Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  He took courses alongside the specialists to understand exactly what they were learning. He took part in DEA Explorers, a program for youth interested in law enforcement careers, and he mentored about a dozen inner-city teens. His new job was a public role, not the rough-and-tumble fieldwork he preferred, but it supported the larger, loftier mission—protect the children.

  In September 2001, Gagne was sent to Marine Corps Base Quan-tico, Virginia, for an intensive two-week instructor development course—required for anyone spending time in front of an audience. Gagne noticed Matt Germanowski's name on the roster.

  The onetime best friends hadn't spoken in a while. Germanowski had just left New York and was preparing for a new post as a DEA Academy instructor, teaching basic agenting skills and such defensive tactics as hand-to-hand combat, ground wrestling, and taking guns off bad guys. There had been a send-off for Germanowski at a local sports bar just a few days earlier. Flaherty had taken off from his family vacation and driven four hours into the city to be there, but there was no sign of Gagne.

  “Gags, you stopping by?” Germanowski had finally called to ask.

  “No, I can't. We're having cocktails at Kristen's parents’ house tonight.”

  “Right, whatever.”

  Germanowski felt like Gagne had abandoned his friends once he got married. Gagne had felt the same when he was transferred to Long Island. In fact, he was still hurt that Germanowski hadn't bothered to throw him a going-away party. Truth was, there were no cocktails at the in-laws’, but Gagne knew it was just the kind of lame excuse that would annoy G. The two tough drug cops were acting like playground rivals. But when each saw the other's name on the class list, both were secretly excited to hang out again.

  On the first day of class Gagne and Germanowski arrived early, traded a casual “Hey,” and sat next to each other.

  At 8:50 a.m., someone walked into the classroom and whispered in the teacher's ear. A five-minute break was called. The teacher returned and made an announcement: “A plane just crashed in New York. We're not sure what's going on.”

  He turned on an overhead television monitor and the agents tuned in just in time to see United Flight 175 crash into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

  “Can you believe this?” Germanowski said.

  “No,” Gagne said. “We should go back.”

  The two friends were back in sync, pleading their case for postponing the course so they could get back to New York, where they would be needed most.

  “Listen, Superman,” the instructor said, “we have four weeks of material to cover in two weeks’ time. Let's get back to work.”

  Quantico went Delta (imminent threat). Young Marines manning tanks mounted with .50-caliber machine guns blocked the entry-ways. The base was shut down; all commercial U.S. air traffic was grounded. Nobody was leaving.

  Gagne tried calling Kristen, but the lines were down. He reached her the next day. She said she was happy to hear his voice. She would stay with her parents for a while until he made it back.

  It was good to have Germanowski around. They didn't talk about the past. They studied and played golf and drank beer and made up wild escape-from-Quantico scenarios while fresh news about the terror attacks trickled in like dispatches from a foreign post.

  The impact from Flight 77's crash on the Pentagon had shaken the windows of DEA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and many DEA employees had a view from their cubicles of the path of destruction. Agents at Gagne's home office, NYFD, located about forty blocks from the Twin Towers, were immediately deployed to the FBI Command Center. They provided technical equipment to help the search-and-rescue teams. The searches turned into body recovery efforts. DEA's Aviation Division transported personnel, equipment, and blood supplies. They provided the Fire Department with airborne video and forward-looking infrared camera systems—thermal imaging technology that could help locate “hot spots” within the World Trade Center buildings so they could determine where to deploy firefighting equipment and extinguish underground fires located near subterranean fuel storage tanks. Security measures at all overseas DEA facilities were upgraded.

  Germanowski would later spend a week at the Pentagon, collecting evidence to help identify victims and give families something to bury. He was sifting through bits of hair and charred skin that had melted onto metal and steel when a beautiful woman's face appeared in the ashes. The image was on a photo identification badge, burnt around the edges, but with a name still visible. Michele Heiden-berger, a fifty-seven-year-old flight attendant from Maryland, was looking back at him. He never forgot her face.

