"Damned from Memory": When the Drug War Turns on its Own

 

John McLaughlin, known to his friends as “Sparky,” was a True Believer in the War on Drugs. He was convinced that his work as an agent of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNI) was protecting innocent people from opportunists and thugs who prey on the weak. 

He eventually came to the sorrowful realization that the most ruthless elements involved in the drug trade aren’t found in Latin America or blighted urban neighborhoods, but in well-appointed offices in Washington, D.C. and Langley, Virginia. McLaughlin also came to understand, from first-hand experience, that the Drug War has created an all-encompassing police state that targets not only the innocent public, but also law enforcement officers who become irritants to government-protected criminal cliques. 

"Sparky" McLaughlin Today

McLaughlin and three of his colleagues, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, identified an east coast drug syndicate that was selling heroin and using the proceeds to fund a U.S.-supported political campaign in the Dominican Republic. 

The syndicate was operated by leaders and activists in the Dominican Revolutionary Party (DRP) on behalf of its standard-bearer, Jose Francisco Pena-Gomez, who – according to a January 17, 1996 CIA memo obtained by McLaughlin – was the Clinton administration’s choice to occupy the National Palace in Santo Domingo. (Pena-Gomez, as it happens, lost the election.) 

After McLaughlin’s squad learned that several suspects were to deliver $550,000 in drug proceeds at a March 28, 1996 DRP fundraiser in Manhattan, they contacted the DEA and arranged a sting operation intended to bring about several high-profile arrests, including that of Pena-Gomez himself. 

At the last minute, the operation inexplicably fell apart. Pena-Gomez, who received a conveniently timed anonymous death threat, was taken into custody by the NYPD and spirited back to the Dominican Republic. At least some of the drug proceeds were given to then-Vice President Al Gore at a DNC fundraiser in Coogan’s Irish Pub in New York City’s Washington Heights. 

McLaughlin points out that just prior to the sting operation, he had refused a demand from a CIA agent named Victoria Baylor that he provide the names of confidential informants within the Dominican drug network. 

“Someone from Washington stepped in and crushed our attempt to seize over $550,000 in proceeds from narcotics sales laundered as fundraising for a third-world political campaign,” writes McLaughlin in his newly published memoir Damned from Memory. “Further, several dozen law enforcement officers stood by on orders from the DEA Sensitive Activities Committee or some other nameless D.C. entity as these funds illegally left our country. No one was touching Pena-Gomez or his entourage.”

Not content to intervene on behalf of Pena-Gomez, the people who scuttled the sting retaliated against McLaughlin and his squad. One of the informants who had helped expose the DRP drug connection was targeted in a car bomb attack and his house was firebombed. The agents were given a series of punitive demotions and transfers and threatened with spurious civil rights lawsuits. 

McLaughlin was transferred a considerable distance from his home in Philadelphia and given contradictory orders that were “aimed at creating situations where the Attorney General [would] get the justification to fire us.” A “black bag” break-in took place at McLaughlin’s home. A few weeks later, an intruder broke into the home office of McLaughlin’s psychiatrist and rifled through the doctor’s patient files. 

Shortly after the second black-bag job, McLaughlin went to a local club where he was greeted by a long-time friend on the police force who called him over to a table already occupied by several other cops. Brimming with bogus bonhomie, the officer invited McLaughlin to reminisce about times past – and perhaps to regale the table with potentially compromising stories about his time on the police force. 

“Hey, Spark,” the officer began, “remember when…?”

“It didn’t matter what followed those four little words,” McLaughlin recalls. “I knew he was wired, or one of those police officers around him was.” 

McLaughlin knew he was being kept under surveillance by people who were determined not only to ruin his career, but put him in prison. Someone who had been through a very similar experience had warned McLaughlin to expect nothing less.

