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Date: September 20 1998
Source: Sunday Times (UK)
'Serpico' claims Scotland Yard elite ran drug cartel by Nicholas Rufford, Home Affairs Editor
DRUG rackets worth millions of pounds were run from inside Britain's biggest police force, according to a former Scotland Yard detective who is to publish his allegations.
The officer, dubbed "Serpico" by friends after the New York police officer who was pilloried for exposing corruption, described sections of the drug squad and the regional crime squad at Scotland Yard as the "most professional criminal cartels in Britain". He is writing a book in which he alleges that officers stole drugs, paid phantom informants and fabricated evidence.
Duncan MacLaughlin, a detective for 18 years, is believed to be the first officer to talk openly about alleged corruption within the elite squads in which he worked.
His claims are likely to give renewed urgency to the efforts by Sir Paul Condon, the Metropolitan police commissioner, to stamp out criminal activity within the force. Condon has already launched a wide-ranging inquiry into police corruption, and has set up CIB3, a special unit of the Complaints Investigation Bureau, to investigate.
MacLaughlin, 38, who admits he was not "straighter than straight", spent five years in the drug squad and five years in the London-based regional crime squad, which drew the best detectives from forces across southern England to investigate serious crime.
He described the regional squad, which he left in 1994, as like Colditz, the second world war prison. "You put all the clever ones, all the brains, in one office, and you got the cleverest scams. There were no better criminals in the country . . . I was a member of the most professional criminal cartel that Britain has ever produced."
MacLaughlin said hundreds of thousands of pounds were siphoned from police funds through the creation of phantom informants. "If we got anonymous information that there was going to be a deal involving, say, 25 kilos of coke [cocaine], straightaway you would create an imaginary informant. Then a friend would come in and sign a bit of paper and maybe receive up to £40,000 reward money."
Another practice was to sell drugs which were seized on raids. "Drugs were recycled all the time. If you found 15 kilos of coke, you produce 12 kilos and 3 would be sold. A kilo of coke you get UKP30,000 for, so you have made £90,000."
The claims are some of the most detailed made against Scotland Yard. MacLaughlin resigned in July. He was facing a discipline charge - which he denies - for allegedly removing paperwork relating to a murder investigation.
MacLaughlin does not admit to being involved in any of the crimes he alleges, though he does admit to holidaying in the Caribbean while on police assignment to trace a drug baron's assets. He said he did not feel guilty because he was not spending taxpayers' money, but cash from a Home Office reward fund. "I was no angel, I would go back to the Caribbean just when it suited me. The Met police had no idea. It just showed how incompetent they were," he said.
Roy Clark, deputy assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, said that some of MacLaughlin's claims were false and others "wildly exaggerated". He said it was a pity that MacLaughlin was "not prepared to come forward and, if there was any truth in his suggestions, share his information with the anti-corruption squad".
Another former senior officer in the complaints bureau described MacLaughlin as an oddball who would have been sacked had he not resigned.
MacLaughlin claims that he was rebuffed when he tried to give information to Ian Quinn, the bureau's director. A Scotland Yard source dismissed the claim and said MacLaughlin had made an allegation to the bureau about the private life of a senior officer for which there was "not an iota of evidence".
A year ago, the Big Media cast out the issue of the CIA and contra crack from the realm of respectable debate. In lengthy front-page articles, The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times deemed an investigative series by Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News flawed and simplistic. The papers claimed victory when Webb's editor Jerry Ceppos agreed that the original series wasn't perfect.
Now, the other shoe is falling. The inspectors general of the CIA and the Justice Department are completing investigations that will clear the CIA and the Justice Department of wrongdoing. The results of those investigations were leaked out in mid- December, but scheduled releases of the actual reports were postponed. The delays meant that the supposed findings could get major media play without any examination of the underlying facts.
According to the Justice Department, Attorney General Janet Reno requested a delay in that report's release for "law- enforcement reasons." Department officials would not specify what those reasons were, but apparently there is fear that the report contains information that might jeopardize an ongoing federal criminal case.
A broader CIA investigation into the question of Nicaraguan contra connections to the drug trade -- outside CIA control -- continues. But it is unclear how much information the spy agency will divulge, especially given the mainstream media's eagerness to put the issue to rest.
Those, like Webb, who challenged the official orthodoxy on the CIA's innocence have paid dearly. Webb was pushed into resigning his job, a purge made official with an announcement by the Mercury News on Dec. 12. Reached at his home in California, Webb said he is working on a book about his experiences.
Still, the new government reports whenever issued seem likely to pour just one more layer of cover-up on top of an already thick foundation. Over the past half century, the federal government -- and the Washington news media -- have never accepted what appears as obvious fact to many outsiders: that CIA covert actions and drug trafficking go together like horse and carriage, like hand and glove, like Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.
You might use this article as a guide for reading between the lines of whatever official words are uttered in the new government reports and press stories that follow.
The first test will be whether the new government reports face up to the seamy history. In particular, look for any reference to two heroin-stained covert operations: in Indochina in the 1960s and '70s and in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Both were well documented by Alfred McCoy in his landmark book, The Politics of Heroin.
The second point of reference will be how the reports finesse the overwhelming evidence of Nicaraguan contra-connected cocaine trafficking. This unsavory reality was documented ad nauseam in "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," a 1989 Senate Foreign Relations report based on hearings chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
The new reports also might have some difficulty explaining past admissions by frank senior government officials. Gen. Paul F. Gorman, head of the U.S. Southern Command, acknowledged in 1984 that "substantial evidence links drugs, money and arms networks in Central America. The fact is, if you want to go into the subversion business, collect intelligence, and move arms, you deal with drug movers."
Gorman knew what he was talking about, situated as he was in Panama City, next door to Gen. Manuel Noriega, who had been recruited by CIA director William J. Casey and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North to help the contras. Noriega, of course, is now incarcerated in federal prison for drug trafficking.
While Noriega helped the contras from the south, the Honduran military and other drug-connected friends pitched in from the north. One was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, whose rap sheet dates back at least to 1970 when he was arrested at Dulles Airport on drug-related charges and was sentenced to five years in prison. Matta escaped before spending a year behind bars.
By 1975, Matta had linked Mexican and Colombian traffickers, giving a major boost to the fledgling cocaine industry. Three years later, Matta financed a coup d'etat by the military in his native Honduras, a putsch that transformed the banana republic into a transit point for northbound white powder.
By 1983, Matta had been identified in a U.S. Customs report as a Class I DEA violator. He also was linked by the DEA to an airline with the acronym, SETCO, that was run by "American businessmen dealing with Matta [and] smuggling narcotics into the United States."
Despite such lineage, SETCO was hired as "the principal company used by the contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel ... from 1983 to 1985," according to the Senate Foreign Relations report. Then, despite Matta's tie to the 1985 murder of star DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Guadalajara, Mexico, the State Department in 1986 renewed SETCO's contract to supply the contras.
Matta is now serving dual life sentences for murder and narcotics trafficking. You might look his name up in the indexes to the new government contra-cocaine reports. [For more details from a non-government source, see Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall.]
Another name worth checking out is that of Syrian-born Manzer Al-Kassar, who boasts a similar drug resume -- and a relationship with the U.S. government.
Reader's Digest reported in 1986 that Al-Kassar had supplied arms and explosives "for terrorist operations in France, Spain and Holland" and sold "silencer-equipped assassination pistols, rockets and other weapons" to Libya, Iran, South Yemen and Lebanon." The article also linked Al-Kassar to heroin deals involving up to 100 kilos (220 pounds). Two years earlier, the DEA had classified Al-Kassar as a major drug trafficker.
Yet, when the Reagan administration's Iran-contra operations were exposed in 1986, the ledgers of Oliver North's "Enterprise" revealed that it had paid $1.5 million for contra arms shipments to the same Manzer Al-Kassar. See how that is explained.
Then, there's the more recent case of former Venezuelan Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila. A year ago, Guillen was indicted on charges of shipping up to 22 tons of cocaine to the United States between 1987 and 1991. According to the Miami Herald, Guillen was the CIA's most trusted man in Venezuela and the senior official collaborating with the CIA on narcotics control.
Guillen claims the CIA knew all along what he was doing. To date he has successfully resisted extradition, but an accomplice, Adolfo Romero Gomez, was convicted in Miami last October on cocaine trafficking charges. A key witness testified that he overheard Romero and Guillen discussing deals with the Cali cartel.
You might check, too, to see how the new reports deal with DEA agents who tried to blow the whistle during the 1980s. Just as the contra-connected drug trade was heating up, the Reagan administration closed the DEA office in Honduras. But from Guatemala City, DEA agent Celerino Castillo III began investigating reports of illegal drug activity at the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, the home of North's contra resupply operation.
As Castillo describes in his autobiography, Powder Burns, his reports on the drug trafficking of contra suppliers were initially ignored. Later, they were criticized for grammatical errors. Then, he was told to stay away from El Salvador and threatened with charges of improper conduct. Finally, after receiving threats against his family, he quit.
Another curiosity -- given the CIA's 50 years of covert activities, often side by side with drug traffickers -- is the absence of a single publicly known criminal charge against a CIA officer for succumbing to the temptation to accept a bribe or to abuse the job's secrecy by aiding and abetting a drug shipment.
Perhaps, the new government reports -- whenever the American citizenry is allowed to peruse them -- will explain how the CIA found and recruited individuals of such exemplary character.
Copyright (c) 1998
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