Part 9: Dark Alliance..."It's bigger than I can handle"..."This thing is a Tidal Wave"...."It's a Burn"

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

14 

"It's bigger than I can handle" 

Victor Gill had no job and no business license, but for some reason he found it necessary to buy eight money-counting machines in the space of a month in early 1986. To U.S. Customs agent Fred Ghio and IRS agent Karl Knudsen, Gill might as well have been wearing a neon sign that said, "Arrest Me!" 

The two agents were on the prowl for money launderers. A good way to find them, they reasoned, was to cheek with companies that made cash-counting machines. One such firm was the Glory Business Machine Co. in Bell, California, a rundown suburb of Los Angeles that in better days had been Hollywood gangster Mickey Cohen's stomping grounds. After seeing how often Gill was visiting Glory, they decided he could stand some scrutiny. 

Ghio and Knudsen dropped by the Bell Police Department to see if anyone there knew their quarry. As luck would have it, the city of Bell's only narcotics detective, Jerry Guzzetta, was on duty, and he knew Gill well. He'd arrested him on cocaine charges a few years earlier and was more than happy to help the two federal agents bust him again. "You can't investigate money laundering without getting into dope. There's just no way," Guzzetta said. 

Jerry Guzzetta went after dopers with a vengeance, and his one-man investigations had produced some impressive results. In November 1985 he'd been the subject of a glowing piece in the Los Angeles Times for his work in taking down a large Colombian trafficking ring. Some of his fellow officers regarded him as a loose cannon and a publicity hound, always trying to make a name for himself. But his friends said Guzzetta's zeal was largely misunderstood. 

"He hated dope dealers. He hated them with a vehement passion, because a dope dealer had killed his brother, and that's one of the things that spurred him to go after these people so aggressively," Officer Tom McReynolds said. 

"In a sense, a drug dealer killed my entire family," Guzzetta said. "After the guy shot my brother in the head, my father died of a heart attack. And then my mother died a couple years later. And he got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter." 

Knudsen and Ghio liked Guzzetta's enthusiasm, and they invited him to join their surveillance of Gill. The trio soon discovered that Gill was buying the money machines for Colombian traffickers who didn't want their names turning up on purchase orders. He was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. 

It was the start of a mutually beneficial relationship for Guzzetta and the two federal agents, who specialized in money-laundering cases. For a small-town police department like Guzzetta's, busting a money launderer was an answered prayer, because the police got to keep a percentage of the spoils. 

After California voters passed Proposition 103, which slashed local property taxes, many local police departments became hooked on drug money, using asset forfeiture laws to replace their lost tax revenues. Cash seized from traffickers and money launderers began being used to pay officers' salaries, for overtime, new patrol ears, uniforms, guns, and even helicopters. 

The cash-strapped Bell PD was delighted to loan Guzzetta out to work with the federal agents. They would find the suspects, Guzzetta would help with surveillance and the search warrants, and afterward the city of Bell and the federal government would divvy up the booty—a win-win situation all the way around. 

The trio "did some very good work together at first," Ghio said. "We took a lot of dope off the streets and seized a lot of cash." He said Guzzetta "became somewhat a local hero. He got a lot of recognition from his fellow officers, the public, and the Bell City Council, mainly due to the funds they got through asset sharing, which was generated from the seized cash." 

Later that summer IRS agent Knudsen received notifications from two L.A. banks about a pair of customers who were making large cash deposits on a regular basis, officially known as "suspicious transactions." Banks routinely report them to the IRS. "They did a bank account check and found out [the customers] had no visible means of support but had over $1 million in the bank," Guzzetta said. The federal agents approached Guzzetta and asked him if he wouldn't mind helping out "because one of the banks was in the city of Bell and I had a good rapport with [the bank officers]." 

Guzzetta began tailing the two depositors, which was easy because they stood out in a crowd. They were the Trees—Jacinto and Edgar Torres, Danilo Blandón's gigantic associates. The Torres brothers were running all over L.A., picking up packages, dropping off packages, making strange nighttime trips into South Central Los Angeles.

Jacinto, Guzzetta discovered, was on probation for cocaine possession. That, combined with the bank accounts, the surveillance, and the lack of employment, provided all the ammunition he needed to get a search warrant for the addresses the Torres brothers had been visiting. On August 11, 1986, Guzzetta and his federal friends raided them—and they hit the jackpot. 

"We found $400,000 in the closet of one of the houses," Guzzetta said. "That was their spare change." But the Torreses were too smart to mix their money with their cocaine. Like their friend Blandón, they kept the two far apart, hidden in nondescript rental houses around the city. The raid produced not an ounce of dope. 

Guzzetta said the brothers disclaimed ownership of the $400,000 and handed it over to the feds, which satisfied Ghio and Knudsen. "They'd seized some money, cleared some paper, and made their bosses happy. They weren't interested in prosecuting them federally because all they really had them on was a currency violation. Even if they were convicted they'd have pulled three years and been out in a year and a half," Guzzetta said. 

But Guzzetta wasn't willing to just turn the brothers loose. If he couldn't put them away, he'd put them to work—for the police. 

As imposing as they were, the Torreses had an Achilles heel that Guzzetta and the federal agents skillfully exploited: their live-in girlfriends, who were close relatives of Medellín cartel boss Pablo Escobar. (In a 1996 interview, Norwin Meneses confirmed the relationship between the women and Escobar.) 

Guzzetta said the Torreses were informed that no charges would be filed against them, but their girlfriends would be prosecuted on conspiracy and tax evasion charges, imprisoned, and then deported as undesirable aliens who would never be allowed to set foot in the United States again. 

To the rest of the world, it would seem like the brothers had sacrificed their women to save themselves, offending traditional Latin machismo. Even worse, it would appear as if they'd ratted out two of the cocaine lord's relatives. "You give up Pablo Escobar's family, and you're dead," Guzzetta chuckled. "So we turned them." 

To keep the brothers on a short leash, it was arranged with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for the Torreses to plead guilty to drug charges under false names. They were given suspended sentences, put on probation, and turned over to Guzzetta, who was assigned as their sole law enforcement contact to minimize their chances of exposure. 

"They were scared to death," Guzzetta said. "They believed very strongly, and I agreed with them, that if anyone found out they were informants— including their girlfriends—they'd be killed in a minute." 

During a debriefing on August 22, 1986, the Torreses told Guzzetta that they were convinced their girlfriends had already hired a couple of assassins. They told the detective they would check in with him every twenty-four hours to let him know they were still alive. "The informants advise that if. . .they are found dead in some other location, that it was their girlfriends who had contracted their killing," Guzzetta's report stated. "The informants relate that if, in fact, they are found dead, that the method which would probably be used upon them is a lethal injection of drugs, which will show up as a drug overdose." 

