11 The Sacrifice of Our Police

SEE Barry Leibowitz as a victim of the war on drugs. The former federal prosecutor does not. And therein lies the moral of the story.

BARRY LEIBOWITZ: THE PROSECUTOR AS VICTIM

Mr. Leibowitz is the only lawyer I know who was actually shot—with a cyanide-tipped bullet, no less—to stop his prosecution of drug dealers. When he had been an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, the idealistic young prosecutor had been engaged in a long investigation of a murderous heroin smuggling ring led by a notorious international trafficker, Linwood Gray. On the morning of December 20, 1978, Gray shot Mr. Leibowitz just outside the federal courthouse in downtown Washington, within sight of the Capitol building. The first bullet sliced through the knot in his tie, the second lodged in the fatty tissue of his body, causing only a superficial wound. It was removed easily with the aid of a local anesthetic. A few days later, however, prosecutor Leibowitz developed severe and frightening cramps from what was discovered to be cyanide, most of which had fortunately been burned off in the barrel of the gun. He admitted he was scared, and began carrying a snub-nosed .32 pistol and wearing a bullet-proof vest.

Scared or not, he persisted in his work and eventually helped obtain convictions of the gang, but Linwood Gray received a sentence of only twenty months to five years for income-tax evasion. Because of insufficient evidence, Gray was never prosecuted, nor was anyone else, for the attempted murder of a federal prosecutor in broad daylight. Popular accounts stated that the prosecution team, including Mr. Leibowitz, were dismayed over the small social benefits obtained from drug-enforcement activities. After the trial, lawyer Donald Campbell, one of his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney's office, asked in despair, "What's the point of all this?" and added, "I'm not sure what good we do in narcotics prosecutions." It was reported in The Washingtonian magazine of May 1983 that even after the passage of several years, "Barry Leibowitz is still concerned for his life."

Thus I was prepared to find in Barry Leibowitz, now a private Washington attorney, a vibrant example of a warrior-victim who would exhibit fear and would offer me some persuasive personal insights into the futility of the drug war. I could not have been more mistaken on all counts.

Mr. Leibowitz turned out to be a very engaging young man of 38, wearing a dark blue lawyer's suit, silver-rimmed glasses, a welcoming smile, and a relaxed air. We strolled from his office through the muggy streets of Washington on a July day in 1985 to the Mayflower Hotel for a leisurely lunch. If he was still frightened, he hid it well.

Far from taking the position that the war on drugs was futile, Barry Leibowitz argued that the drug laws were proper and that they should be enforced more vigorously. "Why should murder carry a 20-year sentence and heroin trafficking only 15?" he asked across the white tablecloth. "They're the same thing. Why not the same sentence?" If there were any problems, then, with the drug laws, it was that they were not enforced harshly enough.

But did Mr. Leibowitz not see, I persisted, that he and other decent enforcement officials were at least in some ways victims of confused laws and policies that put their necks at risk—in his case, quite literally—for very little gain, in fact, for net social losses, something like the good soldiers we sent to fight in Vietnam? The reflective, intelligent former prosecutor simply could not agree with that line of argument. In this respect, he was like most of the warriors I have met in my wanderings across the front lines of the drug war in recent years.

These enforcers of the drug laws are rarely seen as victims by anyone, least of all by themselves. Drug police and prosecutors seemed trapped by their own rhetoric on the need to be tough in the face of the scum who are pushing drugs on our people. In the short run, their courage and toughness are sometimes effective, especially when it comes to dealing with the likes of Linwood Gray and his gang. In the longer run, it is up to the rest of us to rescue the drug warriors from themselves and to assist them in fashioning a new positive social role.

SUPERCOPS OR SUPERSCUM?

A major impediment to carrying out that social rescue mission is that many influential people view drug-enforcement police in one of two bipolar ways: they have almost supernatural powers to control drugs and could if they really wanted to but don't really want to, on the one hand; or, they are an army of pathological oppressors, on the other. Neither is correct.

An extreme example of the first view appeared at the beginning of the terrible summer of 1986, perhaps as an omen of what was to come. A respected veteran writer, James Mills, created this supercop vision in his massive 1,165-page book, The Underground Empire, Where Crime and Governments Embrace. The book was launched in a way calculated to make most writers, including this one, green with envy. Copies of the hardbound tome appeared on the desks of opinion makers all over the country with personal letters from the chairman of the board of the publishing company. Nelson Doubleday seemed to be looking readers earnestly in the eyes when he assured them, "Everything in this astounding investigative study is true; no names have been changed; there are no composite characters; no invented scenes or dialogue." Roughly similar words also were found at the beginning of the book.

