COVERUP CHARGES JOLT DEA

Federal prosecutors and Drug Enforcement Administration supervisors covered
up allegations that narcotics agents may have stolen $1 million worth of
seized cocaine, failed to investigate the agents, then shifted blame to a
drug smuggler, according to a top DEA executive in Miami.

The case against the smuggler has collapsed, the cocaine is still missing,
and DEA Associate Special Agent in Charge Sandalio Gonzalez wants an
investigation of the agents he thinks may be responsible for the drug
disappearance.

In a stinging letter to an official of the Drug Enforcement Administration
in Washington, Gonzalez demanded an independent investigation of what
"appears to be a coverup of this entire mess."

Gonzalez, a 28-year veteran who rose to command 300 agents in Miami, is
angry that one of his agents who reported the misconduct allegations more
than a year ago is the target of what he called "retaliation" by Miami DEA
managers.

Gonzalez has asked DEA headquarters to assign investigators "with no ties"
to local DEA offices or the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami.

Federal authorities in Washington and Miami say his allegations are
irresponsible, untrue and "totally unfair." They say there was no
retaliation, and they remain convinced that no one in law enforcement stole
anything.

"There was no coverup, I can tell you that," said U.S. prosecutor Barry
Sabin, chief of the criminal division in Miami.

Vincent Mazzilli, special agent in charge of the DEA in Miami -- and
Gonzalez's boss -- called the accusations of a coverup "preposterous" and
said he reported every allegation in the case to Washington "the day I got
them."

The controversy stems from a botched Nov. 12, 1998, drug raid at a suburban
Miami house.

DEA agents working with Miami-Dade Police detectives learned from wiretapped
telephone conversations that there were 27 kilograms of cocaine stashed in
the garage that night. Ten days later, agents turned in only 17 kilograms to
the DEA laboratory.

The mystery behind what happened to the missing 10 kilograms has spawned a
feud within local federal law enforcement.

On one side, federal prosecutors and some DEA administrators concluded that
agents botched the search, missing the hidden cocaine, and that the
smuggler, Enrique "Kiki" Bover -- one of the targets of the drug raid --
retrieved it later.

On the other side, Gonzalez and his supporters in the DEA and FBI believe
the evidence suggests the drugs may have been stolen by agents involved in
the search, and no one has objectively investigated that possibility.

They say that Bover and his wife, when they were arrested five days after
the raid, immediately told police that agents had not accounted for all of
the cocaine in the garage and that their statements were first ignored and
later turned against them by agents trying to deflect suspicion from
themselves.

STATUS CHANGES

The Bovers became confidential informants in hopes of leniency immediately
after their arrests. When they were targeted for taking the missing cocaine
six months later, prosecutors ordered DEA and FBI agents to stop working
with them.

More than a dozen promising investigations the couple had initiated were
abandoned.

Gonzalez continues his yearlong demand for a "thorough, independent"
investigation of the DEA agents and Miami-Dade detectives who conducted the
drug search.

Following Herald inquiries, the agency's acting director in Washington,
Donnie R. Marshall, asked that the U.S. Department of Justice conduct an
independent investigation.

A Herald examination of hundreds of records and more than 75 interviews
found that prosecutors and agents clearly focused their attention on the
Bovers in an attempt to explain the missing cocaine.

According to Gonzalez's letter and other federal law enforcement sources,
federal authorities:

* Disregarded the Bovers' early reports that cocaine was missing, then later
blamed Bover.

* Twice charged Bover with drug smuggling in an alleged attempt to discredit
him. Both cases were later dropped for lack of evidence.

* Allowed agents who were accused by the Bovers of taking the cocaine to
essentially clear themselves by investigating, then blaming the Bovers.

* Refused Kiki Bover's offer to take a lie-detector test.

* Discounted concerns that the same Miami-Dade Police squad involved in the
search was also involved in three other federal drug investigations that
were compromised by alleged police misconduct.

* Ordered DEA internal investigators not to interview the Bovers.

DEA Special Agent in Charge Mazzilli and prosecutors acknowledge that agents
failed to find the 10 kilograms during the search, that it took too long to
turn in the drugs that were seized, and that agents erred in filing
incomplete reports about their conversations with the Bovers.