Guzzetta and the federal agents began debriefing the brothers, and slowly, like an ocean liner emerging from a fog bank, the size of the operation they were part of began to take shape. 

It was mind-boggling. 

They revealed a drug ring that was dumping hundreds of kilos of cocaine every week into the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, generating truckloads of cash. "The CI [confidential informant] has admitted laundering approximately $100 million since Jan. 1986," Customs agent Ghio wrote a few days after the debriefings began. "They currently have approximately 1,000 kilos of cocaine currently stored in the Los Angeles area as well as between $250,000,000 and $500,000,000 secreted in various locations locally that they have been unable to get out of the U.S." 

Guzzetta said he initially doubted the brothers' story. Crooks trying to wiggle out of a jam often made extravagant claims, but this took the cake. No one he had questioned claimed to have a half a billion dollars stashed somewhere. "These guys were right off the street. They had absolutely no credibility as far as I was concerned," Guzzetta recalled. 

To prove what they were saying, the Torres brothers invited Guzzetta and his friends to follow them while they made their rounds, dropping off dope and picking up cash from their customers in South Central Los Angeles. "The reliability of the CI has been substantiated," Ghio reported to his bosses a few days later. "Under the control of Det. Guzzetta, Bell, P.D., the CI has picked up and delivered 40 kilos of cocaine and collected and delivered $720,000." Within two weeks, Guzzetta wrote, he had "observed the movement of monies totaling $750,000, $230,000, $130,000, $150,000 respectively, which have been moved by informants and picked up from the Black market area." 

Guzzetta began compiling his debriefing notes into a series of reports he titled "Project Sahara," because he figured the Torreses could help dry up the cocaine supply in South Central. Portions of his Project Sahara reports were located by police investigators ten years later, in 1996. "Basically, there is one major market which informant 36210 and 36211 are dealing with, which for the sake of argument in this report will be designated the Black market, because it is solely controlled by two male Negroes by the name of Rick and Ollie," Guzzetta wrote in his first report. 

Guzzetta listened gape-mouthed as the brothers rattled off names, dates, delivery sites, and routes of transportation. The two black dealers in South Central, they reported, "are generating a conservative figure of approximately $10 million dollars a month." 

The Torreses told him that the blacks were getting their cocaine from three Colombians and "a fourth peripheral source." Two of the Colombians, they knew only by nickname; the "peripheral source" they knew quite well: Danilo Blandón. 

"Informants relate that Danilo Blandón is extremely dangerous because of his access to information," Guzzetta wrote, "and further, is extremely dangerous because of his potential to override the informants' market, thus cutting off the informants from the supply source of cocaine and currency, thus cutting off the informants' source of information." 

Guzzetta said the brothers told him that Blandón had "a lot of inside information as to law enforcement activity, as to people that are working him," and they warned him to "be extremely careful about releasing any information to other law enforcement agencies. . .because they were afraid that Blandón had somebody inside the police department or whatever that was feeding him information." 

Ricky Ross confirmed that Blandón had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids but said he was never able to explain Blandón's clairvoyance. 

The Torres brothers told Guzzetta that "Blandón is working with an ex Laguna Beach police officer by the name of Ronnie, who lives in an expensive house in Mission Viejo and drives a new Mercedes automobile. . .. Ronnie transported 100 kilos of cocaine to the Black market and has transported millions of dollars to Miami for Danilo Blandón." Once Blandón's cash arrived in Florida, the brothers reported, a relative of Blandón's, Orlando Murillo, would launder it. They described Murillo as "a bank chairman under Somoza prior to his being thrown out of power." 

Roberto Orlando Murillo, the uncle of Blandón's wife, was an influential Nicaraguan economist who'd been appointed by President Somoza in 1978 to the Central Bank of Nicaragua, which is similar in function to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. The debonair investment banker was also the official representative of two Swiss banks located in Panama and Managua, and had managed a number of the Somoza family's businesses before the revolution.

It was when the Trees started talking about Murillo and the Contras—and the airfields in New Orleans and Brownsville, Texas, where Contra cocaine was allegedly being flown in under armed guard—that Guzzetta knew he was way out of his league. 

Even if only half of what the Torreses were saying was true, the detective realized, he was up against an organization that could roll over a small-town cop like he was a bug. "I took it to the chief of police. I told the chief, 'It's bigger than I can handle. These guys are talking about millions of dollars in cocaine, they're talking about a Nicaraguan [leader] named Calero being involved in this, Colombian families that strike fear into the hearts of mortal men. I can't handle this by myself.'" 

His chief, Frank Fording, asked him if he would mind teaming up with one of the L.A. County Sheriff's Major Violators squads, the "Majors," as the elite units were known. 

Guzzetta didn't mind at all. In fact, he was thrilled by the prospect. "The Majors were hot shit," Guzzetta said. "They had all the resources, they had the funding, they had the manpower, they had the surveillance equipment, the night vision stuff, the helicopters, the overtime. They had everything." 

They were semi legendary in L.A. law enforcement circles as the best the 8,000-man sheriff's department had to offer. Any cop with the slightest amount of ambition lusted for an assignment to the Majors. They got the biggest cases, seized the largest amounts of cash and cocaine, got the fattest overtime checks, and worked virtually unsupervised. 

As L.A. defense attorney Jay Lichtman put it: "This was really the cream of the crop, the elite, the top officers of the Sheriff's Department." They were considered some of the best drug detectives in the nation. 

They also won notoriety for their boozy off-duty carousing. A drunken crew member had once pulled out a pistol at a restaurant to hurry along a lazy waiter. On another occasion Deputy Daniel Garner, regarded as the best drug detective in the department, relieved himself on the pants leg of an aspiring narcotics officer Garner deemed unworthy of joining the Majors. 

The squads—Majors I, II, and III—worked out of trailers at the Whittier and Lennox stations, each team of seven or eight detectives commanded by a sergeant. Guzzetta was put together with Majors II, headed by Sergeant Edward Huffman, whose brother was a friend of Guzzetta's. "Huffman was great," Guzzetta said. "A real straight arrow." 

Guzzetta gathered up his "Project Sahara" reports and delivered them to the Majors, where they landed on the desk of Detective Thomas Gordon, a tall, soft spoken officer who had spent sixteen years with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. 

By 1986, Tom Gordon had become a hard man to impress. Since 1982 he and his cohorts on the Majors had been tangling with the biggest criminals L.A. had to offer: the Mexican mafia, the gangbangers, Medellín cartel cells, international money launderers. But "Project Sahara" had a bit of everything, and it had an element the Majors had never before faced—a CIA-linked guerrilla army that was allegedly dealing in dope. There was no telling where this investigation could take them. Former lieutenant Mike Fossey, the unit supervisor and intelligence officer for the Majors II squad, called it one of the biggest cases he'd ever handled. 