In 1997, McLaughlin contacted investigative reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News, who the previous August had published an expose documenting the “dark alliance” between street-level drug dealers and the CIA. Webb’s stories described how a San Francisco-based drug ring “sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of the Contra guerillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The key figure in that alliance was “Freeway Rick” Ross, who obtained cut-rate cocaine from CIA-backed wholesalers; he then converted the powder into crack, which was sold through local franchises across the country. A large share of the proceeds obtained from those sales was given to the Nicaraguan Democratic Front, the largest of several CIA-organized rebel groups fighting the Soviet-backed Sandinista government. 

“This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the `crack’ capital of the world,” wrote Webb. “The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America – and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy weapons.” 

By the time McLaughlin contacted Webb, the reporter had already been disavowed by his editor – not because the stories were poorly sourced or badly written, but because of a concerted pressure campaign orchestrated by the CIA and its allies in the media. 

“We are having one heck of a time with Dominican drug traffickers and the same people you were investigating back in August,” McLaughlin told Webb.

“You mean the CIA,” Webb immediately replied.

McLaughlin asked Webb if in the course of investigating the CIA’s role in fomenting the crack epidemic he had seen evidence that the Agency had sought to destroy “the reputation and credibility” of the officers who had uncovered the connection.

“Most certainly,” Webb responded. After McLaughlin briefly described what had happened in the Pena-Gomez case, the reporter warned him: “You’re in for a long road full of sh*t; I’m already up to my neck in it.”

Despite the fact that subsequent investigations by the CIA’s Inspector General and a Senate committee vindicated Webb’s reporting, the writer was ruined, both professionally and personally. In December 2004, Webb – who was divorced, penniless, unemployed and unemployable, and facing eviction – became a member of that exclusive club of suicide victims who somehow managed to shoot themselves in the head, twice. 

A similar fate nearly befell former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent Joe Occhipinti.  In the course of a murder investigation in 1988, Occhipinti uncovered a money laundering operation in which several bodegas operated by members of the Dominican Federation were laundering drug proceeds on behalf of Seacrest Trading Company, a Connecticut-based finance company that specializes in high-interest loans to shady enterprises.

According to Occhipinti and several other investigators, Sea Crest was actually CIA front. This helps explain why Occhipinti’s investigation ended with the investigator himself being prosecuted on civil rights charges – none of which involved corruption, brutality, or dishonesty -- and sentenced to 36 months behind bars with many of the same Dominican crime figures he had investigated. 

McLaughlin managed to avoid prison. In 2002 he and fellow BNI agent Charles Micewski filed a civil rights lawsuit against Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher and several other state officials. The following February a federal jury ruled in their favor, granting them a total of $1.5 million in punitive damages and – much more importantly – vindicating their account of what had happened to them after they had investigated one of the many domestic drug networks either created or protected by the CIA. 

Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- that judgment was overturned by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where Mike Fisher -- the Attorney General who was the defendant in that case -- now sits as a judge. 

 I first covered McLaughlin’s story in 1997 while I was a senior editor at The New American magazine. Shortly after Damned from Memory was published I asked him if his view of War on Drugs had changed as a result of his experiences. “I think the best thing right now is to stress education,” he replied. He’s seen “The Needle and the Damage Done” – and also witnessed the violence and institutional corruption that is the inevitable result of treating vices as if they were crimes.

“I have seen an informant’s son with nothing but goo left on his arm from shooting up so much,” McLaughlin recalls. As a result of heroin addiction, the young man “was the walking dead. We saved him as a little project between ourselves.”

It’s worth noting that this commendable rehabilitation “project” wouldn’t have happened if the addict had been treated like a criminal. It’s just as important to remember that the people who profit from human misery of this kind are empowered by prohibition – and that the most despicable examples of that criminal caste are “public servants,” not private entrepreneurs.

The "war on drugs" is a narcotics price support program and a public works project for the coercive sector (especially the prison-industrial complex). It also provides an apparently bottomless well of revenue to fund the projects in subversion and state terrorism carried out by the CIA and its affiliates.