However, prosecutors say they had five witnesses who corroborated their
theory that it was the Bovers who took the cocaine and sold it behind the
agents' backs. Kiki Bover and his brother Ramon were indicted on those
charges in December. Prosecutors dropped the case in March after a federal
judge ordered them to turn over all records in the case.

Prosecutors say they dropped it in part because a key witness was charged
with unrelated crimes.

VIEW OF WITNESSES

Gonzalez and his camp -- mostly those forced to abandon cases when the
Bovers were blackballed -- say that all five witnesses are tainted and that
the case against the Bovers is peppered with contradictions.

They say that each of the five witnesses either made contradictory comments
in recorded conversations, cut leniency deals or were initially interviewed
by the agents who were accused by the Bovers.

"I am at a loss for words to express my disappointment and frustration at
how this situation has been handled," Gonzalez wrote to Washington. "If we
do not police ourselves properly, someone else will do it for us."

Contacted at his office, Gonzalez -- who commands half of the DEA agents in
South Florida -- refused to discuss his complaints, citing an ongoing
internal investigation.

The case centers on the Bovers, who ran Amarily's Bakery at 12759 SW 42nd
St. in West Dade as a front for a lucrative drug-smuggling operation.

Enrique "Kiki" Bover, 41, a career criminal who arrived from Cuba during the
1980 Mariel boatlift, is well connected. He once operated a homemade fake ID
factory, and has spent nearly half of his life in the United States in
prison on various charges.

His wife, Grisel Garcia Bover, 33, herself a convicted drug dealer, and her
older brother, Orlando -- an addict who has found religion in prison --
blended well into Kiki Bover's world of shady characters and lavish
spending.

TWO EAVESDROPPERS

They had no idea in November 1998 that DEA case agents Russell Davis and
Mark Minor, who between them have seven years of experience at the DEA, had
been secretly listening to their phone calls for a month.

Overseen by Davis and Minor, the DEA's enforcement Group 6 and a handful of
narcotics detectives from Miami-Dade Police were keeping close tabs on the
Bovers' latest shipment, stashed in the garage of Grisel Bover's brother,
Orlando Garcia.

On Nov. 12, they decided to get it. With help from a group of Metro
detectives they work with routinely, Group 6 searched the house for five
hours. Everyone agrees the missing cocaine was then hidden in the top shelf
of a makeshift plywood cabinet in the garage.

From this point on, the two groups of federal authorities disagree.

Gonzalez and his supporters say it strains credulity to believe that trained
investigators could have missed the poorly concealed hiding place and left
the drugs behind.

They believe that one or more of the DEA agents or Miami-Dade detectives may
have removed the drugs during the raid or later the same night when
neighbors said they heard sounds from within the garage after the raid was
concluded.

Prosecutors and other DEA officials believe that agents missed the drugs in
the cabinet and that the Bovers, who were not arrested until days after the
raid, went back to the garage and retrieved the drugs before their arrests.

BUILDING A CASE

Six months after the search -- and after the Bovers reported the missing
drugs to other agents of the DEA and FBI -- prosecutors began assembling
witnesses who suggested the Bovers took the cocaine.

The Bovers, however, say they told agents that drugs were missing
immediately after their Nov. 17 arrests when they turned informants.

Five days of wiretaps of their conversations after the raid, while they were
free, show they never discussed returning to the house.

Kiki Bover's former lawyer, Joaquin Perez, says the Bovers told him
repeatedly about the missing cocaine and how they had reported it to the
DEA. Perez said that on Feb. 1, 1999 -- prior to anyone saying the Bovers
took the drugs -- he went to lead prosecutor Mark Rubino to discuss the
matter.

Rubino denies he participated in that conversation. He says he first got
solid evidence that drugs were missing in April 1999 when witnesses against
the Bovers began to appear.

Rubino acknowledges he had "a hunch" that drugs were missing days after the
November 1998 raid, when Orlando Garcia's first attorney, Julio Gutierrez,
came to tell Rubino he had a problem and needed to bow out of the case.
Garcia, in jail at the time, had told Gutierrez the drugs were left behind
and asked the lawyer to tell Kiki Bover to get them. Instead, Gutierrez went
to prosecutors.