One of its main attractions was that it would provide the law enforcement community with a wealth of information on the inner workings of the L.A. crack market. Though the crack epidemic had been raging in South Central for three years by then, drug agents still had very little understanding of its dynamics. 

They knew the street gangs that dominated the trade rarely left their own neighborhoods, which meant that somehow, someone was bringing in massive amounts of cocaine and delivering it to them. But no one—from the DEA on down—had been able to figure out where it was coming from, who was importing it, or who was reselling it to the gangs. 

Many narcotics detectives assumed that the normal rules of the drug trade— where one or two major drug rings control a "turf"—didn't apply to crack, because the marketplace appeared so disorganized and fragmented. There were crack dealers everywhere, on every corner. The problem seemed uncontrollable. 

"We haven't encountered any major network. We're conducting these little skirmishes. It's very frustrating," one narcotics detective complained to the Los Angeles Times in early August 1986. Robert Stutman, the head of the DEA office in New York in the mid-1980s, wrote that "the marketing of crack was thought to be a cottage industry, a low-level blip in the drug trade like the selling of single marijuana cigarettes." 

But that was only because the cops had never gotten much beyond the streets. In June 1986, DEA intelligence revealed that "what looked like independent street corner pushers were actually the bottom rung of carefully managed organizations," Stutman wrote in his 1992 memoirs. "It came as a revelation." 

Analyzing the information provided by the Torres brothers, the Majors reached the same frightening conclusion. The L.A. crack market, they realized, was far more disciplined and well organized than anyone had ever dreamed. 

And worse, through these two mystery dealers named Rick and Ollie, it appeared that the gangs had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels, which meant they had access to as much cocaine as they could sell. Since the circle was so small, it was little wonder that its bosses had escaped detection for so many years. 

It had been one long cop-free party, but it was coming to an end. The Majors now had the names and addresses of everyone at the top of the distribution chain, from the Colombian importers to the Nicaraguan middlemen to the black wholesalers who controlled the South Central marketplace. If everything went right, Gordon and his men could take down the biggest crack operation ever uncovered—one whose tentacles reached all the way to South America—and cut off the L.A. ghettos' main source of supply. 

"This was going to be my last hurrah," said Gordon, who was scheduled to be rotated out of the Majors in a few months. "Like anyone, I've got an ego, and I wanted to go out with a bang."

15 

"This thing is a Tidal Wave" 

That summer, three years after crack exploded in South Central L.A., the national news media finally figured out  what was happening. 

Within weeks of each other in May 1986, NBC News, People magazine, and the Associated Press trumpeted the news that a deadly new drug plague was stalking the countryside. According to Tom Brokaw, crack was "flooding America." The AP, in a special weekend feature, said "crack is becoming the nation's drug of choice," spreading "like wildfire." The New York Times drew a picture of "a wave of crack addicts" engulfing the city, spreading "prostitution and other crimes." 

Then came the cataclysmic event that is needed to convert any problem into a National Disaster: celebrity deaths. Two well-known black athletes dropped dead from cocaine abuse. 

What Richard Pryor did for freebase, college basketball star Len Bias and pro football player Don Rogers did for crack. With their deaths in June 1986, crack went from being a long-ignored problem in a few black neighborhoods to "a threat to our national security," as one U.S. senator described it. Before the year was out, Time and Newsweek would run five cover stories apiece on crack and the drug war; Newsweek would anoint it as the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate. Time said it was the "Issue of the Year." By November NBC News alone had run more than 400 stories on the topic. 

As with most drug stories, the mainstream reporting tended to be half-baked, or just plain wrong. The coverage "followed a typical pattern in which exaggerated claims were supported by carefully selected cases and fueled with evocative words such as 'epidemic,' with its implications of plague, disease, crisis and uncontrollable spread," drug researchers Andrew Golub and Donna Hartman wrote in a study of the media's role in the 1986 crack scare. 

The Crack Attack began with a faulty premise, based largely on the news media's myopia. Because there had been few previous reports about crack, many editors assumed that it hadn't existed until then, or they surely would have heard about it. And now crack was seemingly everywhere: in Houston, Detroit, Newark, New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Thus, the nation's editors and news directors concluded, crack had spread from coast to coast overnight. While we slept, we had become the victims of a dastardly sneak attack—a kind of chemical Pearl Harbor. 

That crack had been ravaging South Central L.A. since 1983 was not mentioned. None of the stories reported how vast the L.A. crack market had become by the summer of 1986, or how enterprising Crips and Bloods were fanning out across the country, introducing it into other black neighborhoods in the West and Midwest, precisely as the two USC sociologists Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson had predicted. The spread of crack by the L.A. gangs would not become generally known for another two years. 

Nor did the press notice that a similar migration had been occurring on the East Coast for about eighteen months, as the Jamaican posses and Dominican gangs from Miami began expanding their markets westward. A typical observation was contained in the Washington Post of June 13, 1986, which reported that crack was "virtually unheard of nine months ago on the East Coast." In the Post's newsroom, perhaps. 

The only explanation a frightened and bewildered public was given for this "sudden" deluge of crack was a modern-day theory of spontaneous combustion, which holds that people can simply burst into flames. "Crack hit our society with a suddenness unprecedented in the history of illicit drug use," Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia stated. "Literally an overnight phenomenon, crack caught many police agencies by surprise." 

"Eight months ago I had never heard of crack," said Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida, who would write the harshest anti crack laws on the books. "This thing is a tidal wave that has hit everywhere. . .. We are talking about a phenomenon that basically has hit this country in the last year, nine months, eight months, six months." 

Representative Hamilton Fish of New York declared that "nine months ago, addiction to crack was virtually unheard of and today it's an epidemic, a plague, that is sweeping the country." 

If one believed the papers and the politicians, the crack "epidemic" simply happened, and no one knew how or why. During two well-publicized congressional hearings that superheated summer, the government's top drug experts and law enforcement officers lined up to proclaim their official shock and surprise. 

Top scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) testified that the agency had never even heard of crack until 1985, which is why it still had no information about it a year later. "We have not had enough time elapse since then for us to get epidemiological data about crack use per se," NIDA official Charles Schuster explained. The DEA's director of operations, David Westrate, said his agency could only guess at how prevalent the problem was, since "crack has emerged as a major drug problem in less than a year. As a result, data on usage, emergency room mentions and arrests have not been focused on crack as an individual category of drug abuse apart from cocaine." 

Westrate confirmed that "there is no comprehensive analysis of the crack problem, either from a health or enforcement viewpoint. . .. DEA's own enforcement information on crack is also incomplete." 

