It was January 18, 2011, in Phoenix, Arizona, and Peter Forcelli, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), responded to a 911 call regarding a flight in progress.
When he arrived on the scene, it was obvious that something horrible had happened.
“As we walked through the door, the flavor of metal hit my nostrils,” he writes (with co-author Keelin MacGregor) in his new true-crime memoir, “The Deadly Path: How Operation Fast & Furious and Bad Lawyers Armed Mexican.” Cartels” (Knox Press), available now. “A slippery sheen covered the ground. Blood. A lot.”
The former NYPD homicide detective was no stranger to crime scenes.
Given the large amount of fresh blood, those involved were either dead or seriously injured.
But the house was empty and the only evidence left were the guns.
Forcelli and his team, which specializes in federal gun-trafficking crimes, were in the process of recording gun serial numbers when they received a call from their superiors at the Justice Department. They were asked not to continue their investigation, even if it could lead to the identification of the murderer.
“I couldn’t believe my ears,” writes Forcelli. “We were in a bloodbath where the gun was found, and my team (was ordered) to stand down?”
Forcelli, who was sworn in as an ATF agent in 2001, was transferred to Phoenix in 2007 to focus on stopping the illegal flow of U.S. weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. But as he soon discovered, his team was often “forced to allow the release of people clearly involved in gun trafficking,” Forcelli writes. “It went against everything I had experienced over the previous 22 years in law enforcement.”
Much of the problem was due to Operation Fast and Furious, a program started by the ATF’s Phoenix Field division in 2009, which allowed suspects to make off with illegally purchased guns — otherwise known as “gunwalking” – in the hope that they would lead agents. to key figures in Mexican drug cartels.
The problem, however, is that once these weapons crossed the border, they were no longer the ATF’s problem. Or as a prosecutor explained to Forcelli: “The body of the crime is the weapon, not the person. If the gun is in Mexico, the body of the crime is in Mexico.
Not only did ATF agents watch known smugglers ride off into the sunset. There was also the fear that these weapons would come back to haunt them. In December 2010, that is precisely what happened when Customs Agent Brian Terry, patrolling the desert just outside Nogales, Arizona, was shot and killed with a gun that was later attributed to a Fast and Furious investigation.
Fast and Furious wasn’t the only obstacle preventing Forcelli from doing his job. Corpus tortthe legal policy according to which a person cannot be convicted of a crime without concrete proof of its reality, ended several Forcelli investigations that should have been drunk.
One day, after stopping a truck headed to the Mexican border, Forcelli and his team discovered several AK-47 rifles and a dozen cases of 7.62mm ammunition.
Everyone in the truck had Mexican ID cards. But the Phoenix district attorney’s office declined to prosecute. Forcelli was told that the arrest of one of the obvious drug dealers “could be perceived as racial profiling.”
Then there was Forcelli’s months-long investigation into X Caliber, a gun store in suburban northern Phoenix. An undercover ATF agent, posing as a “straw buyer” – the middlemen hired by Mexican cartels to buy guns on their behalf – tried to buy guns from the store owner, George Iknadosian , which unknowingly revealed details about the ins and outs of arms smuggling. .
“Fridays are bad days to transport guns across the border,” Iknadosian told the undercover agent, his confession captured on wiretap. “Mondays are much better. Police are busy investigating what she did this weekend.
Iknadosian was arrested and charged with 21 counts, including conspiracy to traffic in arms, money laundering and fraudulent schemes.
Nearly a year later, drug lord Arturo Beltran-Leyva was killed in a shootout with Mexican Marines. Nearly a dozen firearms were discovered near his bullet-riddled body, all from an X-Caliber bust, “including an ornately bejeweled Colt .38 Super semi-automatic pistol,” writes Forcelli. “Connection… for a man known in the world of drug trafficking in Mexico as The Boss of Bosses.
In June 2011, Forcelli testified before Congress and blasted the ATF and federal prosecutors for their failed gun smuggling policies and enforcement operations, which resulted in the disappearance of more than 2,000 weapons fire on the other side of the southwest border.
“What we have here is actually a colossal failure of leadership within the ATF,” Forcelli told Congress. “We didn’t give guns to people who hunted bears. We were giving guns to people who were killing other humans. »
Forcelli, who retired from the ATF several years ago, isn’t convinced much has changed since he was exposed.
“The same politicians and people occupy important positions of power,” he writes, “with no middleman oversight.”
New York Post
