This undated photo from a wanted poster shows Pedro Flores, left, and his twin brother, Margarito Flores. (U.S. Marshals Service)
[From article]
"As two of the most well-known cooperating witnesses in the country, the Flores brothers (and their families) will live the rest of their lives in danger of being killed in retribution," prosecutors wrote. "The barbarism of the cartels is legend, with a special place reserved for those who cooperate."
The concerns over possible attempts at retribution extend to the brothers' Chicago attorney, whose identity has been kept secret for safety reasons in an extraordinary step. It's unclear whether the attorney will even be in court Tuesday for the sentencing. Extra metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs are expected to add another layer of security at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
The Flores brothers' cooperation has already had real repercussions. Shortly after word got out that the brothers were in DEA custody, their father, Margarito Flores Sr., returned to Mexico against his sons' wishes and despite stern warnings from their government handlers, according to prosecutors.
Within days, the father was kidnapped and presumed to be murdered, the filing said. A note found at the scene of the kidnapping said his sons were next.
Some of the brothers' double-dealing was the stuff of movies. The Flores brothers met with cartel leaders in mountaintop compounds, captured conversations with Guzman's lieutenants with a voice recorder hidden in a coat pocket and even helped prosecutors by cutting deals with a rival faction of the cartel that would have meant certain death if discovered by either side, court records show.
"It was incredibly daring," said Joseph Lopez, a Chicago attorney who has represented many cartel clients. "These guys were allegedly able to get Chapo on tape talking about heroin. He trusted them that much."
The Flores brothers' sentencing marks the end of one of the more remarkable stories of Chicago's cut-throat drug underworld, where in a few short years the twins rose through the ranks of the Latin Kings street gang to eventually run a drug distribution ring that shipped thousands of pounds of narcotics to wholesale customers in New York, Washington, Cincinnati and other cities.
By the time they flipped in 2008 and agreed to dismantle their operation, the twins had reached "the highest echelons of the cartel world," prosecutors said.
[. . .]
Their main supplier was Guzman, whose vast operations included a fleet of 747 jets that had all the seats removed, the brothers said in sworn statements to a federal grand jury.
According to their statements, Guzman would load the planes with clothes and other goods and fly bogus "humanitarian" missions to South America. On the return trip to Mexico City, the brothers said, the planes would be packed with as much as 12,000 kilograms — about 14 tons — of cocaine that was unloaded and driven out of the airport with the help of corrupt officials.
The brothers said Guzman's various lieutenants helped the cartel coordinate shipments of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico using submarines, speedboats and amphibious vessels to avoid law enforcement at sea.
[. . .]
In all, the Flores twins pleaded guilty to distributing more than 64,500 kilograms of cocaine, an "almost incomprehensible quantity ... with resulting harm that is incalculable but without question horrific," prosecutors said.
Their testimony led to sweeping indictments in 2009 against 54 defendants, including Guzman, who remained a fugitive until his sensational arrest in Mexico last February. It's unclear whether he'll ever be extradited to face charges in the U.S., where he is also under indictment in New York and Texas.
[. . .]
At the same time they were cooperating against the cartel, the Flores twins also assisted in the dismantling of their organization in 2009, creating a highly unusual situation where the bosses were cooperating against underlings.
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-82637789/
Sentencing today for twins who flipped on 'El Chapo'
Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune
8:00 am, January 27, 2015
CREDIT LUKE SHUMAN
[From article]
On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Rachel Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. A recent graduate of Florida State, she was dressed to blend into a crowd—bluejeans, green-and-white patterned T-shirt, black Reef flip-flops. On the passenger seat beside her was a handbag that contained thirteen thousand dollars in marked bills.
[. . .]
On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Rachel Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. A recent graduate of Florida State, she was dressed to blend into a crowd—bluejeans, green-and-white patterned T-shirt, black Reef flip-flops. On the passenger seat beside her was a handbag that contained thirteen thousand dollars in marked bills.
