Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

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Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Aug 04, 2013 2:55 pm

Reading "The Underground Empire," by James Mills. Dennis Dayle is quite a character, and a mostly uncorroborated one, too.

Via: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/200 ... und-empire

Dennis Dayle, 81, cracked down on drug cartels
August 4, 2009|By Linda Florea, Sentinel Staff Writer

Dennis Dayle was a bigger-than-life type of hero about whom most people would have known nothing were it not for a book written about three of his cases. Combating international-crime cartel he traveled the world as the head of Central Tactical Unit or Centac.

"When he retired, there were 12 cartel families that ran drugs in the world, and he [had] prosecuted 11 of them at the time," daughter Linda Smith of Atlanta said. "He made the world a much better place."

Dayle of Orlando died Aug. 2 of cardiac failure. He was 81.

The native of Milwaukee was both a star football player in high school and a violin prodigy and concert master touring Europe in his teen years.

After the Korean Conflict broke out in 1950, he enlisted with the Marines, served two tours of duty and became a pilot.

When he returned home from the military, he needed a stable job, with a wife Ursula, who died in 2007, and a child on the way. He could not return to violin at the same performance level immediately, so he became a patrol officer with the Milwaukee Police Department. He distinguished himself by cracking big cases that got front-page newspaper coverage.

He began his federal career working for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in Chicago, a forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he continued to distinguish himself. From the mid-1970s to 1980s, Dayle led investigations into international drug smuggling for the DEA, heading up Centac, which were chronicled in 1986 in a best-selling book, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace, by James Mills.

"He had unlimited jurisdiction to bring down drug cartels around the world," said another daughter, Cathy Hogis of Nashville, Tenn. "Normally, law enforcement has boundaries, but my father could go wherever he needed to go and put cases together."

According to Hogis, the family moved 13 times as she grew up, and even lived in the Middle East for two years. Her father kept his work life segregated from his home life, and when he went to work, they never knew how long he would be gone or where he was going.

"Colleagues knew he had a wife, but they were uncertain about his children, and completely in the dark regarding many aspects of an extraordinary background he labored to conceal," according to an excerpt from The Underground Empire.

Dayle stepped down from Centac in the early 1980s and moved to Orlando. He retired from federal government work in 1982, led the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation from 1984 to 1986, and later helped launch the country's first drug street unit.

Dayle later ran twice, unsuccessfully, for Orange County sheriff, in 1988 and 1992.

In addition to his daughters, he is survived by three granddaughters.

Orlando Direct Cremation Service handled the arrangements.


Underground Empire, p. 15:

Going up in the elevator to his cubbyhole office, I asked Dennis how many Centacs there might be in the world. (The word Centac was used to mean not only Centac itself but also each individual case -- each "Centac" -- as well as those organizations that might someday become Centac targets.)

"Sometimes I wonder if maybe there's only one. It's as if you're working on one Centac on one side of a pyramid and another on another side and you get higher and higher, and the peak they meet and suddenly you see it's all the same one."

"Are you serious? Could it all be one great conspiracy?"

The suggestion seemed fantastic.

"I hate..."

The elevator stopped on the sixth floor, but the door did not open. Dennis gave it a couple of seconds, then threw himself at the jammed door, hitting it like a fullback. It popped open. Dennis stepped into the hallway.

"I hate to think of it," he continued, as if that were how he always emerged from elevators, "but if it is one huge conspiracy it would have to do with the financing, the people who put up the money. As you get close to the top of the pyramid the air gets very thin and cannot support many people."


Chock fucking full of quotables so far, many more to come.
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Re: Dennis Dayle

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Aug 05, 2013 4:32 pm

Quick supplement: a GAO report on CENTAC
http://gao.justia.com/department-of-jus ... report.pdf

p. 117:

...I went looking for the man who six years earlier had invented Centac.