Representative Benjamin Gilman of New York could scarcely believe what he was hearing. "Well, of course you are telling us that crack is just beginning to spread across the country like wildfire in the past year. We have no current data, is that correct?" Gilman asked the government experts. 

"I think it would be fair to say that we do not have any accurate estimate at this time," replied Dr. Jerome Jaffe of NIDA. 

"Am I correct, then," Gilman continued, "that at this point we really don't have any definitive knowledge of how extensive the use of crack is in our country? With all of our expertise? Is that right?" 

"That's correct," admitted Edgar Adams, NIDA's head of epidemiology and statistical analysis. 

"Is that right, Dr. Jaffe?" 

"That's fair." 

Gilman looked at the DEA's representative. "Mr. Westrate?" 

"Yes, I would say especially with statistically valid information." 

But the government's experts weren't quite as ill-informed as they claimed. There was a method to their ignorance. 

Pretending that crack was something that had appeared out of nowhere was, politically, much safer than admitting the truth—that the federal government had been warned about it very specifically many years earlier and hadn't lifted a finger to stop it, effectively surrendering the inner cities to an oncoming plague. If that information became too widely known, the public might start asking prickly questions, such as: Why weren't we told? 

And how could a question like that be answered? Because we didn't believe it? Because we didn't care? Because we thought it might encourage people to try it? Or was it because the drug problem looked as if it would be confined to lower-income neighborhoods, ghettos, as it had been in South America, Jamaica, and the Bahamas?

Sitting in the audience at one of the congressional hearings that summer of 1986, listening to all the official excuses, was a man who knew the sorry truth better than anyone: Dr. Robert Byck, Yale University's top cocaine expert. It had been seven years since he had appeared before Congress to sound the alarm about the approaching drug plague, only to have his warnings ignored. He had no intention of letting the government get away with the charade he was witnessing. 

"In 1979, I testified before the House Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control and I said that we were about to have the worst epidemic of drug use this country had ever seen, something like the speed epidemic of the 1960s, except on a national scale, and that it was going to be the use of free-base cocaine," Byck said, hunching over his microphone. "I begged people, and I begged people at NIDA, for goodness sake, this is a chance to stop, if not to stop it, at least to take a chance on an educational campaign to avert a drug abuse epidemic. . .. This advice went unheeded. We are not significantly more knowledgeable about cocaine smoking. No educational campaign was mounted. Today we are in the midst of the predicted epidemic." 

DEA official Westrate hastened to assure Congress that the drug agency was on full alert now: "DEA last week began an extensive, in-depth intelligence survey through all of the domestic field offices to try to discern the use and availability of crack, its purity and its price." Westrate mentioned that the administration's top drug experts were meeting with President Reagan that very morning to discuss crack. 

Byck renewed his plea for research money so scientists could get the answers they needed about crack use and find some way to slow its spread. "I hope my testimony today will have a greater effect than my warnings in 1979," Byck said bitterly. 

It didn't. 

"Every problem that comes before us, everybody says that money is the answer," scoffed the committee chairman, Senator William Roth of Delaware. "I think you have to use it pretty intelligently and we don't have it in large supply." 

Instead of authorizing money for crack research and educational campaigns, the congressmen voted for tougher laws against crack dealing. If crack was more dangerous than regular cocaine, they said, its sellers needed to be dealt with much more severely. And that kind of medicine didn't cost the federal government a cent—up front. 

At least, that was the rationale behind one of the laws Congress created that summer, the so-called 100-to-1 weight ratio, which would fill America's prisons with tens of thousands of black street-corner crack peddlers and users over the next decade without making a dent in the crack problem. Under the 100-to-1 ratio —a law Congress passed without any hearings—crack dealers were singled out for particularly harsh punishment. The scales of justice became so lopsided that a powder dealer had to sell $50,000 worth of cocaine to get the same five-year mandatory sentence as someone who'd sold $750 worth of crack. (As if crack could be made without powder cocaine.) 

It was, Byck said years later, absolutely senseless. "That all comes from one of the congressmen, the one from Florida, Lawton Chiles," he recalled. "Chiles was asking me a question in which he stated something up front: 'Dr. Byck, isn't it true [crack's] 50 times more addicting?' or something like that. And I said, yes, and that 50 is the number that got doubled by people who wanted to get tough on cocaine and some expert's opinion on addictiveness got translated into weight. . .. The numbers are a fabrication of whoever wrote the law, but not reality." 

As drug expert Steven Belenko of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency later observed, "One interesting aspect of the anti-crack crusade is that it occurred in the presence of a real vacuum of knowledge about the drug." 

Meanwhile, drug experts who were reading and hearing about this "tidal wave" of crack began wondering which planet the media was reporting from. When the scientists looked around, they didn't see any epidemic, except for a few hot spots here and there—specific neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Houston. It was certainly not the grand nationwide epidemic the press was portraying. A Chicago drug expert went so far as to call the whole issue "a hoax." 

"Researchers were finding crack to be, not a national epidemic, but a phenomenon isolated to the inner cities of less than a dozen urban areas," drug expert James Inciardi observed in 1987. Even in New York, Inciardi wrote, "the fact of the matter was that if you lived outside of Washington Heights, crack was just plain unavailable." 

Belenko wrote that "during the period of strongest concern over crack, 1986 to 1990, crack was actually the least-used drug among all illicit drugs." In Miami, at the supposed height of the crack epidemic there, cops running a sting operation in Liberty City had to call it quits because few cocaine customers wanted crack; they were looking for powder. (It was a different story in South Central L.A., of course. There, crack clearly was the drug of choice.) 

But those who deviated from the official line of nationwide crack pandemonium were ignored or chastised. After NIDA officials called a press conference to announce the good news that cocaine use appeared to be leveling off, Senator Lawton Chiles sternly reprimanded the head of NIDA, Charles Schuster. "What kind of message are we sending out there, on the one hand, when we are saying that it is an epidemic, you have your Newsweek story, you have Time magazine, the New York Times, you have everybody in the world saying we have an epidemic, and then along comes NIDA which says that the figures are level, not to worry, and uses numbers that go back to 1982?" Chiles huffed. "Was it really necessary to call a press conference?" 

After finishing its review of local field offices, the DEA initially sided with the scientists. "Crack is currently the subject of considerable media attention. The result has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use as compared to the use of other drugs," the DEA noted in an August 1986 press release. "Crack presently appears to be a secondary rather than primary problem in most areas." 

The DEA's findings went virtually unreported; that kind of news was not what the politicians or the media wanted to hear. But when DEA officials changed their tune and began denouncing crack as the scourge of scourges, those comments got plenty of ink and air time. 

