Posted on 02/28/2007 5:49:10 AM PST by Gritty
(CNSNews.com) - A paid Mexican informer for the U.S. government who worked in an undercover operation targeting a major narcotics cartel allegedly went off the rails and was involved in more than a dozen murders.
Amid allegations of a bungled investigation and an accompanying cover-up, at least one member of Congress is calling for hearings into the matter (see related story).
Guillermo Ramirez Peyro is now fighting an attempt by the U.S. government to deport him and said he fears for his life at the hands of the cartel should he be sent back to Mexico.
Statements from key players and documents before court shed light on a drama involving an out-of-control operative, dangerous druglords, crooked Mexican police, and a serious dispute between U.S. government agencies.
Relatives of five people allegedly killed by the cartel in the Mexican town of Juarez - directly across the border from El Paso, Texas - have brought a wrongful death suit against the U.S. federal government.
The suit, filed in Texas last September, cited government documents and contains claims that Ramirez had knowledge of or participated in 13 murders committed by the cartel - murders the claimants said the federal authorities could have and should have stopped.
Ramirez himself has admitted only to knowledge of the murders, two of which he says he witnessed.
Should his appeal against deportation fail, Ramirez's removal from the country would rob the lawsuit's plaintiffs of a key witness.
In the view of a retired top Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, that's exactly what is intended by those who are pushing for the former informer's deportation.
"He would be the key witness," ex-agent Sandalio Gonzalez told Cybercast News Service. "What else could it be [but a cover-up]? They have protected him all the way. Now they want to get him killed."
U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, whose office supervised the investigation, declined to speak about the matter since it is in litigation. Sutton is the same federal prosecutor who has drawn national attention for his role in the controversial prosecution of two U.S. Border Patrol agents who shot an illegal immigrant attempting to smuggle drugs across the border.
The saga began in early 2002, when the DEA, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio initiated "Operation Sky High," a multi-agency bilateral investigation also involving Mexican authorities, targeting the notorious Vicente Carrillo Fuentes narcotics cartel.
Sandalio Gonzales was the DEA's pointman in the operation.
A decorated DEA special agent, one-time president of the Federal Hispanic Law Enforcement Officers Association, and an official who was called on to testify on the agency's behalf before Congress, Gonzales was to become the most vocal government critic of how the investigation was conducted.
In January 2003, according to the wrongful death suit, the agencies tasked Ramirez to infiltrate the cartel in Juarez, with a key goal being the arrest of top cartel member Heriberto Santillan-Tabares.
Within six months, however, the first sign of trouble appeared, when Ramirez was caught attempting to sneak about 100 pounds of marijuana across the border into New Mexico.
The agencies discussed the matter, and it was decided that the informer should stay in place.
"After a lengthy discussion, the consensus was that if the CI [confidential informant] was closely monitored he could continue to be effective and provide significant information on" the cartel's criminal activities, Assistant U.S. Attorney Juanita Fielden said in a later sworn affidavit. (Fielden worked for Sutton's office and was directly involved in the cartel case.)
But if the agencies thought they had their agent under control, matters were about to get dramatically worse.
On Aug. 5, 2003, an ICE agent contacted Fielden at her home with the news that a murder had taken place in Juarez involving Santillan-Tabares - and that Ramirez had played a key role.
But according to the court documents which cite an ICE debriefing, Ramirez not only participated in the murder but "supervised" it.
The victim was a Mexican lawyer, Fernando Reyes Aguado, who was suspected of losing a delivery belonging to the cartel. The court documents say cartel members bound Reyes with duct tape and a rope and used a plastic bag and a shovel to kill him.
The documents also say that, in a sworn deposition taken in Dallas in February 2004, Ramirez admitted to having bought the duct tape and plastic bag in order to carry out the killing, as well as several bags of lime to help speed up the decomposition of the lawyer's body.
Upon learning about the informer's involvement in the gang slaying, DEA agents suggested arresting Santillan-Tabares immediately and urged ICE to "take down" the operation, Gonzalez confirmed in an interview.
But ICE and the U.S. Attorney's office rejected the recommendation, Gonzalez said.
In her affidavit, Fielden said she reviewed the Attorney General's guidelines regarding criminal activity by a confidential informer. "ICE management in El Paso and in Washington D.C. approved the continued investigation of Santillan-Tabares," she wrote.
In Gonzales' view, the decision not to capture the gang boss and wind up the operation ended up costing the lives of at least 13 other people who were killed in the ensuing months by the cartel in Juarez.
Their bodies were buried in the grounds of the same house where the first killing had taken place - a location that became known as the House of Death.
One of those victims was Luis Padilla, a Mexican national and legal U.S. resident living in El Paso, Texas, who was abducted, apparently in a case of mistaken identity. His wife, Janet Padilla, is the lead plaintiff in the wrongful death suit.
DEA agent's narrow escape
In January 2004, Operation Sky High began to unravel, according to Gonzales and the documents before court.
On Jan. 13, cartel members while torturing a victim learned the address of a supposed businessman living in Juarez, whose home they suspected of containing large quantities of narcotics. The gang planned to capture and kill the man the following day.
The supposed businessman was in fact a DEA agent named Homer McBrayer, who was living in Juarez with his family.
On Jan. 14, crooked local Juarez police and several gunmen pulled McBrayer and his family over while driving. Gun-toting cartel members forced the agent, his wife and two children out of the automobile, according to government documents.