  A week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Gagne got a call from his sister Susan. They needed him back home in Pawtucket. His brother Ronnie had just been arrested. He was being charged with murdering his drug dealer.

  98 RON AND JOE

  JOSE BETANCUR'S COLD BODY was received for autopsy by the Office of Medical Examiners of Providence, Rhode Island, in a white plastic body pouch with a yellow plastic lock. Betancur was forty-five years old, 175 pounds, five feet eight inches tall, with brown eyes, short black hair, a black mustache. The medical examiner inspected the trajectory of two gunshot wounds to his body. One bullet had torn away the skin of his pinky finger before entering just under his left elbow, fracturing his humerus, and leaving fragments in his arm and armpit. The second bullet had entered at the left front of his abdomen, taken a path through his skin, muscle, fatty tissue, and small bowel, and sliced through a major artery and vein before it lodged in his lower back. The assistant ME dislodged a large-caliber copper-jacketed bullet from his right flank and marked it with her initials, JS.

  Bentancur's toxicology report revealed acute cocaine intoxication. But it was the bullet that nicked the arteries that carried blood to his heart that killed him. His abdominal cavity at autopsy was filled with 1.5 liters of blood. He'd hemorrhaged to death.

  On the morning of Betancur's death, September 16, his upstairs neighbor in his Pawtucket apartment heard arguing shortly after midnight, then two “popping noises,” then sustained silence. She later found Betancur lying on the floor of his bedroom, bleeding to death in a multicolored bathrobe, worn inside out. First responders at the scene noted no pulse or breathing at 12:49 a.m.

  Later that day, Ron Gagne got a call from a friend. Cops were at Betancur's place. Someone said he'd been shot. Ron didn't want to believe he was dead. He called him, but it went straight to voice mail, so he left a vague message: Joe, I heard something happened, I'm wondering if it was you, give me a call.

  The charm and the bother of small-town life is always knowing your neighbors. Two days after Betancur's death, Pawtucket police showed up at Irene Gagne's house looking for Ron. One of the detectives pointed to a photo and asked if it was her son. Irene gave him one of her Who you kidding? looks and said, “Yeah—you know him, Scott.” The lead investigator, Detective Scott Feeley, had grown up playing hockey and football against the unbeatable Gagne boys. Ron called Feeley as soon as he heard they were looking for him.

  Feeley casually questioned Ron about his relationship with Betan-cur and Ron said he had just finished installing an over-the-stove light and exhaust fan in Betancur's apartment. He had first met Bet -ancur a year earlier through a buddy who fixed cars. Betancur's brother used to take karate at the same place Bobby once taught karate. Betancur had a daughter; Ron had a young son who lived with his mother. They were friendly. That was about it.

  “Okay,” Feeley said. “I appreciate you calling.”

  A day later, two more detectives knocked on Ron's door and said they needed to bring him in for more questioning. Ron grabbed his coat, locked the apartment, and called his mother to let her know where he was going.

  “Do you want me to come pick you up?” Irene asked.

  “I'm sure they'll give me a ride home,” Ron said.

  At thirty-four, Ron was street-smart and naive at once. He was an electrician by trade, a little taller than his brother Bob
, but a little softer around the edges. Ron was a true-blue, ribs-loving, dues-paying union man. Even as the cops patted Ron down before letting him in the squad car, it never occurred to him that he wasn't coming back home.

  At the station it was almost five hours of grilling: How do you know Joe? When was the last time you saw him? Were you buying marijuana off Joe?

  “Joe doesn't sell marijuana,” Ron scoffed. In fact, Betancur had sold cocaine and Ron was a regular customer. But Ron didn't think he had a problem with drugs and he certainly didn't want his brother to ever find out about it.

  “You know a girl named Terry Bouyea?”

  “Nah, I don't know her,” Ron said.

  “You sure?”

  “Wait a minute. Yeah, I know a Terry, but I don't know her last name or nothing and I ain't seen her in over a year.”

  Terry Bouyea was a girl who used to date a friend of Ron's until Ron caught her walking into a bar with another man and he told his friend to dump her. Bouyea didn't care much for Ron Gagne. Now she was calling him a murderer.

