The DEA Once Turned A 14-Year-Old Into A Drug Kingpin. Welcome To The War On Drugs

The Drug Enforcement Administration was established under the Justice Department in 1973 by President Richard Nixon. Its mission was to keep the nation off and away from drugs, which, at least according to the White House, were a moral evil and catalyst of criminal behavior. The agency was formed just two years after Nixon launched what became known as the "war on drugs." Congress and the rest of the nation remained convinced that the scourge of narcotics and drug abusers -- and perhaps particularly those who were young, poor or black -- was pounding at the gates. Over the next four decades, with most drug policy now firmly in the grips of law enforcement officials, the DEA's annual budget saw a fortyfold increase, going from a paltry $75 million to nearly $3 billion in 2014.

With more than 11,000 employees and a host of responsibilities, the agency's activity has expanded worldwide, all the while attracting scrutiny from critics of the drug war who contend that the DEA is an ineffective agency that uses controversial tools to enforce often misguided or unjust federal drug laws. 

The catalog of controversies below helps explain why the public has often questioned the DEA's priorities, as well as the methods it employs to advance them. While the DEA does its best to keep many of its dealings out of the public eye -- it regularly claims secrecy is imperative to the success of its anti-drug operations -- here are some of the most sketchy, messed up things that we know it has done:

The DEA claimed Prohibition was a success.

Most historians believe the "noble experiment" of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s backfired, creating a myriad of negative unintended consequences and serving as a lesson about the hazards of governing public morals. The DEA, however, tells a different story. In 2010, the DEA and the International Association of Chiefs of Police released a report providing key arguments against drug legalization. In one passage, first highlighted by the Republic Report, the report set out to combat what it called the "myth" that "prohibition didn’t work in the 20’s and it doesn’t work now." Its main argument was that the 18th Amendment didn't go far enough to restrict the manufacturing and consumption of alcohol at the onset of Prohibition. 

Citing figures that suggest there was a decline in alcohol use during that 13-year period -- statistics that are regularly contested and impossible to verify -- the document argues that Prohibition was a successful policy. The report also downplayed the secondary effects of banning alcohol, such as the precipitous rise of organized crime, at one point suggesting that those effects were increasing before the enactment of Prohibition. 

A sample of the DEA's report.

Unsurprisingly, the report made no mention of the clear negative parallels between early-20th century Prohibition laws and today's laws that target drugs. In both cases, strict prohibition has taken away resources from treatment for addiction and abuse, overburdened court systems and jails, fostered corruption in law enforcement, propped up organized crime and even, some argue, created a damaging disrespect for the rule of law. In return, these incredibly costly enforcement experiments have largely failed to actually limit people's consumptive habits.

The DEA imprisoned an innocent suspect in a holding cell for five days without food or water.

In 2012, 24-year-old Daniel Chong was detained by DEA agents in San Diego after his friend's house was targeted by a drug raid. Chong was told there were no plans to charge him and that he'd be released the same day. But he wasn't released, and agents who heard or saw him over the next five days did nothing, each believing he was somebody else's responsibility. Chong was trapped in a windowless 5-by-10 enclosure without food or water, all for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he was finally discovered, he was incoherent and required medical attention. He said he'd drank his own urine to survive, and at one point attempted suicide. At some point, Chong began to carve "sorry mom" into his arm with broken glass from his eyeglasses, which he ate before being released.

Chong, seen during an interview with NBC San Diego in 2012.

The ordeal ultimately ended in a $4.1 million settlement for Chong. Shortly thereafter, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General released a report excoriating top DEA officials not only for the incident itself, but also for failing to immediately report it to their office.

A DEA agent shot himself in a classroom full of children.

Anyone who's spent too much time watching viral videos is familiar with this one:

In April 2004, DEA agent Lee Paige was giving a gun safety demonstration to a classroom full of children when he delivered this now-famous line: "I am the only one in the room professional enough, that I know of, to carry this Glock 40." Moments later, he shot himself in the foot. Rather than take the embarrassing incident in stride (or limp?), Paige eventually sued the DEA, claiming the agency had released the video footage of him. After a prolonged legal battle, he lost the suit.

DEA agents have lost their guns in weird places, including an airport bathroom.

