Cloud of Crisis Over DEA Office Has Lifted : Narcotics: Three trying years marked by scandal, resignations, a slain comrade and low pay are behind the agency as it turns its energies to a new L.A. task force.

In 1988, it was the scandal in Los Angeles law enforcement: three veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agents indicted for stealing drugs and cash from suspects.

Beyond being a sexy case--with millions of dollars stashed in Swiss bank accounts--it was the first hint that something was seriously amiss among agencies that were seizing more cocaine cash than anyone else in the United States.

Indeed, a year later, local DEA chief John M. Zienter found himself sharing experiences with Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, who announced the suspension of nine veteran members of his narcotics bureau.

“I called Sherm and expressed my sympathy,” Zienter said. “(That) it’s not the Sheriff’s Department, it’s a small group. They went bad, the agency didn’t.”

In the odd arena of public perception, however, the sheriff’s scandal marked the start of the healing process for Zienter’s office. It pushed the DEA incident well back in public consciousness--much as the furor over the videotaped brutality of Los Angeles police almost overnight made the sheriff’s affair old news.

And with the conviction of former agent Darnell Garcia in federal court Tuesday, a trying three-year period seems to be behind the DEA office. Now the agency is putting its energy into a new task force that was authorized when Los Angeles was designated one of the nation’s five High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas.

“I think as long as this case went on there was sort of a cloud over the agency here,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Stefan Stein, who prosecuted Garcia. “And I think that this conviction really swept that cloud away.”

In coming back from crisis, the DEA was helped by three very different factors. The Los Angeles office won a string of convictions in the 1985 torture-murder of Mexico-based agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena. The agents received a pay raise that eased a demoralizing manpower crisis. And the agency was able to unite in its condemnation of the fallen agents, who were accused not just of skimming cash but of selling drugs.

“There’s no sympathy,” said office spokesman Ralph Lochridge.

It was little over a year ago that DEA agents in Los Angeles were openly discussing their morale problems, writing to their congressmen about it. Over a three-year period, about 20 agents had resigned, the ranks falling below 100.

The main problem, as with many federal agencies, was low pay. A 1989 national survey of 700 state and local law enforcement departments found that 92% offered starting salaries above those at which the federal government hired criminal investigators.

The effect was greatest in high-cost cities such as Los Angeles, where agents found themselves working on risky undercover task forces alongside local detectives paid among the highest salaries in the nation. Some of the “feds” earned less than half as much as the local officers, who were pulling in $60,000 or more with overtime.

“No way!” exclaimed a Hawthorne detective when DEA agents told him their salaries. “If you get killed, you get killed. But if you get killed and aren’t getting any money. . . .”

“You get a flag, though,” a burly DEA agent retorted, meaning the one placed atop a casket.

It was no joke to DEA officials, however, when a prized young agent, who had finished first in his academy class, left to work for the Los Angeles Police Department, where the starting pay was $13,000 higher.

“A sad scenario,” Zienter called it.

But DEA officials never blamed low pay for the corruption of Garcia, who earned about $45,000 a year, and two other former agents, Wayne Countryman and John Jackson, who both pleaded guilty last year to charges that they stole drugs from an evidence locker and laundered the proceeds.

No matter what an officer is paid, officials noted, it would seem tiny when contrasted with the $100 million in cash seized from drug dealers around Los Angeles in one recent year.

“This isn’t a case where Darnell Garcia was so impoverished he had to go out and sell dope,” said Robert C. Bonner, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles when the three were indicted and now the DEA’s top administrator. “This didn’t happen because of pay scales. This happened because there was a moral collapse.”

Within DEA ranks, Bonner said, “I’m quite certain nobody’s trying to explain this away. These guys crossed way over into the dark side.”

On Wednesday, he telexed messages to all DEA offices informing them of the Garcia verdict. An important part of the recovery process, he explained, is knowing “that your own agency took the steps necessary to clean house.”

As with any such scandal, the taint reached beyond the three men implicated.

The scandal might touch the average agent during banter with a neighbor after a successful raid, such as the one that netted more than 20 tons of cocaine and $12.3 million in cash from a Sylmar warehouse.

“You’ll get an occasional comment, ‘That was a lot of money. How much made it to the bank?’ ” Zienter noted.

But after September, 1989, such comments were more likely to target the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“Last year, it was, ‘Do we want to work with the DEA because they have crooked agents?’ Now it’s the Sheriff’s (Department),” said a narcotics investigator who worked with both agencies.

With the light of public scrutiny pointed elsewhere, the local DEA office got another boost this January with implementation of the first part of a special 16% pay raise authorized by Congress for federal agents in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Although the entry salary still is a modest $28,000, a journeyman agent will earn close to $60,000.

“People are saying this is a pretty nice chunk of change now,” said Lance Williams, the office’s recruiting coordinator, who travels to military bases and college campuses looking for candidates.

The extra pay also has made it easier to get veteran agents to agree to transfer to Los Angeles from less costly locations, said spokesman Lochridge.

“(Before) when agents were told they were going to be transferred, they wouldn’t even come in and look around,” he said with a laugh. “Now they at least look around before they resign.”

In fact, the effect has been tangible, with the agent pool now up to 128, Lochridge said, “basically up to authorized strength.”

Part of the increase results from the DEA’s role in coordinating the enforcement arm of a new Southern California Drug Task Force, which will be formally unveiled later this month.

The task force will consist of 90 federal, state and local law enforcement officers with the mission of conducting “intensive investigations of drug trafficking organizations that act on a national and/or international scale.”

Although the assignment is not that different from the ones given previous DEA task forces, the new campaign--coming at the end of legal proceedings tied to the worst scandal in DEA history--adds to the sense that the office is making a fresh start.

But soon after the jury returned guilty verdicts on five counts of drug trafficking and money laundering against Garcia, there were fresh reminders of the risks of being a police agency charged with narcotics enforcement.

In the same courtroom, the trial resumed for Eddie B. Hill, a 49-year-old staff coordinator on the DEA’s cocaine desk in its Washington headquarters, who is charged with going astray while stationed in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1988. Hill allegedly stole $1,780 from a suspect and paid $5,500 to an informant for information that was never provided.

Also on Wednesday, a California National Guard captain, in charge of a unit that provides surveillance in drug cases, was indicted in Los Angeles for allegedly soliciting $150,000 from drug dealers.

“Large narcotics centers seem to become real areas of disaster both for law enforcement and the community at large,” noted Lochridge. “Miami, Medellin (Colombia) . . . look at any of these centers. The violence, the greed, the tremendous amount of corruption--it really takes its toll.”