Description

This is the story of the single most successful anti-money laundering sting in DEA history and how it led from the cocaine fields of Colombia to the poppy fields of Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

Imagine you are a Drug Enforcement Administration official and you?ve just put together the biggest anti-moneylaundering sting in history. Imagine that you have created a front company that has tied together the Colombian drug cartels, the Sicilian La Cosa Nostra, the Russian mob, and Middle Eastern terrorists in a trail leading from South America to the opium fields of Afghanistan.

Then imaging that the Justice Department shuts you down. What do you do next?

That's the story in Inside the DEA by retired Special Agent in Charge Tom Clifford. It?ll make your blood boil.

Prologue

Defining Moments

This work began as a documentary of the largest international undercover money laundering project, Operation Green Ice, in the history of the United States, but the background to this achievement became just as important as the main topic. This journey is important so you can understand how I arrived at my destination. Therefore, this true story does not confine itself to the first half of the 1990's when the operation took place, but finds its real origin on the day President John F. Kennedy died.

_ _ _

As an eighteen year old college freshman, I ran frantically down the granite steps leading from the Iona College campus to North Avenue in New Rochelle, New York.

“It can't be true. God, make him safe, please,” I muttered aloud.

Running across the avenue and entering the Iona student hangout, the Beachmont, I watched as everyone's gaze was fixed on the overhead television. Silence replaced the Irish ballads which were the usual fare of the day. The TV was tuned to Channel 2 where CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, trying to control his emotions, declared the worse -- the President was dead.

At that moment, it was as if all the viewers were made breathless and a consensual gasp was heard throughout the drinking establishment. It was as if a Northeastern winter wind was created from this gush which climbed down my spine and raised goose bumps all over my skin. At that moment, the words were indelibly inscribed in the hidden caverns of my brain forever.

“No, no,” I said as I retreated out of the bar and darted to my 1959 English Ford parked around the corner. Sitting in the front seat, I sobbed, then, cried uncontrollably. A stranger, walking down the street, looked into the car and upon seeing me crying, his eyes welled as he walked away shaking his head.

I calmed myself enough to drive home to my two story brick house in Woodlawn, a northern Bronx suburb of New York City. I needed to be alone in my own room where I could hide from this unbearable reality. Upon arrival at the house, my sister-in-law, Lois, who was standing at the top of the front stairs of the house, looked distraught.

Lois asked, “Tom, have you heard?”

I replied, “Yes, I saw it on TV.”

“No, no,” she said. “Have you heard about Uncle Jim Coleman?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your brother found him dead this morning in his bed,” she answered.

Overloaded, I could not comprehend this new revelation. Uncle Jim, a World War II Navy veteran, 34 years old, who served as a gunner on a PT boat when he was 16 years old in the battles of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, was dead.

John F. Kennedy, Captain of his own PT boat and President, was dead. My idols and role models were both gone at the same time. One man called for me and my generation to come forward to serve and my uncle provided the simple example of that unwavering service.

I was inconsolable and could not even offer my mother any comfort for the loss of her younger brother. I withdrew to my bedroom and sought sleep as a form of denial-at least for a little while. I spent the next three days between the television and the funeral parlor and it ended when both heroes were placed to rest in different places on the same day. I had only a short period to grieve these events as it would start all over again as my sister in law, Lois at 29 years of age, would be dead in ten weeks. The idyllic life of youth was shattered and the reality of the world seeped into my being.

Years later on January 4, 1971, I raised my right hand in the offices of The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drug's New York Regional Office at 90 Church Street in lower Manhattan, in the shadow of two new silver towers, and pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States and work for the American people.

A picture of John F. Kennedy was on the wall behind the desk of Regional Director Bill Durkin as he read the oath of office. I repeated the words as I looked at the picture and wished that my uncle could also be there on that day and, in a way, I felt he was.

Later that day, I looked at my mother and father's faces, brimming with pride, and an inner strength and confidence welled up within me.

It was now my moment to serve.

What follows is that story.

Chapter 1

“Shut It Down”

March 1995

The sunlight shone through the bar window in San Diego and reflected from the ice in my glass of Jack Daniels. Hypnotized, I stared at its dancing twinkle -- or maybe I was sleep-drinking.

“Wake up, Tom. Earth calling. Your cell is ringing.” said Frank Donnelly.

“Oh . . . sorry,” I replied, “would you answer it? I'm too tired to talk.”

Frank answered the phone in his New York abruptness, “Hello.” He listened and said “Hold on,” passing the phone, sarcastically saying, “sorry, it's your life calling.” Th e phone call was from Greg Passic, the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chief of Financial Operations in Washington D.C., who told me that he had just received word from his source in the Department of Justice that Attorney General Janet Reno was planning a shut down of all our long term undercover money laundering operations. DEA would be notified officially at the regular weekly meeting of the DEA Special Undercover Operations Committee. It was his opinion that the past incidents occurring in Somalia, Waco, Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City were just too much for them and they were now trying to minimize any further risk. It was obvious to me that our operations were considered too risky for this political environment. He then requested that I take a red eye to D.C. and show up at the meeting at 10 o'clock -- adding that I should not disclose this surreptitious phone call.

