Bush acknowledged that the War on Drugs had become more brutal. “The explosive, expensive lesson of the past year in New York is that the rules of the game have dramatically changed.” He argued, however, that new violence from dealers would be matched by more vigorous federal enforcement: “Well, we’ve got to deliver some news to the bad guys. The hunting season is over. The rules on our side have changed, too.”
The same day that Bush appeared at the DEA, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau issued a scathing op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Bush’s Lip Service on Drugs.” Morgenthau was a pragmatic liberal from a dynastic political family who had dabbled in Democratic politics before settling into his four-decade tenure as a prosecutor, first as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1969 and then as Manhattan District Attorney in 1975.
Morgenthau, however, was arguing for a more robust law-and-order approach than conservative President Bush, who Morgenthau alleged was blowing smoke. Morgenthau cited the administration’s significant drawback of the resources they were allocating to local and state drug enforcement.
Morgenthau also criticized a Bush spokesman’s explanation that the drug enforcement funding was not a “uniquely Federal” responsibility. “I, for one, had thought that ridding our communities of drug dealers – ensuring domestic tranquility – was such a responsibility,” Morgenthau countered.
Morgenthau ended with a question: “How many more law enforcement officers must die before our nation’s leaders share their commitment?”
Following Morgenthau’s criticism, the Bush administration requested $350 million in additional state and local drug enforcement funds for the 1990 budget. In September, however, Morgenthau’s criticism reemerged in another New York Times op-ed, “A Drug War, with Little Ammunition.”
Morgenthau highlighted that the budget spike was only an authorization to spend, and that only $39 million in actual additional money had gone into the program. Morgenthau also stressed the need for rehabilitative treatment centers and AIDS clinics, arguing that the investment of $500 million – which he noted was the cost of one Stealth bomber – could help to “regain control of our neighborhoods.”
“If we try to fight the war on drugs on the cheap, we are bound to lose – and, in the future, we will be condemned to pay far more in dollars and human misery,” Morgenthau summated.
The local drug standoff, however, only presaged a broader confrontation with the Bush administration in which Morgenthau investigated the banks that helped launder drug money, and in the process discovered a wide-reaching political scandal. In 1988, Morgenthau had started to investigate the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a private institution with $20 billion in deposits that a Pakistani financier named Agha Hasan Abedi had founded in 1972. Morgenthau, in concert with congressional investigators, uncovered that BCCI had been taking cash from an astounding cast of odious characters, from famed terrorists to the Medellin drug cartel.