PALM BEACH, Fla. — Richard Krieger, pursuer of war criminals and torturers, steps over a dozing poodle in the foyer as he guides a visitor to his den.
"Benji is not much of a watchdog," says Krieger, a 66-year-old man with thinning hair who lives with his wife in one of the ubiquitous gated communities west of Boynton Beach, Fla.
It's unlikely the former Honduran military chief that Krieger got kicked out of the United States last week could appreciate a nemesis who seems this ordinary.
The quiet, suburban home is an unlikely headquarters for Krieger's nonprofit organization dedicated to getting rid of war criminals and human-rights abusers. Since he started dogging Nazi war criminals in the early 1970s, he says he's forced 15 persecutors of various nationalities to leave the country.
The latest was former Gen. Luis Alonso Discua, founder of a Honduran paramilitary unit known as Battalion 316 that human-rights groups labeled a death squad.
Six months ago, Krieger said he learned — he won't say how — that Discua was secretly living in Miami. A visa, issued in 1996, allowed Discua to work as an adviser to the Honduran mission to the United Nations. It required he live in the New York area.
Krieger wrote the U.S. Department of State in January, demanding that the visa be rescinded. Within six weeks, the State Department had notified the Honduran mission that Discua was violating the terms of his visa. He was ordered to leave the country by the end of February, and did so.
Krieger later received a note from a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department thanking him and acknowledging that his letter led to Discua's departure.
Rather than crow about his victory, Krieger poses a question that the State Department wouldn't answer: "How did he get here in the first place?
"The U.S. government had to have known about Discua before he came here. Something is adamantly wrong."
He suspects Discua had friends highly placed in the U.S. government. The general was a four-time student at the School of the Americas in Georgia, U.S. training grounds for hundreds of Latin American soldiers.
Krieger says his sources report that Discua traveled to the Dominican Republic and Guatemala to avoid returning to Honduras, where the local press reported that he faces charges of "illegal enrichment" because he was unable to account for the source of about $165,000 in bank accounts.
Buoyed by the Discua victory, Krieger is asking the State Department for a list of all diplomatic visa holders so he can compare the names to his list of persecutors.
"We are anxious to make sure governments throughout the world know that if they send somebody here, we're going to look at them," Krieger says. "And if I find out if they have done anything in the form of human rights abuses, we are going to kick them out."
From his den, Krieger runs International Educational Missions Inc., a struggling nonprofit that targets war criminals and lobbies for tougher laws on bringing the persecutors to justice. Although the corporation operates on a shoestring — no contributions or expenses are reported on its 1999 income tax form — Krieger is well connected with top U.S. government officials.
The board of IEM is heavy with former U.S. ambassadors, members of Congress and others Krieger has met during his years in Washington as a deputy assistant secretary of state and a consultant to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"He does a remarkable job with scarcely any resources," said Eli Rosenbaum, who heads the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department's Nazi war-criminal unit.
"I think he operates from the highest motives of wanting to help victims of crimes against humanity and prevent the repetition of the crimes," Rosenbaum said.
In his book, "Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up," Rosenbaum praises Krieger for his "daring and ingenious initiatives" to rescue thousands of Jews from Ethiopia and Russia and his pursuit of Nazi war criminals.
Krieger began his interest in Nazi-hunting as an executive with Jewish federations in New Jersey and Michigan in the 1970s.
As a refugee affairs specialist with the State Department, he helped Jews in Ethiopia and the Sudan emigrate to Israel. He also sat on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Over the years, he steered his human rights interests to more recent atrocities all over the globe.
Among those he's now targeting are two retired El Salvadoran generals living in Florida, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Vides. They were sued by relatives of four American churchwoman who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980. A federal jury in West Palm Beach in November decided the generals couldn't be held responsible because they didn't have "effective command" of their troops.
Krieger wants them prosecuted under the International Convention Against Torture, a pact ratified by Congress in 1994 that allows the United States to bring to trial any foreign torturers living here. The United States has not prosecuted anyone under the United Nations agreement, he said.
Krieger estimates that South Florida is home to about 50,000 victims of war crimes, including 30,000 from the Holocaust. He puts the number of war criminals residing in the country at about 800, including 150 in Florida.
"The term 'Never Again' from the Holocaust should have worldwide connotations," Krieger said.
"How can you sit back and watch anyone suffering because of their backgrounds, religion or race? We don't have a right to do that and call ourselves a people."