The "Drug Wars" (19)- Ravenna, Italy 1984

Ravenna, Italy-October 13, 1984
Guardia di Finanza/DEA (Gary Fouse is on far right)


In October, 1984, our DEA office in Milan, Italy was notified that Italian Customs officials in the eastern port of Ravenna had discovered approximately a ton of Middle Eastern hash contained in a ship container in transshipment, destination New York.

As we responded to Ravenna, we notified DEA in New York and began arrangements for a "controlled delivery" of the shipment to its intended recipients, who were, as yet, unidentified. A controlled delivery entails arranging for the shipment to proceed to its recipient, who would then be arrested upon delivery.

In this case, Italian law precluded allowing seized drugs to leave the country-for whatever purpose. Yet, a controlled delivery would still be possible with a small representative sample in the shipment.

The problem was that the local prosecutor was a stickler for details. Not only would he not allow the hash to leave Italy, he would not even allow a representative sample to be kept in the shipment. At any rate, we went ahead and helped the Italians unload the hash, which we intended to substitute with sand.

Then the prosecutor (who was continually present at the site) found some obscure law that said not even Italian sand could be shipped out the country!! (He finally relented and turned his back while we loaded a ton of sand into the container.) While we were doing that, some of us scraped up some hash residue from the floor and tossed it into the container-thus giving us our representative sample.

Finally, once we had packed the sand into the shipping container, for identification purposes, we all marked our initials in an obscure part of the inside of the container in case we were called to testify in New York.

Testify in New York??!!?

You should have seen the Italian cops line up to scribble their initials. The commander, not content to write his initials, proceeded to write his full name, rank, biographical history, and contact details.

So off went the shipment to New York, with DEA and Customs waiting on the other end. As it turned out, upon arrival in New York, further shipment to Ontario, Canada was arranged by the recipients-who were finally arrested in Canada when they arrived to pick up the cargo. It turned out they were a group of Filipinos living in Canada.

And no, no one ever got to go to Canada and testify.