Michael Levine Interview
by Paul DeRienzo
from THE SH@DOW - box 20298 - NY, NY 10009
Michael Levine is a veteran of 26 years of undercover work for four federal
agencies. He is the recipient of many Justice and Treasury Department awards
for hi s work undercover, including the International Narcotics Enforcement
Officer Association's Octavio Gonzales Award. He is also the subject of
Donald Goddard's book Undercover: The Secret Lives of a Federal Agent (Dell,
1990).
Joining the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) after discovering his
brother's heroin addiction which eventually killed his brother, Levine was the
most successful agent in DEA history. By 1977, he had made 3,000 drug arrests
going undercover to set up buy and bust operations against New York City
heroin and cocaine dealers. This led to his assignment as DEA station chief
in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
By 1989, after having several of his operations stopped by higher ups who
allowed his targets to get away, Levine quit the DEA in disgust. Levine then
wrote the book Deep Cover (1990, Delacorte Press), describing his experiences
that led to his leaving the DEA, exposing the government's phony "War on
Drugs".
Levine tells a chilling story of treachery by members of his own agency, and
the CIA, men Levine calls the ":suits" who he says use the War on Drugs as a
cynical cover for covert foreign policy adventures. Levine says that since he
began speaking out against the War on Drugs he has been threatened by high
level DEA agents and has been the target of campaigns meant to discredit him.
His most recent book, released by Dell earlier this year, is Fight Back: How
to Take Your Neighborhood, Schools and Family Back From the Drug Dealer.
:Levine is currently working on his third book, Queen of /Cocaine, about his
experiences as DEA attache to Argentina during the "Dirty War".
This interview with Michael Levine took place on November 9, 1991, during the
Causes and Cur3s Teleconference On the Drug War, sponsored by the Christic
Institute, at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.
Paul DeRienzo- How did you become a DEA agent? Was it like Miami Vice?
Michael Levine- I was wild, I was a very bad kid from the South Bronx, really
bad. By some miracle I never got into heroin. Heroin was already big in the
50's in my neighborhood.
My brother David became a heroin addict at 15. I was a wino who joined the
military, a very violent kid looking for some direction. In the Air Force I
became a boxer.
My odyssey began with a fight I had with another guy in the Air Force, we were
both military policeman, it was over a three dollar hat. He stuck a gun in my
stomach, pulled the trigger and it misfired. Of course everyone was arrested,
the gun was test fired and it fired every time after that.
I considered from that point on my life a gift and I became a fatalist. I
thought I must be here for something, this was too fantastic that I survived.
From that incident evolved someone who was terrified of reaching the end of
life and having to say the words "I wish I had>" I wanted to experience
everything, I wanted to go everywhere, I wanted to taste everything. I was
in a rush to live.
How I ended up in 1965 graduating from Hofstra University, married, with a
baby, with a degree in accounting, I don't know. I was a very depressed young
man when I ran into a buddy of mine who was carrying a little folio in his
pocket that read "take the Treasury law enforcement test, be a G-man." I saw
a picture of a guy on this folio that looked like James Bond. My imagination
went wild, I thought that's the key to adventure, to leading the good life and
I took the Treasury test.
Incredibly, I found myself on a job with the Internal Revenue Intelligence
/Division in 1965. My job was working undercover in the Organized Crime
Wagering Division. I would ride around wearing a little hat betting with
bookmakers and arresting them. It was a lot of fun, but I became very
disenchanted and depressed. I kept asking myself if I had been saved for
this.
Toward the end of my first year in intelligence I found out my brother was a
heroin addict. The discovery destroyed my whole family and it caused me to
jump into the war on drugs feet first. I believed in the war on drugs because
I wanted to do something, and I took it as my mission.
I listened to all the inflammatory stuff that 'they're killing us, they're
dropping white death bombs on our country, they're invading us." I believed
all that and I became an undercover agent and started locking up people by the
droves. The government credited me with 3,000 arrests until 1977.
PD- Wasn't that dangerous?
ML- I was naive and kind of crazed and angry. I took the drug war very
personally, I was akin to a Japanese kamikaze, someone who believes they're on
a mission from god.
PD- What was the secret to your success?
ML- As a police lieutenant said many years later, "you know what the thing is
with you Levine, you're a guy who should have gone bad, you should have been a
gangster, but somehow you turned out right".
I thought about it and I thought of my youth and the way I grew up and I
realized there was a lot to it. I was from the street, the street was in me,
there was a thin line between me and the guys I was working on. That line was
so thin that drug dealers couldn't see it. The line that separated me from
being suspect as an agent was so thin that drug dealers could never believe I
was an agent. That's something you can't teach.
PD- How did you wind up doing foreign operations?
ML- I began working undercover in Southeast Asia in 1970 and 1971, just being
really good at what I do. I was asked to cover different assignments.
PD- Alfred McCoy, who wrote The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade, said his book influenced the way you thought about the work
you were doing in Southeast Asia.
ML- The first time I ran in CIA and other U.S. influences in this war on
drugs was an undercover case I did into Bangkok, Thailand in 1971.
I successfully conned the hell out of Chinese drug dealers who were also the
source of an investigation on a case titled "The William Henry Jackson
Organization". In essence, a bunch of GI's from Vietnam were buying heroin in
Thailand and putting the heroin in dead bodies of GI's killed in Vietnam.
They were using the bodies of 19 year old Americans killed in that other holy
war as conduits for heroin.
The Chinese drug dealers, who really bought my act, wanted to invite me to a
laboratory in Changmai where they were producing hundreds of kilos. This was
a time when the biggest heroin seizure was the French connection, 65 or 67
kilos of heroin.
Here are people inviting me to a factory that produces hundreds of kilo of
heroin a week and mysteriously, I was instructed not to go and the case was
ended with the Chinese dealers in Bangkok. I was told that there are a lot of
things I didn't understand, there were other priorities and of course I
accepted that because I was the good soldier.
What I point out with Alfred McCoy's book is that even if I had his book in my
hand in 1971 and 72, a book that clearly pointed out why I was not allowed to
go to Changmai, what an incredible thing that is to accept. That my own
government could protect people who were using the dear GI's as heroin
conduits. How could I accept that"
If I had McCoy's book in my hand I would have considered it an un-American
ting to read. That's why I can understand what happens to young men who are
in law enforcement, why they refuse to look at the reality of the situation.
It's just too much for Americans to accept, it's too much for young narcotics
agents.
You don't take jobs like this for civil service security, you take it because
you believe in it and most ot these guys do believe. When events happen and
they are told that there are priorities they don't understand and when they
see around them things like Oliver North, who had 500 pages on drug
trafficking in his notebooks, they don't want to accept this because to accept
it is to realize that your career is a lie.
PD-0 So then your were assigned to South America?
ML- In 1978 I was stationed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I was the country
attache for the Drug Enforcement Administration and I covered Argentina and
Uruguay. This was during the year of the dirty war, La Guera Sucia, when the
Argentine hit squads were disappearing any number of young Argentines for
being political activists.
I was there on a holy mission in the war on drugs and I was as focused on the
war on drugs as ever. Blind to anything else, I was there for my country to
protect the American children from the white death.
I've been criticized as being a low level DEA employee, which is not true.
During my two years in Argentina I was the senior law enforcement
representative in the southern cone, the FBI closed their office and I fielded
their work, Bolivia closed down the DEA Operations, I fielded their work, so I
was the senior man during these years.
I quickly penetrated an organization called the Roberto Suarez cocaine
organization that offered me thousands of kilos of cocaine a month when the
biggest drug seizure at the time was 240 kilos of cocaine. The first man I
met was Marcelo Ibanez, who was an ex-minister of agriculture in Bolivia, who
told me there was a man named Roberto Suarez who was putting together all the
drug producers in Bolivia under one umbrella organization, which later became
La Corporacion, the General Motors of cocaine.
I went to DEA and asked for funding and approval to set up a sting operation
and I was called a liar. I was told that ??Roberto Suarez wasn't in the
computer, neither was Marcelo Ibanez. I went to the CIA and checked his name
and they had nothing on him. Of course, three or four months later on 60
Minutes, Mike Wallace called him the biggest drug dealer who ever lived.
There had to be something wrong at that point, but I continued to persist. At
one point I was accused of trying to run a scam on DEA to get an all-expense
paid undercover trip up to the States. But I kept meeting with these
Bolivians, still pretending to be a half Sicilian, half Puerto Rican drug
buyer and representative of the mafia.
Eventually, I forced DEA into setting up a sting operation which they did all
they could to destroy, but I managed to rally a team of undercover agents, who
like me, didn't believe that anybody could go against an operation like this.
We got the support of elements of the Bolivian government, the Lidia Gaylor
government, who were in 1980 genuinely anti-drug, to carry out a huge sting
operation. It ended with the seizure of about 1,000 pounds of coke.
I paid $( million to Jose Roberto Gasser, one of the richest and most powerful
Bolivians, from one of the most powerful Bolivian families, a family that had
long been linked to the World Anti-Communist League and the CIA. He was
arrested leaving the bank with my $( million along with Alfredo Gutierrez, a
man who was in the DEA computer as one of the biggest drug dealers in the
world.
