Pubdate: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 Source: Dallas Morning News (TX) Copyright: 2011 The Dallas Morning News, Inc. Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/lettertoed.cgi Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117 SHOULD THE DEA PLAY BANKER TO DRUG CARTELS? The international drug trade has always had a currency problem. The more aggressive an illicit organization becomes at moving narcotics into the U.S., the more cash it accumulates. At some point, all those dollars have to be processed or the business chokes on its own sordid success. Federal investigators for years have employed the old dictum - follow the money - but with a twist. At some point in the hunt for the really bad guys at the top, agents sometimes become custodians of the cash, picking it up in great bundles, depositing it in accounts and then watching as the drug underworld moves the millions earned on the streets. Operation Juno, conducted over three years in the late 1990s against the Colombian drug cartels, is one example for these kinds of prosecutions. Undercover agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration picked up huge bundles of cash, as much as $500,000 a pop, from couriers who delivered the cash booty in gym bags at major cities, Dallas and Houston among them. The money was placed by the DEA in a bank account in Atlanta, where the black market of money laundering then moved the cash to various accounts in the U.S. and around the world. The sting resulted in over 40 arrests and the seizure of $10 million. In addition, more than 300 bank accounts with an additional $16 million in drug deposits were identified, most of them abroad. The novel investigation, the first of its kind, exposed the international money trail and paid huge dividends for prosecutors. News that the DEA, under the supervision of the Justice Department, is conducting these kinds of operations in Mexico is not surprising. The two countries have worked closely on this common front since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels in 2006. One result of the cooperation, according to a recent article in The New York Times, is the lifting of a ban that prevented U.S. agents from doing this kind of undercover work. The restriction had been in place since 1998, when the U.S. carried out a sting without the knowledge of authorities in Mexico. Are these undercover operations targeting Mexico's powerful drug cartels a good idea? Yes, provided that they are conducted with the proper safeguards and oversights. There is nothing to indicate that they are not, though the Times article does leave the impression that perhaps more stringent guidelines are in order. The undercover gun-smuggling fiasco known as Fast and Furious in some ways now haunts all these covert operations. That's a bit unfair. But if there is a lesson from that rogue operation, which was conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - not the DEA - it is that officials need to aggressively monitor what happens in the field. Now that news of the money-laundering operation is out, senior officials at Justice and their congressional overseers should ask the right questions and make sure they get satisfactory answers. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom