Dea Don Juan

By Jay Carney/Miami

One day in November 1987, Olga Gonzalez, 30, was stopped at a traffic light in Miami Beach when a black Corvette piloted by a man with a touch of gray hair pulled alongside. After a brief conversation, she exchanged phone numbers with the charming driver, Mario Rodolfo Portell. He called that night to ask her out, and before long Gonzalez had fallen in love. It was an affair to remember. At Portell's urging, Gonzalez arranged to purchase a kilogram of cocaine through an acquaintance. But federal drug agents busted her and the dealer, and she is now serving a seven-year prison term.

Score yet another triumph for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's very own Casanova of cocaine. Over the past 1 1/2 years, the handsome 34-year- old Cuban emigre has used a turn-'em-on and turn-'em-in technique to entice some 18 Florida and New Jersey women into setting up drug deals that led to their arrest. Instead of targeting street-level dealers and wholesale drug salesmen, Portell promised love and occasionally marriage if the women, most with no prior criminal record, would only set up a cocaine buy. When the deals went down, DEA agents were on hand to make an arrest. Defense lawyers charge that Portell's undercover work, for which the DEA has paid him $73,000, amounts to entrapment.

Federal prosecutors maintain that they did not have complete knowledge of how Portell concocted his stings, which began in 1987, after he was arrested in New Jersey for writing bad checks. But in the case of Isabel Garcia of Elizabeth, N.J., her defense lawyer has collected memos from authorities in Union County, N.J., showing that the DEA has been aware of Portell's seductive modus operandi since at least the fall of 1987. Garcia loaned Portell $8,700, which he returned in the form of bad checks. She claims she arranged a coke deal only because Portell promised to repay her with the proceeds from the sale. Last week she agreed to plead guilty to possession of coke.

The jig may now be up for the DEA gigolo, thanks to hair-salon owner Miriam Guzman. Portell met her when she was sitting alone and lonely in a Florida restaurant, dated her, borrowed money from her and asked her to set up a coke deal. Guzman's first trial ended in a hung jury last fall. Since then her attorney has been gathering evidence in an effort to prove official misconduct. At a hearing to dismiss charges against Guzman last month, Miami Federal Judge William Hoeveler posed a pointed query: "Is there any question in anybody's mind that this man is not only a thief but a scoundrel?" After defense attorneys began compiling Portell's history, the DEA removed him from its payroll. Guzman, who returns to court this week, may not be the last woman to fall for the dashing Don Juan. But she may be the last one he turns into a suspect statistic in the war on drugs.