If Rick Finley had a hero it was “Serpico.”
Like Al Pacino, who played an honest cop in the 1973 movie, Finley’s life also fell into that same storyline. As an undercover officer his work to combat illegal drugs and corruption would take him from small-town Arkansas to the distant jungles of South America.
That all ended May 20, 1989, when 36-year-old Finley died in a wilderness area of Peru while working on “Operation Snowcap.”
After graduating from Batesville High School in 1970, Finley wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
“I always thought he would just grow up to be a nerd,” sister Sheila Finley said with a laugh.
But Finley would prove her wrong and even today, nearly 21 years after his death, his family is still proud of his accomplishments.
So is the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Last week, William J. Bryant, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s Little Rock field office, arrived at the home of Finley’s mother, Grace Finley, in Batesville to present her with a check for $5,000, which she in turn presented to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to be used for a scholarship fund in memory of her son.
Sheila, 18 months younger than Rick, recalls that, after her brother graduated from Arkansas State University in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he went to live with their uncle Paul Caraway in Little Rock. Caraway’s brother-in-law, who was with the North Little Rock Police Department, talked Finley into applying for a job.
“They immediately put him to work as an undercover police officer,” Sheila said.
He attended UALR to earn a master’s degree in criminal justice, receiving the Mike Carlson Award for the outstanding criminal justice graduate student.
While his sister and mother worried about the dangers he encountered working as an undercover officer in North Little Rock, their concerns grew when he was hired in 1984 as a special agent with the DEA. After completing his initial training in Glynco, Ga., he was assigned to the DEA’s Detroit office.
Sheila said he would fly her to Detroit every summer so they could spend time together. But, she said, Rick’s Thanksgiving holiday was rescheduled every year and celebrated during deer season.
“He had a choice of whether he wanted to come home then, or deer season, and he always chose deer season, so that’s when we celebrated Thanksgiving. And, when he did come home, he always tried to see everybody,” she said.
While his family wanted him to find something less dangerous for a career, Sheila said he was passionate about what he did.
“I’d rather die young doing what I want to than die old doing what I hate,” he told her.
Finley was part of “Operation Snowcap,” a joint initiative between the United States and South and Central American countries to disrupt the cocaine industry. From 1987 to 1994, the DEA sent teams of agents who volunteered for the tour to deploy temporarily to countries like Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
“He thrived on that type of undercover work,” Sheila said. “He’d call and tell us stories and we worried and worried.”
On his many trips to foreign countries he always came back bearing gifts for everyone, she said.
But one of the best gifts came before he left on his last assignment to Peru, when he called their mother and told her for her Mother’s Day present he had been assigned to Fayetteville.
His death prevented Rick from taking that assignment.
———
It was on a Sunday when the news came.
DEA agents met with Sheila at church at Newark to tell her that Rick’s plane was missing after it had left the jungle town of Tingo Mario.
“I wasn’t upset. I thought they would find it,” she recalled.
Later that night the family learned a crash site had been found by natives and there were no survivors. The site was seven hours by land from the nearest city and about 16,000 feet above sea level — it would take nearly two weeks to recover the body.
The plane that crashed was not the one Finley had originally been scheduled to be on.
After a day of field operations, he had been scheduled to return to base camp on a plane that had a pressurized cabin. Instead, he gave his seat to another agent who had ear problems, and took his place on the aircraft that crashed into the side of a mountain. He was the only DEA agent on this particular plane.
To this day, the family is still unsure what caused the crash.
“If there was sabotage, they would never release it,” she said.
———
Today, almost 21 years later, the life of Rick Finley can be found in almost every room of Grace’s home. Hanging on the walls are pictures of a young Rick, Rick as a teenager, Rick with his DEA friends, along with various awards and citations for accomplishments. A framed American flag is displayed on the bed.
Sheila said when new agents would move to Detroit they would stay with her brother and they were a close-knit group.
“He never met a stranger, he was kind to everybody,” she said.
In 1989, his friends in Detroit established the Rick Finley Memorial Foundation. The Finley Foundation assists criminal justice students at UALR where Rick attended. It also established a network to assist families of DEA and Task Force personnel killed in the line of duty. In 1997, the Finley Foundation was used as a model to incorporate five existing Special Agent Memorial Funds into one new DEA Survivors Benefit Fund. The DEA Survivors Benefit Fund is now a part of the Combined Federal Campaign.
The DEA Detroit Division office building, opened in 1995, is named “The Rick Finley Building” in honor of Finley. The DEA’s Detroit office also hosts an annual golf tournament and family picnic in Rick’s name, with proceeds benefiting the DEA Survivors Benefit Fund.
The one thing the family is most proud of is that Rick helped make a difference.