U.S. Asks 60-Year Term for Ex-Drug Agent Garcia

Former federal drug agent Darnell Garcia’s “egregious acts of corruption, drug trafficking and money laundering clearly justify” that he spend at least 20 years in prison before being considered for parole, government prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum filed Monday in Los Angeles.

The incarceration and fines recommended by assistant U.S. Attys. Joyce A. Karlin, chief of the major crimes unit, and Stefan D. Stein went far beyond the penalties recently proposed by the U.S. Probation Office, according to the memo filed in U.S. District Court.

Garcia, 44, of Rancho Palos Verdes, is scheduled to be sentenced next Monday by U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr., who is not bound by any of the sentencing recommendations. The penalty memo by federal probation authorities was not made public.

Following a four-month trial, a jury convicted Garcia last April of five counts of drug trafficking and money laundering. The verdict climaxed a sweeping investigation into the worst scandal in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Two other DEA agents, John Jackson and Wayne Countryman, pleaded guilty to similar charges and testified against Garcia. They recounted for jurors a 1980s crime rampage that made all of them millionaires with secret Swiss bank accounts.

Jackson, 41, of Claremont, and Countryman, 48, of Walnut, are scheduled to be sentenced by Hatter later this month. Under their plea-bargain agreements--again, non-binding on Hatter--they would serve no more than about five years and two years in prison, respectively, before being eligible for parole.

Specifically, Karlin and Stein recommended that Garcia be sentenced to 60 years in prison and fined $3 million--the amount he has in a frozen bank account in Luxembourg. Under federal law, he would be eligible for parole after serving a third of this sentence, or 20 years.

Under the maximum penalty, based on his conviction on five counts, Garcia would have faced life in prison and fines of almost $6 million.

One of Garcia’s attorneys, Mark Overland, said he will argue that his client “should get no more (prison time) than what Jackson got. I think the evidence showed Jackson was the leader--certainly not Darnell Garcia.”

Overland maintains that Garcia is innocent, adding that he will file an appeal.

During the trial, the government presented a picture of three renegade drug agents who stole cocaine, heroin and cash from drug dealers, and even helped themselves to narcotics from the evidence vault at the DEA’s downtown Los Angeles office between 1982 and 1985.

In the 15-page memo, the two prosecutors emphasized that while a federal drug agent, Garcia “sold multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine and heroin and laundered the profits of these drug sales through foreign bank accounts.”

“Garcia’s egregious acts of corruption, drug trafficking and money laundering clearly justify the lengthy prison sentence and substantial fines that the government recommends be imposed upon him in this case.”

They asserted that the tough sentence was proposed partly because Garcia had been a fugitive for seven months before he was captured in Luxembourg in July, 1989, and that he has shown a “complete lack of remorse.”

Garcia said that he amassed the $3 million largely through jewelry smuggling activities for which he was not charged.

Karlin and Stein alleged that Garcia, a former black belt karate expert who is being held at Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Detention Center, was “a corrupt law enforcement officer from the first day he took an oath to uphold the law.”

They said “the most telling piece of evidence in this regard” was a two-page exhibit attached to their memo in which a Los Angeles Police Department detective, Stan Nelson, declared that Garcia wanted to work undercover in 1977 in an ongoing investigation into three suspected drug traffickers. The incident occurred while Garcia was a security guard at a Bullock’s department store, just before he became an LAPD officer.

The three now-convicted drug traffickers under investigation were Ronald and Conway Waddy and Thomas (Tootie) Reese, a Los Angeles-area drug kingpin.

”. . . Garcia attempted to penetrate an ongoing law enforcement investigation of the Waddy brothers and their mentor (Reese) . . . by offering to work under cover on the investigation,” the two prosecutors alleged.

During his trial, the government charged that Garcia hid the Waddys in his Bunker Hill apartment while they were federal fugitives.

In the memo, Karlin and Stein used Garcia’s words on his application to the DEA in 1977 to argue for an extended prison sentence.

On the application, also attached to the government’s sentencing memo, Garcia wrote that “sellers of drugs should be charged to the fullest letter of the law.”