He was a portly Frenchman named Tony Pohl and he looked like Alfred Hitchcock, wearing a trenchcoat in the wind and drizzle of a parking lot. Dennis Dayle told me he was "a complicated piece of work, stubborn, bright and ruthless." Pohl agreed to talk to me if I didn't reveal what kind of work he was doing now, or where, or for whom.

"Say that I'm around."

"I spoke to Tony Pohl, comma, who is around."

"Under a cloak."

After World War II international crime exploded. New York detectives might investigate a murder, Singapore cops seize a load of heroin, and Turks uncover a cache of gold, without any of them dreaming they were working the same case. Crime was in the jet age; the cops were grounded. Police cooperation was tentative even between cities, among countries it rarely existed. Bureaucracy ruled, and protection of turf was often more important than the pursuit of criminals.

Nowhere was the jealousy, paranoia and struggle for power more keenly displayed than in battles between federal narcotics agents and the Bureau of Customs. At times this conflict erupted into open warfare, and in the early 1970s the White House itself was frequently called upon to intervene.

Finally, wrapped in red tape, fighting hostile Customs agents, watching major criminals go unhindered about their business, Tony Pohl made a desperate move. A federal drug agent based in New York, he decided to create his own vest-pocket agency, a tight group of irregulars who could turn their backs on factional wars and get on with the business of locking up drug traffickers.

He wanted to lock them up not one by one but wholesale ... He spoke French, German, Spanish and Italian.

[b]When he decided to set up a renegade enforcement agency, he was supervising a group of eight agents.


"In that huge, competitive, bureaucratic, strangling environment, I had to create something a little bit...nebulous. Something nobody could get their arms around."

He astonished and bewildered his colleagues by simply abandoning his office.

"We just moved out -- lock, stock and barrel. We loaded up our files, our safes, our chairs, our desks. I found an empty room in a Manhattan federal courthouse and we moved in."


...

He had rubber CENTAC stamps made, plastered the word over all his reports, "and the darned thing flew."
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Aug 08, 2013 7:44 pm

p. 121

"There's a lot of competence in making a good Centac case. Police work has become very complex. It's not simple anymore. Most people when you talk about drug trafficking picture a mustachioed gent, a Mafia type, and they think of Mario Puzo's book The Godfather. But it's changed.There are so many entrepreneurs, and large organizations, and they go an awful long time without anybody touching them. Their perception of what they're doing is totally different from ours. It's not crime, it's the ultimate in free enterprise. They're taking tremendous risks and they're proud of those risks."

"Agents have to walk a tightrope to make a case legal. You have to have an awareness of a whole panoply of laws. A lot of sophisticated things have to be done. You can't just have a horde of people who know how to make arrests, and that's all. Guys that talk through the side of their mouth, strap guns on, and tell tales of derring-do. The bulk of the work of these derring-do guys is numbers, how many arrests did you make, how much powder did you put on the table. And anybody trying to change that approach to law enforcement, anybody trying to break up major conspiracies, going for quality rather than numbers and powder on the table, becomes a threat. It's like a heart transplant, it rejects anything foreign, it has to kill it."

...

"If you're only doing five or six cases a year, but five or six big ones, it takes a hell of a lot of self-confidence. Because what if you work for months on a case and fail? You have all these agents running around, and suppose we don't make it? Centac was like a grandiose...reaching...to pie in the sky. It takes a lot of time, a tremendous expenditure of effort, and you don't have a large number of arrests to show along the way."

...

"When you talk to people in the OMB, regardless of how accommodating they sound, the pressure is always there. How many people have you put away? Numbers. Don't talk about complexities. Make it simple. And who's interested in the details and complexities anyhow? Journalists? Hell no. I talked to everyone, from Jack Anderson to TV people. It's: don't tell us about the complexities. We want to know who the good guy is, and who the bad guy is. Tell us who to hate. When you start getting complicated, man, people's eyes glaze over. I talked to Senator Lawton Chiles. He was asking these questions that showed he didn't have the foggiest notion what was even going on. I started to tell him, it's a little more complex...and he fell asleep. Literally."


