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Malevolent Clowns

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends came to the funeral in the same car.

—Steven Wright

Their house is a brownstone on Hillyer Place east of Twenty-First in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. They chose it because Dupont is “walkable,” for Marisol; there are coffee shops, restaurants, and bookstores nearby; and Keller likes the historical resonance of the neighborhood. Teddy Roosevelt lived around here; so did Franklin and Eleanor.

And Marisol loved the crepe myrtle tree that grew up to the third-story window, its lavender blooms reminding her of the vivid colors back in Mexico.

She’s waiting up when Keller gets home, sitting in the big armchair by the living room window, reading a magazine.

“We’re a ‘power couple,’” she says when Keller comes through the door.

“We are?” He bends over and kisses her forehead.

“It says so right here,” she says, pointing to the copy of Washington Life in her lap. “‘Washington power couple Mr. and Mrs.’—actually, Doctor—‘Art Keller showed up at the Kennedy Center fund-raiser. The DEA director and his stylish Latina wife’—that’s me, I’m your ‘stylish Latina wife’ …”

Keller looks at the page, not thrilled that she’s been photographed. He doesn’t like her image being out there. But it’s almost inevitable—she is stylish and interesting, and the story of the DEA hero with the Mexican wife who was once gunned down by narcos is irresistible to both the media and the Washington society types. So they get invitations to the chic parties and events, which Keller would by inclination turn down, but Marisol says that whether they like it or not, the political and social connections are extremely useful to his work.

She’s right, Keller thinks. Mari’s charm has proved to be an effective antidote to what has been referred to as his “anticharm,” and she has opened doors (and kept them open) that would otherwise be closed to him.

When Keller needs to talk with a representative, a senator, a cabinet official, a lobbyist, an editor, an ambassador, a shaker-and-mover—even someone in the White House—the chances are that Mari just had lunch or breakfast or served on a committee with the spouse.

Or she does the talking herself. Marisol is fully aware that people who would say no to Keller find it much harder to refuse his charming, fashionable wife, and she’s not above picking up the phone when an appropriations vote is needed, a critical piece of information has to go out in the media, or a project needs to be funded.

She’s busy—already on the board of the Children’s National Medical Center and the Art Museum of the Americas and has worked on fund-raisers for the Children’s Inn, Doorways for Women and Families, and AIDS United.

Keller worries that she’s too busy for her health.

“I love those causes,” she said to him when he expressed his concern. “And anyway, you need to put political capital in the bank.”

“It’s not your job.”

“It is my job,” she said. “It’s exactly my job. You kept your promise to me.”

He had. When he first called O’Brien to accept the offer, he said he had one condition—a replacement 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. From now on we put our priority on hitting them where we can hit them—here in the United States.”

Howard said, “That’s a piecemeal approach that will require coordination from dozens of metropolitan police departments.”

“Set it up,” Keller said. “Within the next month I want face-to-face meetings with the chiefs of narcotics from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. If they can’t or won’t come to me, I’ll go to them. After that, I want Boston, Detroit and San Diego. And so on. The days of standing at the urinal pissing on each other’s shoes are over.”

But great, Keller thought, I have a deputy who’s looking to sabotage me. I’m going to have to starve him out, and the way to starve a bureaucrat is to deprive him of access and information.

Keller kept Blair after the meeting. “Does Howard have a hard-on for me?”

Blair smiled. “He expected to get your desk.”

The administrator and deputy administrator of the DEA are political appointees—all the rest are civil servants who come up through the system. Keller figured that Howard probably thought O’Brien and his cabal fucked him.

The organizational chart has all the department heads reporting directly to Howard, who then reports to Keller.

“Anything significant,” Keller told Blair, “you bypass Howard, bring directly to me.”

“You want me to keep a double set of books.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” Blair said. “I don’t trust the son of a bitch, either.”

“It blows up, I’ll cover your ass.”

“Who’s going to cover yours?” Blair asked.

Same person who always has, Keller thought.

Me.

“Let’s look at the velorio again,” Keller says.

Blair puts up the photos from Barrera’s wake, taken by an incredibly brave SEIDO undercover working as a waiter for the catering company that serviced the event. Keller stares at the dozens of photos—Elena Sánchez sitting by the coffin; the Esparza brothers; Ricardo Núñez and his son, Mini-Ric; a host of other important players. He studies photos taken in the house, on the lawn, out by the pool.

“Can you order them by time sequence?” Keller asks.

The cliché is that every picture tells a story, but a sequence of pictures, Keller thinks, can be more like a movie and tell a different story. He’s a big believer in chronology, in causation, and now he studies the photos with that sensibility.

Blair is smart enough to shut up.

Twenty minutes later, Keller starts to select a series of photos and lay them out in line. “Look at this—Núñez goes up to Elena. They walk outside, let’s say it’s to talk in private.” He highlights a series of photos that show Elena and Núñez walking closely together, in what seems to be intense conversation. Then—

“Shit,” Keller says, “what’s this?”

He zooms in on Núñez’s hands, on a piece of paper that he gives Elena.

“What is it?” Blair asks.

“Can’t make it out, but she’s sure as hell reading it.” Keller zooms in on Elena’s face—reading, frowning. “It could be the catering bill, who knows, but she isn’t happy.”

They look at pictures of Elena and Núñez in conversation and then check the time log. The conversation lasted for five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Elena gave Núñez the paper and went back inside the house.

“What I wouldn’t give for some audio,” Keller says.

“They were jamming,” Blair says.

Keller goes back to his timeline series of photos and notes Iván and Mini-Ric in what looks to be a casual conversation by the pool. Then Núñez comes out and walks away with Iván, leaving Ric sitting there. Half an hour later, by the time log, Iván comes back out and talks to Ric.

And it doesn’t look casual.

“Am I imagining things,” Keller says, “or are they in an argument?”

“Iván sure looks angry.”

“Whatever got his panties in a wad,” Keller says, “it had to have been when he was with Núñez. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into this.”

And maybe not, he thinks.

All the drumbeats said that Iván was next in line to take control of the cartel, merging the Barrera and Esparza wings of the organization. But now we seem to be seeing Ricardo Núñez summoning Elena Sánchez and Iván Esparza to personal talks, after which Iván appears to be angry.

Jesus Christ, could we have missed something here?

Keller had thought of Ricardo Núñez as a midlevel functionary, at most some kind of adviser to Barrera, but he’s been playing an outsize role in the velorio and the funeral and now he seems to be some kind of go-between from Elena to Iván.

Negotiating what, though?

Elena’s been out of the trade for years.

Keller tries a different theory—maybe Núñez isn’t simply providing “good offices,” but has become a power in and of his own.

Stay tuned, Keller thinks.

¡ADÁN VIVE!

Elena Sánchez Barrera looks at the graffiti spray-painted on the stone wall of the Jardines del Valle cemetery.