Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb
2
By Gary Webb
2
We Were The First
The same day the world's cocaine experts were gathered in Lima to discuss the approaching drug epidemic—July 5,1979—a man who would help spread it across Los Angeles was touching down at LAX. It had been a rough couple of weeks for Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, a pudgy twenty-seven-year-old refugee from the Nicaraguan civil war.
Not long before he'd had the world on a platter. He'd been rich, the second son of a wealthy landowner. His wife, Chepita, had been rich, a daughter of one of the country's most prominent political families. He had a brand-new M.B.A., a cushy government job, and a couple of businesses—an import-export company and a travel agency—on the side. One of his firms had a lucrative contract to supply American food to the Nicaraguan National Guard, the institution that ran the country.
Danilo and Chepita Blandón were solidly plugged into the power structure of General Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship, which was benevolent only in the ways that it rewarded its friends. The Somoza family owned nearly all of the country's biggest corporations—the national airline, the power company, the biggest hotel, the biggest department store, the cement factory, a newspaper. . .you name it, they owned it. It was hard to earn a living in Nicaragua if the Somoza's took a dislike to you. But those families who stayed loyal and pleased the dictator partook of the riches that only a wall-to-wall monopoly can provide. The Blandón's had been blessed by Somoza's smile.
Then the Sandinista's had come to town and spoiled everything.
As Danilo Blandón stepped off the jet from Miami into the vast terminal at LAX, he found himself jobless, nearly broke, and homeless—human driftwood from a far away,conquered land.
"He came here with one hand in the front and one in the back, you know what I mean?" his cousin Flor Reyes said. All he and his wife had grown up accepting as their birthright—the elegant mansions, the servants, the vacationhomes, the elite private schools—was gone, and he dreaded would soon be the property of some grasping commandante.
Though Somoza's army had beaten them down time and again, the Sandinistas rose up from the earth in the summer of 1978 to begin an offensive that would flabbergast both Somoza and his American handlers. By the spring of the following year, they had captured many ofthe smaller rural cities and were closing in on the capital. Somoza's supporters, who called themselves Somocistas,were beside themselves. Who would have ever believed that "Tachito" Somoza, the self-described Latin from Manhattan, could have gotten his ass whipped—and so quickly—by a bunch of bearded radicals? More importantly,how could the Americans have allowed such a thing to happen? The CIA contingent at the U.S. embassy had been assuring everyone that things were fine, that the rebels weren't a real threat. It might get a little tough for the old boy a couple years down the road, the CIA opined, but Somoza would hang on until then.
But what Somoza and, apparently, the CIA didn't realize was that the deal his family had struck with every U.S.administration since Franklin Roosevelt's—a blood pact to combat Communism together—would be dissolved by a Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. Instead of covering up or downplaying the brutality of Somoza's National Guard as past administrations had done, some of Carter's people went on a human rights crusade, complaining publicly that the long time dictator was just too dictatorial, and that his Guardia was wantonly killing people. In 1977 some in Congress had begun wondering why the U.S. government continued putting up with Somoza and his ill-behaved brood. Asked by the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee what harm would befall U.S. interests if Congress were simply to cut off all aid to Nicaragua,Undersecretary of State Lucy Benson replied, "I cannot think of a single thing."
Somoza told his Guardia cohorts to ease up on the rough stuff, and miraculously, complaints dropped off sharply. Satisfied, the Carter administration backed off. "President Somoza is known to have instructed the National Guard on several occasions to eliminate abuses which led to many charges of extra-legal killings and torture,particularly in a northern rural area of insurgent activity," State Department official Sally Shelton proudly told Congress in 1978. That "northern rural area" was the stomping grounds of an especially efficient Guardia general, Gustavo "El Tigre" Medina, who would later play an important role in Danilo Blandón's life. Medina was Somoza's top counter insurgency adviser, a short, steely-looking man hated and feared by the Sandinistas. They consider him responsible for some of the revolution's worst defeats.
The State Department reported in 1978 that, as far as the human rights complaints coming out of Medina's theater were concerned, "it appears that many of the allegations of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment during the course of National Guard operations against the FSLN [the Sandinistas] were well-founded, but others were more dubious." But when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States (OAS), did its own inspection in late 1978, the Latin American team, observers from other countries, saw things in much more graphic terms than had the Americans.
They spoke to a mother who told of picking body parts out of the dust to reassemble her five-year-old daughter after the girl was hit by an air-to-ground missile. They talked with survivors of "Operation Mop-Up," during which the Guardia went in after a street battle and killed everyone they found in the neighborhoods where the Sandinistas had hidden, shooting "numerous people, in some cases children, in their own homes or in front of the same and in the presence of parents and siblings." They visited the jails,reporting that in "all the jails visited, the prisoners alleged that they rarely saw a doctor but that when they did see one he was giving instructions as to the voltage of electricity to be applied during the torture, or examining the tortured persons to see if they could resist any more shocks."
In the northern mountains, the team concluded that of 338 peasants arrested between 1975 and 1977 by the Guardia, 321 of them "were never seen again and are presumed dead." The missing peasants' farms were "appropriated by members of the National Guard," the report said.
When the State Department went to Congress for more money to support Somoza's troops, one congressman was perplexed. "What possible interest does the United Stateshave in training the National Guard of Nicaragua?" the lawmaker asked. "How does that help the American citizen?"
The training programs "have provided us a useful instrument for exercising political as well as professional influence over the Guard," the diplomat replied.
"I know," the congressman deadpanned. "We have been doing that for the last twenty or thirty years."
Because the National Guard had such a tight lock on the country, it was considered invincible by many of Somoza's followers. And it might have been, had the Carter administration backed up Somoza when the Sandinistas were at his throat. But Carter's people never really figured out what they wanted to do in Nicaragua, except to distance themselves from Somoza's excesses.
When it became obvious that the Nicaraguan people would no longer live under Somoza's rule, the American plan for dealing with the crisis boiled down to this: Dump Somoza and salvage the Guardia. Apparently theadministration never realized that, to the Sandinistas and most other Nicaraguans, the Guardia and Somoza were like evil twins joined at the brain. One could not survive without the other.
As Sandinista attacks mounted, Washington let Somoza twist. Gradually, it dawned on Somoza's followers that theAmericans weren't riding to their rescue. By early June 1979 Managua's airport was jammed with people frantically trying to catch a flight out before the rebels arrived. "Hundreds of Nicaraguans struggle daily at Las Mercedes International Airport to get a seat on one of the four commercial flights," Panamanian radio reported on June 9. "The situation here is such that if a donkey with wings appeared, it would be beseiged by travelers," an airport official said. "Departure from the country by land or by sea is impossible because of the danger involved in driving on the country's roads."
Yet Danilo Blandón stayed put, though he had every reason to fear the vengeance of the Sandinistas, to whom the Blandón family represented all that was wrong with the dictatorship. Blandón's father, Julio, owned the land on which was built one of the worst slums in Managua—OPEN#3—a low-rent district that began life as emergency government housing after an earthquake leveled Managuain 1972. Conditions there were so bad that theneighborhood, now called Ciudad Sandino and numbering more than 70,000 residents, was a constant source of new recruits for the Sandinistas and a hotbed of anti-Somoza activity. "It was called Via Misery," said economist Orlando Murillo, an uncle of Blandón's wife. "People there lived like the niggers in Los Angeles. But it made Danilo's father avery rich man."
The Blandóns were social friends of the Somozas and shared common business interests; Julio Blandón and Somoza were two of the biggest landlords in Managua.Blandón could trace his family's relationship with the dictatorship back several generations. Blandón's mother was from the Reyes family, which had an illustrious history in the Somoza regime, and his grandfather was Colonel Rigoberto Reyes, former minister of war and National Guard commander under Somoza's father, Anastasio I.
Danilo's in-laws, the Murillos, were stalwarts of Somoza's Liberal party. The Murillos had provided leaders for the National Assembly for generations; Orlando Murillo's father had been the assembly's president, and Chepita Blandón's father had been Managua's mayor. Like the Blandóns, the Murillos owned large tracts of the capital, including the national telecommunications company headquarters, along with cattle ranches and plantations in the hinterlands.
In some ways, Danilo Blandón had more to fear from the Sandinistas than other Somocistas. He was part of Somoza's government, the director of wholesale markets, and ran a program designed to introduce a free-market economy to Nicaragua's farmers. Blandón's job was to award grants for demonstration projects to create central distribution points for the country's agricultural riches, places where farmers could come and sell their goods to food wholesalers.
The $27 million program, Blandón said, was jointly financed by the Nicaraguan and U.S. governments. It paid for his master's degree in business administration from the University of Colombia in Bogota.
Blandón and his wife held fast during the first jittery weeks of June. Heavy fighting was breaking out in Managua, where they lived; National Guardsmen and Sandinista rebels were shooting each other in the streets. By June 11 things were so far gone for Somoza that the rebels had set up a headquarters in the eastern part of the city, and shells from National Guard howitzers whistled over downtown Managua daily to explode in the Sandinista held neighborhoods. Circling airplanes would drop 500-pound bombs or flaming gasoline barrels into the area. On the edge of town, a National Guard tank had rolled up outside the La Prensa building and pumped round after round into the shuttered offices of the paper that had been Somoza's fiercest critic.
The CIA hastily revised its estimate of Somoza's staying power on June 12, giving his government only a short time to live. Somoza "fired" the Guardia's general staff four days later—many had fought the Sandinista's for decades—and most of them ran to the Colombian embassy for asylum.The exodus was on.
Somoza went on the radio June 19 to denounce the U.S.government for its ingratitude for his long years of service."I want the U.S. people to help me, just as I helped them during thirty years of struggle against communism," he announced. "We want the North Americans to return what we contributed during the Cold War."
That same day the CIA shortened Somoza's life expectancy once more. Now, the agency estimated, he had little more than a week. Danilo Blandón decided he'd hung around long enough. He had a three-year-old daughter, and Chepita was pregnant with their second child. It was time to go. Blandón fell in with a Red Cross convoy on its way to the airport and put his wife and daughter on a plane for Los Angeles, where Chepita had relatives. For some reason,he did not accompany them. Instead Blandón and his older brother, Julio Jr., boarded a flight for Miami, where Blandón entered the United States on a tourist visa he'd been issued several years earlier.
How he managed to do what many others could not—namely, get four seats on jetliners bound for the States—is not clear, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service has refused to release any records of the Blandóns' immigration, citing privacy reasons. Nor is it clear why he first went to Miami.
Years later, Blandón would claim that he couldn't get a ticket to L.A. for himself, and barely could afford the tickets he got. He claimed that he sold a Sony color television for $200 to pay for them, and landed in Miami with $100 to his name. However, his wife's uncle, Orlando Murillo, says he paid for the airline tickets and also gave the couple $5,000 before they left the country. If that was true, Blandón had other reasons for choosing to spend his first few weeks in Miami.
As he tells it, he stayed with a friend and "got a job washing cars" until he could save enough for a plane ticket to Los Angeles. He rejoined his family on the West Coast in early July, and by August he had landed a job as a salesman at a used car lot in East Los Angeles, a heavily Hispanic section of town. His employers were two huge Nicaraguan brothers named Torres.
Blandón has said he knew one of the brothers, Edgar,from his days in college in Monterrey, Mexico, where Edgar was studying economics. Edgar's brother, Jacinto, was a former U.S. Marine and had served in Vietnam. Together they ran Torres Used Cars.
"They had a used car lot with only ten cars," Blandón said. "They just give me a favor to be there and pay me something because they know that I didn't have any money,and then they gave me a job like a salesman in the neighborhood."
But the Torres brothers weren't just car salesmen. They were also major-league cocaine traffickers. Other dealers called them "the Trees" because of their sequoia-like girth;both brothers were estimated to be at least six-six. To the cops they became known as "the Twin Towers." The Torres brothers lived with two sisters who were big in their own way: they were cousins of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian cocaine kingpin who was one of the founders of the Medellín cocaine cartel.
Escobar and his Colombian pals Jorge Ochoa and Carlos Lehder were then firmly in control of the blossoming Miami cocaine market, having wrested it from the Cuban-Americans after a long-running cocaine war. The Cubans had been using the city as a base for small-scale cocaine smuggling since the late 1960s, but the Colombians had bigger ideas. They intended to distribute mass quantities of cocaine all across the United States in an organized and businesslike fashion. [Think the demise of Scarface D.C]
For three years, from 1976 to 1979, they fought the Cubans for supremacy in Miami, and the two sides killed each other in droves. Afterward the Colombians turned the city into a cocaine distribution hub, and it became the official port of call for cocaine dealers of every stripe. Local banks began swelling with drug profits.
Miami was convenient; the Colombians could blend in with the large Hispanic population and move about the city unnoticed. Escobar's associate Carlos Lehder set up shop in the Bahamas, buying an island where the drug planes coming out of Colombia could land, refuel, and wait for the right moment to fly into the United States.
Lehder's transportation system worked well and gave the Medellin cartel its first real toehold in America. Then he began jetting to the West Coast to scope out a distribution system for Los Angeles and the western United States.
When Blandón was working for the Torres brothers, he says, they had not yet begun dealing cocaine. But it apparently didn't take them long to get the hang of it; by 1982 they would be two of the more significant drug dealers in Los Angeles.
