2 Houston-area pilots in limbo amid rumors of DEA plot
2 Houston-area pilots in limbo amid rumors of DEA plot
January 30, 2012
Source: Houston Chronicle
A ranking California congressman contends two Houston-area pilots arrested in Panama were unknowingly snared in a botched money-laundering operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which did nothing to stop the innocent Americans from going to prison.
But sources told the Houston Chronicle on Saturday it was not a DEA case and the claims are rooted in a fast-talking occasional DEA informant, who was a passenger on the private jet and tried to squirm out of getting busted with $2.3 million in dirty money last May.
“He just got caught,” said a source familiar with events. “It appears it was an informant who was doing it without the knowledge of the DEA. They do that all the time. They play both sides (of the law).”
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday to say he’d received “quite unsettling” information about a DEA money-laundering operation that landed the pilots in prison.
It was the latest in a string of accusations against federal law enforcement by Issa, who has been vociferously critical of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and its bungled undercover gun-running operation known as “Fast and Furious.” ATF allowed people suspected of being low-level smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border in hopes of finding higher-level operatives, but it lost track of hundreds of weapons. Two were found in Arizona, where an American Border Patrol agent was shot to death
But DEA Spokeswoman Dawn Dearden said Saturday the incident in Panama was not a DEA matter.
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