As Professor Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison points out, through drug prohibition, police act as "an informal regulator, controlling the volume of vice trading and setting the level of syndication"; this results in the creation of "powerful syndicates and a high volume of illicit activity."  

According to former DEA undercover operative Michael Levine, "The fundamental problem with the so-called war on drugs is that both sides are winning -- the drug lords and the `suits' -- because they both are making a killing” because of prohibition. That’s one reason why investigators like John McLaughlin are rewarded for gathering up huge volumes of tiny fish – and severely punished when they disturb any of the politically protected barracudas.

In a 1997 interview, Levine told me about a conversation he had with a CIA officer in Argentina eighteen years earlier. 

"There was a small group of us gathered for a drinking party at the CIA guy's apartment," Levine recalled. "There were several Argentine police officers there as well; at the time, Argentina was a police state in which people could be taken into custody without warning, tortured, and then `disappeared.'"

In other words, it differed little from what America has now become.

To continue:

"At one point my associate in the CIA said that he preferred Argentina's approach to social order, and that America should be more like that country. Somebody asked, `Well, how does a change of that sort happen?' The spook replied that it was necessary to create a situation of public fear -- a sense of impending anarchy and social upheaval in which the people will literally plead with Congress, `Take whatever rights you need, but save us...."

By now it should be clear to any rational person that we need to be saved from the Prohibitionists. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Michael Reichert and the Road Pirates of Collinsville, Illinois

Professional liar Michael Reichert describes how he plants drug evidence in "training" exercises.

Michael Reichert is a professional liar and, therefore, a decorated police officer with the Collinsville, Illinois Police Department. Thanks to a video of a recent deposition, Reichert may become Collinsville’s unofficial goodwill ambassador, and the city government is understandably unhappy about that prospect.

On December 4 of last year, Reichert conducted a pretext stop of a vehicle driven by Ohio native Terrance Huff, who – along with a friend named Jon Seaton – was returning from a Star Trek convention. As is his habit, Reichert was lurking along the interstate in search of late-model cars with out-of-state license plates. 

After inventing a reason to stop Huff, Reichert carried out a long-practiced routine intended to confect “probable cause” to search the vehicle in the hope of finding contraband or cash.

Reichert’s preferred interrogation tactic is to employ a series of “rolling no” questions. After asking about drugs, weapons or cash, and receiving negative answers, he will then ask for permission to conduct a “quick search” of the vehicle. The idea is either to trick the intimidated driver into consenting to a search by saying “no” as a matter of momentum – or to treat a positive refusal to search as evidence of “evasiveness” and, therefore, probable cause.

This routine was described by Federal Judge Michael J. Reagan in a 2005 ruling that described the officer as a “polished performer” and revealed him to be someone from whom lies flow as easily as bile from a ruptured liver.

“By simply adding up `suspicious’ factors while ignoring non-suspicious or mitigating factors [in the Zambrana traffic stop], Reichert misused the `totality of circumstances’ principle as a sword to unjustly pierce Zambrana’s cloak of Fourth Amendment protection,” concluded Judge Reagan.

In that earlier case, Reichert had taken note of a rental car with out-of-state plates that supposedly “crossed the white divider line.” He then pulled behind the driver and found it suspicious that the driver “continued down the highway in a completely normal manner” despite the fact that he was being followed by a cop. It was the devious act of driving casually that prompted Reichert to pull over the driver and begin the “rolling no” routine. The driver, who was being detained at gunpoint by an armed stranger, understandably became uneasy – and this was also described as buttressing the case for a search with a drug-sniffing dog.

Judge Reagan, unlike many in his profession, was willing to acknowledge what Reichert was doing, and he wasn’t amused. Reichert, motivated by the prospect of seizing contraband, cash, and property, was “simply adding up `suspicious’ factors while ignoring non-suspicious or mitigating factors” in the hope of meeting the “totality of circumstances” test for a warrantless search. Thanks to Reichert’s “ever-evolving matrix of suspicion,” it is possible to invent “probable cause” for a search in every traffic stop.

