Whitey's Payback (20 page)

One assistant U.S. attorney who tried to sound alarm bells about Lucas was Thomas Gruscinski, a man who felt the consequences of challenging the golden goose. Gruscinski met with Lucas for a 2003 investigation of Akron grocers who were suspected of laundering black market proceeds. Lucas bragged to Gruscinski that “he could make trees talk” and told the assistant U.S. attorney that he planned to pull over a grocer on a routine traffic stop. He would take a drug-sniffing dog so he could claim probable cause to search the grocer and seize his assets. Gruscinski felt the scheme was illegal and wanted no part of it. He later was told that Lucas went over his head to a supervisor for approval to make the stop. When Gruscinski wrote an interoffice memo complaining about Lucas, he was taken off the case.

At the hearing for the three PCP dealers, Gruscinski took the stand and testified that he believed his criticism of Lucas was the reason for his dismissal.

Lucas’s trial is scheduled to begin in January 2010. It will be one of the most significant criminal prosecutions ever in the Northern District of Ohio. Testifying against Lucas will be his former CI Bray and his former partner Ansari, not to mention untold agents, deputy sheriffs, cops, prosecutors, dope dealers, and others involved in cases overseen or facilitated by Lucas.

The man has his defenders. At his indictment in May, the courtroom was filled with fellow DEA agents, police officers, prosecutors, and friends, people who contend Lucas is a crackerjack agent who is being used as a scapegoat. A prosecutor who worked with Lucas on numerous drug cases says, “He is the hardest-working law enforcement official I’ve ever known. The people criticizing [Lucas] don’t know the kind of work he put into his cases. He made solid cases and put a lot of bad people behind bars. He did what a law enforcement official is supposed to do.”

The defense of Lucas as a good cop is a slippery slope. Even if Lucas were to be found not guilty, Bray has already pleaded guilty to fabrication of evidence, which calls into question a lifetime’s worth of criminal cases. Many people currently incarcerated are likely to be set free—not just innocent people but actual criminals and dope dealers Lucas knowingly or unknowingly convicted using bogus evidence. Whether Lucas was corrupt or merely ignorant, his actions will lead to the release of hardened criminals. What kind of law enforcement is that?

His wayward trajectory was charted long ago. Back in 1995 at the trial of Peter Hidalgo, Lucas testified that he was, if anything, overly cautious when dealing with informants. “With everyone I deal with in my job, besides my partners, I am careful,” he said. When it came to informants, “You watch them from the nature of what they do. They’re informants … they’re involved with other drug dealers. That is their whole function.”

The defense attorney interjected, “You want to corroborate as much as you can, correct?”

“Exactly,” answered the agent. “The whole reason you do surveillance is corroboration. It’s a large part of our work.”

In the Mansfield drug cases, there was little corroboration. The reason a sixth-grade photo of Geneva France was used was because there were no surveillance photos. That may have been intended. If you’re attempting to frame innocent people, surveillance can be a problem.

James Owen—a renowned criminal defense lawyer representing France, Nabors (who was released after two and a half years), Ballard, and others in a civil lawsuit against Lucas, the DEA, and Richmond County sheriff’s deputies—sees the trial as a possible cover-up. Says Owen, “How was an agent with a checkered career like Lucas—a man whose work had been called into question numerous times in the past—set loose in Mansfield to make wrongful conviction cases, and who knew about it?” To Owen, Lucas was aided and abetted by a criminal justice system that allowed him to operate and encouraged his behavior. With Lucas exposed, the same system seeks to protect itself by cutting off a rogue agent. “Why wasn’t Blas Serrano indicted? Why was Deputy Sheriff Metcalf allowed to plead guilty to a minor charge and return to his job, free of any punishment? Why is Greg White allowed to retire into a cushy job as a federal magistrate without having to explain what he knew and when he knew it?”

