Tarallo became a mentor to Lucas. A former Los Angeles police officer, Tarallo had been a member of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a precursor to the DEA. He was old school. Says Gary McDaniel, a Florida-based private investigator, “To understand Lucas, you have to start with Frank Tarallo. He comes from a law enforcement culture that believes the end justifies the means. Tarallo is partly responsible for having created Lucas.”
With Tarallo as second in command in Miami, Lucas received plum assignments. In his early twenties, Lucas became supervising agent in a major cocaine case right out of Miami Vice.
The coke deal in the case involved many moving parts. Two Cuban drug dealers were sprung from prison so they could circulate as CIs (confidential informants) in Miami’s cocaine underworld. The two were paid $20,000 each to relocate their families, then assigned to a joint task force that included Miami police officers; agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and young Lucas of the DEA.
Setting up a coke deal in Miami in the early 1990s was not difficult. The task force soon organized a major transaction: About 440 kilograms of Colombian coke, with a street value of more than $10 million, would be shipped via speedboat from the Bahamas to a place called Manny’s Marina. (Manny’s owner, a convicted dope dealer, was to receive $500,000 for cooperating.)
That many of the major players were convicted felons working for the government wasn’t unusual. But it was unusual to have a rookie agent, who spoke no Spanish at the time and was barely one year out of Quantico, acting as case supervisor. Clearly, Lucas was being groomed to be a frontline soldier in the war on drugs.
The cocaine arrived in U.S. waters on the night of September 4, 1992. After the bales were transferred to a boat manned by informants and undercover agents, the dope was then taken to a government warehouse.
The shipment was supposed to be delivered to a local smuggler named Gilberto Morales, but Morales was having trouble finding $600,000 to close the deal. The Colombians and the Bahamians grew concerned; they suspected Morales and his partners were planning to rip them off. Two contract killers from Colombia were dispatched to get to the bottom of things. Morales became terrified. And that’s when Peter Hidalgo got involved.
Hidalgo had sold Morales boat equipment. “I dealt with many shady characters,” says Hidalgo. “Sure, I knew people used powerboats to smuggle cocaine. I don’t get to choose my customers, but I was careful. There was a sign on the wall of my store that said IN GOD WE TRUST. EVERYBODY ELSE PAYS CASH. I was not in the cocaine business and made sure I could not be implicated in any way—or at least that’s what I thought.”
Morales knew that Hidalgo sold boat parts and equipment to the Bahamians who were now threatening to have him killed. The Bahamians trusted Hidalgo. Morales asked Hidalgo to call them and reassure them that he was not seeking to cheat them, that he was a man of his word. Says Hidalgo, “I knew the Bahamians from the boat business. If I didn’t do this for Morales, he might wind up dead with his body floating in the Miami River. I defused the entire situation.”
Today, speaking by phone from the Federal Correctional Institution in Coleman, Florida, Hidalgo realized that making the call was the biggest mistake of his life. It made it possible for various informants and Special Agent Lucas to set him up as a major player.
On the night of September 8, 1992, Hidalgo was arrested and charged with being the kingpin of the entire operation. Hidalgo was stunned: “I had heard of things like this from movies and TV shows; now I was living it.”
Hidalgo was offered a plea deal. If he pleaded guilty, he would receive an eleven-year sentence and likely be released in nine. He was also asked to become a paid informant for the DEA. Remembers Hidalgo, “I turned them down. I was innocent. And it would go against everything I believe to become an informant for any government, even the United States, a country I love.”
Though prosecutors had no evidence other than his phone call and the testimony of Lucas and a fellow agent, Hidalgo was found guilty and given four life sentences.
From the stand and in affidavits Lucas testified falsely about the criminal histories of his CIs. Hidalgo and other convicted defendants in the case tried unsuccessfully to use Lucas’s misrepresentation to get their convictions overturned. In 2001, commenting on another case in which Lucas was accused of the same misrepresentations about the same CIs, the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals noted, “It is unclear how Agent Lucas could have made such statements of an affirmative character for which there is no basis without having acted either deliberately or recklessly. Accordingly, we will assume that this was a deliberate or reckless misrepresentation.”
