Mullen, Francis

Francis Mullen was the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from 1981 to 1985. While he became the acting administrator upon his predecessor Peter Bensinger's retirement, Mullen was formally nominated by President Ronald Reagan in January 1982, and eventually confirmed by the Senate in September 1983; most of his tenure running the DEA was technically in an “acting” capacity.

A former member of the U.S. Air Force, Connecticut police officer, and special agent of the FBI, Mullen took office in the DEA at a time when drug crime was reaching its most serious point. Miami and other parts of Florida had become vital parts of the trafficking routes used by Colombian cocaine cartels, and the competition between these cartels and the street gangs they sold to was becoming violent with increasing frequency. Mullen's appointment at this time owed a good deal to his 20 years of service in the FBI. Both the Carter and the Reagan administrations had pondered the feasibility and desirability of merging the FBI and the DEA.

They had conducted pilot programs such as joint operations between the two in order to watch how the agencies interacted. There were a number of key differences between the agencies. The FBI had higher educational and training requirements for its agents, and was able to discipline them more harshly than DEA agents—protected under civil service regulations—could be. The FBI traditionally cultivated long-term relationships with informants, while the DEA had been in the habit of using informants on [Page 539]a short-term bust-by-bust basis. DEA agents were much more knowledgeable about street-level drug operations, while the FBI was accustomed to looking at dealers at the highest level of the distribution system, and had many more successes in tracing criminal funds and money laundering operations. The decision to put Mullen at the head of the DEA was concurrent with the decision to pursue more joint operations between the two agencies, regardless of whether they ever merged.

Mullen oversaw the DEA at a time when the Reagan administration was ramping up its war against drugs, a major component of its domestic policy. Drug education programs were becoming more widespread in public schools, the DARE drug education program was founded (in 1985), and First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on over two dozen television shows, including appearances as herself in Dynasty and Diff'rent Strokes, to talk about teen drug use, peer pressure, and her “Just Say No” campaign. Unlike some of the officials who had spoken out in previous administrations, Mullen was up front about admitting that eliminating drugs from the United States was not possible in the foreseeable future, but recognizing this fact guided a more reasonable and realistic approach to the drug war. The goals of Mullen's DEA were to put pressure on both the top and bottom of the drug trade—the traffickers and the users—in order to make it a prohibitively expensive industry.

It was during Mullen's tenure that officials were given the power to seize assets used in drug trafficking, and incomes generated from same, which was seen as an enormous boon for the disincentivizing power of law enforcement. When a cartel had previously faced only the arrest of lower-or mid-level employees and the loss of some product from a particular operation, it now faced the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, vehicles, homes, and profits. Similarly, the DEA and the FBI were seeing a greater degree of cooperation than before; by 1982, there were 135 joint major cases, compared to the 15 of 1981.

...