Police Officials Say FBI Focus On Terror Hurting Drug Fight By Allan Lengel, The Washington Post
The Washington division of the Drug Enforcement Administration has been criticized by the DEA’s headquarters for a “steady decline” in new cases and arrests, and some area law enforcement officials contend that the agency isn’t doing enough to target major violent drug gangs in the District.
The DEA’s performance has disappointed some officials who want the agency to step up now that the FBI is devoting more of its attention to terrorism matters. In recent years, the FBI targeted major violent drug gangs in the District while the DEA chose to deal more with mid-level cases, according to the U.S. attorney’s office and others.
“We would like to see the DEA step into the void,” said the District’s U.S. attorney, Roscoe C. Howard Jr. “We have talked to them as an office, and it’s something that would be worthwhile, certainly not only of benefit to us but of benefit to our city.”
Although the Washington division has developed some major cases over the years, many in law enforcement say it isn’t measuring up to its potential. More than a dozen DEA agents and law enforcement officials complained that the DEA has too often avoided complicated cases in Washington and some surrounding communities because the division is overly cautious or unwilling to devote the time needed to develop bigger cases. The division covers the District, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.
“There seems to be almost a fear of ‘what if something goes wrong?’ ” one DEA agent said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he feared reprisals. “There’s always the possibility of something going wrong. . . . If you start what-iffing yourself, you don’t get things done.”
R.C. Gamble, who became chief of the Washington division in April 2001, said the agency is doing the best it can with the resources it has. “This office is doing a tremendous job,” said Gamble, a 31-year veteran of the DEA. “You’ve got so many competing priorities. The agency as a whole needs more resources.”
Large-scale drug gangs have plagued many D.C. neighborhoods for years and contribute to the city’s rising homicide rate. Putting them out of business would require a commitment of personnel to conduct extensive surveillance and wiretaps.
A Dec. 10 memo from DEA headquarters sharply criticized the division for the decline in new cases, as well as a drop in arrests and seizures of assets in the past few years. The memo came after a routine inspection last fall.
The memo also cited 13 instances in which the Washington division violated administrative procedures in handling evidence, sensitive materials, fugitives and investigative files.
“The Washington division exhibits a lack of proper management oversight in performing DEA’s mission. . . . I consider the deficiencies addressed herein to be a very serious matter,” wrote Asa Hutchinson, then the DEA’s director. “I expect that you and your staff will promptly take the appropriate action required to resolve the deficiencies cited.”
The number of cases handled by the Washington division dropped from 676 in 2000 to 602 in 2002, according to DEA figures. The number of arrests fell from 2,258 in 2000 to 1,629 in 2002. Seizure of assets also declined, from $19.2 million to $17.3 million.
The DEA nationwide experienced similar declines with the exception of asset seizures, which rose agency-wide.
Gamble downplayed the memo, saying that the administrative violations were isolated incidents and minor, such as the late filing of a report.
He insisted that the statistics are misleading and said he was bothered that “not once was I asked [by inspectors] why the numbers are down.” He said one reason arrest figures were higher in 2000 than 2002 was because his office participated in joint operations with Prince George’s County police and other local forces that led to mass arrests.
Gamble said the Washington division employs about 170 agents, of which 60 are managers. More than 30 of the street agents are assigned to the District and its surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, but four of those agents are on leave, he said.
“We are asked to do a whole lot with a little,” he said.
Gamble said the division is shifting priorities, as dictated by headquarters, by putting more emphasis on bigger-impact cases. He said his agents also are focusing more on assisting other DEA divisions including those in New York and Miami. Drugs sold in Washington frequently come from those places, he said.
Those familiar with the headquarters’ inspection said the statistics can be a fair measure of performance if balanced with other considerations. They say inspectors normally review some closed and pending cases and take into account the scope, impact and quality of those probes before drawing conclusions about statistics.
Still, Gamble maintained that a more telling statistic is the number of new wiretap cases. Last year, there were 51, up from 46 in 2000, a sign that the office is focusing more on in-depth cases, he said.
Gamble’s office has registered some successes, including the breakup of a crack cocaine ring that dominated the Hume Spring section of northern Alexandria. A probe by the DEA and a local task force, dubbed Operation Dirty Dozen, resulted in 70 convictions and the recent indictment of two brothers from Denver charged as suppliers.
A DEA task force group also busted a major ecstasy drug organization last year in Northern Virginia that supplied District clubs. And last year in east Baltimore, DEA agents and a task force helped break up the Lafayette Project Boys, a thriving drug gang that authorities suspect of killing five people.
Gamble disputes complaints by agents that his office is not aggressive enough or is overly cautious.
“I think that’s an unfair statement,” he said during one of two lengthy interviews in his Northwest Washington office. “We do have a responsibility that folks aren’t running into harm’s way.”
Hutchinson is now a top official with the new Department of Homeland Security. Through a spokesman, he declined comment on his memo and referred questions to DEA headquarters.
Will Glaspy, a DEA spokesman at headquarters, downplayed the tone of the memo, saying the evaluation in no way suggests the Washington division is failing.
“We consider ourselves the best drug investigators in the world, and the only way to maintain that is to be very critical of ourselves and try to keep improving.”
Although some law enforcement officials in Washington and Baltimore criticized the DEA for taking on too many run-of-the-mill cases, U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty of the Eastern District of Virginia applauded the agency’s performance.
“My experience is they do all types of cases,” he said. “They do take a lot of quick hits, reactive-type cases, what we call in Virginia communities, impact cases. We value that which takes a handful of crack dealers off the street corner of a neighborhood.”
The DEA here, McNulty said, “is covering the whole field.”
“We’ve been accomplishing a lot, and they are making a lot of good cases,” he said. “Can we do better? Sure we can do a better job.”
In Baltimore, U.S. Attorney Thomas M. DiBiagio said he met with Gamble and the top agent in the Baltimore office after he took office in September 2001 and conveyed his desire to go after bigger cases to meet a mandate from the Bush administration.
He acknowledged that not all the agents have complied, but overall, he said, “the Maryland DEA has really stepped up to the plate. I’ve asked them to do bigger targets, and they’ve responded.”
Not all are so laudatory.
“They don’t seem to have a whole lot of agents interested in doing the really large cases,” said one federal official in the Baltimore area. “They want to do the large targets, but they don’t want to spend the time.”
In the District, Gamble questioned whether the FBI’s shift to anti-terrorism investigations had actually left a void in drug enforcement activities. He said the agency has taken on any District cases that have come its way.
But some law enforcement officials and federal agents disagree.
“The FBI has left a huge gap,” said one DEA agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The FBI did in D.C. what the DEA did in New York, Chicago and Detroit” by going after the big, violent drug gangs, he said.