Before I could get back to Argentina, my post of duty, the United States
Attorney in South Florida, the man who is now prosecuting Manuel Noriega,
Michael Sullivan, released Gasser without putting the case before a grand
jury. These details will be in a forthcoming book, Queen of Cocaine. I
couldn't write this in detail with the chronology of my life in my previous
book Deep Cover for reasons I'll explain.
Gasser goes back to Bolivia and publishes an account of his release, making a
laughing stock of the American drug war and within months Alfredo Gutierrez is
released. So the "biggest drug sting in history", as it was called by
Penthouse magazine, is left without any defendants, only the American People
didn't know that.
Now what happens, Jose Roberto Gasser, Roberto Suarez, Gasser's father Erwin
Gasser, have a meeting with the Bolivian military and begin to foment what
became the cocaine coup, the 1980 Bolivian revolution, in which for the first
time in history, drug dealers now took over their country. During that coup
all the people who helped DEA in the sting were either exiled, killed or
tortured. I learned that the CIA was a supporter of this revolution and
that's why Gasser was released.
At that moment, for the first time in my life, I had no choice but to look at
the truth, that this drug war was not for real. Then I began to complain and
I wrote a letter to the media. A month later I was put under a very heavy
personal investigation that went into every corner of my life.
I was falsely accused of everything from black marketing to playing my radio
too loud in the American embassy. No stone was left unturned in trying to make
me an incredible person and destroy my career, my reputation, my credibility.
I managed to survive that but they did frighten me into keeping my mouth shut.
I was force transferred up to the U.S. where I was put undercover in an
operation called Operation Hun which was even more of a fiasco and scandal
than the Suarez case. During my entire time undercover in Operation Hun I was
kept under investigation by DEA and I was frightened to death. During this
same investigation we learned that my daughter had become a cocaine addict.
Most of my attention then went to getting a hardship transfer back to New York
and to forget everything that happened to me. I didn't want to believe what I
had just lived through for the previous five and six years.
I probably would have gone to the end of my career keeping my mouth shut had
not Operation Trifecta happened ant the end of 1987 and the events described
in the book Deep Cover. When Deep Cover happened, that was the straw that
broke the camel's back and I decided I had to speak out.
PD- Have you been threatened because you decided to make these allegations
public?
ML- It's such a sad commentary to spend almost 26 years of your life as a
government agent, believing in what you were doing for a good part of that
time and then come to the realization that I have to be more afraid of my own
leaders than I ever was of a drug dealer.
I've been threatened throughout my life, but one of the scariest threats that
I've ever had came in the form of advice from a friend of mine in DEA who is
now one of the high level people in DEA. He called me during the hottest part
of their investigation into me when I was criticizing the government. To
fully understand what he sad I need to tell a quick little story.
Sandy (Sante) Bario was DEA agent who was sent to Mexico. I considered him
one of the top undercover agents in DEA. He became involved in all kinds of
CIA type operations with drugs and eventually ended up being arrested while
smuggling drugs. I won't even comment on whether he became corrupt or whether
the whole system is so corrupt that no one can go into it without becoming
corrupt.
Sandy was being held in a jail on the Texas-Mexican border when he took a bite
of a peanut butter sandwich in the jail. He fell down in convulsions and went
into a come. The initial tests indicated that Sandy had been poisoned with
strychnine. He died three or four weeks later and the final autopsy said
death by asphyxiation on a peanut butter sandwich, he choked on the sandwich.
That's incredible.
Half the DEA agents I knew believed that he was either offed by some covert
agency in the government or possibly some elements within DEA. I didn't want
to believe anything like that, I couldn't believe anything like that.
Cut to several years later, and here I am under investigation, criticizing my
own government, and a DEA official calls me and says, "Mike I like you.
Remember a peanut butter sandwich?". "Are you kidding?", I said, and he
replied, "Not at all, I'm only telling you this because I like you"' and he
and I never spoke again.
PD- What was Operation Trifecta?
ML- Operation Trifecta was a three-pronged probe into the top of the drug
world. It went into La Corporacion in Bolivia, where myself and another
undercover agent, Jorge Urquijo, made a 15 ton cocaine deal with people who
were producing 400 kilos of cocaine a day in their lab. They were only a
small part of this corporation.
In the course of this operation we met the top money launderer in Panama,
Remberto Rodriguez, where we were instructed to make our first $5 million
payment. Rodriguez was a man we then believed was closely linked to Manuel
Noriega when the Panamanian dictator was being protected by the United States.