At least Paige knew where his gun was when he shot his foot. An ABC News report in 2008 found that the DEA lost 91 weapons from 2002 to 2007, often in humiliating, or at least seemingly implausible, fashion. Guns were left in supermarkets, at bars, or on top of vehicles; they were stolen from hotel rooms and purses. One "may have fallen into trash basket at work," according to the report. Fighting the war on drugs is apparently not always very precise work.

In 2012, the lapses turned downright dangerous when one DEA agent left his loaded Glock in a crowded airport bathroom beyond the security checkpoint.

A DEA agent left important case documents lying around a suspect's house.

By now we know the DEA has had trouble keeping track of its weapons, and apparently that carelessness also can occasionally extend to physical evidence in the cases it's pursuing. According to a report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner earlier this month, an agent accidentally left key documents about a methamphetamine case in the house of a suspect he was arresting. Later, the suspect's father (who was also a suspect in the drug raid) found the documents, which contained information about a confidential DEA informant who had helped build the case. The father angrily contacted the informant, according to reports, and the confrontation eventually led to the father's arrest as well. 

While a DEA spokeswoman has since said that the agency is dedicated to its undercover source's "safety and wellbeing," it's obvious that the original agent's negligence put the informant in needless danger. 

A DEA agent impersonated a woman by creating a fake Facebook profile in her name.

Earlier this month, BuzzFeed reported on the case of Sondra Arquiett, a 28-year-old New York woman who recently sued the DEA in federal court after an agent impersonated her on Facebook. The agent created an entire fake profile purporting to belong to Arquiett, using personal information and pictures taken from her cell phone following Arquiett's arrest in a cocaine case. He even posted status updates and pictures of her and her children. 

The Justice Department defended the sting, through which agents reportedly hoped to extract incriminating information from friends of Arquiett who might be involved with drugs. The Facebook page was eventually taken down, and the Justice Department announced that it was reviewing the tactics. Facebook later told the DEAto stop violating its policies with this bizarre scheme. 

Corrupt DEA agents made millions off the drugs they were supposed to be taking off the street.

Giving anybody access to drugs worth millions of dollars can pose problems. But when those same people have spent years familiarizing themselves with networks that know how to turn drugs into profit, there's a clear potential for abuse.

DEA corruption was particularly rampant in the late 1980s. Much of this corruption was run-of-the-mill, such as DEA agents ripping off dealers for cash and drugs, which went largely unreported. But a number of more flamboyant scandals also surfaced, damaging the reputation of the agency.

In one notorious case, DEA agents were caught stealing drugs from the agency's evidence vault. The agents gave the drugs to an informant, who sold them and sent at least $1 million in profits to the agents over five years. Later, the same agents, who reportedly spent this dirty money lavishly, also confessed to stealing bundles of cashfrom drug busts. 

Another case from two decades ago suggests that DEA corruption hasn't always been so blatant. In an undercover money-laundering operation in the 1990s that targeted narco-traffickers in Colombia, corrupt DEA operatives were regularly skimming cash from the pool of money they were supposed to be laundering, according to former agents with knowledge of the case. The agents' actions nearly got an informant killed, according to reports. One agent was found guilty of pocketing $700,000 during the operation and sentenced to two years in jail. He was the only person prosecuted as a result of the failed sting. Bill Conroy of the Narcosphere recently reported that $20 million is still unaccounted for in the case, which remains unresolved.

The DEA has terrorized and killed innocent people.

In 2003, 14-year-old Ashley Villarreal was shot in the head by a DEA agent while driving just blocks away from her San Antonio home. Agents who had been staking out the Villarreal household mistakenly believed the person in the car with the teen was her father, whom they suspected of dealing cocaine. Two days later, Villareal died. A few days after the shooting, Villareal's father was arrested on drug conspiracy charges. 

The agents never faced charges in the teen's death, even though testimony from witnesses and subsequent reports conflicted with official accounts of the incident. The details of this case are painful to read, but perhaps most upsetting is the fact that they aren't necessarily unique.

