ALL IN THE FAMILIA

Ensley was treated to warm hospitality during his stay in Sinaloa, embraced
as a member of the family. Through it all, Ensley played the role of
newfound friend, the man who helped wrest Raul's remains from hostile
authorities in the U.S. But on his first day back in the United States,
Ensley went straight to the Riverside office of the FBI.

If Ensley had any qualms about his hazardous new venture, it was over hand.
Valenzuela knew that Ensley was a police officer, but apparently believed
Skip was at least willing to live and let live. And when Luis learned that
Skip was running a trucking operation, he decided to push their
relationship from one of tacit tolerance to active collaboration.

Valenzuela made his move in grand fashion. First he prevailed on Ensley to
meet him in Mexicali, then flew him on a private plane to Mexico City,
where he treated Ensley to a week of the high life in the Mexican capital.
Finally Luis made his pitch: Skip would become his partner, using his
trucks to haul as much as a ton of cocaine at a time across the United
States. They would start with a test run, a 1,500-kilo shipment of
marijuana to Canada.

Ensley stalled for time and returned to South Dakota without making a
commitment. There he contacted a new friend at the FBI - John Dalzeil, a
former colleague from the biker-gang task force. Ensley says Dalzeil was
"ecstatic" at the potential quantities involved, and the prospect of
rounding up traffickers in every city where Skip might make deliveries.

Ensley agreed and told Valenzuela that the partnership was on, but soon
found that Dalzeil had jumped the gun. His bureau chief in Chicago was
skeptical of a sting involving a shipment across two international borders,
and killed the project. To Ensley, the decision reeked of bureaucratic
politics. Such a far-flung scheme would mean the Chicago bureau would have
to share credit for the bust with FBI and DEA posts on the border and
elsewhere. "John's supervisor didn't want another agency getting in on
their thing," Ensley said. "Stats," he fumed, spitting the word like an
epithet. "That's what it's all about."

Hemming and hedging, Ensley backed out of the deal with Valenzuela. "Luis
was champing at the bit to do business. I had to come up with all kinds of
excuses - my truck broke down, my mommy died - anything to turn it off."
But Ensley still believed he could sell the FBI on his nascent partnership
with Valenzuela. He decided he'd have better luck working with the agents
in Southern California, and in 1996 Skip and Karen Ensley returned home.
Karen wanted to be closer to her family, and Skip re-connected with the
Riverside office of the FBI.

But while Ensley was picking up where he'd left off, most of the agents who
first went after Luis Valenzuela had moved on in their careers - Aukland,
in particular, was stationed in Seattle. Ensley started from scratch,
working primarily with a young FBI agent named Peter Freitag. Once more,
Ensley had to demonstrate who Valenzuela was, and how close he could get.

Freitag insisted that Ensley set up a simple drug buy. Ensley knew that
Valenzuela rarely made deliveries himself, but he also knew the dealer had
a fondness for selling heroin, which yielded larger profits and which he
could obtain outside the Tijuana cartel. Valenzuela quickly took the bait,
meeting Ensley on March 22, 1997, in the parking lot of a restaurant in
Montclair. As was customary, the deal was bifurcated; a week later, under
the watchful eyes of an FBI surveillance team, Ensley delivered $24,000 in
cash. It was a Sunday, and Casiano Valenzuela was the designated bagman.
Skip made the payoff in the parking lot of their family church. Ensley
recalls the meeting with a rare note of regret. "Casiano was my best
friend," he said.

Spurred by the successful undercover buy, Agent Freitag pressed Ensley for
more details of the Valenzuela smuggling operation. Ensley says he told
Freitag to ask the agents on the Southwest Border Task Force, some of whom
had been on hand for the 1991 bust, but Freitag declined - because, Ensley
says, he feared losing control of the case.

