ice on the wire

A summary for a friend of developments in the ongoing battle to reveal clandestine criminal activity by high-ranking government officials...

I have been flying nearly blind, here, just using a couple articles and one heavily-redacted FOIA timeline originally produced by the DEA, to come up with this overview. After excruciating hours with this miserable PDF, I next turned to another link that had another -- better informed, but not as acid -- take on the matter. I'm over my hissy. So.

Here:

JUST GO TO THIS PAGE FOR THE START OF A THREE-PART TIMELINE OF THE HOUSE OF DEATH CASE BY BILL CONROY AT NARCO NEWS. HE HAS OBVIOUSLY HAD BENEFIT OF SOURCES WITH UNREDACTED DATES AND TIMES AND NAMES.

Maybe there's value in my "ultra-objective" initial take on inscrutable stuff. If you want to take the chance -- and you should, you asked -- that I might have something valuable to contribute, read on. Or, just wait till I have access to better documents, which shouldn't be too long.


Sources

Narco News Coverage, by Bill Conroy
Executive Summary and Timeline PDF from Narco News
Observer Article, by David Rose
Glenn Greenwald's Blog

It should be noted that Bill Conroy of Narco News has done the bulk of the research on the House of Death story, and I have found that website to be of great help for coverage of the election fraud in Mexico, too.


Key Names and Terms

Sandy -- Sandalio Gonzalez, Special Agent in charge of the DEA in El Paso, Texas who was forced to resign after complaining about the official handling of the House of Death case. Now an honored member of Sibel Edmonds' National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC).

Fuentes -- Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, believed to lead the Juarez drug cartel. The US has a $5m bounty on his head.

The Engineer -- Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, a key henchman of the Juarez gang and the man who arranged the killings at the House of Death.

Lalo -- Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, aka Jesus Contreras, aka a seemingly-endless array of aliases I don’t even want to try to sort out yet, a US government informant who worked as a henchman inside the Juarez drug cartel. Last reported whereabouts: a maximum-security US jail, fighting deportation.

Reyes -- Fernando Reyes [Aguado?], Mexican lawyer murdered at the House of Death. His murder was tape-recorded by Lalo, and the tape was given to ICE.

Sutton -- Johnny Sutton, US Attorney for Western Texas and ex-adviser to Bush. Approved indictments against The Engineer.

ICE -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (part of Department of Homeland Security), which is delicately referred to as "BICE" in the DEA document.

DEA -- Drug Enforcement Administration (part of Department of Justice).

CJRO -- Ciudad Juarez Resident Office, refers to undercover DEA agent/s working in Mexico.

JAT -- Joint Assessment Team (between ICE and DEA).

carne asada -- means barbecue, used as code for kidnap and murder of enemies by the Juarez drug cartel.

House of Death -- Calle Parsioneros 3633, Juarez, Mexico (an upscale neighborhood).

NSWBC -- National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, an organization founded by Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator whose testimony to the 9/11 Commission, and to Congress about security breaches at the FBI, has her under a gag order initiated by the Department of Justice. Partner organizations can be found at their website.


The Story

Lalo used to be a Mexican cop. The Mexican police are heavily infiltrated by the drug cartel/s. He quit being a cop to be a drug smuggler in 1995. In 2000, the United States recruited him as an informant. He made reports to several federal agencies, including ICE, DEA, FBI, ATF. He has received at least $220,000 in compensation from our government.

Lalo had been a CJRO target until they found out he was a confidential source for ICE, and then despite the recommendations of the CJRO, ICE "consistently requested" that no information derived from Lalo be shared with their Mexican government counterparts, but they seemed to be okay at that point with interagency sharing at home.