Pallbearers carry the casket of Ashley Villarreal following a funeral service. Villarreal, the daughter of a drug suspect, was shot and killed by federal agents. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Indeed, Villareal's case is an extreme example of what has become a trend of concerning incidents. As the DEA and other law enforcement agencies have ramped up their use of no-knock raids over the past 25 years, a pattern of disturbing behavior has emerged, with mistakes leading to the injuries and deaths of both civilians and law enforcement. Other times, the damage isn't physical. During a DEA raid in 2007, agents forced their way into a mobile home in California, allegedly shouting obscenities and pointing their guns at the heads of the 11- and 14-year-old girls asleep in the home. The girls were later handcuffed. A few hours later, agents realized they'd ransacked the wrong home. The family later filed a lawsuit claiming the DEA's actions constituted "intentional infliction of emotional distress."

The agency has even killed people on foreign soil.

DEA agents working with local authorities on a Honduran anti-drug mission shot and killed smuggling suspects in two separate incidents over the course of a few weeks in 2012. In both cases, officials claimed the suspects were armed and refusing to surrender, but the episodes nonetheless underscored emerging concerns about the DEA's respect for Honduran sovereignty.

Those killings came just a month after DEA agents took part in an anti-smuggling operation that led to the deaths of four innocent Hondurans, including a pregnant woman. Honduran police initially called the mission a success, but an investigation by journalists and human rights activists later revealed the truth -- the victims of the anti-drug operation that night were on a boat entirely unconnected to the supposed smuggling activity. U.S. officials defended the DEA's involvement, claiming agents didn't fire any rounds during the mission, but the incident sparked aggressive local protests calling for the DEA to leave the area.

Members of Congress later called for a further investigation into the episode and, specifically, the role DEA agents played. But the DEA declined to open an investigation. Months later, reports suggested the agency had not cooperated with local authorities investigating the incident, which led Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) to ask earlier this year: "Could U.S. agents engaged in the 'war on drugs' abroad operate without any sort of accountability?"

The DEA raided a woman's house because she'd shopped at a garden store.

In 2013, agents raided the Illinois home of Angela Kirking after a trip to a garden store led the DEA to flag her as a potential marijuana grower. Kirking said she'd only purchased fertilizer for her hibiscus plant, but this was enough to get her caught up in an operation that involved monitoring garden stores in search of suspects who might be cultivating marijuana.

The DEA obtained a warrant to investigate Kirking, tracking her electricity consumption and digging through her trash to find a small quantity of marijuana stems. That was apparently enough to authorize a raid. When agents stormed into Kirking's house, they found a small baggie of weed, enough only for a misdemeanor charge.

The DEA once tried to ban pacifiers and glow sticks, claiming they were "drug paraphernalia."

In a prime example of the extreme lengths to which the DEA can go to combat drug use, the agency attempted in 2001 to ban popular symbols of rave culture at a prominent New Orleans club that had become associated with Ecstasy. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint, arguing that items such as masks, glow sticks and pacifiers were not "drug paraphernalia" as the DEA claimed, because they played no part in the actual ingestion of any drugs. A federal judge ultimately barred the DEA from enacting such restrictions, finding that "the government cannot ban inherently legal objects that are used in expressive communication because a few people use the same legal item to enhance the effects of an illegal substance."

The agency is so unwilling to reconsider some of its outdated policies that the DEA chief once refused to acknowledge that marijuana is less harmful than crack and heroin.

For all of the sketchy things the DEA has done while waging the drug war, perhaps most upsetting to critics is the agency's often stubborn insistence that the war should be fought with the same aggressiveness on all fronts. 

Earlier this year, the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group dedicated to drug law reform, issued a report showing how the DEA has systematically rejected scientific evidence in order to maintain current prohibitive drug scheduling laws. The report cited a number of cases in which the DEA has undermined, ignored or circumvented research suggesting that marijuana and MDMA, or Ecstasy, don't belong in DEA's Schedule I, a category for substances with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse or severe psychological or physical dependence. 

The agency's unwillingness to reconsider its policies in the face of countervailing scientific evidence was perhaps best demonstrated when DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart testified before Congress in June 2012. In her testimony, Leonhart refused to answer the seemingly straightforward and obvious question of whether heroin or crack are worse for a person's health than marijuana. State and local governments are increasingly acknowledging through policy shifts that marijuana is less harmful than those more potent drugs. But the DEA has insisted on treating marijuana with equal severity. Admitting that it is, in fact, less harmful could have been especially awkward for Leonhart, considering the DEA at the time was in the midst of an aggressive crackdown on medical marijuana facilities.