“The surprise for them will be that they don't want you there so the vote will be decided in their favor. Use your obnoxious New York charm for our side,” he stated.

I had no option. I had to go. I told Frank of the expected Justice decision. Frank went ballistic. “Fucken politicians and bureaucrats- every time they put their two cents in, the crooks have a celebration and laugh their way to the bank.”

Frank Donnelly was a New York City detective with the Homicide Squad in Manhattan South who joined the DEA as an Intelligence Analyst after he retired in 1987. He was now my Doctor Watson in the undercover operation as he had an uncanny instinct to know when people and situations were going well or when something was going to explode in our faces. Besides his dark New York humor, he provided me with the comic relief that I so needed when the pressure became unbearable. One laugh and everything seemed okay.

“It ain't over till it's over, Yogi, so take me to the airport.” I said.

I always carried an overnight bag in my car since unexpected travel became a regular routine since we began Operation Green Ice in 1989. I took the shuttle to LAX and transferred to the red eye on American to D.C. I was exhausted and this was further complicated by the situation that I could never sleep on planes.

In the darkness of that pitch black sky with just the drone of the airplane engines wining, I was left with thoughts of what had gone wrong in my quest even though it had been an exciting and adventurous journey-one without regrets. But now I was confronted with conflict at every turn. People thought I was trying to climb the organizational ladder, but they are wrong. The last thing I wanted was that final promotion to the Senior Executive Service which would put me on the chicken dinner circuit and have me shuffling papers in some large office in a city in which I would be a stranger and distant myself from the real action of the game.

Some people thought I was feeding an inflated ego and others thought it was typical bureaucratic power-grabbing. Then there were those who thought that I was just another obnoxious New Yorker who enjoyed pissing off people who did not come from the greatest city in the world. It was none of these. It was simply the exhilaration and the mystery of the chase. Maybe it was the ‘Sherlock Holmes' syndrome without the drug abuse. The greater and more illusive the target, the more determined I became that it was possible to reach-Don Quixote in the flesh. My windmills are real and I am the wind that turned them.

I didn't know if it was fate, luck or intellect that caused the success of all my long term undercover operations. They just worked and my bosses basked in the light that they gave off for their own careers-even though many fought them along the way. I had to overcome many of my superiors who could not see the vision and many of my subordinates who were only in it for what they could personally glean for their own careers. I shunned the limelight at the end of the operations as I felt emotionally expended when they were over. I was programmed over the decades of my career-the big case or operation was the only investigations that gave me satisfaction-the Mafia, the Cartels, and the Russian Mob were my playmates and the international scene was my playground. I always looked forward for the next bigger one. It was truly the mystery of the chase and the exhilaration of the race which drove me.

The big cases in New York as a rookie agent-the largest undercover buy in Martinique; Operation Springboard-taking down the remnants of the French Connection; the Pizza Connection and other international heroin and cocaine investigations conditioned me like a Pavlovian dog. These early successes resulted in a 1973 invitation to transfer to the International Division in DEA Headquarters-way before a young agent would get the opportunity to rise to such an elevated position. This invitation ensured an early rise in the organization with a promotion to higher level pay grades each year. During this tour, I learned the politics of government and how to short cut the system when you want to get things done-invaluable experience, but more enemies to add to the list as you rise. I learned to stay in the policy ‘gray area' which was the shortest way to achieving what you wanted without breaking the rules on either side.

Then the big cases and operations unfolded in Miami in the late 1970's and early 1980's. These were the large undercover operations which netted hundreds of high level drug traffickers, thousands of kilos of cocaine, hundreds of pounds of heroin and tens of millions of dollars. It escalated me to the top of the agency as the expert of long term money laundering undercover operations, but I never seemed satisfied and this is what worried the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. both in my own agency and in Justice, FBI, CIA and the Department of State. But now I was meeting a stone wall. It was a new day and I was considered as one who made too many waves and created risky business.

The first phase of Operation Green Ice put us over the 80 million dollar mark in drug dollars. We had made three million dollars in commissions in the last 18 months of the operation which gave me the latitude to do anything I wanted to do which was to take down the Cartels in Cali and their partners in Europe and Russia. The scorecard was rising with 260 potential arrests in 12 countries and the identification of 300 money laundering bank accounts. We had established an international financial cartel with a paper bank on the Island of Guersey off the French Coast which the British assisted in establishing. We had storefront businesses in seven American cities and others in Rome, Madrid, London, Toronto, and The Cayman Islands, which served as drop off points for the drug money. Our credibility was solid as our cover story was seamless. We now had a real life American banker in Miami who was our financial man for the organization, and a background in the Mexico underworld that gave our undercover operatives a real underground reference.

