It may say something about the federal government’s “war on drugs” that a celebrated warrior is relegated to paralegal school in Chicago and mulling his next job.
“I’ll have my paralegal certificate by September,” Frank White said last week. “I’m not sure what I’ll do after that.”
White, 52, a k a “The Rifleman,” “Dirty Harry” and “The Wizard,” is by far the best-known Drug Enforcement Administration agent of recent times. He’s also out of work, having retired recently rather than be fired amid allegations of sexual harassment that prompted the reassignment of four other agents in the DEA’s Chicago office.
White has not spoken publicly since the allegations of harassment, made by female police officers from Madison, Wis., who had attended a DEA training session overseen by the Chicagoans. The women filed a federal court lawsuit in Chicago and, in the fray, White and the four other agents, all white males, have countered with reverse discrimination charges against the DEA.
However, the anger inspired by his legal problems, and what some claim is general disarray within the DEA, may explain a decision to speak with me. Though adhering to the admonition of his Loop attorney, David Schippers, not to discuss his legal travail, he left few doubts about his frustration with current anti-drug policy, the hierarchy of the DEA, feuding among agencies, even the botched raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
“We’ve slipped way back in the last two or three years. We should be doing better than we are. We were making headway against narcotics traffickers, both in Central America and Southeast Asia. There was an emphasis on taking out major violators, but it’s changed under Constantine,” he said, referring to DEA administrator Thomas Constantine.
“We’re allowing a flood of drugs to get into the U.S. We’ve stopped putting an emphasis on the overseas portion. There’s not the same pressure on the governments of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.”
White has reason to know, being what colleagues refer to as an “agent’s agent” whose experience is worldwide.
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He’s a New York City native, the son of a liquor store owner. He attended Catholic school and the Citadel military college in South Carolina. After graduation, he became an Army paratrooper and served in Vietnam, where he won a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star. White and his wife (he’s divorced but is now engaged) adopted a Vietnamese boy injured in the fighting.
When he returned home, he joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, predecessor to the DEA, and soon gained the “Wizard” nickname as a result of impressive success in heroin and cocaine cases. When Miami evolved into a major entry port for cocaine, he was assigned there.
It was a much-publicized, controversial tenure and brought him into bitter confrontation with Janet Reno, then Dade County’s state’s attorney, now the U.S. attorney general.
In 1980, a drug dealer handcuffed five DEA agents in a warehouse and tried to flee with a marijuana-filled truck. White and colleagues sought to stop the escape. White, who grabbed the sideboard of the truck, quickly was staring at the barrel of the dealer’s gun.
The agents opened fire and the dealer was soon dead, with 32 bullet wounds, nine apparently from White’s gun.
A year later, he was a key player in a car chase and shootout with a murder suspect and drug-dealing fugitive who was originally confronted outside a South Miami restaurant. The chase ended with the dealer crashing into other cars, then a wall, apparently after firing shots at agents from inside the car. White fired twice from behind the suspect’s car, hitting him in the back of the head and killing him.
Reno oversaw local homicide investigations into both incidents. There was also a DEA formal inquiry. Though Reno was understood to have wanted White indicted, it never happened because of insufficient evidence. Reno, of course, now oversees the DEA.
White eventually moved to DEA headquarters in Washington and was appointed to head a big task force on drugs by then-Vice President George Bush. Later, it was off to DEA tasks in San Francisco and the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., where those assigned to him included some of those who would make up the hostage rescue team at Waco (once the element of surprise was lost, he argues, agents should have merely encircled the compound and waited).
In 1988, he was named the leader of Operation Snowcap, a clandestine DEA operation, done in conjunction with the U.S. military, seeking to get behind drug cartel lines in South America and to sabotage laboratories and trafficking operations.
In 1990, he was assigned to Chicago, where nearly 160 agents oversee a five-state region. His duties included running training sessions for local law enforcers. One session inspired the internal tumult, with allegations of sexist comments, the eventual lawsuit and investigation by DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
It’s not scientific, but chats with some remaining agents suggest the possible truth of White’s claim last week that there is a “devastation of morale within DEA. A lack of leadership. A lack of trust between agents and Constantine,” who has apparently spent much time and money on internal discipline.
The DEA has always feuded with other agencies, including the FBI, Customs, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the State Department and the CIA. White sees that as only worsening, though he takes a minority view in urging merger with the FBI, which has greater resources and more political clout.
He clearly differs with the current DEA hierarchy on strategy. For example, he finds misguided the move to use teams of agents to assist municipal police forces. “We’re spinning our wheels on small-time violators, all these street-level cases, when we should be going after the bigger violators.”
Instead, he thinks the disbanded Operation Snowcap should be revived. “Every lab you would destroy, say, in Bolivia, is one less lab sending stuff to the U.S.”
“Go after kingpins, disrupt their organizations. Take him out, his labs, and then the white-collar criminals who support him and teach him how to launder his money and get his drugs into the U.S. from South America.”
Greater unity, more involvement by the military, would be fine with him. And the so-called “drug czar,” Lee Brown, “is a failure. He doesn’t have authority or power to direct independent agencies, and the heads of those agencies resent anybody over them.”
He also asserts that cocaine trafficking could be dramatically impeded by dropping into coca fields a device called a Spike, used by farmers to destroy wood-bearing plants. “But you’d need the political will of the president to do it.” As for the certainty that farmers would simply move somewhere else, “growing those vast fields would take a very long time.”
Personally, White, the agent out in the cold, says he hasn’t had a huge emotional problem dealing with his departure. He says that his fiance has been very supportive and that time spent with military psychologists during Operation Snowcap taught him about the “adjustments military men had to make in leaving.”
“Yes, this has hurt, but once you accept it, you have to pick up and move on.”
He knows well that others react differently to similar stress.
White confirmed a rumor I’d heard earlier, that a Chicago agent, assigned to the Hammond, Ind., office, committed suicide in the past year amid an internal DEA investigation of alleged misconduct.
COKIE WATCH
Ah, yes, only days after the Senate urged reporters to come clean on outside income, ABC’s Cokie Roberts comes to Chicago Monday to speak for dough to divorce lawyers at a luncheon at the Westin Hotel.
The American Bar Association won’t disclose the fee (she often gets $30,000), but says she is donating it to charity.
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At the luncheon, Roberts will also receive the family law section’s “friend of the family award.”
A most magnanimous gesture: getting paid to receive an award.