U.S. Shrugged as American Informer Sat in Mexico Prison

When the Mexican Federal Judicial Police converged on Kenneth Erickson in the lobby of a Mexico City hotel last September, he was surprised but not overly concerned.

For the previous eight months, Erickson had been working under cover for the U.S. government, masquerading as a member of an international drug ring while feeding information to federal agents.

His friends at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Customs Service would intercede quickly, Erickson thought, to free him from the Mexican authorities.

Instead, Erickson, 41, the owner of a San Diego limousine service, spent seven months in a Mexican prison, ignored by the American agents who ultimately conceded that he had, indeed, played a significant role in a joint DEA-Customs investigation.

Tells of Torture

During that time, Erickson said, he was beaten, tortured and left naked on the floor of a jail cell for two weeks.

“I was just totally abandoned,” Erickson said. “I had fights. I ate out of trash cans. I ate stuff people would throw away. The government never brought me a lawyer, never brought me a clean shirt. Nothing.

“I’ve been scrupulous at every turn in this thing and to end up being accused of being a criminal, that’s the worst indignity.”

The episode, which left Erickson bankrupt and deeply embittered, provides an unusual public glimpse into the world of government informants.

Moreover, Erickson’s story, raises questions about whether the U.S. agencies were operating clandestinely in Mexico.

The acrimony between Erickson and the federal agents for whom he once worked reached a peak last week when his requests for compensation for his financial losses were finally, and flatly, turned down.

Officials of both Customs and the DEA acknowledge that Erickson worked with agents in San Diego, but they insist they never sent him to Mexico. Therefore, they say, they are not responsible for his problems.

Erickson said the officials denied knowledge of the ill-fated trip to Mexico--one of three he says he made for them--because they never informed Mexican authorities that they were conducting an investigation in that country. “It’s totally a lie to say they didn’t know I was going down there. They gave me the purpose for going down there,” Erickson said. “Customs calls me up and says that the group needs me for a very important job. . . . It turns out that they want me to go to Mexico.”

Claims by people who get into legal trouble in foreign countries that they are working as government informants are nothing new. What distinguishes Erickson’s case is the uncontroverted evidence that he was working with the government on the American side of the border in an investigation of the drug smugglers with whom he was eventually arrested in Mexico.

Further, federal agents acknowledge that Erickson himself was never under investigation for any crime and was not cooperating in an attempt to avoid prosecution or to cut a deal on a prison sentence.

Called a Volunteer

“We would call him a citizen source,” said Kenneth Ingleby, special agent in charge of the Customs Service office in San Diego. “He basically volunteered.” Ingleby said he believes Erickson’s claims that he was tortured by Mexican police, who extracted a bogus confession from him shortly after his arrest, and feels bad about Erickson’s current financial state, including the loss of his home and repossession of his cars.

“He went through hell. There’s no doubt about it,” Ingleby said. “He got a raw deal. He gets picked up and gets tortured. . . . I feel for the guy.”

Still, Ingleby said, there is nothing either Customs or the DEA legally can do for Erickson now.

Charles Hill, special agent in charge of the DEA office in San Diego, said he could not comment on matters relating to informants, but added that the DEA did not send Erickson to Mexico.

Erickson’s stint as a government informant began in January, 1987, when he telephoned the DEA office in National City and said he had some information about what he believed was a drug smuggling operation. Later that day, he met with two agents at a restaurant in National City.

Erickson said his motives were altruistic, but also conceded that his limousine business needed a financial boost and he hoped to get the standard fee of 25% of any property seized as a result of information he provided.

Suspected Drug Activity

He told the agents he believed that an old friend he had taken into his home was using his telephone to arrange drug deals. He had met the man years earlier, he said, through his fledgling limousine business and had acted as his personal chauffeur.

Later, the man was convicted of a drug charge and spent time in prison. Erickson told the agents that he allowed the man to move into his home on the condition that he stay away from drugs. He also told them that he chauffeured the man around in late 1986 to pick up money in the Los Angeles area.

“I explained what I knew about him,” Erickson said. “I explained what he had been saying when we drove up to Los Angeles to pick up money--that this was money that was owed to him by friends.

“I gave them the names of the people that I knew,” Erickson said. “They called me back and said, ‘We’re really interested in these people.’ ”

Several days later, Erickson met the agents again. “They actually knew more than I knew at the time,” Erickson said. “They were already looking at these people. There was an operation in San Diego against them and there was an operation in Los Angeles against them.”

The agents instructed Erickson to quietly observe the operation and report back to them, he said.

“One of the instructions that (they) gave me was that if at any time these fellows ever asked me to handle any dope, in any way, that I was to stop the car and get on the phone to (them). . . . I never touched any dope. I never saw it. Most of this was picking up the cash from the dope.”

One of the instructions was to keep the agents posted “completely” of all his activities, Erickson said. “If I learned anything, I told them--I mean minutes after I learned it.” In fact, he said, he spoke to agents on an average of once a day.

Is Assigned a Number

As the months went on and the agents began to trust Erickson, he was given a secret informant’s number. If he were ever arrested, Erickson could simply give the number to the arresting officers, who would then verify it by calling the DEA or Customs, he said.

Soon, the agencies began providing Erickson with expense money to cover some of his costs. That money totaled about $3,000 and the tab was split evenly between the DEA and Customs, Ingleby confirmed.

Erickson also was asked to sign an agreement spelling out his relationship with the agencies.

