In a bed at the Santa Rosa Medical Center in San Antonio, periodically plugged into life-support systems, lies Sante Alessandro Bario, 42, once a crack undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He has lain there more than a month, his eyes always open, his brain waves showing no sign of activity, except for occasional convulsions. He is a victim—for reasons that remain mysterious—of the international drug trade.
Bario was a policeman in his native Italy until 1960, when he met his first wife and followed her to Detroit and then Washington. There he got a job as an investigator for the IRS Intelligence Division, infiltrating organized crime syndicates in Boston, New Orleans and Detroit. He became a federal narcotics agent in 1969. He is believed to have posed as a gambler in the Bahamas, dropping federal money at the roulette wheels of Paradise Island. He liked to wear Cardin suits and Dior shirts. Acting under cover, he became the lover of the mistress of a French heroin ring boss, cracking a drug and counterfeit network extending from France to the U.S. and Canada. Working with New York City's Knapp Commission looking into police corruption, he helped convict an assistant district attorney of bribery. He was brought in from the cold in 1975 to become head of the DEA enforcement section in Mexico City, charged with investigating the flow of drugs from Latin America.
His striking good looks had always added to his James Bond panache, but last year he began to hear the winged chariot of middle age. He became depressed and nervous. His dark, curly hair started falling out, and he lost weight. He wanted to see a psychiatrist, but feared it would hurt his career. He was obsessed with producing a dramatic dope bust that involved trapping cocaine traffickers from South America and France in one place. To make his case, he relied heavily on a longtime DEA informant, a French Canadian who calls himself Claude Picault.
Last April, Picault helped Bario set up a raid in Mexico City that netted 33 lbs. of Colombian cocaine. Bario turned in 22 lbs. to the DEA, but let Picault keep the rest. Bario insisted later to his second wife and his lawyer that he was following standard procedure, allowing an informant to have some confiscated cocaine as a bonus to keep him loyal.
Picault, however, had a different story and in September told it to the DEA in Paris. Bario, he said, had allowed him to keep the coke in order to split the profits from its sale. DEA investigators eavesdropped as Picault set up a meeting with Bario in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and they were on hand as $4,000 in marked bills was transferred. A few days later, on Oct. 7, they listened in on another meeting between Picault and Bario at a San Antonio hotel. Shortly after Bario accepted $5,000 from Picault, agents arrested him.