MIAMI — Thousands of secret law enforcement documents obtained by The Associated Press offer an unprecedented look into the culture of corruption among U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who turned the agency’s shady money-laundering operations into a global manhunt for binge drinking and illicit sex.
Among the documents is a WhatsApp chat in which a group of agents bragged about what they called a “world tour” at government expense, exchanged lurid images of their latest sexual conquests and at one point even joked about “forced anal rape.”
That exchange became even darker when, a few months later, one of the officers in the chat was accused of the same crime in Spain.
The newly obtained documents show that the 2018 arrest of George Zoumberos on charges of forcing anal sex on a 23-year-old woman in a Madrid hotel room set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the DEA. The case ultimately ended with the charges being dropped and the agent being given a letter of reprimand.
Here are some of the key findings from the AP investigation.
The year-long group chat, recovered by federal authorities, included five DEA agents identified by the AP. Among them was José Irizarry, a notoriously corrupt agent and ringleader of the debauchery, now serving a 12-year federal prison sentence.
The chat portrays life in the DEA as a never-ending, degenerate party. Agents planned DEA trips around binge drinking and sex without fear that their coded messages would ever be read by anyone else.
“It’s a tough life, this war on drugs,” one officer joked in a message.
Before one of the trips, an officer wrote to his colleagues that he “hoped you had arranged some welcome drinks for me tomorrow when I landed.”
References to anal sex were so common in the group chat that officers coined a term for it: pancaking, often accompanied by an emoji of a stack of pancakes.
Prostitutes were mentioned frequently and at least twice reference was made to attacking prostitutes and leaving the mess to an informant.
On the night of the alleged assault in Madrid in April 2018, Zoumberos told authorities that the woman approached him at a bar and that they eventually went back to his hotel.
Zoumberos, then 38 and married, maintained the interaction was consensual and told the DEA the woman was “never angry.”
The woman told a very different story in her first public comments on the case. “I told him very clearly that I didn’t want to have sex,” she told the AP, which does not typically name people who say they are victims of sexual abuse.
She said she told Zoumberos she couldn’t have sex because she was on her period. Around 3 a.m., the woman said, police and an ambulance arrived and found her bruised around her wrists and Zoumberos drunk. She told the AP she locked herself in the bathroom before fleeing the hotel through the fire exit in shock.
Zoumberos was briefly jailed in Madrid, but was released within hours after a visit to the jail by U.S. Embassy officials. A Spanish judge later dismissed the case, ruling only that the charges were not “duly substantiated.” The agent eventually returned to work with a DEA reprimand citing “poor judgment.”
Internal documents and interviews show the DEA never spoke to the woman or attempted to piece together what happened the night of the alleged rape.
“We dropped the ball,” a law enforcement official familiar with the matter told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal investigations.
Zoumberos, who now lives in North Carolina, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The DEA has refused for years to discuss its handling of the arrest. It did not answer detailed questions from the AP about the case, but said in a statement that “the alleged misconduct in this case is outrageous and unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards expected of all DEA personnel.”
Ben Greenberg, a former U.S. prosecutor in Miami who reviewed the messages at the AP’s request, called them “beyond inappropriate.”
“In the context of such serious criminal allegations,” he said, “the chats appear to be evidence of a crime and not just grotesque jokes.”
The FBI and a federal grand jury in Tampa are investigating DEA misconduct in Money laundering investigations for years, following a road map outlined by Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2020. But so far, Irizarry is the only government employee to face criminal charges.
Of the agents in the group chat, only one remains with the DEA today. Three others were among at least a dozen agents disciplined or fired for participating in the Bacchanalia or failing to warn about it.
More than a year after his arrest for rape, Zoumberos resigned from the DEA after invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a grand jury.
After Administrator Anne Milgram took over the DEA in 2021, the agency instituted new rules for the use of funds in money laundering operations and warned that agencies could now be fired for a first offense of misconduct if it was serious enough. This is a departure from previous administrations.