Karen Tandy Retaliates Against DEA Whistle-blower
This ugly story provides a frightening example of the sordid relationships our government maintains when conducting international narcotics investigations.
DEA Special Agent in Charge Sandalio “Sandy” Gonzalez was shown the door after submitting a memo implicating a U.S. Government informant in several murders in Mexico.
From WFAA-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth, TX:
Gonzalez began in early 2004 to question the U.S. government's role in allowing an informant to commit possible crimes, even murder.
Twelve bodies had been uncovered in a small duplex in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - a short drive from Gonzalez’s El Paso office.
Gonzalez, however, became shocked when he began to review government reports, including a report saying a paid U.S. informant supervised and participated in at least one murder at the cartel-operated house.
I guess even a high-ranking DEA agent has to draw the line somewhere. But Gonzalez’s superiors in Washington, D.C. didn’t appreciate his principled stand:
Troubled by what he found, Gonzalez ultimately wrote a memo to his ICE counterpart in El Paso, and sent a copy to the Justice Department.
That was the beginning of the end of his career.
“It was a classic case of shooting the messenger,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez got a bad job review from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy, his boss. And felt pressure to retire early.
A more detailed account available at The Narcosphere, is quite a read. Still, this mess has largely escaped the headlines, surely to the satisfaction of Karen Tandy and her colleagues.
It’s no secret that our government frequently hires criminals to do its dirty work in the drug war, but condoning murder is a questionable sacrifice even by the drug war’s flimsy moral standards.
Seeing Karen Tandy take a stand against whistle-blowing at DEA is alarming given her agency’s vulnerability to internal corruption. It makes you wonder what else these guys are up to when they’re not busy interfering with the democratic process.
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DEA in San Francisco
Comment posted by shadow on Sun, 09/03/2006 - 10:57pmBogotá DEA Corruption Allegations Intersect with Covert FBI, CIA Activity in Colombia
New Document Unravels More Mysteries in Kent Memo; Narco-Trafficker, Informant Drop the Dime on Suspected DEA Foul Play
By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
March 6, 2006
In the late 1990s, Luis Hernando Gómez Bustamante, one of the leaders of Colombia’s North Valley Cartel narco-trafficking syndicate, became one of the targets of a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation called Operation Cali-Man, which was overseen by a DEA supervisor in Miami named David Tinsley.
In mid January 2000, Gómez Bustamante attended a meeting in Panama to discuss possible cooperation with the DEA. According to one of Tinsley’s informants, during the course of that meeting Gómez Bustamante revealed that a high-level DEA agent in Bogotá was on the “payroll” of a corrupt Colombian National Police colonel named Danilo Gonzalez — who was eventually indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on narco-trafficking charges.
The informant, an individual named Ramon Suarez, later told DEA internal affairs investigators that the U.S. federal agent identified by Gómez Bustamante as being on the “payroll” was Javier Pena, who at the time was the assistant country attaché of the DEA Bogotá Country Office in Colombia.
Notice that one Javier Pena, second sentence up is the head of the DEA San Francisco Office. See link http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/sanfran_sacbio.html
http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1662.html
Interesting reading