The essence of Mr. Mills's allegedly true story was that during the Seventies, the federal government had created a superpowerful band of DEA and FBI superagents, named Centac (Central Tactical Unit), headed by a supercop leader, Dennis Dayle, who went out and knocked the stuffings out of major drug trafficking organizations all over the world. They did so not by going after white powder, the drugs, but instead after the leaders of the rings and imprisoning them. These brave agents were incredibly successful for several years but were stopped in their good work by the leaders of the FBI, which had been given jurisdiction over the DEA during the Reagan era. All of this had been kept secret until Mr. Mills let the cat out of the bag.

The federal drug-control agencies were putting on a sham drug war that was not truly meant to be won. Why?

Because the United States government is the largest narcotics conspirator in the world. This tired old grand deception theory was supported by these "facts": (1) since the narcotics trade is controlled by the corrupt leaders of third-world governments, such as Panama, Mexico, and Thailand, (2) the U.S. could stop the trade by simply telling those corrupt leaders to stop their criminal actions or else, and (3) our failure to do so is rooted in our desire to retain friendships and military alliances with those nations. Thus we crassly sacrifice the health of the world's people for military and diplomatic gains.

The amazing nature of the police revelations (believe me, I have summarized the whole thing: these supercops arrested leaders and not powder) and the veracity of the conspiracy theory were accepted with breathless belief by the major news organizations of the country. Time and Newsweek wrote supportive articles about the book and its revelations. The NBC "Today Show" devoted a rare five consecutive segments to it, during the week of June 913, with newsman John Palmer hanging on every word uttered by Mr. Mills. I watched and listened in awe as the literary scam of the decade unfolded before my eyes and ruined breakfast after breakfast for me. My breakfast times were not improved during the next week when Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the lead book reviewer of the daily New York Times, gave the book a rave review on June 16. The prestigious reviewer admitted that he had an initial problem "of disbelief' but that he came to "ultimately trust what Mr. Mills reveals," a position taken by many of the major opinion leaders of the country.

As I watched all of this with a sinking heart, I realized how these incidents illustrated the extent of public and professional ignorance about the nature of the drug problem—and how much work we had to do in order to develop sensible policies. It was as if a major publishing house had put out a book telling how a lonely CIA agent and a few of his friends had developed a scheme to convince the leaders of the Soviet Politburo to defect with all of their code books—and how CIA director Casey had stopped the operation at the direction of the Reagan White House so as to support the defense industry. Had this occurred, I assume the book would have been immediately dismissed by the press and media as a silly fraud. That was my initial and continuing reaction to the Mills book.

I called the DEA public affairs office and asked the press officer who answered if the agency was issuing a reaction. Con Dougherty replied roughly along these lines: give me a break; you know us well enough to understand that if we had a unit that was that successful we would have kept it and bragged about it. He did confirm that there had been several such Centac units, that they had accomplished much good, that DEA had never kept them secret, that roughly similar combined units of agents from several agencies were still in operation, and that DEA had released information on their limited successes over the years. Mr. Dougherty had no comment on the other amazing revelations of the book.

On August 15, the FBI wrote to Doubleday, laying out many of the factual errors in the book. However, it took David Johnston, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, to save the honor of the American press, and of much of the rest of society as well. In a front-page story on October 2, 1986, Mr. Johnston revealed the results of a major investigative effort which showed that the core of the Mills story was untrue. Of approximately 50 people mentioned in the book who had been also interviewed by reporter Johnston, 43 said the accounts of their activities were simply false, and four said their actions were distorted.

One of the most revealing comments was made by Douglas Chandler, a DEA official who had been head of Centac; he told David Johnston, "I found that he draws the conclusion that the DEA at one time had the solution to all the dope peddling problems and then abandoned it ... that's ridiculous." Of course, it is.

On the other hand, it is not ridiculous to draw the conclusion that over the years police involved in narcotics investigations have committed some terrible deeds, as I hope I have already demonstrated. Documented stories of the excesses committed by drug-enforcement agents continue to come to light. In the December 1986 issue of Reason magazine, Stanford University policy analyst Dale Gieringer laid out a disturbing new indictment that lists an array of outrages. The article was titled "Inside the DEA" with the subtitle "In the murky world of drug enforcement, agents lie, cheat, and steal in the name of the law." I believe that Gieringer proved that claim and these related allegations: "When a drug law is violated, no individual rights are abridged. There is no murder victim to be avenged, no stolen property to be returned to its rightful owner. And there are no crime victims to complain to the police. So DEA agents must find, or create, their own cases. In doing so, they inevitably intrude on individual lives and liberties and twist the very laws they are supposed to uphold."

