The Butcher (9 page)

T
he war on drugs had not only heated up but was now being fought at a feverish pitch. The Drug Enforcement Administration's Group 33 had never been so busy. They were up against some of the most devious criminals of all time who hailed from Italy, Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, Afghanistan, the Near and Far East, Turkey, and France. These were highly educated, highly motivated, particularly bright men who had ready, well-trained armies of cutthroats at their disposal. Modern business practices were perfected and scaled down to fit the drug lords' needs. They had scores of boats and planes and even submarines. They were busy constructing tunnels that ran from Mexico for several miles into the United States.

The men and women of the DEA fought a heroic battle with teeth and nails, hearts and souls, but no matter what efforts they made, how many sacrifices they were willing to make, it was never enough. Drug lords were like mushrooms after a heavy rain. They popped up everywhere—all shapes, sizes, and colors—and you could not stop them. They were so effective that they literally created new words for the English language. As an example, the term
Colombian necktie
referred to a killing method in which the throat was cut and the tongue pulled out through the slit. It was a horrible, unsettling sight and would last with
whomever saw it for the rest of their lives. All the drug cartels, in their own ways, were particularly dangerous. However, the most dangerous were the Mexicans, the Colombians, and the Dominicans. For them, life was cheap. Most all these individuals, these drug lords, came up the hard way, were from the streets, were ruthless in the extreme, and they'd kill you as soon as say hello to you. Murder, for them, was arbitration, conciliation. Reasoning, for them, was a bullet to the head. Might was right. When the Colombians wanted to kill one man, they would not only kill him but murder his entire family—men and women and children—the very old as well as the very young.

Because they were able to use phony passports and various forms of identification, these were particularly hard adversaries to bring to justice, for they were mobile, in and out of the country as readily as a turtle's head was in and out of its shell. Once the blood was washed from their hands, they could casually go through customs.

For Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel, the war on drugs was a daily part of their lives, an intricate part of who they were. For them, it was not a newspaper article or a blurb on television. They, far more than the public or press, knew the true, heinous nature of the fire-breathing beast they were fighting. They saw the bodies, the crime-scene photos. They heard the stories in great detail about what occurred, how, and when.

Several times a month, the DEA would make huge busts. One would think, considering the amount of drugs they confiscated, that they'd slow, put a dent in, the flow of narcotics. Just the opposite occurred. No matter how many busts they made, there seemed to be a never-ending supply, mountains of drugs in faraway places that were cleverly brought into the United States using unsettling amounts of imagination and creativity.

Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel worked so well together they could readily be likened to a bow and a fiddle in a maestro's hands. They were not only fearless but they were, more importantly, street-smart. From studying how colleagues were shot and murdered, they had
learned well what not to do. Any bad guy who went up against Jim and Tommy was the one in danger. In Group 33 and all throughout the DEA, Jim and Tommy became…famous—respected.

They were moving at two hundred miles an hour.

“They were the best,” a former colleague by the name of Bruce Travers recently said.

On a regular basis, they made busts, using professional informers and snitches, drug users and street people. Every night they were out on the street, looking to collar bad guys all over the tristate area, looking to win a battle in the war on drugs.

Still, no matter how careful they were, with all the resources of the DEA behind them, people were hurt, killed. A good example of just how dangerous their job was, how they were truly putting their lives on the line, happened at 133rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. This was an area known as a Dominican enclave. Of the three worst groups, the Colombians, Mexicans, and Dominicans, the most violent at the time, the most apt to pull the trigger of a gun, was surely the Dominicans. They were less about business and more about overt brutality as a matter of course. They were thought of by the DEA as the most dangerous of all the bad guys they chased. Jim recently explained that he had busted Colombians with kilos on them and no guns, but Dominicans with two ounces and three guns.

Group 33 received word through a Colombian informer that some Dominicans he knew had kilos of cocaine to sell. This was a classic ploy the DEA used to catch drug dealers. It was called buy and bust. Through negotiations that often went back and forth for days or even weeks, a buy was set up in which the DEA would provide money and bust the dealer, most often through an intermediary, an informer.

