Drug Agent’s Fake Passport Aided His Escape to Europe

Elusive former narcotics agent Darnell Garcia, an international fugitive for seven months until he was arrested in Luxembourg last week, used a fake Mexican passport to flee through South America to Europe, a prosecutor in the tiny nation said Monday.

The prosecutor, George Heisbourg, said the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, apprehended July 3 by Luxembourg police, was attempting to purchase air tickets for himself and his wife, who was waiting in a Paris hotel room.

“He admitted the (passport) offense,” Heisbourg said.

The bogus Mexican passport Garcia was carrying was in addition to a genuine United States one also found on his person in Luxembourg, Heisbourg said in a telephone interview. Garcia’s wife, Adaline, was believed to still be in Paris on Monday, but could not be reached for comment.

Garcia, 42, of Rancho Palos Verdes, along with two other former DEA agents and two others, was indicted in December on charges of narcotics trafficking and money laundering. The defendants are scheduled to stand trial in federal court in Los Angeles in November.

Details of Garcia’s seven months on the lam are still sketchy. “Even DEA investigators don’t know all the countries he was in in the last seven months,” a knowledgeable source said.

Still, a picture of the chase is beginning to emerge from interviews with law enforcement and government officials here and abroad, many of whom asked for anonymity. For months, knowledgeable sources said, Garcia’s trail was at least 30 days cold, as he slipped in and out of countries, sometimes changing hotels three and four times in a single city.

But stepped-up pursuit over the last two months, particularly by DEA agents abroad, closed the net even as Garcia accelerated his travel pace, officials said.

“When it concerns one of your own, you become much more aggressive,” said a Europe-based source who participated in the hunt.

Finally, intelligence that Garcia was taking a train from Paris to Luxembourg last week led to DEA agents tipping Luxembourg police of his expected whereabouts. He was quietly arrested in a travel agency in the central district of the City of Luxembourg just before noon.

Garcia was considered a macho character who had a black belt in karate and wrote two books on the subject. At the same time, as court records show, he was a frequent international traveler, both on official and unofficial business, and knew his way around Europe’s major financial centers such as Zurich, Frankfurt and Luxembourg.

Garcia, 42, of Rancho Palos Verdes; John Jackson, 39, of Claremont, and Wayne Countryman, 45, of Walnut, along with Jackson’s wife, Barbara, and Sherman Lair of Alta Loma are accused in a 36-count indictment of conspiring to set up a drug network from Los Angeles to New York. Profits from the drug operation are alleged to have been laundered through domestic and foreign banks.

The government is also investigating the theft of more than five pounds of Asian heroin with a street value of $7.5 million from the DEA’s Los Angeles office in 1984 and 1985.

Luxembourg was not an unfamiliar country to Garcia, according to federal court records. In March, 1988, records disclose that Garcia deposited $320,000 in a Luxembourg bank. Then, according to a prosecution summary of his itinerary between 1984 and 1988, he personally visited the country the following May, about nine months after he left the DEA.

“We are searching for that money,” prosecutor Heisbourg said. But he emphasized that the task was difficult. “We have more than 120 banks in the City of Luxembourg,” he said.

One of Garcia’s attorneys, Francois Beissel, said Adaline Garcia was permitted to visit her husband in prison last week, and then returned to Paris. Garcia is being held in solitary confinement.

Prosecutor Heisbourg said that the fake Mexican passport was issued last February, and was used by the fugitive to flee from South America to Europe. Then, last March, Heisbourg said, Garcia turned up at the French Consulate in Luxembourg to obtain a visa to travel in France. “I suppose he got the visa,” Heisbourg said.

Carrying a fake passport is an offense carrying a penalty up to two years in jail, according to Luxembourg law.

Beissel said that his client assured his local attorneys that he left the United States “quite normally.” Moreover, Beissel said, Garcia emphasized that he was not a drug dealer. According to the attorney, Garcia told him that he had been a DEA agent, but that “he had nothing to do with drug trafficking.”

Instead, Beissel said, Garcia asserted he was traveling in Luxembourg on legitimate business involving “gold trading.”

Garcia, Beissel said, charged that he was being “persecuted by the DEA” and that he had fled the United States as a result of the “feud between him and his former employers.”

Garcia successfully challenged a DEA move to transfer him to Detroit and then to fire him, defeating the agency in a legal fight that was resolved in 1986 by a federal appeals court. Some of his supporters have alleged that the DEA is seeking revenge stemming from Garcia’s victory, a charge agency officials heatedly deny.

Additionally, Garcia’s counsel said, the former DEA agent offerred that “he was involved in tax litigation” in the United States.

Among the charges against Garcia and the other co-defendants are that he filed fraudulently understated income taxes, concealing profits from drug sales. Last month, the DEA moved to seize Garcia’s Rancho Palos Verdes house.

Separately on Monday, a Luxembourg tribunal rejected Garcia’s request for bail. Whether he will appeal the decision could be decided today, according to Beissel.

U.S. Embassy officials in Luxembourg have told local authorities that Washington has started diplomatic machinery in motion to extradite Garcia to the United States, a process that could take at least a month.