Up Close and Undercover

For nearly two years, Heidi Herrera was the unrivaled ice princess of Southern California money laundering. The striking blond daughter of a retired Mexican drug smuggler, Herrera held court with traffickers at her lavish La Jolla suites and jetted around the world to meet with Sicilian Mafia envoys and Colombian cartel connections.

One kingpin murmured that if she cheated him, he could have her killed like that. He needn’t have worried. Heidi’s business acumen was as impeccable as her steely blue eyes. Soon she was listed as one of the most successful Hispanic executives in the United States.

Her clients were dangerous men. And Heidi, as they were soon to discover, was a dangerous woman.

Because Heidi was really Heidi Landgraf, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent, the glamorous operative behind an unorthodox top-secret sting--code-named Green Ice, a metaphor for frozen assets--that was the single biggest anti-narcotics operation of all time.

More than 200 people around the world were sent to jail and $50 million in allegedly ill-gotten gain was seized at the climax of the operation in September 1992. And the elusive Heidi Herrera had vanished.

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Sound like something out of a movie? Hollywood thinks so. Today, Heidi Landgraf’s dangerous masquerade is being recounted in a book, courted for a television drama and developed as a movie that would star Michelle Pfeiffer.

John Davis, one of the producers developing the film for Columbia Pictures, hopes movie audiences are clamoring for a character he sees as America’s first female James Bond. After the box-office success of movies like “Thelma & Louise,” “Waiting to Exhale” and “The First Wives Club,” Hollywood has come to see the wisdom of making movies with strong, believable female characters. An action movie with a woman hero, producers believe, remains a lucrative, untapped genre.

And the Green Ice story would seem like the perfect tale to tap into that genre. Producers plan to reinvent the movie’s Heidi as a single woman--in real life, she is a married stepmother. And there may be an homme fatale, a hunky criminal strategically strewn throughout the story line in a gender reversal on the dishy Bond temptresses.

“This is going to be the DEA’s ‘Top Gun,’ ” said Tony Lord of Lord/Weaver Productions, which is also involved with the project.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the DEA movie, tentatively titled “Ice Queen,” can top the elaborate Green Ice charade. Or the under-the-gun acting of Landgraf, who often had to make things up as she went along.

Like all good lies, the sting rested on a few threads of truth. Women are common in the ranks of Latin American money laundering but rare on the front lines of U.S. anti-drug enforcement, so traffickers would be more predisposed to trust Landgraf than a blond white man. Moreover, Landgraf spoke Spanish and knew her way around Latin society.

So DEA supervisors recast her as a woman born into the business, the exotic bicultural daughter of a retired Mexican drug lord and his beautiful Austrian trophy wife.

In reality, Landgraf is the daughter of a Los Angeles fireman and a pioneer policewoman. She did not immediately settle on a law enforcement career. First she bummed around Europe, studied medicine in Mexico, got an undergraduate degree in psychology at San Diego State University and worked in marketing and drug rehabilitation. At 33, she joined the DEA.

Assigned to the San Diego division, she performed typical rookie tasks for a few months, pitching in on investigations. On the personal front, she quietly began a romance with a DEA colleague, Ken Davis. Working at close quarters, they kept it a secret.

Then a supervisor, Tom Clifford, approached her. He had been toying with a novel proposal ever since the arrest of a beautiful, Sorbonne-educated Colombian woman on suspicion of money laundering. Would Landgraf be willing to pose as a money launderer?

Three months before the DEA began to build the Heidi Herrera empire in October 1989, Landgraf and Davis were married.

The preparations for Green Ice were far more elaborate--and expensive--than their wedding. The cost: $2 million.

The set was a La Jolla office suite with panoramic Pacific views, adorned with plush leather sofas, high-concept lighting, fine art--and electronic bugs. A cliff-top residence--where Landgraf rarely stayed--was furnished down to photographs of her real-life husband. Her office assistant and domestic “help” were all DEA agents.

Heidi, whose tastes lean more toward pantsuits reminiscent of vintage Katharine Hepburn movies, bought leather skirts and gold jewelry. She got boats, planes, a Mercedes--supplied by DEA seizures of traffickers’ property. But her most important new accessory was the hidden wire surveillance microphone she would wear to all her meetings.

Through informants, the DEA put the word out that there was a new money launderer in La Jolla. She was said to be highly skilled at the art of the deal, sanitizing the suspicious-looking duffel bags of crumpled lire, dollars and pesetas through “legitimate” business accounts; someone they could rely on to quickly forward their money--minus commission--to discreet numbered accounts held by traffickers. And she was someone who was also a classy, pleasant lady willing to discuss business--and pick up the check--at elegant locales anywhere in the world.