Around July 2002, Lalo was forced to rearrange his drug smuggling operation after the arrest of an associate who was an INS Inspector. This arrest seems to have yielded a lot of telephone numbers used by Lalo, which in turn ended up yielding leads for the players in the House of Death case. I wonder why it took the arrest of an associate to come up with the telephone numbers used by such a well-paid informant. Sometime later, we find Lalo providing ICE and DEA operatives with the cocaine for a sting operation in Texas, which ended up providing results on both ends of that transaction... an even better fix on Lalo's associates in Mexico. Again, why did the DEA have to use surveillance to ascertain things Lalo could simply have told them?

The FOIA Timeline keeps mentioning "country clearance authorizations" for Lalo that specify "No reports were submitted to Embassy BICE or DEA Mexico City reporting results of this travel." Some concerned agencies were purposely being kept out of the loop. The first two of these authorizations seem to have been for travel to Mexico, which makes me assume the rest of them are too, and which also leads me to believe that Lalo lived in the United States and was receiving authorization (ergo payment) to travel into Mexico to participate in drug trafficking. There are repeating qualifiers about the CJRO wanting to bring the Mexican government into the loop, but ICE continues to inveigh against it, withholding information about Lalo's trips from both agencies' Mexico City branches.

In June 2003, Lalo was busted while trying to smuggle dope into the United States, which caused the DEA to deactivate him as an informant. ICE wanted to keep him on the job. The Observer says:

At a meeting with federal prosecutors the week after Lalo's arrest, [ICE] tried to persuade assistant US attorney Juanita Fielden that, if Lalo were closely monitored, he would continue to be effective. Fielden agreed. She says in an affidavit that she called the New Mexico prosecutor and got him to drop the charges.

In August 2003, The Engineer asked Lalo to assist with a carne asada at the House of Death -- poor Reyes. Lalo had a recording device on him during the murder, and turned it in to ICE when he was debriefed later the same day by his handler. The CJRO did hear about this, but were not given sufficient information to identify the House of Death, and their requests for Lalo to come show them the house were refused by ICE on the grounds that it might endanger him. In any case, while thwarting the DEA thus, the knowledge of this murder now made it so that ICE agents would need clearance from further up the food chain to keep Lalo in the field.

From the Observer article:

Meanwhile the El Paso [ICE] office reported the matter to headquarters in Washington. The information went up the chain of command, eventually reaching America's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John G. Malcolm. It passed through the office of [Sutton]... a close associate of George W. Bush. When Bush was Texas governor, Sutton spent five years as his director of criminal justice policy. After Bush became President, Sutton became legal policy co-ordinator in the White House transition team, working with another Bush Texas colleague, Alberto Gonzalez, the present US Attorney General.

Earlier this year Sutton was appointed chairman of the Attorney General's advisory committee which, says the official website, 'plays a significant role in determining policies and programmes of the department and in carrying out the national goals set by the President and the Attorney General'. Sutton's position as US Attorney for Western Texas is further evidence of his long friendship with the President - falling into his jurisdiction is Midland, the town where Bush grew up, and Crawford, the site of Bush's beloved ranch.

'Sutton could and should have shut down the case, there and then,' says Bill Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has made a detailed study of the affair. 'He could have told [ICE] and the lawyers "go with what you have, and let's try to bring [The Engineer] to justice". That neither he nor anyone else decided to take that action invites an obvious inference: that because the only people likely to get killed were Mexicans, they thought it didn't much matter.'

In the days after Reyes's death, officials in Texas and Washington held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further murders, [ICE] could continue to use and pay him as an informant. And although [The Engineer] had already been caught on tape directing a merciless killing and might well kill again, no attempt would be made to arrest him.

From Greenwald's post:

Permission was given by Homeland Security and the DOJ to continue to work with Lalo. Over the course of the next six months, Lalo directly participated in the murder of 13 different Mexicans, usually extremely brutal murders, and all with the knowledge of ICE. Despite one murder after the next being perpetrated by their paid informant, they never intervened (even though they obviously, by that point, had more than enough evidence to do so). Instead, they continued to seek and obtain permission from the Justice Department to continue to work with (and pay) Lalo, now a serial murderer.