The most shocking cases in Gieringer's multiple-count indictment involve entrapment, where DEA agents went out and enticed susceptible individuals into trafficking in drugs. When they were prosecuted and claimed entrapment, very often the defense was rejected by judges on the legal theory that the defendants were "predisposed" to selling drugs in the first place.

In many of these cases, the DEA allowed some of its informants to traffic in drugs in exchange for turning in their friends and supplying other information. In too many cases, Gieringer claimed, DEA agents themselves directly engaged in trafficking. One of them was William Coller, an ace DEA pilot and a supervisor of DEA air operations. Bill Coller pleaded guilty to marijuana smuggling and got the relatively light sentence of three years in prison in exchange for full information on his many crimes.
Mr. Coller, now out of prison and working in the construction business, recently reflected on the type of day-to-day work world created for drug agents by the demands of the drug war: "It's a sad way to make a living, it really is, running around to bars and lying and seducing people into criminal acts. In the beginning it's just a game, but if you're a thinking agent, it really bothers you what you do. I seldom met a `scarface' or violent-type criminal like on `Miami Vice.' The vast majority of the ones I met were simply small-time entrepreneurs trying to make a buck. It really bothered me what I was doing to them, destroying their lives, their families. I look back at it and I'm really sorry."

While I am prepared to believe that Mr. Coller is truly regretful, I am not prepared to forgive him his personal transgressions; he deserved harsh punishment, perhaps harsher than he received. On a broader level, however, I am not ready to label all of the DEA or all of the police involved in drug enforcement as "The Real Scum of the Drug World," the description on the cover of the Reason magazine issue that contained the Gieringer article. Many of my friends and colleagues view the drug police in those terms and worse. On balance, I am more comfortable viewing most drug-enforcement officers, including Bill Coller, and indeed many of the institutions of American policing, as victims of the drug war. They are often not hapless or innocent victims but, like the soldiers who volunteered for Vietnam, in my eyes, victims nonetheless.

"BABIES!" I THOUGHT

Even though they resist the label, the prosecutors and, more often, the frontline police fit alongside the sick as the saddest victims of the drug wars. The sick come first, to be sure, but the police are second. They are caught in a mad series of social ambivalences and conflicts: between drug laws that at least one quarter of the entire population persistently flaunts and a rising political demand for enforcement; between a rising demand for drugs, a rising number of sellers, and a criminal justice system that is in a state of gridlock with room for comparatively few more offenders; and between their consciences and treasure troves of cash and drugs that amount to more than the salary of a brave lifetime. When police officers of integrity seek to enforce the laws in accordance with their oaths of office, they sometimes run into violent traffickers who are heavily armed and prepared to use their weapons.

On television shows such as "Miami Vice" the drug warriors seem to be glamorous, mature men and women who have weighed all the risks. When I recently sat in the office of a real Miami vice squad and saw the police prepare for an operation, I was struck by quite different emotions, as I had been a few months earlier on that Mendocino mountainside. The officers looked so young, so idealistic, so like my students—or children. One even had braces on his teeth.

"Babies!" I thought. They were good-looking, clean-cut young people, mainly Hispanic, in blue jeans and light shirts and jogging shoes. The young men and one young woman were enthusiastically gathering up their weapons, radios, and other equipment in nylon athletic bags, as if they were preparing for a ballgame. Yet, they were going out on the streets with a kilo of cocaine to meet a trafficker, risking their lives, I thought then, to protect me and my neighbors from drugs. I would rather not have the protection at that price. (I later reflected on how my concerns about the officers as human beings represented the other side of the coin to Bill Coller's concerns about the traffickers.) When I had voiced my reservations, their sergeant and one of the officers said flatly that they all believed in the value and effectiveness of the risks they took daily.

In carrying out the drug war, however, the reality is that our police are in danger of losing their decency, their personal and professional integrity, their physical and mental health, and sometimes their lives. A few insightful police officers have told me that they now recognize this danger. If more of them can be convinced of its reality and build up the courage to speak out, then the police and prosecutors could become powerful forces for reform. The public and politicians tend to listen much more closely to professional police officers than to liberal professors. The drug warriors, then, could save their own souls and lead in saving the soul of the nation—not from drugs but from the internal destruction being wrought upon the country, including its police, by the excesses of the drug war.

