Snatched by Bruce Porter

Author:Bruce Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction; Autobiography, Memoir
ISBN: 9781250031785
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

16

Taking Heat from the AG

Luring big operators out of their lair, exposing them to police action—that was the fantasy that captured the task force almost from the beginning. “Originally,” Tom says, “our thought was just to gather intelligence, but then we began thinking that we could also use the princess to cause disruption, and the way we could create disruption was by seizing money. When you take their money, the higher echelons come out of the woodwork. They start making phone calls; they want to know what happened and who was responsible. They can always make more dope, but the money is the outcome of all the work they’ve done—paying the growers, running the labs, the distribution. That’s their net profit sitting out there, in dollars. If we go and take their money, somebody’s head’s going to roll. So by creating havoc, we could develop more meaningful intelligence, which was our original mission.”

But for quite a while there, the money-grabbing part got left by the side of the road. Reinforcing Pilar’s credibility was what took precedence. After all, she was running a laundering business, not a seizing business. Thus in the first twelve months, the task force laundered more than $12 million but seized just $187,732, not even 2 percent. Needless to say, this was a bonanza for the cartel. They were happy that, unlike with other laundering operations, almost none of the money they gave to the princess fell into government hands, and none of their couriers got arrested.

“So it got very confusing for us,” says Greg Lees. “We were playing their game and we were playing by their rules. They were still moving drugs and still giving us the money to take care of. We had merely injected ourselves into the game and were helping them play it.”

Helping them, that is, until U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno got wind of it. Reno had come late to the princess case because her appointment by President Bill Clinton didn’t take effect until mid-March of 1993. This was thanks to the “Nannygate” scandal, wherein Clinton’s first two nominees for the post fell by the wayside after it was learned they had hired illegal aliens to take care of their children. Then, right after Reno arrived, there was the outrage over the FBI’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. She had green-lighted the attack, and it resulted in a disastrous fire, during which seventy-six members of the religious sect died.

So the attorney general had her hands pretty full that spring, and she didn’t learn about the princess case until a briefing by her deputy, Mary Lee Warren, in preparation for a Senate hearing where the subject of money laundering might come up. To Reno, this information came as an unpleasant surprise.

“We were told by Mary Lee that the AG was shocked,” Tiderington recalls. “‘What do you mean, money laundering? You’re telling me we’re actually taking in their money and not seizing it, just sending it back down to Colombia?

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