One truly remarkable thing about the crack scare was the degree to which the national press—particularly the New York Times—walked in lockstep with the federal government on the issue, fanning the flames of hysteria and unquestioningly parroting the official line, a media phenomenon usually seen only in times of armed conflict. 

While First Lady Nancy Reagan was off on a world antidrug tour in the spring of 1986, the Times began almost daily reporting on the "growing public outcry over the spread of crack." Throughout July and August, the Times featured leaks from "White House sources" who confided that the president himself was taking this crack issue very seriously. Television news was a steady barrage of hair-raising stories. (Years later, Nancy Reagan would pine for what she called "the steady drumbeat" of anti drug stories produced by the government/media partnership.) 

Robert Stutman, chief of the New York DEA office, would later admit that the crack panic of 1986 had been largely his creation. He didn't think the Justice Department was taking the issue seriously enough so "to speed up the process of convincing Washington, I needed to make it a national issue and quickly. I began a lobbying effort and I used the media. Reporters were only too willing to cooperate, because as far as the New York media was concerned, crack was the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War." By the end of August, Stutman noted, the "groundwork that had been carefully laid through press accounts and my own public appearances" had produced incredible results: Newsweek was calling crack "a national scandal" and the New York papers were blaming every crime on crackheads. "Crack was a national menace," Stutman wryly observed in his memoirs, "and 1986 was the Year of Crack."

The PR campaign worked so well that the New York Times was reporting a "frenzy in Washington over drugs." The "frenzy" created a bonanza for the media. CBS News' 48 Hours on Crack Street, which aired in the fall of 1986, is still one of the highest-rated TV documentaries in history. A New York Times —CBS News poll done in early September showed that 13 percent of the American public considered drugs America's number-one problem; five months earlier, only 2 percent had felt that way, a remarkable shift in public attitude in a very short time. 

For politicians facing critical midterm elections a few months down the road, the crack panic had been heaven-sent. Lashing out at crack and crack dealers was a painless way to get a lot of free publicity, a perfect issue for any politician —almost too perfect. "Crack could not have appeared at a more opportune political moment. After years of dull debates on budget balancing, a 'hot' issue had arrived just in time for a crucial election," professors Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine wrote in the journal Contemporary Drug Problems. 

In their analysis of media coverage during the crack panic, drug researchers Golub and Hartman found that most of the information appearing in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time came from two types of sources: cops and politicians. Drug researchers or academics were quoted much less frequently. The New York Times, in particular, showed a remarkable aversion to experts: fewer than one in ten Times stories about crack carried an expert opinion. "It is interesting to note that the top two sources—law enforcement and public officials—are among those who stand to gain the most from a drug panic," Golub and Hartman observed. 

The crack hysteria continued unabated through the elections until something else arose to divert the public's attention. "It was not until the revelations about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North and the Iran-Contra connection toward the close of 1986 that crack media coverage experienced significant declines," drug researcher Inciardi wrote. 

Law enforcement seemed to lose interest as quickly as the public, although the crack problem remained as fierce as ever. In October 1986, about a week after the Iran-Contra scandal began, the L.A. Times carried a story inside the paper about the LAPD "quietly disbanding" its thirty-two-member anticrack task force in South Central Los Angeles. Chief Darrell Gates told the Times that the task force was needed "in other parts of the city" but assured the residents of inner-city L.A. that they were not being abandoned because "conventional law enforcement efforts will continue." 

As the Reverend Charles Mims, a South Central minister, observed, "It seems illogical to move this task force from what most everybody grants is the most active rock cocaine area on earth." 

Just how quickly the crack problem was forgotten by the Reagan administration was demonstrated when DEA director Jack Lawn—following up on Reagan's pledge to crack down on crack—asked for $44 million to hire an additional 200 agents to focus solely on crack. The Justice Department's budget committee rejected his request. "They didn't treat it like a major issue," a surprised Lawn told U.S. News and World Report. The magazine identified the Justice Department official responsible for that decision as Associate Attorney General Stephen S. Trott. 

By then, however, Steve Trott had bigger worries than inner-city crackheads: he had Iran-Contra to deal with. Not only was Congress screaming about North and beginning to scrutinize the Justice Department's involvement in the scandal, but Trott was monitoring a pesky Senate investigation into allegations of Contra drug trafficking. Trott viewed this probe with considerable agitation. Oliver North and the FBI were also keenly interested in its progress, North's notebooks reveal. 

The administration's concern was understandable. By the spring of 1986, the Contras were almost out of money. While North and his agents were able to replace some of the Contras' lost CIA funding with donations from Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, the amounts were only a fraction of what it took to keep the Contras trained, armed, fed, and fighting. Reagan administration and CIA officials estimated that their monthly food bill alone was between $1 million and $2 million. Some estimated the annual cost of the Contra war to be $100 million to $200 million. 

In March 1986 the White House began lobbying Congress to turn the money spigots back on and put the CIA back in charge, and to overtly provide what it truly cost to fight the Sandinistas: $100 million a year. The early indications were that Congress was willing to consider the matter seriously. 

But then Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and his staff started making noises about the Contras being involved with cocaine. They had been interviewing mercenaries, former Contras, and Cuban-American sympathizers, making trips to Costa Rica and Miami, talking to foreign officials and federal prosecutors. They started pushing for an official investigation of Contra connections to drug traffickers. With the public's crack hysteria at a fever pitch, a more deadly or untimely accusation could not have been made against the Contras, and the Reagan administration knew it. 

"The obvious intent of Senator Kerry is to try to orchestrate a series of sensational accusations against the Contras in order to obtain massive press coverage at about the time of the next Contra aid vote," Trott was informed in a May 1986 memo from the Justice Department's congressional liaison. "It will be Senator Kerry's intention to try and twist facts and circumstances in order to unjustifiably defame the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Indeed, we have been informed that Senator Kerry will take every opportunity to make the implication or express claim that there is a conspiracy within the Administration to cover up illegal activities of the Contras and their supporters." The fact that Kerry, a former federal prosecutor, had been an outspoken opponent of Contra aid made Reagan administration officials even more distrustful. 

By June 1986 Kerry's staff had compiled enough information for the senator to approach his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and seek authorization for an official investigation. According to a transcript of that secret meeting, Kerry warned the assembled senators that some of what he was about to tell them "strains credulity at moments in time and it strained my credulity. When I first heard this stuff, I said 'I do not believe this, you know? It cannot be true.'" 

But after talking to many current and former Contras, Kerry said, there was ample evidence to suggest that the Contra leaders were corrupt, dealing in drugs and weapons, using their supply lines to run both, and that some U.S. government officials were protecting them. "We can produce specific law enforcement officials who will tell you that they have been called off drug trafficking investigations because CIA is involved or because it would threaten national security or because the State Department did not want it to happen," Kerry told the committee. "Our sources have suggested in direct testimony that agencies of the United States government may be failing to stop or punish those engaging in these criminal activities because those individuals are otherwise engaged in helping United States foreign policy." 

Kerry warned: "When the State Department begins to say that we should not be pursuing the drug trafficking because it would threaten our national security, this committee ought to understand why we are making a decision that it is okay to have drugs coming into this country." 

Kerry's chief investigator, Washington, D.C., attorney Jack Blum, detailed some of the charges Kerry's staff had looked into and told the senators that "the narcotics are coming into the United States not by the pound, not by the bag, but by the ton, by the cargo planeload." 

And, Kerry added, the leadership of the FDN knew about it and was involved in it. "It is clear that there is a network of drug trafficking through the Contras, and it goes right up to Calero, Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero, Enrique Bermúdez. And we have people who will so testify and who have," he said. 

But the idea of diving into such a stinking swamp made some of the other senators squeamish. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware warned that "we should understand that this thing may take us places we would have rather not gone. But we should be aware of it and I think there is no choice but to go there." Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas said she didn't think the committee had the authority to get into the issue. Instead of holding hearings or subpoenaing records, she suggested an alternative approach: "It seems to me that we should be able somehow to really work with the CIA, the DEA. There are channels, it seems to me, that have that ability." 

Kerry almost laughed. "Well, let me say that I would be amazed if the CIA were to be very cooperative in this," he said. "We had a meeting with the CIA, Justice Department. . .. CIA jumped out of their seats at some of the stuff that they heard we were thinking about looking at. I mean, they just literally jumped out of their seats. They were amazed that we were going to look at this stuff." 

At the request of Foreign Relations Committee chairman Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Kerry gave the committee a list of areas that needed investigation. Among them: "The murder of Dr. Hugo Spottiforo [sic] by contras engaged in drug smuggling in Costa Rica"; "An ongoing drug smuggling operation connecting Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the United States, in which Contras and American supporters, with the apparent knowledge of Contra leadership, handled the transport of cocaine produced in Colombia, shipped to Costa Rica, process [ed] in the region, transported to airstrips controlled by American supporters of the Contras and Contras, and distributed in the U.S."; and "Allegations [that] have also surfaced regarding other drug smuggling operations involving shrimp boats operating out of Texas, Louisiana and Florida." 

The Foreign Relations Committee voted to approve Kerry's request for a behind-the-scenes investigation, but grudgingly, and the Republican staff members on the committee kept the Reagan administration fully informed of what the investigators were unearthing. Those timely tips allowed the Justice Department to head off attempts to obtain certain records, or interview certain witnesses. 

When Kerry's investigators sought to interview Contra drug dealer Carlos Cabezas about the San Francisco Frogman case, the Justice Department announced that he couldn't possibly be questioned, since he was going to be a federal witness in an upcoming drug trial. Cabezas said that was "bullshit. I was never a witness in that case. They just didn't want anyone talking to me."

Justice Department official Mark Richard later admitted in a deposition that the department "was seemingly just stonewalling. . .. DEA was saying they won't do it. They didn't want to respond. They didn't want to provide any information." But some information trickled out anyway. And it got awfully close to exposing the Norwin Meneses-Danilo Blandón drug operation. 

In the spring of 1986, San Francisco Examiner reporter Seth Rosenfeld broke the story of the Frogman case, exposing the Justice Department's bizarre handling of the $36,000 found in Julio Zavala's nightstand in 1983. It also reported Zavala's claim, from a prison cell in Arizona, that he had personally delivered about $500,000 in drug profits to the Contras in Costa Rica. Rosenfeld also unearthed Carlos Cabezas's long-buried testimony about selling Horacio Pereira's cocaine to raise money for the Contra revolution. 

Coming on the heels of several Associated Press reports by Robert Parry and Brian Barger about Contra cocaine trafficking in Costa Rica, Rosenfeld's story provided the first hard evidence of a Contra drug ring operating in the United States. The Associated Press picked up the story, and several other newspapers printed it, but cautiously, burying it deep inside the paper and surrounded by plenty of official denials. Nonetheless, the Reagan administration reacted with fury. 

San Francisco U.S. attorney Joseph Russoniello mailed a four-page letter to the Examiner's editor, calling Rosenfeld's work "one of the most blatant attempts at contrived news-making we have witnessed in recent years," and suggesting that it was a political stunt to harm the Contras' chances of getting aid from Congress. Though Rosenfeld never made the charge, Russoniello indignantly wrote that "there is absolutely no evidence of CIA involvement." Incredibly, he made the same claim regarding the Contras. "There is no evidence to warrant the insinuation the defendants were connected to the Contras except. . .their own statements offered after the fact of arrest and in a futile attempt to explain away their own conduct." 

Russoniello did not disclose that Carlos Cabezas—as a witness for Russoniello's office—had testified about selling dope for the Contras under oath in 1984. Nor did he mention that two high-ranking UDN-FARN officials had written letters to the court attesting to Zavala's official position in the Contra organization. He also forgot about the 1982 FBI teletypes that named Contra officials Fernando and Troilo Sanchez as the drug ring's suppliers. 

In a White Paper subsequently circulated to Congress by the U.S. State Department, Zavala and Cabezas were portrayed as liars and opportunists, and Rosenfeld's story was dismissed as malarkey. 

One-upping Russoniello, the State Department claimed that Cabezas and Zavala had never said anything about the Contras until "long after their conviction. . .. [They] did not raise these issues as a defense in their trial or at sentencing but waited two years before making these allegations, which, as indicated, could not be confirmed." Congress was assured that "DEA has examined allegations of linkages between members of the UNO/FARN and suspected traffickers. It has found no information indicating that members of this group have been involved in narcotics trafficking." 

But it couldn't have been looking very hard. In April 1986, a UPI story featured an interview with former Contra official Leonardo Zeledon Rodriguez, who said he was beaten, paralyzed, and left for dead because he had denounced Contra involvement in drug dealing. Zeledon specifically identified Norwin Meneses's partner, Troilo Sanchez, as being involved and said Sanchez had been arrested for cocaine trafficking in Costa Rica. 

Then, a month before the State Department White Paper was sent to Congress, Rosenfeld had another major front-page story in the Examiner, exposing Norwin Meneses cocaine trafficking network and his involvement with the FDN in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Rosenfeld reported on Meneses meetings with CIA agents Enrique Bermúdez and Adolfo Calero and other Contra leaders. He reported that the FDN's spokesman in San Francisco had been convicted of cocaine charges. He disclosed Meneses donations at FDN fund-raisers. 

The Meneses story was considerably more damaging to the Contras than the Frogman story because it directly involved the CIA's primary army, the FDN, with a major international cocaine and arms trafficker. Yet it drew no response from the administration, no angry denunciations from federal prosecutors. The State Department's White Paper—which belittled every other allegation of Contra drug trafficking that had surfaced in the past year—studiously avoided any mention of Meneses and his well-connected gang. And it wasn't just the government that was keeping mum. 

Though the Examiner's expose appeared just two days before the House of Representatives was scheduled to take up the highly controversial issue of Reagan's $100 million Contra aid package, not a single major newspaper in the country touched the Meneses story. It drew nothing but silence, almost as if it had never appeared. 

After Kerry Committee lawyer Jack Blum saw the Examiner's stories, he asked the Justice Department to turn over its files on Meneses and the longclosed Frogman case. He ran into a buzzsaw, he said. "We had a terrible, terrible time getting information about Meneses from the fellow who was the U.S. attorney out there at the time, Russoniello, who was as rabid a right-wing true believer as ever came down the road and who was bound and determined to prevent anyone from learning anything about that case," said Blum. "He and the Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access to people, records, finding anything out about it. It was one of the most frustrating exercises I can ever recall." Blum said Kerry and Russoniello got into "a screaming match" over the telephone. 

On October 15, 1986, the controversy over the Frogman files reached Oliver North's ears. "46 boxes of transcripts of SF Frogman case," North wrote in his diary. "Justice never provided."

16 

"It's a Burn" 

It was time to put the Torres brothers to the test. Providing intelligence and letting the cops follow them around was one thing. But if the investigation was going to progress beyond that level, the Majors had to be sure the two Nicaraguans could take the next, critical step: they had to give someone up. 

The brothers chose one of the Colombians they'd named as a source for the black dealers, Jaime Ramos. One day in early September 1986, they told Bell narcotics detective Jerry Guzzetta that Ramos and another man were going to be making a pickup from two dealers that day at an abandoned apartment house in South Central. Around 1:00 P.M., the Majors set up surveillance on the building. 

Within an hour, a red Chevy carrying two Latinos and a black Mustang with two black men inside rumbled up the driveway. They chatted briefly and drove off, leading the detectives on an aimless six-hour ride around Los Angeles. 

About 8:00 P.M., near the intersection of 159th and Vermont Streets, the cars pulled over, and one of the black men got out and tossed a blue nylon gym bag into the Chevy. The Chevy sped off to a restaurant in Glendale, where the bag was transferred to a white car and driven to a house on Kenwood Avenue. 

After a short wait, the Majors burst in, yelling and waving their guns. Jaime Ramos and the blue gym bag were found in the bedroom, the latter stuffed with $120,005 in small bills and $101,000 in cashier's checks. In a closet, they found a suitcase and six more nylon gym bags—with 114 kilos of cocaine inside. At another house a brown suitcase contained 17 kilos. Ramos, who was carrying ID from the Colombian military, and three other Colombians, were arrested. 

Two million dollars worth of dope and a quarter million in cash. Not bad for an afternoon's work. It looked as if the Torres brothers were for real. While Detective Tom Gordon and the Majors plotted their next moves, Jerry Guzzetta asked the Torres brothers to show him around South Central. He wanted to know more about this mysterious black dealer they called "Rick," and needed to determine how well the Torreses really knew him.

They drove Guzzetta by a vacant two-story apartment complex off South Avalon Boulevard and told Guzzetta that a cocaine lab was located there. The building was occupied only when the dealers were at work, measuring, testing, and packaging the product. The rest of the time it was vacant, so there would be no suspicious traffic in and out of the dilapidated structure. 

Near an entrance ramp to the Harbor Freeway, they pointed out a multistory apartment building, which they said served as one of Rick's distribution centers. Even during the middle of the week there was a lot of activity—young men lounging along the curb, hanging in the doorways—but the Torreses told Guzzetta to come by the place on a Friday or Saturday night if he really wanted to see some action. "There are numerous drug dealers that come to the location to party and there are numerous new vehicles, like Mercedes and Cadillacs, which would be parked on the street at the time of the parties," Guzzetta's report stated. 

Swinging by 75th and Figueroa, the brothers pointed out a newly constructed motel, the Freeway Motor Inn. Rick had bought the land for a million dollars, they told Guzzetta, and had the motel built to his specifications. Rick's mother, Annie, worked the front desk. 

Suddenly, everything clicked. 

Rick. The Freeway Motor Inn. This was too good to be true, Guzzetta marvelled. The Torres brothers had led him to the legendary Freeway Rick, the elusive crack lord whose existence had only become known to the Majors within the past few months. 

While rumors of a super crack dealer had been floating around South Central since late 1985, it wasn't until April 1986 that the police received informant information suggesting that there might be truth behind the rumors. The Majors I squad asked Detective John Edner to see what he could find out, and Edner confirmed that "Freeway Rick" had a name—Ricky Donnell Ross. While Edner couldn't track him down, he did find Freeway Rick's girlfriend, Marilyn Stubblefield, and got her address. 

On May 15, 1986, the Majors introduced themselves. According to Stubblefield's brother, Steve, they kicked the door in, ransacked the apartment, arrested Marilyn, and beat Steve with a flashlight, telling him to pass a message along to Freeway Rick that he had some real bad hombres looking for him. 

During the search of the Stubblefields' house, which turned up a bit of cocaine, some marijuana, and some empty kilo wrappers, Ross's cousin, George Mauldin, stopped by, and the Majors gave him the same warm welcome they'd given Steve Stubblefield. "Mauldin showed up while we were in the process of searching the house. We had most of the subjects detained in the living room. Mauldin showed up and got into a shoving match with [Detective Robert] Tolmaire after he was told not to interfere with what we were doing," Majors I supervisor Sergeant Robert Sobel recalled. "I believe Tolmaire hit him with a flashlight." 

In late August Majors I struck again, rousting two of Ross's cousins, Anthony and Eric Mauldin, on suspicion of possessing stolen firearms. They didn't arrest them. They "tuned them up" and told them to tell Rick to watch his ass. For the first time in his young life, Rick Ross started worrying about the cops. 

Years later, Ross surmised that the Torres brothers gave him up because he'd quit buying cocaine from them in 1986, reverting back to an exclusive relationship with Danilo Blandón. "Danilo's price was so low, that the Torres brothers simply could not continue to compete," Ross told police investigators in 1996. In addition, Ross and Blandón had become very close friends. "We got more personal with Danilo. We started to get more like friends than just selling dope. You know, first it was just like businesses, you know, like we'd meet him in the street. Eventually we started goin' over to his house and hanging out with him and stuff like that." 

