A Failure of Verve

By John Elson

TITLE: SWORDFISH

AUTHOR: DAVID MCCLINTICK

PUBLISHER: PANTHEON; 606 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: Numbing detail slows the narrative of a sting operation.

The chronicle of the federal drug bust known as Operation Swordfish, briefly summarized, reads like an episode of Miami Vice scripted by John le Carre. It began in December 1980 in Miami, where Robert Darias, then 46, faced a winter of discontent. A Cuban exile, he had spent 20 months in Fidel Castro's prison camps after being captured during the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. He had also served time in an American pokey for tax fraud, and still owed the Internal Revenue Service $200,000. Darias, though, did have a couple of highly marketable assets. His gentlemanly, businesslike demeanor inspired trust, and he knew some things about drug dealing in South Florida's Cuban community. And so, out of financial desperation, he volunteered to spy for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Darias thereupon entered -- to cite the pulsing prose of Swordfish's subtitle -- a world "of ambition, savagery and betrayal," not to mention careerism and bureaucratic incompetence. To lure high-level drug smugglers, the DEA set up a dummy money-laundering corporation in suburban Miami Lakes that was initially called Dean International Investments, Inc. Although he was only a hired hand, Darias more or less ran the operation while his handlers feuded with one another and scuffled for promotions. The bumbling agents, among other foul-ups, managed to lose a key recording of Darias' conversation with a suspect, left piles of money lying around in closets and fell hopelessly behind in keeping official records of the laundering transactions.

Darias' most important contact was Marlene Navarro, a petite, ripe-breasted beauty in her 30s who was known to friends as "the hummingbird." Navarro was a Colombian who had studied at the Sorbonne and converted to Judaism while living in Israel; she could seduce men in five languages. She was also the chief U.S. agent for Carlos Jader Alvarez, one of the godfathers of her country's drug trade. With careful stroking, Darias had persuaded Navarro to let his firm launder more than $1 million of Alvarez's cocaine profits when Operation Swordfish was abruptly halted, partly because a corrupt DEA agent had blown its cover.

Swordfish does not end there. But in contrast to the blow-by-blow account of the operation, the rest of McClintick's story -- Navarro's escape from the U.S., her capture and (probably) illegal extradition for trial from Venezuela, Darias' misadventures as an unhappy witness -- is told in a kind of tired, cryptic shorthand. Darias had the street-smarts to tape his agents as well as his marks. McClintick, who was widely praised for his 1982 Hollywood expose, Indecent Exposure, uses the transcripts of those conversations in such numbing detail that he seemingly ran out of pages to conclude the narrative properly.

This error has been compounded by what might be called a failure of verve. Perhaps because the author wants to protect his subject's identity, Darias comes across as remote and unreflective; as for Navarro, McClintick offers the equivalent of a pencil sketch where only an oil painting will do. Envisioned by a gifted novelist, this vivacious woman -- chic, alluring, as dangerous as TNT -- could have been transmuted into a truly memorable character. In short, some true stories are probably better told as fiction than as fact. Swordfish, unfortunately, is one of them.