Jackpot by Jason Ryan

Author:Jason Ryan [RYAN, JASON]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780762767991
Publisher: Lyons Press

Despite the investigation’s fast start and McMaster’s success in obtaining five full-time agents for the task force, obstacles regularly threatened to derail Operation Jackpot, or at least significantly stall it. One of the biggest hurdles the task force faced was achieving cooperation among its own members. Despite each man’s personal commitment to teamwork, the task force was routinely hampered by protocol differences between the various federal law enforcement agencies and the tendencies of each agency to hoard information rather than share it. The investigators were often torn between loyalties to the task force and their home agency.

Historically there had been little sharing of information between the FBI and DEA, and each was used to being in charge of investigations. When it came to the IRS, past tax investigations by the agency had been politicized. When these scandals came to light, the IRS was restricted from sharing much information with other law enforcement agencies in an effort to reduce abuse of the agency’s deep-reaching powers.

Lemnah, the task force agent assigned from the U.S. Customs Patrol, remembers having frustrating discussions about the case with Goodwin, the investigator assigned from the FBI.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” Goodwin told his colleagues, “because I can’t tell you anything.”

“Then you can’t be part of the task force, because we share,” was Lemnah’s and the others’ consistent reply.

Eventually each of the men conceded that the walls between the agencies were hindering the investigation. Their jobs protected, to some extent, by the autonomous structure of the task force, they began pooling information and sharing old tips and files collected by their home agencies, even if it didn’t sit well with superiors. Lemnah was happy to see Goodwin embrace the task force wholeheartedly.

“Mark was kind of a new breed and a refreshing breed,” says Lemnah. “I’m sure he took some flak over it, but he still did it.”

Another annoyance was the issue of paperwork. Proper documentation of debriefings and interviews was critical to the investigation. Initially this paperwork was essential to understanding the scope of the smuggling networks. Ultimately the agents knew the documentation of their investigation would be important in the courtroom as evidence. Among the five agencies represented on the task force, there were a handful of different forms used to make reports, and, of course, each agent was partial to the one he was accustomed to using. The solution, Lemnah says, was to type up reports on sheets of blank white paper. That idea, he says, took six months to initiate.

“It sounds simple but it was a big thing back then,” says Lemnah. “I think every agency had heartburn over that one.”

Overseeing the effort was Wells Dickson, an assistant U.S. attorney who considered himself the secretary for the task force, keeping the paperwork straight and the agents engaged. He’d receive calls all day from agents in the field, hearing reports of whom they talked to and what they said.

“You’d get a call. We talked to somebody in Beaufort, we talked to somebody in Myrtle Beach, we talked to somebody in Greenville,” says Dickson.

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