A Pattern Emerges

The Pennsylvania State narcotics agents who are suing the federal government — and alleging a conspiracy theory involving defense attorneys, the CIA, the Justice Department, international drug dealers and the State Department — are not alone.

There are more than 20 other federal agents and big city cops in other parts of the country who have raised similar allegations.

Former federal agent Joe Occhipinti is scheduled to testify before Congress, today, July 27, in favor of a bill that would create a new agency to investigate misconduct by the Justice Department. A House Judiciary subcommittee will hear testimony on legislation proposed by U.S. Rep. James Traficant Jr. (D-OH) to establish an independent federal agency to investigate allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Justice Department employees. Occhipinti supports the creation of a new federal agency to investigate and prosecute alleged misconduct, criminal activity, corruption and fraud by Justice Department personnel.

Rejected by the New York City Police Department because he was too short to meet their height requirements, Occhipinti joined the Customs Service and in just five years compiled the highest arrest record in the history of the Service. Along the way he bagged a wide range of bad guys from Mafioso to Colombian drug smugglers.

Occhipinti transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In his 16 years as an INS agent, he became the most highly decorated federal agent in U.S. history, earning 78 commendations and three Attorney General awards for valor and merit.

Occhipinti uncovered evidence that Dominican narco-dealers were buying up grocery stores, called "bodegas," in Washington Heights in order to facilitate drug trafficking and money laundering activities.

In August 1989, Occhipinti initiated "Operation Bodega" to conduct consensual searches — ones agreed to by the owners — of bodegas throughout the Washington Heights area. It was to be the most important investigation of his career.

He found that Dominican-organized crime groups, using bodegas as fronts, were operating an illegal lottery taking in more than $8 million a year. Occhipinti also uncovered evidence of loan sharking, drug dealing, money laundering, food stamp and coupon fraud, and the sale of counterfeit government documents, including INS forms, fake Puerto Rican birth certificates and phony bank letters of credit.

The Occhipinti investigation also uncovered ties between bodega owners with criminal records, members of The Federation of Dominican Businessmen and Industrialists, and a trading company in Greenwich, CT. Among the executives of the trading company was a manager with ties to a Cuban American long suspected by law enforcement officials of being a CIA agent. (Weak banking laws in Connecticut allow trading companies to make loans without a banking license and set interest rates that would be illegal elsewhere.)

By 1989 Project Bodega was a multi-agency task force involving the INS, DEA, U.S. Customs, the IRS and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which assigned three full-time prosecutors, including John F. Kennedy Jr., to prosecute the criminals arrested during this investigation.

Operation Bodega resulted in the arrest of 111 people — many of them illegal aliens — and led to the seizure of a large number of weapons, drugs, counterfeit government documents and illegal gambling material.

In March 1990, the leader of the Federation of Dominican Businessmen and Industrialists, Simon Diaz, and others organized a demonstration on the steps of City Hall and enlisted the aid of City Councilman Guilermo Linares. Mayor David Dinkins issued a statement calling Operation Bodega a "Republican-backed conspiracy" to intimidate law-abiding immigrants in the Dominican community and to discourage them from participating in the census, which would lead to loss of federal funding and congressional representation for the city.

Under political pressure, the INS shut down Project Bodega and in 1991 the U.S. Attorney began investigating Occhipinti for allegedly violating the civil rights of some of the alleged drug dealers and bodega operators. Prosecutors produced 12 witnesses who claimed Occhipinti had conducted illegal searches of their establishments. Some witnesses admitted that they gave him permission to search but claimed Occhipinti did not have them sign the INS "consent to search" form until after the search had been conducted. Up until that time Occhipinti had conducted more than 1,000 consensual searches without a single similar complaint.

Occhipinti was the first U.S. law enforcement official in history to be indicted on a criminal charge for an alleged improper search.

Despite a public outcry and evidence which suggested Occhipinti was innocent of the charges, he was found guilty and sentenced to 32 months in jail. He was sent to a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma and placed in general prison population — surrounded by hundreds of convicted drug criminals. Occhipinti’s cellmate was a Dominican drug dealer from Washington Heights who immediately recognized Occhipinti.

Less than six months after Occhipinti went to prison, on Jan. 15, 1993, President George Bush commuted Joe Occhipinti’s sentence.

Eight men and women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds — black, white and Hispanic — were members of a Philadelphia police narcotics unit known as Gallo’s Squad. The unit was named for its gung-ho lieutenant, John Gallo, and known as the squad with the highest arrest and conviction rates in the city.

Lt. John Gallo had retired but his old squad was arresting up to 30 Dominican dope dealers a week. And then in May, 1998, these eight cops fighting the drug war were yanked off the street. A supervisor told them there was a death threat against the unit. But the cops were puzzled that no patrol cars were posted to guard their families and their homes. More questions from the unit brought evasive answers from their supervisors.

