Downtown Los Algodones, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement informant Isaias Borquez Lizarraga was found executed on March 28, 2014.
Photo: Google Maps
The criminal abuses never end under this White House. Homeland Security imitates FBI advancement rules, "Mess Up Move Up." Here's another Fast and Furious one of several dozen scandals that remain unaddressed due to spineless Republicans and the outrageous number of White House crimes.
[From article]
High-ranking US customs agents violated a treaty with Mexico by approving a covert drug-smuggling probe that took a disastrous turn — funneling at least $100,000 to Mexican dealers while getting an informant killed, The Post has learned.
An alleged coverup of the busted operation allowed two officials to score plum promotions,
[. . .]
Meanwhile, the Mexican government remains completely in the dark about the affair, the source said.
“It’s an unprecedented rogue operation in a foreign country,” the source said.
“You have so many points at which this activity should have been curtailed, and you just wonder who in leadership is actually watching what’s going on.”
The undercover operation was run out of the ICE office in San Diego, according to an email dossier compiled by a whistle-blower, who sparked the government investigations. The whistle-blower is one of several current and former agents with knowledge of the botched probe.
The ICE agents recruited a Mexican national, Isaias Borquez Lizarraga, 39, as an informant. He pretended to smuggle drugs into the United States so the “proceeds” could be traced back to traffickers in Mexico, a source said.
But the operation was conducted without approval from the Mexican government, a move that violated the 1999 Brownsville-Merida Agreement, which governs American law enforcement activity south of the border, the whistle-blower reported.
Lizarraga’s cover was blown, and he was among three people found shot to death, execution-style, on March 28, 2014, inside a dental lab in the Mexican border town of Los Algodones, just west of Yuma, Ariz.
Even after Lizarraga’s murder, ICE agents in San Diego used another informant to make a series of wire transfers totaling at least $100,000 to Mexican bank accounts controlled by the drug supplier, according to the dossier.
None of that money has been recovered, the whistle-blower wrote.
[. . .]
According to the whistle-blower’s report, Derek Benner, the special agent in charge of the San Diego ICE office at the time, and Nick Annan, who was his deputy, “directed and sanctioned” the operation that resulted in Lizarraga’s death and the loss of the taxpayer cash.[. . .]
Derek Benner
Photo: AP
Meanwhile, several ICE officials involved in the screw-up got promoted, with Benner transferred to ICE headquarters in Washington, DC, where he now holds the title of deputy executive associate director of Homeland Security Investigations.
That job makes him No. 2 in charge of more than 10,000 employees around the world.[. . .]
Nick Annan
Photo: U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement
Annan was named special agent in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations office in Atlanta, which oversees operations in three states and is “one of the most productive offices in the country,” according to ICE.
[. . .]
The Department of Homeland Security has estimated that 90 percent of all the cocaine consumed in the United States arrives via Mexico, with traffickers there raking in between $19 billion and $29 billion a year.
The drug trade has been blamed for up to half of Mexico’s 15,000-plus murders last year.
http://nypost.com/2015/10/12/informant-dead-money-missing-in-rogue-agents-illegal-drug-operation/
Informant dead, money missing in rogue agents’ illegal drug op
By Bruce Golding
New York Post
October 12, 2015 | 7:29am
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