Authors: Pete Earley
“You’re under arrest,” he declared.
The Mexican government was enraged when it learned what had happened. The nation’s top prosecutor said Verdugo had been the victim of an illegal kidnapping and issued arrest warrants for the six Mexican officers who had helped the deputies. But they had already fled the country, along with twenty-four of their family members. Safir had arranged for them to enter the United States, and Shur had accepted them into
WITSEC. They would be given new identities, relocated, and paid $32,000 in rewards. Verdugo, meanwhile, was driven to a jail in Los Angeles to await trial on marijuana trafficking charges. As expected, the Los Angeles defense attorneys hired to defend him said they were aghast at the deputies’ actions and argued that his arrest had been illegal. “The U.S. Marshals Service has no right to storm into a sovereign country and kidnap one of its citizens,” Verdugo’s attorneys protested in a court motion demanding his immediate release. But the Justice Department cited several long-standing court rulings that said it did not matter how international fugitives ended up on American soil, as long as their capture did not involve torture that “shocks the conscience.” A judge concurred, and Verdugo remained locked up.
Although Verdugo was a major marijuana trafficker, that was not the main reason why Safir had agreed to help the DEA abduct him. He had taken part in the gruesome 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar, known to his friends as Kiki, and Safir and Shur were eager to do whatever they could to catch and punish Camarena’s murderers. “I told my staff I would accept anyone into WITSEC who had any information about the Kiki murder, regardless of whether or not they would later be used as witnesses to testify,” Shur recalled. “I was lowering our normal standards for admission because I was sickened by how he had been killed. In my eyes, the Camarena case had become the most important case in our office.” As a former DEA agent himself, Safir had worried that other DEA agents would be slaughtered if the United States didn’t act quickly to punish Camarena’s killers. “Of course there was going to be political fallout,” he said later. “But I felt what we did was justified. I was not
going to stand by and watch a DEA agent’s brutal murder go unavenged.”
Camarena had been sent to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1981 to help the local Mexican and state police combat an increase in drug smuggling there. He quickly ran afoul of two powerful drug lords. When their efforts to bribe him failed, they decided to abduct him. On February 7, 1985, Camarena left the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, where the DEA had its office, to meet his wife for lunch. Five men forced him at gunpoint into a car. They drove him to a mansion less than ten minutes away and for the next thirty hours tortured him. Burning cigarettes were pressed against his flesh and he was struck repeatedly with a lead pipe. A nail was pounded into his head. At one point, his tormentors brought in a local doctor to inject him with lidocaine, to stabilize his heart rate and prolong his life so they could continue beating him. Incredibly, his kidnappers tape-recorded the torture, and Camarena would later be heard screaming in pain on the tapes. A Mexican airplane pilot, Alfredo Zavala, was being tortured at the same time in the same house. The drug lords were convinced Zavala was one of Camarena’s sources and had been tipping him off whenever drug-laden flights took off or landed at the Guadalajara airport. Some thirty people visited the walled compound during the time the torture was being administered, but none did anything to help rescue the men. Their bodies were found a month later. They had been stripped to their shorts, eyes taped shut, and hands tied behind their backs. An autopsy showed Camarena had a broken jaw, two broken cheekbones, a broken nose, a crushed windpipe, and two skull fractures in addition to the nail driven into his head.
The Mexican government tried to downplay the
murder. It dragged its feet in the investigation and then Mexican officials speculated that Camarena had been killed because he was accepting bribes. The United States reacted by ordering a trunk-by-trunk search of every northbound car crossing the Mexican border, paralyzing traffic and putting a chokehold on Mexico’s $2 billion-per-year tourist business. Finally, the state police arrested nine small-time dope dealers, but the DEA knew the real culprits were going unpunished. Camarena had been overseeing Operation Padrino, which means “godfather” in Spanish, and its prime target had been Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. He and another godfather, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, had transformed Mexico’s drug trade from a cottage industry in the late 1970s into a billion-dollar conglomerate known as La Familia. Their ties reached into the highest offices in the Mexican government, and they were protected by Mexico’s business community, where La Familia laundered millions of dollars in drug profits through three hundred different firms, including resort hotels, fancy restaurants, and large car dealerships. The DEA learned from informants that Gallardo had assigned one of his top lieutenants, Rafael Caro Quintero, to kidnap and interrogate Camarena. Caro had a personal grudge against him. A few months earlier, the DEA agent had overseen a police raid at a six-thousand-acre farm that Caro owned where thousands of laborers openly grew and harvested marijuana. The raid had cost him an estimated $50 million in lost profits.
