May/June 1996
Michael Levine, Prison Life
So Miguel-the-car-parker goes along with the deal. He has failed the U.S. government-financed test of his honesty; a test that, according to my training, was called Entrapment.
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Now we cut to Snakeface in Southern California making his first DEA-tapped phone call to Chama King of Cocaine. He calls the parking lot where Miguel is supposed to be waiting. But Miguel isn't there.
'He's home sick,' says the woman who answers the parking lot phone.
Do the DEA agents stop here and ask, 'What the hell is the East Coast distributor of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine and the head of his own criminal organization doing parking cars all day long?' No. They call his house and tape-record the call.
Miguel answers. He's in a bad way. He apologizes to Snakeface, explaining that he's home with a terrible hangover. Then he tells this long, confused story about some friend of his getting drunk in his room, stealing his pants, and wrecking his car. Snakeface, with some effort and doing all the talking, finally steers the conversation into some garbled code talk that sounds less like a drug deal than like Roberto Duran trying to explain the Monroe Doctrine to Mario Cuomo.
Snakeface: 'Yeah, what I'm trying to do is--since it's a matter which is quite serious--big--and from the other things that I've seen like this, when we can't be playing with, with unclear words and . . . that's why what I, what you did, and I asked you if you'd spoken with him, because I know that he has the financial capacity and after all he's, he's a partner of, of, of [major drug cartel leader] and, and in the end anything will yield a profit if we're hanging on to a big stick that's on a big branch and, and we won't have any problems. Right?'
Chama King of Cocaine: 'Of course.'
That was about as clear as it ever got. If it was a dope conversation, the fact that he was talking across 3,000 miles of telephone wire from his home phone--something a high school crack dealer wouldn't do--didn't seem to bother Chama or the agents in the least.
At the end of this conversation, did these experienced, highly trained agents say 'This guy doesn't sound smart enough to be a Washington Heights steerer' or 'Let's pull the autopsy report on the rat's wife'? Nope. They open a Class One investigation targeting Miguel the parking lot attendant and pay the rat his first $1,000. And there was plenty more to follow.
The packet of reports indicated that the investigation lasted eight months, during which time Snakeface successfully pimped the DEA agents about Chama King of Cocaine while simultaneously pimping Miguel about 'Tony' (a DEA undercover agent), characterizing him as the Dumb-and-Dumber of the Mafia.
During that time, the California DEA conducted no investigation of Miguel whatsoever. The record showed no telephone investigation to ascertain whether Miguel was making telephone calls to any real drug dealers; no financial investigation to see what he was doing with his drug millions; no surveillance that would have revealed that Chama King of Coke was a working stiff who lived in a one-room apartment. They did nothing but write down as fact whatever their rat told them.
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