For more than fifteen years Hidalgo has been confined to various prisons in the United States fighting to get his conviction vacated. Recent developments in Ohio have raised his hopes. Says Joseph Rosenbaum, Hidalgo’s attorney, “If you look at the actions of Lucas in our case—allegations of evidence tampering, perjury, withholding evidence in relation to criminal informants—you will see all the patterns that are coming out in Ohio. There’s a time line in Lucas’s career of misrepresenting the truth, an uninterrupted trail of deceit. And he’s been able to get away with it for a long time.”
The use of criminal informants—rats, snitches, and stool pigeons—has been part of the prosecution of the drug war since its inauguration in the late 1960s. Its defenders contend it’s necessary to use unsavory characters to catch other criminals. But in many cases, the CIs are professional con artists whose experiences in the criminal underworld far outstrip those of the agents and prosecutors who are their overseers. The instances of case agents and government lawyers being played by crooks are far more prevalent than the Department of Justice (DOJ) cares to admit.
One person who has been a vocal critic of the DOJ’s dependence on CIs is Michael Levine, former DEA agent and author of the bestselling memoirs Deep Cover and The Big White Lie. “I can’t tell you the number of times,” he says, “I’ve heard fellow agents, cops, training instructors, and prosecutors say, ‘Mike, never trust an informant.’ But I have never once heard a prosecutor say that to a jury.”
He adds, “Over the years, I have seen the DEA and other law enforcement agencies become more and more dependent on rats. The question is: Do you have to put yourself in league with the devil for some higher good? I think the net balance is we lose.” Still, Levine does not blame the informants themselves, noting, “A rat cannot take control of an investigation unless the people who are supposed to control him become as immoral and corrupt as he is.”
The career of Lee Lucas has been particularly dependent on the use of rats in general and one rat in particular. In the early 1990s, Lucas formed an alliance with Helmut Groebe, a charming German-born con artist who would become his informant benefactor. Lucas and Groebe launched criminal stings around the globe, making Groebe rich and adding international luster to the unpolished former bouncer from Cleveland.
As a young man, Groebe once bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a wealthy German widow and a doctor he’d known for years. After a stint in prison for another fraud, Groebe slipped out of Germany to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1980s. He promptly ripped off his own twenty-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen years, for $100,000. During the next decade, Groebe lived the life of an international playboy and predator in Brazil and South Florida.
It is not clear exactly when Groebe signed on as a paid informant for the DEA, but he met Lucas for the first time in the early 1990s. This was a pair made in heaven, or maybe hell: an experienced con man and a young, gung-ho agent.
One Lucas-Groebe sting involved German businessman Wolfgang von Schlieffen. Von Schlieffen had achieved great wealth as an investor in real estate, construction, and the import-export business in the Miami area. He lived the good life, owned a yacht and luxury vehicles, a Rolls-Royce among them.
Von Schlieffen trusted Groebe, who had a polish and mastery of English that he admired, and agreed to meet with Groebe’s business
associates (Lucas and another undercover agent) interested in condos and cars. At the meeting, much to Von Schlieffen’s dismay, the men spoke rapid-fire English and kept steering the conversation to the subject of narcotics. They even flashed a small package he thought was cocaine. A transcript of the conversation shows Von Schlieffen, in fractured English, struggling to explain he was not interested in a cocaine deal. Nonetheless, he accepted a $10,000 down payment from Lucas for what he thought was an automobile transaction. He was arrested on the spot and charged with money-laundering conspiracy charges.
Lucas testified at Von Schlieffen’s trial, referring to him as “the Count.” He claimed the Count “pacified the thing and put the deal together.” Von Schlieffen was found guilty of conspiracy and money laundering. He was sentenced to eight years.
For years, the Count spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers to clear his name. After serving seven years in prison, he was released when U.S. District Judge Wilkie Ferguson ruled in his favor, dismissing the conviction as fraudulent. The judge was especially critical of the prosecution’s lawyers and agents, who he determined had acted in bad faith by using a “treacherous” informant, adding, “The only people who can protect the system against the rogue actions of confidential informants are those who use them: the government.”