Eventually the squad members learned there had never been a death threat; the whole thing apparently was a ruse to get them off the street and away from their investigations into Dominican narco-dealers.

The cops soon learned why they had been banished to desk jobs. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had informed the Police Department that it would no longer prosecute cases made by Gallo’s Squad.

Over the next two years, some squad members either retired or reluctntly accepted new assignments. But four filed a grievance with the Fraternal Order of Police against the city. Ken Rocks, Philadelphia FOP vice president, says that at an arbitration hearing in March no credible evidence was offered against the Gallo’s Squad cops. And he expects a favorable ruling. "All four should be returned to the narcotics unit," Rocks said. "They’re all good, dedicated cops. It’s a disgrace what happened to them. The U.S.

Attorney and the Police Commissioner should hang their heads in shame."

Mike Levine worked for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for 25 years. The tough-talking DEA supervisor/inspector was considered a superstar in the agency. Fluent in Spanish, Levine held a number of high ranking-positions, including: inspector of the Drug Enforcement Agency field operations worldwide; desk officer, Cocaine and Heroin Desk, DEA headquarters; DEA Miami airport supervisor, Vice President George Bush’s South Florida Task Force; DEA Country Attaché in Argentina and Uruguay and the senior law enforcement officer and Special Operations Officer for South America.

Since his retirement from the DEA Levine has worked as a regular instructor of Undercover Tactics and Informant Handling for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Ontario Provincial Police Academy. He is a guest lecturer for the FBI’s Advanced Undercover Seminar, a regular lecturer at the New York State Police Academy and a licensed New York State Police Instructor.

Levine, one tough cop, is also one tough critic of his own government’s war on drugs. He has leveled charges that certain branches of the American government committed what amounts to treason in the drug war. In his book, Deep Cover — a New York Times bestseller — Levine claims that an undercover operation investigating a drug cartel’s shipment of 15 tons of cocaine had been targeted by agents of the DEA, the CIA and the State Department. Levine says the undercover operation was deliberately exposed by the Justice and State Departments to spare an important American ally in Latin America.

The Big White Lie, Mike Levine’s second book, details events that occurred when he was the DEA attaché in Argentina and Uruguay from 1978 to 1992. Levine’s exposé documents how the CIA and State Department allegedly destroyed a DEA undercover investigation and supported the takeover of Bolivia by Bolivian military men and politicians who were backed by cocaine traffickers.

Mike Levine will be an expert witness for the BNI agents when their case comes to trial.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the 34th precinct was known as the murder capital of New York City. A majority of the homicides and other major crimes were committed by Dominican criminals in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan — home to hundreds of thousands of Dominican immigrants. Community activists asked the NYPD for help and they responded by forming an elite anti-crime unit of nine plainclothes officers, drawn from the 34th Precinct. In its first three years the unit arrested more than 700 people and was involved in half a dozen shootouts with violent drug dealers.

A number of Dominicans alleged to be drug dealers and their defense attorneys began to lodge numerous complaints of improper searches against the unit. The U.S. Attorney began an investigation of the anti-crime unit. The squad was disbanded. A two-year investigation by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York yielded not a single indictment.

The U.S. Attorney failed to prove that there had been any illegal searches, so they expanded their probe. Federal prosecutors cut a deal with a Dominican drug dealer who had been convicted of dealing more than 200 kilos of cocaine and 200 kilos of heroin. The dealer was an occasional informant for the anti-crime squad. The informant had several telephone conversations with Officer Patrick Regan, a highly decorated police officer with almost 10 years’ experience on the street. Regan had received numerous commendations, including the NYPD Combat Cross for "heroism at risk of life" after receiving a gunshot wound to the head while making an arrest. (Regan never drew his own gun but instead disarmed the shooter and arrested him.)

Regan was called to testify before a grand jury and was asked about the details of government-contrived conversations with the drug dealer/informant.

Regan could not recall the details of the conversation and was charged with perjury. Regan was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. (Regan has a motion for a new trial based on new evidence he says will clear his name.)

DEA agent Rick Horn, now stationed in New Orleans, is suing the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department. Horn claims that when he was a DEA attaché in Burma (now known as Myanmar), the Central Intelligence Agency spied on his operations and undermined DEA efforts to combat international drug traffickers.

Horn found a CIA electronic surveillance device inside his home. When his lawyer filed suit several years ago, the Federal government classified all of the paperwork and forced his lawyer, a former assistant U.S. Attorney, to get a security clearance before he could advance the lawsuit. To this day, the lawsuit remains classified.

—Jim Barry