DEA DRIVES OFF THE OLD GUARD

Changing times brought on by Janet Reno have forced many of the agency's
most experienced, toughest agents into early retirement. Their departure may
be great news for drug cartels.

They call themselves the "Jurassic narcs" -- a fitting description for such
an endangered species. Most of them came to law enforcement after service in
Vietnam, where they'd witnessed not only the stunning defeat inflicted on
the United States but had watched helplessly as heroin, LSD and marijuana
attacked the moral fiber of the military. The images fixed in their memories
of comrades transformed into drug zombies and friends dead from overdoses
prompted hundreds of veterans to enlist in the war on drugs, to join Lyndon
Johnson's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and later Richard Nixon's
replacement superagency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.

. . . . "We had a mission and we were out to fulfill it," remarks a 20-year
DEA veteran. "Sure it beat the tedium of an ordinary 9-to-5 job. There was,
I suppose, a selfishness about what we were doing -- wives, families,
suffered. But we were serious about it, really committed."

. . . . For those who had seen service in Indochina, such as Celerino
Castillo, fighting drug dealers and traffickers amounted to a cause. Writing
in his memoir Powderburns, after he left the DEA in 1990, the Texas native
and son of a World War II veteran recalled having learned to "hate the OJs
(marijuana joints soaked in opium) and needles as much as I hated the
enemy." The Viet Cong didn't kill the first GI he watched die, he says;
heroin did. "His death scene gave me a purpose. If ever I left Vietnam, I
would put all my energy into fighting America's drug habit," Castillo wrote.

. . . Two, three decades later, the Jurassic narcs -- Vietnam vets and their
contemporaries in the DEA who adopted a no-nonsense, crusading style to
drug-busting -- are a dwindling band. For some, ill health and death have
intervened. Others were exhausted by the fight and grabbed pensions early.
But in the last five years the march of time has been given a sharp shove by
DEA chief Tom Constantine -- who with little fanfare or notice from Congress
or the media has been presiding over a shake-out and a changing of the guard
at America's leading agency in the war on drugs. Or so say internal agency
critics -- people who use the word purge.

. . . . Constantine, who was plucked in 1993 from his post as superintendent
of the New York State Police by Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director
Louis Freeh to head the DEA, has engineered a revolution by stealth. Veteran
agents charge that through harassment, administrative leaves, constant
transfers and a hair-trigger readiness to believe the worst of any of his
older agents, unleashing prolonged internal-affairs probes against them,
Constantine has forced out many of the remaining Jurassic narcs. Those
encouraged to leave include some of the DEA's most successful and
experienced agents -- people whose names might appear on a roll call of
honor or an index to a chronicle of the agency's most significant busts.

. . . Among the casualties whose careers read like movie scripts: Ed Heath,
the former DEA attachE9 in Mexico who moved heaven and earth to identify
those behind the 1985 Guadalajara murder of agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena;
Phil Jordan, a former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center; Don
Ferrarone, the Houston special agent in charge, or SAC, who at the time of
his forced departure last year from the DEA was hot on the trail of
drug-linked Mexican politicians; Hector Berrellez, a bulldog of a man who
kidnapped a Mexican doctor suspected of involvement in the Camarena murder;
Billy Mockler, who in the 1980s in Colombia slipped a transmitter into a
batch of precursor chemicals, tracked it, and busted a vast
MedellEDn-cartel jungle cocaine lab; and the legendary Frank White, who
when asked during a trial why he'd shot a notorious Florida drug-dealer nine
times, responded: "Nine? Because I ran out of bullets."

. . . . And that's just scratching the surface. A top list also would
include Ken Cloud, Tommy Burn, John O'Neil, Glen Cooper and Frank Rodriguez,
the DEA attachE9 in Mexico City last year who was made the scapegoat,
sources say, for a Washington intelligence snafu that embarrassed U.S. drug
czar Barry McCaffrey. "We've lost the best," laments a veteran U.S. lawman.
"The DEA ain't ever going to be the same."

. . . That would seem to be Constantine's aim. All the current SACs except
for one are Constantine appointees. To hasten a generational change, there's
been fast-track promotion of younger agents. Most first-line supervisors now
have less than eight years of DEA experience, compared with an average 15 to
20 years' experience for supervisors a decade ago.

