Betrayal of his badge
DEA agent caught up in a lifestyle of corruption points finger at others
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Jose Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sports cars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won’t go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions in drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and debauchery.
The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pickups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht with plenty of booze and prostitutes.
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” Irizarry, 48, said before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence. “We would generate money pickups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.
“The drug war is a game . ... It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
DOJ takes action
Irizarry’s story, which some former colleagues have attacked as a fictionalized attempt to reduce his sentence, came in days of contrite, bitter, sometimes tearful interviews in his native San Juan. It was much the same account he gave the FBI in lengthy debriefings and sealed court papers obtained by the AP after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 19 corruption counts.
But after years of portraying Irizarry as a rogue agent who acted alone, U.S. Justice Department investigators have recently begun to follow his confessional road map, questioning as many as two dozen current and former DEA agents and prosecutors accused by Irizarry of turning a blind eye to his flagrant abuses and sometimes joining in.
The inquiry has focused on a jet-setting former partner of Irizarry and several other trusted DEA colleagues assigned to international money laundering. And at least three current and former federal prosecutors have faced questioning about Irizarry’s raucous parties, including one still in a senior role in Miami and another who appeared on TV’s “The Bachelorette.”
The expanding investigation comes as the nation’s premier narcotics law enforcement agency has been rattled by repeated misconduct scandals in its 4,600-agent ranks. But by far the biggest black eye is Irizarry, whose wholesale betrayal of the badge is at the heart of an ongoing external review of the DEA’s foreign operations in 69 countries.
The once-standout agent has accused some former colleagues in the DEA’s Miamibased Group 4 of lining their pockets and falsifying records to replenish a slush fund used for foreign jaunts over the better part of a decade, until his resignation in 2018. He accused a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of accepting a $20,000 bribe. And recently, the FBI, Office of Inspector General and a federal prosecutor interviewed Irizarry in prison about other federal employees and allegations he raised about misconduct in maritime interdictions.
“It was too outlandish for them to believe this is actually happening,” Irizarry said of investigators. “The indictment paints a picture of me, the corrupt agent that did this entire scheme. But it doesn’t talk about the rest of DEA. I wasn’t the mastermind.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. A DEA spokesperson said: “Jose Irizarry is a criminal who violated his oath as a federal law enforcement officer and violated the trust of the American people.”
Partner eyed
The AP was able to corroborate some of Irizarry’s accusations through thousands of confidential law enforcement records and dozens of interviews with those familiar with his claims and the ongoing investigation, including several who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The probe is focused in part on George Zoumberos, one of Irizarry’s former partners who traveled overseas extensively for
money laundering investigations. Irizarry told the AP that Zoumberos enjoyed unfettered access to so-called commission funds and improperly tapped that money for personal purchases and unwarranted trips, using names of people that didn’t exist in DEA reports justifying the excesses.
Zoumberos remained an agent after he was arrested and briefly detained on allegations of sexual assault during a trip to Madrid in 2018. He resigned only after being stripped of his gun, badge and security clearance for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights in 2019, when the same prosecutor who charged Irizarry summoned him to testify before a federal grand jury in Tampa.
Authorities are so focused on Zoumberos that they also subpoenaed his brother, a Florida wedding photographer who traveled and partied around the world with DEA agents, and even granted him immunity to induce his cooperation. But Michael Zoumberos also refused to testify and has been jailed outside Tampa since March for “civil contempt” — an exceedingly rare tactic.
Some current and former DEA agents say Irizarry’s claims are overblown or lies. The former ICE agent scoffed at Irizarry’s accusation he took a $20,000 bribe, saying he raised early red flags about Irizarry. And the lawyer for the Zoumberos brothers says prosecutors are on a “fishing expedition.”
Central to the Irizarry investigation are overly cozy relationships developed between agents and informants — forbidden under federal guidelines — and loose controls on the DEA’s undercover drug money laundering operations that few Americans know exist.
Every year, the DEA launders tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the world’s
most violent drug cartels through shell companies, a tactic touted in long-running overseas investigations such as Operation White Wash that resulted in more than 100 arrests and the seizure of more than $100 million and a ton of cocaine.
DEA under fire
But the DEA has also faced criticism for allowing huge amounts of money in the operations to go unseized, enabling cartels to continue plying their trade, and for failing to tightly monitor and track the stings, making it difficult to evaluate results.
Rob Feitel, a former federal prosecutor, said the DEA’s lax oversight made it easy to divert funds for unapproved purposes. And as long as money seizures kept driving stats higher, few questions were asked.
“The other agents aren’t stupid. They knew there were no controls and a lot of them could have done what Irizarry did,” said Feitel, who represents a former DEA agent under scrutiny in the inquiry.
Irizarry was a federal air marshal and Border Patrol agent before joining the DEA in 2009. He said he learned the tricks of the trade as a DEA rookie from veteran cops who came up in New York City in the 1990s when cocaine flooded American streets.
But another key part of his education came from Diego Marin, a longtime U.S. informant known to investigators as Colombia’s “Contraband King” for allegedly laundering dope money through imported appliances and other goods. Irizarry said Marin taught him better than any agent ever could the nuances of the black-market peso exchange used by narcotraffickers across the world.
Irizarry parlayed that knowledge into a
life of luxury that prosecutors say was bankrolled by $9 million he and his Colombian co-conspirators diverted from money laundering investigations.
Irizarry’s spending habits quickly began to mimic the narcos he was tasked with targeting, with spoils including a $30,000 Tiffany diamond ring for his wife, luxury sports cars and a $767,000 home in the Colombian resort city of Cartagena. He’d travel first class to Europe with Louis Vuitton luggage and wearing a gold Hublot watch.
“I was very good at what I did but I became somebody I wasn’t,” Irizarry said. “I got caught up in the lifestyle. I got caught up with the informants and partying.”
Irizarry contends as many as 90% of his group’s work trips were “bogus,” dictated by partying and sporting events. And he says the U.S. government money that helped pay for it was justified in reports as “case-related — but that’s a very vague term.”
Case in point: an August 2014 trip to Madrid for the Spanish Supercup soccer finals that was charged as an expense to Operation White Wash.
But Irizarry told investigators there was little actual work to be done other than courtesy calls to a few friendly Spanish cops. Instead, he said, agents spent their time dining at pricey restaurants and enjoying prime seats for the championship match between Real and Atletico Madrid.
Joining the posse of agents at the game was Michael Garofola, a then-Miami federal prosecutor and erstwhile contestant on “The Bachelorette” who posted a thumbs-up photo on Instagram standing next to Irizarry and another agent.
Garofola said the trips included official business and he was told everything was being paid for out of DEA funds.
“There were things about those trips that made me question why I was there,” Garofola said. “But Irizarry totally used me to ratify this behavior. I was brand new and green and eager to work money laundering cases. He used me just by my being there.”
Irizarry’s downfall was as sudden as it was inevitable — the outgrowth of a lifestyle that raised too many eyebrows, even among colleagues willing to bend the rules. Eventually, he was betrayed by one of his closest confidants, a Venezuelan American informant who confessed to diverting funds.
“Jose’s problem is that he took things to the point of stupidity and trashed the party for everyone else,” said one defense attorney who traveled with Irizarry and other agents. “But there’s no doubt he didn’t act alone.”
To date, prosecutors have yet to charge any other agents, and several former colleagues have quietly retired rather than endure the disgrace of possibly being fired.
“I’ve told them everything I know,” Irizarry said. “All they have to do is dig.”
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this. There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”