After days of discreet phone calls, Jason Elysse flew from Boston to meet a drug dealer at a busy IHOP in Hialeah, Fla. Over hot chocolate and scrambled eggs, they discussed the surging price of street drugs and a plan for Mr. Elysse to buy at least a kilogram of cocaine.
To grease the wheels, the dealer insisted that Mr. Elysse take a free baggie of the stuff to try after leaving the pancake house. Like a sample at Costco, the dealer would later testify.
Mr. Elysse left with the bag. It’s not clear if he tested the product himself, but it was apparently good enough: A few days later, he showed up to a meeting to buy the full kilogram.
Once he got there, detectives were waiting. The generous dealer was actually an undercover detective with the Hialeah police. Mr. Elysse was arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking.
It was a typical sting operation, in all ways but one. The sample on offer was not flour or baby powder. It was real cocaine.
Now, years later, Mr. Elysse’s conviction has been overturned and the curtain has been pulled back on a long-running operation in which narcotics detectives in Hialeah regularly handed out real cocaine as samples during investigations, often losing track of the drugs.
The judge overseeing the case, Milton Hirsch of the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, cited the practice in overturning Mr. Elysse’s conviction in April. State law, the judge wrote, does not allow officers to “stand on the street corner, or sit in the IHOP, and hand out free cocaine.”
The judge found that the Hialeah Police Department had regularly been putting cocaine “on the streets of Florida and, inevitably, into the veins of Floridians.” He noted that detectives could not tell him “if a child died from ingestion of the cocaine that they gave away.”
The unusual ruling was the latest twist in a South Florida corruption saga involving a prolific informant, a police chief now facing charges related to the undercover drug stings, and a city eager to shake its reputation for bending the rules of law enforcement.
Detectives posing as drug dealers — a tactic known as a reverse sting — is legal and not new, although defense lawyers often criticize it as entrapment.
A spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office said in a statement that prosecutors would not appeal Judge Hirschs’s ruling for legal reasons unrelated to the cocaine samples. The spokesman, Ed Griffith, defended the practice of providing samples of drugs such as marijuana or cocaine as a way to help build broad cases against criminal organizations and “gain the trust” of the would-be buyers.
He added a caveat: “Of course, this would never be done with a substance as dangerous as fentanyl or a whole host of other substances.”
The Hialeah Police Department declined to respond to a list of questions.
Detectives typically use sham drugs in reverse stings, unless they can immediately recover them, said Chris Foreman, the director of training and development for the National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition. The risk of letting real drugs circulate in the community is too high, he said.
“It is highly irregular that you would let real drugs walk out and not be accountable for where they end up,” Mr. Foreman said.
Hialeah has long been known for blue-collar grit, traffic jams and its sizable Cuban American population. Fairly or not, Hialeah is also known for police misconduct, something that rankles city leaders.
Earlier this year, Mayor Bryan Calvo threatened legal action against the makers of the Netflix movie “The Rip” over its fictional depiction of Hialeah police officers who steal millions of dollars in cash from a drug dealer’s home. The movie is loosely based on a real story — but one that did not happen in Hialeah or involve its police force.
Still, over the past decade, Hialeah officers have been convicted in cases of kidnapping, writing bogus traffic tickets and sexually exploiting women in custody.
Last year, state agents arrested Sergio Velazquez, a former chief of the Hialeah Police Department, on allegations that he stole cash seized during police drug stings and squirreled it away in his office. Mr. Velazquez, who held the position from 2012 to 2021, has pleaded not guilty to charges of grand theft, money laundering and organized fraud.
Many of the department’s drug money seizures were arranged by a confidential informant who was arrested in 1987 as part of Operation Pisces, a landmark undercover investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration targeting the empire of the Colombian narcotics trafficker Pablo Escobar.
After going to prison and testifying against fellow traffickers, the man spent time in the federal witness protection program, and then became a “professional informant” in Florida, according to court filings and testimony.
The informant’s work with the Hialeah police, for which he received about 25 percent of seized drug money, led to the arrest of more than 100 people over the years in Miami-Dade County, according to court records.
They included Mr. Elysse.
A few days after receiving the cocaine sample from the undercover detective at the IHOP in June 2020, the police said, Mr. Elysse showed up to a second meeting at a warehouse, intending to buy a kilogram of cocaine. Hialeah police officers then arrested him. A jury convicted Mr. Elysse of felony trafficking and conspiracy three years later.
After the trial, Mr. Elysse’s lawyers accused the Hialeah police of improperly hiding the identity and criminal past of the informant. They also accused the informant of secretly employing his own brother in Colombia to help find targets for sting operations, and using coercive tactics to entrap defendants in Hialeah.
“The police were creating crime in order to seize money,” said Matlin Brown, an assistant public defender who represented Mr. Elysse. “And here, the money was going into the police chief’s pocket.”
But what drew Judge Hirsch’s ire was the Police Department’s practice of handing out of real cocaine in sting operations, which echoed a scandal from decades earlier.
In the early 1990s, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the Broward Sheriff’s Office broke the law by manufacturing its own crack cocaine to use in reverse stings. In its ruling, the court expressed alarm that the sheriff’s office lost track of a “significant portion” of the crack cocaine.
“The police simply cannot account for all of the rocks which are made for the purpose of the reverse stings,” the justices wrote.
Just last week, prosecutors in Broward County announced they were tossing out the criminal convictions of 42 people arrested during those stings in the 1980s and ’90s. Hundreds still had related arrests and convictions on their records, prosecutors said; their investigation was unrelated to the Hialeah case.
In overturning Mr. Elysse’s conviction, Judge Hirsch found that Hialeah police officers had violated his due process rights.
During a hearing in January, the judge pressed a Hialeah police detective on the practice. The detective acknowledged that the department may have given out samples totaling a quarter of a kilogram of cocaine over the years.
According to a transcript, Judge Hirsch was incredulous.
“It was just a risk you took,” he asked, “as part of doing business?”
The post The Detectives Posed as Dealers. The Cocaine They Peddled Was Real. appeared first on New York Times.