The Dominicans had rented a stash house in a tenement on 133rd Street. The drugs were supposed to be in the apartment. It was a little after midnight. The informer told Jim and his team, all told eight agents, that the cocaine was in the apartment.

“Are you sure?” Jim asked, always wary.

“They say it's there,” the informer said.

Jim well knew that they could be running into a situation where the Dominicans were looking to rob them; that there were no drugs; that this was, in fact, a rip-off. It had happened before. DEA agents were killed in situations in which they thought they were buying drugs only to have the dealers turn on them, shoot them dead, and steal the money.

This was a risk they would have to take this night. Would they be facing a compliant dealer or a dangerous predator? There was only one way to know for sure. The Colombian informer, Jim and Tommy and the rest of them knew, had proven himself reliable in the past. With that, Jim and his team headed into the tenement and started going upstairs cautiously, guns drawn. They were in plain clothes but had badges on chains around their necks. Unfortunately, just as they were moving up the stairs, the Dominicans were coming down. They were startled by the agents and hightailed it back up into the stash apartment. Hearing this, Jim and his people ran full out, got to the landing, and burst into the apartment. As they went, Jim grabbed one of the Dominicans and brought him to the ground, cuffed him, and handed him off in fluid, amazingly fast movements, almost as though it were a magic trick, all the while the agents yelling,
“Policía
!
Policía
!”

Jim and Tommy Geisel now ran to the back of the apartment looking to get the other two. In the far rear room, there was a window open and a fire escape. The agents could see a bad guy making for the window. Jim bolted forward and dove on the bad guy. Tall, wiry, very strong, every sinew and muscle in the man's body fought Jim as Jim continued to shout,
“Policía! Policía!”
Wanting to end this quickly, Jim struck him in the head with his pistol, but the dealer furiously fought back and their life-and-death struggle continued. The bad guy didn't acquiesce. Jim was forced to strike him over and over. The bad guy knew there was a hidden assassin in the closet whose job it was to kill, to kill indifferently, to kill efficiently, and the bad guy wanted nothing to do with the murder of a cop.

As Jim was grappling with the man, Geisel had been searching the kitchen. Now he moved back toward the bad guy. As Geisel went to help Jim, some ten steps away, DEA agent Bruce Travers, a dark-haired Irishman with a muscular build, opened a closet door Tom and Jim had passed. At first glance he saw nothing. He was about to close the door when he thought he discerned, in the weak light of the stash apartment, a human form and, suddenly, the outline of a gun—pointing at him. As he raised his own firearm, there was a deafening explosion. The bad guy was low in the closet, pointing the gun up when he fired. He had in his hand a .357 Magnum. The Magnum's slug tore into the bottom of Bruce's jaw, drilled through his face and came out right below his eye. Bruce went down. He didn't quite look human anymore. In the darkness and in the life-and-death havoc, Jim Hunt did not know who was firing.

“That us or is it them?” he called out.

The assassin in the closet now stood straight up. Though he had just shot a cop in the face, he was not finished. He could see, from where he stood, the doorway and outlined in the hall light was the informer and Group 33 boss Ken Feldman and Agent Jon Wilson. Without hesitation, he raised the .357, took a bead on the informer, and fired. The informer went down, muscles torn and shredded, bones broken.

Tommy Geisel now aimed at the closet and opened fire with equal ferocity. Hunt was still fighting furiously with the perp on the floor. Feldman and Wilson also began firing at the closet. Between Geisel, Feldman, and Wilson they fired twenty-one rounds. In the small, hard confines of the tenement, the shots were loud and resonating. The small, empty apartment reeked of gun powder. The assassin was hit three times. Neither Tommy nor Jim knew that a steel support pillar for the building had stopped most of the rounds. Had the pillar not been there, the assassin would surely have been dead. As it was, he survived.

