Forte pardon makes Maddow Lame Duck Watch

by: Jason Springer

Wed Nov 26, 2008 at 10:31:09 AM EST

To make ends meet, Forte spun one night a week at the Manhattan nightclub Veruka, as a celebrity DJ. It was there, one Thursday in 2000, that Forte met a bald-headed thirty-five-year-old drug dealer named Chris Thompson. A native of Jamaica, Thompson needed some new, reliable couriers, preferably female, to handle what he called "stuff." John Forte knew many females.

Alerted by a tipster at a local hotel, police in Harlingen, Texas, stopped two of those young women on July 12th, 2000, as they made their way back to New York. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Houston opened their suitcases and discovered thirty eight-by-ten freezer packs filled with a bluish-green liquid -- liquid cocaine, a form of the drug favored in the trade because it is difficult for both dogs and X-ray machines to detect.

The DEA made a deal with the couriers, who called Forte in New York. "Put the ice cream in the tub," he said, and told them to fly to Newark International Airport. Cell-phone records show twenty-two calls between Thompson and Forte that day. Agents arrested Forte the next morning at Newark, after he dropped the "ice cream"-filled cases into the trunk of a taxi.