The December 4, 2011 involving Terrance Huff was a faithful application of the tactics denounced by Judge Reagan in the 2005 case. Huff was stopped for a non-existent traffic infraction. He was subjected to the “rolling no” routine. When he balked over a search and asked if he could go, Huff was told that his passenger looked "nervous" -- a lie, naturally -- and that this supposedly gave Reichert reasonable suspicion that a search would be justified. Huff was also told that his car would have to be impounded if he didn’t consent, and that he would be given a “ride” by the officer (which would have meant putting him under arrest). 

Although Huff never gave positive consent, Reichert simply declared, "I am going to search your car." Reichert first did an external sweep using his drug-sniffing dog, Macho – with the officer clearly and obviously doing his best to prompt the dog to “alert” for narcotics. That, in turn, gave Reichert an excuse to search the interior of the SUV. 

After finding nothing, Reichert claimed that there was marijuana “shake” – or residue – in the interior, which was yet another lie. Remember this fact; we’ll come back to it shortly.

There was nothing novel about the treatment Huff experienced: The Collinsville PD conducts dozens of identical stops each week, and roughly half of its operating budget comes from seizures of cash and property through civil asset forfeiture. 

Despite – or perhaps owing to -- the fact that Reichert was fired twice after being put on the so-called Brady List (a roster of police officers whose documented dishonesty disqualifies them from testifying in court) he is in charge of instructing other Collinsville officers in the dark arts of manufacturing “probable cause” for vehicle searches. 

 This makes a certain cynical sense when it’s understood that the Collinsville PD is engaged in a cut-throat competition with road pirates in the employ of other local police agencies.

The stretch of freeway patrolled by Reichert falls under the jurisdiction of four law enforcement agencies – the city police, the municipal police from nearby St. Claire, the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, and the Illinois Highway Patrol. This makes it a highly coveted territory for predatory police officers hungry for a slice of the asset forfeiture plunder. 

In January 2011, Reichert was given a commendation by Collinsville Police Chief Scott Williams.  In April, Reichert was named “Officer of the Month.” This was a reward for what was described as exemplifying “the proactive and innovative philosophy of law enforcement prescribed to [sic] by the Collinsville Police Department. He has demonstrated this by his aggressive approach to drug trafficking in the area.”

“Officer Reichert had 166 total incidents with 6 arrests and 7 citations in 13 working days,” explained the department’s report. “In addition to this he had 3 self initiated significant incidents that is very worthy of praise [sic.]”

Once again: Remember the phrase “self-initiated significant incidents”; we’ll return to it anon.

The traffic stop involving Terrance Huff was entirely typical, except for the identity of the victim: Huff is a documentary filmmaker, and thus had the means to fight back. “Breakfast in Collinsville,” the short film Huff produced using dashcam footage from Reichert’s police car exposed the officer’s practiced, award-winning dishonesty to the world.

On December 4 -- his birthday, as it happens -- Huff released a follow-up entitled “Lodging in Collinsville” that has earned itself a place on what could be called the “Wrath of Khan” list – that is, the small and exclusive roster of sequels that improved upon their predecessors. The second film includes footage of a recent deposition in which Reichert admits to planting narcotics evidence on vehicles as a “training” exercise. 

Under questioning by attorney Louis Meyer, who is representing Huff in a lawsuit against the City of Collinsville, Reichert describes how he would visit parking lots and train drug-sniffing dogs by “taking … weed and wiping it on the door.” This leaves a “residue” of marijuana that can be detected up to an hour later. This “training” technique would be applied using “big trucks, U-Haul trucks, 18-wheelers, and so forth,” Reichert related.

Asked if he would get permission from vehicle owners before tainting their property with drug residue, the squirmy, sheepish officer replied that he would do so “sometimes.” In other words, he tacitly admitted that he sometimes or often does so without either asking the owners or informing them of what had been done to their vehicles.

