USA TODAY International Edition
Massive wiretapping operation in L. A.
Drug agents intercept more than 2 million conversations in USA
RIVERSIDE, CALIF. Federal drug agents have built a massive wiretapping operation in the Los Angeles suburbs, secretly intercepting tens of thousands of Americans’ phone calls and text messages to monitor drug traffickers across the USA despite objections from Justice Department lawyers who fear the practice may not be legal.
Nearly all of that surveillance was authorized by a single state court judge in Riverside County, who signed off last year on almost five times as many wiretaps as any other judge in the USA. The judge’s orders allowed investigators — usually from the Drug Enforcement Administration — to intercept more than 2 million conversations involving 44,000 people, federal court records show.
The eavesdropping is aimed at dismantling the drug rings that have turned Los Angeles’ dusty eastern suburbs into what the DEA says is the nation’s busiest shipping corridor for heroin and methamphetamine. Riverside wiretaps are supposed to be tied to crime within the county, but investigators have relied on them to make arrests and seize shipments of cash and drugs as far away as New York and Virginia, sometimes concealing the surveillance in the process.
The surveillance has raised concerns among Justice Department lawyers in Los Angeles, who have mostly refused to use the results in federal court because they concluded the state court’s eavesdropping orders are unlikely to withstand a legal challenge, current and former officials said.
“It was made very clear to the agents that if you’re going to go the state route, then best wishes, good luck and all that, but that case isn’t coming to federal court,” a former Justice Department lawyer said. The lawyer and other officials described the situation on the condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss the department’s internal deliberations.
Federal agents often prefer to seek permission to tap phones from state courts, instead of federal courts, because the process is generally faster and less demanding than seeking approval through the Justice Department. In addition, California law allows them to better conceal the identities of confidential informants they rely on to help investigate drug rings. Over the past decade, drug agents have more than tripled their use of wiretaps, mostly by using state court orders.
Wiretaps — which allow the police to secretly monitor Americans’ communications — are among the most intrusive types of searches the police can conduct, and federal law imposes strict limits on when and how they can be used. The law requires that police use wiretaps only after they have run out of other tools to build a case.
In Riverside, the authorities’ use of that last- ditch tool quadrupled over the past four years. Last year, Riverside County prosecutors and a judge approved 624 wiretaps, far more than any other jurisdiction in the USA, according to records compiled by the federal court system. Nearly all were tied to drug investigations.
“Those numbers — the totals and just the size of some of those wiretaps — are huge red flags for us,” said Dave Maass, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When there’s this amount of secrecy, it starts to raise serious concerns about accountability for electronic interceptions.”
Because wiretap orders are sealed, there is no way to know precisely how many of them were sought by the DEA and the local officers it deputized to work on a drug task force. Some of the taps were sought by police officers and officers in neighboring counties. Prosecutors acknowledged, however, that the drug agency plays a leading role in the wiretapping. The county’s former district attorney, Paul Zellerbach, who presided over the rapid rise in wiretapping before he left office in January, said the drug agency was “a significant player.” ‘ SERIES OF REFORMS’ Riverside County’s new district attorney, Mike Hestrin, said he found out about the county’s wiretap numbers not long after taking office. He was concerned by what he found.
Hestrin said he made a “series of reforms” to how wiretaps are handled, which he said will lead to fewer taps. He said he personally evaluates new wiretap requests and insists each one must “have a strong investigative nexus” to the county.
Hestrin said prosecutors “follow the law to the letter” when seeking wiretaps, but he would not discuss the details. “This is an area of our law, an area of our law enforcement, where we can’t be totally transparent, in the same way that the federal government can’t be totally transparent about the massive intelligence operations they run,” he said.
DEA officials said it should not come as a surprise that so much of their surveillance work happens in the area around Riverside — a vast expanse of suburbs and desert east of Los Angeles, crisscrossed by freeways that have become key shipping routes for drugs moving from Mexico to the USA and for cash making the return journey. “There are organizations here, and we’re working these organizations, and we’re trying to stay abreast of the technology and all the different ways these organizations are operating,” said Stephen Azzam, the associate special agent in charge of the DEA’s Los Angeles division.
Federal law sets a minimum standard for police to obtain a wiretap, even when they seek one from a state court judge. California courts have repeatedly said the state’s wiretaps are sufficient.
But current and former Justice Department officials said prosecutors in Los Angeles repeatedly told the drug agency they would not accept cases based on state court wiretaps — and those from Riverside County in particular — because they believed the applications approved by state judges fell short of what federal law requires. Prosecutors were particularly concerned that the DEA sought state court wiretap orders without adequately showing it had first tried other, less intrusive, investigative techniques.
In December, court records show, DEA agents and detectives in South Gate, Calif., near Los Angeles, used a state court wiretap to target a suspected drug trafficker named Omar Salazar. Between searches of Salazar’s car and his house, officers seized $ 76,869.94, a gun and a cache of illegal drugs, including 36 pounds of methamphetamine and 5 pounds of heroin. Investigators found some of the drugs in a safe in Salazar’s garage, along with a box of ammunition and probation paperwork from one of his previous arrests.
That should have been enough to build a significant federal case with a long mandatory prison sentence, but that was not what happened. Court records show the Justice Department prosecuted the $ 76,869.94 in a civil asset seizure case. But it did not prosecute Salazar. Neither the DEA nor prosecutors would explain why. PROLIFIC WIRETAPPING Perhaps the only outward sign that Riverside has become America’s most wiretapped place can be found on a deserted floor of the city’s courthouse. On a recent Friday afternoon, a handful of officers in scruffy jeans and baseball caps waited there with sealed manila envelopes in their hands. After a few minutes, they disappeared inside Judge Helios Hernandez’s locked courtroom for hearings closed to the public.
No judge in the USA has been so prolific in authorizing eavesdropping.
Records compiled by the federal courts’ administrative office show Hernandez authorized 624 wiretaps that ended last year and 339 that ended the year before. Hernandez approved three times more taps than all of the federal judges in California combined last year and once received more wiretap applications in a day, 17, than most courts do in a year. ( The court office counts wires based on when they end, rather than when they begin, to avoid revealing ongoing investigations.) The next- closest court was in Las Vegas, where judges approved 177 wiretaps that ended last year.
California law generally requires that each county court appoint one judge to handle wiretaps. For the past three years, that job fell to Hernandez, who was Riverside’s chief narcotics prosecutor before he became a judge. The records do not indicate how many wiretaps, if any, Hernandez turned down.
Hernandez declined to comment through a spokesman.
Federal records show the taps that ended in 2014 cost more than $ 18 million. The records do not indicate who paid for them.
The figures are based on reports that judges and prosecutors are required to submit each year to the federal courts.
Those reports show the overwhelming majority of the more than 2 million communications investigators intercepted last year as a result of Riverside wiretaps had nothing to do with crime. Police are not supposed to record conversations that are not relevant to their investigations.
DEA officials said the agency conducts wiretaps wherever investigations lead. The Riverside field office, which covers neighboring San Bernardino County, was responsible for a large share of the methamphetamine and heroin seizures last year. “We don’t pick a jurisdiction. We take the enforcement action where it’s warranted and where we can do it effectively,” spokesman Timothy Massino said. Nonetheless, Hernandez approved 20 times as many wiretaps as his counterparts in San Bernardino County. DEA officials said they could not explain that difference.
Zellerbach said Riverside’s wiretaps multiplied during his tenure because prosecutors and the county’s court became more “efficient and effective” in handling surveillance applications and word spread throughout the law enforcement community, bringing still more applications.
Zellerbach said the taps yielded significant arrests and seizures. And they paid other dividends. “We liked it because in these difficult economic times, my budget was being cut, and that was a way to somewhat supplement funding for my office,” he said. Prosecutors would not say how much money they received.
Zellerbach said the operation grew under the leadership of an aggressive new lawyer, Deena Bennett, who still heads the wiretap unit. Bennett rebuffed attempts to contact her, telling a reporter that “the fact that you have my cellphone number is really harassment, and I’m going to report it.”
Investigators have used wiretaps in Riverside to seize hundreds of pounds of drugs and millions of dollars. The taps have helped agents pinpoint smuggling tunnels dug beneath the Mexican border and map the inner workings of trafficking groups.
If the taps also produce arrests, they are difficult to find.
Prosecutors seldom make use of state court wiretaps in the federal courts around Los Angeles. Riverside County’s public defenders handle 40,000 criminal cases a year; no more than five involve disclosed wires, said Steve Harmon, the head of that office.
Court records and interviews with DEA officials and prosecutors show the drug agency has used the fruits of its Riverside wiretaps to help stop and seize shipments of drugs and cash elsewhere in the USA. In some of those cases, agents used wiretaps to identify drug couriers, then tipped off other investigators, who were told to find their own independent evidence to conduct a search. That practice is being investigated by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
“That approach ends up insulating dubious police practices from any kind of judicial review. That’s what so pernicious about it,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Nathan Wessler said.