The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

by James Mills

An award-winning journalist's shocking expose of the international drug smuggling trade. The Underground Empire is the result of Life reporter James Mills's behind-the-scenes investigation which spanned five years and traversed four continents. With recent media attention propelling the narcotics issue into the nation's headlines, Mills dramatically addresses this issue with stunning depth to explain why we're losing the most important war of our time. Everything in this book is true: no changed names, scenes, characters or dialogues.

The Underground Empire, James Mills, Doubleday, 1st edition, 1986, ISBN # 0-385-17535-3. 1,165 pages. Description: Book; Gray boards with black cloth spine, gold lettering to spine and gold script of author's name on front board, red endpapers. Dust jacket; White with black blocks with white text and red splatter on front panel, black and red lettering to the spine, back panel has blurb for this book and author's bio (Report to the Commissioner, Panic in Needle Park), inside flaps carry second blurb for this book, jacket not price clipped, dated 0686 on bottom of the back flap. Condition: Book; Very good with some soiling to top edge of the pages, boards are bright and tight and clean, free of any dings, rubbing or creases to this very thick spine, all the gold lettering is strong but some letters, especially the publisher's name, are hand soiled. Inside red end paper has a black smudge on the upper back area about 1-inch long. No other marks. Dust jacket; Very good with bright and clean panels, not price clipped, chips along the edges of the spine, one closed tear at the bottom of front board, slight sunning to all panels but still bright, points chipped. Jacket now protected in Brodart.

Genres: History, Crime, Nonfiction

1201 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

James Mills is an American novelist, screenwriter and prize-winning journalist.

Mills wrote two New York Times bestsellers, Report to the Commissioner, a novel, and , a study of international narcotics trafficking. As a result, he testified before a panel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as an expert. His books The Panic in Needle Park and Report to the Commissioner were later made into major motion pictures.

Reviews

[Sarah Etter · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was one of the first books i read in college when i started studying journalism. i know it's partially biased, i know the whole thing is crazy, i totally get that. but come on, mills did his homework - and it's so incredible.

getting a look inside the government's efforts against drug lords at the highest level is one of the coolest things i've ever read. the research done here, the length of the manuscript, picturing mills living his life like this to get a story - i just remember it had a huge impact on me. when i finished reading this book, it became clear that it's impossible to stop drug trafficking - mainly because countries america trades with and needs to depend on would collapse without the revenue they earn. and i think mills proves that clearly with this book. going further, he proves why the "war on drugs" was such a load of crap.

mills details these insane happenings - drug lords keeping their stashes on secret islands where they're protected by trained tigers (!?), drug lords floating metric tons of cocaine into the boston harbor, drug lords doing all sorts of other crazy drug lord stuff. but it all comes back to america's being unwilling or unable to really do anything about the drugs moving in and out of the country.

this reads, scarily, like it should be a movie. it shouldn't be a secret CIA project that goes belly up for reasons i'll let mills explain. sure, this is a long book. but i couldn't put it down. and i never forgot it. read it.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

would make a great movie!

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the fundamental books to get an understanding of CENTAC and how things were different in the days of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics/Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs

it was dismantled a few years before Iran-Contra


excerpt

No more than a handful of men in the world understood completely what Centac was and what it did. Though Centac was controlled from a position within the Drug Enforcement Administration, its operations and power reached far beyond that agency.

At any given time Centac had working for it full time more than fifty DEA agents around the world, plus agents from the Internal Revenue Service, Customs, and other federal agencies, as well as foreign police agents in a dozen countries, and state and city cops from New York to California. With a phone call from his office, Dennis could put agents on the street in Bangkok, intercept smugglers at a Bogota airport, send undercover men into the coca-rich Andes, mobilize surveillance planes and coastal gunboats. So discreet did Centac remain that many of the foreign agents and American police officers didn't even know they were working for Centac, that they were assigned, controlled, moved from city to city and state to state at the behest and expense of Centac. And when the case broke and arrests were made - often hundreds in a single sweep - Centac quietly withdrew, leaving headlines to the local officers and their politically dependent bosses. "When Centac targets an organization, Dennis told me, "intelligence has already identified its characteristics. We write an operational plan, select our staff, marshal our forces, and attack. From that moment on, the target is doomed. Centac has never lost. And we do not merely prune criminal organizations so they grow back stronger. We uproot the entire tree, chop it to splinters, burn it, and bury the ashes. That tree will never grow again." Centac had been felling trees since 1973, with Dennis as chief the last four years, and so far it had destroyed nearly a score of international criminal conglomerates, caused the imprisonment of thousands of criminals, solved hundreds of major crimes, seized millions of dollars - yet remained, itself, virtually unknown.