Both Gutierrez and Rubino deny that the missing drugs came up during their
conversation. Immediately afterward -- one week after the search -- Rubino
asked agents Davis and Minor to go back to the house to look for more
cocaine, according to records.

The case agents decided against it. They reasoned that it would probably be
gone by then anyway and that "probable cause was stale" for a second search,
reports say.

Davis and Minor now say they instead asked the Bovers repeatedly about any
missing cocaine, and the Bovers denied its existence.

Neither the agents' questions about the missing cocaine nor the Bovers'
alleged denials appear in otherwise detailed investigative reports written
by Davis and Minor, an omission authorities acknowledge is "sloppy."

Through a DEA spokesman, Davis and Minor declined to comment.

The Bovers and their attorneys argue they were targeted by agents after they
began to make noise about the missing cocaine.

On Jan. 18, 1999, two months after Kiki Bover turned government informant,
Minor jailed him on charges that he sold a kilogram of cocaine to a drug
dealer. The charges were dropped without an indictment after authorities
discovered that the substance he sold wasn't cocaine.

The evidence used to charge Bover came from Miami-Dade Detective Danny
Morales, a member of the same squad that helped in the original raid at
Orlando Garcia's house. Even though reports say Morales wasn't at the house
during the search, the Bovers' defense team has focused on him. Here's why:

Twice in 1998, Morales was accused of skimming a total of $50,000 cash from
seizures. The alleged victims passed lie-detector tests, and the cases were
referred for prosecution. Prosecutors found insufficient evidence to file
charges. Three other DEA drug cases were "compromised" after Morales'
narcotics unit became involved, records say.

Morales did not return five telephone messages and pages or a request for an
interview through a Miami-Dade Police spokesman.

"We are not saying that Morales or that squad took the cocaine. We don't
know who took the cocaine," said Frank Quintero, Bover's most recent defense
attorney. "What we are saying is that federal prosecutors and the DEA had
more reason than usual to believe my client was telling the truth, and they
chose to ignore it."

ISSUE OF `TRUST'

By May 1999, Rubino -- with his boss, Neal Stephens, narcotics section chief
at the U.S. attorney's office -- moved to revoke Kiki Bover's bond, refused
his offer of a lie-detector test, told him his hopes for leniency were
finished, and ordered Kiki and Grisel blackballed as sources by anyone in
federal law enforcement.

"We can't use sources we cannot trust, it's as simple as that," said
prosecutor Sabin, adding that he rejected the lie-detector test and ordered
the Bovers deactivated.

The decision to blackball the Bovers, who federal authorities acknowledge
were promising informants, angered FBI and other DEA agents who had begun to
use them.

More than 12 cases -- counterfeiting, espionage, drug smuggling, marijuana
farms -- were abandoned because of the decree. In one case, a suspected
shipment of 375 kilograms of cocaine -- enough to fill an outdoor trash bin
and worth $35 million -- was not pursued.

Juan Perez, a DEA agent who was working with the Bovers on these cases,
raised a fuss and reported the Bovers' allegations of misconduct.

Since then, Perez has been targeted for investigation by the DEA's Office of
Professional Responsibility for allegedly leaking to The Herald an earlier
story about the missing drugs -- a story based entirely on public records.

Agent Perez, who has retained an attorney, declined to comment.

"It is inconceivable to me how this matter has been twisted to target the
person who brought alleged misconduct to our attention," Gonzalez wrote to
Washington investigators, suggesting that he and his employee were being
attacked because they are Cuban Americans.

Mazzilli said the agent was not singled out because he is Cuban American or
to intimidate him, but to keep him from getting into more trouble.

"The theory that the U.S. attorney's office, 11 DEA agents within a group,
the Miami-Dade Police Department, the SAC of the Miami field division, and
OPR investigators -- who don't even know the people involved -- all got up
together to conspire to cover up a 10-kilo theft is simply preposterous,"
Mazzilli said.

Felix Jimenez, chief inspector at the Office of Professional Responsibility
in Washington when the investigation began, said his office conducted a
thorough probe and found no wrongdoing.