'LIKE A RELIGIOUS CALLING': FORMER CAPE POLICE OFFICER NOW A DEA AGENT

A flag-draped coffin coming out of the old Lorberg's Funeral Home on Sprigg Street was enough to stop 8-year-old Michael Braun from riding past on his bicycle. It was March 13, 1961, three days after Cape Girardeau auxiliary police officer Herbert Goss died in a shootout.

Braun was frozen, watching the uniformed officers carry the coffin out to the street on its way to Fairmount Cemetery.

"For some reason, on that day I knew I wanted to be a cop," Braun said.

Now, 48-year-old Braun has about a quarter century of law enforcement experience, mostly as a federal drug agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. For him, few things are as satisfying as seizing millions of dollars from drug kingpins or capturing tons of cocaine intended for sale in America. He does this regularly.

"For me, this is something like a religious calling," Braun said.

After graduating from Notre Dame High School in 1971, Braun didn't jump into police work. He and a friend joined the Marine Corps. If the Marines couldn't polish the rough edges off his character, he reasoned, no one could.

Braun returned to Cape Girardeau from Vietnam in 1973. He felt welcomed home, especially at Southeast Missouri State University.

"When I came back I had two weeks to get enrolled," he said. "The people at the university really pulled out the stops for me."

Solitary work

While studying for a degree in criminal justice, he found a job with the Cape Girardeau police. He began regular undercover narcotics work in 1975.

Marijuana was easily Cape Girardeau's predominant drug, with some arrests for cocaine and methamphetamine. In the 1970s, no one was arrested for making their own meth, he said.

The work of a narcotics officer was also more solitary.

"When you worked narcotics in Cape then, it was just you," he said. "You primarily would hang out in bars, try to get next to people."

After three years with Cape Girardeau police, Braun moved on to the Illinois State Police. Again he specialized in narcotics, handling cases from Chicago to Southern Illinois.

In 1985, Braun passed up a job offer by the FBI to wait for an opening with DEA. The DEA's offer came a week later.

As a federal narcotics agent for 16 years, there is little Braun hasn't done.

He started his career close to home, in the DEA's St. Louis office. Braun soon moved on officially to Washington, D.C., but unofficially he was spending approximately three years in covert paramilitary operations battling drugs in Central and South America.

"We were in camouflage with automatic weapons, working shoulder to shoulder with local law enforcement," he said.

Braun was involved in seizing shipments of cocaine weighing two tons, knocking $4 million aircraft carrying 1,500 kilos of cocaine from the sky and blowing up clandestine drug labs.

After South America, Braun returned to Houston, Texas, where he led a squad that targeted the most violent drug gangs along the Mexican border. Threats on his life were an everyday occurrence.

The paper jungle

Braun was later moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as special assistant to Thomas Constantine, then top administrator of DEA, South America might have seemed somewhat easier.

"Assistant to the director is a job that agents curse," Braun said. "The director worked 24-7, and you're right with him."

Two years in the "paper jungle," including weekly meetings with former Attorney General Janet Reno and State Department officials, taught Braun politics he did not know, he said.

A DEA budget of $1.7 billion is used efficiently, considering agents seize almost that much from drug dealers, he said.

Fighting drug traffickers demands large expenditures, Braun said. The newest gadget for drug dealers is encrypted satellite telephones, costing well over $3,000.

The phones might be used for a couple weeks, then they're destroyed.

"Using and tossing mobile phones is nothing for them, because they have all the money in the world to invest in this," he said.

This makes it harder for the DEA to maintain successful wiretaps, Braun said.

Typically, it takes a week to get a federal judge to approve a wiretap. This allows narcotics agents about a week to gather information from phone conversations before the phone is thrown away, he said.

Braun is currently in the No. 2 agent's position for the DEA in Los Angeles, where the four major Mexican drug cartels direct much of their United States trafficking.

Drug cartels operate by using several small groups in a given area that don't know each other. This means if a person from one group is arrested, he can't give information about any other group, Braun said.

"I guarantee you that there is some Mexican-based trafficker in Cape Girardeau right now," he said.

This gives Braun the motivation for a job that never ends.

While he visited his parents in Cape Girardeau last week, Braun took several calls one evening that led to a seizure of $3.5 million in narcotics money.

"In this job it's breakneck speed, it's always going," he said.