I had taken operational trips to sixteen countries where we established an operational coalition of law enforcement and intelligence agencies that were able to act in real time. Green Ice continued in its second phase and was now making its way into the Mexican Cartels, the Southern California casas de cambios (money exchange houses) and their underground banking system. It was ironic that all these accomplishments were teetering on the interference of wavering Washington bureaucrats who were out of touch with the real objectives of the operation. We had come so far in the last six years and all could be lost by a mere vote in a bureaucratic Committee.

I arrived at eight o'clock in the morning at Ronald Reagan National Airport and took a taxi to DEA Headquarters. I had served two tours over seven years in Headquarters so I was well versed on the games people played within. The Headquarters buildings are two maroon glass towers overlooking the Pentagon on Army Navy Drive. I have to laugh when I think of the original thirteen story Headquarters building in the red light district on 14th Street where we had lunch in strip bars during the seventies. A long time has passed since then when the management expected us to drink heavy so we could hang in with the criminal underworld while, and now, the new cadre of agents spent lunch in the gym and surfed the government net during the day.

I am not critical of these new warriors as time, size, bureaucracy and politics had changed the agency and I believe they will never experience the adventures that I was privileged to have had in the last two decades-the international investigations ending on the streets of New York City; infiltration of the Gambino Family in Brooklyn; closing down the remains of the French Connection mob; chasing down mid level cocaine distributors in Miami and the Caribbean, and shutting down banks and professional businesses in the money laundering business in South Florida. These adventures were real and I was a player within real life Web video games.

I cleared myself with the Security checkpoint and went to the Financial Investigations Section where I knew that I would inadvertently find out about the Special Undercover Committee meeting. I was right for as soon as I walked into the office, the secretary asked if I was here for the meeting. I played dumb as she requested that I better attend as Green Ice was on the agenda so, I naively agreed, thus getting the Chief off the hook for his secret phone call the night before. The meeting took place promptly at 10 o'clock and there were a number of chins which dropped when I came in and greeted my allies and antagonists at the table.

On the opposition was Mary Lee Warren who is the Assistant Deputy Attorney General under Attorney General Janet Reno. While we both respected each other, she knew I didn't pull punches and played my New York street tactics when I wanted to win at all costs. She knew that this would be one of those times. Others at the meeting included the Assistant Administrator for Enforcement, Chief of Special Operations, the Cocaine Desk Chief, and Greg Passic, the Chief of Financial Investigations and a group of Staff Assistants. I now knew that the majority of votes would be in my favor because of my physical presence and since the Department of Justice was not a voting member, but had veto power on policy matters. I was wrong.

After clearing out routine matters and approval of some pending investigative decisions, they discussed the status of a pending internal investigation of a DEA supervisor who stole $700,000 from a trafficker in a Fort Lauderdale money laundering investigation. The agent was arrested and was scheduled for trial. Even though this had nothing to do with Green Ice, Mary Lee Warren used this incident as the prelude to her startling announcement that the Attorney General wanted to begin the process of establishing close out dates for our pending undercover operations that involved the strategy of using storefronts for money laundering. She said that the Attorney General believed that the operations weren't moral, and that the potential for corruption, as demonstrated by the Fort Lauderdale supervisor, was so strong that she felt it was better that we follow more traditional investigative strategies.

“Throw the baby out with the wash water!” I retorted and asked immediately “What are those traditional strategies?” She faltered as she attempted to name things like wire taps and surveillance. My face slowly turned red and Warren started to feel uncomfortable for she knew that the obnoxious New Yorker was lurking beneath.

The Assistant Administrator, Julius Beretta, interrupted to relieve the tension. He stated that DEA had used the ‘undercover storefront' strategy for 12 years and its results were so impressive that it was hard to understand how any other strategy would achieve the same results. Warren said “It was a moral issue with the Attorney General.”

I retorted that her inference was that the previous three Attorney Generals took an immoral view of our strategy. Warren did not want to discuss the past. I posed the question that by taking Reno's viewpoint that this strategy was immoral, then the DEA should also withdraw from the strategy of buying and selling drugs which it had been doing since the early 1930's. I further stated that wouldn't the opposite also be true that if we stopped our money laundering operations then the money would be handled by criminal organizations that would never be uncovered because we would have no intelligence that our undercover operations provided. Would it also be true that hundreds of individuals would go free and hundreds of millions of dollars would not be seized since we were never be able to penetrate the underground economy before we used this present strategy? I continued ranting. Could it not be said that the Attorney General would be making an immoral decision if we were to stop these operations which would give the future potential defendants tacit immunity in the future? My Aristotelian logic was falling on deaf ears.