Exasperated at the bureaucratic skirmishing, Ensley says he called
Washington, D.C., and spoke to Thomas J. Kneir, then deputy assistant
director for drug investigations at the FBI and now head of the bureau's
Chicago office. Ensley laid out the whole story - the start-and-stop
investigations, the hoarding of information, the failure even to slow down
the Valenzuela organization. Contacted recently in Chicago, Kneir said he
did not recall the exchange, but said he was often asked to intervene in
squabbles over turf. According to Ensley, the deputy director ordered
Freitag and the task force to coordinate the case against Valenzuela.

Whatever the impetus, the record shows that in May, two months after Ensley
made his heroin buy, Freitag contacted DEA Agent George Eliot, supervising
agent at the L.A.-based Southwest Border Task Force. The conversation that
ensued represented a major advance for the task force, the first real break
in the investigation.

OPERATION RIO BLANCO had been launched eight months before, in September
1996, when a DEA agent in Tucson contacted a man known only as Mario who
boasted of shipping tons of cocaine across the border. Mario was looking
for a driver. The agent offered his services.

A deal was struck: The agent would drive a truck laden with 300 kilos of
cocaine from Nogales to Los Angeles, where he would collect a fee of $1,000
per kilo. It was a blind delivery: Mario provided the agent a single pager
number. A day later, arriving in Los Angeles, the agent dialed. Someone
named Julian called back and gave him another number. When the meeting
finally took place, agents trailed the pickup man to El Monte, where they
stopped the loaded car, recovered the dope and made a single arrest. Aside
from that, all the agents obtained were numbers to a pager and a cell phone.

The hot numbers represented a thin lead. Depending on the extent of court
authorization, agents could track the numbers dialed by some phones and
could listen in on others. But the conversations they monitored were quick,
sketchy and in code. Cocaine, for example, was referred to variously as
"wedding dresses," "family," "the girls," "the boys," "books from the
library," "cars," "parts," "platanos," "chili," "a hand" (for 5 kilos) or
simply as "things." Meetings were arranged on the fly, as drivers conferred
by cell phone while plying the freeways, making surveillance chancy at
best. Piecing together who was who and what was happening was a daunting
task, often virtually impossible.

And the numbers kept changing. Within a week of the 300-kilo bust, all the
phones involved had been disconnected. The number for one cell phone was
changed four times in the space of three months. Tracking the new phone
registrations was made more difficult because the phone retailers where
they did business were often in league with the smugglers. In particular,
according to court affidavits, A-Tel Cellular, in Downey, and A-1 Beeper,
in Hollywood, "notify the trafficker of any inquiry by law enforcement." As
the investigation progressed, the agents tapped the lines of the phone
retailers themselves.

It was not until he spoke with Agent Freitag that George Eliot learned just
whose phone he was listening in on - that of Luis Valenzuela, a trafficker
wanted by the government since 1991. The phone numbers provided by Ensley
showed it was Valenzuela who had coordinated the 300-kilo delivery in Los
Angeles. Valenzuela's number also turned up as a key supplier to another
midlevel dealer the task force had been monitoring for months. In the drug
scene in Southern California, Ensley said, "You couldn't swing a dead cat
without hitting someone connected to Luis."

Not only was Valenzuela central, but he was stable. "While the majority of
the other telephones were eventually discarded, Valenzuela's telephone
remained active," agents said in court papers. "This target telephone
became an anchor in the investigation."

Freitag also told Eliot about Ensley - that he'd conducted a heroin buy
with Valenzuela, and that Ensley was continuing to negotiate possible
shipments of "multikilogram quantities of heroin and cocaine to an
out-of-town buyer." On the strength of what he learned from Freitag, Eliot
made Valenzuela the primary subject of his construction jobs and
administering polygraph exams, but his family life is all but shot. His dad
died in 1995, and Karen has enrolled in school and spends much of her time
away from home. When she attends a family event, Casiano and Kathleen are
often on hand, and Skip stays away. Karen keeps his whereabouts secret.