Blandón insists he wasn't dealing drugs in 1979 either. That was a couple years down the road. At the moment, he had plenty to keep him busy. Chepita was getting bigger with their second child every day, and he was struggling to pay the bills. In August 1979 he started a new job with another car lot, Rocha Used Cars, and was also hustling rental cars at an L.A. hotel, according to his friend Frank Vigil. And in his spare time Blandón was also trying to start an army.
"I was the first," Blandón boasted. "Well—we—we formed a group in L.A. to—a group of our people to go and fight against the Sandinista's that we called F.D.N, Fuerza Democratica Nicaragüense [Nicaraguan Democratic Force]. We were in charge. We were five people in charge of it in L.A. We were in charge to get some money at that time."
Blandón said his counterrevolutionary group came together soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. At first it was just a group of Nicaraguan exiles who got together occasionally to bitch about the Sandinista's and help each other find a toehold in their new country. They would "talk about developments in Nicaragua," Blandón later told the CIA. "Other members of this group also opposed Somoza and the Sandinista regime. . .. They simply came together to share common experiences and discuss their mutual desires to see the Sandinista government out of Nicaragua." They had "meetings every week, every 15 days, okay, since we got to L.A., in 1980–81. And we raised money for the Contra's." When it began, he said, his group was not officially connected to anyone. It had no formal structure, no officers, no membership requirements.
"You Americans have no idea what it's like to lose everything and be thrown out of your own country," commented Jose Macario Estrada, an ex-judge who later became Blandón's lawyer and business partner. "When you are in exile, you become very close to other exiles." [yeah, most Americans are not involved in oppressing their fellow countrymen,so most American's are not in danger of getting 'thrown' out of the country.I see this corrupt Judge had to take a step down on the corruption ladder once here D.C]
At the end of 1979 Blandón applied for political asylum in the United States, claiming that he would be killed by the Communists if he returned to Nicaragua. And he listed his membership in an "anti-Communist organization" as proof that his life was worthless back home. If Blandón's recollection is correct, his little L.A. group was one of the first flickering of an organized resistance movement against the Sandinista's in the United States. Acquaintances and former college classmates say Blandón sometimes brags that he was one of the earliest founders of the F.D.N., which became the biggest and most famous of the various Nicaraguan anti-Communist armies that would later be called the Contras.
The F.D.N didn't officially come into existence until mid-1981, so if Blandón was raising money for Contra fighters as early as he says—in 1979–80—he was doing it on behalf of the F.D.N's predecessor: the Legion of September 15, a violent band of ex-Guardia men then based in Guatemala. The legion, a terrorist organization started by former Somoza bodyguards soon after Somoza's fall, was to become the hard core of the F.D.N after the CIA merged it into two smaller resistance groups in August 1981.
Blandón's Contra fund-raising efforts bore little fruit at first. "At the beginning, we started doing some parties, you know, some—how do you call—some activities in the park,until 1980 and '81," he said. "We have to have some rallies or whatever." The fund-raisers were disappointing, though, bringing in only "a few thousands or something." An acquaintance reported that Blandón also hawked copies of Somoza's bitter memoirs, Nicaragua Betrayed, and helped put out an anti-Sandinista newsletter that was printed at a little shop owned by a sympathetic Nicaraguan.
About the same time that Blandón and his compatriots began their fund-raising efforts in L.A., Somoza's cousin, Luis Pallais Debayle, began making the rounds of the various exile groups in the United States and Central America to see if anyone was interested in helping Somoza fight his way back into power.
Pallais contacted his cousin in Paraguay, and the ex-dictator promised to kick in $1 million to start a resistance movement. It was a promise he never kept. On September17, 1980, Argentine revolutionaries blasted a rocket-propelled grenade and a hail of M-16 fire into Somoza's Mercedes-Benz limo, killing Somoza and scattering pieces of him and his German automobile across a block of downtown Asunción.
Another visit Pallais made, with happier results, was to former National Guard colonel Enrique Bermúdez, to see if Bermúdez would be willing to lead a resistance force if one could be put together. Bermúdez was a logical choice to be the Contras' military commander. Of all the former officers of Somoza's National Guard, he probably had the best contacts with the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Convincing the Americans to back them was going to be critical if the Contras were ever to get off the ground. And Bermúdez was a leader who was very palatable to the Americans. He was a known quantity.
"He fit the profile," one U.S. official later told journalist Sam Dillon. "He was malleable, controllable, docile."
In 1965 Bermúdez had been the deputy commander of an infantry company Somoza sent to support a U.S. led invasion of the Dominican Republic, an excursion to putdown a leftist political movement. It was another one of those favors Somoza had done over the years to help his American friends stamp out any hint of communism in Latin America.
Bermúdez had been in the United States since 1975, first as a student attending courses on subversion and counterinsurgency at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington and later as the Nicaraguan government's liaison to the American military. The Americans thought so highly of him that he was one of six Guardia officers they recommended to head the National Guard during the final days of the Somoza regime, in a last-minute public relations ploy by the Carter administration to change the Guardia's murderous image and take some of the wind out of the Sandinista's sails before their final offensive.
The State Department considered Bermúdez a safe choice; he had spent most of the revolution in Washington and, the reasoning went, couldn't be held responsible for any of the Guardia's human rights violations—the tortures, the disappearances, the aerial bombardments of civilian neighborhoods. Somoza picked someone else, however, and Bermúdez rode out the remainder of the civil war from the safety of Embassy Row in Washington. When the Somoza government collapsed, Bermúdez began a new career as a truck driver, delivering Newsweek magazines.
He would not toil long at such a menial task. Soon after the uplifting visit from Somoza's cousin, Bermúdez got a call from Major General Charles E. Boyd, a top U.S. AirForce official, who invited Bermúdez to the Pentagon to kick some ideas around. There, after sounding out Bermúdez on the idea of running a rebel force to harass the Sandinista's, Boyd told him he had a friend at the CIA who was interested in speaking with him. By mid-1980Bermúdez had packed his family and his belongings and left Washington behind, moving to a rented house in Miami. According to one account, Bermúdez was then on the CIA's payroll.
He began traveling widely, gauging the sentiment of vanquished National Guardsmen hiding in the United States and Central America and reporting his findings to his CIA handlers. Those who wondered how Bermúdez could afford his travels when he was jobless were told he was living off the profits from the sale of his home in Washington.
According to Boyd, the CIA "put Bermúdez in touch" with the Legion of September 15 in Guatemala. Soon Bermúdez would move there and become the legion's commander.
It was a motley crew, if there ever was one. Made up mostly of ex-Guardia officers who escaped from Nicaragua at the end of the war, the legionaries had a safe house in Guatemala City and were training on a farm near the Honduran border called Detachment 101. Coincidentally,the farm was located in the same small town, Esquipulas, that had served as the headquarters for the CIA backed group that overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954.
Since there was no war for them to fight—yet—the legion kept in shape by hiring itself out to perform a variety of warlike deeds for others. The CIA acknowledged in 1998 that the Legion "to some extent engaged in kidnapping,extortion, and robbery to fund its operations" and also "engaged in the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian airliners and airliner hijackings as methods of attacking the Sandinista government." According to a June 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, the Legion's commanders "see themselves as being forced to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre."
That the CIA would know this band of terrorists so well that it would know the thinking of its commanders is not a surprise. Much of the Legion's leadership had worked with or for the Agency during their previous lives as Somoza's secret agents, rooting out dissidents for the dictator's Office of National Security, which was advised by the CIA.One of the earliest published accounts of the Legion's existence notes that it was "run by former members of Somoza's intelligence service." In other words, the men of the CIA and the men of the Legion were kindred spirits—anti-Communist spooks—and this mutual affection would come to serve the Legion well after the CIA took over the day-to-day operations of the Contras.
Still, the CIA's matter-of-fact description of the Legion's criminal history is too kind. Its Inspector General never mentioned the Legion's most horrific deed: the March 1980 assassination of the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was shot through the heart as he held Mass. Romero had the bad luck to interest himself in the fate of some parishioners who had been "disappeared" by the infamous Salvadoran death squads.The archbishop had been warned several times to butt out,but he hadn't taken the hint.
Records seized from a right-wing Salvadoran politician suspected of orchestrating Romero's murder, Roberto D'Aubuisson, revealed that D'Aubuisson had gone to Guatemala three days after Romero's murder and made two "contributions to Nicaraguans," one for $40,000 and one for $80,000. Written underneath these amounts was the name and telephone number of Colonel Ricardo Lau, a former intelligence and security officer for the Guardia who was running the Legion of September 15 prior to Bermúdez's appointment as commander.
Lau, who was never charged in connection with Romero's murder, would go on to become Enrique Bermúdez's right-hand man in the Contra organization. The CIA has admitted that during 1981–82 it was receiving regular reports that Lau and seven other Legion commanders were "involved in criminal activities." Coincidentally, that's what Danilo Blandón was doing for the Contras in Los Angeles. His little exile group was moving up in the world, and had switched from cocktail parties to car theft and loan fraud. They had also become an official part of the CIA's new Contra army, the Fuerza Democratica Nicaragüense— the F.D.N.
In 1981 CIA agent Enrique Bermúdez paid Blandón's little group in L.A. a visit. "Bermúdez came to a meeting of the group to give a pep talk and to ask that the group keep the idea of a free and democratic Nicaragua alive by publicizing the Contra cause in the United States," Blandón told CIA inspectors. The colonel asked the group "to adopt the colors and the flag of the F.D.N," and, after that, the CIA inspectors wrote, "Blandón and other member of the group called themselves F.D.N and used the F.D.N's colors, flag and letterhead."
They also got an assignment, Blandón testified. "It came,you know, that we had to provide some cars and we got involved in another thing to get some money." By then Blandón had been working in L.A. long enough to establish a credit history, so he applied for an auto loan.
"My thinking was to get back to Nicaragua, never to stay in the States, so I used my car salesman job to get a loan application, to make an application and to get a car without—just giving them the down payment—and sending it to the Contra revolution in Honduras," Blandón said. "We were the first people, the first group that sent a pickup truck to the Contra revolution in Honduras." (In the spring of 1981 the Legion of September 15 moved its operations from Guatemala to a new headquarters in Honduras, where it would remain for the rest of the war.)
Blandón said the payments on the cars they sent to the Contras were to be picked up by "the organization. . .and they didn't pay the monthly payments, so I lost my credit. But at that time I didn't care because they [the Contras] were my idea, my cause."
As Blandón tells the story, his transformation occurred shortly after getting a call from a friend from Miami, an old college classmate named Donald Barrios. Barrios told Blandón that someone wanted to meet with him, a man who would be flying into L.A. very soon. The passenger's name was Norwin Meneses. Blandón was to meet him at the airport and listen to what Meneses had to say.
"He had to talk to me about something," Blandón said.For most Nicaraguans that would have come as decidedly unwelcome news. Meneses had a nasty reputation in his homeland. Blandón had heard him referred to as "El Padrino" (The Godfather) and he'd heard rumors of drug trafficking. A 1982 FBI report said Meneses "had a reputation as a hit man who had killed in Nicaragua."
Barrios didn't say why he wanted Blandón to meet with the gangster, but Blandón figured it had to do with the Contras, "because he [Barrios] was in the Contra—in the Contra revolution organization."
People who know Barrios describe him as a wealthy former insurance broker and financier from Managua who emigrated to the States long before the revolution and married an American woman. They say Barrios is a relative of former Nicaraguan president Violeta Barrios deChamorro, widow of the crusading journalist Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, whose 1978 murder sparked the uprising that eventually toppled Somoza. Norwin Meneses, records show, was a partner of Violeta Chamorro in a finance company before the revolution.
After the Sandinista takeover, Donald Barrios reportedly became a financial angel to dispossessed Somocistas, helping them settle in Miami and find jobs. He also became business partners with some of them, including at least two members of the dictator's general staff and the owner of the largest pharmaceutical company in Nicaragua.
At the time he called Blandón in Los Angeles, Barrios was partners with Somoza's old guerrilla hunter, Gustavo "El Tigre" Medina, the counterinsurgency expert who'd ravaged the northern mountains rooting out Communist sympathizers. Medina was head of G-4—the officer in charge of supplies—for the National Guard at the end of the war, and he fled Managua with Somoza on the morning his regime ended. "I was in the plane right behind his," Medina said. Because of his activities during the war, Medina is among the minority of Nicaraguans who have not gone home.
Medina and Barrios started a restaurant and an investment company in Miami, records show. Other partners included former colonel Aurelio Somarriba, head of G-1 for the Guardia, Somoza's chief administrative officer; and Enrique "Cuco" Sanchez, a member of a wealthy Nicaraguan family that would play a key role in the founding of the Contras.
Blandón's hunch about Meneses and the Contras turned out to be correct. The meeting, he said, was "to start the movement, the Contra revolution."
After picking his passenger up at the airport, Blandón said, the wiry Meneses "started telling me that we had to do some money and to send it to Honduras." Later, at a restaurant, Meneses explained his idea more fully: "He told me to make some drug business in L.A. for raise money to the Contra, and we started that way."
Blandón was shocked by the suggestion at first, he said."I didn't agree at that time, because I had to think."
Joining up with a man like Norwin Meneses would be agreeing to work for a killer—a career criminal. Meneses's nickname, "El Perico," is a Spanish pun, and a telling one.The word usually means "parakeet," and given Meneses's quick, dark eyes and small beakish face, it's easy to see why such a moniker would stick. But in Argentinian slang the word means "cocaine." And to cops in Central America from the 1970s to the 1990s, cocaine often meant Meneses.
The CIA, in a recently declassified 1986 cable, described Meneses as "the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Somoza." The agency would later describe him as the Cali cartel's representative in Nicaragua, but Norwin wasn't finicky. He'd sell cocaine for anyone.
In fact, he'd been selling cocaine since before there were any cartels. In the small world of international cocaine smuggling, Norwin Meneses was a pioneer.
Back when Medellín kingpin Carlos Lehder was still just a car thief sitting in a cell at the Danbury, Connecticut, federal prison, Meneses was making multi kilo deals directly with Peruvian cocaine manufacturers. According to Nicaraguan police officials, Meneses's relationship with the drug lords of Colombia began during the marijuana era of the early 1970s, and the story they tell of his first big deal is illustrative of Meneses's modus operandi.
Roger Mayorga is a former Sandinista intelligence officer who also headed up investigations for the Nicaraguan National Police narcotics unit. Mayorga says the drug kingpin's association with the Colombians began after an airplane full of marijuana made an emergency landing at a ranch owned by one of the Somoza's. The Managua police were called, and they arrested the Colombian pilots, seized the airplane, and confiscated its load of prime weed.
In Somoza's Nicaragua, the Managua police department was a branch of the National Guard. And the Guardia officer who commanded the Managua police for many years was Colonel Edmundo Meneses Cantarero—Norwin's brother. Colonel Meneses came to an understanding with the Colombians who owned the aircraft. Mayorga said the pilots and the airplane were allowed to leave, but the load of marijuana remained behind as "evidence." Somehow the evidence got turned over to brother Norwin, and a drug kingpin was born.
The role played by the Nicaraguan National Guard in creating Meneses's criminal empire can't be overstated.The Guardia, which one researcher called "one of the most totally corrupt military establishments in the world," permeated the Meneses family. In addition to Edmundo,another brother, Brigadier General Fermin Meneses, commanded the Guardia garrison in the city of Masaya, a commercial and cultural center not far from Managua. The family's long ties with the Guardia and its history of staunch anticommunism help explain Norwin's later activities on behalf of the Contras.
"The whole [Meneses] family was anti-Sandinista to the death," the Nicaraguan news magazine El Semanario reported in 1996. "It is a hate that seems almost genetic,ancestral."
The Guardia wasn't just an army; it had its hands in everything. If the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the army,the air force, the Marine Corps, the National Guard, the Coast Guard, Customs, Immigration, and the Postal Service were all rolled into one, it would begin to approach Somoza's National Guard in its power over the everyday lives of the average citizen. "Nicaragua is one of the few countries we are aware of in which all arms shipments that go into the country, whether they are sporting goods or of whatever kind, have to be received by the National Guard," State Department official Sally Shelton told Congress in 1978. "We have been shipping hunting equipment, for example. They are in effect purchased by the National Guard and then resold in retail outlets."
"Say that again?" one stunned congressman asked. "The National Guard is a wholesaler for hunting ammunition?"
"They are passed through the National Guard and sold in retail outlets," Shelton repeated. "It is more an accounting procedure than anything else."
According to the hearing transcript, "general laughter" ensued.
But the pervasive corruption of the Guardia was no laughing matter to Nicaraguans. "Gambling, alcoholism,drugs, prostitution and other vices are protected and exploited by the very persons who have the obligation to combat them," Nicaragua's Roman Catholic bishops complained in a 1978 pastoral letter to Somoza. "Widespread corruption continues unchecked and public scandals further undermine the confidence and morale of the people."
To many the Guardia was little different than the Mafia.And if Somoza was its godfather, the Meneses brothers were his capos. Somoza was closest to Edmundo, known as Mundo, who was one of his favorite generals. In the1960's Mundo—who'd been trained in irregular warfare and anticommunism at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Panama—conducted a series of bloody operations against Sandinista rebels near the town of Pancasan in northern Nicaragua. Those campaigns killed several key Sandinistas and crippled the guerrilla movement for years.Later Somoza gave Mundo the Guardia's choicest plum,control of the Managua police, a perch from which a man so inclined could dip his beak into every imaginable scam.For the unscrupulous, the profit potential was unlimited.
"You have to realize that you did a lot of things in your career in the Guardia and you progressed up through the ranks so you might have been a lot of things," explained former Somoza secretary Juan C. Wong. "Now, Police Chief, that's one of the best. That's a nice job. That was the last job he [Edmundo] had in his military career. Then here tired and went into the diplomatic corps."
Under Mundo's watchful eye, Managua became an open city for brother Norwin, who by the late 1970s owned discotheques—the Frisco Disco and the VIP Club, among others—drive-in whorehouses with waterbeds and porno tapes, and a thriving drug business.
A "highly reliable" FBI informant told Justice Department inspectors that Meneses used his influence within the Somoza regime to smuggle cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. and "had even used a Nicaraguan Air Force plane once for such a shipment."
"Norwin ran all the rackets for the Guardia," said Mayorga. "And remember, his brother was the chief of police. No one could do anything."
San Francisco cocaine trafficker Rafael Cornejo, who has worked for the Meneses family since the 1970s, told of pre-revolution jaunts down to Managua where he would spend weekends partying with the Meneses brothers. "You'd walk down the street with Mundo, and everyone would salute you," Cornejo recalled with a smile. "We went riding around in the Jeeps, you know, guys with big guns everywhere around us. It was a trip."
Though never a member of the Guardia, Norwin did his part for the Somoza regime. In his teens and twenties, acquaintances said, he worked as an undercover informant for the Office of National Security (ONS), Somoza's plainclothes secret police, which rooted out subversives and political dissidents. Before going to Guatemala to startup the Legion of September 15, Colonel Ricardo Lau spent much of his career with the ONS and was allegedly one of its chief torturers.
Former Managua police chief Rene Vivas, an early member of the Sandinista movement, said Norwin Meneses infiltrated pro-Communist groups for the O.N.S,sometimes posing as a news photographer, other times as the secretly disaffected son of a powerful Somocista family.In a magazine interview in 1996, Meneses told of starting up an armed guerrilla group to support Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba but insisted that he was never a Communist.
With Mundo and the National Guard as his protectors,Norwin appears to have literally gotten away with murder. In the spring of 1977 Norwin found himself under investigation by the chief inspector of the Nicaraguan Customs Department, a particularly tenacious sleuth named Oskar Reyes Zelaya. Inspector Reyes and the FBI believed Norwin was running a massive car theft ring, which was using the National Guard to "import" stolen American cars into Nicaragua and then selling them to various potentates of the Somoza government. Importing cars through the Guardia allowed the buyer to evade the hefty tariffs the Nicaraguan government had placed on imports.
According to press reports, Norwin first tried to get the annoying inspector off his tail by setting him up with an attractive woman in a Managua hotel room. The woman,Pamela Cestoni, then went to the police, claiming that Inspector Reyes had raped her. When the investigation revealed that Cestoni was a friend of Norwin's, Reyes was cleared, and "the sexual maneuver was used only to exacerbate the prosecution against Norwin," La Prensa reported.
On the evening of June 2, 1977, the chief inspector got a phone call at his home, allegedly from a man who wanted to give him a payoff in order to drop the Meneses investigation. Dressed in a bathrobe and flip-flops, Reyes hopped into his Jeep Cherokee and drove to an alley behind a nearby supermarket, where the man was waiting to meet him. Whoever it was in that alley shot Reyes three times in the stomach and throat. But he didn't complete the job. Bleeding profusely, the inspector was taken to the emergency room of the Orient Hospital in Managua. As he lay writhing on a cot, the dying Reyes spotted his friend Pablo Zamora Moller, the chief investigator for the Managua police department, standing nearby.
"Pablo, protect me!" Reyes cried. "This is Norwin! Norwin Meneses sent away to kill me!" Reyes died a short time later.
Norwin was arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. But after a "rigorous and exhaustive" investigation ordered by brother Edmundo, Norwin was cleared of any involvement and released. Meneses claimed he was at a motel when the killing happened, and both Rafael Cornejo, one of his San Francisco-based cocaine traffickers, and his nephew Jaime Meneses, who also was dealing cocaine in the Bay Area, backed up the story, testifying that Norwin was with them.
Reyes' murder would never be solved, but the Justice Department would later receive compelling evidence that Meneses was behind it, just as the dying inspector had claimed. In 1986, federal prosecutors in San Francisco debriefed Edmundo Meneses' son, Jairo, who informed them that "during the Somoza regime, Norwin Meneses smuggled weapons, silencers, and video equipment into Nicaragua, which he exchanged for money or narcotics. The operation was discovered by Oscar Reyes, who was a high-ranking customs official under Somoza. Norwin then arranged for Reyes' assassination."
After the publicity died down, Norwin calmly resumed his smuggling ventures, but the FBI kept its eye on him. As Somoza's government teetered, the Bureau laid plans to keep Norwin from ever coming to the U.S. In 1979, the FBI office in Mexico City asked that Meneses be included in the Bureau's "top thief" program and requested an arrest warrant "if for no other reason than to preclude him from entering the United States." The FBI also asked for a hold on his immigration status so he could be questioned if he tried to cross the border. But the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco, citing Norwin's "political connections" in Nicaragua, refused to do either—and it would not be the last time that office would exhibit such an odd reluctance to battle the Meneses crime family.
One longtime Contra supporter said Norwin's arrest and the subsequent scandal that enveloped Edmundo so upset Somoza that it may have triggered his heart attack in July1977, after which he went off to the United States to recuperate. Edmundo soon left the police department, was promoted to brigadier general, and retired from the National Guard. Somoza then sent him off to Guatemala tobe Nicaragua's ambassador.
It would be Edmundo's last assignment for Tachito.
On September 16, 1978, Ambassador Meneses was machine-gunned in Espana Park in Guatemala City,catching three bullets in his back. Two days later, as he clung to life in the Guatemala City Medical Center, a revolutionary group, the People's Guerrilla Army (E.G.P),claimed credit for the attempted assassination.
The E.G.P's communique described Meneses as being far more than a diplomat. According to the guerrillas, he was overseeing anti-Communist counter insurgency operations all over Central America. "Meneses Cantarero enjoyed special privileges amongst Guatemala's authorities and army commanders," the guerrillas declared. "Exploiting his ambassadorial position in Guatemala as a smokescreen, he actually discharged the duties of coordinator between the Guatemalan army and the Nicaraguan National Guard, and also between Somoza and Guatemala's reactionary government. He coordinated political repression for all of Central America and the operations undertaken by the governments of this area against popular revolutionary movements." The E.G.P claimed that the ambassador was gunned down to "show solidarity with the struggle of the Sandinista National Liberation Front."
"The Sandinista's never forgave my brother Edmundo for the guerrillas of Pancasan," Santiago Meneses told El Semanario in 1996.
Edmundo Meneses lingered for another fifteen days before succumbing to his wounds. At his funeral, Somoza hailed him as a martyr in the worldwide struggle against communism.
The nature of Edmundo Meneses's relationship with the U.S. government is not clear. The CIA has refused to disclose any information about him, on grounds of national security. The State Department, incredibly, has claimed it can find no records that even mention his name, a stunning admission given Meneses's stature in the Somoza government—its chief law enforcement officer and ambassador to Guatemala.
In light of Edmundo's murder, Norwin figured the Sandinista's probably had the same fate in mind for him,and he left Nicaragua in early June 1979. He caught a flight to El Salvador, went to Ecuador for a while, then to Costa Rica—where he had businesses and at least six ranches—before finally emigrating to the United States in early 1980 and applying for political asylum. Meneses had homes in Florida and Alabama, he said, but spent most of his time in San Francisco, where he had begun buying property in 1978.
After the Sandinista's marched into Managua, the Bay Area—like Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles—saw a large influx of Nicaraguans who had supported Somoza. Not surprisingly, Contra support groups quickly popped up in those cities, and Meneses played a key role in getting the San Francisco organization going. "Even before the term 'Contra' was being used. . .there were meetings of 'anti-Sandinista's at Meneses' house, which were attended by politicians, Somocistas, and other exiles interested in starting a counter-revolutionary movement," a DEA informant who knew Meneses told the Justice Department in 1997. Meneses posed as a successful businessman, purchasing a used car lot, a couple of commercial buildings, a travel agency, and a restaurant. He zipped around town in a gray Jaguar sedan. His nephews bought bars and nightclubs. Norwin purchased two houses in Pacifica, a small town just down the coast from San Francisco, one for himself and the other for his brother Ernesto.
He spent much time in San Francisco's Mission District,working out of a travel agency office owned by nephew Jaime Meneses. The Mission is a heavily Hispanic section of town, with a history of hospitality to Central American revolutionaries of all stripes. According to Roberto Vargas, a San Franciscan who later became the Sandinista's ambassador to China, the Mission was home to several ofthe Sandinista's future commandants, who practiced their sharpshooting skills at rod and gun clubs down the coast.
Meneses's ability to freely travel in and out of the United States, buying properties, starting businesses, and applying for political asylum—all under his own name—speaks volumes about his lack of concern about attracting the attention of American law enforcement officials. "I even drove my own cars, registered in my name!" he boasted.
How someone with Meneses' record was ever allowed into the United States in the first place is still a mystery, and one that is likely never to be solved. The Justice Department's Inspector General tried in 1997 to figure out how Meneses was able "to come and go from the United States as frequently as he did" but found huge gaps in his immigration files. The I.G didn't even try to explain how Meneses was able to obtain visas from U.S. Embassies while he was under active DEA and FBI investigation. It's entirely possible, though, that Uncle Sam was repaying some IOU's.
Meneses told the Justice Department he met with CIA agents shortly after the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua to teach them how to cross his country's borders undetected,a claim that makes a certain amount of sense given Meneses' considerable expertise in that area. By 1986, Meneses was boasting that he had U.S. government agents escorting him across America's borders, a claim that—amazingly enough—was true, as we shall see.
The cocaine kingpin's easy access to U.S. shores becomes even more disconcerting when one considers just how much the federal government knew about him by then.He'd been turning up in law enforcement files with some regularity for nearly 20 years. In 1968 he was suspected of murdering a money changer in Managua and Nicaraguan authorities asked the CIA and FBI to search for him in San Francisco, where they assumed he'd fled. During their unsuccessful search, federal agents found records of other crimes Norwin had committed in San Francisco in the early 1960s: statutory rape, shoplifting, and "misuse of slot machines."
Court records show that the DEA first picked up word that Norwin was a drug dealer in 1974. By December 1976 its office in Costa Rica had identified him as a cocaine "source of supply" based in Managua.
The FBI became aware in April 1978 that Norwin and his brother Ernesto "were smuggling 20 kilos of cocaine at a time into the United States" and identified Norwin's nephew, Jaime Meneses, as their San Francisco distributor. The DEA learned that Meneses was dealing cocaine in Miami as well, bringing it into the country aboard commercial airliners.
The following year, the New Orleans DEA determined that Meneses was responsible for smuggling cocaine into that city also. The DEA's "Operation Alligator," as the sweep was called, resulted in the indictment of "numerous persons for smuggling cocaine. It was determined that Norwin Meneses was a source of supply for this group."
One of the men arrested in that DEA operation, Manuel Porro, would end up in Guatemala as a commander of the Legion of September 15 Contra army, and the CIA would link him repeatedly to criminal activities there. Nonetheless,he would go on to serve as a top aide to CIA agent Adolfo Calero, the political leader of the Contras, and would handle some of Calero's Caribbean banking activities.
By the fall of 1981, the time Blandón says Meneses recruited him to sell dope for the Contras, the DEA had Meneses under active investigation for cocaine trafficking and possible gun running. "The Drug Enforcement Administration has developed information over the past several years that the Meneses Family has been involved in the smuggling and distribution of cocaine in the San Francisco Bay Area," stated a November 1981 affidavit by DEA agent Sandra Smith.
Smith, who was one of the DEA's first female agents in San Francisco, recalled that her investigation of the Meneses family was "the only thing that I ever worked, in all the time I worked there, that I thought was really big. . .. In this business, if you have people coming in from Nicaragua bringing in cocaine and the rumor was they were taking guns back. . .that's sort of an interesting combination."
Starting in the late 1970s, Smith said, she began gathering string on the Meneses family, "putting together the comings and goings." She said Meneses was living in "a gorgeous house" in Burlingame, a ritzy suburb of San Francisco. Periodically, she and a Customs agent would stake out the house, sitting in the parking lot of a nearby elementary school and jotting down license numbers of cars seen pulling up Meneses's thickly treed drive. "We really didn't have anybody on the inside," she said. "That was part of the problem."
The local San Francisco police were also running across various and sundry Meneseses, often in the company of large quantities of cocaine. Omar Meneses, another nephew, was arrested for cocaine sales at a bar in the Mission owned by nephew Jaime in June 1980. A month later nephew Roger Meneses was arrested with twenty pounds of cocaine and more than $8,800. That same month, Omar got busted again with a quarter pound of cocaine.
By mid-1981 Smith had put together enough information from her investigation and from the DEA's files to sketch out a fairly detailed portrait of a family steeped in drug trafficking. The Nicaraguan, it appeared, had cocaine coming in from everywhere. "Meneses had an endless supply of dope, from what I could see."
In June 1981, Smith got a break in her on-again, off-again investigation.
Detective Joseph Lee of the Baldwin Park police in southern California got a tip that a cocaine dealer in West Covina, a Nicaraguan named Julio Bermúdez (no relation to Enrique Bermúdez), was making two trips a month to San Francisco, "where he contacts a large cocaine smuggling organization headed by Norwin Meneses." The informant told Lee that Bermúdez was bringing down between fourteen and twenty pounds of cocaine on each trip. Another informant reported that Bermúdez called San Francisco and "places his order by telephone" before each trip. The police subpoenaed Bermúdez's telephone records for the previous three months, and sure enough, they found fifty-one long-distance calls from Bermúdez's phone to a number in Daly City, a working-class suburb south of San Francisco. The number belonged to Norwin's nephew,Jairo Meneses.
It was enough for the Baldwin Park cops, along with members of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the U.S. Customs Service, to put a tail on Bermúdez and stakeout his house at 1128 Greendale Street.
On November 12, 1981, Bermúdez left the house with a small beige suitcase and drove off in a 1972 Buick. The cops followed, observing him stop to pick up another man,Jose Herrera, before heading to the L.A. airport. The duo bought two one-way tickets to San Francisco on PSA Flight 425 and got there at 3:40 P.M., when DEA agent Smith picked up the surveillance.
Smith watched as the two traffickers were met outside the terminal by an unidentified Latino man driving a gold 1979 Toyota, a car registered to Herrera, one of the traffickers. They drove to a small house in Daly City, and the three men went inside. After a bit Bermúdez came out, opened the trunk, and got out the beige suitcase, which he placed behind the driver's seat; then he drove off.
Bermúdez managed to shake his tail in the traffic. Thirty-five minutes later, though, the cops spotted the car in another part of Daly City, parked outside Jairo Meneses's house. Bermúdez came out about two hours later and drove back to the first Daly City house.
The sequence of events provided the police with enough evidence to get a search warrant and they hit Bermúdez's house in West Covina two days later, catching the dealer with three pounds of cocaine—an enormous amount for the times—which Bermúdez promptly admitted he'd bought from Norwin Meneses. They also found $17,000 and a drug ledger bearing the entry: "11–11–81—$90,000 to Jairo." Bermúdez was hustled off to jail and Smith got a warrant for Jairo Meneses' house.
On November 16 the police hit Jairo's place and caught him with drugs and drug paraphernalia. They found a plastic bag containing Thai stick, a potent form of grass, an envelope containing $9,000, an O'Haus triple-beam scale—the kind favored by drug dealers—a 12-gauge shotgun, a.22-caliber pistol, and "miscellaneous pictures, address books, photographs and passports."
Convinced that the family was a major trafficking organization, Smith said she asked her supervisor if she could work the case full-time. The answer was not encouraging. "He said, 'Well, that sounds like a good idea.Who would run it?'" Smith recalled, laughing. "I think it was just that, being a female, my credibility was somewhat in question."
The investigation soon fell apart. Julio Bermúdez was released on bail and promptly skipped the country, never to be seen again. Once again, the San Francisco U.S.Attorney's office declined to pursue a case against Norwin or his nephew and the file was closed.
Smith said she never worked the Meneses family again. "They had me assigned to other things, like the Hell's Angels case, and I really didn't have enough time," she said. "This was a pretty big case to me, and I think had I been given free rein and some assistance and some time to do it, I think I could have really done something." But, she said, "I'm not so sure the DEA management took it seriously enough to allow me the time and the assistance I would have needed." She quit the DEA three years later. Norwin Meneses said he was well aware that the DEA was after him in 1981, and came close to catching him during its investigation of Julio Bermúdez. He was in love with Bermúdez's sister, Patricia, at the time, and was often at the house in West Covina. The DEA, in fact, described Norwin as the owner of the three pounds of cocaine found with Bermúdez.
But the arrests of one of his distributors and his nephews didn't slow him down a bit. According to Blandón, the Meneses organization moved 900 kilos of cocaine—almost a ton—into the United States in 1981, about $54 million worth at wholesale prices.
Blandón accepted Meneses's pitch to become a cocaine salesman for the Contras, he said, after he and the drug kingpin took a trip down to Honduras for another "pep talk" from CIA agent Enrique Bermúdez. At a Contra camp near the Nicaraguan border, Bermúdez "told them of the trouble the FDN was having in raising funds and obtaining equipment," and he exhorted them to raise money for the counter revolution. "He was in charge, okay, how to raise money in California."
Meneses confirmed Blandón's account of the meeting with the CIA agent, who was an old friend of the Meneses family. "I've known him since he was a lieutenant," Meneses said, adding that his brother Edmundo had been friends with Enrique Bermúdez even longer: "They'd known each other since childhood." Meneses, who was on an FDN fund-raising committee, said Bermúdez put Blandón in charge of raising money in southern California. Meneses raised funds in the Bay Area and also screened and recruited potential Contra soldiers from the Nicaraguans who'd emigrated to the United States.
Meneses became Bermúdez's intelligence and security adviser in California, he claimed; anyone recruited to fight for the Contras in Honduras had to pass his muster first, so the organization would be safe from Sandinista infiltrators."It was an understanding between old friends," Meneses said of the job Bermúdez gave him. "Nobody would join the Contra forces down there without my knowledge and approval."
Blandón confirmed that, telling the CIA that Meneses's role in the FDN operation in California was "primarily that of a personnel recruiter for the group."
Adolfo Calero, the CIA agent who was the head of the Contras' political directorate, denied that the two cocaine traffickers had any official positions with the FDN. ButCalero confirmed that Meneses had come to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez and had brought him a crossbow as a gesture of his esteem.
Another top Contra, former FDN director Edgar Chamorro, acknowledged that Meneses was involved with both the FDN and Bermúdez. "It was very early, when theContras did not have as many supporters as later," Chamorro said. "Very early the Contras were trying all kinds of things to raise funds. This man [Meneses] was connected with the Contras of Bermúdez, because of the military kind of brotherhood among the Somoza military—the brotherhood of military minds."
Blandón insisted that Bermúdez never mentioned drugsales during his fund-raising pitch, but from Blandón's description of Bermúdez's instructions, that didn't appear necessary. The Contra commander apparently had a prettygood idea of what they were getting into. "There's a saying that the ends justify the means and that's what Mr.Bermúdez told us in Honduras, okay?" Blandón said. "So we started raising money to the Contra revolution." Blandón doubted that Bermúdez knew specifically they would sell cocaine to raise the cash, but Contra commander Eden Pastora has said it would be naive to think that Bermúdez didn't know he was asking drug dealers for financial assistance. It was well known in prerevolutionary Nicaragua "that [Meneses] was involved in illicit or dirty business,"Pastora said. "He had hotels and it was also said that he was involved in the sale of cocaine. In those days, cocaine sales was not very common."
Besides, at that point Bermúdez's Contra group—the Legion of September 15—was already busily involved in cocaine smuggling and Bermúdez knew it, as did the CIA.In September 1981, Langley was informed by cable that the Legion's "leadership had made a decision to engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations." The cable said Bermúdez reportedly had advised against the idea but apparently he hadn't objected too strenuously; the CIA cable reported that a successful "trial run" had already taken place. Langley was informed that a suitcase full of cocaine was smuggled onto a commercial airliner in July 1981 by a Legion officer, who then sold the dope in Miami and gave the profits to another Legion commander.
The CIA's Inspector General found no evidence that the CIA officials running the Contra program then did a thing about it.
At their meeting with Bermúdez, Blandón said, Bermúdez asked if he and Meneses "could assist in theprocurement of weapons." In court testimony, Blandón called it "a mission" that took them to Costa Rica to "contact some people to get some connections from where to construct the Contra revolution. . .. We have to get in contact with someone that was going to—we were going to give some money to buy some weapons."
The trip had an inauspicious start, Blandón later told the CIA.
"Both he and Meneses were escorted to Tegucigalpa airport by armed Contras," a summary of his CIA interview states. "Unbeknownst to Bermúdez and the Contras, Blandón says, he was carrying $100,000 in drug proceeds to be used in a Bolivian drug deal. In the process of departing the airport, Blandón was stopped and detained by Honduran officials. Blandón states that his Contra escorts, seeing that Blandón had been detained with money, assumed that Blandón had been given the funds by Bermúdez to purchase arms for the Contras. As a result,the Contras interceded on Blandón's behalf, effected the return of the money, and secured Blandón's release."
In doing so, Blandón said, "the Contra escorts told the Honduran airport authorities that Blandón and Meneses were Contras. Blandón states he was allowed to leave the next morning and that he then joined Meneses, who had not been detained and who had been allowed to travel to Guatemala."
They were unable to contact the arms dealers they were looking for, Blandón said, and he returned to California with Meneses to begin his career in the cocaine business.
Meneses didn't simply hand him the dope. He brought Blandón to San Francisco for a two-day seminar on the intricacies of drug dealing. "Mr. Meneses explained to me how I, you know, how to see. . .the quality, how they sell it by the ounce, by kilo," Blandón said. Meneses also showed him how to transport the drug undetected in pickup trucks by putting the cocaine in "the compartment of the door, the driver's side door." Meneses brought in a one-eyed Nicaraguan exile, Raul "El Tuerto" Vega, as a transportation consultant. Vega, who lived in L.A., was an old hand at driving dope cars for Meneses, and "Norwin wanted that I went with Raul Vega to show me how to drive, how to do it because he used to work more often."
Meneses was a fount of advice on how to avoid problems, Blandón explained. He told Blandón not to give out cocaine on credit; "Don't this, don't do a lot of things. But I didn't know to whom to sell it. But he told me go and visit a few people and I start." Meneses gave him two kilos of cocaine—worth about $60,000 each at the time—and the names of some customers in Los Angeles, and told him to hit the streets. The cocaine was provided at no cost, but with the understanding that Blandón would pay Meneses back out of the profits.
When Blandón began doing this is a matter of some conjecture. Blandón insists that he didn't actually sell his first ounce of cocaine until early in 1982. But others who knew him at the time say he was dealing drugs in L.A.much earlier. Still others insist Blandón, like Meneses, was already a trafficker back in Somoza's Nicaragua, before the Sandinista revolution.
The Torres brothers would later tell the FBI that Blandón picked up his two kilos from Meneses in 1980. "Shortly after Blandón moved to the Los Angeles area Blandón was introduced to Norwin Menesis [sic] in the San Francisco,California, area by Donald Barrios," Jacinto Torres told the FBI. "In approximately 1980, Danilo Blandón, Frank Vigal[sic] and Douglas Diaz travelled to the San Francisco area where they obtained two kilograms of cocaine from Menesis. Blandón, Vigal and Diaz returned to the LosAngeles area where they had thirty days to sell the cocaine."
Frank Vigil is a Contra supporter who had worked as a public relations director for Norwin Meneses in one of Norwin's nightclubs in Managua. Though he admits being in Los Angeles in 1980, he denies traveling with Blandón to meet with Meneses or selling cocaine himself, although he says he knew Blandón was doing it. Blandón has identified Diaz as a man who would drive Meneses's cocaine to L.A. occasionally, but he said Diaz was not with him during his training period at Norwin's house.
Blandón's wife's uncle, economist Orlando Murillo, also agrees that Blandón was selling drugs for Meneses before 1982. "I was in Costa Rica and Chepita called me and said, 'I have serious problems with Danilo,'" Murillo recalled. Chepita told him they'd started a small business,but that Danilo was dealing drugs and had gotten in debt to Meneses, who was now pressing her for the money. "I sent her another $5,000," Murillo said. He acknowledged that his money was probably used to pay off Meneses, but said Chepita "is my niece and my only relative. And Danilo is a very dangerous man. So I help her when I can."
Murillo placed the call from his frantic niece in "1981,February or January."
One DEA informant told the Justice Department that Blandón was a drug dealer even before he came to the United States, and had known Meneses for years, long before meeting up with him at LAX that day. Long time Meneses employee Rafael Cornejo claimed that Blandón and Meneses "knew each other back in Nicaragua before the war. Danilo was sort of in the background of the group that hung around with Mundo. I'd see him at parties sometimes."
In an interview with journalist Georg Hodel, former Sandinista leader Moises Hassan—who is related to Blandón's mother-in-law, Vilma Pena Alvarez—said Blandón "was involved with drugs and contraband prior to the Sandinista takeover." Hassan had known Blandón since college, where Blandón was a student activist on behalf of Somoza's Liberal party.
The DEA, in a sworn statement filed in San Diego federal court, corroborated Hassan's statements. In a sealed search warrant affidavit filed in May 1992, DEAagent Chuck Jones wrote, "Blandón fled Nicaragua after the Samoza [sic] regime was deposed. Blandón had beena cocaine trafficker in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Samoza[sic] but had enjoyed protection through family political influence. Since about 1982, Blandón has been a cocaine trafficker in the United States."
At the time Jones made that statement, he was Blandón's case agent. Four years later, though, when defense attorneys accused federal prosecutors of hiding Jones's revealing affidavit from them, Agent Jones would suddenly remember that it wasn't Blandón he'd been referring to when he prepared the affidavit to search his storage locker. No, he claimed, he'd confused Blandón'sbackground with Meneses's.
Regardless of when Blandón's career as a cocaine trafficker began, by the time he says he started selling drugs for the Contras, they were no longer just a ragtag group running around the jungles on their own. They were,by early 1982, the property of the Central Intelligence Agency.
next
"I Never Send Cash"
That same day the CIA shortened Somoza's life expectancy once more. Now, the agency estimated, he had little more than a week. Danilo Blandón decided he'd hung around long enough. He had a three-year-old daughter, and Chepita was pregnant with their second child. It was time to go. Blandón fell in with a Red Cross convoy on its way to the airport and put his wife and daughter on a plane for Los Angeles, where Chepita had relatives. For some reason,he did not accompany them. Instead Blandón and his older brother, Julio Jr., boarded a flight for Miami, where Blandón entered the United States on a tourist visa he'd been issued several years earlier.
How he managed to do what many others could not—namely, get four seats on jetliners bound for the States—is not clear, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service has refused to release any records of the Blandóns' immigration, citing privacy reasons. Nor is it clear why he first went to Miami.
Years later, Blandón would claim that he couldn't get a ticket to L.A. for himself, and barely could afford the tickets he got. He claimed that he sold a Sony color television for $200 to pay for them, and landed in Miami with $100 to his name. However, his wife's uncle, Orlando Murillo, says he paid for the airline tickets and also gave the couple $5,000 before they left the country. If that was true, Blandón had other reasons for choosing to spend his first few weeks in Miami.
As he tells it, he stayed with a friend and "got a job washing cars" until he could save enough for a plane ticket to Los Angeles. He rejoined his family on the West Coast in early July, and by August he had landed a job as a salesman at a used car lot in East Los Angeles, a heavily Hispanic section of town. His employers were two huge Nicaraguan brothers named Torres.
Blandón has said he knew one of the brothers, Edgar,from his days in college in Monterrey, Mexico, where Edgar was studying economics. Edgar's brother, Jacinto, was a former U.S. Marine and had served in Vietnam. Together they ran Torres Used Cars.
"They had a used car lot with only ten cars," Blandón said. "They just give me a favor to be there and pay me something because they know that I didn't have any money,and then they gave me a job like a salesman in the neighborhood."
But the Torres brothers weren't just car salesmen. They were also major-league cocaine traffickers. Other dealers called them "the Trees" because of their sequoia-like girth;both brothers were estimated to be at least six-six. To the cops they became known as "the Twin Towers." The Torres brothers lived with two sisters who were big in their own way: they were cousins of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian cocaine kingpin who was one of the founders of the Medellín cocaine cartel.
Escobar and his Colombian pals Jorge Ochoa and Carlos Lehder were then firmly in control of the blossoming Miami cocaine market, having wrested it from the Cuban-Americans after a long-running cocaine war. The Cubans had been using the city as a base for small-scale cocaine smuggling since the late 1960s, but the Colombians had bigger ideas. They intended to distribute mass quantities of cocaine all across the United States in an organized and businesslike fashion. [Think the demise of Scarface D.C]
For three years, from 1976 to 1979, they fought the Cubans for supremacy in Miami, and the two sides killed each other in droves. Afterward the Colombians turned the city into a cocaine distribution hub, and it became the official port of call for cocaine dealers of every stripe. Local banks began swelling with drug profits.
Miami was convenient; the Colombians could blend in with the large Hispanic population and move about the city unnoticed. Escobar's associate Carlos Lehder set up shop in the Bahamas, buying an island where the drug planes coming out of Colombia could land, refuel, and wait for the right moment to fly into the United States.
Lehder's transportation system worked well and gave the Medellin cartel its first real toehold in America. Then he began jetting to the West Coast to scope out a distribution system for Los Angeles and the western United States.
When Blandón was working for the Torres brothers, he says, they had not yet begun dealing cocaine. But it apparently didn't take them long to get the hang of it; by 1982 they would be two of the more significant drug dealers in Los Angeles.
Blandón insists he wasn't dealing drugs in 1979 either. That was a couple years down the road. At the moment, he had plenty to keep him busy. Chepita was getting bigger with their second child every day, and he was struggling to pay the bills. In August 1979 he started a new job with another car lot, Rocha Used Cars, and was also hustling rental cars at an L.A. hotel, according to his friend Frank Vigil. And in his spare time Blandón was also trying to start an army.
"I was the first," Blandón boasted. "Well—we—we formed a group in L.A. to—a group of our people to go and fight against the Sandinista's that we called F.D.N, Fuerza Democratica Nicaragüense [Nicaraguan Democratic Force]. We were in charge. We were five people in charge of it in L.A. We were in charge to get some money at that time."
Blandón said his counterrevolutionary group came together soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. At first it was just a group of Nicaraguan exiles who got together occasionally to bitch about the Sandinista's and help each other find a toehold in their new country. They would "talk about developments in Nicaragua," Blandón later told the CIA. "Other members of this group also opposed Somoza and the Sandinista regime. . .. They simply came together to share common experiences and discuss their mutual desires to see the Sandinista government out of Nicaragua." They had "meetings every week, every 15 days, okay, since we got to L.A., in 1980–81. And we raised money for the Contra's." When it began, he said, his group was not officially connected to anyone. It had no formal structure, no officers, no membership requirements.
"You Americans have no idea what it's like to lose everything and be thrown out of your own country," commented Jose Macario Estrada, an ex-judge who later became Blandón's lawyer and business partner. "When you are in exile, you become very close to other exiles." [yeah, most Americans are not involved in oppressing their fellow countrymen,so most American's are not in danger of getting 'thrown' out of the country.I see this corrupt Judge had to take a step down on the corruption ladder once here D.C]
At the end of 1979 Blandón applied for political asylum in the United States, claiming that he would be killed by the Communists if he returned to Nicaragua. And he listed his membership in an "anti-Communist organization" as proof that his life was worthless back home. If Blandón's recollection is correct, his little L.A. group was one of the first flickering of an organized resistance movement against the Sandinista's in the United States. Acquaintances and former college classmates say Blandón sometimes brags that he was one of the earliest founders of the F.D.N., which became the biggest and most famous of the various Nicaraguan anti-Communist armies that would later be called the Contras.
The F.D.N didn't officially come into existence until mid-1981, so if Blandón was raising money for Contra fighters as early as he says—in 1979–80—he was doing it on behalf of the F.D.N's predecessor: the Legion of September 15, a violent band of ex-Guardia men then based in Guatemala. The legion, a terrorist organization started by former Somoza bodyguards soon after Somoza's fall, was to become the hard core of the F.D.N after the CIA merged it into two smaller resistance groups in August 1981.
Blandón's Contra fund-raising efforts bore little fruit at first. "At the beginning, we started doing some parties, you know, some—how do you call—some activities in the park,until 1980 and '81," he said. "We have to have some rallies or whatever." The fund-raisers were disappointing, though, bringing in only "a few thousands or something." An acquaintance reported that Blandón also hawked copies of Somoza's bitter memoirs, Nicaragua Betrayed, and helped put out an anti-Sandinista newsletter that was printed at a little shop owned by a sympathetic Nicaraguan.
About the same time that Blandón and his compatriots began their fund-raising efforts in L.A., Somoza's cousin, Luis Pallais Debayle, began making the rounds of the various exile groups in the United States and Central America to see if anyone was interested in helping Somoza fight his way back into power.
Pallais contacted his cousin in Paraguay, and the ex-dictator promised to kick in $1 million to start a resistance movement. It was a promise he never kept. On September17, 1980, Argentine revolutionaries blasted a rocket-propelled grenade and a hail of M-16 fire into Somoza's Mercedes-Benz limo, killing Somoza and scattering pieces of him and his German automobile across a block of downtown Asunción.
Another visit Pallais made, with happier results, was to former National Guard colonel Enrique Bermúdez, to see if Bermúdez would be willing to lead a resistance force if one could be put together. Bermúdez was a logical choice to be the Contras' military commander. Of all the former officers of Somoza's National Guard, he probably had the best contacts with the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Convincing the Americans to back them was going to be critical if the Contras were ever to get off the ground. And Bermúdez was a leader who was very palatable to the Americans. He was a known quantity.
"He fit the profile," one U.S. official later told journalist Sam Dillon. "He was malleable, controllable, docile."
In 1965 Bermúdez had been the deputy commander of an infantry company Somoza sent to support a U.S. led invasion of the Dominican Republic, an excursion to putdown a leftist political movement. It was another one of those favors Somoza had done over the years to help his American friends stamp out any hint of communism in Latin America.
Bermúdez had been in the United States since 1975, first as a student attending courses on subversion and counterinsurgency at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington and later as the Nicaraguan government's liaison to the American military. The Americans thought so highly of him that he was one of six Guardia officers they recommended to head the National Guard during the final days of the Somoza regime, in a last-minute public relations ploy by the Carter administration to change the Guardia's murderous image and take some of the wind out of the Sandinista's sails before their final offensive.
The State Department considered Bermúdez a safe choice; he had spent most of the revolution in Washington and, the reasoning went, couldn't be held responsible for any of the Guardia's human rights violations—the tortures, the disappearances, the aerial bombardments of civilian neighborhoods. Somoza picked someone else, however, and Bermúdez rode out the remainder of the civil war from the safety of Embassy Row in Washington. When the Somoza government collapsed, Bermúdez began a new career as a truck driver, delivering Newsweek magazines.
He would not toil long at such a menial task. Soon after the uplifting visit from Somoza's cousin, Bermúdez got a call from Major General Charles E. Boyd, a top U.S. AirForce official, who invited Bermúdez to the Pentagon to kick some ideas around. There, after sounding out Bermúdez on the idea of running a rebel force to harass the Sandinista's, Boyd told him he had a friend at the CIA who was interested in speaking with him. By mid-1980Bermúdez had packed his family and his belongings and left Washington behind, moving to a rented house in Miami. According to one account, Bermúdez was then on the CIA's payroll.
He began traveling widely, gauging the sentiment of vanquished National Guardsmen hiding in the United States and Central America and reporting his findings to his CIA handlers. Those who wondered how Bermúdez could afford his travels when he was jobless were told he was living off the profits from the sale of his home in Washington.
According to Boyd, the CIA "put Bermúdez in touch" with the Legion of September 15 in Guatemala. Soon Bermúdez would move there and become the legion's commander.
It was a motley crew, if there ever was one. Made up mostly of ex-Guardia officers who escaped from Nicaragua at the end of the war, the legionaries had a safe house in Guatemala City and were training on a farm near the Honduran border called Detachment 101. Coincidentally,the farm was located in the same small town, Esquipulas, that had served as the headquarters for the CIA backed group that overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954.
Since there was no war for them to fight—yet—the legion kept in shape by hiring itself out to perform a variety of warlike deeds for others. The CIA acknowledged in 1998 that the Legion "to some extent engaged in kidnapping,extortion, and robbery to fund its operations" and also "engaged in the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian airliners and airliner hijackings as methods of attacking the Sandinista government." According to a June 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, the Legion's commanders "see themselves as being forced to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre."
That the CIA would know this band of terrorists so well that it would know the thinking of its commanders is not a surprise. Much of the Legion's leadership had worked with or for the Agency during their previous lives as Somoza's secret agents, rooting out dissidents for the dictator's Office of National Security, which was advised by the CIA.One of the earliest published accounts of the Legion's existence notes that it was "run by former members of Somoza's intelligence service." In other words, the men of the CIA and the men of the Legion were kindred spirits—anti-Communist spooks—and this mutual affection would come to serve the Legion well after the CIA took over the day-to-day operations of the Contras.
Still, the CIA's matter-of-fact description of the Legion's criminal history is too kind. Its Inspector General never mentioned the Legion's most horrific deed: the March 1980 assassination of the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was shot through the heart as he held Mass. Romero had the bad luck to interest himself in the fate of some parishioners who had been "disappeared" by the infamous Salvadoran death squads.The archbishop had been warned several times to butt out,but he hadn't taken the hint.
Records seized from a right-wing Salvadoran politician suspected of orchestrating Romero's murder, Roberto D'Aubuisson, revealed that D'Aubuisson had gone to Guatemala three days after Romero's murder and made two "contributions to Nicaraguans," one for $40,000 and one for $80,000. Written underneath these amounts was the name and telephone number of Colonel Ricardo Lau, a former intelligence and security officer for the Guardia who was running the Legion of September 15 prior to Bermúdez's appointment as commander.
Lau, who was never charged in connection with Romero's murder, would go on to become Enrique Bermúdez's right-hand man in the Contra organization. The CIA has admitted that during 1981–82 it was receiving regular reports that Lau and seven other Legion commanders were "involved in criminal activities." Coincidentally, that's what Danilo Blandón was doing for the Contras in Los Angeles. His little exile group was moving up in the world, and had switched from cocktail parties to car theft and loan fraud. They had also become an official part of the CIA's new Contra army, the Fuerza Democratica Nicaragüense— the F.D.N.
In 1981 CIA agent Enrique Bermúdez paid Blandón's little group in L.A. a visit. "Bermúdez came to a meeting of the group to give a pep talk and to ask that the group keep the idea of a free and democratic Nicaragua alive by publicizing the Contra cause in the United States," Blandón told CIA inspectors. The colonel asked the group "to adopt the colors and the flag of the F.D.N," and, after that, the CIA inspectors wrote, "Blandón and other member of the group called themselves F.D.N and used the F.D.N's colors, flag and letterhead."
They also got an assignment, Blandón testified. "It came,you know, that we had to provide some cars and we got involved in another thing to get some money." By then Blandón had been working in L.A. long enough to establish a credit history, so he applied for an auto loan.
"My thinking was to get back to Nicaragua, never to stay in the States, so I used my car salesman job to get a loan application, to make an application and to get a car without—just giving them the down payment—and sending it to the Contra revolution in Honduras," Blandón said. "We were the first people, the first group that sent a pickup truck to the Contra revolution in Honduras." (In the spring of 1981 the Legion of September 15 moved its operations from Guatemala to a new headquarters in Honduras, where it would remain for the rest of the war.)
Blandón said the payments on the cars they sent to the Contras were to be picked up by "the organization. . .and they didn't pay the monthly payments, so I lost my credit. But at that time I didn't care because they [the Contras] were my idea, my cause."
3
The Brotherhood of Military Minds
Danilo Blandón says he never intended to become a cocaine trafficker when he arrived in L.A. in 1979. He became a drug dealer out of patriotism. When the bugle sounded and the call to serve came, Blandón was hustling used sheet metal at H&L Auto Exchange in Los Angeles—an honest guy making an honest two thousand bucks a month. Next thing you know, he was selling cocaine instead of Chevy's. As Blandón tells the story, his transformation occurred shortly after getting a call from a friend from Miami, an old college classmate named Donald Barrios. Barrios told Blandón that someone wanted to meet with him, a man who would be flying into L.A. very soon. The passenger's name was Norwin Meneses. Blandón was to meet him at the airport and listen to what Meneses had to say.
"He had to talk to me about something," Blandón said.For most Nicaraguans that would have come as decidedly unwelcome news. Meneses had a nasty reputation in his homeland. Blandón had heard him referred to as "El Padrino" (The Godfather) and he'd heard rumors of drug trafficking. A 1982 FBI report said Meneses "had a reputation as a hit man who had killed in Nicaragua."
Barrios didn't say why he wanted Blandón to meet with the gangster, but Blandón figured it had to do with the Contras, "because he [Barrios] was in the Contra—in the Contra revolution organization."
People who know Barrios describe him as a wealthy former insurance broker and financier from Managua who emigrated to the States long before the revolution and married an American woman. They say Barrios is a relative of former Nicaraguan president Violeta Barrios deChamorro, widow of the crusading journalist Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, whose 1978 murder sparked the uprising that eventually toppled Somoza. Norwin Meneses, records show, was a partner of Violeta Chamorro in a finance company before the revolution.
After the Sandinista takeover, Donald Barrios reportedly became a financial angel to dispossessed Somocistas, helping them settle in Miami and find jobs. He also became business partners with some of them, including at least two members of the dictator's general staff and the owner of the largest pharmaceutical company in Nicaragua.
At the time he called Blandón in Los Angeles, Barrios was partners with Somoza's old guerrilla hunter, Gustavo "El Tigre" Medina, the counterinsurgency expert who'd ravaged the northern mountains rooting out Communist sympathizers. Medina was head of G-4—the officer in charge of supplies—for the National Guard at the end of the war, and he fled Managua with Somoza on the morning his regime ended. "I was in the plane right behind his," Medina said. Because of his activities during the war, Medina is among the minority of Nicaraguans who have not gone home.
Medina and Barrios started a restaurant and an investment company in Miami, records show. Other partners included former colonel Aurelio Somarriba, head of G-1 for the Guardia, Somoza's chief administrative officer; and Enrique "Cuco" Sanchez, a member of a wealthy Nicaraguan family that would play a key role in the founding of the Contras.
Blandón's hunch about Meneses and the Contras turned out to be correct. The meeting, he said, was "to start the movement, the Contra revolution."
After picking his passenger up at the airport, Blandón said, the wiry Meneses "started telling me that we had to do some money and to send it to Honduras." Later, at a restaurant, Meneses explained his idea more fully: "He told me to make some drug business in L.A. for raise money to the Contra, and we started that way."
Blandón was shocked by the suggestion at first, he said."I didn't agree at that time, because I had to think."
Joining up with a man like Norwin Meneses would be agreeing to work for a killer—a career criminal. Meneses's nickname, "El Perico," is a Spanish pun, and a telling one.The word usually means "parakeet," and given Meneses's quick, dark eyes and small beakish face, it's easy to see why such a moniker would stick. But in Argentinian slang the word means "cocaine." And to cops in Central America from the 1970s to the 1990s, cocaine often meant Meneses.
The CIA, in a recently declassified 1986 cable, described Meneses as "the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Somoza." The agency would later describe him as the Cali cartel's representative in Nicaragua, but Norwin wasn't finicky. He'd sell cocaine for anyone.
In fact, he'd been selling cocaine since before there were any cartels. In the small world of international cocaine smuggling, Norwin Meneses was a pioneer.
Back when Medellín kingpin Carlos Lehder was still just a car thief sitting in a cell at the Danbury, Connecticut, federal prison, Meneses was making multi kilo deals directly with Peruvian cocaine manufacturers. According to Nicaraguan police officials, Meneses's relationship with the drug lords of Colombia began during the marijuana era of the early 1970s, and the story they tell of his first big deal is illustrative of Meneses's modus operandi.
Roger Mayorga is a former Sandinista intelligence officer who also headed up investigations for the Nicaraguan National Police narcotics unit. Mayorga says the drug kingpin's association with the Colombians began after an airplane full of marijuana made an emergency landing at a ranch owned by one of the Somoza's. The Managua police were called, and they arrested the Colombian pilots, seized the airplane, and confiscated its load of prime weed.
In Somoza's Nicaragua, the Managua police department was a branch of the National Guard. And the Guardia officer who commanded the Managua police for many years was Colonel Edmundo Meneses Cantarero—Norwin's brother. Colonel Meneses came to an understanding with the Colombians who owned the aircraft. Mayorga said the pilots and the airplane were allowed to leave, but the load of marijuana remained behind as "evidence." Somehow the evidence got turned over to brother Norwin, and a drug kingpin was born.
The role played by the Nicaraguan National Guard in creating Meneses's criminal empire can't be overstated.The Guardia, which one researcher called "one of the most totally corrupt military establishments in the world," permeated the Meneses family. In addition to Edmundo,another brother, Brigadier General Fermin Meneses, commanded the Guardia garrison in the city of Masaya, a commercial and cultural center not far from Managua. The family's long ties with the Guardia and its history of staunch anticommunism help explain Norwin's later activities on behalf of the Contras.
"The whole [Meneses] family was anti-Sandinista to the death," the Nicaraguan news magazine El Semanario reported in 1996. "It is a hate that seems almost genetic,ancestral."
The Guardia wasn't just an army; it had its hands in everything. If the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the army,the air force, the Marine Corps, the National Guard, the Coast Guard, Customs, Immigration, and the Postal Service were all rolled into one, it would begin to approach Somoza's National Guard in its power over the everyday lives of the average citizen. "Nicaragua is one of the few countries we are aware of in which all arms shipments that go into the country, whether they are sporting goods or of whatever kind, have to be received by the National Guard," State Department official Sally Shelton told Congress in 1978. "We have been shipping hunting equipment, for example. They are in effect purchased by the National Guard and then resold in retail outlets."
"Say that again?" one stunned congressman asked. "The National Guard is a wholesaler for hunting ammunition?"
"They are passed through the National Guard and sold in retail outlets," Shelton repeated. "It is more an accounting procedure than anything else."
According to the hearing transcript, "general laughter" ensued.
But the pervasive corruption of the Guardia was no laughing matter to Nicaraguans. "Gambling, alcoholism,drugs, prostitution and other vices are protected and exploited by the very persons who have the obligation to combat them," Nicaragua's Roman Catholic bishops complained in a 1978 pastoral letter to Somoza. "Widespread corruption continues unchecked and public scandals further undermine the confidence and morale of the people."
To many the Guardia was little different than the Mafia.And if Somoza was its godfather, the Meneses brothers were his capos. Somoza was closest to Edmundo, known as Mundo, who was one of his favorite generals. In the1960's Mundo—who'd been trained in irregular warfare and anticommunism at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Panama—conducted a series of bloody operations against Sandinista rebels near the town of Pancasan in northern Nicaragua. Those campaigns killed several key Sandinistas and crippled the guerrilla movement for years.Later Somoza gave Mundo the Guardia's choicest plum,control of the Managua police, a perch from which a man so inclined could dip his beak into every imaginable scam.For the unscrupulous, the profit potential was unlimited.
"You have to realize that you did a lot of things in your career in the Guardia and you progressed up through the ranks so you might have been a lot of things," explained former Somoza secretary Juan C. Wong. "Now, Police Chief, that's one of the best. That's a nice job. That was the last job he [Edmundo] had in his military career. Then here tired and went into the diplomatic corps."
