DEA agents joked about rape in WhatsApp chat before one was accused of the crime

In a WhatsApp chat that quickly devolved into depravity, a group of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents boasted about their “world debauchery tour” of “boozing and whoring” on the government’s dime. They swapped lurid images of their latest sexual conquests. And at one point they even joked about “forcible anal rape.”

Within months of that jaw-dropping exchange, an agent in the group chat was accused of that very crime.

The 2018 arrest of George Zoumberos for allegedly forcing anal sex on a 23-year-old woman in a Madrid hotel room set off alarms at the highest levels of the DEA, beginning with a middle-of-the-night phone call from a supervisor to the agency’s headquarters outside Washington. But U.S. officials never even spoke with the woman and made only cursory efforts to investigate.

The DEA has refused for years to discuss its handling of the arrest, instead telling The Associated Press in response to its questions that “the alleged misconduct in this case is egregious and unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards expected of all DEA personnel.”

The details of the case and the graphic group chat are outlined in a trove of thousands of secret law enforcement documents obtained by the AP that offer a never-before-seen window into a culture of corruption among federal narcotics agents who parlayed the DEA’s shadowy money laundering operations into a worldwide pursuit of binge drinking and illicit sex.