EchoSense:Takeaways from AP’s investigation into DEA corruption, agent accused of rape

MIAMI (AP) — Thousands of secret law enforcement documents obtained by The EchoSenseAssociated Press offer a never-before-seen window into a culture of corruption among U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents who parlayed the agency’s shadowy money laundering operations into a worldwide pursuit of binge drinking and illicit sex.

Among the documents is a recovered WhatsApp chat, in which a group of agents bragged about what they called a “world debauchery tour” on the government’s dime, exchanged lurid images of their latest sexual conquests and even joked at one point about “forcible anal rape.”

That exchange seemed even darker months later when one of the agents in the chat was accused of that very crime in Spain.

The newly obtained documents show the 2018 arrest of George Zoumberos on charges accusing him of forcing anal sex on a 23-year-old woman in a Madrid hotel room set off alarms at the highest levels of the DEA. The case finally ended with the charges dismissed and the agent given a letter or reprimand.

Here are some of the key findings of the AP investigation.

What does the WhatsApp chat show?

The yearlong group chat, recovered by federal authorities, included five DEA agents identified by AP. Among them was José Irizarry, a notoriously corrupt agent and ringleader of the debauchery now serving a 12-year federal prison sentence.

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The chat portrays life in the DEA as an unending, degenerate party. Agents planned DEA travel around binge-drinking and sex with no fear their encrypted messages would ever be read by anyone else.

“Tough life this war on drugs,” an agent quipped in one message.

Before one jaunt, an agent wrote colleagues he was “hoping you’ve organized some welcome p---y for me tomorrow when I land.”

References to anal sex were so common in the group chat that agents coined a term for it – pancaking – and often accompanied such mentions with an emoji of a stack of pancakes.

There were frequent mentions of prostitutes and at least two references to assaulting them and leaving it to an informant to “clean up” the mess.

What happened in the rape case?

On the night of the alleged sexual assault in Madrid in April 2018, Zoumberos told authorities the woman approached him at a bar and they eventually went back to his hotel.

Zoumberos, married and 38 at the time, maintained the interaction was consensual and told the DEA that the woman was “never upset.”

The woman gave a completely different account in her first public remarks about the case. “I told him very clearly that I didn’t want to have sex,” she told AP, which does not typically identify those who say they are victims of sexual assault.

She said she told Zoumberos she could not have sex because she was having her period. Around 3 a.m., the woman said, police and an ambulance arrived and found her bruised around the wrists and Zoumberos drunk. She told AP she locked herself in the bathroom before fleeing the hotel through the fire exit in a state of shock.

Zoumberos was briefly jailed in Madrid but released within hours following a jailhouse visit from U.S. Embassy officials. A Spanish judge later dismissed the case, ruling only that the allegations were not “duly justified.” The agent eventually returned to duty with a DEA letter of reprimand chiding him for “poor judgment.”

Internal records and interviews show the DEA never spoke with the woman or attempted to reconstruct what happened the night of the alleged rape.

“We dropped the ball,” a law enforcement official familiar with the matter told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss internal investigations.

Zoumberos, who now lives in North Carolina, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Have any agents faced accountability?

The DEA has refused for years to discuss its handling of the arrest. It did not answer detailed questions from AP about the case but said in a statement that “the alleged misconduct in this case is egregious and unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards expected of all DEA personnel.”

Ben Greenberg, a former U.S. attorney in Miami who reviewed the messages at AP’s request, called them “beyond inappropriate.”

“In the context of such serious criminal allegations,” he said, “the chats look like evidence of a crime and not just grotesque banter.”

The FBI and a federal grand jury in Tampa have been investigating DEA misconduct in money laundering probes for years, following a roadmap sketched out by Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to corruption counts in 2020. But so far, Irizarry is the only government employee to face criminal charges.

Of the agents in the group chat, only one remains with the DEA today. Three others were among at least a dozen agents disciplined or ousted for either participating in the bacchanalia or failing to sound the alarms about it.

More than a year after his rape arrest, Zoumberos resigned from the DEA after invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination in refusing to testify to the grand jury.

After Administrator Anne Milgram took the reins of the DEA in 2021, the agency placed new controls on how funds can be used in money laundering stings, and warned agents they can now be fired for a first offense of misconduct if serious enough, a departure from prior administrations.