The DEA set up a front corporation to absorb the cash, Trans Americas Ventures Associates, a financial octopus of businesses and bank accounts all over the world.

And Heidi began to meet some very interesting people.

There was Carlos Rodrigo Polania-Camargo, an elegant chain-smoker who, like Landgraf, led a double life. To the world, he was inspector general of Colombia’s superintendency of banking. He even served on international anti-drug commissions. Once, he scheduled a meeting with Landgraf to launder drug money at the same time he was to attend an Organization of American States conference on money laundering in Washington.

There was the representative of Colombia’s Cali cartel, Carlos Urquijo-Illera, who in a meeting in a cabana at Curacao told Landgraf that if she was caught stealing, he could have her killed for $10,000. “It was said in a friendly way,” Landgraf said. “He wasn’t the violent type.”

Even more macabre was cartel hit man Osvaldo Montalvo, an amiable young lounge lizard at the La Jolla office. He loved to brag of how he had killed and tortured double-crossers. His DEA file included newspaper clips that purported that he had once meticulously removed the fingernails and teeth of a woman who made the mistake of stiffing the cartel $20,000.

“The penalty among traffickers is worse than anything they would get from U.S. authorities,” she said. “Left to their own devices, they are far more dangerous to one another.”

All meetings took place surrounded by a phalanx of armed DEA agents who milled around the restaurants, airports and bars while Landgraf and her clients talked business. Still, Landgraf said: “I was worried about my safety all the time.”

Landgraf said her clients did not try to engage her in coquetry. They knew she was married, and “they didn’t want to screw up a business connection. But did they become what they thought of as friends? Yes.”

Unlike most of the DEA, Landgraf was married to a fellow agent, so she could discuss her undercover work with him. Had he been a businessman, Landgraf would have faced the lonely--but common--experience of being unable to tell her spouse anything about her undercover job.

Nevertheless, for Landgraf, the strain of pretending to be someone she was not was becoming, toward the end, unbearable. And she knew that the longer the act continued, the greater the risk that her cover would be blown.

When a meeting at John Wayne Airport almost became a confrontation, DEA supervisors decided to call it quits. One day in September 1992, they alerted law enforcement authorities in time zones all over the world. As the clock ticked forward, they arrested scores of people throughout Europe and the Americas, in a record coup for the DEA. Nearly all of those arrested were succesfully prosecuted, an agency spokesman said.

“It had just gotten too big,” Landgraf said. “Too many people were involved.”

In the wake of the sting, there was an uproar in the Colombian narcotics world and talk of a multimillion-dollar price on the head of Heidi, the money laundress who charmed and betrayed them. The DEA thinks the cartels opted to cut their losses and move on, instead of inviting the international crackdown that a DEA agent’s murder would trigger.

Landgraf retreated, for a time, into a quieter life.

Then in June 1994, a story on ABC’s “Day One” detailed her role in Green Ice, and suddenly Hollywood players were scrambling to buy the story. Once again, her cover was blown.

“I got so many calls from all kinds of production people from New York, Los Angeles, all over the place,” Landgraf said. “It was very strange, because I spend most of my career trying to have people not know who I am or what I do. Keeping Green Ice alive meant hiding who I really was.”

The rights to her story were problematic, since DEA rules forbid Landgraf--or any agents--from selling their story or profiting from it. Instead, producers bought the rights to an article in Working Woman magazine from its author, Time Magazine correspondent Elaine Shannon.

John Davis pulled White House strings to win DEA cooperation, other producers say. Kate Guinzburg, Michelle Pfeiffer’s production partner, contacted the DEA independently. In the end, with the backing of Columbia, Davis Entertainment and Lord/Weaver ended up joining forces with Pfeiffer and Guinzburg. A Columbia spokesman says all three companies are listed as producers in the deal.

The layers of twisted human relationships made the Green Ice story seem a natural psychological thriller about the international drug trade, with potential for action without the standard guts and gore.

And like “Top Gun,” it could mark the Hollywood turnaround of yet another icon derided by ‘60s youth culture. In the Woodstock and Vietnam War era, “narcs” were counterculture pariahs. Not anymore, producers say. Domestic drug violence and the international cocaine cartels have all but stripped away the drug culture mysticism conjured up in “Easy Rider,” they say. “Now it’s about crack babies and people killing each other,” said producer Matt Weaver.