In March 1985, the brutally beaten bodies of American DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar and his Mexican pilot, Alfredo Zavalar Avelar, were found near a rural road in Mexico. U.S. ambassador to Mexico John Gavin voiced the commonly accepted view when he declared that the murders of the two represented "losses in an ongoing war." I saw those men primarily as "victims" of a misguided policy in America and in much of the world. In my scale of values, I assign the same definition to the great majority of the other 55 American police officers killed in the last decade fighting the unwinnable drug war.

Many people seem to accept the death and injury of police officers as a painful though necessary cost in a just and virtuous campaign to save other Americans from poison. Officers slain pursuing drug violators are mourned by their colleagues but I have not encountered a single instance in recent years when a prominent police official or members of the rank-and-file raised public questions, in the wake of losing one of their own officers, about the wisdom of the laws or the possibility of rationally changing enforcement methods so as to reduce the number of police victims. In a religious crusade, the warriors rarely question underlying sacred doctrines.

When, for example, 27-year-old Ariel Rios was killed in Miami on December 2, 1982, he was mourned by the law-enforcement community. Concern was also expressed for his partner, Alexander D'Atri, 36, who was riddled with bullets, too, but miraculously survived. Both were U.S. Treasury Special Agents assigned temporarily to Vice President Bush's South Florida Task Force. The agents were involved in a buy-and-bust operation in Miami's Little Havana section when, in the words of the official newsletter of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), "something went wrong." Something often goes wrong in such situations. These undercover drug operations are the most dangerous in the entire field of police work. Rarely are the risks to the officers worth the potential gain.

Many police leaders refuse to see that even within existing laws, they have a duty to do more to reduce the danger to their own officers, as well as to suspects and innocent citizens. While I argue for a wholesale revision of the drug laws, I accept the need to enforce existing laws, especially for large-scale and violent traffickers, who deserve only to be caught and punished. The existing laws, until they are changed, should be enforced, but with more restraint, caution, and concern for everyone involved.

None of this concern about pointless casualties came out in the FLEOA newsletter that carried the story about Ariel Rios, even though the association is dedicated to the professional advancement, health, and welfare of federal law enforcement officers. Indeed, another story in that newsletter demonstrates how the war mentality is so deeply ingrained in our law-enforcement structure that a good deal of consciousness raising will be necessary before the police can be recruited to play a role in seeking peaceful solutions to drug problems. In a letter to the editor, Frank T. Devlin, the Inspector-in-Charge of the Fugitive Squad of the U.S. Marshal's Office, commended two deputy marshals, John S. Boggia and Michael F. Witkovich, for their apprehension of Clyde Evans, a federal parole violator, who had originally been convicted for wire fraud and distributing narcotics. The marshals received confidential information in the early morning hours of October 7, 1982, that Evans was hiding in a Brooklyn apartment. They sought help from other officers, but no other police were available. They courageously went without additional assistance, knocked upon the door, and announced who they were. Immediately, they heard "the distinctive `click' of the bolt going home on an automatic weapon." Nevertheless, they proceeded with their combat mission in Brooklyn.

The U.S. marshals kicked the door open, whereupon, almost as expected, Evans opened fire with a deadly .45 caliber submachine gun and with a pistol. The marshals returned the fire and killed Evans on the spot, although at first they did not know it. Deputy Boggia was wounded in the head whereupon Witkovich heroically rescued his partner, dragged him out to their car, and sped to a hospital. The entire neighborhood was soon cordoned off and large numbers of police and marshals flooded in with shotguns and automatic weapons. The police discovered that the fugitive Evans was dead. "It might be considered poetic justice," Inspector Devlin wrote, "that Evans's body was found with a tourniquet around his arm and a hypodermic needle stuck in his vein." Apparently, the police had interrupted the addict as he was taking an injection.

The inspector did not seem even to contemplate the possibility that other options of a more peaceful and more humane nature, for both the suspect and the officers, were available. Within current laws, it might be wise if all officers were trained to recognize, as indeed some do now, that the click of an automatic weapon is a signal for a courageous police person to get the devil out of the way, call for help, and negotiate with the suspect. And where, it might be asked, was the poetic justice in shooting a narcotic addict who was involved in the act of injecting? Even under current laws, that act is not a capital offense. Moreover, under another, more humane system there might at least have been the possibility that this addict would have been simply a peaceful patient injecting legal drugs prescribed by a doctor rather than a criminal shooting a deadly weapon at police officers in part to defend the drugs he had felt impelled to obtain through crime.