In August, Owen’s clients delivered a letter to Special Prosecutor Bruce Teitlebaum, who is handling the Lucas investigation. The victims demanded to see documents currently under seal by a federal order. They wrote, “We view any refusal to allow us access to this information to be a cover-up that simply continues the crime committed against us.”

Owen argues that a federal judge needs to appoint an independent commission to investigate Lucas’s career, why he was allowed to make cases and how those cases were facilitated by others.

Nabors remembers when he took the stand and prosecutor Serrano demanded, “Why? Why on earth would a federal agent like Lee Lucas frame you on drug charges? What could possibly be his motive?” Nabors did not have a good answer, and he is still baffled by the question.

What did Lucas have to gain by framing a bunch of innocent African Americans in the small industrial town of Mansfield? The answer is to be found in the inverted morality of the war on drugs.

In the Northern District of Ohio, Lucas had an exalted reputation as an agent who delivered a high volume of cases; he made the world go around. With narcotics charges, you don’t need much of a case. Lucas was good at securing an indictment (his word and the word of a CI was usually enough), and severe mandatory sentencing ensured a wealth of plea bargains. Lucas wasn’t so good at producing evidence for trial—surveillance videos, corroboration, even believable photos to verify identities. There is a temptation to be sloppy with dope cases because one can be. Lucas and his team could easily have made a dozen legitimate arrests in Mansfield, but that wasn’t enough to justify the allocation of federal money and the formation of a federal task force.

The day after the announcement that Lucas had been indicted, the new U.S. drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski, made the startling declaration that the DOJ would no longer use the phrase war on drugs. In the
Wall Street Journal
, Kerlikowski is quoted saying, “Regardless of how you try to explain to people that it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on product,’ people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

Kerlikowski’s statement seemed to suggest a shift in how the DOJ views narcotics prosecutions. But in the following months, he appeared to backtrack by announcing, “We will continue to vigorously prosecute any violations of the drug statutes in this country.” When contacted to comment on drug police in general and, more specifically, the Lucas case, a spokesperson for the U.S. Office of National Drug Policy responded that Director Kerlikowski could not “fit it into his schedule.” Official spokespersons for the DOJ, DEA, and U.S. Attorney’s Office also declined to comment. Whether or not the drug war is over, or even in remission, remains to be seen. But if anyone wants a clear assessment of how narcotics prosecutions have skewed criminal justice and subverted the notion of due process, they don’t need to look far. Innumerable federal agents, cops, U.S. attorneys, prosecutors, and judges facilitated and benefited from the efforts of Lucas. Every case he supervised over the years is now tainted.

In a courtroom in downtown Cleveland, it is DEA agent Lucas who will stand accused, but his co-conspirators are legion.

POSTSCRIPT: On February 5, 2010, Lee Lucas was acquitted on eighteen criminal counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Many in Cleveland were shocked, with one local attorney familiar with the case referring to it as “our O. J. Simpson case.” However, the verdict had seemed inevitable once the judge in the case ruled that no evidence would be admissible that did not relate exclusively to the Mansfield drug cases. There was no mention of Lucas’s previous controversial cases in Miami and Bolivia, no evidence pertaining to his previous uses of confidential informants. Consequently, the entire case rested on the testimony of Jerrell Bray. After the verdict, a juror was quoted as saying that the jury simply did not believe that Bray was a credible witness.

Jerrell Bray died in prison from natural causes on September 9, 2012. He was forty years old.

The killings take place in a crowded area in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, mid-afternoon.

A white Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates is chased by two vehicles one block from the U.S. border, near the Rio Grande. The driver of the Toyota is a man, age thirty-four. His wife, next to him in the passenger seat, is thirty-five; she is four months pregnant. In the back, a seven-month-old baby is strapped into a car seat.

A black SUV and another vehicle occupied by armed gunmen pull alongside the Toyota. The man driving the Toyota tries to escape; he maneuvers desperately through traffic toward the Paso del Norte Bridge, the border crossing to El Paso, Texas. From the black SUV, gunmen open fire, strafing the side of the Toyota. The driver is hit; the car veers widely out of control, collides with other automobiles, and comes to a halt alongside the curb.

