United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents George Greco and Keith McNichols first noticed something amiss in 2014, shortly after they arrived for their assignments in Haiti: A senior DEA official there had received over a million dollars for expenses that didn’t seem legitimate. McNichols and Greco looked into it: “They used fake receipts,” said McNichols. “I documented numerous payments.” They reported this to their superiors but instead of being congratulated were reprimanded. “To them,” continued McNichols, “it was like I was opening up an ants’ nest. They felt I was a troublemaker and made my life hell.

A year later it got worse.

Haiti was known for ports where huge quantities of illegal drugs arrived—“an open sewer,” in Greco’s words. In April 2015, the Panamanian-flagged ship Manzaneres docked at a Haitian port, and the longshoremen started offloading bags of “sugar”—until the bags ripped open, revealing cocaine and heroin. When McNichols was alerted and arrived at the port, he saw men in presidential garb and police uniforms grabbing those bags and speeding away.

Leading the foray was police officer Dimitri Héard, later to become the head of the Haitian president’s security detail, and still later to become the prime suspect in the assassination of that president. He is currently in jail, awaiting trial.

McNichols knew that the subsequent disappearance of those millions of dollars of drugs was no accident: “The corruption goes up to the top levels.” He and Greco pursued the drug smuggling—McNichols even interviewed Héard—but the investigation went nowhere.

That is, it went nowhere until the two agents sought assistance from the Government Accountability Project, which represents whistle blowers. Finally, in July 2021, after more thorough investigations, the U.S. Office of the Special Council reprimanded the DEA’s Haitian office for its neglect in mismanaging drug smuggling in general and the Manzaneres case in particular. McNichols’ and Greco’s charges of “rampant corruption and misconduct” were substantiated, though the DEA still denies them.

By then, the two men had both resigned from the DEA, but they don’t regret their whistle blowing. “It was a cover-up,” said McNichols in an interview with the Miami Herald. “One of my big complaints was all the millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money that was wasted in fighting drug trafficking in Haiti. . . . Nothing is being done in Haiti. There is a floodgate of dope coming through Haiti.”

Their careers shot down, McNichols says, “I want to tell my story to make things better for my former colleagues at DEA and for future whistle blowers.”