“It was a very simple document setting out that there was no agency relationship,” Erickson said. “I wasn’t getting a badge or anything. It meant that they carry some responsibilities in law, but I am not an employee of theirs.”

Erickson apparently also won the confidence of the drug smugglers, who were working up a plan to use a turboprop Aerocommander airplane to smuggle cocaine and marijuana from Colombia to Mexico and then across the U.S border at Mexicali.

Erickson had once operated an air charter business and, although he was not a licensed pilot, his knowledge of planes and related paper work made him invaluable to the organization. Ultimately, because of his clean record, the airplane was registered in Erickson’s name, with the knowledge and secret assistance of the DEA and Customs, which had joined the investigation and had placed a secret transponder on the plane, Erickson said.

Mechanical problems and difficulty with pilots cut short two trips to Mexico in April, 1987, Erickson said. The agents knew about and approved of both trips, Erickson said, and even picked him up one day after he called them from Mexico to inform them of the aborted smuggling attempt.

The pilot hired by the smugglers quit after inspecting the plane in Tijuana and instead drove Erickson back to the U.S. border, Erickson said. There, Erickson called the agents he had been working with--Brian Simon of Customs and Doug Hibert of the DEA. Simon and Hibert picked him up at the border and drove him to Brown Field to meet another pilot who might agree to fly the plane, Erickson said.

No Comment

Hibert and Simon refused to discuss any aspect of their relationship with Erickson.

Erickson’s final trip to Mexico began last Sept. 11 when he boarded a commercial airliner for Mexico City, where, as the apparent owner of the Aerocommander, he was to straighten out some paper work with Mexican authorities, who had impounded the aircraft.

He and one of the drug dealers waited for several days at an expensive hotel while the Mexican bureaucracy dealt with the registration.

The operation collapsed last Sept. 17 as Erickson and the drug dealer were checking out of the hotel.

“Somebody came running up the stairs toward me with a .45-caliber gun,” Erickson said. “He grabbed me and stuck a gun to my head and said if I said one word he was going to shoot me in the head.”

Simultaneously, eight others involved in the smuggling group were arrested in a nearby city.

Erickson was taken by car to another location, where he was interrogated for eight days, he said. During that time, he was beaten and shocked with an instrument resembling an electric cattle prod, which was applied to his chest. He said he remembers signing a confession in which he implicated Customs Agent Simon as a participant in illegal activity.

Later, Erickson was transferred to the Southern Detention Facility, where the other members of the smuggling group also were imprisoned and had begun to hear rumors of his dual roles and threatened his life.

No Help From U.S.

Strangely, Erickson thought, no help seemed to be forthcoming from either the DEA or Customs.

Ingleby, the head of Customs in San Diego, blamed his agency’s initial reluctance to help Erickson on the fact that he had implicated an agent in a crime.

Meanwhile, Erickson’s parents mortgaged their home and hired a lawyer to attempt to free their son.

The lawyer, Gerald Blank of San Diego, began prodding both agencies as well as the Mexican government, but it was nearly six weeks after Erickson’s arrest before U.S. officials offered their first assistance.

In a highly unusual letter to Mexican authorities, Ingleby acknowledged that Erickson had been cooperating with the U.S. government in an investigation of “a significant group of narcotics traffickers in Southern California.”

He also acknowledged that Erickson had traveled to Mexico to sign official documents for an airplane being used in that investigation. The airplane, Ingleby wrote, had been equipped with a secret transponder so that it could be tracked by U.S. agents.

Nevertheless, the letter said, Erickson had gone to Mexico “without the authorization or knowledge of U.S. Customs.”

“While I cannot condone Mr. Erickson’s unauthorized travel to Mexico,” Ingleby wrote, “I firmly believe that he did so for the sole purpose of having the aircraft released, thereby making it easier for the traffickers to be caught by law enforcement authorities. . . . This, coupled with his inexperience, led him into breaking the law.”

Ingleby also wrote that he was concerned for Erickson’s personal safety because he was in prison with the traffickers, who had become aware of his cooperation with the investigation.

A DEA official in Mexico City wrote a similar letter to Mexican authorities.

Mexicans Unswayed

The letters appeared to hold little sway with Mexican officials, who were embroiled in a battle of their own with the Americans, in particular federal agents from San Diego. Several volleys of indictments had emanated from San Diego in the previous two years accusing more than a dozen Mexican police officials with corruption and drug-related crimes.

And Ingleby’s boss in Washington, Customs Commissioner William von Raab, had provoked angry protests in May, 1986, when he severely criticized Mexican law enforcement officials as inept and corrupt, contending that they have done nothing to counter the surge in drug trafficking across their northern border.

Ingleby suggested that Erickson’s prison stay may have been lengthened for political reasons unrelated to his case.

“There was a conscientious attempt to persuade the Mexican government to let him go,” Ingleby said.

Erickson said he is not certain why he was finally released from the prison in April, but he said he believes efforts by Customs and the DEA were too little and too late.

Since his release he has been pressing both agencies for money, but to no avail. He was told that because the investigation collapsed in Mexico and the airplane was seized by Mexican police, there are no proceeds from which to compensate him.

“There’s really no justification for any kind of payment,” Ingleby said. “If there was, I would be more than happy to pay Mr. Erickson.

“He provided some original information that initiated an investigation. We cannot pay for something a foreign government does. . . . You never know up front what’s going to be at the end.”