When it became clear that Mexican officials were not going to help them go after the drug lords, the DEA decided to go after them on their own, starting at the bottom and working up, which is where Safir’s black bag job had come into play. One of Caro’s most trusted associates in the drug business was Verdugo,
the smuggler shoved through the chain-link fence into the United States.
Worried that Safir would send his deputies after him next, Caro fled to Costa Rica, taking seven bodyguards and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend with him. There he bought a four-acre estate from an Iranian exile for $800,000 in cash, but three weeks later, acting on a tip from the DEA, Costa Rican commandos raided the villa and forced him to return to Mexico. He was arrested by Mexican authorities as soon as he crossed the border. They were worried that if they didn’t put him in jail, Safir’s deputies would snatch him up.
With two of Camarena’s murderers now in custody, the DEA and Marshals Service moved up the ladder by going after La Familia’s two godfathers. Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros had returned to his native Honduras, where he was one of the wealthiest residents of Tegucigalpa, with a personal fortune estimated at a billion dollars. The Honduran constitution forbade extraditions of any kind, regardless of the crime, so the DEA and Safir began lobbying military and Honduran police officials to find some excuse to expel Matta. They refused at first but under increased pressure finally agreed to cooperate in one of Safir’s black bag jobs.
On April 5, 1988, a team of deputy marshals led a hundred Honduran police and military soldiers to Matta’s exclusive compound. They arrived at 5:30
A.M.
and were poised to burst inside when someone pointed out that the Honduran constitution forbade the execution of search warrants before 6
A.M
. Matta was not at home in any case. He had gone on his morning jog and was drinking coffee with his lawyer, who lived on the same street. Glancing outside, Matta’s sister noticed the troops and telephoned him. Since Matta had not
broken any laws in Honduras, his lawyer urged him to return home and investigate the commotion. What happened next would later be hotly disputed. Matta would claim he was physically abducted, but Honduran police insisted that he had started swinging and kicking at them first. Under Honduran law, this gave them the right to arrest him and search his estate. The police would later claim they had found a bag of cocaine sitting in Matta’s kitchen. This conveniently gave them the authority they needed to expel him from Honduras. With two of Safir’s deputies riding in the car, Matta was whisked to the airport by two Honduran policemen. During the forty-minute ride, Matta offered the Hondurans a million dollars each if they would let him go and kill the deputies. When they didn’t respond, he began upping the price; by the time the car reached the airport he was offering them $20 million each. The Hondurans didn’t doubt Matta had the cash; they simply assumed that if they accepted it, he would kill them later without paying.
Matta was physically forced onto a flight headed to the Dominican Republic. By “chance,” a deputy was sitting on either side of him. When the plane landed, Dominican customs officials refused to let him disembark because he didn’t have a passport. The Dominicans, who had been tipped off by Safir, escorted Matta to another flight—the next one scheduled to leave their country. It “happened” to be an airplane bound for Puerto Rico, and now Matta found himself surrounded by four of Safir’s deputies. Again, they “happened” to be sitting in the seats next to him. During the flight, he tried to bribe them, again offering as much as $20 million each, but they arrested him as soon as the flight entered U.S. airspace. When the flight touched down, he was taken immediately to a federal prison.
