Pubdate: Mon, 08 May 2000 Source: Inquirer (PA) Copyright: 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. Contact: 400 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19101 Website: http://www.phillynews.com/inq/ Forum: http://interactive.phillynews.com/talk-show/ Author: Sudarsan Raghavan A HARD-CHARGING DEA OFFICIAL SETS HIS SIGHTS ON AREA HEROIN DEALERS. Drug war's new general in region There he was, face down on a hotel bed, handcuffed and bleeding, a gun pressed to his head. "Why are you looking at me?" the Cuban drug dealer hissed at him. "You think you're going to identify me? You are seconds from dying." Miami, 1983: An undercover sting had gone wrong. Now, the dealer had the drop on a young DEA agent. An hour earlier, the agent had tucked a loaded pistol under a pillow beside him. Would the dealer spot it? Would the agent need to use it? Felix Jimenez would survive that fix to continue his war on drugs. A Hispanic law officer who made his career busting Latino outlaws in Colombia, Mexico and the Caribbean, Jimenez, now 51, is the region's new federal narcotics sheriff. At a time when authorities say Hispanic drug lords control the area drug trade, Jimenez, as head of Philadelphia's Drug Enforcement Administration office, brings luster to a minority community concerned about stereotypes and reputation. "If he does his job here, it's going to translate into something positive for the entire community," said Hernan Guaracao, editor and publisher of Al Dia, the region's largest Spanish-language newspaper. Since January, Jimenez has been pursuing the major traffickers bringing heroin into Philadelphia. The narcotic, with high purity levels and low prices, is hooking a new generation of addicts. In the Philadelphia suburbs, one-third of those receiving treatment for heroin abuse in 1998 were 24 and younger, up from 24 percent in 1995. By September, 42 percent of those arrested for heroin possession or sale in Philadelphia were 25 or younger - up from 33 percent in 1992. The heroin sold in Philadelphia is the second-cheapest among major U.S. cities, after San Francisco, according to the DEA. It is also the nation's most potent - with a 71 percent purity level, compared with a national average of 41 percent. Traffickers now bring heroin here directly from Colombia, bypassing traditional gateway cities such as New York and Miami. "Now, especially in Philadelphia, we have a severe problem with heroin," Jimenez said recently. "Why? It's the place of least resistance" for the traffickers. Jimenez says he joined the DEA to collar drug dealers who were corrupting his native Puerto Rico. He was born in San Juan. His mother died when he was 6, and his father, a sugar cane farmer who later became a wealthy landowner, raised him and an older sister in a strict, religious household. Jimenez became an agent for the Justice Department in San Juan in 1971, after graduating from Puerto Rico's Catholic University. He joined the DEA in 1974. Jimenez infiltrated major drug cartels by posing as a millionaire buyer. He wore expensive suits and gold jewelry. He spoke Spanish like the bad guys. One slip in his speech, one slip in his confidence, could mean a bullet. "You have to be a natural actor in order to be successful," Jimenez said. "With your body language, they will detect if you are for real or not." Years ago in that Miami hotel room, Jimenez did not blow his cover. The dealer still believed he was a drug buyer but had decided to rob him instead of selling to him. Jimenez was bleeding from a blow to the temple. His left hand was cuffed to another undercover agent, and his right hand was bound with a coat hanger. "I was very nervous, and basically losing control of the situation," Jimenez recalled, his voice shaking as he told the story in his office at Sixth and Arch Streets. "This guy was very hyper. He was looking for a motive to pull the trigger." Jimenez survived with a lie, a stuck zipper, and the loaded gun. The lie: Jimenez told his captor there was $80,000 in a garment bag inside a closet. Take it and let me go, he said. The zipper: The trafficker walked backward toward the closet, smiling. But the bag's zipper would not budge, so he flipped his weapon to his left hand to get at the zipper with his right. The gun: As the dealer switched hands, Jimenez freed his right hand, grabbed the gun from under the pillow and opened fire. Startled, his captor fired back. A hail of bullets. Shattered mirrors, lamps, windows. One dead drug dealer. "God is the only one who saved me," Jimenez said. Jimenez had seen death before. He had seen it packaged in little blue bags of heroin. He had seen it in the sad eyes of parents who had lost children to drugs. So it did not bother him, he said, when he killed the dealer. He was back at work the next week. Jimenez is solidly constructed, 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds. Brown hair, mustache, wide shoulders. His handshake is firm. He says he reads the Bible every day. He likes Vietnamese food, collects oil paintings, and drives a Mercedes-Benz, sometimes a Porsche. He describes himself as an introvert who never shows emotion. Yet he is passionate talking about his career. His words are driven, like hammered nails. "I'm a very ambitious person," he said. "My short-term goal is to go after major drug organizations in the area. "I'm going to attack the problem from different angles. I'm going to attack the problem from a distribution point of view; I'm going to attack the problem by attacking the finances." The Philadelphia police narcotics chief, Raymond Rooney, who works closely with Jimenez, said of him: "He comes in with a lot of new ideas. He's proposing ways of expanding existing programs and then thinking about other ones." Jimenez says he hopes to attack the heroin trade through technology, as dealers increasingly use cell phones and the Internet to smuggle drugs. Just how will the DEA go about this? Jimenez would rather not say. Jimenez rose to become chief inspector at the DEA headquarters in Washington - the fourth most senior person in the agency and the highest-ranking Hispanic. He built his reputation by working long hours, he said, but was also criticized as a tough micromanager. "This guy will go 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Michael S. Vigil, special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean field division, who has known Jimenez for 15 years. "He was one of those indviduals who never went home. He lived and embraced DEA." Last year the Oregon public school system named him one of 13 outstanding Hispanic role models in the country. When he sees a Hispanic person selling drugs, he said, he sees a criminal who is shaming a community's name. "It makes me feel bad, because this is a bad example for the culture," Jimenez said. "My job is to ensure that that Hispanic American will not continue trafficking. The only way I'm going to solve the problem is by putting that individual in jail." Guaracao and other Hispanic leaders say they hope Jimenez will bring more sensitivity to the DEA. Too often, they say, the agency stereotypes Hispanics as drug sellers and buyers. Philadelphia may be Jimenez's last assignment. He left Washington, he said, to be closer to his son, a sophomore at Villanova University. He is also approaching the DEA's mandatory retirement age of 57. He plans to go out just as he began. In the next five years, Jimenez wants to reduce the availability of heroin and put its traffickers "in jail or force them out of the state." Now and then, his mind drifts back to that hotel bed in Miami, and he thinks how it might have gone - if the zipper had not stuck, if he had not hidden the gun, if the dealer had simply decided to shoot him on the spot. Jimenez learned then that, in the drug enforcement profession, God can work in mysterious ways. He says he is thankful for that. - --- MAP posted-by: Greg