Before she reached the Georgia-peach stands and Tupelo-honey venders on North Meridian Road, she texted her boyfriend. “I just got wired up,” she wrote at 6:34 P.M. “Wish me luck I’m on my way.”
“Good luck babe!” he replied. “Call me and let me know what’s up.”
“It’s about to go down,” she texted back.
Behind the park’s oaks and blooming crape myrtles, the sun was beginning to set. Young mothers were pushing strollers near the baseball diamonds; kids were running amok on the playground. As Hoffman spoke on her iPhone to the man she was on her way to meet, her voice was filtered through a wire that was hidden in her purse. “I’m pulling into the park with the tennis courts now,” she said, sounding casual.
Perhaps what put her at ease was the knowledge that nineteen law-enforcement agents were tracking her every move, and that a Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance plane was circling overhead. In any case, Rachel Hoffman, a tall, wide-eyed redhead, was by nature laid-back and trusting. She was not a trained narcotics operative. On her Facebook page you could see her dancing at music festivals with a big, goofy smile, and the faux profile she’d made for her cat (“Favorite music: cat stevens, straycat blues, pussycat dolls”).
A few weeks earlier, police officers had arrived at her apartment after someone complained about the smell of marijuana and voiced suspicion that she was selling drugs. When they asked if she had any illegal substances inside, Hoffman said yes and allowed them in to search. The cops seized slightly more than five ounces of pot and several Ecstasy and Valium pills, tucked beneath the cushions of her couch. Hoffman could face serious prison time for felony charges, including “possession of cannabis with intent to sell” and “maintaining a drug house.” The officer in charge, a sandy-haired vice cop named Ryan Pender, told her that she might be able to help herself if she provided “substantial assistance” to the city’s narcotics team.
[. . .]
Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun.
[. . .]
Two days after Hoffman disappeared, her body was found in Perry, Florida, a small town some fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee, in a ravine overgrown with tangled vines. Draped in an improvised shroud made from her Grateful Dead sweatshirt and an orange-and-purple sleeping bag, Hoffman had been shot five times in the chest and head with the gun that the police had sent her to buy.
[. . .]
In legal parlance, she was a “coöperator,” one of thousands of people who, each year, help the police build cases against others, often in exchange for a promise of leniency in the criminal-justice system.
Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty per cent of all drug cases in America involve them,
[. . .]
Often, deploying informants involves no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny; their use is necessarily shrouded in secrecy.
[. . .]
Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.
The recruitment of young informants often involves risks that are incommensurate with the charges that they are facing. And the costs of coöperating can be high.
[. . .]
Shelly’s death was connected to work she had done as a police informant. Just days before she was killed, cops had spotted Shelly and a friend smoking a blunt on the balcony of a Motel 6 in a Detroit suburb. When they raided the room, they found a sandwich bag with half an ounce of marijuana in the toilet tank. One of the officers threatened Shelly with prison—a particularly terrifying prospect for a transgender woman, who would be sent to a male facility—and then offered her a way out: she could set up her dealer, Qasim Raqib, and walk free that same day. She agreed.
[. . .]
When Rachel’s parents arrived at the headquarters of the Tallahassee Police Department, they immediately grew suspicious. “I remember noticing that they weren’t taking us to the missing-persons unit,” Margie recalled. “Instead it was like, ‘Come over here to Narcotics.’ ”
[. . .]
Rachel’s parents watched the coverage on the television in her apartment. It marked, for Irv Hoffman, the beginning of what he sometimes refers to as “the smearing”—the period following Rachel’s murder during which their daughter was portrayed in police statements and front-page news stories as, in his words, “this horrible drug-dealing monster.”
[. . .]
“The first stories tried to paint Rachel as a low-life druggie drug dealer.” Two months later, in a TV segment on Hoffman’s death, the ABC News correspondent Brian Ross interviewed Police Chief Jones. “I’m calling her a criminal,”
[. . .]