The above testimony, surely paraphrased by James Mills, comes courtesy of Centac's 2nd director, Marty Pera, who replaced Tony Pohl and passed the torch to the dapper Dennis Dayle.

But wait -- it gets better. He spanks Gerald Ford on the way out....

p. 122

So on a July morning in 1976, in the second year of the Ford Administration, Marty Pera walked into room 3302 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Speaking with the candor and passion of a man leaving a system that could no longer do him harm, he told the senators what they may not have wanted to hear.

He condemned the administration's "barrage of press releases," the "meaningless" public proclamations made only for "image enhancement." Attacking the long-standing politicization of Federal drug law enforcement, he told the senators there was nothing new about the "exploitation" of drug enforcement as a political issue, except now it was being done "on a grander scale," now that it was called "the President's War on Drugs." Long-term, effective attacks on major drug organizations were were shoved aside for "high-visibility, quick turnaround" gimmicks aimed at "maximum exploitation by news media."

...

A true attack on the drug problem, Pera pleaded, would demand "professional in-depth planning, analysis and execution with concurrent long-range commitment." Instead, the country received "splashy, high-visibility special operations" lasting months in which "impressive numbers of defendants and quantities of heroin seized, for the purpose of media exposure, which is really the ultimate objective." These programs had a way of concluding with spectacular success just before an election.
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Hammer of Los » Fri Aug 09, 2013 5:03 am

...

Going up in the elevator to his cubbyhole office, I asked Dennis how many Centacs there might be in the world. (The word Centac was used to mean not only Centac itself but also each individual case -- each "Centac" -- as well as those organizations that might someday become Centac targets.)

"Sometimes I wonder if maybe there's only one. It's as if you're working on one Centac on one side of a pyramid and another on another side and you get higher and higher, and the peak they meet and suddenly you see it's all the same one."

"Are you serious? Could it all be one great conspiracy?"

The suggestion seemed fantastic.

"I hate..."

The elevator stopped on the sixth floor, but the door did not open. Dennis gave it a couple of seconds, then threw himself at the jammed door, hitting it like a fullback. It popped open. Dennis stepped into the hallway.

"I hate to think of it," he continued, as if that were how he always emerged from elevators, "but if it is one huge conspiracy it would have to do with the financing, the people who put up the money. As you get close to the top of the pyramid the air gets very thin and cannot support many people."


The air does get thin when you get real high.

I'm rubber stamping this missive.

CENTAC.

...
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby semper occultus » Fri Aug 09, 2013 5:59 am

....old Alberto was quite a character come to that....

Alberto Sicilia Falcon, a Bay of Pigs and CIA Operation 40 veteran who was trained at Fort Jackson. Falcon worked with Ted Shackley’s Trak II program in Chile, then moved to Mexico where he created an overnight empire moving Sinoalese heroin.

http://deanhenderson.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/whos-behind-the-mexican-drug-cartels/



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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Aug 09, 2013 9:33 am

Wow, a Bay of Pigs and Operation 40 veteran? That does not get mentioned by Mills thus far, although he has been quite disparaging of the CIA in general.

I was pretty stunned by the origin story of the Sinaloa cartel being mentioned so casually, early in the book, probably because Mills didn't realize the implications -- he couldn't at the time.

I've been taking notes like crazy and will be typing up many more passages this weekend...because what's more exciting than that?
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby semper occultus » Fri Aug 09, 2013 10:02 am

....buying a scanner...?

just ordered Henderson's book....was well down the wish list on price grounds but piqued to read it now....
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Aug 09, 2013 11:23 am

I much prefer text to .png - although it is all the same onscreen. I also rather enjoy the act of re-typing good passages, and seem to recall HST did the same with Hemingway, no?