Now only one Mexican godfather was still at large. The DEA knew Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was living in a house in Guadalajara that was swarming with bodyguards. But when they staked out the compound, they noticed a curious fact: All the bodyguards left the house early in the morning to eat breakfast in a nearby cantina. It turned out that the drug lord’s young wife refused to cook for them. The DEA and a squad of Mexico’s state police pushed their way inside the house during breakfast and arrested him without firing a bullet. Inside his bedroom, the DEA found records showing that he owned fifty homes and two hundred ranches in Mexico, and was worth an estimated $3 billion.
For more than five years, the DEA and the Marshals Service continued to track down other Mexicans suspected of being involved in the Camarena torture and murder. Whenever they ran into a problem getting help from Mexican authorities, they found a way around them. For instance, in April 1990 Mexican bounty hunters burst into the medical office of gynecologist Humberto Alvarez Machain in Guadalajara and forced him across the border to where DEA agents were waiting. He was accused of being the physician who had kept Camarena alive with injections while he was being tortured. His arrest set off another round of angry protests. Abducting drug dealers was one thing; snatching a prominent physician was another. Mexico’s president complained directly to the White House, and the nation’s top prosecutor filed criminal charges in Mexico City against the DEA agents who had engineered the arrest. The prosecutor then suggested that the Mexican government hire U.S. bounty hunters to kidnap the DEA agents and deliver them to Mexico for trial. In Los Angeles, defense attorneys demanded the
physician be released. This time a U.S. district judge agreed with them and ruled his capture was illegal. The Justice Department appealed, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court at the same time that marijuana smuggler Verdugo’s appeal got there. Since both men were claiming they had been kidnapped, the court consolidated their petitions and issued its ruling in 1992. The justices said the U.S. Constitution did not prohibit federal agents from kidnapping fugitives living in foreign countries, nor did it prevent the government from paying or hiring others to kidnap them, even though the abductions might be “shocking” and violate international law. Ironically, when the physician was put on trial, a Los Angeles jury acquitted him, and he was sent back to Mexico after having spent three years in a U.S. prison.
In the end, more than twenty Mexican citizens were arrested in the Camarena case. Verdugo, who was shoved across through the fence, was sentenced to life in prison plus 240 years. His boss, Rafael Caro Quintero, was tried in Mexico and given a forty-year sentence. Honduran drug kingpin Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros was sentenced in the United States to 225 years for drug trafficking, plus three life sentences for conspiracy in the death of Camarena. The last godfather captured, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, was sentenced by Mexican authorities to a forty-year prison term.
The period between 1983 and 1989 would later be described by many as the U.S. Marshals Service’s golden years. Safir would be credited with helping turn the service into a professional and highly specialized law enforcement operation. But much credit would also be given to Stanley E. Morris, who became the Marshals Service’s director in 1983, replacing William Hall. Morris was not a cop. Instead, he was a skilled
administrator who had served stints at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services. He understood how the Washington bureaucracy worked. Under his guidance, the Marshals Service was modernized and professionalized. It was Morris who established the National Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Program, which put deputies in charge of selling millions of dollars of property seized from drug dealers and other criminals under the RICO Act. He started a comprehensive Court Security Officers Program that trained deputies how to protect judges and federal courthouses. He began “Con Air,” the service’s private airline operation that shuttles some eighty thousand federal inmates each year across the country for court appearances or for prison transfers. He got Congress to increase his budget each year, and he used the extra funds to hire a third more deputies, purchase long-needed equipment, and build better facilities. He revamped the Marshals Service’s pay structure, a move that gave deputies hefty raises and attracted better-qualified recruits. Under Morris, the Marshals Service adopted an unofficial slogan: “When a job needs to be done and you don’t know who to give it to—give it to the U.S. Marshals.”
The WITSEC branch thrived under Morris. It became one of the most envied assignments in the service. Its 160 inspectors were the top of the heap. In 1988, the Marshals Service opened a WITSEC Safesite and Orientation Center in a secret location in a Washington suburb. It was Howard Safir’s brainchild, but it was Morris who had gotten the federal funds to build it. The center was created to operate as an Ellis Island for witnesses.