Recall now that Reichert claimed to have found marijuana “shake” in Huff’s vehicle. That is almost certainly not the first time he has made such a claim – which is probably true in those instances involving vehicles he had previously tainted during “training” exercises. 

In his deposition Reichert disclosed that he will visit motels near the expressway and ask staff if they have seen “suspicious” people with out-of-state license plates who have paid for their rooms in cash. He also admitted that he has used vehicles in motel parking lots in “residue training” exercises.

This is how a “self-initiated significant incident” can be easily created: Reichert visits a motel parking lot, prompts a member of the productive class to say that there are “suspicious” people lodging therein, then he goes into the parking lot and plants drug “evidence” that is later used as “probable cause” for a traffic stop. 

Not surprisingly, Huff ends his video with a warning that out-of-state motorists should avoid spending the night in any of the motels found off the Bluff Road exit in Collinsville.

The reaction of the Collinsville City government was entirely predictable: Rather than demanding that Reichert and his comrades in the police department desist from their criminal behavior, they are demanding that Huff take down his video.

“I just got an e-mail from the city attorney asking to have the [Lodging in Collinsville] video taken down by the end of the day,” attorney Louis Meyer informed Pro Libertate in a December 4 phone interview. “He didn’t explain why he thought Mr. Huff had to do this. It is a publicly available document attached to our motion for summary judgment. There was nothing placed under seal, and all of this information – including the video of the deposition – was available to anybody willing to go into the clerk’s office and ask for it.”

On December 3, Collinsville city attorney Steven Giacoletto filed a motion for summary judgment invoking the familiar, and entirely specious, claim of “qualified immunity." He also filed a motion to discontinue discovery until after U.S. District Judge Reagan -- yes, the same judge that lambasted Reichert in 2005 -- rules on the summary judgement motion. For Reichert and the corrupt municipal clique that employs him, the highest priority is to prevent any further exposure of their feculent little forfeiture racket.

In their response, Huff's attorneys pointed out that "Summary judgment is only appropriate where material facts are undisputed" -- which is emphatically not the case here. Huff does not concede that he committed a traffic violation, and Reichert has never provided evidence that he did. Huff repeatedly refused consent to search the vehicle, until Reichert offered a tacit but unmistakable threat to seize the car and arrest its owner. 

After Reichert finally browbeat the innocent driver into permitting an exterior search with the drug-sniffing dog, the officer manipulated the canine into providing a false "alert": "While Reichert walked his canine around the vehicle, he gave the canine cues. The canine did not make a positive alert on Plaintiff's vehicle. With proper discovery, [Huff] will be able to prove that the alleged alert was false or even worse, fabricated. The alert was belied by the fact that there was no contraband in [the] vehicle."

"Proper discovery" is precisely what Reichert and his keepers are desperately seeking to avoid by playing the "qualified immunity" card.

Reichert's hunting ground along I-70.

 “Every time there’s an episode of police misconduct, `qualified immunity’ is the defense of first recourse,” Meyer points out. “It is determined on a case-by-case, fact-specific basis, and the benefit of the doubt is given when an officer is dealing with a murky legal situation and makes an honest error of judgment. That doesn’t apply in this case. Reichert has a documented history of dishonesty. He fabricated the excuse for the traffic stop, detained Huff and his passenger for longer than necessary, and misrepresented the findings of the drug-sniffing dog to conduct an illegal search.”

Attorney Dan Kiss, who is Meyer’s partner in a Chicago-based civil rights litigation firm, told Pro Libertate that Huff’s video – and the ensuing publicity – has caused many other victims to seek legal redress. 

“The officers involved in this enterprise aren’t out there saving crime victims,” Kiss observes. This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about making money. And Collinsville isn’t unique. It’s pretty typical of small towns near interstates where people driving vehicles with out-of-state license plates are fair game for pirates in police uniforms.”

(This version of the essay was updated to include the name of Huff's passenger and excerpts from the legal motions filed late in the day on December 4.) 

Dum spiro, pugno!