IN OUR SOCIAL CESSPOOLS: WHO'S CORRUPTING WHOM?

There are few calls by police or social leaders for changing the underlying policies that create the social cesspools into which we throw our police daily. Police failings are viewed as totally personal and in no way connected to the impossible conditions social leaders have helped to create. It is as if we hired police to work in our cesspools and then criticized them for smelling like they had just come from a cesspool somewhere. And most social leaders seem to accept the continued existence of those social cesspools.

Two popular books of the Seventies, both eventually made into major movies and both generally supported by other objective research, illustrate how widely these social conditions are known. The books exposed the situation in New York City, the center of hard-drug addiction and related crime in the country. Peter Maas's Serpico told the story of an idealistic, tough young policeman who believed that all the laws ought to be enforced fairly, even the narcotics laws and even the laws against corruption by his brother police officers in the New York Police Department. Frank Serpico took enormous risks to enforce both types of laws and became a victim in regard to both. His becoming a victim of drug-law enforcement was more sharply and immediately painful. On the night of February 3, 1971, Patrolman Serpico had been the point man in a buy-and-bust operation in Brooklyn. He had been standing in the half-open door of a dealer's apartment and was in the process of completing a heroin buy. Suddenly, a gun had appeared about eighteen inches from his face; it roared, and he collapsed with a bullet in his head.

When the word went out that Serpico had been shot, many in the department thought it had been at the hands of another cop; for months Serpico had earned the hatred of much of the force due to his anti-corruption work. He recovered from his wounds and continued his battle to expose systematic corruption in what is possibly the greatest police department in the world. The lessons of the book seemed to be that corruption was based upon internal attitudes and reward systems—and that it could not have continued unless it were at least tolerated at higher levels of the department.

However, I have yet to discover any mention in the book or movie, or in the related report of the famous Knapp Commission in 1972 on police corruption, that suggested that drug policies played a significant role in fertilizing the ground for corruption. Nor did anyone suggest that the young officer was a needless victim of a drug war that has been fought with the massive firepower of over 20,000 police officers and under the toughest state laws in this democratic nation—and which has continually failed. Even Serpico believed, "If the cops wanted to, they could eliminate a great deal of the narcotics business overnight." There simply is no factual support in the annals of police experience for this belief held by the idealistic and courageous officer, who reminds me in this respect of many others I have met in recent years.

A few modern police experts openly hold the view that the police are victims in the drug war. One is my colleague at the American University School of Justice, James Fyfe. Jim spent 16 years as a police officer on the streets of New York City, retiring as a lieutenant. While he is a respected scholar now and a critic of the excessive use of deadly force by American police, he is, in his heart of hearts, still very much a police officer. He winces when I mention Serpico and claims that many lowly police officers in the city were constantly forced to risk "a bullet in the face for a lousy nickel bag of heroin" just like Serpico. It was not unusual then and it continues to this day. Professor Fyfe is in good company, including that of the pioneer police practitioner-scholar, August Vollmer, who often lectured his colleagues in professional policing during the Twenties and Thirties about the corrosive influence of "vice" law enforcement on police institutions and on individual officers. Today, Vollmer and Fyfe and like-minded police experts are voices in the wilderness.

This was amply demonstrated in Prince of the City by former New York City deputy police commissioner Robert Daley, published several years after Frank Serpico had resigned from the force in despair and in continuing physical pain from his bullet wound. Daley's book dealt exclusively with the work of narcotics detectives and the agonies of enforcement in the city. It gave the inside story of the Special Investigations Unit, Narcotics Division. Detectives of the SIU operated with almost complete independence as virtually laws unto themselves in their ceaseless pursuit of high-level traffickers of narcotics, mainly heroin. "They chose their own targets and roamed New York at will. Someone once called them the Princes of the City, for they operated with the impunity, and sometimes with the arrogance, of Renaissance princes. They could enforce any law or not enforce it, arrest anyone or accord freedom," wrote Robert Daley.

The details of the drug-enforcement cesspool in New York City supported this broad statement of official decadence and defiance of laws, all in the name of enforcing impossible drug laws. Narcotics detectives made big cases and usually took part of the money and drugs simply lying around in the chaos. All the heroin seized as a result of the heralded law-enforcement triumph in the French Connection case by SIU detectives, for example, eventually disappeared from their office safe. They regularly violated laws meant to control their powers, such as those regarding wiretapping. At the same time, there was a touchingly humane side to these basically decent officers. If one of their addict-snitches ran out of drugs, some officers, such as the "hero," Robert Leuci, might leave their Long Island homes in the middle of the night and drive into the city to provide bags of heroin and relief. These were merciful acts, amounting to improvised heroin maintenance programs, which, as it happens, violated a fistful of laws, not the least being that the illegal heroin should never have been kept in the possession of the police in the first place. All told, in Brooklyn alone, perhaps 25 to 30 street addicts were being maintained by various police officers who regularly gave them illegal heroin because their informing activities had made it impossible for them to function openly on the streets anymore.

