DEA DIRECTOR RETIRING AFTER 5 YEARS AT POST

Mexican Gangs Called Growing Threat

Thomas Constantine, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration for the
past five years, announced his retirement yesterday, and warned that Mexican
drug trafficking gangs pose a growing threat to the United States.

Constantine, who added 1,200 agents to the nation's primary counterdrug
force and oversaw a revamping and modernization of the agency's intelligence
operations, said he had sent a resignation letter to Attorney General Janet
Reno and would leave his post by early July after 39 years in law
enforcement work.

The DEA has 8,000 special agents and support personnel working in 200
domestic offices and 80 foreign offices in 56 countries. Earlier this year a
new $29 million training facility was opened in Quantico, Va.

Constantine, who took over the DEA in May 1994, said the most important
achievement of his tenure was working with the Colombian National Police to
dismantle the Cali cocaine cartel, which by the early 1990s had grown to
become the world's most sophisticated drug trafficking syndicate.

The Colombian police, with help from the DEA and CIA, arrested the six top
Cali cartel operatives in the summer of 1995. While the leaders received
relatively light sentences and continue to run part of their drug empires
from prison, the sophisticated networks that moved hundreds of tons of
cocaine from Colombia to the United States and Europe were significantly
disrupted.

"What we did there was very, very effective," Constantine said in a
telephone interview. "Those were our most significant organized crime arrests."

In contrast, Constantine said, his biggest frustration was the rapid
expansion of Mexican drug syndicates across the United States and the
inability of Mexican law enforcement to tackle them.

"There has been explosive growth of criminal drug mafias from Mexico," he
said. "We just turned around and they were everywhere, in New York, in
Baltimore, in Atlanta. ... What is frustrating is that we know who the 20 or
25 top drug dealers in Mexico are, but the Mexican law enforcement is so
weak it seems unable even to find them, never mind arrest them or extradite
him."

Because of the growing strength and impunity with which the groups operate,
Constantine said, the Mexican organizations pose "a growing threat" to both
Mexican institutions and U.S. citizens.

While saying he had no disagreements with the Clinton administration's drug
policy, Constantine said fighting drugs is receiving cyclical rather than
sustained attention from policymakers.

"I give the most best, most honest analysis I can, and give that to the
people who make policy," he said. "But attention is cyclical; it responds
only to a crisis. If it were a war, there would be sacrifices made to win
the war. You can't win a war without sacrifices."

Constantine, 60, began his career as a deputy sheriff in Erie County, N.Y.,
in 1960 and became a state trooper in 1962. In 1986 he was named
superintendent of the New York State Police. He said he plans to teach in
New York to be closer to his six children and 11 grandchildren.