How the DEA let one of Haiti’s biggest drug busts slip through its fingers

PORT-AU-PRINCE
The Panamanian-flagged cargo ship pulled into a privately owned Haitian port in broad daylight with a secret buried under a mountain of imported sugar: 700 to 800 kilos of cocaine and 300 kilos of heroin with an estimated U.S. street value of $100 million.

When longshoremen started unloading the bags of sugar, they stumbled across the hidden stash — and a lawless free-for-all unfolded. Bags of drugs were grabbed by a host of people, including police officers who sped up to the docks in cars with tinted windows, according to a Haiti police report obtained by the Miami Herald and confirmed by an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the time a squad of Haiti narcotics police officers arrived at the dock two hours later, most of the drugs were gone.

The sugar boat haul in April 2015 should have been exactly the kind of smuggling operation that DEA agents and Haiti’s narcotics police were prepared to take down. But today, more than three years after the MV Manzanares docked at the Terminal Varreux port in Cité Soleil, the only person behind bars is a low-level longshoreman, awaiting trial on drug smuggling charges. No one in authority — neither Haiti’s anti-drug police nor the DEA — has been held accountable for the missing drugs on the sugar boat.

The bungling of the investigation in Haiti didn’t even come to light until two veteran DEA agents filed whistle-blower complaints that have triggered a U.S. Justice Department investigation into the effectiveness of the DEA’s drug-fighting efforts in the impoverished country. An initial review by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency, took two years and recently found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” in the DEA’s Haiti Country Office. That resulted in an automatic referral to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for an investigation by the Justice Department.

There are other inquiries into the DEA office in Haiti, too.

The DEA agents’ complaints, filed in 2016, have attracted the attention of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who called the allegations “substantial.” Both requested a Justice Department probe. In addition, two separate criminal investigations into the Manzanares smuggling case are also under way — one by Haitian authorities, the other by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.

In the whistle-blower complaints, the two agents lay out a list of allegations, blaming their own office along with Haiti’s narcotics police for security failures at Haiti’s ports that they said have allowed drugs to flow through the country long before the Manzanares incident. They say thousands of kilos of cocaine and other drugs had been passing through Haiti undetected for years, en route to the United States. They also accuse DEA supervisors in the Haiti office of corruption, misconduct and even collusion with the former head of the country’s anti-drug unit, which is called the Brigade in the Fight Against Narcotics Trafficking, or BLTS.

Their scathing accusations suggest that the U.S. government has wasted U.S. taxpayers’ money with little to show for it. The U.S. pays for the DEA’s operations in Port-au-Prince and has invested more than $250 million in Haiti’s roughly 15,000-member police force in the past eight years. About $18.7 million of that amount has gone for training and other resources for the Haitian police 300-member narcotics unit but nothing for seaport security in Port-au-Prince.

Both longtime DEA agents — the Miami Herald is not naming them because whistle-blower laws protect the identities of federal workers who disclose government wrongdoing — said they see the Varreux port incident as a missed opportunity and part of a larger failure of the U.S. war on drugs in Haiti.

“The vessel was a demonstration of the corruption of BLTS, apathy of the U.S. government and exploitation by the drug traffickers,” one of the agents told the Herald.

The DEA’s recently appointed special agent in charge of the Caribbean division, A.J. Collazo, insisted in an interview last month that the eight-person office in Port-au-Prince has collaborated effectively with Haiti’s anti-drug officers to slow the flow of cocaine and other narcotics into the U.S.

“We’re there to fight narcotics trafficking,” he said. “We’re not there to allow it to happen or to sit back and not do anything about it.”

He laid responsibility for the Manzanares case on Haiti alone. He said of the DEA: “I don’t know if it was a case that we were looking to make.”

That viewpoint isn’t shared by at least one other U.S. law enforcement agency. The Herald has learned that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami is considering whether to file drug-trafficking charges in connection with the Manzanares smuggling operation based on evidence gathered by one of the whistle-blower DEA agents, who believes the drugs were destined for Florida. The U.S. Attorney’s Office wouldn’t confirm that, or say whether there is a U.S. investigation into the Manzanares at all.

But a spokeswoman for the U.S. Coast Guard, which helped Haitian police search for the drugs, said the sugar boat case “is still an open [federal] investigation.”

Blowing the whistle
The whistle-blowers’ allegations, coupled with interviews and documents obtained by the Herald, paint a picture of a DEA office in Haiti operating with little oversight as supervisory agents allowed what might have been the biggest drug bust in Haiti in a decade to slip through their fingers.

The agents, who have a combined 40 years with the DEA, say their agency should have done a thorough investigation into drugs on the Manzanares but those efforts were stymied by their supervisors — even though one of the agents says he had collected evidence showing that the ship’s cocaine and heroin loads were destined for the U.S.

When they tried to reduce the flow of drugs from Haiti by improving seaport security, the two DEA agents say they also suffered from retaliation. One said he was placed on bathroom escort duty at the U.S. Embassy; the other said he was harassed so badly by his immediate commander that he suffered severe health problems. Their lawyers said the agents want to force the agency to change what they called a lax approach to fighting drug smuggling in Haiti.

The whistle-blower complaints, meanwhile, have been winding through a web of government regulation. The Office of Special Counsel’s referral to Sessions happened in May. It’s unclear whether the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General or the DEA’s internal affairs office would handle the resulting probe. Neither agency would comment on the status of the case.

Lawyer Tom Devine, legal director for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., that represents federal employees with whistle-blower complaints, said his group is encouraged by the special counsel’s referral of the complaints to the Justice Department.

“It means … [the special counsel] agrees the concerns likely are a serious breach of the public trust, which must be investigated and acted on,” Devine said.

This spring, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Rubio also had asked for a DOJ investigation. House members had expressed their disappointment with the DEA’s internal handling of the complaints, and wanted an independent agency to review the allegations.

Rubio, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said he is concerned about what he says is a “substantial amount” of cocaine bound for Florida that’s moving through Haiti with impunity as South American traffickers look for routes beyond Central America and Mexico.

“Traffickers are always looking for new routes,” he said. “And if word gets out that routes have been established because key individuals are compromised, it’s going to attract more people to jump on that route.”

‘Sugar boat’ bust
When the Manzanares docked in Haiti on April 5, 2015, it had already spent three days anchored off the bay of Port-au-Prince, according to the Haiti National Police investigative report. The 371-foot freighter was coming from Buenaventura, Colombia, with a 13-member crew and pulled into Terminal Varreux. More than 24 hours passed before Haitian customs arrived to clear the ship.

Routine cargo unloading began — until the discovery of the hidden packages of cocaine and heroin. Arguments over the drugs started in the cargo hold, then spread to the docks. Witnesses later told Haitian police they saw bags of drugs whisked away in vehicles — specifically, a white Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows driven by what witnesses said was a Haitian police officer assigned to the National Palace and a yellow Nissan XTerra driven by a special tactical police officer who was accompanied by another officer. One of the whistle-blowers also said some of the drugs were even stolen by a judge.

One of the DEA agents described the scene: “You have all of these folks running in there trying to get their fill.”

For two hours, though, no Haiti police officers were on the scene. It wasn’t until 5:30 p.m. that Haiti’s anti-drug unit — alerted by a Varreux port manager to the frenzy — showed up and then notified the DEA in Port-au-Prince, according to Haitian officials. For several days, the Haitian narcotics officers were unable to find the drugs, even with the help of two K-9 dogs.

“It was just a bunch of guys standing around not knowing what to do,” said the DEA agent, who was at the port the day after the fight broke out. He noted that the Haitian officers didn’t even know how to board the boat, much less search it: “[They] had never done it.”

The Haitian police investigative report acknowledged that “there probably was a quantity of drugs that was removed during the first hours” of the unloading of the ship on the afternoon of April 6. A source familiar with the case also said that at least some of the drugs were diverted from the boat, beginning the night before when the Manzanares was docked.

The DEA and Haiti investigators believe that the Manzanares held as much as 800 kilos of cocaine and 300 kilos of heroin, based on intelligence and the capacity of the ship’s secret hold.

“We are talking about a well-planned set-up intended to recover the drugs as quickly as possible,” the Haiti police report said. It described the scheme as “strategic and well-calculated.”

After days of being unable to find any trace of the drugs, Haitian police called for assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard in Miami. Together, they eventually found a fraction of the suspected stash — about 109 kilos of cocaine and almost 16 kilos of heroin — still concealed on the ship.

“The cocaine and heroin that was seized would not have been found were it not for the U.S. Coast Guard ... team,” said Marilyn Fajardo, the U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman in Miami.