A tale of drugs and spooks

I had intended to annoy you with more AA77 skepticism today, but a reader has directed my attention toward a more pressing mystery -- the story of a man who didn't board a jet.

John "Sparky" McLaughlin tried to take his family on vacation last July, only to discover that that an unknown agency had placed him on the terrorist "no-fly" list. This came as quite a surprise to McLaughlin: He's a cop. In fact, he once headed an effective anti-narcotics unit in Philadelphia.

Too effective. His 90s-era investigations of a drug ring run by citizens of the Dominican Republic brought him into conflict with no less a body than the CIA. His work was disparaged, smeared, and shut down. He fought for years to counter the allegations, eventually winning his day in court, along with a $1.5 million dollar judgment (now on appeal). Although his name was cleared, its appearance on a "no-fly" list suggests that "anti-terrorist" measures are being used to persecute a whistleblower.

All the evidence indicates that McLaughlin is a good cop who has made some powerful enemies. To get the full story, check out the lengthy investigations by the Philadelphia City Paper, here and here, as well as the terrific follow-up piece by Bill Conroy over at NarcoNews. I suggest printing out every page and savoring the details over lunch. You won't find a more fascinating or frustrating true crime tale.

The gist:

A decade ago, McLaughlin and three other agents of the Philadelphia Bureau of Narcotics Investigations and Drug Control (BNI) had targeted a coke and heroin ring run out of the Dominican Republic -- a ring which used a fleet of tricked-out Oldsmobile to run "supplies" into Philadelphia, Boston and New York. The four agents -- later dubbed "the Bastard Squad" -- arrested a crack dealer whose brother was the chief stateside fund-raiser for to Revolutionary Dominican Party (PRD), then poised to gain power in the home country. Connections to this party turned up with unnerving regularity.

An informant revealed that the PRD hoped to use drug money to fund the campaign of PRD presidential candidate Jose Pena Gomez. The party intended to buy votes -- literally purchase them outright -- from members of the massive expatriate community living in the United States. This scenario was confirmed when a "wired" informant met with PRD officials.

The Bastard Squad ran this data by their intelligence advisor, a former CIA man named Wilson Prichett. Although some might want to place quotation markes around the word "former," Prichett seems to have acted in good faith. (The writers of the original City Paper article received remarkable access to CIA agent names and confidential memos.)

Prichett fed the Squad's findings to CIA, who passed the data to station chief in Santo Domingo. In the Dominican Republic, rumors connecting Pena Gomez to the drug trade played a quiet role in the election. Even so, the Agency clearly favored Jose Pena Gomez in the upcoming elections.

(As an intelligence-gathering agency, CIA is not supposed to favor anyone -- in theory. Actual practice is another story, as any good CIA history will confirm.)

The CIA made a suspiously vigorous effort to discover the identities of the Squad's informants. McLaughlin infuriated the powers-that-be when he refused to dilvulge the information.

The Drug Enforcement Agency, acting in conjunction with McLaughlin's crew, planned to move against Pena Gomez during a fundraising trip the United States. But the DEA changed its mind at the last minute, allowing the candidate to go home with $500,000 in drug profits. (Eventually, he lost a close election, and died not long thereafter.)

That's when the bomb dropped on the Bastard Squad.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

The U.S. Attorney's Office announced that they would no longer accept any cases originating from McLaghlin and his associates.

Soon therafter, State District Attorney Tom Corbett made the same announcement.

These decisions effectively shut down the unit. All of their ongoing investigations had to cease. Perpetrators walked -- even some who had pled guilty.

Rumor linked the "Bastard Squad" to various corrupt practices, such as fabricating evidence and conducting searches without probable cause. One of Corbett's top men investigated these rumors and found them baseless; Corbett squelched the exonerative report and continued to treat McLaughlin as a pariah.

The squad members became convinced that their problems stemmed from their refusal to expose the brave informants who had fingered the PRD in the heroin and coke trade.

The pariah treatment was unprecedented. When undercover cops are suspected of going bad, the usual practice is to keep them under surveillance in order to catch them red-handed.

Members of the squad went to court to clear their names. From a 2003 AP account:

The agents filed a civil rights lawsuit in 1997, saying they had "become the targets of vicious unfounded attacks on their credibility and careers by the federal government," with the "marionetted support" of the Philadelphia DA's office and [the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office].

The lawsuit also claimed that Pena Gomez's Dominican Revolutionary Party "was, and is, protected and sanctioned, unlawfully, by agencies of the United States government, to include the CIA and the State Department, enabling the Dominicans to distribute illegal drugs at will to the black and Hispanic populations of the Eastern Seaboard."

The 1997 lawsuit was dismissed, but a subsequent suit resulted in a $1.5 million judgment in favor of McLaughlin and his men.

I should mention here that the PRD is considered moderately left-of-center. (So was Mexico's PRI, despite its long and close association with the American power establishment.) The party's color is white, which cynics might interpret as a fitting tribute to the product flooding American streets.

The questions that comes to my mind are these: Is McLaughlin correct in his claim that a faction at CIA protected the Dominican drug trade? If so, who was in that faction?

No outsider can answer that question with any authority. But perhaps we can gather a few hints if we attempt to trace some of the relevant history -- beginning with CIA head Porter Goss:

Rep. Porter J. Goss has disclosed precious few details of his CIA employment from roughly 1960 to 1971,” reported a profile in the Associated Press. Reuters called him a “mystery man,” and said he had been “close-mouthed about his past.”

“He worked in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico -- tumultuous countries during that decade of the Cold War,” Reuters reported.

During a 2002 interview with The Washington Post, Goss joked that he performed photo interpretation and "small-boat handling," which led to "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits."

One should never forget Goss' mysterious promotion of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had a background in that part of the world. Foggo was, in turn, a long-time friend to the notorious Brent Wilkes, the prime mover in the Cunningham corruption scandal.

In a previous piece on Wilkes, I presented evidence suggesting that he has long had a relationship with the CIA. Wilkes had worked for the World Finance Corporation, a predecessor to BCCI. WFC, founded by anti-Castro Cuban Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya, was, in the 1960s and 70s, the financial institution most favored by narcotics traffickers with CIA connections.

I hope the reader will forgive a lapse into self-quotation:

If, as I suspect, Wilkes joined forces with WFC in the mid-1970s, he may have played a role in the creation of a spin-off called the Dominican Mortgage Corporation, which shared the same address as WFC's Coral Gables HQ. This group heavily invested in Vegas -- casinos, real estate development, even a detective agency.

The "Dominican" part of the name now seems particularly resonant.

But why would the CIA take such a special interest in the PRD? The choice seems particularly bizarre when we recall that, back in the 1960s, the Johnson administration had damned PRD founder Juan Bosch as pro-communist -- even though Bosch had, in fact, banned communist movements in his nation.

In the 1980s, PRD leader Salvador Jorge Blanco proved to be spectacularly corrupt. Yet in this same period, the party seems to have forged strong links to American intelligence.

Another PRD leader, Hipólito Mejía, ran the Dominican Republic from 2000 to 2004. During his tenure, poverty increased and the massive Bainiter banking scandal (which tarred more than one party) was exposed.

Quirino Paulino, a former army captain in the Dominican Republic, has been accused of running much of the cocaine traffic between that nation and the United States. Paulino has made large contributions to all the major political parties in his country.

Note: "sparky178" -- presumably John McLaughlin -- has answered questions about his case in a dialogue preserved here.