ON TAPE, COPS SOUND LIKE CROOKS

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The black-and-white surveillance tape is a little
fuzzy, but the faces and words come through loud and clear. In the
passenger seat of a Jeep, a woman gives advice to someone she thinks is a
drug trafficker who wants to kill a dealer who didn't pay.

"The best way to get rid of a body is to cut it open and, with a cement
block, throw it into the sea so the fish can eat it," she says.

This isn't a scene from the hit show The Sopranos. The "drug trafficker" is
an undercover agent.

The woman offering the free advice isn't a drugged out or depressed pawn of
an organized crime gang. Ivette Ramos is an evidence technician with the
Puerto Rico Police Department who, with that piece of advice and more,
shocked relatives and others who saw the videotape in the packed courtroom.

Her words were among the most explosive testimony so far in Operation Lost
Honor, the FBI's biggest police corruption case in history. Her colleague
Richard Melendez added plenty of sparks of his own, though, by agreeing to
kill the fictitious dealer for $20,000.

The 29 officers and three others are accused of using their weapons and
sometimes their patrol cars, to transport and protect cocaine shipments.
The case has sent tremors throughout a department already reeling from bad
press.

Many shudder to think how many more of the department's 19,000 police
officers could fall once the accused start to talk. Police Superintendent
Pierre Vivoni, who took over in January, is focused on cleaning house and
already said that more arrests would come soon.

"This is a dramatic situation that has shaken the very foundations of the
police, and it's demoralizing," said Lt. Nelson Echevarria, who has been on
the force for 23 years and is president of the Puerto Rican Police
Federation. "This causes a psychological damage that we can't really measure."

Almost none of the officers had criminal backgrounds. Many had associate
degrees in criminal justice or some other university education.

As supervisors ask why, though, the answer is obvious to many. Prosecutors
say each one received between $2,000 and $28,000. That may seem like a lot
of money to young, frustrated police officers with less than 10 years on
the force who put themselves in harm's way for $17,000 a year.

Officials estimate that 43 percent of the cocaine that gets to the United
States passes through Puerto Rico, and a quarter of that stays on the
island, feeding the vicious cycle of addiction, crime and corruption. With
$68 million worth of drugs hitting the island's coasts every day -- and the
corruption seen at various levels of government here in the past few years
- -- the pressure from the drug trade may be too much to resist for some.

And it's a blow the police don't need right now. Six officers accused of
police brutality for beating up guests at a child's birthday party in the
coastal town of Loiza cried defiantly at more court hearings last week.
Four other officers in the central mountain town of Utuado -- who tried to
conduct a traffic stop while off duty and out of uniform -- also are under
investigation for shooting at the moving car whose driver fled thinking it
was a robbery attempt.

Six officers from Vieques, now behind bars, were arrested in 1999 for
protecting cocaine shipments similar to the 29 officers rounded up in the
recent sting. Police officers have been tied to the "crazy cows" and the
"black cats," groups accused of robbing homes and other crimes.

Vivoni promised that background and character checks on new recruits will
be more rigorous, a process that suffered during the push in the 1990s to
beef up the force and put hundreds more officers on the streets. Training
on moral values and ethics will no longer take a back seat, he said.

"The police are going through a period of transition and internal
purification that's going to result in a better police force," Vivoni said.