Unlike more highly visible antinarcotics forces, Centac took almost no interest at all in drugs. Centac agents never appeared in news photographs standing around a table covered with bags of heroin or cocaine. "If you took all the heroin in the world" Dayle said, "and stacked it up on some barren wasteland, all you'd have is a large pile of white powder. You cannot put a kilo of heroin in jail. You cannot make it tell you who its friends are. The problem is not powder. The problem is people. And Centac just simply devours people. Its metabolism is such that it is constantly in search of kingdoms to consume."

.....

I sat in an orange chair at a tiny round table in a comer of his office near the door, hoping to be unobtrusive. Everyone who entered glanced uncertainly at me, then at Dennis. "It's all right," Dennis said, introducing two agents who wanted to discuss "mop-up aspects" of Centac-10. "He'll be here for a while. Don't let it bother you. Business as usual."

Centac-10 (they were numbered chronologically - the next would be Centac-24) had destroyed the largest LSD organization in the world, and now LSD, once a major problem, had virtually disappeared. Dennis talked to the agents about lingering gun charges against the organization's leaders.

When the agents had left he selected a pipe from one of nineteen in three large ashtrays and two racks on his desk and windowsill. He loaded it from a white can of Captain Black taken from a desk drawer and tamped it down with a gold pipe tool.

"Most police antidrug groups," Dennis explained, getting the pipe going, "are geared toward seizure and interdiction because it has impact, it's exciting, visible, gets on TV7 and shows the taxpayer what he's getting for his money. But every drug seizure is really only part of a much larger conspiracy. Centac does not produce lots of cases, it exploits cases. We don't want to go in, search, make three arrests, seize a pound of heroin, and do that over and over and over again. We do it, and then we exploit. We get everyone connected to that pound of heroin, the people who made it, shipped it, wholesaled it, collected the money, invested the money - just everyone. Centac does not hunt drugs. Centac hunts flesh."

.....

Dennis said he worked with a budget, provided by DEA, of $1,100,000 a year. This was only a fraction of the value of funds and property Centac seized. Centac made more money for the taxpayer than it spent. At least 60 percent of people indicted in Centac cases were top-level bosses, what the government called Class-l and Class-II violators. Dennis said that, on the average, one agent working one year for Centac produced 6 indictments of Class-l violators. One agent working one year outside of Centac in DEA produced only 1.6 Class-l indictments.

And Centac had invented a unique way of quickly displaying its effectiveness. The success of an antinarcotics organization was usually measured by the amount of narcotics seized. But since Centac concentrated not on narcotics but on those who profited from them, another yardstick had to be found to impress politicians responsible for Centac's existence and budget. Centac therefore employed a new statistic: cost per indictment. Dennis divided the total cost of a particular Centac by the number of people it indicted. A senator or congressman could thus be told that a major multinational trafficking organization had been destroyed, and hundreds of its members indicted, for a cost of, say, $17,200 per man. A bargain. And that didn't count the multimillion-dollar value of cash, bank accounts, buildings, ships, and aircraft seized along the way.

.....

"If you regarded the Mafia as a single corporation," I asked, "and all the other multinational criminal groups as a corporation, how would they compare?"

He thought about that, quietly returning the carafe to its tray. "I think the other groups together would be five times as great as the Mafia."

An agent with thick glasses walked in and complained that a particular Centac looked like a tough one. "I can't see a seizure coming out of it."

"Don't worry," Dennis said, confronting once again the seizure-is-everything theory of drug enforcement. "We'll take junk from past cases and put flesh with it."

This was what he meant by exploitation, taking old cases that had produced the immediate arrest of a couple of low-level dealers, and tying them to organization leaders. The tool that allowed him to do this, the tool with which Centac was built, was the federal conspiracy law.

