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Federal sting often put more drugs on the streets

November 23, 1998
By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Rodney Matthews noticed lawmen waiting as he veered his airplane loaded with 700 kilograms of cocaine toward a remote Houston airstrip on New Year’s Eve in 1989. He landed anyway.

Police sirens blared, and officers drew their guns, thinking they had made a major bust

Matthews didn’t flinch. He handed over the high-quality Colombian cocaine with a street value of more than $50 million, and before the new year was even a few hours old, Matthews — who could have been imprisoned for life based on the weight of his load — was at home in Texas with his family, with the blessing of the U.S. Customs Service.

All it took, Matthews said, was a phone call to a key federal agent. For not only did he have the government’s blessing to bring in the drug; he had permission to sell it, too.

That might seem like a strange way to fight the war on drugs, but it’s a common tactic used in government sting operations, the Post-Gazette found. The object is to snare key leaders in drug smuggling operations. In this case, it succeeded only in putting more drugs onto America’s streets.

When feds deal in drugs

It is against the law for federal agents to distribute illegal drugs, just as it is for ordinary citizens, but there are exceptions.

Under "extraordinary" circumstances — to nab big-time dealers or smugglers, for example — top Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI or Custom’s officials may issue an order to allow it.

It is that kind of order that Matthews said he was given, but two years after his close encounter near Houston, Matthews was arrested with a boatload of cocaine in Florida and eventually sentenced to three life terms in prison. He insisted that he was double-crossed, that he was busted for an operation that the government had approved.

Two U.S. Customs agents corroborated his story in court, but top officials at the U.S. Justice Department denied that. They even brought perjury charges against the two agents who vouched for Matthews, saying they wouldn’t go along with what Matthews calls a "high-level coverup." A jury acquitted the agents.

The only certainty in this mess is that Matthews is doing life in prison at the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, one of the toughest in the country.

From his cell, he has staged a one-man assault against the government, which, he says, tried to cover up its deals with him by asking him to perjure himself and then condemned him to life in prison because he refused.

A criminal’s initiative

Often, it’s the criminals who suggest this country’s drug stings — even when those suggestions seem far-fetched.

Mustaq Malik knew the only way he’d be freed early from his 24-year sentence at the federal prison in Petersburg, Va., for drug trafficking was to help federal agents set up a sting that would snare other big-time drug dealers.

The native of Pakistan would do anything to ensure the sting’s success, even lie in court, he later told a defense attorney.

Malik testified in 1993 that he had lied in court before and that he was willing to testify against people he didn’t even know, so long as prosecutors agreed to shave years off his prison sentence.

Defense Attorney: "What you would do is . . . use the government in any way that you possibly could [in] . . . getting your sentence reduced from 24 years and five months to something lesser, wouldn’t you?"

Malik: "Well, that’s the system."

The deal that Malik offered federal agents in 1990 seemed especially odd. The guy he set up, 63-year-old New Yorker Raphael Santana, was already serving a life sentence in prison. As part of the sting, Malik persuaded Santana to arrange from prison for the distribution of a shipment of heroin that Malik would bring into the country. Then the federal government would bust everyone involved.

But in its zeal to grab a few small-time colleagues of this lifer, the federal government turned over a package of almost pure heroin from its own drug lockers to Frank Fuentes, a small-time criminal with a bad drug habit.

Agents could have arrested Fuentes, Santana and the other conspirators before Fuentes took possession of the heroin. For reasons not clear, they did not. So Fuentes promptly got the heroin into the hands of street dealers in New York City.

Experts testified that it would have been cut into 8,500 individual packets and sold on the street for $170,000.

Federal agents arrested Santana; Fuentes, a down-on-his-luck former dealer who was so broke that he once missed a meeting with federal agents because he didn’t have money to get his car out of a tow pound; Santana’s wife, who was dying of cancer; and four street-level dealers.

A Senior U.S. District Judge eventually ordered that the conspiracy charges against the defendants be dropped, saying the amount of heroin given to Fuentes "boggles the mind" and constituted outrageous government misconduct.

His ruling was overturned on appeal, and Fuentes is again appealing his life sentence.

Most of Malik’s court records are sealed, so his fate isn’t clear, but the Post-Gazette found a few records that show he continued to buy down his prison term as an informant in New York and Chicago. One court paper also shows the government paid him $50,000 for his efforts. At last report, he was in the federal witness protection program.