Raids on legal marijuana facilities have slowed in recent years, and Leonhart's stance on the drug war has appeared increasingly at odds with the more progressive views of Attorney General Eric Holder. Still, the DEA chief recently suggested that the push toward legalization only drives the agency to "fight harder."

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart takes part in a news conference at DEA headquarters in Arlington, Va., Thursday, July 26, 2012. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

The DEA again showed its rigidity in the drug war earlier this year when Kentucky legalized the cultivation of hemp, a plant that is related to cannabis but lacks the psychoactive ingredient that produces a high. With Kentucky expecting a shipment of 250 pounds of hemp seeds from Italy, the DEA stepped in, impounding the shipment and claiming the importation was still illegal because under current federal drug law, both hemp and cannabis are considered Schedule I substances. After a brief legal battle, the DEA released the shipment.

Americans spent approximately $100 billion a year on illegal drugs between 2000 and 2010, according to a 2012 report published by the RAND corporation. Part of the Drug Enforcement Administration's job, alongside several other law enforcement agencies, is to make that process more difficult at home, where harsh federal drug laws have ensured that such transactions are conducted -- until recently, in some states -- entirely on the black market. The DEA also works to cut off imported illicit drugs at the source, which means mounting operations around the world to tackle a global drug trade that generates $322 billion annually, according to UN estimates.

It's a gargantuan task. Critics of the war on drugs say it's an impossible one. Over 40 years, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion in the fight. Thousands of people on both sides of the battle have lost their lives. In the end, it's led only to cheaper, higher quality drugs at home and abroad, and by most accounts, little change in the number of people using them. While the momentum may finally be shifting away from an enforcement-first national drug policy and toward prevention and treatment, aggressive enforcement of the nation's drug laws doesn't appear to be going anywhere just yet.

Until the nation drastically rethinks its approach on drugs, the DEA will continue to play an integral part in the war against them, and that sometimes means resorting to controversial tactics. Below, find out how domestic spying, broken promises and a 14-year-old from Detroit have all played a part in that seemingly endless struggle.

The DEA has been spying on U.S. citizens with a surveillance program more expansive than the NSA's.

Just months after Edward Snowden unmasked the National Security Agency's massive domestic spying program, The New York Times broke news of the Hemisphere Project, which pairs experts from telecommunications giant AT&T with federal and local anti-drug officials, including DEA agents. It gives law enforcement officials access to "every call that passes through an AT&T switch -- not just those made by AT&T customers -- and includes calls dating back 26 years," according to the Times report. That's around 4 billion call records every day, each logged with information on the location of callers. The official government slideshow describing the program suggested it had been helpful in tracking drug dealers who frequently change phones, or use disposable "burner" phones.

The White House attempted to allay privacy concerns about the Hemisphere Project last year, noting that AT&T stores the collected data, unlike in the NSA's program, in which data is turned over to the government. Federal officials can quickly access the records, however, often within an hour of a subpoena.

The ACLU criticized the apparent secrecy of the program, which had been in existence for six years before being revealed by the Times in 2013. The organization suggested that blanket surveillance and close federal involvement could represent a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

"Hemisphere is deeply troubling, not only because the government is amassing detailed, comprehensive information about people who've done nothing wrong, but also because the government has deliberately kept Hemisphere secret, even from criminal defendants who've been subjected to the program," wrote ACLU attorney Linda Lye.

And the DEA instructs agents not to tell the truth about sources of key intelligence.

A Reuters report, also from 2013, detailed how the DEA's Special Operations Division, or SOD, teaches agents to cover up vital tips that come from the department. A DEA document obtained by Reuters shows that federal agents are trained in "parallel construction," in which essential intelligence obtained SOD wiretaps, informants or other surveillance methods can be concealed by crediting it to another source.

An unnamed former federal agent who received tips from the SOD gave an example of how the process worked: "You'd be told only, 'Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

If an arrest was made, agents were instructed to hide the fact that the initial tip had come from SOD, and instead use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information." This process is sometimes used to hide case details from prosecutors and judges, as well as defense attorneys. Several lawyers told Reuters that the practice could jeopardize a defendant's constitutional right to fair trial and cover up evidence that might otherwise be inadmissible.

DEA officials defended the technique, however, calling it a common law enforcement tool that allows the SOD to crack high-profile cases.

