THE BORDER REPORT

After four years of silence, it finally fell to a U.S. Army staff sergeant to expose an operation gone wrong during the FBI’s cocaine sting, Operation Lively Green.

Lively Green was supposed to be the biggest public official sting in years, netting more than 30 cops, soldiers, airmen, federal agents and prison guards in Arizona, all who believed they were working for a drug cartel to smuggle coke.

But something went horribly wrong in September 2002 and, as often happens, a renegade informant screwed up. It was finally exposed by Staff Sgt. Derreck Curry in testimony in military court at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

In the Lively Green case, an informant who the FBI flipped, took a group of the suspects out to the MGM Grand Hotel for a party in Las Vegas.

Strippers were brought up as hookers. A party with drugs and liquor ensued. A girl passed out. An informant masturbated over her face while another man took digital photographs of it all.

Curry said in court it was the informant who destroyed evidence.

I don’t know if it was in fact the informant. I have my suspicions.

Allegations of misconduct were filed against the agents but for nearly a year, the FBI and Justice Department turned down Freedom of Information Act requests asking for those allegations to be specified.

This is what I believe: Operation Lively Green fell apart; it was cut short, sentences were reduced and the whole thing was given over to Washington D.C. to handle because the FBI allowed an informant to lose control.

It would never have been made public either – but the FBI apparently forgot about the workings of Article 32 hearings in military court.

You can’t plead out in military court, there has to be a trial. That means that evidence has to be brought in from everywhere to defend you.

The police officers, federal agents, military personnel and prison guards picked up in Lively Green simply took the deal the feds offered: five years for running amounts of cocaine that should have earned them ten-plus years in prison.

It was smooth …

Defense attorneys were shown the allegations filed against the FBI but were never given the allegations.

By giving their clients incredible deals – five years max – the prosecutors were guaranteed there’d be no trials.

No trials means no disclosure, no discovery, nothing.

The whole ugly incident can be swept under the rug and forgotten about. The media can focus on the nasty cocaine runners and the feds can bring yet another informant back in, another that they lost control over.

The ensuing cover-up explains as well why Noel L. Hillman, section chief of the public integrity section of the criminal division of the Justice Department, prosecuted the cases and not the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.

Why didn’t Paul Charlton take the case?

Arizona’s top prosecutor had an in-road for easy cases with major headlines.

But, I believe he’s a man of integrity. I believe he chose to turn down the prosecutions for a reason. Was the reason because there were allegations against the feds?

If that’s true though, why not say something against the FBI in Phoenix? Why was nobody prosecuted?

Now that a corrupt informant has been exposed working for the FBI, I gather a little more insight into why D.C. had to get involved.

It’s happened several times in the past: with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and again with the U.S. bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

With ICE, an informant named Lalo ran a House of Death in Ciudad Juarez. Lalo was more than a spectator watching the Juarez Cartel though. The Dallas Morning News found that he ordered killings, paid off corrupt cops and was implicated in some of the killings of the women in Juarez.

ATF suffered a similar fate when an informant working undercover for them used drugs himself, beat people up and another had to be pulled off the street while working a Hell’s Angels case in Arizona.

I’m betting that renegade informants turn up a hell of a lot more often than we know about too.

Meanwhile, there’s a stripper, whom I won’t name, up in Vegas who has no idea who the party boys were that dragged her out of a hotel room in September 2002.

She had a companion, another stripper who they called to have her drag her friend out of the hotel room.

They never went to the cops. Who is going to believe a stripper against the likes of Vector 14 Tucson FBI agents?

But the truth is out now, even if the FBI still doesn’t want to admit it.

And that’s a shame.