The Count died in 2003, but his estate was posthumously awarded $356,000 in damages.
Some DEA officials contend that our narcotics problem is less the result of excessive demand or porous law enforcement than it is corruption among foreign public officials. To illustrate this point, in the early 1990s the DEA focused on Faustino Rico Toro, a controversial figure in the Bolivian army. Colonel Rico Toro had been accused of human rights violations and aiding drug smugglers, and after he was named the country’s drug czar he was targeted by the DEA.
In 1994, Bolivian police arrested Rico Toro on an extradition request from the U.S. attorney in South Florida. Extradition proceedings dragged on for months until Rico Toro agreed to enter a federal detention center in Miami, where he learned that federal prosecutors had linked him to drug deals, citing five hundred audiotapes and fourteen videotapes. His primary accuser was a man he never met: Helmut Groebe.
The case was weak. Rico Toro had never been caught with drugs, there was no physical evidence, they found no hidden assets typical of a drug kingpin, and he was not on the surveillance tapes. Other than Groebe, who said he met with Rico Toro in Bolivia, there were no witnesses against him. In August 1995, Lucas, now stationed in Bolivia, sought to rectify that. He and other agents paid a visit to Juan Padilla Burela, a co-conspirator in the Rico Toro indictment who was acquitted in 1993.
According to Burela’s sworn affidavit, Lucas offered him money for testifying against Rico Toro. Burela had already stated at his own trial that he didn’t know the colonel, but Lucas didn’t seem to care. Threats were made, and Burela became angry and asked the agent to leave. He later learned that Groebe and additional agents offered cash for testimony to three other co-conspirators.
While detained in Miami, Rico Toro hired private investigator Gary McDaniel of Pretext Services in North Palm Beach to help his defense. McDaniel was the first person to unravel the Lucas-Groebe relationship. He uncovered a mountain of incriminating evidence known to various prosecutors, but never turned over to defense lawyers, in violation of the law. McDaniel was astonished that a case as politically sensitive as the prosecution of a foreign official would be handled by an agent in his mid-twenties, especially one who was “being led around by the nose” by a con artist like Groebe.
Eventually, a financially destitute Rico Toro pleaded guilty to a minor drug charge and was released after serving five years. But the battle had only begun for McDaniel. During the next decade he sought the attention of Lucas supervisors in the DEA and DOJ. Says McDaniel, “I’m an old military man, so I made sure my various letters and inquiries went up the chain of command to supervisors of divisions and ultimately to the DOJ’s Department of Professional Responsibility. I made sure everyone signed off on those letters. In some cases, I was told, ‘Gary, we are aware of the problem.’ But nothing was ever done.”
A 1997 German documentary, King Rat, detailed the life of Groebe and his relationship with Lucas. McDaniel was interviewed, as was Michael Levine. On camera, Levine refers to Groebe as “a danger to democracy.” As to why “reprehensible” CIs are used to make cases, Levine says, “It’s done for one reason: to make the agent look good, to make the DEA look good, to make the U.S. drug war look good.”
It is not clear why Lucas wound up back in Cleveland. In courtroom testimony, Lucas would claim that nearly five years in Bolivia—known in the DEA as a hardship post—gave him the choice of his next assignment. Others claim Lucas left a paper trail that was potentially embarrassing to the DOJ and was buried in a low-profile regional division. Whatever the reason, Lucas returned home in 2000 as a star agent, a big fish in a small pond.
The DEA’s regional office isn’t even in Cleveland; it’s in Detroit and had a reputation for lethargy. Lucas sought to change that. According to a prosecutor who worked with Lucas, “He was tireless. Some of us wondered if he had any kind of personal life. He fed more drug cases into the system in a year than some agents do in a lifetime.”
There were some complaints about Lucas’s cases. In a July 2003 confidential memo, FBI agents detailed an interview with Joseph Pinjuh, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Ohio. Pinjuh had concerns about the “quality and truthfulness” of Lucas’s investigation.
