The Butcher by Philip Carlo Page B

particularly hard adversaries to bring to justice, for they were mobile, in and out of the country as readily as a turtle’s head was in and out of its shell. Once the blood was washed from their hands, they could casually go through customs.
    For Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel, the war on drugs was a daily part of their lives, an intricate part of who they were. For them, it was not a newspaper article or a blurb on television. They, far more than the public or press, knew the true, heinous nature of the fire-breathing beast they were fighting. They saw the bodies, the crime-scene photos. They heard the stories in great detail about what occurred, how, and when.
    Several times a month, the DEA would make huge busts. One would think, considering the amount of drugs they confiscated, that they’d slow, put a dent in, the flow of narcotics. Just the opposite occurred. No matter how many busts they made, there seemed to be a never-ending supply, mountains of drugs in faraway places that were cleverly brought into the United States using unsettling amounts of imagination and creativity.
    Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel worked so well together they could readily be likened to a bow and a fiddle in a maestro’s hands. They were not only fearless but they were, more importantly, street-smart. From studying how colleagues were shot and murdered, they hadlearned well what not to do. Any bad guy who went up against Jim and Tommy was the one in danger. In Group 33 and all throughout the DEA, Jim and Tommy became…famous—respected.
    They were moving at two hundred miles an hour.
    â€œThey were the best,” a former colleague by the name of Bruce Travers recently said.
    On a regular basis, they made busts, using professional informers and snitches, drug users and street people. Every night they were out on the street, looking to collar bad guys all over the tristate area, looking to win a battle in the war on drugs.
    Still, no matter how careful they were, with all the resources of the DEA behind them, people were hurt, killed. A good example of just how dangerous their job was, how they were truly putting their lives on the line, happened at 133rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. This was an area known as a Dominican enclave. Of the three worst groups, the Colombians, Mexicans, and Dominicans, the most violent at the time, the most apt to pull the trigger of a gun, was surely the Dominicans. They were less about business and more about overt brutality as a matter of course. They were thought of by the DEA as the most dangerous of all the bad guys they chased. Jim recently explained that he had busted Colombians with kilos on them and no guns, but Dominicans with two ounces and three guns.
    Group 33 received word through a Colombian informer that some Dominicans he knew had kilos of cocaine to sell. This was a classic ploy the DEA used to catch drug dealers. It was called buy and bust. Through negotiations that often went back and forth for days or even weeks, a buy was set up in which the DEA would provide money and bust the dealer, most often through an intermediary, an informer.
    The Dominicans had rented a stash house in a tenement on 133rd Street. The drugs were supposed to be in the apartment. It was a little after midnight. The informer told Jim and his team, all told eight agents, that the cocaine was in the apartment.
    â€œAre you sure?” Jim asked, always wary.
    â€œThey say it’s there,” the informer said.
    Jim well knew that they could be running into a situation where the Dominicans were looking to rob them; that there were no drugs; that this was, in fact, a rip-off. It had happened before. DEA agents were killed in situations in which they thought they were buying drugs only to have the dealers turn on them, shoot them dead, and steal the money.
    This was a risk they would have to take this night. Would they be facing a compliant dealer or a dangerous predator? There was only one way to know for