The DEA has confidential informants who have made it a lifetime career.

Confidential informants -- sometimes referred to as "snitches" -- are crucial assets in the DEA's war on drugs. In 2005, the agency told the Justice Department it has around 4,000 of these sources actively working for it at any given time. Many of these informants are recruited after being caught for drug crimes themselves, and are offered a chance to work for the DEA as a way to earn a reduced sentence. Others have made a full-time profession out of informing, a controversial practice in itself, as some critics suggest it encourages longtime informants to go after and potentially entrap low-level dealers rather than higher profile targets.

Informants can make tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars helping the government prosecute and convict drug dealers, with payment often contingent on how much money is seized in an eventual bust. That's how Andrew Chambers Jr. once made a name for himself as "the highest-paid snitch in DEA history," with a 16-year career as a federal informant between 1984 and 2000, during which time he reportedly netted as much as $4 million in government money, nearly half of it from the DEA. A report earlier this year in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that Chambers was only one of the agency's million-dollar informants.

Chambers, seen in a YouTube video from the Speakers Agency.

The "highest-paid snitch in DEA history" was also found to have lied repeatedly in testimony. Despite his reputation, he recently resumed work with the DEA.

Chambers' work with the DEA halted in 2000, after a review of testimony revealed he'd committed perjury in at least 16 cases, when he lied on the witness stand about his credentials. Agents who'd worked closely with Chambers during the time, however -- including Michele Leonhart, who became DEA administrator in 2010 -- spoke highly of him despite the criticism that made him a national story. Around the time of Leonhart's confirmation, the DEA reactivated Chambers as an informant.

While his current role with the DEA is unclear, legal professionals have expressed concerns beyond Chambers' record of perjury. Defense attorneys told the Arizona Republic that he regularly failed to record introductory meetings, which left open the possibility that he was entrapping suspects and compromising cases.

Shortly after news broke that Chambers had resumed working with the DEA, a case in which he served as the primary informant fell apart and federal prosecutors asked for the charges to be dismissed.

Confidential informants are given so much free rein that one top DEA source actually had his own sub-network of informants.

While the DEA has released information about the general size of the program and the basic guidelines under which it operates, less is known about exactly how -- and to what extent -- the agency controls its informants.

The perils of this ambiguity were exposed in 2004, when it was revealed that a star DEA informant was actually paying his own sub-informants to help him set up drug deals. In one case, in which this arrangement wasn't initially revealed to defense attorneys, a sub-informant made a number of calls to a defendant who would later be facing charges for trafficking methamphetamines. The calls weren't recorded, however, which opened up the possibility that the alleged meth trafficker had actually been pressured to go through with the deal that led to his arrest. A judge determined that this raised the possibility of entrapment and ordered federal prosecutors to release a full list of the cases in which the informant and sub-informant had collaborated. When the government refused, the judge threw out the indictment and freed the defendant, writing that the DEA had tried to "shield itself from accountability by hiring someone outside of law enforcement who is free to violate citizens' rights."

In a ruling explaining her decision, the judge also blasted the DEA, suggesting it was "highly unlikely" that it was unaware of the informant's sub-contractors. In an earlier case, the informant had testified that he'd never told his DEA handlers about his network, and that they'd never asked. 

The DEA allows informants to break the law, but have no records as to how often it happens.

Federal agencies came under fire in 2012 in the wake of the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal for not adequately tracking instances in which they authorize informants to commit crimes in the line of government duty. In the case of Fast and Furious, gun dealers working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sold 2,000 weapons to Mexican cartels, but failed to have them traced. In response to a USA Today report, both the ATF and DEA claimed they were "in compliance" with rules determining when they could advise their informants to break the law.

Both agencies also acknowledged that they didn't track how frequently they granted such permission.

Some congressional representatives have called for more accountability among federal agencies with regard to informants. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) sponsored an unsuccessful bill in 2013 that would have required federal agencies to report to lawmakers whenever an informant commits a serious crime, with or without authorization. 

One of America's most notorious terrorists once served as a DEA informant.

In 2013, David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani descent, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for plotting the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, which killed at least 164 people and wounded hundreds more. Government officials with knowledge of Headley's past spoke of a man who had grown increasingly radicalized in the years leading up to the attack, but subsequent reporting also followed up on his work as a confidential informant for the DEA between 1997 and 2005, according to sources.

