Tucson military recruiters ran cocaine
Some kept visiting schools for 3 years after FBI caught them on tape[/align]By Carol Ann Alaimo [/align]Arizona Daily Star [/align]Tucson, Arizona | Published: 12.17.2006[/align][/align]
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A midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson. [/align][/align]Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools. [/align]They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle. [/align]Together, these dozen or so recruiters formed the nucleus of one of the FBI's biggest public corruption cases, the sting known as Operation Lively Green, which unfolded in Southern Arizona from 2002-2004 and was made public last year. [/align]Many of the drug-running recruiters remained on the job, with continued access to local schools, for months — and often, years — after FBI agents secretly filmed them counting cash next to stacks of cocaine bricks, the Arizona Daily Star found in a months-long probe of court records and military employment data. [/align]Some were still recruiting three years after they first were caught on camera running drugs in uniform. Most have pleaded guilty and are to be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military. [/align]There is no suggestion in court records that the recruiters were providing drugs to students. [/align]What they did between FBI drug runs isn't known because they weren't under constant surveillance, the FBI said. For example, in the middle of the cocaine sting, one of the recruiters was arrested by another law-enforcement agency in an unrelated drug case, accused of transporting nearly 200 pounds of marijuana on Interstate 19, court records show. [/align]Military recruiting officials say the corruption was not widespread. They also say they kept these recruiters on the job because they either didn't know they were under investigation, or were told by the FBI to leave the suspects alone so as not to jeopardize the sting's outcome. [/align]Some Tucson parents and school officials, contacted by the Star about the results of the paper's research, said students should not have been left exposed for so long to recruiters known by the FBI to be involved in cocaine-running. [/align]"I don't like the thought of someone involved with drugs having access to my child, and I don't know anything about it and the school doesn't know anything about it," said Kathy Janssen, who has a 15-year-old son at Tucson High Magnet School, the city's largest high school. "High school students are very vulnerable." [/align]This isn't the first time the FBI has come under criticism in the Lively Green case. Allegations of sexual misconduct by undercover informants also have dogged the case and could result in reduced punishment for the recruiters and dozens of other defendants.[/align]SCHOOLS [/align]At a press conference to unveil the case last year, the FBI announced that many Lively Green defendants were military members. Agents didn't say that recruiters were involved. [/align]A Phoenix-based FBI spokeswoman said the agency can't say much at this point about the Lively Green probe because it's still in progress. [/align]Special Agent Deb McCarley did say the FBI generally performs risk assessments before deciding to keep suspects who work in public positions on the job during undercover probes. [/align]"We recognize the range of ethical issues that inherently arise in the course of our undercover investigations," McCarley said in an e-mail. [/align]"We have sound policies in place" to address such dilemmas, she said, and "this case has been no exception." [/align]Some high schools in Tucson Unified, Flowing Wells Unified and Marana Unified school districts, and in Amphitheater Public Schools, were visited by one or more of these recruiters on a regular or occasional basis, according to military recruiting officials. Schools in other districts may have had visits as well, but precise records no longer are available in some cases, officials said. [/align]One TUSD Governing Board member was incensed to hear the recruiters remained on the job so long. [/align]"It's ludicrous to me that the FBI would leave these people in place and allow them onto our high school campuses," Judy Burns said. [/align]"If they were going to do that, they should have been monitoring them constantly." [/align]Monica Young, who has two children attending TUSD high schools, agreed. [/align]"It is appalling that recruiters who were known to be involved in such activity were allowed on any school campus," she said. [/align]Legal expert Stephen Saltzburg, who teaches criminal procedure at George Washington University, said it's entirely possible that the Tucson recruiters were running drugs in their free time and still functioning normally on the job. [/align]Once the FBI made the decision to leave them in place at local schools "one would hope they would be watching that very carefully," he said. [/align]ETHICS [/align]From a military standpoint, it's especially egregious that recruiters took part in the cocaine runs, experts say. [/align]"The military definitely views recruiters as persons in a special position of trust," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, in Washington, D.C. [/align]Recruiters are supposed to meet high standards to promote an honorable image of the military, Fidell said. If court-martialed, they probably would be punished more harshly than non-recruiters, he said. [/align]The willingness of Tucson recruiters to run drugs was clear to FBI agents from the start of the Lively Green sting, according to agent testimony at the court-martial of a Davis-Monthan technical sergeant — a non-recruiter — convicted in the Lively Green case in June. [/align]In fact, it was a recruiter who caused the FBI to set up the sting in the first place, FBI Special Agent Adam Radtke said.[/align]That recruiter, Radtke said, was former Army National Guardsman Darius W. Perry, who pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court. [/align]Radtke said the sting got started in late 2001, when the FBI received numerous complaints that Perry, who worked out of the Guard's East Side recruiting office, was taking bribes to fix the military aptitude test scores of new recruits. [/align]The FBI put an undercover informant in place to check it out. As the FBI plant was paying Perry to fix a test score in the parking lot of a Tucson restaurant, Perry opened the trunk of his recruiting vehicle and offered to sell part of a kilo of cocaine, Radtke said. [/align]"Perry basically introduced the crime to us," the agent testified. [/align]Perry couldn't be reached for comment. His federal court file, including the name of his attorney, has been sealed by the court. The Arizona Daily Star has filed a legal motion to have the case unsealed, and the action is pending. [/align]Perry, 42, and another former Army National Guard recruiter, Mark A. Fillman, 56, were the first to offer their drug-running services to undercover informants who posed as Mexican drug lords during the sting, Radtke said. [/align]The sting was set up so participants could make money in two ways — by agreeing to help transport cocaine and by finding others to do so. [/align]The Tucson recruiters, trained to sell people on the military, often used those skills to recruit for the drug ring, helping the sting to mushroom, court records show. [/align]One Army recruiter, Rodney E. Mills, 40, brought in six people. Perry persuaded six others, all Army National Guard members, to<

 

Operation Lively Green. Thats so funny. Like I found out after I joined the Army, you just cant trust a recruiter.

And yeah, Leavenworth is gonna suck for those guys. I know a couple guys who ended up there too.I hope they all have funbreaking big rocks into medium rocks, medium rocks into small rocks, small rocks into really small rocks, and then repeating every day for years on end.

 

That's true... 90% of the recruiters are full of B.S. However, I will say that in their defense it'd be impossible to be 100% honest because the military will change whatever they want whenever they want... for people who don't know this, when you join the military you become government property, yes that's right they own you, if you get a sunburn and it interferes with your ability to work you can be citied for fines, hard labor etc, for what's called "Destruction of Government Property".... whatever a recruiter tells you can and will change... Some stuff they do imbelish upon a bit much but it'd be impossible to tell someone exactly what was going to happen....