In many cases, a startling number of incriminating conversations that Lucas attested to were mysteriously not recorded due to “equipment malfunction.” Many supposedly occurred just before, after, or even between recorded conversations. Pinjuh also found that claims crucial to establishing probable cause for warrants were not backed up by facts or evidence. Also, the FBI memo maintained Lucas and his sometime partner, Detective Jamal Ansari of the Cleveland narcotics squad, had beaten a suspect in custody. Turns out Lucas and Ansari were being investigated by the FBI on charges of official misconduct and excessive use of force. Lucas would eventually be cleared in 2005 but only after his DEA supervisors complained to the DOJ about the FBI’s investigation and successfully shut it down.
In June 2003, Pinjuh and another assistant U.S. attorney met with Lucas and Cleveland narcotics cops and criticized the “lack of probable cause in law enforcement stops, lack of control in drug buys, and a continuing theme of pearly handled recorded conversations.” The meeting, according to Pinjuh, was “somewhat heated.” Lucas bridled at the questioning.
But Pinjuh wasn’t the only one. In a pretrial correspondence, U.S. District Judge Peter Economus all but called Lucas a liar. Pinjuh’s superiors were worried about the judge’s denigration of Lucas’s credibility, most likely because he’d created an issue that would be used against Lucas in future cases. So Pinjuh was instructed to approach the judge. According to the FBI memo, “Judge Economus did agree to reword the opinion and dropped a sentence from the opinion regarding Lucas’s lack of candor.”
Pinjuh told the FBI agents he did not believe the issue of Lucas’s problematic testimony was ever forwarded to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
The FBI agents filed their memo; one year later, in July 2004, it was forwarded to U.S. Attorney Greg White. The U.S. Attorney’s Office decided to restrict the activities of Detective Ansari by having collaborating witnesses available at all his drug buys and interrogations, but the restrictions were not applied to Lucas. No aspersions were cast on an agent who was so prodigiously feeding the beast, making federal prosecutors look busy and effective by handing them a steady stream of dope cases.
In mid-2005, the Richmond County sheriff’s department contacted the DEA office in Cleveland. The sheriff’s department had picked up local thug Jerrell Bray holding stolen diamond rings. Bray was a career criminal and none too bright. He’d served fourteen years in prison and did not want
to go back. He offered his services as a snitch, claiming he could make undercover crack buys all over Mansfield.
Lucas didn’t know much about Mansfield, but he agreed to meet. Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Metcalf was excited. If Lucas got involved, it would lead to the formation of a task force, which meant federal funding—money allotted for the U.S. government’s war on drugs—money to make dope buys, to purchase fancy surveillance equipment, to pay agents working long overtime hours on the company tit.
They met with Bray in the county hoosegow. Thirty-two years old and overweight, Bray was skittish and lacking in self-confidence, a grade-school dropout who had been diagnosed early as a schizophrenic. During his incarceration, Bray was cited for twenty-two violations and served much of his time in isolation. On the street, he was thought of as someone who acted out of fear instead of toughness, the kind of homeboy who shoots first and asks questions later.
Bray’s value as an informant was evaluated by a group known as the Metrich Enforcement Unit, an organization that fostered cooperation between various law enforcement agencies in Richmond County. Bray was rejected by Metrich evaluators. City police reached the same conclusion, and told the sheriff’s office he shouldn’t be deployed and was not to be trusted. The task force proceeded anyway. Lucas had handled Cuban refugees and international playboys; surely he could handle a bottom-feeder like Jerrell Bray.
To begin, Lucas, Bray, and the task force made a list of targets. The plaintiff’s attorney and many of those falsely accused say task force members gave the list of suspects—and quite possibly the entire investigation—the informal name “Niggers with Rims,” as in black males with no discernable income driving around in cars with expensive hubcaps. The theory was they had to be drug dealers—or close enough to be guilty by suspicion. According to Bray, Lucas set the tone by telling him “we get them any way we can” in order to “get the motherfuckers off the street.” Lucas accompanied Bray on the first few undercover buys. He knew how to act and talk like a thug; it was part of his repertoire.
American Gangsters Page 14