The guy in the balaclava worked for me while I was a group supervisor in Phoenix. He's sitting on board a jet belonging to the PGR, which is the Mexican Attorney General's Office, interviewing a man that we were investigating for quite some time. That man, an American who was married to a high ranking police official in Mexico, had manufactured hundreds of hand grenades for the Sinaloa cartel. He also converted the semi-automatic AK-47 and AR-15 rifles that were smuggled into Mexico into fully automatic machine guns. We had him in our custody in Arizona many months earlier when he was caught smuggling over 100 disassembled hand grenades, minus the explosives, across the border into Mexico just outside of Yuma. He gave us a shocking, detailed confession. We were ordered to release him by prosecutors at the US Attorney's Office in Phoenix. I begged them to charge him. They didn't. Watching him walk out the door after his confession was horrific. After I blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the case was reassigned and things were finally getting done, but that was well over a year later. Luckily, we were able to get Mexican federal agents to conduct a search warrant on his grenade mill, which led to a hair raising stand off just outside of Culiacan, Sinaloa. Turns out he wasn't just making grenades and converting rifles into machine guns. He was running a school teaching the cartels how to do it themselves. Ironically, the same prosecutor who refused to move forward with this case was the lead prosecutor on Operation Fast & Furious itself. I wonder how many people died from grenades this man manufactured after we had him caught dead to rights and were forced to release him? Stay tuned!
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