Under Mundo's watchful eye, Managua became an open city for brother Norwin, who by the late 1970s owned discotheques—the Frisco Disco and the VIP Club, among others—drive-in whorehouses with waterbeds and porno tapes, and a thriving drug business.
A "highly reliable" FBI informant told Justice Department inspectors that Meneses used his influence within the Somoza regime to smuggle cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. and "had even used a Nicaraguan Air Force plane once for such a shipment."
"Norwin ran all the rackets for the Guardia," said Mayorga. "And remember, his brother was the chief of police. No one could do anything."
San Francisco cocaine trafficker Rafael Cornejo, who has worked for the Meneses family since the 1970s, told of pre-revolution jaunts down to Managua where he would spend weekends partying with the Meneses brothers. "You'd walk down the street with Mundo, and everyone would salute you," Cornejo recalled with a smile. "We went riding around in the Jeeps, you know, guys with big guns everywhere around us. It was a trip."
Though never a member of the Guardia, Norwin did his part for the Somoza regime. In his teens and twenties, acquaintances said, he worked as an undercover informant for the Office of National Security (ONS), Somoza's plainclothes secret police, which rooted out subversives and political dissidents. Before going to Guatemala to startup the Legion of September 15, Colonel Ricardo Lau spent much of his career with the ONS and was allegedly one of its chief torturers.
Former Managua police chief Rene Vivas, an early member of the Sandinista movement, said Norwin Meneses infiltrated pro-Communist groups for the O.N.S,sometimes posing as a news photographer, other times as the secretly disaffected son of a powerful Somocista family.In a magazine interview in 1996, Meneses told of starting up an armed guerrilla group to support Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba but insisted that he was never a Communist.
With Mundo and the National Guard as his protectors,Norwin appears to have literally gotten away with murder. In the spring of 1977 Norwin found himself under investigation by the chief inspector of the Nicaraguan Customs Department, a particularly tenacious sleuth named Oskar Reyes Zelaya. Inspector Reyes and the FBI believed Norwin was running a massive car theft ring, which was using the National Guard to "import" stolen American cars into Nicaragua and then selling them to various potentates of the Somoza government. Importing cars through the Guardia allowed the buyer to evade the hefty tariffs the Nicaraguan government had placed on imports.
According to press reports, Norwin first tried to get the annoying inspector off his tail by setting him up with an attractive woman in a Managua hotel room. The woman,Pamela Cestoni, then went to the police, claiming that Inspector Reyes had raped her. When the investigation revealed that Cestoni was a friend of Norwin's, Reyes was cleared, and "the sexual maneuver was used only to exacerbate the prosecution against Norwin," La Prensa reported.
On the evening of June 2, 1977, the chief inspector got a phone call at his home, allegedly from a man who wanted to give him a payoff in order to drop the Meneses investigation. Dressed in a bathrobe and flip-flops, Reyes hopped into his Jeep Cherokee and drove to an alley behind a nearby supermarket, where the man was waiting to meet him. Whoever it was in that alley shot Reyes three times in the stomach and throat. But he didn't complete the job. Bleeding profusely, the inspector was taken to the emergency room of the Orient Hospital in Managua. As he lay writhing on a cot, the dying Reyes spotted his friend Pablo Zamora Moller, the chief investigator for the Managua police department, standing nearby.
"Pablo, protect me!" Reyes cried. "This is Norwin! Norwin Meneses sent away to kill me!" Reyes died a short time later.
Norwin was arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. But after a "rigorous and exhaustive" investigation ordered by brother Edmundo, Norwin was cleared of any involvement and released. Meneses claimed he was at a motel when the killing happened, and both Rafael Cornejo, one of his San Francisco-based cocaine traffickers, and his nephew Jaime Meneses, who also was dealing cocaine in the Bay Area, backed up the story, testifying that Norwin was with them.
Reyes' murder would never be solved, but the Justice Department would later receive compelling evidence that Meneses was behind it, just as the dying inspector had claimed. In 1986, federal prosecutors in San Francisco debriefed Edmundo Meneses' son, Jairo, who informed them that "during the Somoza regime, Norwin Meneses smuggled weapons, silencers, and video equipment into Nicaragua, which he exchanged for money or narcotics. The operation was discovered by Oscar Reyes, who was a high-ranking customs official under Somoza. Norwin then arranged for Reyes' assassination."
After the publicity died down, Norwin calmly resumed his smuggling ventures, but the FBI kept its eye on him. As Somoza's government teetered, the Bureau laid plans to keep Norwin from ever coming to the U.S. In 1979, the FBI office in Mexico City asked that Meneses be included in the Bureau's "top thief" program and requested an arrest warrant "if for no other reason than to preclude him from entering the United States." The FBI also asked for a hold on his immigration status so he could be questioned if he tried to cross the border. But the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco, citing Norwin's "political connections" in Nicaragua, refused to do either—and it would not be the last time that office would exhibit such an odd reluctance to battle the Meneses crime family.
One longtime Contra supporter said Norwin's arrest and the subsequent scandal that enveloped Edmundo so upset Somoza that it may have triggered his heart attack in July1977, after which he went off to the United States to recuperate. Edmundo soon left the police department, was promoted to brigadier general, and retired from the National Guard. Somoza then sent him off to Guatemala tobe Nicaragua's ambassador.
It would be Edmundo's last assignment for Tachito.
On September 16, 1978, Ambassador Meneses was machine-gunned in Espana Park in Guatemala City,catching three bullets in his back. Two days later, as he clung to life in the Guatemala City Medical Center, a revolutionary group, the People's Guerrilla Army (E.G.P),claimed credit for the attempted assassination.
The E.G.P's communique described Meneses as being far more than a diplomat. According to the guerrillas, he was overseeing anti-Communist counter insurgency operations all over Central America. "Meneses Cantarero enjoyed special privileges amongst Guatemala's authorities and army commanders," the guerrillas declared. "Exploiting his ambassadorial position in Guatemala as a smokescreen, he actually discharged the duties of coordinator between the Guatemalan army and the Nicaraguan National Guard, and also between Somoza and Guatemala's reactionary government. He coordinated political repression for all of Central America and the operations undertaken by the governments of this area against popular revolutionary movements." The E.G.P claimed that the ambassador was gunned down to "show solidarity with the struggle of the Sandinista National Liberation Front."
"The Sandinista's never forgave my brother Edmundo for the guerrillas of Pancasan," Santiago Meneses told El Semanario in 1996.
Edmundo Meneses lingered for another fifteen days before succumbing to his wounds. At his funeral, Somoza hailed him as a martyr in the worldwide struggle against communism.
The nature of Edmundo Meneses's relationship with the U.S. government is not clear. The CIA has refused to disclose any information about him, on grounds of national security. The State Department, incredibly, has claimed it can find no records that even mention his name, a stunning admission given Meneses's stature in the Somoza government—its chief law enforcement officer and ambassador to Guatemala.
In light of Edmundo's murder, Norwin figured the Sandinista's probably had the same fate in mind for him,and he left Nicaragua in early June 1979. He caught a flight to El Salvador, went to Ecuador for a while, then to Costa Rica—where he had businesses and at least six ranches—before finally emigrating to the United States in early 1980 and applying for political asylum. Meneses had homes in Florida and Alabama, he said, but spent most of his time in San Francisco, where he had begun buying property in 1978.
After the Sandinista's marched into Managua, the Bay Area—like Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles—saw a large influx of Nicaraguans who had supported Somoza. Not surprisingly, Contra support groups quickly popped up in those cities, and Meneses played a key role in getting the San Francisco organization going. "Even before the term 'Contra' was being used. . .there were meetings of 'anti-Sandinista's at Meneses' house, which were attended by politicians, Somocistas, and other exiles interested in starting a counter-revolutionary movement," a DEA informant who knew Meneses told the Justice Department in 1997. Meneses posed as a successful businessman, purchasing a used car lot, a couple of commercial buildings, a travel agency, and a restaurant. He zipped around town in a gray Jaguar sedan. His nephews bought bars and nightclubs. Norwin purchased two houses in Pacifica, a small town just down the coast from San Francisco, one for himself and the other for his brother Ernesto.
He spent much time in San Francisco's Mission District,working out of a travel agency office owned by nephew Jaime Meneses. The Mission is a heavily Hispanic section of town, with a history of hospitality to Central American revolutionaries of all stripes. According to Roberto Vargas, a San Franciscan who later became the Sandinista's ambassador to China, the Mission was home to several ofthe Sandinista's future commandants, who practiced their sharpshooting skills at rod and gun clubs down the coast.
Meneses's ability to freely travel in and out of the United States, buying properties, starting businesses, and applying for political asylum—all under his own name—speaks volumes about his lack of concern about attracting the attention of American law enforcement officials. "I even drove my own cars, registered in my name!" he boasted.
How someone with Meneses' record was ever allowed into the United States in the first place is still a mystery, and one that is likely never to be solved. The Justice Department's Inspector General tried in 1997 to figure out how Meneses was able "to come and go from the United States as frequently as he did" but found huge gaps in his immigration files. The I.G didn't even try to explain how Meneses was able to obtain visas from U.S. Embassies while he was under active DEA and FBI investigation. It's entirely possible, though, that Uncle Sam was repaying some IOU's.
Meneses told the Justice Department he met with CIA agents shortly after the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua to teach them how to cross his country's borders undetected,a claim that makes a certain amount of sense given Meneses' considerable expertise in that area. By 1986, Meneses was boasting that he had U.S. government agents escorting him across America's borders, a claim that—amazingly enough—was true, as we shall see.
The cocaine kingpin's easy access to U.S. shores becomes even more disconcerting when one considers just how much the federal government knew about him by then.He'd been turning up in law enforcement files with some regularity for nearly 20 years. In 1968 he was suspected of murdering a money changer in Managua and Nicaraguan authorities asked the CIA and FBI to search for him in San Francisco, where they assumed he'd fled. During their unsuccessful search, federal agents found records of other crimes Norwin had committed in San Francisco in the early 1960s: statutory rape, shoplifting, and "misuse of slot machines."
Court records show that the DEA first picked up word that Norwin was a drug dealer in 1974. By December 1976 its office in Costa Rica had identified him as a cocaine "source of supply" based in Managua.
The FBI became aware in April 1978 that Norwin and his brother Ernesto "were smuggling 20 kilos of cocaine at a time into the United States" and identified Norwin's nephew, Jaime Meneses, as their San Francisco distributor. The DEA learned that Meneses was dealing cocaine in Miami as well, bringing it into the country aboard commercial airliners.
The following year, the New Orleans DEA determined that Meneses was responsible for smuggling cocaine into that city also. The DEA's "Operation Alligator," as the sweep was called, resulted in the indictment of "numerous persons for smuggling cocaine. It was determined that Norwin Meneses was a source of supply for this group."
One of the men arrested in that DEA operation, Manuel Porro, would end up in Guatemala as a commander of the Legion of September 15 Contra army, and the CIA would link him repeatedly to criminal activities there. Nonetheless,he would go on to serve as a top aide to CIA agent Adolfo Calero, the political leader of the Contras, and would handle some of Calero's Caribbean banking activities.
By the fall of 1981, the time Blandón says Meneses recruited him to sell dope for the Contras, the DEA had Meneses under active investigation for cocaine trafficking and possible gun running. "The Drug Enforcement Administration has developed information over the past several years that the Meneses Family has been involved in the smuggling and distribution of cocaine in the San Francisco Bay Area," stated a November 1981 affidavit by DEA agent Sandra Smith.
Smith, who was one of the DEA's first female agents in San Francisco, recalled that her investigation of the Meneses family was "the only thing that I ever worked, in all the time I worked there, that I thought was really big. . .. In this business, if you have people coming in from Nicaragua bringing in cocaine and the rumor was they were taking guns back. . .that's sort of an interesting combination."
Starting in the late 1970s, Smith said, she began gathering string on the Meneses family, "putting together the comings and goings." She said Meneses was living in "a gorgeous house" in Burlingame, a ritzy suburb of San Francisco. Periodically, she and a Customs agent would stake out the house, sitting in the parking lot of a nearby elementary school and jotting down license numbers of cars seen pulling up Meneses's thickly treed drive. "We really didn't have anybody on the inside," she said. "That was part of the problem."
The local San Francisco police were also running across various and sundry Meneseses, often in the company of large quantities of cocaine. Omar Meneses, another nephew, was arrested for cocaine sales at a bar in the Mission owned by nephew Jaime in June 1980. A month later nephew Roger Meneses was arrested with twenty pounds of cocaine and more than $8,800. That same month, Omar got busted again with a quarter pound of cocaine.
By mid-1981 Smith had put together enough information from her investigation and from the DEA's files to sketch out a fairly detailed portrait of a family steeped in drug trafficking. The Nicaraguan, it appeared, had cocaine coming in from everywhere. "Meneses had an endless supply of dope, from what I could see."
In June 1981, Smith got a break in her on-again, off-again investigation.