. . . . No one has written an elegy for the Jurassic narcs. Their passing,
though, deserves one -- they were the DEA equivalent of the FBI's famous
Eliot Ness generation, the Untouchables. And any obituary for them should
raise questions about the effectiveness of the culture that's replacing
them. It also should prompt the query: Why has Constantine been so eager to
rip out the agency's past? According to the old guard, the Jurassic narcs
just don't fit the Constantine DEA where, they say, individual initiative is
now frowned upon. The agency's traditional rebellious streak has been
scrubbed. "Bureaucracy rules the roost," remarks one of the vets. Others
lament the loss of a can-do energy, of a sense of a crusade that was
exhibited to the nth degree by the Jurassic narcs. "There used to be an old
law-enforcement saying about the DEA and FBI," remarks a drug warrior who
left the agency two years ago because he says he had fought his war and
needed rest. "The FBI is an outstanding institution with mediocre people;
the DEA is a mediocre institution with outstanding people. It is the
outstanding who're leaving and only time will tell whether the new bunch
will compare."

. . . . Bitter complaints of the Constantine-engineered change in DEA
personnel and culture now have spilled into public. A World Wide Web site
called "DEA Watch" has become the online vehicle for old-guard attacks on
"Constantinople," as the vets scornfully refer to the agency now. Among the
recent contributions: "HQ doesn't want fighters, they want bookworms and
yes-men ... the kind of people who'd rather fight the drug war behind a
desk. It takes fighters to take down drug dealers." Other Watch contributors
say the DEA has become "a vicious circle of promotion-seekers" and a
"dog-eat-dog agency." Of the new generation of rapidly promoted first-line
supervisors in Constantinople, one vet says: "Some are 90-day wonders --
they think they know it all, they make incredible mistakes; they can be
easily misled or sidetracked by corrupt cops." Above all, the recently hired
are viewed as lacking the right stuff -- panache, zest and a gallant spirit.

. . . . Is this just a case of generational rivalry, as some Constantine
loyalists maintain? They argue previous directors Jack Lawn and Robert
Bonner indulged the good ol' boys and allowed them to get away with murder.
Discipline was lacking, and in the new Reno-ordered law-enforcement regime
of greater cooperation and less turf-fighting between federal agencies in
the war on drugs everyone has to toe the line. From their viewpoint the
Jurassic narcs were cowboys wandering the range. "Those who buckled under
have been left alone," says a senior DEA official.

. . . . And those who wouldn't? One was White, a New Yorker who gloried in
the nicknames his colleagues gave him: Dirty Harry, the Rifleman and the
Wizard. In Vietnam, White received a Purple Heart and Bronze and Silver
stars, but he was forced out in 1995 amid allegations made by female police
officers from Wisconsin attending a DEA training session in Chicago. The
female officers objected to the politically incorrect language White and
four other agents used. He had been in trouble for that before -- having
been hauled onto the carpet once for referring to Reno as a "dyke" during a
heated meeting with assistant U.S. attorneys.

. . "But who do you want to send into the drug war -- politically correct
Ivy Leaguers or people who grew up on the streets and studied at the school
of hard knocks?" growls a Dirty Harry defender when reminded of the Reno
remark. His point: Some slack should be cut for the Jurassics because
they're the most effective agents against the most dangerous traffickers,
street dealers and enforcers for the smugglers.

. . . . White, by all accounts, was as fearless as a lion, the type you want
in that proverbial last ditch. The Florida bullet-pumping incident came in
1980 when Miami drug dealers captured half a dozen DEA agents during a
warehouse bust gone wrong. One of the kidnappers tried to flee in a truck
and White found himself perilously balanced on the running board staring
down the barrel of the dealer's gun. In 1981 he was involved in another
bloody Miami shoot-out and fired two bullets into the back of a narcotics
fugitive during an intense firefight. Both incidents brought him to the
angry attention of a local prosecutor who wanted to indict him -- one Janet
Reno. White, who went on in the late eighties to lead the clandestine
Operation Snowcap, a U.S. initiative in Colombia involving assaults on
remote jungle drug labs, had his card marked when Reno and Constantine came
in, say insiders.

. . . . Diplomacy was never the Jurassic narcs' strong point. Heath's
departure from the DEA was sealed the moment he joined in the national
debate over the virtues and drawbacks of Mexico joining the United States
and Canada in a free-trade pact. Like many DEA agents in the early nineties
his point was that the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, would
be a godsend to the traffickers. As director of EPIC, the federal
intelligence-sharing facility, Heath publicly blasted the Mexican government
for drug corruption. "The politicos here didn't want anyone saying anything
about Mexico," says a DEA old-timer. "Ed Heath got transferred to Washington
by Constantine in 1993, a day after saying there was corruption in the
[governing] PRI party. Heath quit rather than move."

