BUSH NOMINATES MINNESOTAN AS NO. 2 FEDERAL DRUG COP

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When she was growing up in St. Paul, Michele Leonhart's
bike was stolen -- a blue Huffy with a white basket and pink streamers.

She scoured her Selby Avenue neighborhood and got it back. It was her first
case in what has become a lifetime of law enforcement.

Along the way, she hit a few roadblocks. She had trouble passing the police
strength test in St. Paul, and Los Angeles thought she was too short.

But Baltimore eventually hired her, and before long she moved from street
patrols to the murky world of undercover narcotics investigations.

Now Leonhart has been nominated by President Bush to be the deputy
administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which would
make her the nation's No. 2 drug cop.

It also makes her one of a handful of Minnesotans to win high-level
appointments in the Bush administration.

If Leonhart is confirmed by the Senate, as expected, the former Minneapolis
DEA agent will serve under Karen Tandy, a former federal prosecutor and the
first woman to run the DEA.

While Tandy rose to the top through courtrooms and the Justice Department,
Leonhart came up from the drug netherworld. Over a 23-year career, Leonhart
has busted drug dealers from Guadalajara to the Canadian border.

It was hardly an easy progression for a girl who grew up going to Catholic
school in St. Paul, and later moved to the relatively safe cities of
Mankato and White Bear Lake.

"The way I grew up, I should have had no street smarts," Leonhart, now 47,
said in an interview this week. "Going to downtown St. Paul or Minneapolis
was really going to the big city back then."

Her appointment will move her to Washington from her current post in charge
of the DEA's Los Angeles field office.

Earlier she worked out of DEA offices in San Francisco, San Diego and St.
Louis, and at the agency's D.C. area headquarters. At each stop, she
burnished a reputation that began in the Twin Cities.

"You could tell early on that she had all the talents and gifts to be a
great leader," said Michael Campion, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau
of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). "She was guided by her intelligence and her
ability to deal with people."

The Wild Side

Although Baltimore gave Leonhart her first crack at police work, her DEA
career began on familiar turf: in Minnesota, where she had gone to Lakewood
Community College in White Bear Lake and Bemidji State University. As the
top rookie in her DEA class, she got to choose her first post.

Tempted by action-packed Miami, she instead chose the Minneapolis field
office, becoming its first female agent.

"I thought it would be my chance to do something good for my hometown," she
said. "It was just as hokey as it sounds."

That was in 1980, after she left the Baltimore police force, where she was
known alternately as "Mikey" or "Alice," as in Alice in Wonderland -- a
joke on her sheltered Midwestern upbringing.

In Baltimore, she also had finished number one in her rookie class and had
patrolled the town's toughest precinct.

In Minneapolis, Leonhart went to work for Jim Braseth, a legendary DEA
supervisor who mentored a generation of drug agents in the Twin Cities.
Under his tutelage, Leonhart quickly developed street credibility.

Braseth, who died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2000, once said of Leonhart, "If
you could look in the dictionary for the definition of a federal drug
agent, you'd find Michele's picture."

Cops aren't the only ones who pay her respect. Dan Scott, a federal public
defender in Minneapolis who represented many of the defendants Leonhart
arrested, said that though she left Minneapolis 17 years ago, she's still
talked about in the U.S. Courthouse in Minneapolis.

"She was a real pro," he said. "She was able to do the cowboy undercover
part of the job, without falling into the pitfalls of the wild side. She
could come back and write an accurate report on the case."

Mysterious Millionaire

Leonhart's first drug case was one of her biggest.

It started her first day on the job, when Braseth asked, "Would you like to
meet a millionaire?"

The mysterious millionaire was Casey Ramirez. A civic philanthropist in his
adopted home town of Princeton, Minn., Ramirez paid for high school
football uniforms and financed the town's $500,000 hockey arena.

It turned out that he also made most of his money as a big-time drug dealer
in south Florida.

Braseth tried to infiltrate Leonhart into Ramirez's operation by arranging
for the two to meet at a civic function in Princeton. Ramirez took the
bait, inviting her back for a visit.

But the plan nearly fell apart later when Ramirez and Leonhart happened to
meet by chance at the federal building in Minneapolis. Thinking on her
feet, she explained her presence by saying she was on federal probation.

Ramirez apparently bought the alibi, and Leonhart stayed on the case,
helping piece together evidence of an operation that brought hundreds of
pounds of cocaine from Colombia to Florida with a fleet of small planes.
Ramirez served 13 years in prison.

Also among Leonhart's cases was Clyde Bellecourt, a leader of the American
Indian Movement (AIM), who was convicted in 1986 of selling undercover
agents 500 hits of LSD. One of the agents was Leonhart, who met with
Bellecourt in a laundry room at Little Earth of United Tribes, a south
Minneapolis public housing development.

Bellecourt pleaded guilty in federal court but went to prison insisting he
had been "set up by the government."

Suspected Snitch

Leonhart earned ready acceptance in the macho culture of federal drug
agents, who often maintain scruffy appearances that hardly distinguish them
from the bad guys.

But her colleagues quickly noticed that she didn't fit in by playing the
skirt or cussing and trying to act just like the guys.

Nor did she need to.

"I never even had to think about playing any gender politics, from the
first day with Jim Braseth," she said. "I worked very hard, and they all
knew it. They said, 'You're good because you're you.' And I never forgot that."

One of her partners, John Boulger, an ex-Minneapolis cop and DEA agent who
now works with the Minnesota Gang Strike Force, said Leonhart succeeded by
keeping her cool under pressure.

Posing as a drug buyer, she once talked her way out of the back seat of a
car driven by two Twin Cities drug dealers who realized they had a police
surveillance vehicle behind them.

Tearing out of a fast-food parking lot on University Avenue in St. Paul,
they managed to lose the surveillance car. They also were becoming
increasingly suspicious of Leonhart, who they had tagged as a snitch.

She knew she had better start talking.

"You're stupid if you're going to be driving around with the dope,"
Leonhart told the two dealers. "Drop me off at the corner and I'll hook up
with you later. If you get caught you won't have anything on you."

Her spiel made sense to the dealers, who dropped her off and gave her their
stash of cocaine.

"She was as good as anybody at what she did," Boulger said. "She was
terrific. Outstanding. It's good for the DEA that they've got somebody up
in that position know who knows the streets."