1995, Hope
Street, Philadelphia: My partners and I are out hunting heroin dealers –
hopefully a nice pinch. The tip comes in
from an informant with a long tail,
the length extending with each corroborated whisper that leads to an
arrest. He is more right than wrong
lately. Drug pinches are routine for me;
I cannot remember a day without an arrest.
Even the odd off-duty robbery arrests infiltrate my life to a point
where it all blurs together.
Things always
look the same; abandoned houses, cockroach covered walls moving in the dark ,
rats, no doors, no windows and the walking
dead, as we come to call the zombies that roam East division. Today feels different. We enter an abandoned house, some Agents are hands free, and some are carrying automatic
MP5s. We make our way in through a dark
empty hall to one huge room. The
interior walls and ceilings are gone.
Sunlight floods the place. I
squint against the glare and the dust we kick up. There is a rainbow hanging high above the
smell of death. No pot of gold here.
The only sound comes from rats scratching on some aluminum sheets that board up
the house.
The place is
empty. Just one body lay dead in a maze
of trash and rubble. The set of works from the community free
give-away program stood shiny, new, and still stuck in his carotid
artery. Same scene, same smells, but
today is different for me. Everything is
too bright and sharp-edged. I start
softly singing “He’s off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz” in a
monotone, my partners stare. The irony gets
to me. Here we are in what some call East, others the Land of Oz, the press terms it The
Badlands, and I find myself once again singing, just above a whisper Somewhere over the Rainbow when all I
ever see is Death and Destruction. The Great and Powerful OZ, which I recently
equated with Al Gore and the Clinton Administration, once again fails to answer
the Drug War. They are somewhere in the bright sun,
campaigning, shaking hands, probably enjoying a Mama Juana, a Dominican cocktail, with their supporters – all
courtesy of the ten spot this junkie and others like him, spent to off himself.
All the
connections are getting to me, running backward through my head. This guy, laying in his own vomit, probably
stole from his own mother to buy the glassine packet of heroin supplied by the
Dominican Traffickers who write a fat check to Clinton and Gore who preach a
War on Drugs. The drugs dealt on Hope
Street in Philadelphia are supplied by traffickers in the Dominican Republic
who are buying votes in the US and lining Bill, Hillary Clinton and Vice
President Al Gore’s pockets. Gore
accepts a check from them just the night before at Coogan’s Bar in Washington
Heights in the heart of the most notorious part of the Dominican Drug
Trafficking area of New York City. The
spoils of the War on Drugs are lining the pockets of the Clinton
Administration.
I make the call
to Homicide and they will call the meat
wagon. I will do my paperwork. And like always, I will end my day asking
myself, is this shit for real? Hope
Street, of all places, in a house that looks like a twister hit it. No hope, here.
For 19 years
until I am sidelined by forced withdrawal,
I fought the Drug War on the streets of Philadelphia. I never had a problem fighting the dealers
and the addicts – that is the job I live for.
What I have a problem with and what I am forced to withdraw from is
fighting all the good guys including
my commanding officers, State officials, and Federal agents. I challenge men and women in power who are
supposed to be on the forefront of the War on Drugs.
As I find out
the hard way, there are a whole lot of people in Federal, State, and Local
Agencies who have agendas that fly in the face of law enforcement. My superiors give me and my partners the
moniker Bastard Squad because we won’t
back off of what we know is a major Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) that
needs to be taken down and so now they isolate us from everyone else, no one is
allowed to work with us; we are the bastard step children. Word comes down that the CIA and The State
Department are behind the orders; but I will tell you who the real bastards
are. The way it plays out in the press is
much different from the truth, but it’s always that way isn’t it; well here’s
how it is reported.
In the fall of
1995, my partner, Charlie Micewski aka the Flash, and I discover that a
Dominican Republic political party is raising campaign funds for Dominican
Presidential candidate Pena Gomez, by selling heroin and cocaine in
Philadelphia and up and down the East coast.
We work with DEA agents in New York and attempt to seize half a million
in campaign funds that we know come from drug deals. This campaign money is to be given to the
visiting Pena Gomez and his PRD delegation and we know when and where. We are to stop the entourage and confiscate
the ill-gotten funds but the State Department calls it off. The U.S. State Department is backing the
guy. I didn’t give a shit.
Two weeks later
US Attorneys and the local DA tell the OAG they will no longer prosecute our
cases. Over 80 accused drug dealers that
we take off the street, skate,
because of this decision.
My book takes
the reader from my youth in Philadelphia through 34 years in Law
Enforcement. I have no agenda. I tell the whole truth.
One of the
agencies that most effectively block our efforts is the CIA. It’s documented. There’s no conjecture here. I write the facts as they have been reported
in every area of the media including my firsthand knowledge. The CIA turns a blind eye to certain
activities because it serves their purposes.
In the 80’s and early 90’s the CIA helps to keep the Haitian military
and political leadership in power and in the process turns a blind eye to drug
trafficking. They add positions to the
CIA payroll for National Intelligence Service (SIN), which ironically, is created
to fight the cocaine trade. SIN officers
however, traffic drugs and aid some of the Haitian military and political
leaders.
“We had problems in Haiti, where friends of ours -- that is,
intelligence sources in the Haitian military -- had turned their facilities,
their ranches and their farms over to drug traffickers. Instead of putting
pressure on that rotten leadership of the Haitian military, we defended them.
We held our noses, we looked the other way, and they and their criminal friends
distributed, through a variety of networks, cocaine in the United States -- in
Miami, in Philadelphia, New York and parts of Pennsylvania." - (Jack Blum in
testimony before Congress)
My story follows
Dominican traffickers, backed by Dominican politicians who are backed by the US
State Department. It’s a clear trail of
drugs, money and political deals.
Every agency has
a mission and an agenda, and how they fulfill their mission often conflicts
with other agency missions. My book explores these facts from a unique
angle. I am one of the narcotic agents
on the street who suffer the consequences.
In trying to do the right thing every day I am challenging people in
high places who swore to uphold the law.
It just so happens that the losers in this
game are citizens on the street, the kids who end up dying from crack and
heroin and the Narcs like me who risk their lives every day trying to make it
all right.