"Big Oil and Their Bankers" looks mighty tasty, good call...although, that cover looks quite familiar. I seem to recall seeing Henderson on RT or Al-Jazeera and being mightily incoherent while promoting that same work.

Still, I am in library mode. I have no problem reading deeply flawed books, so long as there's lots of details, citations and references.

Possibly related: just received a copy of "The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection" by Stephen Emerson. I'll let you know how it is.
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Gashweir » Fri Aug 09, 2013 1:30 pm

I read Underground Empire a few years ago and was quite impressed, and immediately followed it up with the Big White Lie. The two of them together were quite informative and I highly recommend both.
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:02 pm

Thank you, I have put that puppy on order, too.

UE, p. 218:

The CIA had not attended Dennis's Centac-24 briefing, but they were there in spirit, a dark hovering cloud. Five years earlier it had appeared that the untouchable Lu Shu-shui was finally headed for an American penetentiary -- until the CIA stepped in and the operations against him abruptly stopped.

When Bruce Stubbs first arrived in Bangkok, one of his DEA colleagues at the American embassy had been Matty Maher, an aggressive, fast-falking former professional basketball player. Maher wore white socks and a crew cut, but if you wrote him off as a dumb jock you were likely to regret it. His supervisor called him treacherous, and Matty would probably have agreed with that himself, might even have mistaken it for a compliment. But despite his treachery, brains and fierce commitment to his job, he had proved no match for the CIA.


p. 222

Nine months after Operation Durian was terminated the chief of the DEA's intelligence division wrote a summary report. It was, in fact, an obituary.

"As a result of the activities conducted during Operation Durian," the report said, "intelligence was developed concerning the trafficking organization of Lu Hsu-shui. The intelligence gathered was detailed enough for Bangkok to begin planning an enforcement operation aimed at immobilizing Lu...Operation Durian was terminated in order to allow the CI's use in a high-level, sensitive national security operation."

However important the "high-level, sensitive national security operation" might have been (was is simply a matter of discovering what Taiwan was up to in the international arms market?), and whatever other reasons, unstated to the DEA, the CIA might have for approaching the Durian informant, was the death of Durian really worth the price? An opportunity was lost to eliminate one of the world's largest and most securely insulated sources of heroin into the United States, Canada and Europe.


On p. 219, Matty Maher describes the CI in question as follows -- I cannot find biographical information on him so I cannot place dates (yet)

"I had a brief acquaintance with a Chinese informant in New York. I knew he'd spent some time in the Burma-Laos-Thailand area. He'd gone to Taiwan and become bodyguard for Chang Kai-shek, traveled with him all around the world. A very dapper, genteel, soft-spoken guy. He was a Taiwanese intelligence agent, and a lot of people believe he's still a plant, a Taiwanese guy working for us, for them. Eventually he got connected with the DEA, and they brought him to New York. He supposedly had some information on the Hip Sing Association in New York, of which he was a member."

"That a Tong?" I asked.

"A tong, yeah. Well, they claim it's a merchants association."

"Right. So is the Mafia."

"No, that's a branch of Catholic Charities."

He has a quiet, wheezing laugh, full of the New York street kid's tough awareness of irony.


Via: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... /bios.html

Matthew Maher retired from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1994 as director of International Operations, with responsibility for the DEA's seventy-two offices in fifty-one countries. Maher's previous DEA experience included twenty-four years of service in both the United States and abroad, including Southeast Asia and Europe.

As a Senior Fellow with the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), Maher has been involved with the creation and implementation of the Georgetown Executive Leadership Seminar, which presents strategic approaches to dealing with transnational crime to select groups of high-ranking government and private sector representatives from around the world.

Since retiring from the DEA, Maher has been active providing business and security consulting services to various governmental and private sector organizations with an emphasis on international programs and strategic initiatives.