The unhushable news of Lalo, ICE's pampered informant having been "witness to" -- a characterization with which the CJRO seemed to be unhappy -- a murder also finally made it so DEA Mexico City and the Mexican government had to be brought into the loop, and assurances were made to keep them in the loop at that time. Despite this, two more "country clearance authorizations" to travel were issued to Lalo, without notifying "BICE Embassy [presumably the channel through which we would [[not]] notify the Mexican government] or DEA Mexico City" before mid-January 2004.

So Lalo assisted The Engineer and some Juarez cops with more carne asadas up to early January 2004. Fuentes would put a contract out on someone, The Engineer would call the cops to go pick up the person or persons in question and bring them to the House of Death, where Lalo would help them torture, kill and bury the victims in the yard. Very tidy... in a really grisly way.

Despite numerous complaints about the apparent racism of letting these little internecine barbecues between brown people continue apace, I don't think the color, or really even the nationality, of the victims mattered much, if at all, in the US government policy evidenced in this case. It's almost a conceit, or a pulled punch, to yell about the ease with which we overlook the killing or oppression of brown people. Whenever and wherever our interests are better served to ignore the suffering and death of humans, we just do. Period.

In mid-January 2004, an undercover DEA agent was due to be the next carne asada. From the Observer article again:

Under torture, one of [The Engineer's] victims had revealed the address of Homer Glen McBrayer - a DEA special agent resident in Juarez who operated under diplomatic cover. At 6pm on 14 January, two men rang his doorbell continuously for 10 minutes. Afraid, his wife phoned him at work. McBrayer rushed home and ushered his wife and daughters into their car. As soon as they left the estate where they lived, they were stopped by a Mexican police car. Two civilian vehicles hemmed McBrayer's car in. Their occupants got out and waited while McBrayer talked to the cops. They were [The Engineer's] men.

Having showed his diplomatic passport, McBrayer phoned a DEA colleague, who arrived within minutes. Unwilling, perhaps, to abduct two US agents, a woman and two children on a busy street, the cartel men backed off. As the standoff unfolded, [The Engineer] twice called Lalo. He asked him to find out what he could about an American called Homer Glen - the corrupt police had not given McBrayer's surname. [The Engineer], claimed Lalo, said he thought he worked for the tres letras - code for the DEA - and intended to blow up his house.

This came swiftly to the attention of higher level DEA agents, who immediately set about ascertaining what had been going on. There is an Investigative Note in the timeline about CJRO personnel having listened to recorded conversations under the control of ICE, only getting copies of the last two, and finally being told that the first two did not exist. This I would assume means that the first two were lost or destroyed and only alleged transcriptions survive, but could also mean ICE was just stonewalling.

It was at some point shortly after the attempted abduction of the undercover agent that the DEA was informed by an Assistant US Attorney and somone/s from ICE of the plan to lure someone, probably The Engineer, into the United States with phone calls from Lalo -- as if it were justification for keeping him out of intensive debriefing by the DEA. At an interagency meeting in Mexico City, the DEA Regional Director asked why the lure request had not been coordinated through DEA Mexico City. ICE advised that the proposed lure was based on a murder investigation. The DEA Regional Director responded that this was a drug investigation, and that ICE did not have jurisdiction over murder cases anyway. This is apparently where some of the higher level DEA agents first learned that Lalo had participated in a murder.

This is probably how Sandy learned of it, but the notes don't mention ICE informing them of the number of murders in which Lalo had taken part. I'm sure ICE was not anxious for the Mexico City agents at that meeting to hear about having been left right back out of the loop as soon as they were promised to be kept in it either.