McBrayer somehow managed to use his cell phone to contact a fellow agent in Juarez, who alerted Mexican state police. They rushed to the scene and prevented the abduction.
At this point, the wrongful death lawsuit claims, "ICE and the Justice Department ... could no longer ignore the serial killings" and the fact that their paid informer, Ramirez, was one of the alleged killers.
The very next day, Santillan-Tabares was lured across the border and arrested in El Paso.
Gonzales, furious that his DEA colleagues in Juarez had been endangered, sent an angry letter to his ICE counterpart, John Gaudioso, slamming the ICE for its handling of the case and pointing out that the DEA had been forced to evacuate its agents in Juarez.
Santillan-Tabares was charged with murder and drug trafficking, but Sutton negotiated a deal, and the murder charges were dropped. Santillan-Tabares pleaded guilty to the narcotics charges and was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment.
In a statement announcing the outcome, Sutton said the murder charges were dropped in exchange for Santillan-Tabares' guilty plea.
He explained that Mexico has a superior interest in prosecuting those responsible for the killings, as "all of the murders were committed in Ciudad Juarez, by Mexican citizens, including law enforcement officials, and all of the victims were citizens of Mexico."
'Knew or should have known'
The wrongful death suit alleges that Ramirez, over a two-year period, was "paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the U.S. government to work for ICE and the U.S. Attorney."
Yet all the while, it says, "Ramirez had outsmarted his handlers; he could traffic in drugs, torture and kill countless victims - while on the payroll of the U.S. government. With no fear of prosecution, Ramirez killed and threatened indiscriminately."
But the degree to which the U.S. agencies had knowledge about the informer's ongoing activities remains a matter of dispute.
Gonzales said it was only after Santillan-Tabares' arrest that he learned about the killings that had occurred after the first one - the death of lawyer Reyes in August 2003.
Fielden, too, said she learned about the subsequent murders for the first time when she interviewed Ramirez on Jan. 28-29. ICE special agent Gaudioso said he first heard about the string of killings on Jan. 25.
Ramirez' attorney, Jodi Goodwin, doesn't buy those arguments and said her client kept government officials informed throughout the probe.
"The U.S. Attorney's office clearly ... knew or should have known," Goodwin told Cybercast News Service in an interview. "Was the investigation out of hand? It looks to me like it was. But ICE chose to continue."
One DEA official and one ICE official carried out a joint review of the operation, in the process interviewing 44 people between Feb. 10 and 19 of that year. Remarkably, they did not interview Ramirez, however, Goodwin said.
Gonzalez says he doesn't believe the review was a serious investigation.
In his strongly worded letter to Gaudioso, written on Feb. 24, 2004, Gonzales complained that ICE and the U.S. Attorney's Office restricted the DEA's access to Ramirez and withheld vital information from the DEA.
He said the decision to keep Ramirez in place and allow the investigation to continue after the first killing allowed "at least 13 other murders to take place in Juarez, Mexico in what can only be described as a total disregard for human life."
Gonzales' letter triggered a negative response from DEA supervisors, who prohibited him from speaking further on the matter.
DEA Administrator Karen Tandy wrote in a March 5, 2004 message to ICE and Justice Department officials that her agency headquarters had not been aware beforehand of Gonzalez's "inexcusable letter."
"I apologized to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a no comment to the press," she said.
Tandy's note was an exhibit in a discrimination lawsuit Gonzales brought against his employer dealing with the Juarez investigation and an earlier unrelated incident. He won the case last December, and the government is appealing.
Most of the allegations in the wrongful death suit were denied in a government response to the complaint. The government denies that ICE obstructed the DEA, the government's handling of the case led to more murders, and that ICE could have prevented the risk posed to DEA agents.
The government response does, however, admit to Ramirez's March 2004 deposition - when he confirmed he bought the duct tape, plastic bag and lime used in the Reyes murder.
Although Sutton refused to discuss the case, his office did ask for questions to be sent in writing, to be forwarded to the Justice Department. The office later reaffirmed that it could not comment.
ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda did not respond to written questions on the case, submitted by Cybercast News Service at her request last week.
A DEA spokesman in El Paso also declined to comment, deferring to the Justice Department and ICE. A separate DEA spokeswoman in Washington said it's unlikely Tandy or anyone in the agency would talk about the case, considering the litigation.
'Stab him in the back'
Ramirez is now incarcerated in an undisclosed prison in the Midwest, fighting a government attempt to deport him.
In August 2005, an immigration judge determined that there was a credible threat to his life if he returned to Mexico and granted approval for him to remain in the United States. An appeals court judge overturned the ruling, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals is now considering the matter.
According to his lawyer, Goodwin, Ramirez denies involvement in the murders. He confirms knowing about "a dozen murders" and having witnessed two, she said.
Goodwin echoes Gonzalez's claims about a cover-up.
"The big G government in Washington wants him to be as quiet as possible," she said. "It's hard to understand how they could use somebody for so many years and stab him in the back."
"a drama involving an out-of-control operative, dangerous druglords, crooked Mexican police, and a serious dispute between U.S. government agencies. "
And...
Sounds like business as usual. Too many cooks, not enough accountability and everybody hoping to take credit for "the big bust" when it happens.
WOD joke.
House of death, ping.
PING!
Glad to see this story finally getting some attention.
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