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Old 11-20-2009, 07:19 PM
Borderwatch Borderwatch is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2009
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Default UPDATE: Johnny Sutton and the House of Death

It was rumored that the price Mexico extracted from the United States to keep quiet about the US' involvement in the House if Death in Juarez, included the Prosecution of Ramos and Compean.

Now some congressmen are suggesting an investigation may be in order,

This is a complicated but important story

http://www.examiner.com/x-10317-San-...er-and-amnesty

http://www.examiner.com/x-10317-San-...murder-coverup

Or

Original Story:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue33/article962.html

The House of Death
IMAGE: Johhny Sutton: House of Death
U.S. Prosecutors Protect an Informant Who Killed Mexican Citizens, as Two DEA Agents Barely Escaped Alive

By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

April 22, 2004

Mexican state police Commander Miguel Loya Gallegos disappeared in January.

Several of his associates disappeared, too, vexing law enforcement agents who say their mysterious disappearance – and consequent unavailability as potential witnesses to multiple murders – could prove very convenient to U.S. prosecutors and a confidential informant under their protection.

U.S. law enforcement agents, coming forward on the condition of anonymity, believe that the comandante – the U.S. Attorney indicted him in Texas as part of an alleged drug-smuggling organization – was witness to up to nine murders committed by a confidential informant while that informant was on the payroll of the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Those same law enforcement sources don’t know if Loya is dead or alive, but they fear he is probably dead: If he were alive, they say, the comandante’s testimony linking the informant to the murders could derail two high profile, priority, cases currently being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

But the commander was last seen in the Mexican city of Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and his assistants, are nowhere to be found.

The disappearance of these potential witnesses raises just some of the troubling unanswered questions involving the bizarre case against 49-year-old Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, who, U.S. prosecutors allege, is a top lieutenant in Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’ Juarez drug organization.

Santillan is currently in prison in El Paso, Texas. He is charged with cocaine and marijuana smuggling along with five counts of murder allegedly carried out as part of a continuing criminal enterprise – a crime that can get him a death sentence in the U.S. justice system.

The confidential informant, who allegedly had attained high standing within the Juarez organization, played a critical role in snaring Santillan.

The same informant, according to law enforcement sources, also played a crucial role in a separate case that resulted in a 92-count federal indictment against 19 people allegedly involved in a scheme to smuggle $37 million worth of black-market cigarettes into the United States. The supposed ringleader of that racket, according to a federal indictment unsealed in late January of this year, was 34-year-old Jorge Abraham of Sunland Park, N.M. – a quadriplegic who also is facing federal charges for marijuana smuggling.

“This informant was key to making both of these cases,” one law enforcement official contends. “That’s why he is so well taken care of to this day.”
The House of Death

At stake in this tale of treachery and murder are not only the Santillan and Abraham legal cases, but also the moral convictions of multiple law enforcement sources. They have come forward to tell this story to Narco News, they say, as a matter of conscience.

Between August 2003 and mid-January of 2004, a dozen people were murdered and buried in the yard of a house in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border city of 1.2 million people.

Santillan and his cronies controlled the house. This group included the informant, known only as “Lalo,” who was on the payroll of the U.S. Immigration and Customs agency (which is part of the new Homeland Security department that was created in 2002 through a merger of various law enforcement agencies).

The informant, over the past six years, under guidance of U.S. officials, had wormed his way into a high standing with Santillan’s operation. During all this time, say the law enforcement sources, he was on the U.S. government payroll. He would be contacted whenever Santillan determined there was a need to “open up the house.”

The informant, “Lalo,” say the law enforcement whistleblowers, even brought the tape and the lime used to help dispose of the bodies. The law enforcement sources believe that he was at the death house during up to nine of the 12 murders known to have taken place there. Most of those killed were allegedly Mexican drug dealers, except for one individual, who was a U.S. citizen – “some kid from Socorro, Texas, just south of El Paso,” says one law enforcement source.

The Santillan organization, say law enforcers, used the house as a chamber of horrors to extract information from people through torture. The victims included competing smugglers who made the mistake of trying to run drugs through Juarez, or Santillan underlings suspected of stealing the boss’ dope. These individuals would be brought to the house and tortured until they gave up the locations of the stash houses where they kept the drugs, mainly marijuana. The victims would then be killed and buried in the back yard of the death house.

The informant, say the law enforcement sources, participated in many of the murders – on at least one occasion wearing a wire for his U.S. police agency handlers. But they believe that the key player overseeing the House of Death was 35-year-old Miguel Loya-Gallegos, a night-shift comandante with the state police of Chihuahua, Mexico; the indicted, but disappeared, co-defendant in the Santillan case.

The law enforcement sources contend that Loya and what they called “his death squad” of a dozen or more state police agents were on Santillan’s payroll. His men ran the murder machine, using their cover as law-enforcement officials, their badges, to pull people into the death house.

The informant was the middleman for Santillan. He opened the death house when needed and was, they say, the go-between for providing payments to Loya. During all this, the informant also was passing information onto his ICE handlers.

The informant had been on the payroll of ICE (and its predecessor agency, U.S. Customs) since the late 1990s. The informant also worked for DEA for a short time, but was “deactivated” by the agency in July 2003 – after he was caught trying to run 200 kilos of grass across the border. That bust never showed up on his record, though, as drug trafficking charges were conveniently not pursued by U.S. prosecutors, allowing the informant to continue working for ICE.

The informant’s handlers at ICE in El Paso became aware of the death house at least by August of 2003, when the informant told his handlers that he had participated in a murder there, a murder that was caught on tape because the informant was wearing a wire that day. At that point, DEA officials, who were clued into the ICE operation, wanted to make Mexican officials aware of the murder and to pull in the ropes on Santillan and the ICE sting.

However, officials with ICE and the U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to shut the investigation down. The reason, according to multiple sources, was that exposing the informant’s participation in the murder would have crashed not only the Santillan sting, but also the Abraham cigarette-smuggling case – because the same informant was a key player in making both cases.

The refusal to close down the Santillan investigation and inform the Mexican government of the murder did not sit well with a number of U.S. law-enforcement officials familiar with the case.

“What’s more important, murder or a cigarette case?” one source asks. “Where do they draw the line?”

From the time of that first murder in August 2003 until mid-January 2004, as many as 11 more people were tortured and killed in the house, with the informant participating in and reporting to his ICE handlers many of those additional murders.\
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