. . . . Heath wasn't alone in alienating Constantine with dire warnings
about the smuggling consequences of NAFTA -- which among the Jurassic narcs
is mocked as the North American Free Trafficking Agreement. Insiders say
Hector Berrellez, who in the early nineties was leading the continuing probe
into the 1985 Camarena murder, did himself no favors when in 1993 he flooded
DEA headquarters with intelligence reports detailing traffickers' links with
top Mexican politicians. And he wouldn't desist. Berrellez had few friends
in Constantinople, where he was seen by the new DEA regime as epitomizing
the worst traits of the Jurassics -- he was stubborn, bullheaded,
irreverent. Responsible for the abduction in 1990 from Mexico of Dr.
Humberto Alvarez Machain -- the operation was authorized by then-DEA head
Bonner -- Berrellez was a diplomatic embarrassment, a thorn in the side of
U.S.-Mexican relations. Alvarez was acquitted later in a high-profile Los
Angeles trial, but not before the abduction triggered a furious argument
between Washington and Mexico City, one that still is reverberating.

. . . . While Washington cringed, the ol' boys applauded -- as far as they
were concerned Berrellez had shown all the derring-do expected of a Jurassic
narc. A Mexican warrant out for his arrest and a contract on his head from
traffickers merely attested to Berrellez having the right stuff. .

. . . "It isn't hard to understand why Constantine would want to see the
back of Berrellez or Heath or any of that lot," says a retired DEA agent.
Sympathetic to Constantine, he argues the Jurassics were trouble and made no
effort to fit in with the new regime. They resisted change and from the
start mocked their new administrator. The Buffalo-born Constantine -- he
worked his way up from highway patrolman to the superintendent's job -- was
seen as just a local cop, lacking real know-how and appreciation of federal
law enforcement.

. . . . Under Constantine there has been a new set of objectives, including
an increased focus on drugs and violence in America's inner cities. As far
as the old-timers are concerned, that isn't a federal responsibility and on
the whole should be left to state and local forces to investigate and
combat. To pursue what Jurassics sniff at as "microstuff" merely betrays
Constantine's state-police roots, they say. They argue it also highlights
why Constantine was brought in by Reno and Freeh in the first place -- he'd
follow their direction, and they wanted a DEA controlled by the FBI, one
less gung-ho and awkwardly independent. "Remember," says one Jurassic, "Reno
wanted to fold the DEA into the FBI and Bonner defeated that plan. But in a
sense that's happened anyway -- Freeh calls the shots and the DEA is a shell
of its former self. It is no longer the lead agency in the drug war. When
was the last time anyone in the administration asked Tom Constantine for his
advice? When Clinton signed a new methamphetamine bill Constantine wasn't
even invited to the White House."

. . . . The loss of the DEA's status within the federal law-enforcement
community has hit the Jurassics hard. In some ways it predates Constantine.
When the first drug czar was appointed, then-DEA chief Jack Lawn reportedly
lamented, "I thought that was me." Under Constantine the process of reducing
the DEA's clout has proceeded pell-mell. The DEA administrator answers to
Freeh, who chairs a law-enforcement oversight committee.

. . . . And what angers them even more are what they see as regular
witch-hunts against stalwart agents, such as John Marcello, a 27-year DEA
veteran. Marcello was a key agent in the successful 1994 takedown of Claude
Duboc, the world's largest hashish trafficker until his arrest. As the Duboc
case was wrapped up, Marcello was put on administrative leave and
investigated. The probe was based on an extraordinary conspiracy theory
involving not only Marcello -- a Vietnam vet -- but two highly respected
Customs agents and three other senior DEA agents, say sources highly
knowledgeable about the inquiry.

. . . . Some basic police work at the start would have shot down the graft
theory, the sources say. But that wasn't done until much later. Marcello
remained under investigation for three years when, after strenuous failed
efforts to get something on him, he was told unceremoniously that "no
adverse action" would be taken against him. "No adverse action for what?
There never was anything on him -- but once they'd gone for him, Constantine
wouldn't let up," according to a DEA source.

. . . . As a consequence, morale is slipping, adding to the exodus of the
old-timers. The paucity of big, high-profile busts compared to the past is
taking its toll as well. Dozens of current and former agents interviewed for
this article applauded U.S. Customs for Operation Casablanca -- the recent
undercover sting that exposed Mexican and Colombian money-laundering and
netted several bankers -- but they all bemoaned the fact that it wasn't
DEA-led. "That's the kind of thing we used to do," says a veteran drug warrior.

. . . . One recruiter tells Insight: "Enrique Camarena was killed because he
defied corrupt Mexican politicians, the U.S. Embassy staff and the DEA suits
when he hired a private pilot to fly him over 150 acres of marijuana in the
fields of Zacatecas. Photos in hand, Kiki returned to Mexico City and the
Mexicans had no choice but to burn the fields. As I look into the eyes of
Constantine's new hires, I don't see a Camarena among them. That bodes well
for the Mexican cartels."

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett