Dennis Dayle & "The Underground Empire"
Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 2:55 pm
Reading "The Underground Empire," by James Mills. Dennis Dayle is quite a character, and a mostly uncorroborated one, too.
Via: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/200 ... und-empire
Underground Empire, p. 15:
Chock fucking full of quotables so far, many more to come.
Via: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/200 ... und-empire
Dennis Dayle, 81, cracked down on drug cartels
August 4, 2009|By Linda Florea, Sentinel Staff Writer
Dennis Dayle was a bigger-than-life type of hero about whom most people would have known nothing were it not for a book written about three of his cases. Combating international-crime cartel he traveled the world as the head of Central Tactical Unit or Centac.
"When he retired, there were 12 cartel families that ran drugs in the world, and he [had] prosecuted 11 of them at the time," daughter Linda Smith of Atlanta said. "He made the world a much better place."
Dayle of Orlando died Aug. 2 of cardiac failure. He was 81.
The native of Milwaukee was both a star football player in high school and a violin prodigy and concert master touring Europe in his teen years.
After the Korean Conflict broke out in 1950, he enlisted with the Marines, served two tours of duty and became a pilot.
When he returned home from the military, he needed a stable job, with a wife Ursula, who died in 2007, and a child on the way. He could not return to violin at the same performance level immediately, so he became a patrol officer with the Milwaukee Police Department. He distinguished himself by cracking big cases that got front-page newspaper coverage.
He began his federal career working for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in Chicago, a forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he continued to distinguish himself. From the mid-1970s to 1980s, Dayle led investigations into international drug smuggling for the DEA, heading up Centac, which were chronicled in 1986 in a best-selling book, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace, by James Mills.
"He had unlimited jurisdiction to bring down drug cartels around the world," said another daughter, Cathy Hogis of Nashville, Tenn. "Normally, law enforcement has boundaries, but my father could go wherever he needed to go and put cases together."
According to Hogis, the family moved 13 times as she grew up, and even lived in the Middle East for two years. Her father kept his work life segregated from his home life, and when he went to work, they never knew how long he would be gone or where he was going.
"Colleagues knew he had a wife, but they were uncertain about his children, and completely in the dark regarding many aspects of an extraordinary background he labored to conceal," according to an excerpt from The Underground Empire.
Dayle stepped down from Centac in the early 1980s and moved to Orlando. He retired from federal government work in 1982, led the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation from 1984 to 1986, and later helped launch the country's first drug street unit.
Dayle later ran twice, unsuccessfully, for Orange County sheriff, in 1988 and 1992.
In addition to his daughters, he is survived by three granddaughters.
Orlando Direct Cremation Service handled the arrangements.
Underground Empire, p. 15:
Going up in the elevator to his cubbyhole office, I asked Dennis how many Centacs there might be in the world. (The word Centac was used to mean not only Centac itself but also each individual case -- each "Centac" -- as well as those organizations that might someday become Centac targets.)
"Sometimes I wonder if maybe there's only one. It's as if you're working on one Centac on one side of a pyramid and another on another side and you get higher and higher, and the peak they meet and suddenly you see it's all the same one."
"Are you serious? Could it all be one great conspiracy?"
The suggestion seemed fantastic.
"I hate..."
The elevator stopped on the sixth floor, but the door did not open. Dennis gave it a couple of seconds, then threw himself at the jammed door, hitting it like a fullback. It popped open. Dennis stepped into the hallway.
"I hate to think of it," he continued, as if that were how he always emerged from elevators, "but if it is one huge conspiracy it would have to do with the financing, the people who put up the money. As you get close to the top of the pyramid the air gets very thin and cannot support many people."
Chock fucking full of quotables so far, many more to come.