But the biggest draw, in a story about an institution dominated by male agents, was the gender angle. “Heidi is a woman in a man’s world who is a fascinating, complex female character,” said Guinzburg, through a spokeswoman.

From the start, Landgraf was chagrined at the way her story was eclipsing the contributions of the 70 or so other agents in Green Ice.

“I would be in nice restaurants with the bad guys, and they’d be outside with a cold cup of coffee,” she said. “I felt bad for my peers, because they worked hard behind the scenes, and the media could care less. They made it sound like it was one woman against the world.”

As the movie project moved ahead, Landgraf met with Guinzburg at the studio and visited Davis’ plush offices on Century City’s Avenue of the Stars. “They seemed amazed by my story. DEA agents are not very amazed by each other,” she said. “They were looking at me saying, ‘How did she do this?’ and I was looking around thinking, ‘Wow, Hollywood.’ ”

But as producers set about recreating Heidi Landgraf, the precise nature of her real life undercover role became the topic of creative discord, according to the screenwriters.

Landgraf had never read the work of Joan Didion or John Gregory Dunne when the two were hired to take first crack at the story, an ill-fated venture which is told from Dunne’s perspective in “Monster,” his new book on Hollywood. But they impressed her favorably during their four-hour interview.

“I’m not into who’s who, but everyone seemed very excited to get them on the project,” Landgraf said. “They seemed very serious and not Hollywood-ish at all. Not people who write fluff things.”

At the start, Dunne says, Guinzburg explicitly told him that Pfeiffer did not want Heidi to be rescued by a man, “an idea we had never contemplated.” The screenwriters were less willing to discard their impression, after the interview with Landgraf, that Heidi was a front for the sting, not a behind-the-scenes orchestrator.

“We have this basic disagreement . . . you seem to think of Heidi as Nancy Drew (with time out for a shopping sequence). We don’t,” Dunne said he and Didion wrote in a lengthy fax to Guinzburg, after they delivered their draft of “Ice Queen.” “We think it works precisely because she is not in charge, she is not running the sting, it is not her idea, she is the front, she got into this because her life was going nowhere and now she is the bait: that is the jeopardy and that is the tension,” the fax said.

Bait? The real Heidi Landgraf gasps.

“They didn’t do their homework,” she said. “An undercover agent has to be involved with the strategy every step of the way, because you are the front-line receiver of all the firsthand information.”

Bill Birnes is finishing a book, “Operation Green Ice,” for Kensington Publishing in New York with his wife, Nancy Birnes, and J. Stryker Meyer. He said Dunne’s take on Landgraf’s role contradicts what he was told in interviews with DEA agents involved in Green Ice.

“That is just dead wrong,” said Birnes, who is negotiating with Producers Entertainment Group, the production company behind the 1994 HBO movie “Against the Wall,” to sell the rights to the book for a television drama.

Dunne and Didion left the movie project. Brian Strasmann, 35, whose credits include a “Free Willy” rewrite, has been hired to write his own “Ice Queen” draft. “While the studio likes the angle that she was catapulted into this, she still accepts the stress and danger and rises above it all to successfully complete a very dangerous mission,” Strasmann said.

According to DEA heavyweights involved in Green Ice, Landgraf was, in fact, one of the major strategists of Green Ice, putting in hours at behind-the-scenes meetings and planning every step of the operation with her supervisors. Her expertise in marketing helped set her up in the high-finance world of money laundering, they said. She was no inexpert ingenue muddling her way through history, they say.

“Her role was pivotal,” said Craig Chretien, assistant administrator of intelligence at DEA headquarters in Washington. Chretien was a San Diego chief at the conclusion of the Green Ice operation. “She never stumbled, even when things didn’t go right and the crooks didn’t behave.

“You can only go so far with smoke and mirrors, but you can’t pull it off without the level of trust she created. She’s a very brilliant lady, and her beauty is certainly disarming.”

Landgraf has been assured that her character--who will be given a fictional name in the movie--won’t be shown engaging in unprofessional personal behavior. But as the glare of public attention grows brighter, Landgraf still voices concern over precisely how Hollywood will portray her.

“I know they have ideas like, ‘Did any of these guys come on to you?,’ and the truth is they did not. Maybe they want me to have a hard time putting one of these guys behind bars,” she said. “I don’t mind a lot of action, but I didn’t have to do anything against the law in this case. The truth is, a lot of the operation involved sitting there, pretending to be having a relaxed chat with the traffickers, while all the time I was really thinking about how to get them. You’re thinking about the surveillance agents and you’re saying, ‘Can I have another glass of champagne?’

“It was a lot like being an actress.”