The FOIA timeline, as you will have seen at the link, becomes so heavily redacted by this point that it is extremely difficult to tell who said or did what to whom, but it is abundantly clear that the DEA is unhappy with ICE's increasingly-apparent complete unwillingness to use Lalo to help the DEA make arrests, or fall afoul of anyone in the drug cartel, or the DEA. Tapes of conversations or debriefings or meetings or murders are not being shared. It has gone from stonewalling to telling them outright they can't have them. The Assistant US Attorney involved isn't helping. She tells the DEA they cannot have copies of the tapes. The agencies are at odds about ICE's and the FBI's unwillingness to share any information with the Mexican government. This seems to be exclusively a DEA priority. The whole thing turns into a multi-agency cat fight, with the DEA -- whose agents had nearly been abducted and killed -- getting the worst of it, or certainly Sandy did.

He ends up being put under the lamp by the JAT on February 11, 2004, not even a month after the incident -- for what he knew or did not know, and when he knew or did not know it -- for all the events since the DEA had deactivated Lalo as a source, summer of 2003 -- before the Reyes murder. He had not known about any of it until the narrow escape of his undercover agent and family set him to finding out about it in a hurry.

The DEA had managed to find out within a week after the narrow escape, probably from debriefing undercover agents, that ICE had known for months about Lalo being involved in multiple carne asadas. Sandy must have blown his lid about this mess. He put on paper -- in a letter -- his displeasure with ICE for having allowed a homicidal maniac to almost murder one, or maybe two, of his agents. Poor career move.

From the Observer article yet again:

But [ICE] and its allies in the DoJ were covering up their actions, helped by the US media - aside from the Dallas Morning News, not one major newspaper or TV network has covered the story. The first signs came in the response to [Sandy's] letter to Gaudioso - not from [ICE], but from ... Sutton.

He reacted not to the discovery of corpses at Calle Parsonieros, but with concern [Sandy] might talk to the media. He communicated his fears to a senior official in Washington - Catherine O'Neil, director of the DoJ's Organised Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Describing [Sandy's] letter as 'inflammatory,' she passed on Sutton's fears to the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and to Karen Tandy, the head of the DEA, another Texan lawyer.

Tandy was horrified by [Sandy's] letter. 'I apologised to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a "no comment" to the press,' she replied on 5 March. [Sandy] would have no further involvement with the House of Death case and was ordered to report to Washington for 'performance discussions to further address this officially'.

[Sandy] was told that Sutton was 'extremely upset'. [Sandy], who had enjoyed glittering appraisals throughout his 30-year career, was told he would be downgraded. On 4 May, DEA managers in Washington sent him a letter. It said that, if he quietly retired before 30 June, he would be given a 'positive' reference for future employers.

Sandy refused, and sued. And ain't Sutton a hoot for worrying about anyone talking to the media? Like, I'm just so sure. They'd be gaping at Sandy, going, "Huh?" They are gaping at Sandy, going, “Huh?” There is little reason to assume that even an audience with the Pope would have gotten this matter enough attention from what passes for the fourth estate in America. There is still less reason to assume such a tenured veteran of the DEA would ever take a gripe to the media, short of really dire circumstances which Sutton had no righteous reason to initiate as he did. Maybe I can turn this into a Hollywood screenplay when I'm done with it? Maybe Sandy's suit can get some lower level ICE agents fired? Sigh.

It seems as though it was a complete accident that the DEA found out about ICE's Lalo to begin with. There's clear indication of ICE's lack of cooperation and shielding of Lalo right up until Lalo's smuggling bust for a puny hundred pounds of pot, which may even have come about precisely to get the DEA off ICE's back. Really. Think about it. It might well have worked. The DEA might have stayed off ICE's man had it not been for the foiled carne asada attempt on their undercover agent. And ICE only became more uncooperative and protective of Lalo after that level law enforcement horror. What could possibly be up with that?

I wonder what it was that actually was irking Sutton about Sandy's completely understandable position on the matter. Which would be why I'm researching for you at all. In my wild imagination, this includes some really heinous notions... utterly odious, wickedly-despicable, execrably-unspeakable secrets. And few could blame me for such suspicions in this day and age. In fact, I have an old friend who insists that for whatever awful thing one can think up about the government, it won't ever be as bad as actuality.