Conspiracy law is the most powerful weapon in the battle against the international drug industry. It makes every member of a criminal conspiracy, including those at the very top, guilty of the criminal acts of every other member of the conspiracy. When a junkie sells a nickel bag of some millionaire executive's heroin on a street comer in Harlem, the executive shares his guilt. That the executive has never heard of the junkie, does not even know he exists, makes no difference. The executive is guilty of conspiracy to sell a nickel bag of heroin on a street corner in Harlem. One act, even a legal one, by any member of a planned conspiracy "activates" the conspiracy and makes all its members guilty of the criminal acts of all the others, whether they know of their existence or not whether they approve of, or are even aware of, their crimes.

If you and I discuss the possibility of robbing a bank, agreeing that I will procure a getaway car and you will obtain a gun, so far no crime has been committed. But as soon as either of us commits "an overt act", even a legal one, toward commission of the robbery, we are both guilty of conspiracy to rob a bank, and we will from that moment forward be guilty of all the criminal acts committed by any other member of the conspiracy, regardless of when the other member joined the conspiracy or whether we actually know of him or approve of his acts.

If I make a telephone call to ask a friend to help me find a getaway car, that overt act, even though there is no law against making a phone call, sets the conspiracy in motion. If that friend, perhaps without telling you or me, recruits a second friend. and that friend a third. and the third friend kills a man while stealing the getaway car - you and I are both guilty of homicide. You may prove you never knew the killer, or even the man who recruited him, and that you would never have approved of his recruitment, that you had no idea anyone would be killed, that you would in fact have been horrified at the thought - but it will make no difference. You are guilty of the criminal acts of all members of the conspiracy. You are guilty of homicide.

It's a powerful law. And it is particularly useful against businessmen, politicians, diplomats, and others so highly placed, so isolated by power, wealth, or respectability, that they never touch or see drugs, though they direct or profit from drug operations.

Conspiracy law is Centac's bread and butter.

"No criminal who has to work with others can escape Centac," Dennis told me, "because he can't wipe out what he's already done. It will always be there. And we will find it, and exploit it. The Centac methodology can destroy any criminal group in the world."

.....

I asked about the eighteen Centacs already completed. The first had targeted an organization manufacturing heroin in Lebanon. Seven others also involved heroin, mostly in Asia and Mexico. Three went after large cocaine organizations operating into the United States from Latin America. Others destroyed groups making and distributing LSD, PCP, and amphetamines. Most Centacs, while targeting one major group, had also wiped out other large producers and distributors.

Centac-16, for example, had been so extensive it was split into two parts -West Coast and East Coast - and reached also into Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. It knocked out a major international heroin organization, plus three other importing groups, as well as five major New York distribution networks.

.....

Another Centac, targeting five related organizations smuggling cocaine into twelve American ports aboard freighters and cruise ships owned by the Colombian government, lasted a year and a half and indicted 160 traffickers at a cost of $763 and 19 agent-days each. For good measure, it also seized a beauty parlor in Queens.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaw-dropping. And, at times, difficult to absorb and tome-like read (1100+ pages!) — but, and this is what's so odd about it, Mills doesn't even bother to mention administrations in the U.S. while unspooling his tale (mostly the result of Centac agents being tired of laboring in the dark, to little acclaim and avail, and wanting their stories told). You need to almost take a step back to digest the matter (who the hell are all these people?), given that the sets of referents in one's head as a Modern-Day American doesn't accommodate making room for who's running Peru, the kicked-out-of-Marseilles-after-WWII "French Connection," the Golden Triangle participants in Asia, some famous matador in Mexico who's chummy with a power-broker drug-dealer down there (ditto a Mexican actress, one of his mistresses, and also close with the then-President) — what the fuck is this? And why wasn't I told? Wouldn't Dan Rather have mentioned some of it ... or something? The ability to adjust to this that one develops by reading it broadens one's view of the world, and with it, why Referents are or aren't raised in Our Culture, and how that too is changeable. Scary.

[Pablo Fandango · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal book!!! Great read, could not put it down from start too finish! Fabulous book.

