A HARD-CHARGING DEA OFFICIAL SETS HIS SIGHTS ON AREA HEROIN DEALERS.

Drug war's new general in region

There he was, face down on a hotel bed, handcuffed and bleeding, a gun
pressed to his head.

"Why are you looking at me?" the Cuban drug dealer hissed at him. "You
think you're going to identify me? You are seconds from dying."

Miami, 1983: An undercover sting had gone wrong. Now, the dealer had
the drop on a young DEA agent.

An hour earlier, the agent had tucked a loaded pistol under a pillow
beside him. Would the dealer spot it? Would the agent need to use it?

Felix Jimenez would survive that fix to continue his war on
drugs.

A Hispanic law officer who made his career busting Latino outlaws in
Colombia, Mexico and the Caribbean, Jimenez, now 51, is the region's
new federal narcotics sheriff.

At a time when authorities say Hispanic drug lords control the area
drug trade, Jimenez, as head of Philadelphia's Drug Enforcement
Administration office, brings luster to a minority community concerned
about stereotypes and reputation.

"If he does his job here, it's going to translate into something
positive for the entire community," said Hernan Guaracao, editor and
publisher of Al Dia, the region's largest Spanish-language newspaper.

Since January, Jimenez has been pursuing the major traffickers
bringing heroin into Philadelphia. The narcotic, with high purity
levels and low prices, is hooking a new generation of addicts.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, one-third of those receiving treatment
for heroin abuse in 1998 were 24 and younger, up from 24 percent in
1995. By September, 42 percent of those arrested for heroin possession
or sale in Philadelphia were 25 or younger - up from 33 percent in
1992.

The heroin sold in Philadelphia is the second-cheapest among major
U.S. cities, after San Francisco, according to the DEA. It is also the
nation's most potent - with a 71 percent purity level, compared with a
national average of 41 percent.

Traffickers now bring heroin here directly from Colombia, bypassing
traditional gateway cities such as New York and Miami.

"Now, especially in Philadelphia, we have a severe problem with
heroin," Jimenez said recently. "Why? It's the place of least
resistance" for the traffickers.

Jimenez says he joined the DEA to collar drug dealers who were
corrupting his native Puerto Rico.

He was born in San Juan. His mother died when he was 6, and his
father, a sugar cane farmer who later became a wealthy landowner,
raised him and an older sister in a strict, religious household.

Jimenez became an agent for the Justice Department in San Juan in
1971, after graduating from Puerto Rico's Catholic University. He
joined the DEA in 1974.

Jimenez infiltrated major drug cartels by posing as a millionaire
buyer. He wore expensive suits and gold jewelry. He spoke Spanish like
the bad guys.

One slip in his speech, one slip in his confidence, could mean a
bullet.

"You have to be a natural actor in order to be successful," Jimenez
said. "With your body language, they will detect if you are for real
or not."

Years ago in that Miami hotel room, Jimenez did not blow his cover.
The dealer still believed he was a drug buyer but had decided to rob
him instead of selling to him. Jimenez was bleeding from a blow to the
temple. His left hand was cuffed to another undercover agent, and his
right hand was bound with a coat hanger.

"I was very nervous, and basically losing control of the situation,"
Jimenez recalled, his voice shaking as he told the story in his office
at Sixth and Arch Streets.

"This guy was very hyper. He was looking for a motive to pull the
trigger."

Jimenez survived with a lie, a stuck zipper, and the loaded
gun.

The lie: Jimenez told his captor there was $80,000 in a garment bag
inside a closet. Take it and let me go, he said.

The zipper: The trafficker walked backward toward the closet, smiling.
But the bag's zipper would not budge, so he flipped his weapon to his
left hand to get at the zipper with his right.

The gun: As the dealer switched hands, Jimenez freed his right hand,
grabbed the gun from under the pillow and opened fire. Startled, his
captor fired back.

A hail of bullets.

Shattered mirrors, lamps, windows.

One dead drug dealer.

"God is the only one who saved me," Jimenez said.

Jimenez had seen death before. He had seen it packaged in little blue
bags of heroin. He had seen it in the sad eyes of parents who had lost
children to drugs.

So it did not bother him, he said, when he killed the dealer. He was
back at work the next week.

Jimenez is solidly constructed, 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds. Brown hair,
mustache, wide shoulders. His handshake is firm. He says he reads the
Bible every day.

He likes Vietnamese food, collects oil paintings, and drives a
Mercedes-Benz, sometimes a Porsche. He describes himself as an
introvert who never shows emotion.

Yet he is passionate talking about his career. His words are driven,
like hammered nails.

"I'm a very ambitious person," he said. "My short-term goal is to go
after major drug organizations in the area.

"I'm going to attack the problem from different angles. I'm going to
attack the problem from a distribution point of view; I'm going to
attack the problem by attacking the finances."

The Philadelphia police narcotics chief, Raymond Rooney, who works
closely with Jimenez, said of him: "He comes in with a lot of new
ideas. He's proposing ways of expanding existing programs and then
thinking about other ones."

Jimenez says he hopes to attack the heroin trade through technology,
as dealers increasingly use cell phones and the Internet to smuggle
drugs.

Just how will the DEA go about this? Jimenez would rather not
say.

Jimenez rose to become chief inspector at the DEA headquarters in
Washington - the fourth most senior person in the agency and the
highest-ranking Hispanic.

He built his reputation by working long hours, he said, but was also
criticized as a tough micromanager.

"This guy will go 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Michael S.
Vigil, special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean field division,
who has known Jimenez for 15 years. "He was one of those indviduals
who never went home. He lived and embraced DEA."

Last year the Oregon public school system named him one of 13
outstanding Hispanic role models in the country.

When he sees a Hispanic person selling drugs, he said, he sees a
criminal who is shaming a community's name.

"It makes me feel bad, because this is a bad example for the culture,"
Jimenez said. "My job is to ensure that that Hispanic American will
not continue trafficking. The only way I'm going to solve the problem
is by putting that individual in jail."

Guaracao and other Hispanic leaders say they hope Jimenez will bring
more sensitivity to the DEA. Too often, they say, the agency
stereotypes Hispanics as drug sellers and buyers.

Philadelphia may be Jimenez's last assignment. He left Washington, he
said, to be closer to his son, a sophomore at Villanova University. He
is also approaching the DEA's mandatory retirement age of 57.

He plans to go out just as he began. In the next five years, Jimenez
wants to reduce the availability of heroin and put its traffickers "in
jail or force them out of the state."

Now and then, his mind drifts back to that hotel bed in Miami, and he
thinks how it might have gone - if the zipper had not stuck, if he had
not hidden the gun, if the dealer had simply decided to shoot him on
the spot.

Jimenez learned then that, in the drug enforcement profession, God can
work in mysterious ways. He says he is thankful for that.