Deep inside a top level drug investigation
In the following book excerpt, a former undercover Ontario narcotics officer Bob Deasy describes how his team got inside the head of South American drug smugglers. For cops involved with high level drug investigations, the book, “Boarding Air Cannabis” by Bob Deasy and Mark Ebner, makes for pretty gripping reading.
From the book:
Since the Amigo Squad was wiretap-driven, we were constantly stirring the pot. The wire would give us the location of a drop, where a car would be parked with coke in the trunk, and we would go and remove the dope, then seal the trunk up as if nothing had happened.
Then we would sit back and listen to the fireworks on the wire: a mid-level transporter had just lost 10 or 15 kilos of someone else’s drugs. He’d have a meltdown, call everyone who worked with him to explain what just happened, then call anyone who owed him a favour who could airlift him out of the hole he was in. Now we had all of them on tape as well.
With a ghost loose in the machine, he’d want to make sure everything was locked down — the stash houses, fake condos, rental storage units where he stowed the drugs and incriminating evidence — and we would dutifully follow him on his rounds. Then we would break in and liberate the dope there as well, increasing his problems 10-fold. Everyone blamed everyone else, and no one suspected the police could have been behind any of it.
Our strategy took the drugs off the street, which was our prime directive, but it also sowed doubt among all the parties, which was a wedge we could constantly exploit. An operation like the Colombians’ is run completely top-down; every decision is made at the executive level, and all parts of the network are in constant contact through the chain of command. It would have been impossible to place an undercover officer anywhere in that pipeline because he would have needed to be Colombian, and they would have vetted his story at the source and then murdered his extended family. You had to wait for someone inside to flip. Our job was to speed up the process.