Continuing with Gary Webb's Dark Alliance,these chapters deal for the most part with the ring coming into focus for LOCAL enforcement,feds are a different story,except for Kerry.As I jump to the present(2019)I cannot help but see the same agencies playing the same games with these drugs.You only have to be a casual observer of the so called 'news' to run across the latest drug they are allowing(bringing)into the country to line their pockets and help thin the herd,I am referring to Fentanyl. They lie so bad about controlled substances it is beyond stupid.The Federal Government created the crack craze, which by the way is still plaguing our country,they have created this worse plague with the Fentanyl which is in it's infancy.I will predict that the string pullers will connect this killer with China,if the Op is given time to run it's course....

.... Victor Gill had no job and no business license, but for some reason he found it necessary to buy eight money-counting machines in the space of a month in early 1986. To U.S. Customs agent Fred Ghio and IRS agent Karl Knudsen, Gill might as well have been wearing a neon sign that said, "Arrest Me!"

The two agents were on the prowl for money launderers. A good way to find them, they reasoned, was to cheek with companies that made cash-counting machines. One such firm was the Glory Business Machine Co. in Bell, California, a rundown suburb of Los Angeles that in better days had been Hollywood gangster Mickey Cohen's stomping grounds. After seeing how often Gill was visiting Glory, they decided he could stand some scrutiny.

Ghio and Knudsen dropped by the Bell Police Department to see if anyone there knew their quarry. As luck would have it, the city of Bell's only narcotics detective, Jerry Guzzetta, was on duty, and he knew Gill well. He'd arrested him on cocaine charges a few years earlier and was more than happy to help the two federal agents bust him again. "You can't investigate money laundering without getting into dope. There's just no way," Guzzetta said.

Jerry Guzzetta went after dopers with a vengeance, and his one-man investigations had produced some impressive results. In November 1985 he'd been the subject of a glowing piece in the Los Angeles Times for his work in taking down a large Colombian trafficking ring. Some of his fellow officers regarded him as a loose cannon and a publicity hound, always trying to make a name for himself. But his friends said Guzzetta's zeal was largely misunderstood.

"He hated dope dealers. He hated them with a vehement passion, because a dope dealer had killed his brother, and that's one of the things that spurred him to go after these people so aggressively," Officer Tom McReynolds said.

"In a sense, a drug dealer killed my entire family," Guzzetta said. "After the guy shot my brother in the head, my father died of a heart attack. And then my mother died a couple years later. And he got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter."

Knudsen and Ghio liked Guzzetta's enthusiasm, and they invited him to join their surveillance of Gill. The trio soon discovered that Gill was buying the money machines for Colombian traffickers who didn't want their names turning up on purchase orders. He was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges.

It was the start of a mutually beneficial relationship for Guzzetta and the two federal agents, who specialized in money-laundering cases. For a small-town police department like Guzzetta's, busting a money launderer was an answered prayer, because the police got to keep a percentage of the spoils.
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