Warren stated that she was a messenger and that the Attorney General made decisions on policy for DEA. I knew that Mary Lee Warren would have been on my side if she was still the aggressive Assistant United States Attorney in New York and was working directly on these investigations. She looked at me and told me that I, just like her, worked for the Attorney General. I looked her in the eye and told her that I did not work for transitory appointees, but rather for the American people. I was not flag waving, but rather that my oath was to the Constitution and the American people and not to any particular Administration, which changed on a regular basis.

The Assistant Administrator now joined in and rebuked me for my aggressive diatribe, but he expressed the view that the exchange of these differing opinions was healthy. I now knew that the DEA Assistant Administrator was transformed by the ‘alien pods' turning him into a permanent bureaucrat. I couldn't control myself and blurted out that the decision to recede in an accepted strategic investigative tool had to do with politics. “Waco, Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City made any aggressive strategy too risky for politics and that the intrusion of politics into the investigative process is a disgrace to the role of constitutional officers,” was my retort.

“These groups are globalizing and we are withdrawing in retreat.” I concluded.

The meeting was getting out of hand as I had not slept in days and my normal control restraints were coming undone. Warren then added more fuel to the fire. She told me that my previous request, to place two new groups of American money laundering organizations from San Ysidro and Sacramento, California under Green Ice, was denied. I told Warren that whoever made that decision was giving tacit immunity to money laundering organizations and it had the appearance that a conflict of interest or a corrupting influence may be perceived in this denial.

She asked me if I was making an accusation. I told her that I was not making accusations, but describing the net effect. That is the reason why political appointees remained partitioned from the investigative process. Special prosecutors were created by law since politicians should remain outside the work of federal investigative agencies. I declared, “If I want to investigate the President for legitimate and corroborated criminal allegations, nothing can stop me, and the Attorney General is telling me that I can't investigate two money laundering groups in California.”

Warren retorted that she was not saying that they can't be investigated, but I should investigate them outside Green Ice. I told her that is my point . . . traditional investigative methods do not work in this specialized field of money laundering law enforcement. “Following the money requires eyeballs-not pencils.”

The Assistant Administrator stopped the meeting without a vote- the political thing to do. He stated that these matters require the direct involvement of the Administrator with the Deputy Attorney General and he closed the meeting.

I was livid. Everything that I had accomplished for the last fifteen years was being destroyed by an Attorney General with no balls. They were telling me, in effect, that if I didn't like it, I knew where the door was and don't let it hit me in the ass as I departed. I was determined not to give up at that time.

I left the meeting immediately without talking to anyone. At the Security Station, one of the staff assistants caught up with me and told me that they wanted me in the Assistant Administrator's office. I told the assistant “okay,” and when he left for the elevator, I went out the door and hailed a cab for the Airport. I had no sleep nor patience left and knew that I would lose it if I got into a debate with the bureaucrats over the politics of this situation. I looked back out of the taxi window at the two glass structures and sadly realized that I would not be returning to them ever again.

On the return trip, I loaded myself down with bourbon to make up for the lack of sleep and my intense emotions. All I could hear in my head was a voice echoing, “Shut it down! Shut it down!” I didn't know if it was my voice saying it so that I could start living a normal life or was it Janet Reno screaming in my ear.

Green Ice was more than traffickers' laundering drug money. When I created Green Ice, I did not fully realize the darker implications of the domestic and international impact of money laundering on us as a nation and the international community as a whole. As the operation continued, I observed that we were losing our attempts to stop it, and my visions became alarming. Money used for evil purposes begets avarice and greed. Greed begets arrogance, and arrogance begets misplaced power. Th is leads to corruption of the co-conspirators, the victims, the innocent and ultimately to our financial and social institutions.

Th is is the lesson of Colombia, Russia, Panama and now Mexico, and any other location where the drug villains touch and wish to acquire and corrupt. Of course, there is another group of people who have to share their own shame in the growth of the kingdom of drugs. The American people developed an insatiable need to change their existence by altering their minds in the 1970's. Today there is a popular cliché that goes “If you can remember the seventies, you obviously weren't there,” which summarizes the state of our culture at the time. Drug abuse increased and was intensified by the Vietnam War and our colleges and streets became experimentation labs for every drug imaginable.

We have had a hard time as one nation accepting blame upon ourselves in that we have our own national defense mechanisms of rationalization in explaining away our faults. In the early seventies, we declared a ‘War on Drugs' for we looked upon the drug suppliers as the evil ones and the drug users as victims. We even called ourselves a ‘victim' nation which gave the connotation that we did not have control over our environment or ourselves as responsible individuals. It was easy to blame those other people who were victimizing us, and not give a thought that the real evil might lie somewhere closer to home.

As the plane made its way to San Diego, my nostalgic day dreams wandered back again to the past and how this all started.

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