This was three months before Noriega's indictment.
We then met with the grandson of the man who wrote the Mexican Constitution,
Mexican colonel Jorge Carranza, and I bribed him with $1 million to land the
first shipment of cocaine from Bolivia in Mexico with Mexican military
protection to ferry the load up to the States.
The case in all three countries was truncated by my own government's actions.
We were not allowed to go further then we went and that's when I wrote Deep
Cover and then I retired from the agency.
PD- What is the subject of your most recent book"
<L- It's called Fight Back: How to Take You Neighborhood, Schools and Family
Back From The Drug Dealer. The book's premise is that we have been fooled
into aiming our efforts in the wrong direction. We have an $11.5 billion
budget that's mostly going against this war against drugs, war against the
Medellin Cartel, war against Manuel Noriega. After my 25 year career, I
concluded that the $11.5 billion was wasted.
$200 million was recently spent to bring Noriega to "justice" and what
happened is that before his seat was cold, the drug situation, according to my
sources that are still within the DEA and who still contact me, is much worse
than when Noriega was there . We have to conclude that the $200 million was
wasted money.
If you add all the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in
this war on drugs, what you'll find is that hadn't we spent one nickel in the
last 25 years the situation would not be any better or any worse. It had
absolutely no effect, it was wasted money.
The thrust of Fight Back is that the only way to fight back is to take away
this notion that a supply side war on drugs works at all.
To examine what communities have done that actually works that hurts the drug
economy. To examine what cultures like Japan have done, that quickly
devastated the drug economy without going to war against drugs. To see if we
can get these programs operating around the country and in essence take the
war on drugs out of the hands of the suits, the lying politicians, the
bureaucrats and into the people and local police and local communities. Where
we will effectively destroy the drug economy.
Chief of Police Reuben Greenberg of Charleston, South Carolina is one of the
examples I cite in the book. He said you got to attack it as a business.
Drugs don't shoot and drugs don't fight, you can't go to war against drugs,
although our leaders would have us go to war against drugs forever because
that will maintain the bureaucracy and the drug economy. A hell of a lot of
people want that drug economy to continue.
What Chief of Police Greenberg did was instruct his police officers t go down
in the street and not make any arrests. They called it a shadowing
operation. They would stand around near the drug dealers and followed them.
They found that the users, 80 to 90 percent of whom are affluent buyers from
outside the community, who are afraid of exposure, just turned around and
left. Within a year, without making any arrests, Chief Greenberg
significantly reduced drug related crime.
If you tell hard core drug abusers, like my baby brother David, that it's not
your fault, then you're adding fuel to the fire, you're giving an impetus to
the drug economy. If you don't aim any of our anti-drug efforts at this
affluent majority market and you give them license to feel they're victims of
this influx of drugs just like the black community, you're adding fuel to this
fire.
If you target the affluent drug buyers, like the Morris Avenue block
association in my native South Bronx, where the community took to the streets
with video cameras and bullhorns and frightened away drug buyers. They were
able to kill the drug economy in their neighborhood. It's the dollars of the
affluent users coming into poor neighborhoods that bring the bullets, those
dollars are what's keeping the Medellin Cartel in business, what's keeping La
Corporacion in Bolivia in business, the drug cartels in Peru in business.
One of the reasons I wrote Fight Back was when I heard of a poll taken showing
that the majority of Americans are willing to give up their rights under the
constitution to win the war on drugs. I said it's time to fight back. If we
change this constitution, a guy like Mike Levine criticizing his government
wouldn't exist. Fight Back is intended to stop this madness, to stop this
militarization, to stop this erosion of our constitution.
It can't begin by waiting for George Bush, it has to begin on the street
level. Communities banding together and not making it a racial issue, making
it an issue for communities black and white, not to accept the drug economy.
PD- You've been criticized by some who say your proposals take away some
people's rights. What do you say to those criticisms?
ML- I'll have to disagree with you Paul. My proposals are not meant to take
anyone's rights away. We've expressed through polls, and let me tell you our
government is now doing it, that we're willing to take away our rights under
the constitution and the government is now dutifully taking those rights
under the banner of the drug war. What Fight Back is meant to do is to show
America that you can end drug trafficking as a business without giving up a
single right. You can do it in each community that wants to end it.
Glennville, Mississippi police have read the book because they have, for a
population of 70,000 people, an horrendous drug problem. At the end of March
we're going to begin a fight-back program organizing the local community with
local police and without a war against drugs, we're going to make that city
drug free. We're going to show the American people and the government that it
can be done without killing people, without spending billions of dollars and
without invading any country. Without a war against drugs.
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