for Mari at her clinic had to be found and funded. O’Brien called him back the same morning with the news that a Texas oil firm had stepped up with a qualified physician and a big check, and was there anything else he needed?
Marisol started her diplomatic campaign to help him. Joined the boards and the committees, went to the lunches and the fund-raisers. Over Keller’s objections she was profiled in the Post and the Washingtonian.
“The cartels already know what I look like,” she told him. “And you need me doing these things, Arturo. The Tea Party troglodytes are already out to hang you, and the liberals don’t love you, either.”
Keller knew that she was right. Marisol was “politically perspicacious,” as she once put it, her observations and analysis usually dead-on, and she was quick to discern the nuances of the increasingly polarized American scene. And he had to admit that his desperate desire to escape politics and “just do his job” was naive.
“All jobs are political,” Marisol said. “Yours more than most.”
True enough, Keller thought, because he was the top “drug warrior” at a time when the current administration was seriously questioning what the war on drugs should mean and what it should—and, more importantly, shouldn’t—be.
The attorney general, in fact, had ordered DEA to stop using the phrase war on drugs at all, stating (rightly, in Keller’s opinion) that we shouldn’t wage war on our own people. The Justice Department and the White House were reevaluating the draconian drug laws passed during the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s that legislated mandatory minimum sentences that put nonviolent offenders behind bars for thirty years to life.
The result of that legislation was that more than two million people—the majority of them African American and Hispanic—were in prison, and now the administration was reviewing a lot of those sentences, considering clemency for some of them, and exploring ending mandatory minimum sentences.
Keller agreed with these efforts but wanted to stay out of the controversies and focus on the mandate to end the heroin epidemic. In his opinion, he was the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while he was willing to put less emphasis on enforcing, say, marijuana laws, he preferred to defer policy statements to the drug czar.
Officially the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the “drug czar”—as the position had been tagged—was the guy who spoke for the president on drug policy and was in charge of seeing the White House’s intentions implemented.
Well, sort of.
The current czar was a hard-liner who was somewhat resistant to the AG’s reforms that POTUS supported, so he was on his way out to become the boss of US Customs and Border Protection (so Keller would still have to work with him), and a new guy—more amenable to the reforms—was on his way in.
To Keller, it was just another strand of bureaucracy in an already tangled net. Technically, Keller’s immediate boss was the attorney general, but they both had to take the drug czar into account, as the AG served at the behest of the White House.
Then there was Congress. At various times, DEA had to consult with and report to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, Budget Committee, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
The House was even worse. It had its own Budget, Appropriations, and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees, but its Judiciary Committee also had subcommittees—Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, and Immigration Policy and Border Security.
So Keller had to confer and coordinate with the Justice Department, the White House, and the Senate and House committees, but there were also the other federal agencies whose missions coincided with his—Homeland Security; CIA; FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco; ICE; Bureau of Prisons; the Coast Guard and the Navy; the Department of Transportation; the State Department … the list went on and on.
And that was just federal.
Keller also had to deal with fifty state governments and state police forces, over three thousand county sheriff’s departments and more than twelve thousand city police departments. Not to mention state and local prosecutors and judges.
That was the United States, but Keller also had to communicate, confer and negotiate with government officials and police from foreign countries—Mexico, of course, but also Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and all the European Union countries where heroin was bought, sold and/or transshipped. And any of those dealings had to be run through the State Department and sometimes the White House.
Of course, Keller delegated most of this—in many ways the DEA was a perpetual motion machine that functioned on its own momentum—but he still had to handle the major issues personally and was determined to sharpen its blade and point it straight at the heroin problem.
Keller took over a DEA that was deeply wary of him as a former undercover operative, a field agent and a hard charger with a reputation for ruthlessness.
We got us a real cowboy now was pretty much the overall take, and a number of midlevel bureaucrats started to pack their personal belongings because they thought the new boss would bring in his own people.
Keller disappointed them.
He called a general meeting at which he said, “I’m not firing anybody. The knock on me is that I’m not an administrator and don’t have a clue how to run a gigantic organization. That rap is accurate—I don’t. What I do have is you. I will give clear, concise direction and I trust you to make the organization work toward those objectives. What I expect from you is loyalty, honesty and hard work. What you can expect from me is loyalty, honesty, hard work and support. I will never stab you in the back, but I will stab you in the chest if I catch you playing games. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes—only slackers and cowards don’t make mistakes. But if we have a problem, I don’t want to be the last to know. I want your thoughts and your criticisms. I’m a big believer in the battleground of ideas—I don’t need the only word, just the last word.”
He set priorities.
Next he called in the deputy administrator, Denton Howard, and the chiefs of Intelligence and Operations and told them that their first priority was heroin.
The second priority was heroin.
The third priority was heroin.
“We’ll sustain our efforts on all Schedule I drugs,” he told them, “but our overriding emphasis on the enforcement side is ending the heroin epidemic. I don’t care about marijuana, except where it can lead us up the ladder to the heroin traffickers.”
Which meant focusing on the Sinaloa cartel.
Keller’s approach is something of a departure—historically, Sinaloa hadn’t been greatly involved with heroin production since the 1970s, when the DEA and the Mexican military had burned and poisoned the poppy fields (Keller was there), and the growers turned to other products.
The Barrera wing of the cartel had made most of its money from cocaine and marijuana, the Esparza wing from methamphetamine, the Tapia faction from a combination of all three.
“It’s a mistake to put all our efforts into fighting them in Mexico,” Keller told his people. “I know, because it’s a mistake I made. Repeatedly.
