won't have the heroin cases that you have in New York. Chicago: you'll have some cocaine and heroin, but it will be Mexican heroin. In New York, you have Southwest Asian heroin at times, Southeast Asian heroin other times, right now it's South American heroin—and it fluctuates.”

  Gilbride began his career in 1981 as a co-op intern at NYFD, graduated first in his Basic Agent class, and rose up the ranks, earning top awards and a DEA Purple Heart for getting shot in the head yet continuing to chase down a cocaine trafficker on the streets of Brooklyn in 1988. Now, as special agent in charge of NYFD, Gilbride is the top agent in New York and calls the shots over divisional offices in Rochester, Syracuse, Plattsburgh, Buffalo, Albany, and Westchester, and on Long Island.

  Agents hone their skills in New York, in part, because they are constantly negotiating the inherent frustrations of the city. Sometimes traffic was so bad it would take Gagne and his partners almost two hours just to drive to Queens to watch a target's apartment. Other times it's the vertical challenge of New York that puts agents in danger—like when a dealer who is a known weapons hoarder is on the twenty-eighth floor of a thirty-story apartment building, there are lookouts watching from every corner, and the agents have to figure out how to get in, get up, control the situation as fast as possible, and make the arrests.

  DEA investigations today focus on the highest-level narcotics trafficking organizations. But it wasn't always so. Retail-level dealers were fair game in SAC Gilbride's day, back when the city provided a beggar's banquet for drug addicts. Gilbride wore his canvas PF Flyers to work because he knew that each day promised, as the saying went, “a kilo, a gun, and someone was gonna run.” Agents kept folding lawn chairs in the trunks of their “G-rides” (government vehicles) because it could take twenty hours at central booking to get an arrestee processed. Sometimes they didn't go home for days and would sleep in bunk rooms or on couches at NYFD, keeping extra clothes in their cars. An agent could spend hours driving around town, making arrests, and stuffing thousands of dollars in seized cash and drugs in the trunk, because there wasn't time to get it all back to the evidence vault before the next takedown.

  “It was the Wild West up in Washington Heights,” says Special Agent John McKenna. He was twenty-three years old his first day on the job in 1987, thrilled to have a gun and a badge—”like a kid in a candy store.”

  “We used to average three hundred fifty arrests in one year in just one group, and we took guns off these guys all the time,” McKenna says. “I was in three shoot-outs my first four years.”

  On a typical day, McKenna and his team would drive a surveillance van up to Washington Heights, seize five kilos of cocaine and arrest five Dominican dealers, put them in the van, and then drive to Queens, where another deal was about to go down. They'd lock up a few Colombian dealers, throw them in the van too, and then go to the Bronx for another hit.

  “We'd come back at night with like twenty people under arrest, three different cases. This was every single night,” McKenna says. “We were hitting them so hard in Washington Heights they knew our group number—’Oh, those thirty-three guys,’ all the informants would say, ‘They're scaring the dealers up there.’ “

  By the time Gagne and Germanowski were on the scene, DEA operations had evolved to higher-level targets—suppliers and cartel heads. Today, a twelve-agent group in NYFD averages between fifty and seventy arrests a year. The Wild West atmosphere slowly gave way to more complicated drug conspiracy cases. DEA's 1992 “Kingpin Strategy” refocused agency resources on targeting kingpins and their organizations. Evolution also brought about stricter policies on conduct, evidence handling, and case operations. For instance, the two-man rule requires that all evidence be immediately transported to evidence custodians by no less than two agents—no more running around town all day in a paddy wagon and then stopping off for a quick beer, letting the perps, cash, and coke cool in the van.

  NYFD, like all DEA field divisions, is organized pyramid style. Below the SAC are several associate special agents in charge who oversee administrative operations, the divisional offices, the Diversion Unit (which polices doctors and pharmacists), the Unified Intelligence Division (a mixture of DEA, NYPD, and New York State Police, who gather intel to support investigations), and the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force—the oldest and largest drug task force in the nation, best known for its work on heroin cases, as dramatized in the film The French Connection.

  Below the associate SACs are ten assistant special agents in charge, or ASACs. Each ASAC oversees a division and each division is made up of five enforcement groups, which are run by a group supervisor, or GS.

  GS Lou Cardinali was responsible for special agents Gagne, Germanowski, Flaherty, and their teammates in group D-35—the so-called gun carriers at the bottom of the pyramid. Gagne and his undercover partners didn't write drug policy or speak at press conferences. They wore jeans and T-shirts to the office. And their office was a multipurpose tan brick building at 99 Tenth Avenue in a filthy corner of Manhattan.

  Whenever Gagne pulled up to the office in the mid-nineties, he was met by the usual parade of hustlers, prostitutes, and drug dealers who lined the streets. The block was so crime-ridden
, burglars would break into every unattended vehicle and DEA secretaries had to be escorted to their cars at night so they wouldn't be mugged or worse.

  Gagne couldn't park without a hooker—usually of the transsexual variety—jumping in the passenger side of his car and offering a blow job. “Out,” he'd say with the casualness of one who has tired of the daily routine. The area was a petri dish of cheap sex, drugs, and carnage. In fact, the DEA building previously had held a meatpacking outfit. The abandoned elevated train tracks that once operated above Tenth Avenue still divert at 16th Street and tag the building's façade. Animals were brought in by boxcar, hoisted up by pulleys, and slaughtered on the top floors of the building. The floors were slightly sloped, with the highest point at the center, and the walls were free-floating so that blood and viscera could be hosed down from the top floors and wash down along the walls, floor to floor, until it reached the bottom.

  DEA took over the lease in 1991 and turned the butcher block into NYFD command central. The floating walls have been shored up and the slaughterhouse remnants are long gone, but there are small reminders of its past: if a chemist in the lab accidentally spills liquid on the ground, it will slowly roll toward the walls.

  Just as agents have to keep a low profile on the job, the NYFD building is an edifice of undercover style. The structure has no identifying signs or official seals. The twin front entrances—Tenth Avenue for visitors and 17th Street for employees—are sheltered by plain red awnings marked “99.” The windows and glass entrance doors are shatterproof and dark-tinted to protect the identities of the undercover agents and confidential informants inside. There are some forty closed-circuit television cameras in and around the building monitored 24/7 by base operations and the guards inside the lobby and at the loading docks. X-ray machines monitor every package that comes through. Armed guards control access to the parking garage.