“You need to understand that if you speak out you’re opening Pandora’s box,” Hoffman recalled being told. “You’re going to be out of your comfort zone real quick, and some people are going to support you and other people are going to come out against you.
[. . .]
According to Mitchell McLean, an agent from a federally funded narcotics task force laid out Jeremy’s options, saying, “You can sit down with us and make a deal. Or you can go upstairs, get a lawyer, and get ready to be ass-rammed in prison.” Jeremy signed a contract to “make purchases of controlled substances from four individuals,” in return for which his charges would be reduced, “with a recommendation of no jail time.”
[. . .]
Before long, using a camera hidden in his baseball cap, Jeremy had set up at least five local drug suspects. But, according to his parents, he was told that he would need to keep going,
[. . .]
On December 29, 2008, Jeremy left the house after a snowstorm to buy some milk. He didn’t return. Reagan had paid an accomplice to bait or kidnap Jeremy and bring him to a nearby motor home, where he was waiting with a .22-calibre pistol. He shot Jeremy three times in the back of the head, then once, at close range, in the face.
[. . .]
result of an equally cynical and utilitarian calculation. “The cops, they get federal funding by the number of arrests they make—to get the money, you need the numbers,” he explained, alluding to, among other things, asset-forfeiture laws that allow police departments to keep a hefty portion of cash and other resources seized during drug busts. “It’s a commercial enterprise,” he went on, citing a view shared by many legal scholars and policy critics. “That’s how they pay for their vans, for their prosecutors—they get money from the war on drugs. They put zero dent in the supply. They just focus on small-town, small-time arrests.”
[. . .]
It’s little fish chasing other little fish, like Jeremy and his eight methadone pills. This argument is at the heart of a lawsuit that Jeremy’s parents decided to file last December.
[. . .]
California, he later learned, was one of the few states that had rules governing the use of teen-age informants, and prohibiting recruits younger than thirteen. Those rules had been devised after a seventeen-year-old named Chad MacDonald was brutally murdered and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend raped and shot in retaliation for Chad’s work as a low-level drug C.I., in 1998.
[. . .]
An internal-affairs investigation revealed that police officers had committed at least twenty-one violations of nine separate policies in Hoffman’s case. “I didn’t think it would be so many policies not being followed,” Chief Dennis Jones told the Tallahassee Democrat, which covered the case extensively. He admitted that it had been wrong to blame the victim, and expressed regret.
[. . .]
Many vice cops, in particular, argued that forbidding the use of juveniles as C.I.s would force them to turn a blind eye to young people committing adult crimes. More record keeping would only increase the risk of C.I.s’ identities being disclosed. The right-to-an-attorney clause, they contended, would make it far too cumbersome to catch and “flip” a drug suspect on the spot, effectively nullifying a valuable, real-time tactic for fighting crime.
[. . .]
“There’s no such thing as training an informant,” Brian Sallee, of B.B.S. Narcotics Enforcement Training and Consulting, told me. “You direct them what to do, and if they follow those directions that will make it safer for them. There’s always going to be a risk, but when things go bad it’s usually because they didn’t do as they were told to. They get themselves hurt, not the officers. The informants cause their own dilemma.”
[. . .]
The revised bill passed both chambers of the Florida legislature unanimously. On May 7, 2009, the anniversary of Hoffman’s murder, Governor Charlie Crist signed Rachel’s Law.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/03/the-throwaways
SEPTEMBER 3, 2012 ISSUE
The Throwaways
Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.
BY
SARAH STILLMAN
* * *
http://abcnews.go.com/US/dangers-college-student-campus-police-drug-informant/story?id=28357345
The Dangers of a College Student Becoming a Campus Police Drug Informant
By GAIL DEUTSCH, STEPHANIE FUERTE,
JONATHAN BALTHASER (
@JonBalthaser) and
LAUREN EFFRON (
@leffron831)
Jan 23, 2015, 1:47 PM ET
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