Detective Joseph Lee of the Baldwin Park police in southern California got a tip that a cocaine dealer in West Covina, a Nicaraguan named Julio Bermúdez (no relation to Enrique Bermúdez), was making two trips a month to San Francisco, "where he contacts a large cocaine smuggling organization headed by Norwin Meneses." The informant told Lee that Bermúdez was bringing down between fourteen and twenty pounds of cocaine on each trip. Another informant reported that Bermúdez called San Francisco and "places his order by telephone" before each trip. The police subpoenaed Bermúdez's telephone records for the previous three months, and sure enough, they found fifty-one long-distance calls from Bermúdez's phone to a number in Daly City, a working-class suburb south of San Francisco. The number belonged to Norwin's nephew,Jairo Meneses.
It was enough for the Baldwin Park cops, along with members of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the U.S. Customs Service, to put a tail on Bermúdez and stakeout his house at 1128 Greendale Street.
On November 12, 1981, Bermúdez left the house with a small beige suitcase and drove off in a 1972 Buick. The cops followed, observing him stop to pick up another man,Jose Herrera, before heading to the L.A. airport. The duo bought two one-way tickets to San Francisco on PSA Flight 425 and got there at 3:40 P.M., when DEA agent Smith picked up the surveillance.
Smith watched as the two traffickers were met outside the terminal by an unidentified Latino man driving a gold 1979 Toyota, a car registered to Herrera, one of the traffickers. They drove to a small house in Daly City, and the three men went inside. After a bit Bermúdez came out, opened the trunk, and got out the beige suitcase, which he placed behind the driver's seat; then he drove off.
Bermúdez managed to shake his tail in the traffic. Thirty-five minutes later, though, the cops spotted the car in another part of Daly City, parked outside Jairo Meneses's house. Bermúdez came out about two hours later and drove back to the first Daly City house.
The sequence of events provided the police with enough evidence to get a search warrant and they hit Bermúdez's house in West Covina two days later, catching the dealer with three pounds of cocaine—an enormous amount for the times—which Bermúdez promptly admitted he'd bought from Norwin Meneses. They also found $17,000 and a drug ledger bearing the entry: "11–11–81—$90,000 to Jairo." Bermúdez was hustled off to jail and Smith got a warrant for Jairo Meneses' house.
On November 16 the police hit Jairo's place and caught him with drugs and drug paraphernalia. They found a plastic bag containing Thai stick, a potent form of grass, an envelope containing $9,000, an O'Haus triple-beam scale—the kind favored by drug dealers—a 12-gauge shotgun, a.22-caliber pistol, and "miscellaneous pictures, address books, photographs and passports."
Convinced that the family was a major trafficking organization, Smith said she asked her supervisor if she could work the case full-time. The answer was not encouraging. "He said, 'Well, that sounds like a good idea.Who would run it?'" Smith recalled, laughing. "I think it was just that, being a female, my credibility was somewhat in question."
The investigation soon fell apart. Julio Bermúdez was released on bail and promptly skipped the country, never to be seen again. Once again, the San Francisco U.S.Attorney's office declined to pursue a case against Norwin or his nephew and the file was closed.
Smith said she never worked the Meneses family again. "They had me assigned to other things, like the Hell's Angels case, and I really didn't have enough time," she said. "This was a pretty big case to me, and I think had I been given free rein and some assistance and some time to do it, I think I could have really done something." But, she said, "I'm not so sure the DEA management took it seriously enough to allow me the time and the assistance I would have needed." She quit the DEA three years later. Norwin Meneses said he was well aware that the DEA was after him in 1981, and came close to catching him during its investigation of Julio Bermúdez. He was in love with Bermúdez's sister, Patricia, at the time, and was often at the house in West Covina. The DEA, in fact, described Norwin as the owner of the three pounds of cocaine found with Bermúdez.
But the arrests of one of his distributors and his nephews didn't slow him down a bit. According to Blandón, the Meneses organization moved 900 kilos of cocaine—almost a ton—into the United States in 1981, about $54 million worth at wholesale prices.
Blandón accepted Meneses's pitch to become a cocaine salesman for the Contras, he said, after he and the drug kingpin took a trip down to Honduras for another "pep talk" from CIA agent Enrique Bermúdez. At a Contra camp near the Nicaraguan border, Bermúdez "told them of the trouble the FDN was having in raising funds and obtaining equipment," and he exhorted them to raise money for the counter revolution. "He was in charge, okay, how to raise money in California."
Meneses confirmed Blandón's account of the meeting with the CIA agent, who was an old friend of the Meneses family. "I've known him since he was a lieutenant," Meneses said, adding that his brother Edmundo had been friends with Enrique Bermúdez even longer: "They'd known each other since childhood." Meneses, who was on an FDN fund-raising committee, said Bermúdez put Blandón in charge of raising money in southern California. Meneses raised funds in the Bay Area and also screened and recruited potential Contra soldiers from the Nicaraguans who'd emigrated to the United States.
Meneses became Bermúdez's intelligence and security adviser in California, he claimed; anyone recruited to fight for the Contras in Honduras had to pass his muster first, so the organization would be safe from Sandinista infiltrators."It was an understanding between old friends," Meneses said of the job Bermúdez gave him. "Nobody would join the Contra forces down there without my knowledge and approval."
Blandón confirmed that, telling the CIA that Meneses's role in the FDN operation in California was "primarily that of a personnel recruiter for the group."
Adolfo Calero, the CIA agent who was the head of the Contras' political directorate, denied that the two cocaine traffickers had any official positions with the FDN. ButCalero confirmed that Meneses had come to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez and had brought him a crossbow as a gesture of his esteem.
Another top Contra, former FDN director Edgar Chamorro, acknowledged that Meneses was involved with both the FDN and Bermúdez. "It was very early, when theContras did not have as many supporters as later," Chamorro said. "Very early the Contras were trying all kinds of things to raise funds. This man [Meneses] was connected with the Contras of Bermúdez, because of the military kind of brotherhood among the Somoza military—the brotherhood of military minds."
Blandón insisted that Bermúdez never mentioned drugsales during his fund-raising pitch, but from Blandón's description of Bermúdez's instructions, that didn't appear necessary. The Contra commander apparently had a prettygood idea of what they were getting into. "There's a saying that the ends justify the means and that's what Mr.Bermúdez told us in Honduras, okay?" Blandón said. "So we started raising money to the Contra revolution." Blandón doubted that Bermúdez knew specifically they would sell cocaine to raise the cash, but Contra commander Eden Pastora has said it would be naive to think that Bermúdez didn't know he was asking drug dealers for financial assistance. It was well known in prerevolutionary Nicaragua "that [Meneses] was involved in illicit or dirty business,"Pastora said. "He had hotels and it was also said that he was involved in the sale of cocaine. In those days, cocaine sales was not very common."
Besides, at that point Bermúdez's Contra group—the Legion of September 15—was already busily involved in cocaine smuggling and Bermúdez knew it, as did the CIA.In September 1981, Langley was informed by cable that the Legion's "leadership had made a decision to engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations." The cable said Bermúdez reportedly had advised against the idea but apparently he hadn't objected too strenuously; the CIA cable reported that a successful "trial run" had already taken place. Langley was informed that a suitcase full of cocaine was smuggled onto a commercial airliner in July 1981 by a Legion officer, who then sold the dope in Miami and gave the profits to another Legion commander.
The CIA's Inspector General found no evidence that the CIA officials running the Contra program then did a thing about it.
At their meeting with Bermúdez, Blandón said, Bermúdez asked if he and Meneses "could assist in theprocurement of weapons." In court testimony, Blandón called it "a mission" that took them to Costa Rica to "contact some people to get some connections from where to construct the Contra revolution. . .. We have to get in contact with someone that was going to—we were going to give some money to buy some weapons."
The trip had an inauspicious start, Blandón later told the CIA.
"Both he and Meneses were escorted to Tegucigalpa airport by armed Contras," a summary of his CIA interview states. "Unbeknownst to Bermúdez and the Contras, Blandón says, he was carrying $100,000 in drug proceeds to be used in a Bolivian drug deal. In the process of departing the airport, Blandón was stopped and detained by Honduran officials. Blandón states that his Contra escorts, seeing that Blandón had been detained with money, assumed that Blandón had been given the funds by Bermúdez to purchase arms for the Contras. As a result,the Contras interceded on Blandón's behalf, effected the return of the money, and secured Blandón's release."
In doing so, Blandón said, "the Contra escorts told the Honduran airport authorities that Blandón and Meneses were Contras. Blandón states he was allowed to leave the next morning and that he then joined Meneses, who had not been detained and who had been allowed to travel to Guatemala."
They were unable to contact the arms dealers they were looking for, Blandón said, and he returned to California with Meneses to begin his career in the cocaine business.
Meneses didn't simply hand him the dope. He brought Blandón to San Francisco for a two-day seminar on the intricacies of drug dealing. "Mr. Meneses explained to me how I, you know, how to see. . .the quality, how they sell it by the ounce, by kilo," Blandón said. Meneses also showed him how to transport the drug undetected in pickup trucks by putting the cocaine in "the compartment of the door, the driver's side door." Meneses brought in a one-eyed Nicaraguan exile, Raul "El Tuerto" Vega, as a transportation consultant. Vega, who lived in L.A., was an old hand at driving dope cars for Meneses, and "Norwin wanted that I went with Raul Vega to show me how to drive, how to do it because he used to work more often."
Meneses was a fount of advice on how to avoid problems, Blandón explained. He told Blandón not to give out cocaine on credit; "Don't this, don't do a lot of things. But I didn't know to whom to sell it. But he told me go and visit a few people and I start." Meneses gave him two kilos of cocaine—worth about $60,000 each at the time—and the names of some customers in Los Angeles, and told him to hit the streets. The cocaine was provided at no cost, but with the understanding that Blandón would pay Meneses back out of the profits.
When Blandón began doing this is a matter of some conjecture. Blandón insists that he didn't actually sell his first ounce of cocaine until early in 1982. But others who knew him at the time say he was dealing drugs in L.A.much earlier. Still others insist Blandón, like Meneses, was already a trafficker back in Somoza's Nicaragua, before the Sandinista revolution.
The Torres brothers would later tell the FBI that Blandón picked up his two kilos from Meneses in 1980. "Shortly after Blandón moved to the Los Angeles area Blandón was introduced to Norwin Menesis [sic] in the San Francisco,California, area by Donald Barrios," Jacinto Torres told the FBI. "In approximately 1980, Danilo Blandón, Frank Vigal[sic] and Douglas Diaz travelled to the San Francisco area where they obtained two kilograms of cocaine from Menesis. Blandón, Vigal and Diaz returned to the LosAngeles area where they had thirty days to sell the cocaine."
Frank Vigil is a Contra supporter who had worked as a public relations director for Norwin Meneses in one of Norwin's nightclubs in Managua. Though he admits being in Los Angeles in 1980, he denies traveling with Blandón to meet with Meneses or selling cocaine himself, although he says he knew Blandón was doing it. Blandón has identified Diaz as a man who would drive Meneses's cocaine to L.A. occasionally, but he said Diaz was not with him during his training period at Norwin's house.
Blandón's wife's uncle, economist Orlando Murillo, also agrees that Blandón was selling drugs for Meneses before 1982. "I was in Costa Rica and Chepita called me and said, 'I have serious problems with Danilo,'" Murillo recalled. Chepita told him they'd started a small business,but that Danilo was dealing drugs and had gotten in debt to Meneses, who was now pressing her for the money. "I sent her another $5,000," Murillo said. He acknowledged that his money was probably used to pay off Meneses, but said Chepita "is my niece and my only relative. And Danilo is a very dangerous man. So I help her when I can."
Murillo placed the call from his frantic niece in "1981,February or January."
One DEA informant told the Justice Department that Blandón was a drug dealer even before he came to the United States, and had known Meneses for years, long before meeting up with him at LAX that day. Long time Meneses employee Rafael Cornejo claimed that Blandón and Meneses "knew each other back in Nicaragua before the war. Danilo was sort of in the background of the group that hung around with Mundo. I'd see him at parties sometimes."
In an interview with journalist Georg Hodel, former Sandinista leader Moises Hassan—who is related to Blandón's mother-in-law, Vilma Pena Alvarez—said Blandón "was involved with drugs and contraband prior to the Sandinista takeover." Hassan had known Blandón since college, where Blandón was a student activist on behalf of Somoza's Liberal party.
The DEA, in a sworn statement filed in San Diego federal court, corroborated Hassan's statements. In a sealed search warrant affidavit filed in May 1992, DEAagent Chuck Jones wrote, "Blandón fled Nicaragua after the Samoza [sic] regime was deposed. Blandón had beena cocaine trafficker in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Samoza[sic] but had enjoyed protection through family political influence. Since about 1982, Blandón has been a cocaine trafficker in the United States."
At the time Jones made that statement, he was Blandón's case agent. Four years later, though, when defense attorneys accused federal prosecutors of hiding Jones's revealing affidavit from them, Agent Jones would suddenly remember that it wasn't Blandón he'd been referring to when he prepared the affidavit to search his storage locker. No, he claimed, he'd confused Blandón'sbackground with Meneses's.
Regardless of when Blandón's career as a cocaine trafficker began, by the time he says he started selling drugs for the Contras, they were no longer just a ragtag group running around the jungles on their own. They were,by early 1982, the property of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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"I Never Send Cash"
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