Jim Hunt was very fond of Bruce. Jim viewed him as a younger
brother, an eager, trusted protégé. He was one of the nicest, most giving men Jim had ever met and here he was now lying on the floor, a remnant of who he had been, his face destroyed, a large pool of blood surrounding him. Knowing that seconds mattered, knowing that Bruce's life was hanging by a thread, Jim and Tom picked Bruce up and seemed to fly down the stairs. An ambulance was summoned but they could not wait. They knew in that time they could lose their brother. They put Bruce in the backseat of an unmarked DEA vehicle and sped over to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital some thirty blocks away, at points in time hitting 110 miles an hour. As they went, they called DEA headquarters, who in turn called the hospital, and word was sent that a cop had been shot—shot in the face.

When they pulled up at the emergency ward at Columbia Presbyterian, there was a team of a dozen nurses and doctors waiting for Bruce. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. He wanted so badly to tell them that he had another gun strapped to his ankle, that he didn't want to get shot while the orderly was taking it off, but he could not talk. His tongue was destroyed. His situation was so dire, his life precariously hanging by a thread, that doctors were forced to cut open his trachea, giving him a tracheotomy right there in the street. A plastic tube was forced down his throat and his lungs were given desperately needed oxygen. He drifted off into a deep, comalike sleep.

In no time, some fifty anxious, worried DEA agents had gathered at the hospital. They were as close as brothers and sisters and they stayed there all night long. Because of the brilliant efforts of the surgeons and nurses, Bruce's life was saved. Higher-ups in the New York office of the DEA arranged for a plane to pick up Bruce Travers's parents in Boston, where he was born and raised, and fly them and his brothers and sisters and fiancée to Teeterboro Airport, where they were placed in an SUV with a souped-up engine and were sped, sirens screaming, lights flashing, to Columbia Presbyterian.

When, later that day, Bruce woke up, he was in a fog, though he could make out his whole family gathered around the bed. His father
took his hand. He said, “You're going to be all right, son. You're going to be all right.” Bruce had no idea how his family had so quickly been summoned and were there, but he was grateful, deeply and profoundly grateful. He tried to talk but could not.

When, in Washington, D.C., President Reagan heard what had happened, he insisted on placing a call to Bruce. He wanted to talk to him. The phone at his bedside rang. Bruce's father answered. He was shocked to hear President Reagan on the other end. He explained that Bruce couldn't talk. President Reagan told Bruce's dad that he was “extremely grateful” for what he'd done, that he and Nancy sent their support and love and prayers. Everyone was very touched, very moved. Mr. Travers thanked the president and hung up.

“It's a hell of a thing,” Mr. Travers said to his son. “A hell of a thing.”

 

Jim Hunt was deeply touched by what happened to Bruce Travers. He had become close to Bruce. Bruce had a wide-eyed enthusiasm. He was not a cynical, hard man who was a product of the streets like many with years in law enforcement. He was a gentleman, though a particularly tough, resilient individual.

The doctors told Jim and all his colleagues that Bruce was still in danger, that Bruce could “still die.” If he survived, he would have to undergo “many operations” to regain a face similar to the one he had once had.

Many in Group 33 went to church and lit candles and prayed for their colleague, prayed for their friend. Bruce was liked by everybody. Just how truly heroic Bruce Travers was would not be made clear for some months, for the pain and the discomfort was just beginning. He still had fourteen major operations ahead. When police ballistic experts re-created the shooting using triangulations of trajectory, they came to know that the shooter had been crouched down, and when he fired the .357 Magnum, the bullet went up into Bruce's lower jaw and burst out of his face, just beneath his eye.

As it happened, the assassin in the closet had been paid to do exactly what he did. His job was to shoot and kill anyone who tried to impede the selling of the cocaine. He, Jim knew, all the agents knew, was from another culture, another mind-set. From where he hailed, from the place he came, life was cheap; life was worth nothing. What struck them all as odd, though, was that he had to know Bruce and all the rest of them were cops. They were yelling, “Cops! Cops!
Policía! Policía!”
over and over.

Yet, still, he pulled the trigger without a second thought.