The DEA, which sent Headley on a number of trips to gather intelligence on heroin traffickers in Pakistan, has denied that he was working officially with the agency as late as 2005, or at any time when he was receiving training at militant camps in the region.

An Indian soldier takes cover as the Taj Mahal hotel burns during gun battle between Indian military and militants in Mumbai, India. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)

Another informant allegedly shot and killed a man who confronted him for molesting his child.

Sometimes informants get caught doing unauthorized dirty deeds while on the agency's payroll. In Albuquerque, the DEA is facing a lawsuit claiming it was negligent in supervising an informant who allegedly shot and killed another man earlier this year. The informant has been charged in the man's death, as well as with criminal sexual penetration of a child under 13 and a host of other charges. The victim had allegedly confronted the informant over the sexual assault of his son when he was shot. The suit is seeking $50 million in damages, alleging that the informant had prior felony convictions and a history of violence and should not have been recruited by the DEA.

The DEA strung one informant along for 20 years with the promise of citizenship. She still hasn't received it.

When Norma was just 19 years old, she became a confidential informant for the DEA. She told her story to Yolanda Gonzalez Gomez as part of a partnership between New America Media and HuffPost Voces. Norma explained how desperation and the promise of citizenship led her to sign up for a commitment she knew little about. Over the course of 20 years, Norma says she repeatedly put her life on the line for the DEA, and in return, she got paid, although she said agents sometimes refused to give her the money she was owed. Citizenship, however, never came, and now Norma fears she'll be deported and sent back to Mexico, where she hasn't lived since she was 5 years old. She also said she believes her life would be in danger there as a result of her work for the DEA.

Norma is an alias -- she asked that her real name be withheld -- but immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin knows stories like hers are not uncommon. "Federal government agencies use and abuse undocumented confidential informants for years, trample their rights with impunity, promise them permanent residency and never deliver on it," she told Gomez. "And they know they don't have to deliver on it. But they keep pressuring them with that promise so they will keep cooperating."

The DEA has also been accused of using other exploitative means to recruit assets.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, a New Mexico man and former DEA informant alleged that the agency had recruited him by targeting his history of substance abuse. An attorney representing 38-year-old Aaron Romero claimed that her client had recently beaten a crack cocaine addiction in 2011, when a DEA-sponsored informant offered him the opportunity to sell drugs -- provided to him by the U.S. government -- and to feed the agency information on other drug dealers. His payment, Romero's attorney alleged, came in the form of crack for personal use. Romero relapsed, his attorney said, and was eventually arrested on federal counts of distributing crack cocaine near a school, charges that were ultimately dropped after he spent a number of months in jail.

The DEA once turned a teenager into a drug kingpin so he could act as an informant.

In the 1980s, federal agents with the DEA and FBI plucked 14-year-old Richard Wershe from his Detroit high school and began crafting a new identity for him as a drug kingpin. Over the next few years, the teenage Wershe would live a double life, one as the legend who'd later be known as White Boy Rick, one of the most notorious drug lords in city, and the other as a valuable informant for the DEA and other law enforcement agencies.

"I was just a kid when the agents pulled me out of high school in the ninth grade and had me out to 3 in the morning every night," Wershe told The Fix in 2013. "They gave me a fake ID when I was 15 that said I was 21 so I could travel to Vegas and to Miami to do drug deals."

With intelligence provided by Wershe, authorities were able to make a series of high-profile arrests, disrupting Detroit's rampant drug trade and the police corruption that had grown alongside it.

But in 1988, then 17 and no longer an informant, Wershe was pulled over and busted for work in the same drug business as the one to which the DEA had introduced him. The 17 pounds of cocaine found in his car resulted in a life sentence. He's the only convict still behind bars in Michigan to receive a life sentence as a minor under the state's now-repealed "650-lifer" law. Many of the targets whom Wershe helped put in jail have long since been released.

The DEA did treat one informant very nicely, giving him nearly $900,000 for information it could have gotten for free.

The Associated Press reported in August that the DEA had paid an Amtrak secretary $854,460 over nearly 20 years as an informant to pass confidential information about passenger reservations. But as the AP reported, Amtrak police are already part of an anti-drug task force that includes the DEA, and would have given the agency that information free of charge.