In the midst of a police department in the midst of a huge American metropolis, then, a medieval princedom operated in defiance of principles of ethical behavior—sometimes improving on them, usually falling beneath civilized standards, but almost always ignoring them. The book documents how the integrity, the lives, and the souls of most of these officers were destroyed while they tried to enforce the law from the base of that perverted princedom. To a large extent that included Robert Leuci, who went undercover and became an informer for the prosecutors investigating his colleagues. One of the key prosecutors was, of course, a young Assistant U.S. Attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. Detective Leuci testified against many of his old friends, helped send some of them to jail, and destroyed their careers. One of them committed suicide. Leuci stayed on the force but lived in terror and was often afraid to walk the streets of his own city.

I have never heard of any sensible lessons drawn from the tragedies documented by Robert Daley in writing about the activities of these often courageous and competent narcotics detectives in New York City—not by that author or by any of the key actors in real life. Even though he was shown to play a sensitive and caring role in the prosecutions, Rudolph Giuliani, now the U.S. attorney in New York, is as strong a supporter of the drug laws as ever. All the experts and participants involved seem to be saying that these were tragedies that happened because human beings are sometimes weak and deficient. Of course, that again is part of the truth but of less significance than the more ignored part—to an extent, these detectives were victims of the conditions created by the drug laws and the war on drugs.

My guess is that if we somehow convinced all of the professors, rabbis, priests, and nuns in New York to change uniforms with the SIU detectives, in a sufficient period of time the results would be roughly the same. And I suspect that no one would be talking about the new crop of corrupt police in any sense as drug-war victims, only as personal failures.

However, either we accept the idea that current conditions—a harsh drug war in the midst of a huge popular demand for illegal drugs—have created almost irresistible temptations for ordinary mortals, or we must accept another very harsh concept. That concept would be that the current generation of American criminal justice officials is composed of individuals who suffer from extraordinary defects of character.

Charges of corruption as well as illegal drug abuse have ripped through every level of government in communities throughout the country, and not simply in frontline drug policing, but it is in that enforcement arena that the greatest damage seems to have occurred. As the war on drugs took on increased intensity during the late Seventies and early Eighties, the charges came in continuing, growing waves.

One of the most notorious cases involved a heroic and successful DEA agent, Sante Bario. He had achieved star status for his skillful undercover work in arresting mobsters and racketeers while serving in the Internal Revenue Service and then later in the DEA. His wife, Joanne Bario, claimed that in Mexico City during the mid-Seventies she saw him slowly coming apart as a human being under the pressure of "making" (successfully investigating) undercover international narcotics cases; moreover, she saw a similar deterioration in other DEA agents, many of whom she believed to be alcoholics. Ms. Bario saw that it was difficult for her husband to know who he really was because he so often had to maintain at least two identities. In 1978, agent Bario was arrested for allegedly taking a bribe from a drug trafficker. One night while in jail, he went into convulsions and then into a coma from which he never recovered.
Sante Bario's death has never been fully explained. Some speculate he might have been poisoned. Nor has anyone explained how or why a heroic police officer became a criminal, the same type of criminal he had so courageously pursued throughout his career. Was it simply his personal failing? Was it the inevitable result of playing a criminal for so long? Was he framed by other corrupt agents? In any event, wasn't he a drug-war victim?

In the same vein, how do we explain the criminal behavior of the first FBI agent to be convicted of massive narcotics trafficking? Daniel A. Mitrione was the son and namesake of the American foreign aid official kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Uruguay in 1970. At 38, he had become a respected 11-year veteran of the FBI, in recent years considered perhaps the most elite and the most incorruptible group of law-enforcement officers in the world. Under the powerful J. Edgar Hoover, who allegedly understood the harsh realities of the world of drug enforcement, the FBI managed to stay out of the field, a prohibition which ended when President Reagan demanded a full-court federal press in support of his drug war.

