Drug Bust
Rothchild, John
Drug Bust The modest success of one DEA sting suggests that with the agency's present tactics, it can't win the war on drugs by John Rothchild Swordflsh: A True Story of Ambition, Savagery, and...
...This claim may be exaggerated...
...There, she is tried and convicted and serves six years in prison until 1992, when she is granted a new trial...
...Swordfish begins in the early eighties, when certain factions in U.S...
...Instead of letting a good reporting job speak for itself, McClintick steps out of his reporter's role in the epilogue to give his opinion that drugs such as cocaine should not be legalized, that operations such as Swordfish should be continued, and that the war against drugs can be won...
...Navarro is spooked into fleeing the U.S...
...for South America, and Darias and his fam50 The Washington Monthly/September 1993 ily receive death threats and go into hiding in north Miami...
...Meanwhile, Darias has attracted other customers who want their bills laundered, so the cash is piling up in desk drawers and filing cabinets at the Dean headquarters, millions of dollars that nobody is bothering to inventory...
...Carlos Jader is captured by the Colombian police and also extradited to the U.S., where he is tried, convicted, and continues to serve his prison term...
...Darias manages to hold them off as he works to win Navarro's trust...
...Nobody seems to be in charge...
...Darias the ex-con, nearly destitute and still owing back taxes to the IRS, offers his services to the DEA as a sort of freelance infiltrator...
...There's an easy way for him to find out—the DEA is still tapping Navarro's phones...
...representatives, the informants and their aliases, the long list of government bureaucrats assigned to the case and their overlapping jurisdictions, this is a complicated adventure...
...In fact, what has changed during the eight years that McClintick worked on this book is that the turf wars between rival drug factions have been resolved, so now business runs smoothly, professionally, and boringly, like AT&T...
...jail on tax evasion charges...
...The drama peaks when Navarro is worried she's been betrayed, and Darias is desperate to know whether she thinks he's the rat...
...This involves exchanging all the bills for a Dean International cashier's check, which is sent to Colombia and turned into pesos, which in turn are deposited in Jader's accounts...
...In Swordfish, this doesn't happen, because McClintick can tell a story, as opposed to simply hanging the quotes around the facts and calling the result a narrative...
...In South Florida, narcotics cases and sports franchises are both named after marine life...
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...in fact, the bigger busts are a sure sign that more and more drugs are getting through...
...Operation Swordfish begins to look like a fool's errand that has accomplished nothing...
...After much bureaucratic ping-pong, the Miami DEA gets the OK from Washington to experiment September 1993/The Washington Monthly 49 with this new approach...
...In fact, the manufacturers and suppliers of illegal drugs, crack in particular, have been far more successful than the pharmaceutical companies at making a product that's readily available, affordable, and shrewdly promoted...
...Eventually, Navarro gives Darias a few briefcases full of Carlos Jader's drug money—mostly $20 and $100 bills—to be laundered...
...their suspects, they are taping their own conversations with co-workers, informants, and their bosses at the DEA...
...Since nobody in this business seems to trust anybody else, people are bugging each other constantly...
...Snow business Enter Robert Darias, a middle-aged Cuban exile who walks unannounced through the DEA's front door and becomes the hero of Swordfish...
...It isn't long before Darias connects with the second most appealing character in the book, Marlene Navarro, a woman with the allure of Mata Hari and the competence of a Harvard MBA...
...As it turns out, the government is no more adept at running a phony investment company than it is at running the Post Office...
...Swordfish is devoted to a single DEA sting: Operation Swordfish...
...He is the author o/Up for Grabs, a book about speculators and con men in Florida...
...There are squabbles among the DEA agents, squabbles between the agents and their bosses, squabbles with Washington, and more squabbles with the FBI, which is worried that the DEA's Operation Swordfish will undermine its own similar Operation Greenback, or that the DEA will hog the limelight if both operations succeed...
...It sets up a phony investment company, Dean International, which offers banking services to the cocaine trade...
...The money is laundered in offshore banks, away from federal oversight, and operations have been decentralized away from Miami, so you don't hear as much about it as you used to...
...The only effective way to stop the flow, these factions argue, is to attack the major suppliers through their banks and their laundering operations...
...Darias is the perfect banker for Dean Investments: glib, charming, and Latin...
...Ignore the unconvincing policy prescriptions at the end of this book and you've got a terrifically engrossing tale with a cast of characters Hollywood would be hard-pressed to imagine...
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...All of this is a shame...
...He asks his bosses what Navarro has been saying, but they won't tell him because the rules of wiretapping preclude a potential witness in a case from hearing the wiretap evidence in advance...
