Nicky Barnes was “Mr. Untouchable.” That’s how he, a brazen narcotics kingpin from Harlem, was identified on a cover of The New York Times Magazine in June 1977, and for good reason. He had been arrested more than a dozen times at that point, but the charges had rarely stuck.
Mr. Barnes was so brimming with bravado that when he was told by the magazine editors that his police mug shot would run with the profile, he agreed to pose for a formal, more flattering portrait.
But his good fortune was about to run out, thanks in part to the undercover investigative efforts of Louis Diaz, a fearless, fractious agent for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and a Brooklyn-born former boxer. His work helped ensure Mr. Barnes’s conviction that December and a sentence of life in prison — a penalty demanded by federal prosecutors, who had been galvanized by their bosses in Washington.
Many months earlier, President Jimmy Carter had become so incensed that a drug lord was cavalierly violating the law — getting away with murder, in fact — that he ordered the Justice Department to, figuratively, place a target on Mr. Barnes’s back.
The attorney general energized the D.E.A., which enlisted Mr. Diaz to go under cover. His superiors deliberately chose a white man because, they figured, Mr. Barnes would be expecting his heroin-trafficking ring to be infiltrated by an agent who, like him, was Black.
Posing as a part-time hit man and the cousin of a mob wannabe, and tooling around New York in a garish yellow Cadillac, Mr. Diaz used Mr. Barnes’s own henchmen to insinuate himself into the ring, headquartered in Harlem. The operation had imported tons of heroin and had laundered tens of millions of dollars in drug profits.
His stakeouts and taped conversations were instrumental in the federal prosecution of Mr. Barnes and his co-conspirators.
One dealer who suspected that Mr. Diaz was a government informant once held a .45 caliber handgun to his head. Mr. Diaz didn’t blanch.
“If you have any reservations about who I am, you might as well pull the trigger now,” he said, recalling the incident in a memoir. The dealer, convinced by Mr. Diaz’s daring, replied, “You gotta be real,” and uncocked his gun.
With the D.E.A., Mr. Diaz was also instrumental in sabotaging a Colombian drug cartel and destroying heroin labs in Bolivia. After being transferred to Los Angeles, he parlayed the Hollywood contacts he cultivated while there into a side career as an actor.
He died on May 12 at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif. He was 79. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Maria Jose Diaz, said.
Dominic Amorosa, a former federal prosecutor, said of Mr. Diaz in an interview, “He was a courageous, brilliant undercover agent who put his life on the line repeatedly.”
Luis Diaz was born on Feb. 25, 1946, in Brooklyn. His father, Alfonso Diaz Canellada, was a Spanish-born dockworker and newspaper delivery supervisor. His mother was Enriquetta Diaz, who was known as Henrietta. The family lived over an Italian deli in the Red Hook neighborhood.
His father belittled and beat him with “volcanic rage,” Mr. Diaz recalled, and he grew up rebellious and sometimes volatile, too, in seeking to prove himself. Luis joined a street gang when he was 12 and took up boxing in his teens, winning Golden Gloves honors.
“I promised myself about what kind of man I would become in this world,” he wrote in “Dancing With the Devil: Confessions of an Undercover Agent” (2010), a gritty memoir that he wrote with the journalist Neal Hirschfeld. “Gentle and compassionate on the inside, fierce on the outside.”
Mr. Diaz graduated from Most Holy Trinity High School in Brooklyn in 1963, served in the U.S. Army in Germany and later earned an associate of arts degree from Queensborough Community College.
Through it all, he retained the volatility he had displayed as a youth. When his first wife, Iris Maldonado, whom he had married in 1968, died of a brain aneurysm in 1997, Mr. Diaz was so angry at God that he smashed the statue of the Virgin Mary on the family’s front lawn.
He married Maria Jose Rodriguez in 2000. In addition to her, he is survived by their two children, Maria and Luis Jr.; his brothers Rigel and Alfonsito; and several grandchildren.
After college, seeking the security of a civil service job, Mr. Diaz applied to the New York Police Department but was rejected because he was one inch shorter than the 5-foot-8 height requirement at the time (although later, as a federal agent, he won a boxing gold medal as a welterweight in the International Police Olympics).
Spurned by the police, he worked for a phone company, as a drug counselor and in other jobs. But he kept alive his law-enforcement ambitions, and after a chance meeting with the undercover police detectives who broke the “French Connection” global heroin-trafficking case in the late 1960s, he joined the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 1972. He moved to the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1975.
Soon, he was on the heels of Nicky Barnes. After his conviction and sentencing, Mr. Barnes turned government informant and was released into the federal witness protection program in 1998. He died at 78 in 2012.
Mr. Diaz was transferred from New York to California in 1985, and there, he continued to impersonate Sicilians, Colombians and Cubans as what he called an “undercover actor.”
His escapades included a joint operation with Scotland Yard that resulted in a drug bust in England that involved one of the masterminds of the 1963 “Great Train Robbery.” He went on perilous missions to Bolivia to dismantle drug labs. And he participated in “Operation Pisces,” which crippled the Colombian-based Medellín drug cartel with the seizure of tons of cocaine and $100 million in cash and the arrests of hundreds of cartel soldiers.
Even before he was named chief of technical operations for the D.E.A. in Los Angeles, Mr. Diaz stumbled into a second career as an actor. He took acting lessons and developed friendships in the movie industry that led to numerous parts in films and television series under the stage name Lou Casal (he thought it sounded less ethnic).
He appeared in episodes of “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” “L.A. Heat” and “Arliss” and in crime thriller movies like “Maniac Cop III” (1992), “Dangerous Waters” (1994) and “Pure Danger” (1996).
“When it came to playing mobsters in particular, I had no difficulty at all getting into character,” Mr. Diaz wrote. “I already was that guy.”
Until his children were grown, they were told that their father drove a truck for a living. His first wife knew whom he worked for, but the criminals he dealt with daily were never the wiser.
Still, the work had him continually on edge. Mr. Diaz kept a loaded handgun under his pillow, he said, and had a 110-pound German shepherd named Lady for protection, though the only person she ever attacked was the letter carrier.
“You can be cool on the job, but there’s nothing you can do about the nightmares,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1996, the year he retired from government. “You can’t control the haunts.”
Mr. Diaz said when he first encountered Mr. Barnes at a Harlem rendezvous, he felt terror. When he ran into Mr. Barnes at his trial at the United States Court House in Lower Manhattan, he said he felt pity. Their brief exchange, as he recalled in his memoir, said something about honor among thieves.
“Hey, Nicky,” Mr. Diaz said. “Nothing personal. You did what you had to do. I did what I had to do.”
“Knowing this,” Mr. Barnes replied, “I understand it.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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