KING OF THE DRUGBUSTERS

Andrew Chambers was the DEA's secret weapon against hundreds of big-time
dealers and buyers-until his own brushes with the law got in the way

June 25 - Fast-talking, streetwise and cool as ice, Andrew Chambers was
utterly convincing when he played the role of a big-time drug dealer. For
16 years, working undercover for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,
Chambers would fly into a strange city, make contact with local druggies
and pass himself off as a gangsta Crip from L.A., a coke dealer from St.
Louis or a half-Cuban heroin dealer from Miami.

In the twilight world of undercover drug investigations, Chambers's
lifetime stats are legendary.

HE TALKED THE talk and walked the walk-a consummate actor, the Eddie Murphy
of confidential informants. "Some people have the ability to sing or
paint," says Jeff McCaskill, a former DEA agent who ran some of Chambers's
more successful stings. "He has the ability to get in with those types of
people and make them believe. "

In the twilight world of undercover drug investigations, Chambers's
lifetime stats are legendary: 445 arrests in nearly 300 separate cases,
plus seizures totaling 1.5 tons of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. Between
1984 and February 2000, Chambers fronted for DEA investigations in Atlanta,
Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami,
Minneapolis, Newark, New Orleans, San Diego and St. Louis. For this work,
he collected approximately $2.2 million in rewards and expenses as a "CI,"
or confidential informant. "The guys called me 'CI slash agent'," he told
NEWSWEEK. "They thought I could do anybody." But now Chambers has been
"deactivated," and red-faced DEA officials are conducting an investigation
to see how badly the federal rules on confidential informants were broken.
The reason? In 16 cases where he gave crucial testimony for the
prosecution, Chambers is alleged to have lied under oath.

Some of his war stories, corroborated by DEA sources and court records,
read like a real-world version of "Beverly Hills Cop." (This week,
Chambers's exploits will be featured on ABC's "20/20" news show.) In one
case, Chambers was driving his blue Corvette down a freeway in L.A. when
another driver waved to him and started a conversation car to car.

Chambers quickly sized up the man as a drug dealer seeking an L.A.
connection: within weeks, the chance encounter on the freeway took Chambers
to Detroit and a DEA sting that led to the arrest of three coke dealers.
When a suspect in a Florida case noticed the lens of a surveillance camera
in the dashboard of his car, Chambers told him it was only a device for
"monitoring my engine"-and got away with it. To convince a Houston suspect
that he, too, was a crook, Chambers bought dozens of silk shirts at
government expense, distributed them to the suspect's homies and grandly
told the bad guys that the shirts had been stolen by "my people." It was
pure Axel Foley, and it worked.

Chambers's career as a drug informant began in St. Louis, when he walked
into the local DEA office and said he wanted to become an agent. He was a
former Marine with a GED, but he wasn't eligible to be an agent because he
had no college degree. But the Feds wanted him as a freelance informant and
he said yes. The DEA relies heavily on informants-it has about 4,000 right
now-but the vast majority are criminal suspects ratting out confederates in
hopes of getting lighter sentences for themselves. Chambers wasn't facing
criminal charges at all, which made him far more believable as a witness,
and he loved the excitement of the job. "It's cool to just sit back and
say, 'Damn, I can get that mother'," he says proudly. He liked the money,
too: federal informants are paid for expenses and information, and DEA pays
rewards that can run as high as $250,000.

Time and again, Chambers played the key role in elaborate DEA stings. One
such investigation was targeted at Cecil Fuller, a Long Beach, Calif.,
nightclub owner who was suspected of being a major supplier of cocaine and
crack. Chambers told Fuller he was a coke dealer from St. Louis, and Fuller
sent his son Darren (Hootie) Fuller to check on Chambers's story. In St.
Louis, Chambers squired Hootie around town while he collected fake drug
proceeds from scruffy DEA agents playing bit parts for the ruse. Then he
let Hootie count the take. "Man, you got it going on," Hootie said
admiringly. Later, Chambers steered Hootie to a Las Vegas "financial
adviser"-actually, an IRS agent-who reported that the Fullers' cocaine
business earned as much as $50,000 a day. Cecil and Hootie went to prison.
Chambers collected a $250,000 reward, his biggest.

It all began to unravel with a 1996 case in Los Angeles, when Chambers got
the goods on a drug-dealing restaurant owner named Edward (Fast Eddie)
Stanley. Among other details, Chambers provided federal agents with Fast
Eddie's cell-phone number, and that in turn produced a wiretapped
conversation in which Stanley hired a hit man, Daniel Ray Bennett, to carry
out a contract killing. Enter Dean Steward, a veteran public defender who
represented Bennett. In a last-ditch attempt to overturn his client's
plea-bargained murder conviction, Steward challenged the search warrant for
the tap on Stanley's cell phone.

That led to Chambers and his credibility problem. Steward checked on past
cases and quickly found that in at least some, Chambers had lied on the
stand. Chambers said he had never been arrested, when in fact he had
been-10 times between 1984 and 1998, according to government records,
although he was convicted only once. The charges ranged from forging his
brother's name on loan documents to assault and disturbing the peace (the
complainant was his future wife). Chambers was arrested twice, in 1995 and
1998, for soliciting sex from prostitutes, and in one of these cases he
pleaded guilty and paid a $475 fine. He also concealed the fact that he got
in trouble with the IRS by failing to pay taxes in the late 1980s and again
in the late '90s.

Steward, now in private practice, says Chambers "perjured himself virtually
every time he's testified." The former public defender posted a simulated
"Wanted" poster about Chambers on the Internet, effectively alerting
defense attorneys across the country to the discrepancies in Chambers's
record. The issue is dead-serious because the government has a legal
obligation to disclose all damaging material about its witnesses so that
defense lawyers can challenge their credibility at trial. Both DEA and
federal prosecutors failed this obligation in some of Chambers's cases. So
far no case in which Chambers testified has been overturned, but that could
happen. Defense lawyers are beginning to file motions citing his
credibility problems, and prosecutors, concerned that their star witness
had been tarnished beyond repair, have already dropped 14 pending drug
prosecutions in Florida and South Carolina. Richard Fiano, DEA's operations
chief, says he is "baffled" by Chambers's lack of truthfulness. "Whether it
looks good for you or bad for you," Fiano adds, "you gotta tell the truth."

Chambers insists he never lied about the cases he worked on, though he
admits he lied about himself. Probably he was just embarrassed-after all,
he saw himself as a "CI slash agent." He still dreams of going back to DEA,
but if that doesn't work he's got a plan: a book deal, and maybe a movie
about his life. Spike Lee, he says, seems interested.