...By confiscating the profits from drugs, the theory goes, the government can put suppliers out of business...
...Other equally complicated adventures involving international crimes, banks, and government bureaucrats—the BCCI scandal, for example— have produced books in which it's impossible to keep track of who is doing what to whom, so the reader loses interest...
...But wittingly or not, McClintick has proven the opposite...
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...Even with Jader and Navarro put away, you leave Swordfish convinced that the DEA is no match for private enterprise, and that busting a drug lord or two is hardly going to stop the flow of cocaine out of Colombia...
...Darias makes some profitable real estate investments, but his relaxed, tropical attitude toward certain gringo rituals—like tax-paying—gets him in trouble...
...Wiretaps are installed on Navarro's telephones to augment the tapes that Darias has been making all along, and the DEA prepares to move in with indictments and arrests of Navarro and several of her associates...
...His approach is out of date...
...This time around, he exposes the bumblers in the Drug Enforcement Agency, but nobody seems to care...
...She invites him into her condo, where Darias notices the porno movies in her video library and the photograph of Navarro sitting barebreasted on a horse...
...They want to come along on his visits, in part because they don't trust Darias, and in part because they've heard Navarro is a knockout...
...Even in Miami, the national capital of smuggling where Swordfish is set, the book appeared on the best-seller list for only two or three weeks...
...drug enforcement have begun to realize that busting a boatload of cocaine, and then a bigger load of cocaine, and so on, is not the same thing as stopping cocaine traffic...
...When agents aren't wiretapping John Rothchild is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He was captured and locked in a Cuban jail, then released in President Kennedy's famous ransom deal and returned to Miami...
...operations for a major narcotics syndicate and its flamboyant kingpin, Carlos Jader Alvarez, whom the DEA describes as the "godfather of the Colombian Mafia...
...This alternately thrills and horrifies his superiors, who on the one hand are delighted when Darias gets big-time traffickers to launder money through Dean, and on the other are horrified that their top-secret project is controlled by a walk-on with a felony record...
...Several lesser characters are jailed as well...
...Like many of his fellow exiles, Darias fought at the Bay of Pigs...
...Drug Bust The modest success of one DEA sting suggests that with the agency's present tactics, it can't win the war on drugs by John Rothchild Swordflsh: A True Story of Ambition, Savagery, and Betrayal David McClintick, Pantheon Books, $25 To the surprise of the publishers who paid a $1 million advance for it, this long-awaited bombshell of a book, eight years in the making, has been a dud at the sales counter...
...The titillation of McClintick's naming names—crooked lawyers, money-laundering bankers, inept DEA officials engrossed in petty disputes, several of whom still live in the area—has not been enough to draw people into local bookstores...
...But it's still a big business, and very successful...
...Between the Colombian drug kingpins and their U.S...
...Darias, posing as banker, struggles to keep his incompetent gringo handlers from screwing up his performance with Marlene Navarro...
...So when McClintick reconstructs a dialogue, it's verbatim...
...She is director of U.S...
...A book about the Colombian cartel modeled after Tom Peters's In Pursuit of Excellence would be more to the point...
...In the vacuum of competence at the local DEA, his role quickly expands until he's more or less running the entire show...
...Nobody in the agency can play the role of Latin banker, which is what Dean Investments needs before it can gain any credibility with the smuggling crowd...
...No doubt about it...
...every time a Colombian is arrested, he turns out to be the "godfather of the Colombian Mafia," but that lader is a big-time trafficker nobody would dispute...
...So the end of the book is a surprise: As a result of Operation Swordfish, Navarro is captured in Venezuela and extradited to the U.S...
...One of the subplots of Swordfish is whether Darias, a married man, will end up in Navarro's bed...
...Indecent Exposure, McClintick's earlier expose of wheeler-dealers in the movie industry, caused a great fuss that put Hollywood on the momentary defensive...
...Many of these come to him through tape recorders and hidden microphones that are the stock in trade of narcotics agents...
...Moreover, the DEA in Miami is top-heavy with gringos, and this is a Latin American town...
...The cocaine trade is a triumph of modern capitalism that ought to be studied in business schools...
...To ensnare anyone at all, the DEA relies on informants, mostly local dealers who are happy to throw the agency an occasional small-timer in return for being allowed to stay in business themselves...
...Perhaps that's why McClintick's book hasn't struck a chord...
...Soon, he finds himself in a U.S...
...The Colombian cartel operates like a major corporation," says Miami Herald reporter Jeff Leen, the resident expert on the subject...
...What makes this a gripping story is that McClintick infiltrates the feds as well as the bad guys and gives details that you're amazed he could have discovered...
Vol. 25 • September 1993 • No. 9
