In a WhatsApp chat, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents boasted about their “world debauchery tour” of “boozing and whoring” on the government’s dime. They swapped lurid images of their latest sexual conquests and joked about “forcible anal rape,” the Associated Press reports. Within months of that exchange, an agent in the group chat was accused of that very crime. The 2018 arrest of George Zoumberos for allegedly forcing anal sex on a 23-year-old woman in a Madrid hotel room set off alarms at the highest levels of the DEA. U.S. officials never spoke with the woman and made only cursory efforts to investigate. The DEA has refused for years to discuss its handling of the arrest, instead saying that “the alleged misconduct in this case is egregious and unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards expected of all DEA personnel.”
The details of the case and the group chat are outlined in a trove of thousands of secret law enforcement documents obtained by the AP that offer a window into a culture of corruption among federal narcotics agents who parlayed the DEA’s money laundering operations into a worldwide pursuit of binge drinking and illicit sex. Zoumberos, married and 38 at the time, maintained the interaction was consensual and, after a jailhouse visit from U.S. Embassy officials, was released and flew home within hours of his arrest. A Spanish judge dismissed the case, ruling only that the allegations were not “duly justified.” The agent eventually returned to duty with a DEA letter of reprimand chiding him for “poor judgment.” The woman told AP, “I told him very clearly that I didn’t want to have sex."
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