Maher's participation in that seminar is very interesting, indicating that he has since made peace with working in Chinatown. Throughout the transcript, he toes a very military-industrial drug war line, acknowledging the value of treatment and demand reduction but insisting, repeatedly, that it need to be "balanced" with paramilitary LEO operations and the street-level quote enforcement that characterizes the failures and social destruction of our War on Drugs.

Or rather -- The President's War on Drugs. My bad and apologies to the ghost of Gerald Ford.

One more background piece: a good general intro to Bangkok and organized crime...
http://thediplomat.com/2012/06/15/taiwa ... ?print=yes

Taiwan and the Mob
June 15, 2012 By Cain Nunns

Gangsters and politicians have a long and complicated relationship in Taiwan, Cain Nunns reports from Taipei. Indeed, sometimes they’ve been the same thing.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard published a composite of potential disguises for fugitive ex-lawmaker Lo Fu-Chu in late April. In one picture, he looks like a Dutch leader of a peacekeeping force, complete with beret and handlebar moustache. In another, he’s done up like one of the Gallagher brothers from seminal British rock outfit Oasis. A coifed mop frames his usually balding head as the handlebar gives way to a goatee.

But it’s probably the shot of Lo in black ’70s aviator shades, ala late Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar, that’s the most fitting. For Lo wasn’t just any Taiwanese politician failing to turn himself in for a four-year money laundering and insider trading prison sentence.

The former legislator, convict and parliamentarian brawler with strong ties to the ruling Kuomintang has also been described as the “spiritual leader” of Celestial Way. According to law enforcement, Celestial Way is an indigenous super gang that was formed when mob leaders were locked up together. It is, by some estimates, the island republic’s third largest organized crime syndicate.

“It isn’t a street gang that worries about turf battles. It’s highly organized, cooperates with big business and politicians and has very strong political, crime and business links internationally, particularly in Hong Kong, China, Macao, Japan and Southeast Asia,” says a Criminal Investigation Bureau official, who declined to give his name because of the sensitive nature of his work. “We think Lo jumped a fishing boat to China. It’s going to be extremely difficult to get him back from there.”

Analysts say Lo is just the last in a long line of KMT or KMT-aligned gangster-legislators who decided it was more beneficial to not only pay off politicians, but become them as well. Taiwan’s front pages are filled with stories about politicians on both sides of the fence turning up at gangster funerals and the weddings of powerful mobster scions.

“The nexus between crime and politics can be traced back to the KMT-era in mainland China, when a famous Shanghai gangster, Du Yuesheng, AKA ‘Big-eared Du,’ helped Chiang Kai-sheik purge the communists,” says Lo Shiu Hing, an expert on governance and transnational crime at Hong Kong Institute of Education.

That “purge” was actually more of a massacre. An estimated 5,000 Communist sympathizers were either executed or went missing. As a reward for his services, Chiang made Du the head of the national board of the Opium Suppression Bureau, giving him effective control of the country’s drug trade.

Du eventually fled to, and died in, Hong Kong after Mao Zedong’s troops drove the nationalists across the Taiwan Strait. After his death, Chiang Kai-shek had his body shipped to Taipei and buried in an outlying suburb of the capital.

The KMT’s Lost Army, or the 997th Brigade, also headed south. Way south. It marched all the way into northern Burma where it produced opium for export to the rest of the world. Other elements of the defeated army ended up in Hong Kong and Macao, where they started triads that are still active today.

Back in Taiwan, the KMT found itself outnumbered by Taiwanese who had migrated to the island from China’s southern Fujian Province centuries earlier. “Mainlander” gangs such as the Bamboo Union, which the U.S. Customs Department estimates to have 10,000 members worldwide that are active in drugs, human trafficking, arms trading, prostitution, cybercrime, money laundering and counterfeiting, formed soon after.

“When the KMT retreated to Taiwan, it continued its authoritarian government until the ’80s when Lung Wai, the predecessor of the Democratic Progressive Party, participated in county, village and legislative level elections. The KMT used local gangsters to mobilize supporters to vote for their candidates,” says Lo.

Analysts say that up until that point, Taiwan’s feared intelligence apparatus had used mobsters to forward administration policies within constituencies that were increasingly frustrated with the KMT’s draconian rule. The opening up of Taiwan’s political process meant that gangs became more valuable as vote getters rather than enforcers and informants.

Rutgers University professor Chin Ko-lin argues in his book Heijin, Organized Crime, Business and Politics in Taiwan, that an embarrassing episode on U.S. soil in 1984 was a catalyst for that shift, and forerunner to gangsters’ increased access to the island’s political institutions. According to Chin, the head of the Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense ordered three high-ranking Bamboo Union members to assassinate Chinese-American writer Henry Liu on U.S. soil. Liu was reportedly murdered over a derogatory profile he had written about then President Chiang Ching-kuo.

The term heijin refers to a member of the underworld.

“(Modern) black-gold politics in Taiwan is the penetration into politics of violent underworld figures and greedy business tycoons and inevitable subsequent social ills such as vote buying, political violence, insider trading, bid rigging and official and unofficial corruption,” writes Chin.

After martial law was lifted in 1987 and Chiang’s death a year later, Lee Tung-hui was ushered in as the Republic of China’s first Taiwanese president. Later, he became the Chinese-speaking world’s first democratically elected president when free elections were held in 1996.

It was around this time that things got hairy.

“Lee tung-hui’s era was the worst time for gangster-politics. Lee needed supporters because he was under pressure from the KMT’s old guard. There was a time when he wasn’t his own man,” says Parris Chang, a former deputy director of the National Security Council under the contentious Chen Shui-bien administration; Chen is serving his own 18-year sentence for corruption.

Chang says that Lee was unable to use the intelligence apparatus to control the country as his predecessors had, and reached out to gangsters to either secure votes or run under the party’s banner or as independents who would vote with the KMT in parliament.

The KMT swept the elections, but the political environment turned very nasty, very quickly. The list of violent crimes either committed by or directed at politicians reads like a Chicago crime blotter from the 1930s.

In 1996, Taoyuan County’s commissioner was gunned down in his home just outside of Taipei, along with two county councilors, five colleagues and a team of bodyguards. A high-ranking female DPP member was murdered in southern Kaohsiung soon after. Also in the south, a powerful speaker from Pingtung reportedly shot dead his illegal gambling den partner in front of his mother.

While the politicians were busy securing votes, mobsters were able to access first-hand information on construction bids, land development, the judiciary, public works planning and the budget. The government’s allowance of deliberate infiltration of criminal elements into selected institutions provided organized crime huge influence and increased lobbying power.

Lin wrote of Lo during this period: “an influential legislator who is also the convener of the judicial committee of the legislature could also be one of the richest entrepreneurs in the country, (despite) proclaiming himself to be the ‘spiritual leader’ of a powerful gang and being listed as a hoodlum by the authorities.”

Lo was notorious for beating up his fellow lawmakers – including a female opposition member – who either opposed him or publically denounced him as a triad boss. Sometimes he would act alone. On other occasions, he would team up with fellow mob lawmakers Wu Tse-yuan and Lin Ming-yi to dole out parliamentary punishments. One unfortunate legislator who locked horns with him was allegedly abducted, stripped, placed inside a dog cage and dumped on the side of a road three days later.

Despite being jailed for more than three years in the mid-80s over his ties to Celestial Way, Lo was still allowed to run as a KMT candidate in 1996 and then again in 1999 as an independent. Lo’s 2002 bid was cut short after he was detained for four months on fraud and embezzlement charges. He did, however, mount an unsuccessful challenge in late 2011.

Analysts suggest that his methods, along with favors earned, intimidated the Legislative Yuan into allowing him seats on the powerful Financial and Judiciary Committees. In effect, Lo had some control of the police budget and could influence investigations. In return for being shielded from prosecution and seats on committees that determine public works bids, gangsters were said to be expected to vote along party lines on national ticket issues.

It’s here that mobsters have also proven adept at dropping party favoritism. When the DPP was in power from 2000-2008, gangsters would reportedly often work with the new party.

In a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, an American Institute in Taiwan staffer wrote that a DPP official told him that securing (a prominent gangster-politician’s vote) was as easy as building a new road in his electorate.

Mobsters are viewed as good vote-getters in rural areas because of their grassroots personalities, services to constituents, generosity, and ability to obtain funding for local infrastructure projects. And, as in other parts of Northeast Asia, the boundary between clean and dirty politics isn’t always clear cut. In fact, it’s often murky and porous.

“In this part of the world, government participation at the grass roots level isn’t up to scratch and the vacuum is filled by triads. They can win the hearts of minds of people in their constituency because they fight for their interests,” Lo says via Skype.

Good local politics or not, organized crime still negatively affects the national stage through corruption, vote buying, nepotism and violence.

In 2010, three KMT lawmakers lost their seats for vote-buying. That same year, Sean Lien, the son of former KMT chairman and two-time losing presidential nominee Lien Chen, was shot in the face at a campaign rally.

The mobster-shooter claimed to have hit the wrong man – saying his intended target was another KMT member, who he was involved in a land dispute with. An innocent bystander was killed.

In 2008, Lo’s KMT lawmaker son, Lo Ming-tsai, was also implicated in Celestial Way business, when his office reportedly played host to a deadly late night shooting of a gang member following an altercation at a downtown Karaoke bar.

Lo’s son, who has also served multiple terms on the finance committee, says he isn’t connected to the underworld.

According to one expert on organized crime who spoke on condition of anonymity, Taiwanese gangs work in illegal businesses that span the globe and are worth billions of dollars a year. They have also moved into legitimate areas including restaurants, hotels, the music and movie industries, gravel mining, waste disposal, construction, cable TV, publishing, fisheries, communications and stock trading.

“The old gangsters have passed away. Their interests have been passed on to their sons, who have become chairmen of companies or congressmen,” says Roger Hsieh, a one-time political prisoner, lawmaker and author of Gangsters Rule Taiwan.

“They are extremely influential in finance, construction, the economy and politics – basically everywhere,” Hsieh says, adding that the influence of gangs within Taiwanese politics and business hasn’t waned. It’s the rules of the game that have changed.

“Some of Taiwan’s biggest companies are gangster owned. This younger generation is very well educated. They have degrees from Ivy League schools and have more money and greater influence than their fathers.”

But perhaps it’s intrepid gangster-fugitive Lo fu-chu, who said it best when being interviewed for Lin’s book: “if government and business people are not involved in bid-rigging then there (would be) no room for heidao (gangster) people to participate.”

Cain Nunns is a freelance journalist who writes for The Guardian, Monocle and Global Post, among other publications.
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Sep 01, 2013 11:38 am

p. 317, the testimony of assassin, Phoenix veteran and probable CIA agent Michael Decker - Falcon is Alberto Sicilia Falcon:

And then Falcon walked in from his bedroom, and he reeked of regality. It was almost princelike. People just hushed. They froze.

...

I could tell it was really important for him to impress me. He impressed me when he sat down and laid my entire Navy service record in front of me, and two thirds of that record was top-secret, a lot of the stuff I did with Operation Phoenix and so forth for the CIA in Vietnam was top-secret. An he had photocopies of everything. And you talk about impressed -- I was impressed. Because I had no idea how he got to those files. And it sent chills up and down my back thinking, "What the hell is going on back in Washington that this guy can get a copy of these records?"


p. 398, Dennis Dayle on the veracity of Michael Decker's cinematic testimony:

"Do you think Decker was affiliated with the CIA?" I ask.

"Yes. Because he is the ideal profile of someone who would be attracted by the CIA, who would gravitate towards the CIA. Visions of grandeur. Machoism. Lone operator. "I can do anything, I'll walk into the jaws of death anytime, just watch me. Give me a knife and I'll get you hostages."

"Is he also the profile, though, of someone the CIA might gravitate towards?"

"Oh, absolutely."

"What do you think his role might have been with the CIA?"

"Seeking out secrets about arms movements, Cuban influences in Mexico. They would take someone like Decker and exploit him, by placing him deliberately into a drug-trafficking situation, maybe even bankrolling him. If they felt it was important to Decker to be in their eyes a successful assassin, they would orchestrate someone to be hit by Decker, and they would give someone the money to pay Decker to do it."

"Really?"

"I'm talking about someone who would be hit anyway. I'm not putting down the CIA. I'm talking about the world of reality. I'm talking about Subject A in a CIA effort who was going to be assassinated. They would rationalize: he's going to be assassinated, we've talked to the people who are going to have it done, and here's someone we need who wants to assassinate someone. Let's put factor one and factor two together. There's nothing wrong with this at all. If Decker doesn't do it, someone else will. And Decker would be attracted to that."

"Do you think Falcon was ever affiliated with the CIA?"

"There's no question in my mind.
And I do not say that negatively as to the CIA. Because their deviousness in attempting to manipulate Falcon -- I would be even more devious than that. It's what I hold near and dear as a technique, as an art, as a responsibility, and that is to exploit situations that are inevitable, where all you need is to orchestrate them to create good rather than bad. I have no problem with that -- no moral problem, no ethical problem, no legal problem."

I tell him Decker said Falcon had offerend him what he was sure were CIA assassination jobs.

"Who said that to whom?" He looks up sharply, his interest alerted.

"Decker told me Falcon said it to him."

"It's consistent with my feelings."

"You would put a high level of credibility on it?"

"Absolutely. When you shake hands to many times with the CIA your life becomes extremely complicated. When you become involved with the CIA in the way I think Decker was, you are only a means to an end. You are totally expendable. The entire concept is something that cannot be eaten, it just eats, it devours. When you join that circle you're playing out of your league. People like Falcon with his gigantic ego, and Mike Decker with his, they want to hit the Super Bowl, and they're just simply playing out of their league. They're joining a company of people whoe objectives are totally opposed to building competitors like Falcon would be, if he had his way. He perceived that joining the CIA would place him where he wanted to be, and that's ludicrous."
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Sep 02, 2013 12:55 pm

p. 464 - DEA cultural bias against even investigating white collar (and, curiously, white-skinned) drug crimes

"You're going to end up with some Ph.D, no criminal record, head of a licensed pharmaceutical company, and if you think he's going to jail, pal, you're full of shit."

A large bald man, six-four, with red eyebrows and mustache, a New York City Cop for ten years, Customs agent for 13 years, with DEA since 1973 -- John Fallon dominates the table. From its head he looks around at the other height man and lets them know what he thinks about Centac going after a presumably respectable drug company.

"You go to one of their industry things and there's four senators on the dias."

Dennis, an ambassador receiving protest from the host government, points out that if in the past courts have failed "to recognize drug companies' crimes as crimes" an attack on one firm might "sensitize the industry, the prosecutors, and the courts."

"Sensitize?" Fallon says scornfully, red eyebrows raising. "Would you say they are sensitized to marijuana? And we can't get a conviction on eighty thousand pounds. These guys you're talking about are respectable people with big lawyers and influence and I can guarantee you they are not going to jail for this."

"Well," Dennis says, his pipe sending up a cloud of blue smoke, "this country has had a lot of attorneys general, and John Mitchell was the first to go to jail."
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Re: Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Sep 02, 2013 5:17 pm

This is great stuff. Thank you for putting it in here!
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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