The woman passenger screams in terror. Professional assassins step out of their car. Dressed commando-style in all black, they open fire on the woman and her husband, finishing the job.

After the fusillade subsides, the assassins approach the vehicle. Some members of the hit team cordon off the area. Although they are less than a block from the border, where dozens of Mexican customs officials and armed military personnel are stationed, no cops approach the murder scene.

The gunmen check to make sure the man and woman are dead. Ignoring the crying baby in the backseat, they gather up spent shell casings and other evidence, then leave the scene. No one chases after them.

Once the killers are gone, military police descend. The couple in the front seat is history. In the backseat, the baby screams amid shattered glass and splattered blood but is miraculously okay. A policewoman reaches in and grabs the baby and clutches her to her chest.

The killings should be shocking. Even in Juárez, called the deadliest city in the world, where the war against narco traffickers has given rise to a staggering body count, this terrible murder—which takes place in the middle of the day in front of dozens of onlookers—is outrageous.

Even so, the flagrant brutality of the hit might have been absorbed into the body politic of Juárez, a city under siege, were it not for a simple fact: The victims are not only American citizens, but also government employees. The female victim, Lesley Enriquez, worked at the U.S. consulate in Juárez. Her husband, Arthur Redelfs, was a corrections officer at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, across the border in El Paso.

The killings take place on March 13, 2010. At roughly the same time as the Enriquez-Redelfs hit, elsewhere in Juárez another assassination takes place. Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the husband of a U.S. consulate worker, leaving the same children’s birthday party attended by Enriquez and Redelfs, in a similar white SUV, is also gunned down by a professional hit squad.

The killings have all the earmarks of drug cartels, which have been slaughtering people in Juárez, and all of Mexico, at an ungodly rate. The presidents of Mexico and the United States condemn the killings, with a spokesman for the National Security Council referring to them as “brutal murders.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expresses regret and denounces the cartels, saying, “There is no question that they are fighting against both our governments.”

If there was doubt before, there is no longer. The killings represent a tipping point. What was viewed by some U.S. citizens and public officials as mostly a Mexican problem is now an American problem, with American victims. No one is immune. And no one is safe.

“In all my years in law enforcement, I never imagined it would get this bad,” says Phil Jordan, a thirty-one-year veteran of the DEA who, in the mid-1990s, was promoted to director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency’s eyes and ears on the borderland and the international drug trade. Although he is now retired, Jordan maintains a network of law enforcement contacts, and he is frequently quoted on narco-related subjects in the press. His interests are professional but also personal. In 1995, his younger brother, Lionel Bruno, was shot dead in a Kmart parking lot in El Paso. A thirteen-year-old hood from Juárez was eventually arrested and prosecuted for the homicide; the official story was that it was a carjacking gone wrong. But Jordan remains convinced the cartels targeted his brother because of his career in the DEA. A version of Jordan’s story is chronicled in the 2002 book
Down by the River
by Charles Bowden.

“What you are seeing in Mexico now,” says Jordan, “is a new low. The cartels have become like Al Qaeda. They have learned from Al Qaeda.”

Jordan is referring specifically to the cartels’ use of beheadings to deliver a message. Cartel rivals and other enemies are kidnapped and, on occasion, videotaped being beheaded or dismembered, with the savagery broadcast on YouTube and popular Internet sites such as El Blog del Narco.

Then there are the remote-control car bombings that, throughout the summer of 2010, became increasingly commonplace. The entire country has morphed into a perverse version of the traditional Mexican celebration el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead).

The numbers are shocking. Since December 2006, there have been nearly 30,000 narco-related murders in Mexico. The violence has taken place all around the country, from large municipalities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara to tourist enclaves such as Acapulco and the Yucatán Peninsula. Mass graves, severed heads and limbs, mutilated bodies left on display in the town plaza with threatening notes have become a near-daily occurrence.