  Shortly after Betancur's death, Bouyea had come forward and said she was at Betancur's place when Ron started banging on the door looking for drugs. She told police she'd hidden in the closet just before Ron busted in and shot Betancur.

  “You guys are crazy!” Ron said. “You're out of your mind. She's lying!”

  They asked him if he owned a gun. Ron thought about it. He didn't have a permit for that Ruger .22 caliber that was sitting in a Dexter shoe box in a back closet, so he denied it. When they told him he didn't need a permit to keep a gun in his home, Ron confessed, “Okay, I gotta gun,” and told them where to find it. He'd used it a couple of times for target practice in the woods, but it had been so long since he fired it, he couldn't even remember what color it was. It didn't matter anyway—it wasn't the murder weapon. Betancur had been shot with a 9 mm.

  Ron told the cops he had been home alone watching 9/11 news and a movie on the night of Betancur's death. He said his truck was parked in the yard the whole time. “Ask my neighbors.” He had yelled at them to keep it quiet at about 12:30 a.m. because they were noisily loading their car with flea market wares.

  “We never said what time Joe was killed.”

  “I don't care what time he got killed,” Ron said. “I'm just telling you what time I yelled at my neighbors.”

  The cops told Ron they'd found his personal checks, written out to cash, lying on Betancur's kitchen table. Ron was getting annoyed now.

  “What—is that my signature?” he mocked. “Like I'm a serial killer and that's my calling card just in case you were looking for me? … Listen, I'm telling you she's lyin’—I don't know how many different ways you want me to tell you.

  “You know me, Scott,” Ron said to Detective Feeley. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  Feeley asked Ron if he wanted to take a lie detector test.

  Polygraphs are inadmissible in Rhode Island courts and their reliability at determining a person's truthfulness is often called into question because they're meant to measure physical responses such as pulse rate, muscle movements, and blood pressure. Police often use them as an interrogation tool because suspects have been known to confess to crimes, even falsely so, if they think they've been caught by a lie-detecting device. But Ron didn't know—and wouldn't have cared—about any of that.

  “Yeah, give me the test. I got nothing to hide,” Ron said.

  They hooked him up to the monitors, put a mike on his shirt, asked a few baseline questions, and then got to it: Did you kill Joe Betancur?

  “No.”

  When it was over, one of the cops spun his laptop around to show Ron the squiggly line that said he was lying.

  “Either that machine's wrong or you people don't know how to read it, because I ain't lying!” Ron said. “I didn't kill Joe. I don't know what the hell is going on here!”

  The detective dropped an arrest warrant on the table and turned it around for Ron to read. All he saw were the words “Ronald Gagne” and “murder.”

  “Yeah, this is a joke,” Ron said.

  “It's not a joke. On your feet.”

  He was taken to a holding area where he was processed and ordered to remove his belt and shoes.

  “Ron, this is the last time I'm going to ask you,” Feeley said. “You got something you want to tell me?”

  “Yeah,” Ron said, “I got something I want to tell you: I didn't fucking do it!”

  “We'll see if you change your mind in the morning.”

  Ron would spend the night in the cage and be transferred to Rhode Island's Adult Correctional Institution (ACI), in Providence, the next morning.

  As he curled up to sleep in the cold jail cell that evening, he finally understood that it wasn't a joke. The police were building a murder case around him.

  99 “I GOT NOTHING TO HIDE”

  GAGNE DROVE STRAIGHT TO Providence as soon as his course ended and he was cleared to leave Quantico. He checked in his gun and badge at ACI and waited in a small room with a table and two chairs. Ron was escorted in a few minutes later by armed guards.

  “How you doing?”

  “I'm doing great, Bob. Can you get me out of here?”

  “I'm working on it,” Gagne said. His brother looked tired and disheveled

  “Why did you go with them?” Gagne asked. “Why didn't you ask to see an attorney?”

  “Because I didn't do nothing and I got nothing to hide.”

