DEA doesn’t have to pay drug informant, court says

Carlos Toro says he spent 29 dangerous years as a confidential source helping the Drug Enforcement Administration bust big-time dealers from Florida to South America.

But now a federal judge says Toro can’t prove the government owes him anything.

Frustrating Toro’s hopes for a $5 million payout, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas C. Wheeler has rejected the onetime Florida resident’s contention that he had an implied oral contract with the DEA.

“Unfortunately,” Wheeler wrote in the decision issued Friday, “Mr. Toro cannot name any authorized representative of the government who entered into this contract, much less any of the contract’s fundamental terms.”

Wheeler added, moreover, that the six-year statute of limitations would probably block Toro’s claims even if he could establish the existence of a binding contract allegedly begun in 1986.

The DEA declined to comment on the case Monday. Toro’s attorney could not be reached. Toro told a Florida Center for Investigative Reporting writer last April that he was adopting a new false identity.

The rejection of Toro’s lawsuit marks the latest turn in a globe-trotting yarn that became public last year, when the former Medellin cartel operative took his story to the news media. Last September, he filed his formal complaint in the claims court several blocks from the White House.

Toro’s lawsuit was replete with details, ranging from his purported “DEA Identifier” number to the names of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based U.S. Marshals Service officer and the Jacksonville, Florida-based federal prosecutors he says he worked alongside.

Toro cited, as well, a litany of specific investigations to which he’d contributed, including undercover work as an employee at Raleigh’s main post office and testifying in the Miami trial of a Medellin cartel pilot.

At one point, Toro claimed, he served as “public relations manager” for top drug traffickers. At other times, he said he’d assisted a Fort Lauderdale police detective and identified drug-trafficking “assets” in Ocala, Florida.

“His direct participation resulted in cocaine seizures, asset forfeitures, indictments, arrests and convictions, disruption of international trafficking networks and the interception of thousands of kilograms of cocaine destined for the United States,” Toro’s lawsuit claimed.

The DEA deploys about 4,000 confidential sources at any one time, according to a 2005 Justice Department review, and their handling has drawn criticism from the department’s Office of the Inspector General.

Other federal drug informants, too, have taken their own complaints to the claims court, with mixed results.

Toro’s attorney, Michael L. Avery Sr., had previously represented another former DEA confidential informant, a South Florida resident nicknamed “the Princess.” In 2014, a claims court judge awarded the woman $1.14 million for harm caused by a kidnapping while she was serving as a DEA source.

Miami-area resident Baruch Vega likewise had claimed he was owed millions of dollars for his service as an FBI and DEA informant, but in 2008 the claims court rejected his bid for $28.5 million.

The former informants’ claims court cases can pivot on different legal arguments. For Toro, as it was for a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives informant who likewise lost a 2001 suit, a key question was whether the law enforcement handler had the authority to enter into a contract on behalf of the federal government.

Although Toro had identified a DEA special agent with whom he worked, the Justice Department countered in a legal brief that Toro “provided only an extremely vague allegation of an oral agreement with the government.”

Wheeler, too, concluded this was insufficient.

“The named government official is a DEA agent incapable of contracting on behalf of the United States with Mr. Toro,” Wheeler wrote, adding, in words that would-be informants might well heed, that “contracting authority is not an integral part of a DEA agent’s duties.”

This story was originally published March 28, 2016 at 4:53 PM with the headline "DEA doesn’t have to pay drug informant, court says."