Part 5: Dark Alliance....A Million Hits is not Enough....He Would have had Me by the Tail"

Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb  

8

"A million hits is not enough" 

Ivan's whereabouts were no mystery to Danilo Blandón. He'd been observing Ivan's dealings with Ricky Ross for quite some time, seeing their sales expand, watching the venture become more and more profitable. He had to admit it; he was jealous. Despite all the work he'd been doing for Norwin Meneses personally—keeping the books, working for the Contras, helping Norwin's wife run the restaurant and the T-shirt company—the drug kingpin was still nagging him to move more cocaine. Every couple of months Blandón would drive all the way to Meneses house in Pacifica, a nine-hour trip, pick up another kilo or two, drive back to L.A., and then have to put up with Meneses flogging him to sell it. 

Blandón had been hitting up other car salesmen he knew, helping other cocaine dealers through dry spells now and again, but he wasn't making any great strides. He estimated that he spent "about a year, year and a half, you know, with the same two, one or two keys." 

But Ivan Arguelles, another Nicaraguan exile scuttling around L.A. with cocaine to sell, had found this kid in South Central, Ricky Ross, and they were really starting to move the powder. Blandón knew Ivan, who also used the name Claudio Villavicencio, because of their shared heritage and their new profession. He sold Ivan a little cocaine every once in a while. But Ivan had other sources of supply. 

The Torres brothers—the two giants with the little car lot —also got into the cocaine business around this time, according to Blandón, who surmised that they were supplying Ricky Ross. "I supposed that maybe they start with Rick," Blandón said. "I know them so well, you know, they are Nicaraguan people. . .. When I saw them getting rich, getting money, so I saw that they start doing business with him." 

If the Torres brothers were dealing with Ross, as Blandón claims, it is likely that they were doing so as Ivan's suppliers, because Ross said he never met the Torres's face-to-face until long after Ivan disappeared. 

Blandón had no other sources. He was stuck with Norwin Meneses, who was squeezing him dry for the Contras, charging him $60,000 a kilo and taking nearly every penny he made. Norwin was holding him back, he believed. "I didn't have my own car," Blandón complained. "I have to rent cars, you know. I used to work with him [Meneses], you know, coming from San Francisco, going back, and I thought, 'Hey, what are you doing? You're not doing nothing, you know? You're not making no—no money.'" 

That's why Ivan's deal with Ricky Ross looked so good to Blandón. This little kid was a mover, and he was getting bigger all the time. "I wished I could have known Ricky. . .because all the time I want to grow in the business," Blandón said. "He [Ivan] and his brother-in-law [Henry] was selling to Rick. So I wish I could [have known] him. . .. I knew how much they were selling." 

Blandón got his wish. Ivan Arguelles caught a bullet in the spine that crippled him from the waist down. He was hospitalized for months and forced to quit the cocaine business while he recuperated. "He got shot by his wife," Blandón said. "He's paralyzed right now." A tough break for Ivan, but it was the break Danilo Blandón had been waiting for. Ivan's customers had fallen to his brother-in-law, Henry Corrales, a drug dealing amateur. "Henry was kind of a knucklehead," Ross recalled. "He was a nice guy who just wanted to party all the time. He didn't know what he was doing." 

Blandón agreed. "When he [Ivan] got in the accident, it started Henry Corrales getting in [the business]," he said. "Henry was running the business because his brother-in law was in the hospital. And when the guy that got paralyzed get in the hospital, he lost that [cocaine] contact. And Henry didn't have any contact more than me when he took over."

In all the time he'd been hanging around Ivan, Henry apparently hadn't made any connections of his own. In a business where a man is only as good as his sources, Henry Corrales was hurting. Ivan's people expected him to deliver. And where the hell was he going to come up with the cocaine for these black gangsters downtown? 

When Blandón came by to offer his sympathies and lend a hand, Henry must have seen him as a savior. "When he doesn't have any sources, [he] asked to me and that's when we began the relationship with him," Blandón said. Corrales told him Ross was "the best customer" he and Ivan had, "a big customer that they were selling five or ten [kilos] a week. . .. For me, it was a big customer." 

Henry was so grateful for Blandón's help that he agreed to share his profits on every kilo he sold, fifty-fifty. "We split the commission," Blandón said, but he couldn't remember how much that was. "I was selling to Henry Corrales and Henry Corrales was selling to him [Ricky]. Henry was coming to me to pick up the stuff." 

Ross denied he was receiving that much cocaine from Henry when he started his relationship with him. He and Ollie were still dealing mostly ounces at that point, he said. It was in multi-ounce lots, to be sure—they'd buy four or eight ounces a day. But he said they did not graduate to buying kilos until later. Blandón said he knew how much Ross had been buying from Ivan because the quantity he sold him determined his price. 

Ross said he did not know that Danilo Blandón had adopted him as a customer. Just as he hadn't known where Ivan got his coke from, he didn't know where Henry got his. It's not that he wasn't curious. It was just a question cocaine dealers didn't ask each other. 

In the cocaine business, serious dealers had good reason to cut out their wholesaler and buy directly from the source. The closer they got, the cheaper and purer the cocaine became. The more hands it passed through, the more times the product got stepped on, or cut, and the lower the profits became. 

All Ricky knew was that once he started dealing with Henry, his cocaine prices fell again. Maybe Ivan's disappearance wasn't going to be such a bad deal after all, Ross decided. "After we started dealing with Henry, it got even better." 

Not long afterward, Ross started noticing a slight change in the cocaine market around South Central. Some of his customers were taking the cocaine powder he was selling them and turning it into weird little rocks—just like the one he'd seen back in 1979. A couple dealers had actually starting trying to sell rocks, he noticed, but the dopers Ricky knew regarded the product suspiciously. 

"At first, nobody wanted rock," Ross said. Nobody wanted to mess with cocaine that didn't look like cocaine. Secondly, the price was too low. How could anything claiming to be cocaine cost only $25? It had to be a rip-off. 

But Ricky vividly recalled his Christmastime experience with the pimp a couple years back, when the man had smoked a rock and come running back waving $100. If this stuff catches on, Ross considered, it might be worth looking into. Then one of his customers asked him if he had any rock to sell, and Ross got the message. 

"See, the way rock came into play, it would be like, say somebody was going to work early in the morning and they wanted some cocaine. They wanted to get high and they'd say, 'Damn, I gotta cook this shit up and I'm late for work,' and they'd ask me, 'Can you cook it up for me?'" It was a question of convenience. Ross said sure, and promptly hired someone to make it for him. 

"Know what I got in chemistry in school? A 'F'!" Ross laughed. "First started out, I was paying someone to cook it. But everybody always used to make it more complicated than it was. Like the cookers never wanted you to learn how to cook it. So everybody kind of kept it like hush-hush. 'Oh man, you got to let me do it. You goin' to mess it up.'" 

In truth, rock cocaine is easy to make. Put cocaine powder in a pan, add some water and baking soda, and heat until it starts crackling. Done. 

The recipe had been floating around a little while before it caught hold in South Central. In November 1979, Tennyson Guyer's Select Committee investigating cocaine provided the first public airing of the ingredients needed to turn powder into crack. "A saucer, a glass, a paper towel and Arm & Hammer baking soda are about all that is needed," testified Dr. Franklin Sher of Walnut Creek, California, a Bay Area physician whose family owned the country's largest freebase paraphernalia company at the time.

In 1981 an author named T. Davidson published a pamphlet, The Natural Process: Base-ic Instructions and Baking Soda Recipe, out of Tustin, California, an Orange County town about thirty miles east of L.A., which contained step-by-step instructions on how to make crack. Davidson hailed the simple procedure as "safe, healthy and economical." 

Ross said he watched his cooker for a while and thought, "'What the hell, I'm going to try it.' Because the first person that ever tried it was me. Ollie didn't try it first. I tried it first. Then I told Ollie, 'You can do that shit too.' So we started cooking it ourselves and we started selling what we called 'ready rock.'" He crumbled the rock up and delivered it in $20 hits—nuggets about the size of a ball bearing—first in tiny bits of aluminum foil, then later in tiny glass vials. 

Ross smoked some himself and found the craving for more so powerful that he vowed to stay as far away from the shit as possible. 

But, man, what a product. 

He saw how his customers reacted. Once they tried it, they never wanted anything else. "I think what made us start smoking was curiosity and frustration. I know that it wasn't the Black brothers' or sisters' intention to smoke cocaine as a career. It's just so addicting. It's like one hit is one too many and a million hits is not enough," explained Big Shiphead, a Shotgun Crip since he was twelve years old. "In my opinion, it's the worst drug that ever hit the face of this earth." 

What happened next was just what the scientists had been predicting since 1974. As base had done in Lima and La Paz eight years earlier, rock caused a sensation in South Central. But it was an underground sensation initially. 

A 1985 study by two University of Southern California social scientists provides some of the only existing documentation of crack's progression in South Central in the early 1980s, when Ross and others began selling it. It is like reading the origins of the Black Death. 

"We. . .reviewed the LAPD South Bureau Narcotic Division activity reports from January of 1982 to the present [April 1985]," sociologists Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson wrote. "From January to April of 1982 there are notes of cocaine increase with freebase as the most popular method. In May there is a random comment about 'rock hard' pre-free-based cocaine. With continuing increases in arrests, the first real mention of rocks came in September 1982 in the Southeast division. It showed up in 77th Division after another five months. Thereafter, monthly reports continued to report the presence of rock cocaine throughout the Bureau in increasing amounts." 

And that was only what the LAPD was finding when they busted somebody stupid, according to Ross; "They mighta got some dude with a few rocks in his pocket, but the LAPD didn't know nothing about what was really goin' on. The LAPD didn't mess with us at all." 

Former LAPD narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was riding the streets of South Central at that time, said Ross's viewpoint was essentially correct. Street cops like him, Polak insisted, saw what was happening. As the USC study showed, many of them were putting it in their reports. But none of them really knew what they were looking at, and the brass didn't seem that interested in finding out. "We didn't know what it was. I was there as a cop in uniform. I was stopping people on the streets and seeing these rocks. I'd see them throwing these rocks, these little things, and I'd go, 'What the fuck is this?' I didn't know what the fuck it was, you know?" 

When Polak asked, he was told they were bleached peanuts. "I'd put the handcuffs on them and I'd say, 'You know this is dope. I carry bleached peanuts all the time in my pocket and throw them away when I see the cops, so, you know, come on, give me a break.' It's just a matter of sending it to the lab and seeing exactly what he had and, you know, it was coming back this coke stuff." 

Polak started seeing other strange items as well. "We were stopping these people and they had these little bottles of Puerto Rican rum and little glass pipes and what we called a torch, a torn-off piece of a coat hanger with a cotton swab wrapped around it. What they were doing was dipping the swab in the rum because of its high alcohol content and then they'd put the rock on top of the glass pipe and then they'd flame [the swab] up. But then again, you learn, you know? There's nothing written on this shit." 

Once word got out that the Five-O was wise and was starting to bust people with rocks on them, Polak said, "We'd drive by and see them put their hands in their mouths. And we'd come back an hour later and they'd either be overdosed or wired like a motherfucker, jumping all around like little tops. They'd put it in their mouths and they'd leave it in so long it would start to dissolve, like an aspirin. These guys were falling all over." 

Smarter users found crack to be an ideal drug for the streets of South Central, where the cops tend to frisk young black men just for looking at them funny. Now you could actually carry dope with you in public, and the cops couldn't get there fast enough. "It's easy to get rid of in a pinch. Drop it on the ground and it's almost impossible to find," complained a Miami narcotics detective in 1986. "Step on it and the damned thing is history. All of a sudden your evidence ceases to exist." 

The inner city of Miami started seeing crack about a year after the Los Angeles market started, but on a much smaller scale. Longtime Miami area drug researcher James Inciardi, a criminology professor, wrote in 1988 that "although crack in one form or another appeared in Miami as early as 1982, at first it was generally limited to the Caribbean and Haitian communities." The drug "advanced to the wider drug subcultures in 1984," Inciardi wrote. "By early 1985, crack had become widely available in every inner-city neighborhood in the greater Miami area." 

According to several sources, 1985 was the year Jamaican posses took over the nascent crack market in inner-city Miami and began organizing and expanding it. Though the Miami market trailed the L.A. market by about a year or two, the similarities between them are striking in some respects. Both markets exploded following political upheavals in foreign countries—upheavals in which the CIA played an active role. 

Just as the South Central crack market began flourishing when political exiles from Nicaragua arrived to raise money for themselves and their political causes, the Miami crack market didn't really take off until political exiles from Jamaica moved in. The intelligence division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, in a 1994 report on crack cocaine, offered a startling explanation for the evolution of the Jamaican posses from small-time dopers to "one of the most effective trafficking groups" in the United States, rivaled only by the Crips and Bloods of Los Angeles. 

Since the 1970s Jamaica had been run by a socialist government headed by Michael Manley, a graduate of the London School of Economics, who immediately angered U.S. officials by recognizing the Cuban government of Fidel Castro and supporting socialist rebels that a CIA proxy army was battling in Angola. In 1977 two investigative reporters exposed a "destabilization program" against Manley's government reportedly being run by the CIA's Jamaican station chief, Norman Descoteaux. The campaign included covert shipments of arms to Manley's opponents, the use of selective violence, bombings, and assassinations, covert financial aid to the conservative Jamaica Labour party, the fomenting of extensive labor unrest, and bribery. 

One of the CIA agents who would later play a key role in the Contra project, Luis Posada Carriles—a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran with a history of engaging in arms-for-drugs deals—was sighted in Jamaica near the scene of at least one bombing, the reporters wrote. 

During the course of a bitter election campaign in 1980 between Manley and a candidate from the CIA-backed Jamaican Labour party, rival political gangs killed "more than 700 people," according to the DEA. Manley lost the election. What happened next was in many ways a carbon copy of what had happened in Nicaragua and Los Angeles a year earlier, despite the fact that here the political changing of the guard was roughly the reverse of the Nicaraguan situation. "Following the election, many of these political gunmen left or were driven out of Jamaica and immigrated to the United States. They settled into the large Jamaican and Caribbean communities in Miami and New York City," the DEA intelligence report stated. "In the early 1980s, the U.S. posse leaders maintained a sense of allegiance to their political parties in Jamaica, sending weapons and drug profits back home." Eventually, the DEA said, the Jamaican traffickers in the United States "evolved from small-time marijuana sellers into nationwide cocaine and crack distributors." 

The political leanings of Miami's and South Central's major cocaine suppliers were not known to lower-level dealers and hustlers, who probably wouldn't have cared anyway. Dope was dope. Politics was polities. And it wasn't until one got to the very top of the cocaine business that the two worlds intersected. 

Ricky Ross had no political interests at all, and never would. His worldview was limited to South Central, and how much cocaine he could move into it. What his Nicaraguan suppliers were doing with their money was their business, he figured.

What he was concerned with in late 1982 was that the new crack market in South Central wasn't turning into the money-maker he'd been expecting. Dealers had gotten away with charging more for powder, he said, because it sold in more expensive doses. When you were talking to someone about $300 for a gram or $3,000 for an ounce, you could pack a little more profit in around the edges, and nobody would say anything. "We was making more money when it was powder," he groused. "[The market] went to powder and rock, and eventually just went straight to rock because everybody had stopped snorting. I had to get out on the street myself and sell $20 rocks, run at the cars." 

The reason crack became so popular in South Central and elsewhere was that it only cost a few bucks to become a customer. Crack normally sold in $25 hits, but you could find tiny rocks for as little as $5. "One of the principles of modern marketing is to develop products for increasingly small market segments at prices each segment can afford. Crack pushers accomplished this by creating prepackaged units at more-or-less standard sizes and prices," drug experts David Allen and James Jekel wrote in 1991. 

Yale cocaine expert Dr. Robert Byck agreed that crack was a triumph of modern marketing principles. But there were more reasons than packaging for why it took off so quickly, he said. "I think the crack phenomenon is not just a matter of smoking freebase. What happened with crack was a change in the selling, distribution, and price. It was sold in a very convenient form, which was accessible to a wide range of people. Smoking, unfortunately, in our society is not an abnormal behavior. Injecting something intravenously is. Snorting something into your nose is abnormal. 

"So here was a way of taking a drug that was completely within the range of so-called normal behavior. And. . .gave you the same kick that you got from shooting it intravenously, but this was free of the risk of AIDS. It was socially acceptable and, on top of that, the drug was sold in a very convenient unit package. This was to drugs like McDonald's was to hamburgers. They knew how to sell it. And I think that what happened to crack was, they knew how to sell it." 

Crack's second big advantage over powder was that it democratized cocaine not only for users but for dealers as well. It didn't take a large investment anymore to call yourself a player. You could buy half a gram of powder for $150, rock it up, and get ten to twelve doses of crack, each of which would give the buyer a bigger blast than ten times as much powder. And you doubled your money. 

"Crack increases its own on-the-street sales force because many addicts find they must become pushers in order to make enough money to sustain their own habits," Allen and Jekel wrote. "And they can get cocaine powder at 'wholesale' prices this way and make their own crack." 

For Ross, that was the biggest problem with crack. Now he had to worry about competition from customers as well as other dealers. Competition meant fewer customers, and that meant less volume, negating the very advantage of selling crack in the first place. At the same time, his costs were going up; crack cost more to make. When he sold powder, all he needed was a scale and a bag of lactose. Now he needed a place to cook the shit up, because he couldn't do it in his cousin's apartment. He had to rent an apartment and pay rent bills and power bills. And then he needed vials, and people to help put the crack in the vials. To get the necessary volume, they had to pay people to go out and sell it, because he and Ollie couldn't do it all by themselves now. Overall, it was a bigger headache, with lower profits. 

Since standardization had eliminated Ross's strategy of cutting street prices and boosting volume, he had to figure out another way to raise his profits. Fortunately, Danilo Blandón was a stickler for quality, and Henry's cocaine was of a very high purity. By experimenting, he found that he could dilute the cocaine even further, before he mixed it with the baking soda, and his customers couldn't tell the difference. Because the dope was being cooked and smoked, purity and appearance didn't matter as much as it once had. 

"We called it 'blowup' and what we would do is cut it with procaine," Ross said. "You could get more weight and it would look bigger." Ross settled on a three-to-one cut, which turned one ounce of powder into four ounces. "You could turn it into as many as you wanted but the more you cut it, the less it was acceptable. . .one batch we cooked up we couldn't sell it. Customers wouldn't take it no more." 

Now he had four times as much crack to sell for roughly the same cost. But a couple months later, other dealers began using blowup too. That's when he decided to get out of street-corner crack sales and get into wholesaling, selling to other crack dealers. 

There was a new thing happening in parts of South Central and the San Fernando Valley suburb of Pacoima: rock houses, which some dealers had set up as one-stop shopping centers for crack. You made your crack in the kitchen, sold it in the dining room, and the customer smoked it in the living room. When they were out, the cycle began again. Since crackheads smoked hit after hit after hit until they ran out of money, it made more sense to get them in the house and keep them there, rather than go to a park or stand on the street drawing a crowd by making repeat sales all day long. Some of the more enterprising rock house operators had "strawberries" back in the bedroom if that's what you wanted, crack whores who would suck a dick for a suck on the pipe. 

James Inciardi had been a drug researcher in Miami for years and considered himself to be a hardened and streetwise observer. But nothing, he wrote, prepared him for the nightmarish world of a crack house. "I observed what appeared to be the forcible gang-rape of an unconscious child. Emaciated, seemingly comatose, and likely no more than 14 years of age, she was lying spread-eagled on a filthy mattress while four men in succession had vaginal intercourse with her," Inciardi wrote. "After they had finished and left the room, another man came in and they engaged in oral sex." Inciardi discovered that she was a "house girl," who got food, clothing, a roof over her head, and all the crack she wanted if she put it out for the customers. 

That was where he could still use his high-volume, low price strategy, Ross decided. Those new rock houses and those baby brand-new dealers out there—those hustlers buying half-grams and "slanging" on the corners—they would be his customers. Ricky would sell his "ready rock" in batches, cheaper than they could make it themselves, prepackaged and ready to peddle. And the other dealers could have the street trade and the competition and cops that went along with it.

The move, which Ross places near the end of 1982, worked. It reduced his operation's costs and took him off the streets. It reduced his customers' costs as well. He moved once again into an arena with no competition, where he was free to set his own prices, cherry-pick the best customers, and undercut anyone who tried to move in on him. 

"We was like. . .the first quantity dealers," Ross said. "Because there wasn't nobody really dealing quantity in L.A. at that time." Others agreed. "Ricky, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, there had to have been someone before him to hand him a rock, but he had to be one of the very first people, if not the first guy, to really sense the economic potential of street-level marketing," L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz said in 1995. "In my story I called him the first crack millionaire to rise from the streets of South Central." Katz's 1994 profile, headlined "Deposed King of Crack," said of Ross, "He didn't make the drug and he didn't smuggle it across the border, but Ricky Donnell Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived." 

Ross told CIA inspectors that he was South Central's biggest cocaine dealer by the end of 1982. "I knew this because it was my business strategy to know my competitors and stay on good terms with them," Ross told the agents. 

James Galipeau, a longtime probation officer in the South Central area, said Ross was indeed a pioneer. "The thing about Rick that set him apart from the other guys who started out selling when he did, guys like Honcho Day and Michael Harris, is that pretty soon, they ended up buying from him. And they were learning from him."

But it seemed that as soon as Ricky got one problem solved, another one would crop up. Now Henry was freaking out on him. Henry had never been all that reliable to begin with, Ross said, but he was getting worse all the time. He wasn't showing up when he said he would. Sometimes at night he didn't want to come down to the 'hood. And he was looking real nervous when he came. Rick didn't like it. Henry was still his only supplier. If he took a hike like Ivan did, Rick would have to find another quantity dealer with Henry's prices. Fat chance of that. 

As it turned out, something was going on with Henry. He didn't have the stomach for the business. And the more cocaine he sold to Ricky Ross, the more fretful he became. By late 1982 or early 1983, Ross said, Henry had gone from selling him ounces to selling him kilograms. And Blandón said he was selling many, many kilos to Ross through Henry. 

"How many kilos a week?" Blandón was asked. 

"To Henry?" 

"To Henry, to Ricky." 

"To Henry could be 10 or 15," Blandón said. 

"Ten to fifteen?" 

"Yes." 

"Would 50 a month be a fair estimate?" 

"In 1983, it. . .through Henry, yes." 

That means Ricky Ross—within a year of crack's first real appearance in South Central L.A.—was selling between 1,000,000 and 1,250,000 doses of crack every single month (using DEA estimates of 20–25 rocks of crack per gram of powder, 20,000 to 25,000 per kilogram). 

During 1982 and 1983, Blandón said, he and Meneses brought "three or four" planeloads of cocaine from Miami to Los Angeles.According to the Torres brothers, each one of those loads from Miami ranged between 200 and 400 kilos. These "regular" flights continued until at least 1984, they said. (Whether all of that was sold to Ross, or was divided among other customers of Meneses and Blandón, is not clear.) 

Blandón said Henry's cocaine deals with Ross began frightening the novice dealer. "He was selling him so often he was getting so paranoid, you know?" Blandón said. "Somebody from his organization was in jail. . .. He told me, 'I've got $200,000, $300,000, I'm going to leave.'" 

Corrales, Blandón said, planned to retire to the relative safety of Honduras. "He feel that he got a lot of money and he told me, 'Let me introduce you to my guy because my brother-in-law is still in the hospital.'" Blandón explained that Ivan Arguelles was still considered "the owner of Ricky Ross" by Henry, but since Ivan was laid up, and Henry was leaving town, Henry wondered if Blandón would mind dealing with Ricky. 

Henry was not turning over his best customer for free, though. Blandón would have to continue splitting commissions with him. "He wanted to leave to Honduras, be there and get some commission," Blandón said. "He wanted that I give some commission to him, you know? That was the proposal." Blandón agreed, and Henry took him down to South Central to meet the rising young crack magnate. 

"He introduced me, right in front of the house of Mary," Blandón said, referring to Mary Monroe, a friend and employee of Ross. "It was in South L.A.. . .. that was the house that later came to be the warehouse for money, and to deliver." 

Ross recalled the meeting well. "We had a place, one of the ladies in our neighborhood, we used to hang out in her back yard and play pool, mess with her daughters. Danilo met us in the front yard. Henry came in the back and knocked on the door and said he wanted to talk to me. He said, 'Come on. Let's go for a ride.' So we got in the car and we were riding around and he said, 'I'm leaving and I'm going to turn you over to the man. He's gonna do a better business than what we been doing and you gonna have a better price. Everything is gonna be better for you." 

The price he paid for his cocaine fell once again. "After we started talking directly with Danilo, I mean the price was just. . .everybody was saying it was the bottom. That's what they used to say. 'You've got the cheapest price in town.' Everybody else was paying like $3,000 for an ounce of cocaine and when me and Ollie started dealing directly with Danilo, I think we was getting it for like $1,800 an ounce." 

After his trip to South Central, Blandón knew why Henry was nervous. It was "a rough area" of town, he said, and the place fairly bristled with firearms. For his first drug delivery, "We went to an apartment that was on the second floor and there was a door, an iron door. And there was a guy, you know, with a shotgun: 'Who are you?' We identify ourselves, then you have to pass another guy with another machine gun, or shotgun. And inside, near the dinner table in the living room, there were about five guys, and all the guys were there with a gun at the table."

When asked to date that encounter, Blandón was unclear. "1982," he said under oath. "Excuse me. Sorry. 1983. 1983, I think so really. 1983. Excuse me, I make a mistake. 1984, because I was living in Northridge. Yes, 1984." Ross said he was introduced to Blandón about six or seven months after he started dealing with Henry, which would put his first face-to-face meeting with Blandón some time in the fall of 1982 or early 1983. 

Henry's retirement also seemed to improve the quality of the cocaine Ross was getting. When he took it to the dealers who were his customers, they raved about it. "They said that the stuff was not cut. It was pure." Ross had finally reached the source, the wellspring from which pure, uncut cocaine flowed in abundance. His street-dealing days were over. Now, he was the man to see. 

And true to form, he began to innovate. If there was a neighborhood where the dealers were not pushing his supply, Ross said, he would find the hood's top dealer and pay him a friendly visit, bringing with him a couple kilos of Danilo's finest, which he would give the rival dealer free as a measure of his respect. Try it out and see what you think, he would tell them. And then Ross would tell them the price, and he would have another customer. 

Other times, he would invite dealers to smoke parties, where all the crack they wanted would be available on the house. There was plenty more where that came from, they would be told. And the price. . . 

Ross said his first deal with Blandón was for "around eight ounces." Blandón, however, said it was much more than that, at least a kilo, and that their business grew geometrically from there. "In those times, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe seven a day," he said. "Every day." 

At seven kilos a day, Ross was moving more than 200 kilos of cocaine every single month. That meant he was pumping out around 165,000 vials of crack a day—5 million rocks a month. 

"There is no doubt that Ricky Ross created a massive distribution network that poured enormous amounts of crack into Los Angeles, and elsewhere, during the mid1980s," the Justice Department's Inspector General concluded in 1998, calling it a "huge drug empire." 

"I had as many as five cookhouses. Because that was our hardest thing, to cook. Once you cooked it, it was sold," Ross said. Compton crack dealer Leroy "Chico" Brown told of visiting one of Ross's "cook-houses," and his description matched the one Ross gave. A house in a cheap neighborhood would be purchased by a front man and gutted. The windows would be barred and steel doors installed. Large, restaurant-size gas ranges and big aluminum pots would be brought in at night and set up. And then the cookers went to work. They would work in shifts, arriving and departing as if they lived in the house. The only visitors would be the couriers, one to drop off the powder and the other to pick up the crack. 

"They were stirring these big pots with those things you use in canoes," Brown said with wonder. "You know, oars." 

"Working around the clock, taking the age-old axioms of good business to ominous extremes, [Ross] transformed a curbside operation at 87th and Figueroa into the Wal-Mart of cocaine," the L.A. Times wrote in 1994. 

South Central L.A. had become a boomtown of sorts. What happened there was reminiscent of what occurred in the hills and hollows of Kentucky during the coal boom of the 1970s, when seemingly worthless land was suddenly worth millions. While most of the residents remained poor and poorly educated, a few struck it rich overnight. Satellite dishes started popping up near shacks. Big, expensive cars—Cadillacs, BMWs and Mercedes Benzes—began rolling through the streets. 

In early 1983 stories began appearing in the Los Angeles Sentinel, the South Central area's black-oriented news weekly, about the crack houses that were springing up here and there. "I would say that things got worse when cocaine hit the streets in '83 because prior to that all the brothers that were slangin' were selling water, Sherman, angel dust, PCP, or whatever you wanted to call it," said Leibo, an East Side Crip. "About '82 or '83 is when rocks hit the streets hard." 

Fed by an unending supply of cocaine from Danilo Blandón, Ricky Ross's crack trafficking organization prospered and grew unhindered by law enforcement in the ghettos of Los Angeles. The cocaine business was turning out to be exactly as he'd seen it in the movies. 

"Right when I was starting to sell drugs Scarface came out," Ross said, referring to the 1983 remake starring Al Pacino as a cocaine kingpin. "A whole bunch of us went and saw it, like 10 or 15 of us. We took our girlfriends, and we see this guy who. . .don't have nothing and the next thing, he's on top of the world." Like his fictional hero, Ross said, "I became a drug-dealing legend." 

Chico Brown, a Corner Pocket Crip who was also heavily influenced by Scarface, agreed. "You ask any of the people who they looked up to back when they was starting out, and all of them will tell you it was Ricky Ross. He was like a legend in the neighborhoods. He got a lotta people started." 

9

"He would have had 

me by the tail" 

Barely a year had passed since the CIA had taken over the financing of the Contras, and already the covert war was no longer a secret. The week before the 1982 elections, Newsweek magazine published the first detailed account of the Reagan administration's support of the Contras: "America's Secret War: Target Nicaragua." The cover story portrayed the Contras—whose forces had built up to around 4,000 men by this point—as being in a position to overthrow the Sandinistas. There were full-color photographs of paratroopers dropping from the sky, which made it appear as if the invasion was already under way. 

But that was a gross exaggeration of reality. The Contras, in truth, had just started receiving the American weapons and supplies that Reagan had promised them a year earlier. According to one account, the main source for Newsweek's story was none other than CIA director William Casey, who wanted to ensure that the Contra project didn't get shelved. Now that it was public knowledge that the Reagan administration was helping the Contras, Casey's reasoning went, it would look like a sellout—another Bay of Pigs—if it stopped. 

The reporting incensed some members of Congress, particularly those who had been told by CIA officials that the Contras were merely border guards, keeping the Sandinistas from sending arms into El Salvador. The Contras' first major act of war, in fact, had nothing to do with El Salvador. Under CIA direction, two bridges linking Honduras and Nicaragua were blown up in March 1982, an operation Contra commanders considered to be the opening shots of the war. 

In response to the Newsweek report, Congressman Tom Harkin proposed a complete cutoff of funding for all paramilitary activities against the Nicaraguan government. The fact that the war was illegal, Harkin argued, was nothing compared to the U.S. government cozying up to "perhaps the most hated group of Nicaraguans that could exist outside the borders of Nicaragua, and I talk about the Somocistas." Harkin called them "vicious, cutthroat murderers" and urged Congress to "end our involvement with this group." 

When the Reagan administration heard about Harkin's proposed amendment to the annual defense budget bill, Oliver North later wrote, it "hit the roof. . .. The President let it be known that if Congress approved the Harkin Amendment, which was unlikely anyway, he would promptly veto it." Instead, Congress passed the first Boland Amendment, named for the Massachusetts Democrat, Edward P. Boland, who authored it. Boland, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, knew full well that the CIA was funding the Contras, and he was not opposed to it. But Harkin's move—making a public issue out of a secret CIA project—had put Boland on the spot and riled up other liberals. Boland told Harkin that Congress had no business passing laws like the one he was proposing. That's why there was an Intelligence Committee, Boland lectured, "to keep the nation's secrets and exercise sensible and prudent oversight." The Intelligence Committee, a body generally protective of the CIA, had been one of the few committees told of the secret Contra project. 

To quiet Harkin and other liberals, Boland agreed to an amendment that prohibited the use of taxpayer funds "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras." The House passed it on Christmas Eve 1982 by a vote of 411–0. 

No doubt the lawmakers were eager to get home for the holidays, but the reason the Boland Amendment received unanimous support was because it accomplished nothing. It was largely a fraud, designed to make it look as if Congress was cracking down on the Contra project without actually doing so. 

Internal government memos show that the CIA, the White House, the Defense Department, and the Contras' congressional supporters knew that the Contras had no hope of defeating the Sandinistas. Since there was no way in hell the Contras were ever going to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, their supporters reasoned, they could continue spending CIA funds despite the Boland Amendment. If the Contras were given money for one purpose—arms interdiction—and decided to use it another way, well, that wasn't the CIA's fault, was it? The money hadn't been given "for the purpose" of an overthrow.

Indeed, by early 1983, CIA dollars were pouring into Honduras and Costa Rica in torrents. Best of all, the Contras no longer had to ask their Argentine advisers for permission to spend it. Most of the Argentines were called home in 1982 after their country's disastrous war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands. 

Enrique Bermúdez and the other top-ranking FDN officials started living like real generals. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bermúdez moved into "an elegant two-story place, all dark wood and balconies, overlooking the Tegucigalpa basin from a lovely hillside lot in the exclusive neighborhood of Ciudad Nueva." Bermúdez and his staff spent their evenings dining on roasts, puffing cigars, quaffing tequila, or carousing in the excellent casinos downtown. "Bermúdez had developed a taste for the teenage girls his men were recruiting in Nicaragua," journalist Sam Dillon wrote in his 1991 book Comandos. "Bermúdez was inviting them from the base camps back to Ciudad Nueva, one at a time, to try out as his 'secretaries.'" [Some folks might consider him a damn pervert.Given the clowns track record,he was at least 'their pervert' DC]

Dillon wrote that the CIA was sending "tens of thousands of dollars a month to Bermúdez's general staff to pay the 'family aid' salaries of his field commanders, and other prodigious sums to buy food for the thousands of FDN fighters." But much of that aid was being diverted and never reached the soldiers in the field. The Southern Front commanders in Costa Rica, Eden Pastora and "El Negro" Chamorro, constantly complained that Bermúdez and his CIA friends were stiffing them on the supplies, raking off the best weapons and the best food and sending them garbage—planeloads of diapers, feminine napkins, and extra-large underwear. It wasn't merely unfair, they argued, it was an insult to their manhood. 

"Bermúdez's staff officers were pocketing the money," Dillon wrote. "They were also stealing half the CIA's food budget. Though they routinely shipped only half the necessary beans, rice and other foodstuffs to the base camps, they were billing the CIA for full rations." 

Several accounts, including Dillon's, paint a picture of massive corruption inside the FDN, perpetuated by Bermúdez and his closest associates, death squad leader Ricardo Lau and millionaire land baron Aristides Sanchez. At one point, dozens of midlevel FDN field commanders petitioned to have Bermúdez fired for stealing money and squandering supplies. Some CIA field officers were pushing for his removal on the same grounds. 

But Bermúdez had friends at CIA headquarters at Langley, and after he contacted them about the incipient mutiny, the complainers were the ones booted out of the FDN. The CIA brass felt they couldn't dump "the obedient asset who'd helped construct their entire project," Dillon wrote. 

Still, congressional discomfort over the CIA's army was growing. In May the House Intelligence Committee issued a special report suggesting that the "operation is illegal" and that the administration knew plainly that the Contras were trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. On July 28, 1983, the House passed a resolution by a 228–195 vote to stop all aid to the Contras. "Opposition in the House to aiding the Nicaraguan rebels seemed almost insurmountable and it would be easier for House Democrats to block passage of a new aid authorization in 1984 than it had been to cut it off in 1983," former State Department official Robert Kagan, a Contra supporter, wrote. 

Yet it was somewhere around this time, according to Danilo Blandón, that he stopped sending the profits from his L.A. cocaine sales to the Contras. At other times he has said it was late 1982. In either case, Blandón said that the reason he was given for halting the donations was that the Contras had plenty of money. 

"In 1983, okay, the Contra gets a lot of money from the United States," he told a federal grand jury in 1994. "And they were—when Reagan get in the power, Mr. Reagan get in the power, we start receiving a lot of money. And the people that was in charge, it was the CIA, so they didn't want to raise any money because they have, they had the money that they wanted." 

"From the government?" Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall asked. 

"Yes, for the Contra revolution." 

"Okay." 

"So we started—you know, the ambitious person, we started doing business by ourselves," Blandón said. 

"To make money for yourselves?" 

"Yes." 

"There's a lot of money to be made?" 

"Yes." 

Blandón told CIA inspectors that FDN commander Enrique Bermúdez came to California sometime in 1983 and told him personally that it wasn't necessary for the Los Angeles group to raise any more money. "The FDN needed people, not money, because the CIA was providing money," he said Bermúdez told them. But Blandón's mentor, Norwin Meneses, said Blandón remained a loyal financial supporter of the Contras for the duration of the war. Asked when Blandón stopped giving the Contras monetary support, Meneses replied, "Never, as far as I know." 

Blandón said he was working for Meneses at the time the Contra cocaine kickbacks ended. "I continued working for a period of time, about six months, and then I changed because Meneses was—it was the same thing. I wasn't making any money." Blandón was tired of being stuck in the middle of fights between Norwin and his estranged wife, Maritza. Meneses was still charging him too much for cocaine and was refusing to let him share in the spoils. "When I was with Meneses, you see, I didn't make no money at all," Blandón griped. "Meneses was charging me, you know, a big price, that I couldn't meet. I couldn't make enough money, you know, because all the time I owe him." 

Blandón said he owed Meneses around $100,000 and couldn't seem to reduce the debt because "I didn't make any money. So I start looking for my own resource, or my own sources." He found them by going behind Meneses back and dealing directly with Norwin's L.A. suppliers—a couple of Colombians he knew only as Luis and Tony, to whom he had been delivering cash for his miserly boss. "I used to deliver money to the Colombian connection from Meneses, and I got a friendship with them and they know how hard I was working at that time. It was easy for me to ask them for credit because they knew how, how hard I work at that time for them."

The Colombians were happy to help, Blandón said, and encouraged him to strike out on his own. "When I fight with Norwin, the Colombian people started, you know, pushing me along, trying to cross Norwin, and they go with me and talk to me that I can make it myself." Asking the Colombians for cocaine on credit was not difficult. They were used to working cocaine deals that way. They would give you the cocaine and a few days to sell it. Then you'd pay them what you owed. It was a clever way for the cartels to expand their customer base in the United States and keep their own exposure to a minimum. 

The Colombians advanced Blandón fifteen kilos—worth about $885,000—and they were off to the races. He started out getting fifteen kilos a month and within a couple months had progressed to thirty kilos a month. He left Meneses and the Contras behind and concentrated on making money for himself, he said. 

But several parts of Blandón's story don't add up. He testified that when he was supplying Henry Corrales in 1983, Ross was already selling up to seven kilos a day, and Blandón said he had other customers as well. If Blandón's testimony about the size of his initial dealings with the Colombians is true, he wouldn't have had enough cocaine to supply Ross for a week, much less a month. Before his purported split from Meneses he had been selling far larger quantities of cocaine than that, he admitted. 

"And do you remember if you were getting large amounts or small amounts from Mr. Meneses?" Blandón was asked in 1996. 

"At the end, large." 

"And what is a large amount?" 

"About 40, 50, at this time," he testified. During his federal grand jury appearance in 1994, Blandón was asked to estimate "how much total you would have gotten from Norwin" during the time he was receiving cocaine from him. 

"How many I received from Norwin?" 

"Yes." 

"Well, it was—I received from him, okay, not for me, because it was—I was only the administrator at that time. I received, in L.A. about 200, 300," he said. 

But if Blandón didn't make his first sale until the spring of 1982 and spent a year to eighteen months dealing only ounces and grams, as he testified, it would have been impossible for him to have sold 200 to 300 kilos for Meneses by late 1982 or early 1983, when he claims he broke from him. 

In fact, evidence turned up by the FBI and DEA in later years showed that Blandón and Meneses were still working together as late as 1991. In August 1986 Blandón's and Meneses NADDIS files—computerized intelligence profiles maintained by the federal government on suspected drug traffickers—showed both men as current associates. Moreover, if Blandón double-crossed Meneses in 1982–83 by stealing his sources and his L.A. customers, it is doubtful the men would have remained friends and business partners, yet they continued to operate hotels and other businesses together in Nicaragua. 

What appears to have happened is that Blandón acquired additional sources of supply sometime in 1984 and became his own boss in L.A., while Meneses remained in charge of the San Francisco drug operation. And they continued working with each other and with the Contras for years, more or less as equals. 

Others who were present at the time confirm that this, in fact, is exactly what occurred. "The principal group is controlled by Blandón and is the focal point for drug supply and money laundering for the others," an August 1986 DEA report stated. "The other group is run by Meneses and is located principally in the San Francisco area. . .. Per CI [confidential informant] cocaine is often transported to the Blandón association and then from Blandón to Meneses in San Francisco." That DEA report, based on debriefings of an informant inside Blandón's drug ring, showed Blandón and Meneses working together so closely in mid-1986 that they were sharing the same cocaine supplier and money launderer. 

In a 1992 interview with the FBI, Blandón's associate Jacinto Torres told agents that Blandón continued receiving cocaine from Meneses for at least two years longer than Blandón admits. "As of approximately 1984, Blandón was involved in cocaine sales in the Glendale, California area. Blandón's supplier as of 1984 continued to be Norwin Meneses," Torres told the FBI. Torres said Blandón's cocaine business "dramatically increased" in 1984, and that Meneses was flying planeloads of dope in from Miami to keep up with the demand; "Norwin Meneses, Blandón's supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West Coast. Blandón eventually 'separated' from Meneses and obtained other sources of supply." 

A 1990 DEA report, requesting the formation of a multi agency task force targeting Blandón and Meneses, shows that the DEA also believed the two "disassociated" from each other in 1984 but had, by the late 1980s, reunited to head "a criminal organization that operate(s) internationally from Colombia and Bolivia, through the Bahamas, Costa Rica, or Nicaragua to the United States." The report claimed their drug ring was getting its cocaine from the politically connected Suarez family in Bolivia, and the Ochoa family in Medellín, Colombia, the founders of the notorious Medellín cartel. The Bolivian cocaine was coming into Miami, the report said, and the Colombians' powder was landing in L.A. 

The DEA reported that Meneses had given Blandón his start in Los Angeles in the early 1980s and that from 1982 to 1984 "Blandón had operated directly under Meneses." After that, the DEA said, Blandón "began to work as an independent drug distributor with several subordinates working directly for Blandón." 

That Blandón continued dealing with Meneses through 1984 was unwittingly confirmed by the Los Angeles Times in a 1996 story that attempted to demonstrate that Blandón and Meneses had split in 1982. The Times claimed to have interviewed an unnamed "cocaine trafficking associate" of Blandón, who said he was present at Meneses house in the Bay Area on a day when Meneses and Blandón were celebrating the consummation of a big drug deal. "Danilo and Norwin had done some business," the Times quoted the associate as saying. "The deal involved 40 or 50 kilos. The money was all divvied up. There was cash all over the place. Norwin had steaks on the grill. It was going to be a big party." 

The phone rang, and Mendes's girlfriend, Blanca Margarita Castano, answered it and then shrieked, "'Jairo's been arrested!' Well, everybody cleared out in a heartbeat. They grabbed the money and ran. . .. I don't think anyone turned off the steaks." 

Records show Jairo Meneses was arrested on November 26, 1984, roughly two years after Blandón claims he quit dealing with Norwin. San Francisco cocaine dealer Rafael Cornejo, a longtime wholesaler for Meneses, also confirmed that Blandón and Meneses were still working together then. "I didn't see him a lot, but I know he was with Norwin in '84," Cornejo said. Blandón and Meneses had paid him a memorable visit in San Francisco that year, stopping by a commercial building Cornejo owned on Chenery Street. Norwin wanted to store something in his building, and Cornejo didn't ask what. "It didn't matter to me. You know, if Norwin wants to do something. . .I said, 'Anything you want.' I like Norwin, I respect Norwin." 

During that visit, Cornejo said, "Blandón starts telling me he'd been doing lots of things with the black people down there [in L.A.]. And I said, 'Yeah, so?' And he wanted to see if I was interested in doing something up here. And I said, 'Why?' And he said I should get into the black thing. No one cares about them, he tells me. When they start killing themselves no one cares." Cornejo told Blandón "not to play me with that race thing. Business is business, but don't play me with that race thing. The difference between him and me was that I grew up in San Francisco and it didn't mean that much to us. But he grew up in Nicaragua, with these rich and powerful people, and that's the way he thought."

Blandón's own experience had taught him that no one cared about the cocaine that he was pouring into South Central in 1984. By then, he'd been dealing ever-increasing amounts to Ricky Ross for two years and had received no interference from the police whatsoever. The only media in L.A. that seemed alarmed by the spread of crack in black neighborhoods was the African-American press. The white newspapers didn't even know what crack was. 

In December 1983, for instance, former L.A. Dodger legend Maury Wills was arrested for driving a stolen car. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner noted that the "arresting officers also found a small vial on the automobile's front seat containing a white, rock-like substance believed to be cocaine. Police said a clear glass water pipe was found next to the vial." An LAPD officer "refused to speculate if the water pipe may have been used for free-basing, a technique in which cocaine is smoked to intensify the high." The story said Wills was "booked on the grand theft auto allegation pending further identification of the white substance by the LAPD's narcotics laboratory." 

Starting in 1984, unlike what they'd been seeing one or two years earlier, street cops like Steve Polak were arresting low-level dealers in South Central with more cocaine than they had ever seen before. The patrolmen were reporting their finds to the LAPD's Major Violators Unit but were getting nowhere, said Polak, who was one of the LAPD's crack experts and lectured police departments around the country. "A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying to them, 'Hey, these blacks, no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing ounces, they were doing keys.'" The Major Violators Unit, which dealt primarily with Colombians and South Americans, found such reports hard to swallow. "They were saying, basically, 'Ahh, South Central, how much could they be dealing?'" Polak laughed. '"The money's not there. We're not going to bring in millions of dollars in seizures or large quantities of coke down there.'" As a result, the crack dealers of South Central "virtually went untouched for a long time. They enjoyed quite a run there without anyone ever working them." 

The same could not be said for the Meneses organization in San Francisco. Since 1981, it had been under constant investigation by the DEA, the FBI, and the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNE). But aside from a couple of nickel-and-dime busts of Norwin's nephews, nothing much happened. 

"Norwin was a target of ours, and his organization was one that we'd worked on," said Jerry Smith, former head of the BNE's San Francisco bureau. But Smith said Meneses network was so tight-knit that it was impossible to get anyone inside. The Meneses organization, one federal prosecutor wrote in 1993, had been "the target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years." 

Meneses, on the other hand, seemed to have much better luck at infiltration than the police. 

"There were some things that happened and I'm really kind of reluctant to go into that particular thing," Smith said. "It had nothing to do with the CIA or the FBI. It had to do with one of my guys, who subsequently was fired. . .I think he was trying to broker some information to somebody for some money. And we got onto it very quickly and so he's no longer around, and I don't think anything ever came to fruition. But it was something that bothered us at the time." 

Meneses, in an interview, boasted that he had a DEA agent on his payroll who was feeding him information about the government's many investigations, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the law. 

Even if that's true, however, it does not fully explain the drug lord's complete imperviousness to prosecution. It's hard to imagine how one or two corrupt narcotics agents could have held off the entire U.S. law enforcement community, especially when the DEA and FBI had been aware of Norwin's criminal activities since the 1970s. It becomes even harder to fathom given the events that would unfold in late 1984. 

"Oh, he [Meneses] was totally protected by the U.S. government," insisted Contra supporter Dennis Ainsworth, a former San Francisco—area economics professor. "He was protected by everyone under the sun." 

That conclusion had been a difficult and painful one for Ainsworth to reach. A staunch conservative and Republican party stalwart, the tall, patrician Ainsworth had believed in the Contras, and threw himself wholeheartedly into their cause starting in late 1983, when he became involved in efforts to assist Nicaraguan refugees who had settled in San Francisco after fleeing the Sandinistas. The Nicaraguans, he said, most of whom had been Somoza supporters, had difficulty getting help from the liberal churches in San Francisco, which Ainsworth claimed were interested only in assisting refugees from right-wing Central American dictatorships. "All of a sudden, bang, we've got a problem in our backyard, and nobody wanted to help them," Ainsworth recalled. "And so, I met some of the Nicaraguans and we started helping. Getting clothing donations and stuff like that." 

In February 1984, Ainsworth said, he saw an announcement in the San Francisco Chronicle about a seminar at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel concerning Central America and the Contras. He attended and met Julio Bonilla, a Nicaraguan who was the local coordinator of the FDN. The men chatted briefly and exchanged phone numbers. (According to one published source, Norwin Meneses helped finance that seminar at the Drake.) About three weeks later, Ainsworth said, Bonilla called him and invited him to an informal gathering at a house on Colon Avenue in San Francisco, to meet with some of the Nicaraguans who had helped put the seminar together. Ainsworth found a pleasant group of middle-class husbands and wives, many of them recent immigrants. One, he said, had been Anastasio Somoza's dentist. Their leader was a jovial pharmaceutical salesman, Don Sinicco, known to others in the trade as "Mr. Maalox" because he sold the popular antacid to local hospitals. Sinicco was not Nicaraguan; he was born in Italy and lived there until 1938, when Mussolini came to power. He later married a Nicaraguan, Nydia Gonzales, the daughter of a powerful Nicaraguan general, Fernando Gonzales. Through them, he became fascinated with Nicaraguan politics. 

As the covert war in Nicaragua escalated, stories about the conflict began popping up in San Francisco's newspapers, and Sinicco read them avidly, but not happily. He believed the press was cheerleading for the Sandinistas, and he fired off dozens letters to the newspapers, chiding them for their "slant." Many were published. "I got a reputation," he said proudly. 

In late 1983, Sinicco said, he got a call from a man named Adolfo Calero, the head of the political wing of the FDN. Sinicco said Calero called him because of his letter writing campaign, which flattered him considerably. "He said, 'We need someone like you to help us get the word out. People will listen to you because you're an American.' So they contacted me, and I said that's fine." At Calero's suggestion, Sinicco formed a small organization called United Support Against Communism in the Americas (USACA), and he and his friends began holding regular meetings, casting about for ways to publicize the Contras' plight. 

Sinicco said he'd never met Calero before, but his wife and Calero's wife were old friends. In Managua, Calero had been a well-known businessman, a Chamber of Commerce type who'd run the bottling plant for the local Coca-Cola distributorship. He was also a CIA asset, someone the U.S. government had hoped might replace Somoza as Nicaragua's president before the Sandinista takeover. According to former FDN director Edgar Chamorro, Calero "had been working for the CIA in Nicaragua for a long time. He served as, among other things, a conduit of funds from the United States Embassy to various student and labor organizations." In early 1983 the CIA had brought Calero out of Nicaragua and installed him as the political director of the FDN; his broad, acne-scarred visage soon became the most familiar face of the Contra rebels in the United States. Tall and imposing, Calero spoke English well, not surprisingly for a graduate of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. "Calero and Bermúdez were our main links with the CIA," Chamorro declared. "They met constantly with the CIA station chief." 

In 1984 Calero began visiting San Francisco frequently, Ainsworth and Sinicco said, and would usually stay at their homes while in the city attending to FDN business. While finding Calero personable and smooth, Ainsworth was dismayed by the lack of political sophistication displayed by the FDN support group Sinicco had assembled at Calero's request. The Nicaraguans were eager and committed to the Contra cause, Ainsworth recalled, but there wasn't a soul among them who knew anything about working the American political system. "That little group that used to meet at his house. . .would have done nothing if I hadn't come over and said, 'Look, I'll set these things up.' All Sinicco and his friends were thinking of doing was writing a few letters to the editor. They had no connections whatsoever. And I happened to walk in and I was a well connected guy." 

Ainsworth gently suggested to the Nicaraguans that there were other ways of drawing attention to their cause. Why not sponsor a speaking tour for some Contra officials, such as Adolfo Calero? Bring him to town, show him around, get some press coverage. Sinicco, who was USACA's president, said he and his friends were "very impressed" with Ainsworth's ideas and his political connections and voted to make him a director of their new group. "As far as I knew, he was presumably very active in Republican politics. He knew senators, he knew representatives, both federal and in Sacramento. He knew the chairman of the party. He seemed to be influential and was active internationally in anti-Communist efforts," Sinicco said. Ainsworth, he said, began opening doors all across San Francisco. "He was the one who appeared to be able to get us these bookings at places like the Olympic Club, the Commonwealth Club. None of us belonged to those kind of places. But he either did or knew people that did. He was able to devote his full-time attention to the group. Most of the rest of us were working men. We had businesses to run, jobs to go to." 

On June 4, 1984, Ainsworth arranged a private reception for Calero at the exclusive St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco with about sixty of the city's most influential business leaders and Republicans. "It was just a chance for everybody to meet and greet. It wasn't a fund-raiser. Calero was in the news, he was a newsmaker, and some people I knew had expressed an interest in meeting him," Ainsworth said. Calero gave a short speech, answered a few questions, and mingled. "The cocktail party went very smoothly," Ainsworth would later tell the FBI. 

Afterward, Calero, Ainsworth, Sinicco, and about twenty others drove over to Caesar's Italian Restaurant, one of the many near Fisherman's Wharf. When the bill came, Ainsworth said, a small neatly dressed man he had not noticed before called the waiter over and picked up the tab for the entire party. Ainsworth leaned over and asked a Nicaraguan friend who Mr. Generosity was. "You don't want to know," was the response he said he got. 

Sinicco said he initially assumed one of the Mendoza brothers—two strident Cuban anti-Communists who were members of USACA—had paid the bill. "When we called for the check, we were told it had been taken care of, and I thought it was one of the Cubans who'd paid for it. I thought Max [Mendoza]'s brother had paid for the dinner, and in fact I went up and thanked him afterwards and I'm sure he wonders to this day what I was thanking him for." Before the evening was over, Sinicco was set straight by another Nicaraguan: the big spender was named Norwin Meneses. He owned a restaurant and a travel agency in the Mission District. "I'd never heard of him," Sinicco said, "but we were glad for the financial assistance." 

At the end of the dinner, Ainsworth stood and announced that in two days, Don Sinicco was going to be hosting a cocktail party for their esteemed guest, Adolfo Calero, and that everyone in the room was invited. 

At the party two days later, Norwin Meneses came in with the crowd dressed in an expensive white linen sports coat with a cashmere overcoat draped over his arm. Sinicco said Meneses spoke to Calero briefly, and the two men retired to a back bedroom, apparently for a meeting. Ainsworth confirmed that. Calero has said he never met privately with Meneses.

Later, as the party was winding down, Sinicco got out his Instamatic camera and began snapping pictures of the historic occasion. He got a shot of some of the wives posing behind a handmade cloth map of Nicaragua. He snapped one of Max Mendoza, the Cuban, with a big grin on his mustachioed face. Sinicco found Calero in the kitchen, huddled by the refrigerator with Meneses, San Francisco FDN coordinator Julio Bonilla, and some other local FDN officials. He told the group to smile and lined up the shot, but just as he snapped the shutter, Meneses closed his eyes and turned away. "Let me get another real quick," Sinicco said. This time Meneses kept his eyes open, but he didn't smile. He looked at Sinicco and glared. Calero posed with a tight smile on his face. 

Sinicco suddenly remembered Meneses from the restaurant two nights earlier, and he approached him and thanked him for his kindness. "I told him that now that he knew where we lived, he should come to our next [USACA] meeting and he said that he would, but that he really needed to leave now." 

After that Meneses began attending USACA's meetings, Sinicco recalled, usually arriving with the Mendoza brothers, who ran a Cuban anti-Communist group in San Francisco. Ainsworth said he did not believe there was a connection between Menses and the Cubans, other than a political one. However, a former FDN mercenary from Florida, Jack Terrell, said Meneses was plugged tightly into the Cuban exile community in Miami. "He assisted the Cuban Legion in their radio propaganda shows coming from Miami," Terrell said, adding that Meneses was an associate of several members of the 2506 Brigade, which was made up of Bay of Pigs veterans. 

Sinicco showed the author attendance records, minutes of meetings, and other assorted paperwork he kept as USACA's president. One of the documents he provided was a handwritten note that he said were his talking points for one of USACA's earliest meetings. "Our first time venture as USACA has proven highly successful," Sinicco had written, and he listed "seven successes." The first was that "Adolfo was brought over." 

Success No. 6: "We are receiving some attention from some Cuban people who appear eager to help." 

Success No. 7: "Mr. Meneces' [sic] contribution." Meneses dropped a $160 contribution on the little group one night, Sinicco said, and picked up another dinner for $324.20. 

According to Sinicco's files, another founding member of USACA was Father Thomas F. Dowling, a San Franciscan whom Sinicco said was "some kind of a priest." Though he sometimes passed himself off as a Roman Catholic priest, Dowling was an ordained member of a tiny splinter church called the North American Old Roman Catholic Church of the Utrecht Succession, a church whose legitimacy is a matter of some debate. While working with USACA and the Contras, Dowling appeared before Congress in 1985 sporting a clerical collar and identifying himself as a Catholic priest, to testify as a purported witness to Sandinista atrocities. His appearance had been arranged by the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, later described by congressional investigators as an illegal CIA-run domestic propaganda mill. 

"Senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State," a 1992 House committee staff report concluded. "Almost all of these activities were hidden from public view and many of the individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed by the Iran/Contra committees." 

Through that office, the CIA and the National Security Council engaged in "a domestic, covert operation designed to lobby the Congress, manipulate the media and influence domestic public opinion," the report said, echoing a 1987 investigation by the Comptroller General of the United States, which said the State Department had engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities." 

Dowling later admitted receiving about $73,000 in cash and travelers checks from Oliver North, CIA agent Adolfo Calero and other members of North's operation between 1986 and 1987 "to affect public opinion favorably toward the Reagan position inside, regarding Central America." Dowling testified that the money went to a non-profit organization he'd set up in San Francisco called the Latin America Strategic Studies Institute (LASSI). In addition to Dowling, LASSI employed a recently retired CIA officer with extensive Latin American experience, G. James Quesada, a Nicaraguan who lived in the San Francisco area. "I met [Quesada] when I spoke before the retired group of intelligence officers a few years back," Dowling testified in 1987. 

Quesada confirmed that he worked with Dowling but said he did so as private citizen, not for the CIA. "I know nobody thinks a CIA agent ever retires, but I really did retire," he said in an interview, with a laugh. Quesada also met Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón at an FDN meeting, and instantly, he said, his antennae went up. "I found out what Meneses was pretty quickly, but he was not involved in our side of things, which was the political side," Quesada said. Meneses and Blandón had something to do with "the other side," meaning the military part of the Contra operation. "As I recall, Blandón was looking for medical students or was recruiting medical students to go down to Honduras. I stayed away from both of them." 

In addition to his work with Oliver North and the San Francisco FDN, Father Dowling was also heavily involved with CAUSA, a conservative political organization that was part of the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon's Unification Church. During the time of the CIA funding cutoff, Moon's organization—which was linked in the 1970s to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency—stepped in and began funneling money and supplies to the Contras. Dowling was a member of CAUSA's national advisory board and a frequent speaker at CAUSA rallies and conferences. Among the documents USACA founder Sinicco showed the author was an August 1984 letter from CAUSA's president, retired air force general E. D. Woellner, thanking Sinicco's organization for attending the annual CAUSA convention and suggesting that the groups work more closely in the future. 

Though the combination of fringe religions and the Contras may seem strange, partly declassified CIA records show that the agency had evidence as far back as 1982 that there were unwholesome connections between Meneses drug ring, the FDN, and an unnamed religious organization in the United States. According to a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report, the CIA's Domestic Collection Division picked up word in October 1982 that "there are indications of links between (a U.S. religious organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups." The heavily censored CIA cable said, "These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms." 

The CIA's domestic spies reported that "there was to be a meeting among the participants in Costa Rica regarding this exchange" and that two U.S. law enforcement agencies were aware of it. Though the agencies were not named in the censored CIA cable, the FBI had the Meneses organization under investigation at the time and had learned through wiretaps that Norwin's Costa Rican Contra associates—Horacio Pereira, Troilo Sanchez, and Fernando Sanchez—were shipping cocaine to San Francisco. 

CIA headquarters ordered its domestic agents to get more information about the upcoming meeting in Costa Rica, and a few days later another cable arrived at Langley with additional details. "The attendees at the meeting would include representatives from the FDN and UDN, and several unidentified U.S. citizens," the CIA cable reported. It "identified Renato Pena as one of four persons—along with three unidentified U.S. citizens—who would represent the FDN at the Costa Rica meeting." 

Renato Pena Cabrera was one of Norwin Meneses San Francisco drug dealers and a friend of Dennis Ainsworth. Pena was dating Danilo Blandón's sister, Leysla, and was a top official in the San Francisco FDN. Pena told CIA investigators that he met Meneses in 1982 at an FDN meeting and served as an official representative of the FDN political wing in northern California from 1982 until mid-1984. After that, he said, he "was appointed to be the military representative of the FDN in San Francisco, in part because of Norwin Meneses' close relationship with [Enrique] Bermúdez." 

Pena said Norwin introduced him to his nephew, Jairo, who was in charge of distributing the family's cocaine to other dealers. Soon, the young Contra found himself hauling cash and drugs up and down the freeways of the Golden State. "Pena says he made from six to eight trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles between 1982 and 1984 for Meneses' drug trafficking organization," the CIA Inspector General reported. "Each time, he says, he carried anywhere from $600,000 to $1,000,000 to Los Angeles and returned to San Francisco with six to eight kilograms of cocaine. Pena says that a Colombian associate of Meneses told Pena in general terms that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the cocaine Pena brought to San Francisco were going to the Contras." 

Even with the inflated cocaine prices of the early 1980s, the amount of money Pena was taking to L.A. was far more than was needed to pay for six to eight kilos of cocaine. It seems likely that the excess—$300,000 to $500,000 per trip—was the Contras' cut of the drug proceeds. 

When the information about Renato Pena's involvement in the upcoming Costa Rican meeting was relayed back to Langley, CIA headquarters immediately ordered the Domestic Collection Division to halt any further investigation, allegedly because "of the apparent participation of U.S. citizens." But the agency began having second thoughts about sitting on the information. On November 17, 1982, Langley worriedly cabled one of its stations in Latin America to tell its agents that while headquarters didn't think the reports about the Contras and drugs were true, "the information was surfaced by another [U.S. government] agency and may return to haunt us. Feel we must try to confirm or refute the information if possible." Langley wanted to know if Contra leaders had "scheduled any meeting in the next few weeks? If so, what information do you have regarding the attendees?" 

The response was probably not what CIA headquarters wanted to hear. "Several Contra officials had recently gone to the United States for a series of meetings, including a meeting with Contra supporters in San Francisco," the Central American CIA station reported back. (It was during October 1982 that FDN leaders met with Meneses in L.A. and San Francisco in an effort to set up local Contra support groups in those cities.) 

The CIA Inspector General's report is silent about what, if anything, the agency did next. Pena told CIA inspectors that the unnamed U.S. religious organization mentioned in the CIA cables "was an FDN political ally that provided only humanitarian aid to Nicaraguan refugees and logistical support for Contra-related rallies, such as printing services and portable stages." 

When Renato Pena and Meneses nephew Jairo were arrested on cocaine trafficking charges in November 1984, Ainsworth began suspecting that the FDN was also involved in drug trafficking. "Renato wasn't a drug dealer," Ainsworth said. "He was a Contra and he was duped. When Congress cut off aid in the fall of 1983, these guys had nowhere else to turn and they wanted to get their country back. And once you say I'll do anything to get my country back, then they were easy prey for Meneses, who said, 'Hey, you do this for me and I'll help you guys out.'" 

