When Sheila Lyons started with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration three decades ago, no women were running any of the agency’s field divisions.
Now, Lyons, newly appointed as the first female special agent-in-charge of the Chicago field division covering northern and central Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, is one of five women heading one of the DEA’s 23 field divisions.
Lyons said in an interview Wednesday she plans to finish her career in Chicago, where she began it as an intelligence analyst.
In between, she’s held posts in Bulgaria, Afghanistan and Mexico and worked in the DEA’s Washington headquarters under the now-retired Jack Riley, who was the No. 2 official in the agency after heading the DEA in Chicago.
“It’s a real honor to be able to finish my career in the city that I was born and raised in and started in, back in 1992,” Lyons said.
She grew up in Hometown, a city of 4,300 on the southwest edge of Chicago, in a family of “strong women,” with three sisters and a brother, and plans to mentor female DEA agents and local police officers who are part of a DEA task force.
“I’ve always been somebody that believes in inclusion, and I definitely see diversification throughout the law enforcement ranks is something that’s really important,” Lyons said.
Lyons graduated from Bradley University, where she concentrated on Spanish and international studies.
She said her top goal is to fight Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, which supply Chicago with fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana.
Fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, is often mixed with heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs and sometimes pressed into counterfeit pills that look like Adderall, ecstasy and other drugs.
As a result, there’s been a rising number of overdose deaths attributed to fentanyl in the Chicago area and around the country. Last year, more than 1,700 deaths in Cook County were linked to fentanyl, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
“It’s everywhere, this awful, terrible challenge of fentanyl,” Lyons said. “It’s in every suburb. It’s in every corner of the city. It’s in every state in the union. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in law enforcement.”
Besides targeting drug cartels, Lyons is a cheerleader for the DEA’s national campaign to educate parents, teachers, coaches, professors and other adults who have influence over young people that “one pill can kill.”
Her two teenage sons have told her how they could easily get prescription pills like Percocet or Xanax online. Such pills often are fakes laced with fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs.
“I’m hyper-aware that my family and my sons are just as vulnerable as anyone to fall into this situation,” Lyons said.
More than a decade ago, Lyons supervised a team that identified Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera’s networks throughout Illinois. She said she learned how sophisticated the cartel was in managing its business, from having people who scouted warehouses for drugs to accountants who tracked the cash to strategists who analyzed U.S. pharmaceutical trends and representatives who dealt with the street gangs distributing the product.
“All cartel members aren’t mindless thugs,” she said, though “they might be vicious and violent.”
Chicago DEA’s office arrested twin Chicago brothers Pedro Flores and Margarito Flores, major drug traffickers who testified against Guzman, who’s now serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado.
Asked whether the DEA is waiting for China to collaborate with the United States in trying to stop precursor drug-making chemicals from being shipped from China to Mexico — chemicals that help produce fentanyl and methamphetamine — Lyons said, “That would be a fair thing to say. We’re always hopeful and open to any type of cooperation and collaboration.”
She was careful in responding to a question about Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s statement March 9 that “here, we do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl,” with the president blaming the overdose crisis in the United States on “social decay.” That’s despite ample evidence that Mexican cartels are producing fentanyl in Mexico and that people in Mexico’s border towns have become addicted to it.
“This is an international problem,” Lyons said. “I think high-level statements like that cannot affect what we do day to day.”
