How a Dogged L.A. DEA Agent Unraveled the CIA's Alleged Role in the Murder of Kiki Camarena

In January 1989, Hector Berrellez reported to Los Angeles, handpicked by the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to get to the bottom of a 4-year-old murder investigation that was a top agency priority. This wasn't just another killing in the seemingly endless bloodshed in the Mexican drug wars; the victim, like Berrellez, was a DEA agent. Enrique "Kiki" Camarena had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered at the hands of a Mexican drug cartel four years earlier. The identity of the killers was clear enough; two cartel bosses had been convicted of the killings and were imprisoned in Mexico. But the DEA had reason to believe there were many more guilty parties in addition to the two capos behind bars.

Berrellez was 42 at the time. A former homicide cop, he'd joined the DEA more than a decade earlier as a prized recruit, a thrill-seeker and trained investigator who spoke Spanish without a trace of an American accent — a natural-born undercover narc. He was posted to DEA operations in Colombia and Mexico, living under assumed identities, infiltrating the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel, the Guadalajara cartel. " I was good," he says. "I could penetrate cartels as Mexican. When I was asked if I was a cop, I'd tell them, 'Yo ni tengo papeles!'"

One retired fellow agent called him the Wyatt Earp of the DEA. His supervisor in the Los Angeles office said Berrellez had better sources than the CIA. But of the 200 investigations Berrellez had run in his 12 years with the administration, the Camarena case would be the one where he got more information than he bargained for.

Given his experience, Berrellez was an appropriate choice to lead the investigation. Nonetheless, on the day he got the assignment from DEA headquarters, he believed he was the butt of a practical joke. It was December 1988, a month after his cover had been blown in Mexico and he and his wife and children had to be evacuated from Mazatlán under threat of death. A month of kicking around his hometown of South Tucson, Arizona, on administrative leave, bored stiff, steeling his excitable nerves for a desk job in Phoenix. Boy, the guys must have really pulled out all the stops this time; the woman's voice on the phone sounded official: "Yes, Agent Berrellez, please hold for the administrator." Berrellez was a proud rank-and-file agent, wary of Washington, D.C.; he'd managed to fly under the radar at headquarters. He had certainly never fielded a call from the administrator before, and what he expected to hear now were the snickers of his fellow agents over speakerphone, not the voice of Jack Lawn asking if he would like to take over the investigation code-named [font color=darkred]Operation Leyenda[/font]...

http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-a-dogged-la-dea-agent-unraveled-the-cias-alleged-role-in-the-murder-of-kiki-camarena-5750278

Adrienne Shelly (June 24, 1966 – November 1, 2006), was an American actress, director and screenwriter. She became known for roles in independent films such as 1989's The Unbelievable Truth. In late 2006 Shelly was the married mother of an infant daughter and was waiting to see if her film Waitress, would be accepted for the Sundance festival. On November 1, 2006, Shelly was found dead, hanging in the shower of her Greenwich Village work studio apartment. The initial examination of the scene did not reveal any suspicious circumstances, and police apparently believed it to be a suicide...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Shelly

Michael Beschloss ?@BeschlossDC: Civil rights heroes Schwerner, Chaney & Goodman were murdered today1964 in Mississippi:

Jeff Stein ?@SpyTalker: Moving story about the vicious prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling.

Show #703
Original airdate: October 23, 2014
Guests: Jim DiEugenio / Gary Webb
Topics: Gary Webb / CTKA / Treefrog / Letters

Gary Webb (1:07:51) Real Media or MP3 download or YouTube Video

*Gary Webb with Len and Anita Langley on BOR Show #47, August 23, 2001
*Gary was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in California
*Drug asset forfeitures, cocaine, Crips and Bloods
*Some of the money was used to buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras
*"Freeway" Ricky Ross, the start of the crack epidemic, Dark Alliance: (Webb 1999)
*CIA was running the drugs into the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles
The group included an MBA in marketing, a weapons advisor, a macro-economist
*Norwin Meneses, they were untouched by law enforcement for many years
*A professional marketing operation, not a lot of moral examination
*Crack democratized cocaine, a cheaper unit cost, a bigger kick
*Dr. Robert Byck congressional testimony on the smoking of cocaine
*Increased prison sentences, not allowed to study it
*Political overtones to the crack market, Miami, Haiti
*An LAPD Rick Ross task force, civil rights violations
*CIA/Contra evidence disappeared, CIA/Meneses, operated fairly openly
*He could be blatant about it because he was a useful money launderer
*The Sandinista revolution, the Somozas, Reagan, a PR campaign
*"The moral equivalent of our founding fathers", [font color=blue]DEA Agent Celerino Castillo[/font]
*A DEA Investigation of CIA, these things get rooted in systems, they're protected
*Did Gary make a difference? Yes. In African-American society this is still an issue
*This story took off in 1996 on the world wide web, linked to source documents
*The backlash was enormous, the Washington Post, the newspaper's reputation
*CIA was allowed to investigate itself, cocaine brought in on freighters
*3 million dollars a day in crack sales, Dr. Hugo Spadafora
*Cocaine trafficking was the coin of the realm in Central America
*Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Department of Justice
*Agencies were profiting from the Drug War
*Asset forfeiture, property confiscated without being charged

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2014.html

On April 1, 1967, CIA director Richard Helms launched a secret world-wide campaign, entitled “Countering Warren Commission critics,” which sought to discredit JFK ‘conspiracy theorists” with newspaper editors and reporters.

At the same time, James Angleton, chief of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff, established a secret committee, which monitored Garrison’s investigation for the next two years. Declassified documents show that Angleton’s “Garrison Group” identified scores of CIA assets and sources who figured in the New Orleans investigation.

While intensely suspicious of the CIA, Garrison actually underestimated the extent of the agency’s interest in accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed.

Angeton’s staff had monitored Oswald for four years after his defection to the Soviet Union in November 1959, according to declassified records released in 1990s. Jane Roman, an aide to to Angleton, told the Washington Post that certain CIA officials had “keen interest” in Oswald in late 1963...

http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/the-cia-is-hiding-two-secret-files-on-jim-garrison-the-prosecutor-celebrated-in-the-jfk-movie/#more-19333