[Deirdre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening, sad, disturbing, shocking and angry were my emotions while reading this profoundly informed and well-researched book about Centac, an agency that more than likely could have chopped off the head of the drug dragon many years ago, had it not been for the bureaucratic infighting and political greed of other government agencies that took over the War on Drugs, but haven't accomplished much in the way of winning it.

[Lexy Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dennis Dayle was my grandfather. I only met him once but recently inherited all of his possessions from my mothers recent passing. Quite an incredible career he had and it has been truly incredible learning about it from his own words and the words of his family at the time in letters and personal, personal correspondences and tapes. I love seeing what he accomplished in his career, remembered to this day. He laid so much groundwork for what the current departments use today.

[Thomas Orsini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting

[Rico]

The best book ev

[Roger Dodger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am adding my review THIRTY YEARS after reading the book, it is that worthwhile to recommend for reading. (Online reviews didn't exist in the 1980s!) Sadly, the book is STILL *VERY* relevant to most readers. It was one of the most eye-opening reads of my life. I reference it in discussions today, not because I lack other perspectives but because of how it continually but with compelling fashion immerses you in the sheer volume and force of underground drug money and the INEVITABLE power, corruption, violence, and death that flow from it. That is why it is so good today. That part doesn't change even if the players have. Plus, I think if non-experts read how this stuff was happening decades ago, they will doubly appreciate how the War on users and marijuana/soft drugs will not succeed. Decades of trying with countless variations has failed, as history as proven. This book does more than expose the realities of that. It has compelling and accurate stories about people in the various aspects of the underground drug world. (FYI - Facts about corruption and its magnitude that seem unbelievable are documented very well with reliable sources.) The stories of violence and criminal influence and wealth are old while todays characters are different, but how their stories are compiled and interwoven is what gets you interested. Strap yourself in for a wild ride. I recommend it to the highest degree.

When you're done, ponder that the same problems are still here today and worse, all thanks to the creation about fifty years ago of a "War" limited mostly to the supply of drugs and against the users (not their behavior directly). It is now obvious we need to stop the "War" on users and fight FOR the redemption of users despite the cost. The costs of free and widespread rehab pale in comparison to the back-breaking societal costs of incarceration, the increased profits for cartels that arise from fighting the supply of soft drugs (particularly marijuana), and the failure to curb demand by employing extensive rehab.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about a government organization tasked with drug investigations called Centac that was developed back in the 1980's.

I read this book back in 1986 or so and it was one of those books that opens one's eyes to a particular topic, this one being international drug trafficking. The subject matter is infuriating because it is an illustration of how governmental politics and the influential doomed the potential successes of this program almost from the start.

It is also a book about how governments wash the hands of other governments out of claims of "national security" or when declaring certain drug traffickers are important to the functions of a government and given passes as long as their existence is beneficial.

The book is well sourced and if one looks around, from time to time, networks such as the History Channel replay documentaries with those mentioned in this book.

[Acid · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book opens on a sobering fact...that the world spends more on illegal drugs than they do on food every year...more than they spend on any other service or need.... the information for this statement was taken from cia documents...If that doesn't interest you in this book nothing will... we are the underground empire and the drug war is a denial of the fact that humans want there drugs...we are getting them you and I...so read this book and know how deep the conspiracy of the drug empire goes...have you ever heard of centac? has your dealer? lol...mike seely and the acid tong

[William Crosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concerning the international narcotics "industry" and its influence in and control of world governments. The journalist focuses on Centac, an organization now defunct, and its efforts to destroy three particular drug empires (those of Lu Hsu-Shui, Alberto Sicilia-Falcon and Donald Steinberg) through investigations and letting other agencies do the arrests and getting the credit.

[Dennis Blewitt]

Fair review of the drug trade, although somewhat biased.

[stan · Rating 5 out of 5]

iT IS SOME TIME AGO I READ THIS BOOK. IT SEEMS I MISPLACED THE ITEM BUT THIS IS A FINE READ WELL WORTH THE EFFORT TO TRACK DOWN

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning book. Obviously, the "War on Drugs" is a total failure.

[Diana Gail · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book some 30 years ago and it's rather unforgettable. I was astounded at the business of drug smuggling. As we've seen in the news lately, not much has changed.

[Tommy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hundreds of pages of very sensationalist dialogue.

[Jerry Peace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just made it halfway. Too much information for me.