Levine: It's 1987 and I'm posing as Luis Miguel-Garcia, an undercover Mafia don who's half Sicilian and half Puerto Rican. I'm in a meeting at a restaurant outside of Panama with another undercover customs agent and the ruling faction of La Corporacion, the Bolivian cocaine cartel. They invited us to Bolivia to look at their production facilities. At that time, the U.S. had begun its paramilitary operations in Bolivia, which are now in Colombia.
So as a pretext, I told the man that we can't go down there because we read in the newspapers that the U.S. military is down there. He laughed and said, "That's just for the gringos. That's not real." And his hand slid up and down above the table. He said, "They have helicopters that go up and that go down. We know what they are doing before they do." That's the reality of the drug war. It's completely fictitious. It's only for the American people.
Reason: You think that's still the case?
Levine: It's absolutely still the case.
Reason: You say, in your experience, that 90 percent of drug users are white. What do you base this on?
Levine: That's DEA statistics. I've spent much of my life in these ghetto neighborhoods watching drug dealers. I would say 95 percent of the customers are white.
Reason: If this is the case, why are the statistics almost reversed when it comes to drug arrests?
Levine: Because you go after the dealer. You have a lot of these think tanks, such as The Lindesmith Center, saying that it's a racist drug war and that the cops go after users. That mistaken theory is based on the statistic of arrests for possession. I have made 3,000 arrests myself and, as a supervisor of squads of agents for 17 years, have probably been involved in 8,000 arrests. A huge amount of them are for possession. But none is for using drugs. Not one. We didn't go after users. We went after a dealer, street-level or whatever, and charged them with possession because it's easy to prove.
Reason: You said that when you were stationed in New York, news directors would call up the DEA for a drug story on a slow news week and ask if they could go along with a bust. Did you have personal experience with that?
Levine: I've been on video with my face blacked out. Dan Rather, 20/20, ABC News.
Reason: You actually had personal experience with news directors calling up and then raids being hurried up or fabricated?
Levine: Here's what happens. A news director needs a story. The special agent in charge of New York, who we called Captain Video, because he was very media conscious, would call our squad and say so-and-so is on the phone from ABC. Do you have anything going? Do you got anything you can make an arrest on?
Is that manufacturing news? I don't know. You tell me. That's what would happen.
Reason: You claim to have witnessed numerous constitutional abuses. Can you give me some examples?
Levine: The Carlson case is the best. The man was a Fortune 500 executive and had no reputation whatsoever. He didn't know coke from garden mulch. A criminal informant pointed out his house and two other houses. Agents, without any investigation whatsoever, just crashed into his house and shot the man down. That is now typical. 60 Minutes did a wonderful piece on it in 1993 called "The Informers." There is no U.S. Constitution any more when it comes to the drug war.
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