As part of the huge investment of federal officers from all agencies, Special Agent Mitrione was assigned in 1982 to Operation Airlift, a sting scheme to trap smugglers. In his undercover role, Mitrione was told to work with an informant who was cooperating with the police. In a familiar scenario that sometimes seems to flow naturally from the dynamics of the situation, one day the informer asked for the privilege of being a real dealer on the side while he was acting like one for the government. Agent Mitrione allowed the man to take a small load of cocaine to Miami and simply failed to tell his FBI supervisors about it. For this small initial courtesy, the appreciative informant-trafficker gave him $3,500 and a $9,000 gold Rolex watch. Soon Dan Mitrione was actively involved in the trade, skimming off small amounts from many of the illegal shipments he was supposedly capturing. Within a few years, he received in excess of $850,000.

To its credit, the FBI found him out, confronted him, and got him to plead guilty. In 1985, the disgraced federal officer was sentenced to ten years in prison. Commenting on the case, FBI director William Webster offered the usual banalities: "The corrupting power of drug money is one of the obvious reasons why this No. 1 crime problem must be conquered." This leading law-enforcement official had no new suggestions as to how to effect that conquest, or how to prevent his officers from succumbing to the lure of huge bribes, except to threaten other agents who might be tempted with a similar fate.

Greater insight into the dynamics of law enforcement in this new era of heightened temptations was later revealed by William C. Hendricks III of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section. In 1985 he observed that over the previous few years these cases had been recurring time and time again. "Who's corrupting whom? Is the agent corrupting the informant, or is the informant corrupting the agent?" he asked in December 1985. At that point, many Reagan administration officials were openly dismayed over the extent of corruption of federal officials, especially in the drug area. Charges against DEA and FBI agents had become much more common; so were investigations of one group of agents by another in the same agency. In 1986, NORML did a study that resulted in a stunning chronological summary of cases of official corruption that were known to the public between January 1983 and December 1985. Approximately 300 justice officials at all levels of government were implicated. Because it was based only on newspaper stories, the report probably greatly underestimated the full scope of the problem.

Charges were even made against prosecutors who had graduated from the best law schools and had been recruited into elite Justice Department Strike Forces, the pride of the Reagan drug warrior corps. One of these was David P. Twomey, indicted in October 1985 for selling information to a major Boston-area marijuana smuggler whom the lawyer was supposedly investigating while serving as a federal prosecutor. Over an extended period Mr. Twomey allegedly received $210,000 in cash and a 30-foot sailboat. In March 1986 he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

THE DRUG-USING ENFORCER: A NEW DIMENSION

Another case that came to a head in the same month showed yet another dimension to this growing problem. Daniel N. Perlmutter was 29 and seemed to have started a brilliant career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York City. Then it was discovered that he had been stealing cash, heroin, and cocaine from the office safe, where it had been placed as evidence. Attorney Perlmutter had broken up with his wife and admitted to being a cocaine addict. He stole the drugs mainly for his own use. After Perlmutter's guilty plea in October 1985, the head of the office, Rudolph Giuliani, commented sadly, "It was like a death in the family."

The use of illegal drugs by officials has been a subject usually mentioned only in whispers along the corridors of power. Yet government officials are not recruited from the moon, which might still be drug-free, but from a society in which illegal drug use is about as common as illegal sex. It should have been no surprise therefore when, in addition to Mr. Perlmutter, hard-drug users and addicts were recently discovered, for example, on the staffs of key Senate committees and in important federal executive agencies. It should also be no surprise to learn that a small but significant number of enforcement officials believe the drug laws to be hypocritical; some of those doubters include users of banned substances. In 1981, the former general counsel to the District of Columbia police department, Gerald M. Caplan, now a law professor, revealed that "a decade ago, more than 100 officers were taking heroin. How did we learn about them? Not because their performance was poor or because they were shaking down drug dealers. We took urine specimens. Those officers were users, not addicts, and they were not criminals, apart from their illegal use of heroin."

Add, then, to the complications of drug enforcement the fact that some officers doubt, with good reason, the rationality of the drug laws, the effectiveness of the war on drugs, the ethics of picking on drug users who commit no other crimes but possession—and that they use the substances themselves and observe in most instances that they seem to suffer less harm than if they had a beer or a shot of Scotch. That certainly thickens the plot, as could be clearly seen when D.C. police officer Bobby Walker was arrested for selling cocaine in 1983. The officer denied the charge but admitted that he used drugs as did many other officers, in part because, he claimed, they believed that it did not affect their performance on the job. Indeed, the 13-year veteran, who had received six commendations, claimed it helped him because "drugs calmed me down." Whether or not Officer Walker's claims about the impact of illegal drugs on police performance are true, it seems likely that his own drug use made him reluctant to vigorously pursue and arrest street drug users who, he observed, seemed to be hurting no one.