As for Lalo, the guy they were still trying to both appease and keep safe, even after all those murders, and the near loss of some agents, I still haven't seen evidence of what makes us so sure he was in on all those murders, but I hear he is finally in jail, fighting deportation, which would mean a death sentence for him.

Or... would it?


My Take On It

If you read Sandy's letter, and note the high level response it elicited with lightning speed, you might begin to see the real heedlessness and incompetence at work in our government.

I have no wish to belittle Sandy, because I see him as an American hero, but, let's be frank, the probability of him ever taking another step in retaliation for ICE's egregious treatment of his agents and his agency were slim. In any bureaurocracy, the very worst measure you can take against fellow bureaucrats is to memorialize their bad behavior on paper. Though almost never does anything come of it, a document of one's failings means there is a possibility that one might eventually risk being held personally accountable for an error or misdeed. Sandy had been with the DEA for nearly thirty years. There was absolutely no reason for anyone, even the recipient of his letter, his counterpart at ICE -- NB: not even making so bold as to direct it to his counterpart's superior -- to begin to dream that he might try to bring this to the public's attention. This was a big enough decision for Sandy, to exact his pound of flesh from within the system in this manner. To any observer, the act of writing that letter would at most have been seen as Sandy making sure his, and the DEA's, asses were covered in case this filthy mess ever turned around to bite any of them. The worst this letter really threatened was more interagency hostility -- more of the same.

Instead, within nine days, seven working days, the Director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force at the USAG's office has been in touch with a top Texan administration crony, and is already screaming to the DEA Administrator, who is in turn having an immediate cow about this completely righteous complaint from one Special Agent in Charge to another Special Agent in Charge. In bureaucratic terms, even when murder has been involved, that is quite faster than the speed of light -- and by this I mean, so fast as to be deemed outright impossible by all reasonable adults. I can imagine that Sandy, and even his boss in Mexico City, must have been utterly shocked by the ferocity of the response to his letter. In fact, if anyone responded at all he would have been surprised. In fact, if no one had responded at all, THAT would have been the best insurance that nothing ever came of it. And everyone higher up the food chain would know this by heart already.

If there had not been in place already some top priority surrounding the protection of Lalo, or someone close to him, there is extremely little chance things would have played out like this at all. It can only be seen as proof of either ICE protection of certain drug traffickers connected with Lalo, or this Administration playing supreme-to-the-point-of-unremitting-hyper-vigilance departmental favoritism (ergo: BOTH). No one at ICE would have felt they would be held personally accountable for the murders in Mexico because none of it would have played the way it did if their superiors were not down with it from the start. It's clear that everything about Lalo's involvement with ICE was being directed from above. So not even the ICE SAC who got Sandy's letter would have ended up feeling personally threatened by it. Only total neophyte bunglers, or people directed to strike terror into the hearts of all bureaucrats, would have reacted to Sandy's letter to that extent, if at all. That just is not going to be done to uphold DHS over DoJ, especially when DoJ is doing the doing like it was here.

In short: The speed and shape and size and coordinates of the response to Sandy's letter tells us that very powerful people are, or were, making a lot of money with Lalo's help, and parts of our government were knowingly making sure it stayed that way no matter what. Almost all of the players could have been dirt ignorant about why Lalo was such a precious commodity, the say-so of their superiors being enough to move them the way they moved.

I'm going to stop here, not go on into Sandy's whistle-blower suit itself, other than to state that it is being, or has been, thwarted by the government claiming "national security" to keep from producing any evidence of their wrongdoing. I mean, like, that's so totally what-else-is-new? these days, and we need to figure out how to breathe new life into this stuff, come up with approaches they can't bat away with this worn tactic.

Heh. This is probably way more than you wanted to know to begin with.

I'm really stopping now, dammit... until...?