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Inquiry in drug slayings turns to 4 U.S. agents

BY ALFREDO CORCHADO
The Dallas Morning News

EL PASO , Texas - (KRT) - Four more U.S. Customs special agents are being investigated for their role overseeing activities of an informant who allegedly participated in killing drug-trafficker suspects across the border in Ciudad Juarez , according to U.S. government officials.

Raul Bencomo, Todd Johnson, David Ortiz and Luis Rico of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, face questioning by the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility over their close relationship with the U.S. informant, who is said to have supervised the killings of at least five drug-trafficker suspects last year, the officials said.

The agents declined to comment, and ICE officials would neither confirm nor deny the expanded inquiry.

In June, ICE group supervisor Patricia Kramer and El Paso director Giovanni Gaudioso were transferred to headquarters in Washington as part of a shake-up designed to restore confidence in the agency, officials said. ICE has been in upheaval since March, when The Dallas Morning News first published details about the case.

Gaudioso is expected to return to his post in El Paso next month, while Kramer appears to have been transferred permanently from her post. Her El Paso home is for sale, U.S officials said.

ICE's investigation explores what the agents knew about the killings of drug-trafficker suspects who were rivals of the Juarez cartel led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

At issue is what and when the agents were told about the informant's alleged criminal activities - apparently by the informant himself, said U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The officials said they're intrigued by reports from sources that Ortiz, the case agent monitoring the informant, was "largely kept in the dark" by his supervisors about the man's activities.

Ortiz's initial report about the informant, known within the agency by the nickname Lalo, apparently was rejected by superiors for unknown reasons. Responsibility for documenting Lalo's activities was given to another agent, Luis Garcia, who subsequently drafted a graphic memo on August 25, 2003, detailing the informant's first alleged killing, of Durango attorney Fernando Reyes Aguado.

"There are too many loose ends here, too many unanswered questions," said a U.S. government official familiar with the case.

A congressional hearing is scheduled for Friday in Washington in which the "informant's activities in Mexico are likely to come up," one official said.

Lalo is a presumed former high-ranking member of the Juarez cartel, Mexico 's most powerful drug organization. He operated on American soil under supervision of ICE officials in the United States . He has alleged that in Mexico , he worked for Heriberto Santillan Tabares, who allegedly belonged to the cartel's elite group known as the Gatekeepers, or La Linea , said U.S. and Mexican officials.

The informant is in a witness protection program in the United States . The Dallas Morning News has decided not to publish his name.

Last January, the bodies of 12 drug-trafficker suspects were uncovered in the back yard of a house in a middle-class neighborhood in Juarez . In at least one of those cases, U.S. supervisors had been notified ahead of time and listened in on an open cellphone line as the killing took place, U.S. and Mexican officials have said.

In a three-page memo written April 8 - one month after the informant case came to light and 10 months after the first known killing - an ICE investigator reminded Michael Garcia, assistant secretary for ICE in the Department of Homeland Security, that "during the course of criminal investigations, threats to life or serious bodily injury ... as well as threats to occupied structures and conveyance can become known to agents."

In such cases, the ICE investigator warned, "reasonable action must be taken to attempt to protect the individual or structure in question."

Failure to do so, he said, can result "in a Federal Tort Claims Act suit against the agency and the individual agents involved."

No one ever warned any of the 12 Juarez victims, among them Luis Padilla-Cardona, a U.S. citizen from the nearby town of Socorro , Texas .

Relatives of some of the victims are preparing a lawsuit against the U.S. government.

In a separate memo dated May 27, Michael Garcia said:

"If an active informant is arrested or is believed to have engaged in unauthorized, unlawful conduct, including any act of violence, other than a petty crime or a minor traffic offense, the use of the CI (confidential informant) should be immediately suspended."