It is also likely that there are thousands of undiscovered Bobby Walkers in American criminal justice. For the great majority of nondrug-using officials, their continuing presence creates enormous stresses, contributing to the impotence and victimization of those "clean" officers who sometimes break under the resistance to the laws found both within and outside the criminal justice system. Therefore, the drug warriors are forced to work in such a twisted, schizophrenic world that it is a wonder that any of them keep their balance and their integrity.

THE PERSONAL TRAUMA OF UNDERCOVER WORK

Specialists in psychology are starting to document the harsh impact that drug-enforcement work, especially in undercover disguises, may have on the mental health of police officers. Dr. Michel Girodo, a University of Ottawa psychologist, reported in 1984 on the evaluations made of 270 American and Canadian undercover enforcement officers. He found that undercover agents were "psychologically at risk" three times more often than were agents before their first assignments, when they generally showed no unusual number of problems. By contrast, the undercover agents displayed abnormally high anxiety levels, depression, and major personality changes.

One agent had spent three years as part of a large community of drug traffickers, and had become accepted virtually as one of their extended family. While testifying on the stand for fourteen days in their prosecution, "his behavior reflected the schizophrenic life he had been forced to lead. One moment he would answer questions in the detailed, objective, and professional manner of a law-enforcement officer, and then, without warning, he would slip into the role of his other self." The officer would then take on the accent and body language of the targets, and was "apparently unable to control which part to display."

Another officer showed serious personality disturbances after living seven months undercover with a motorcycle gang. He developed paranoid delusions of grandeur and claimed to have evidence of massive conspiracies that would be of interest to both U.S. and Canadian enforcement officials. Those delusions operated so as to prevent him from slipping into a deep depression. "His case surfaced when he shaved his head, put a ring through his nose and attempted to board a U.S.-bound flight carrying three concealed weapons," Dr. Girodo wrote.

Yet another agent was discovered to have hidden drug purchases under the seat of his car in order to conceal his success in making the buys. It turned out that the three months he had spent with his targets had developed in him a genuine affection for them. The agent exhibited what might have been interpreted in other circumstances as decent, normal human behavior when he confessed, "I couldn't testify against them ... they're my friends."

Success brought severe depression to a fourth agent in the study. During the six months following his victory over the targets he had befriended, the officer was unable to do anything but sit on his living room floor and talk to his dog.

THE SOUTH FLORIDA SYNDROME

In many cases of improper police behavior, there is no indication of an identifiable mental health collapse. All that comes through is bizarre and destructive behavior, often of a serious criminal nature. Such officers seem to act as if they lived in their own corrupt world unregulated by any law or ethical obligation. It is always a question as to whether the officers rationally and deliberately sought out the opportunities for illegal gains or if the temptations and stresses of drug enforcement simply happened to overcome their moral defenses.

Stresses on the police in the south Florida area seem to have exacted a huge toll in recent years. Indeed, simply to live in that area is to know daily that you are living in the middle of a war zone. Even after almost 10,000 arrests claimed by the federal drug task force since 1982, the Miami Herald observed in December 1985 that no matter where you live in south Florida, "chances are a drug dealer lives nearby." Chances are, too, that a corrupt police officer does also. Police officers have been implicated in a stunning array of offenses, most having some connection with the billions in drug money flowing through the community—drug use, drug sales, thefts of large sums of cash from police department safes, home burglaries, robbery, and murder. The question on the minds of many citizens was etched in a headline of the Herald in late 1985: "How many cops have gone bad?"

Far too many had, by that time and thereafter. The allegations of massive police corruption continued into 1986. However, I met a large cross section of the enforcement officials in that area—the staff director of the Vice President's task force, Customs agents, many Miami drug-enforcement police and prosecution officials, from top executives to street cops. And I have spoken to many experts in the area and reviewed a mountain of written material about that region and its police. If these people are somehow afflicted with mass defects of character, I did not observe them. In my opinion, many of the enforcement officers in south Florida rate among the best the county has. The entire structure of law enforcement and justice in that region, however, is being weakened by the harsh pressures of the drug war.

There is a message in the chaos of south Florida—and in the social cesspools into which we have thrown our prosecutors and police all over the country—that we cannot ignore. Even our finest enforcement officials face great risks of themselves becoming victims of the crushing pressures created by seeking to enforce the drug laws in the martial spirit demanded by the leading drug warriors at this time in America.