Ensley blames his misfortunes - and Valenzuela's triumph - on the careerist
imperatives that dominate the life of the federal agencies waging the war
on drugs. The Southwest Border Task Force concentrated on padding numbers
that would impress supervisors in Washington, he said, instead of making
the sort of arrests that could hamper the flow of drugs across the border.
"These law-enforcement agencies are actually unethical," Ensley said. "They
conduct their investigations to benefit themselves instead of taking care
of the crime at hand."

Ensley's jaundiced view of the task-force system is supported, in part, by
Eric Blumenson, a professor at the Suffolk University Law School in Boston
and an expert in asset forfeiture. He points out that cash seized in drug
busts has become a driving force in federal and local agency budgets, with
seizures totaling more than $1 billion last year. Consequently, Blumenson
said, "Virtually all drug-enforcement decisions are subject to this
economic temptation." Another researcher, a graduate student who spent a
year working as an officer on a federal task force, concluded, "The drug
enforcers and the drug traffickers become symbiotic beneficiaries of the
war on drugs." Ensley put it in more graphic terms: "If they quit the
shadowboxing and went right into Mexico, they could do some serious damage
to the cartels. But then they'd all be out of jobs."

In the case of Rio Blanco, the $15 million in seized currency was
distributed among 17 agencies, some as far-flung as Tucson and San Diego.
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department received the largest share - $5.7
million, according to the DEA. Sheriff's Lieutenant James Whitten said the
funds can be spent on "any legitimate law-enforcement expenses," but he
considered cash seizures a "side benefit" in drug investigations. "The
primary goal is to catch criminals," Whitten said.

Agents with the federal task force dismiss Ensley's critical assessment of
Rio Blanco. After all, Jorge Castro was convicted in federal court on
charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and to launder money, and
sentenced in March 2000 to 17 years in federal prison. The three
accomplices arrested with him also pleaded guilty and are now serving
prison sentences, but to the task-force agents, Castro was the key.
"Obviously, we always look to get the highest target," Eliot said.

That's not good enough for Ensley. If Valenzuela and his crew were out of
town, he asked, "Why not wait until they were back in the area?" The task
force had maintained its surveillance net for more than a year - it could
have waited another week to nab Valenzuela. Eliot answers that, with Castro
on the move, "We had a small window in which to operate." Ensley remains
adamant. "They took a figurehead, strictly for eye appeal. Castro may have
had the biggest reputation, but why not take 'em all?"

Ensley accuses his federal handlers of avarice and incompetence, but other,
less malicious motives could have been at play. It could be that, in his
obsessive hunt for validation, Ensley so alienated the feds on the task
force that they allowed Valenzuela to slip away through deliberate
indifference. "The FBI felt Skip was a wild card," said Ensley's friend who
followed the case. And Ensley could be abrasive, always ready to remind
Eliot and others that he was the only one in direct contact with a ranking
member of the cartel. The small-town cop with all the answers had to grate
on the nerves of his federal handlers. At some point, the agents faced what
must have seemed an easy choice - use Luis Valenzuela as a conduit to other
traffickers, or arrest him and share the credit and the loot with Skip Ensley.

Of course, whatever happened doesn't speak well for the government's effort
to stamp out the drug trade. In the case of Rio Blanco, more than 30
traffickers were named in various applications for wiretaps, and agents
overheard scores more discussing transactions, prices, shipments and debts.
Absent Skip's driving personal agenda, selecting whom to arrest when
became, inevitably, an almost random decision. In the meantime, as one
federal agent said in court papers, "The seizures represent only a small
percentage of the cocaine and money being transported."

Whatever the priorities the task force was juggling, Ensley can't get past
one simple fact: He delivered to the federal task force an open-and-shut
case that led to the indictment against Luis Valenzuela, and the government
never laid a hand on him. Ensley even induced Valenzuela to personally
conduct a drug transaction himself - a rare breach of procedure for a
top-level trafficker. "I spent 10 years grooming this guy," Ensley fumed.
"They didn't know Luis even existed."