Agents found a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of Pena's car. At an apartment Jairo Meneses maintained in Oakland as a cocaine storehouse, the DEA found half a kilo in a safe. Because the evidence against him was so overwhelming— hand-to-hand sales to DEA agents and a kilo in his car— Pena pleaded guilty to one count of possession of cocaine with intent to sell in March 1985. He also agreed to help the government prosecute Jairo Meneses, and was given a two-year sentence in return. 

As part of his deal with the government, Renato Pena was extensively debriefed by the DEA and his interviews were nothing short of astonishing—which is probably why they remained sealed for 15 years. 

"When debriefed by the DEA in the early 1980s, Pena said that the CIA was allowing the Contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds," the Justice Department Inspector General reported in 1997. Jairo Meneses had told him that "the United States was aware of these dealings and that it was highly unlikely that I would even get in trouble." Both Norwin Meneses and Blandón told him they were raising money for the Contras through drug dealing; Blandón had even claimed "the Contras would not have been able to operate without drug proceeds." 

Further, FDN leader Enrique Bermúdez "was aware of the drug dealing" and Pena described Bermúdez as "a CIA agent." When challenged by CIA questioners on that statement, Pena merely laughed. "It's very obvious," he said: Bermúdez had been Somoza's military attache in Washington and it was common knowledge in Nicaragua that anyone who had that job under Somoza also worked for the CIA. (Bermúdez, in fact, was on the CIA's payroll from 1980 to 1991, which means at the least that he was a contract agent, if not an agency officer.) 

As if Pena's testimony wasn't convincing enough, the DEA obtained independent corroboration in the spring of 1986 from a longtime informant who'd known Meneses since childhood described by the DEA as "extremely reliable." He told a DEA intelligence analyst that Meneses was indeed part of the FDN and had been using drug money to buy weapons for the Contras. He also vouched for Renato Pena's credibility: "Renato Pena worked for Jairo Meneses and ran the San Francisco office of the FDN," the informant explained. "Pena was one of the major Contra fund raisers in San Francisco and was one of those responsible for sending Meneses' drug proceeds to the Contras." 

In interview years later with inspectors from the CIA and the Justice Department, Pena defiantly stood his ground, even though he was under threat of immediate deportation. He insisted that "the CIA knows about all these things. . .The money the Contras received from the Reagan Administration was peanuts and the growing military organization needed supplies, arms, food, and money to support the families of the Contras. The CIA decided to recruit Meneses so that drug sales could be used to support the Contras. Bermúdez could not have recruited Meneses on his own. . .but would have had to follow orders." 

Ainsworth said Pena was devastated by his arrest and confessed to him his role in the Contra drug network. Alarmed, Ainsworth began looking into the relationship between the FDN and drugs. He made "inquiries in the local San Francisco Nicaraguan community and wondered among his acquaintances what Adolfo Calero and other people in the FDN movement were doing and the word that he received back is that they were probably engaged in cocaine smuggling," Ainsworth later told the FBI. 

During one of Ainsworth's trips to Washington in 1985, he said, "I went to see some friends of mine and started asking some questions." One friend slipped Ainsworth a copy of a Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence report dated February 6, 1984. The DEA report, prepared by agent Sandalio Gonzalez in San Jose, Costa Rica, told of the results of a debriefing of a confidential informant. Ainsworth's heart sank as he read it. The informant "related that Norwin Meneses Cantarero, Edmundo's younger brother, was presently residing in San Jose, Costa Rica, and is the apparent head of a criminal organization responsible for smuggling kilogram quantities of cocaine to the United States." The discovery left Ainsworth reeling: "I had gone through the Looking Glass. I had crossed over into the nether world that 99 percent of the population wouldn't even believe existed." 

In September 1985 Ainsworth was contacted by a U.S. Customs Service official who was "investigating the Nicaraguan role in a large narcotics ring extending from Miami, Florida to Texas and California." The Customs agent wanted to ask Ainsworth about the FDN. "During the contact, [name deleted] complained to Ainsworth that national security interests kept him from making good narcotics cases and he acted frustrated at this chain of events," Ainsworth would later tell the FBI. "According to [name deleted] two U.S. Customs Service officers who felt threatened and intimidated by National Security interference in legitimate narcotics smuggling investigations had resigned and had assumed false identities." The FBI report went on to say that the Customs agent "told Ainsworth that Norwin Meneses would have been arrested in a major drug case in 1983 or 1984 except that he had been warned by a corrupt [information deleted] officer." 

Other law enforcement sources told Ainsworth "they had a file on Meneses that was two feet thick. I thought this bastard should have been arrested. I assumed there would be an outstanding warrant on this guy. I was amazed. There wasn't a single outstanding warrant on Meneses. Not one. They had no interest in him whatsoever. Here you had a major cocaine trafficker who was deeply involved with the Contras, and apparently, everyone but me knew about it. After I broke with Calero, I found out Calero and Meneses were very good friends." 

Calero has admitted meeting with Meneses on at least six occasions in San Francisco, but he has portrayed them as simple greetings during large public gatherings. He has repeatedly denied knowing Meneses was a drug trafficker, yet he admitted to a Costa Rican paper in 1986 that he knew Meneses was "involved in some illegal things, but I don't know anything." 

USACA president Don Sinicco said he never suspected Norwin Meneses was involved in criminal activities, but he confirmed that Ainsworth began muttering about it. "What always bothered me about [Dennis] is that towards the end, I don't know what, he seemed to get disillusioned or disgusted with Calero. Dennis got disillusioned about something," Sinicco said. 

Ainsworth's disillusionment caused him to quit working with the Contras and seek out the FBI. In early 1987, records show, during his first meeting with FBI agents, Ainsworth warned them that the FDN "has become more involved in selling arms and cocaine for personal gain than in a military effort to overthrow the current Nicaraguan Sandinista government." He told the agents about Norwin Meneses and Renato Pena, about Tom Dowling and Oliver North, and about North's illegal Contra support network in the U.S. and Central America. Much of the information Ainsworth gave the FBI and, later, Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's staff about the inner workings of the FDN and the relationships between Contra leaders and U.S. government officials was corroborated during the congressional Iran-Contra investigations. 

Ainsworth was also getting death threats, he told the FBI, but the agents seemed unimpressed. "He had no information to substantiate this alleged threat," they wrote. Ainsworth never heard from them again. "I mean, here I am as a citizen, I complained to the FBI and they tell me they have no interest in the case. Then I call Walsh's people up and they sent a couple FBI guys out to talk to me and they have no interest in it. I couldn't find anyone who was interested in this. And I made a legitimate effort. And people were like, 'Den, leave this alone. Just leave it alone,'" Ainsworth remembered. "I thought I was part of the establishment. And all of a sudden I was a leper." Frightened and heartsick, Ainsworth fled California for the East Coast, where he went into semi-seclusion. 

Meanwhile, the narcotics investigation that began with the arrests of Renato Pena and Jairo Meneses seemed to fall into a black hole. The case federal prosecutors had assembled against the drug kingpin's nephew was a slam dunk. They'd found cocaine in Jairo's apartment; his co-defendant had cut a deal and was prepared to testify for the government. If convicted of the charges against him— one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and six counts of possession with intent to distribute—Jairo Meneses would spend the next fifteen years in the federal pen. His decision to plead guilty and rat out Uncle Norwin could hardly be considered a surprise. 

Like Pena, Jairo Meneses was debriefed by the DEA and he, too, implicated the Contras in Norwin's drug sales, confirming that his uncle had direct dealings with both Blandón and FDN commander Enrique Bermúdez. But his admissions in court were limited to the bookkeeping work he'd done for Norwin in San Francisco; he never breathed a word in public about the Contras.

Were these men telling the truth? If one looks at the outcome of their criminal cases, the inescapable conclusion is that they were. Inventing stories about Contra drug trafficking was not the usual way admitted dope dealers ingratiated themselves with Ed Meese and his hypersensitive Justice Department. But despite being caught red-handed with pounds of cocaine, they were neither sent to jail nor deported. They got probation and a work-furlough job and kept their mouths shut, which suggests that the Justice Department found them entirely too believable. 

In an interview with a Costa Rican paper in 1986, Meneses scoffed at his nephew's testimony. Jairo had made it up, Norwin declared, because he'd refused to bail the boy out when he'd gotten arrested. "If Jairo supposedly was my accountant, like he says, I would have been interested in taking him out of jail because he would have had me by the tail," Meneses told La Nacion. "Isn't that logical?" (Norwin didn't mention that Jairo's bail was paid by Danilo Blandón's sister, Leysla Balladares, who also bailed out Pena, her boyfriend.) "Besides," Norwin added, "I remained in San Francisco. I have never hidden. There's never been a warrant for my arrest. I have not changed passports. That I directed a drug trafficking organization is totally false." 

Some of Meneses assertions were indeed irrefutable. With the testimony of Jairo Meneses and Renato Pena, and the stacks of other evidence the police had compiled against him over the years, it would have been a relatively easy matter to have convicted the drug lord on any number of trafficking and conspiracy charges. Many dopers have gone to jail on much less evidence. At a minimum, the government could have deported him as an undesirable alien and banned him forever from the United States; he was, after all, living in the United States as a guest of the government—a political refugee. 

But it didn't happen. Nothing happened. Norwin Meneses continued living as a free man, crisscrossing U.S. borders with impunity, dealing cocaine and sending supplies to the Contras. And his relationship with the U.S. government grew even closer. 

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