  Gagne never doubted his brother. Not once. Back in their misspent youth of drunken Friday nights, when everyone was in the parking lot brawling, Ron would be trying to sleep it off in the backseat of a car, fending off a rabble-rouser who was grabbing at his feet through the window. Somehow Ron would end up getting beat up with his own shoe. Gagne saw his brother as the kind of guy who would end up shooting himself if he was trying to shoot someone else.

  “I believe you,” Gagne said. “I'm going to help you. But you gotta watch your back in here. Don't talk about your case with anyone. Don't trust anybody.”

  They did not speak about his drug use.

  “I'm so sorry if I've embarrassed you.” Ron's voice broke and he started tearing up. “It wasn't my intention for this to be spread out in the newspaper for everybody to read. I'm so sorry. I hope this doesn't hurt your job.”

  “C'mon. Don't worry about me,” Gagne said. “You need anything?”

  Ron needed a shower, he needed to brush his teeth, he needed to feel human again. They hugged good-bye.

  “Thanks a lot for coming and everything. Look, don't worry. I'll be all right.”

  “Yeah, you'll be all right,” Gagne said. He knew this was going to be a long haul.

  An hour later a guard called Ron from his cell and sent him to the commissary. When he got there, a care package had been set aside with his name on it. Inside the box was shampoo, soap, a razor and shaving cream, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

  100 A KINGPIN IS CROWNED

  WASHINGTON WAS DEVISING ITS 2002 Kingpin list and Oded Tuito was a top contender for inclusion. Linda Lacewell needed Gagne's help pulling a few things together—Tuito's photograph, a summary of his crimes, things they could prove down the line when he was brought to the States.

  Under the laws of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, the president must send to Congress by June 1 each year a list of names of the foreign drug traffickers who present a threat to national security, foreign policy, or the economy of the United States. The drug kingpin list is a who's who of the baddest of the bad—the leaders of the most notorious global trafficking organizations. The Department of Justice's Consolidated Priority Organization Target (CPOT) program later developed its own “CPOT List,” an expanded lineup of the most-wanted command-and-control drug traffickers and money launderers.

  If you're an agent whose target just got named to one of these lists, it's like being handed a magic pair of scissors that cuts through red tape. Buy money, wiretap budgets, and other res
ources are made available to you a lot faster.

  If your name is on the list, the U.S. government has frozen all the assets you haven't properly hidden and is actively working to freeze the assets of your operatives. The law was designed as a way to deny the top drug organizations access to U.S. banks and trade with U.S. companies.

  On May 31, 2002, President George W. Bush released the names of seven new kingpins. The list included five cocaine traffickers from Mexico and Brazil, a Pakistani heroin distributor, and Ecstasy trafficker and French-Israeli citizen Oded Tuito.

  Pittsburgh agent Gregg Drews's first reaction when he saw Tuito's name on the kingpin list was “Holy crap.”

  Tuito had been Drews's first big target at DEA—one small controlled delivery of cocaine that had blossomed into a multiagency international investigation and the naming of an Ecstasy kingpin. The battle over the Fat Man's prosecution had soured Drews on the case in recent months. But even with all the infighting and struggles, after seeing Tuito's name on that list, Drews was satisfied.

  101 “DID YOU DO IT?”

  GAGNE FOUND A VETERAN Rhode Island defense attorney named Robert Mann to handle his brother's case. Mann was a Yale law grad with twenty-eight years of experience. He had a soothing voice and a round face covered by a beard of cumulus tufts of white hair.

  Mann's first impression of Ron was that he “radiated the antithesis of a killer.” He was more like a gentle giant. His first impression of Bob was that he was one of those rare people who truly believed in right and wrong. Mann would always recall their first conversation, when Bob told him that if he had thought his brother was guilty he would have done everything possible to help him in prison—make sure he had access to the commissary, advise him on a plea bargain—but he would not have helped Ron to beat the case.

  It would have been easy for Gagne to say he couldn't get involved because it might compromise his position with DEA, but Mann never heard him grumble or mention it. In fact, Mann would have welcomed a little breathing room from Gagne.