While the Majors I crew worked Ross's organization from the bottom up, Majors II was working it from the top down, trying to zero in on Ross's suppliers. The Ramos bust had been impressive in terms of cocaine and cash seized, but ultimately it had been a dead end. Despite the Torres's claims that the Colombian was one of Ross's big suppliers, no evidence was found linking him to Ross. In later interviews with police, Ross and his partner, Ollie Newell, both specifically denied that any of their suppliers had been arrested in September 1986, and both said they had not lost any money that month as the result of an arrest. 

The Ramos case was eventually plea-bargained down to nothing, "and they let a guy who we found with 230 pounds of coke plead to a five-kilo bust and deported him," Gordon said. Later events led him to believe that Ramos had been a CIA operative, but according to court records, his light punishment may have been due to the fact that the Majors had no search warrant when they busted into his house. 

Gordon went back to square one. 

He started working his way down the list of other men the Torres brothers had identified as supplying Ross. It was not promising. He had only first names —Diego and Stefano—for the other two Colombians. All he knew about Diego was that he was a flashy dresser and a womanizer. Stefano, reportedly a college student, appeared to be working with some Italians who owned a fish processing plant in Riverside. Neither path seemed to point to South Central L.A., and the Torres brothers seemed vague on details about those two. 

The information was much harder on the fourth man, Danilo Blandón, and his ex-cop sidekick, Ronnie Lister. These were the guys who, according to Guzzetta, the Torreses were really afraid of. If they were able to frighten a pair of heavily armed behemoths like the Torreses, they must be something. On the afternoon of September 17, 1986, Gordon ran the names the Torres brothers had provided through two computer databases, NIN and NADDIS, which collect information from narcotics investigations around the world. They can instantly provide an officer with a criminal history of the suspect, his known associates, aliases, addresses, and the case file numbers of all DEA investigations in which the suspected trafficker's name has turned up. 

Running a NIN and NADDIS check is a routine way to begin a narcotics investigation; it lets the investigator know if anyone else is working on the same suspects. If a doper has a NIN or NADDIS file, the protocol dictates that whoever entered the trafficker into the database "owns" that doper from then on. (Narcotics cops frequently complain about officers who enter everyone they run across into the databases, just to claim ownership in case the person one day turns out to be a major trafficker.) NADDIS also alerts the "owner" if someone else accesses the computer file. "The idea is so that we don't end up shooting each other," Gordon explained. 

The computer screen brought up Blandón's file first. He was listed as a Class One trafficker, the biggest. He had some addresses in Glendale, which showed up in connection with the Torres brothers. A couple file references from 1983 and 1984 described him as the head of a cocaine distribution organization in Los Angeles. He had only two known associates: Roger Sandino and Norwin Meneses. 

Gordon decided to check them out with the computer. 

Sandino's criminal history included a 1981 conviction in Hialeah, Florida, for attempting to sell 50,000 Quaalude tablets, while in the country illegally from Nicaragua. 

The next name Gordon typed into the NADDIS computer was that of Norwin Meneses. When his file came up, it seemed as if it would never end. On and on it went, screen after screen. 

This guy, Gordon observed, was in a league of his own. Another Nicaraguan, he had been in the NADDIS database since 1976—a decade. A Class One trafficker. Twelve aliases. Houses all over the Bay Area. A mansion in Managua. Mentioned in thirty-two DEA investigations, some as far back as 1974. A couple of classified files from 1976. Bringing in cocaine from Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, sending it to New Orleans, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Among a host of current associates were a cross-match: Roger Sandino and Danilo Blandón. 

The report also revealed that someone else had been in Meneses NADDIS file recently. The date of the last update was only nineteen days earlier. When Gordon started checking the status of the DEA investigations in Meneses file, he learned that a number of them were still open. Yet despite all the official interest, Meneses had never been charged with a single thing. He was clean. 

Gordon called up Ronald Lister's file next. It was short and sweet. He was an ex-policeman who was under active DEA investigation. The case was so active, Gordon noticed, that Lister's NADDIS file was less than a month old. 

Another live wire. 

But all the details of that case were classified, the NADDIS report stated. Gordon jotted the name of Lister's "owner" on the bottom of the printout: DEA agent Sandalio "Sandy" Gonzalez, U.S. Embassy, San Jose, Costa Rica—the same agent who "owned" Blandón. 

Something didn't add up. Lister lived in Orange County. Blandón lived in San Bernardino County. Why would a Costa Rican DEA agent have them under investigation—unless they'd been down in Costa Rica recently? Then Gordon noticed that Meneses had been under investigation in Costa Rica also. 

When Jerry Guzzetta brought the case in the door, he'd been insisting that he'd uncovered an international crack ring. It was sure beginning to look that way. 

Gordon picked up the phone and called DEA agent Gonzalez to find out what was going on. The reaction he got was memorable. Gonzalez "goes through the ceiling," Gordon recalled. "He starts screaming that all the phone lines go through Nicaragua and [says] 'You can't call me on an open line and talk about this!' He said he'd fly to Panama and call me from there." 

Now the detective was really baffled. So what if the phone lines went through Nicaragua? They probably went through a lot of other places on their way down there and back. What's the big deal? 

Gordon didn't hear from Gonzalez for five days, and when the DEA agent finally called back, Gordon was out. Gonzalez asked the cop who answered the phone to take a message for him, which Gordon found on his desk: "Tom, got a call from Sandy Gonzalez of Costa Rica DEA. He said [local DEA agent] will let you read the info. Sandy can not talk on the phone because all the lines are through Nicaragua. Sandy asks that you don't mention anything in your s/w [search warrant affidavit]. It's a burn." 

There's those Nicaraguan phone lines again, Gordon saw. And what's this crap about "a burn?" That was cop slang meaning that his investigation had been exposed and the bad guys knew he was investigating them. Gonzalez was telling Gordon not to put any details of his investigation into the sworn statement he had to file with his application for a search warrant because the search would come up dry and he would tip his hand for nothing. 

Gordon didn't get that one at all. How the hell could his investigation of Blandón and Lister have been burned? It hadn't even started yet. The case was still sitting on top of his desk. Nobody had done anything except run a couple of computer checks, and no one besides Jerry Guzzetta—and now the DEA—even knew the Majors were working on it. 

Besides, how would a DEA agent a couple thousand miles away know that a newborn investigation by the L.A. County Sheriff's Office had been burned? 

When Gordon called the DEA office in L.A., as Gonzalez suggested, his uneasiness grew. No, he was told, the Costa Rican DEA office was not investigating Lister and Blandón. But an agent in Riverside, California, just outside L.A., was. 

Gordon found that Riverside DKA agent Thomas A. Schrettner was only too happy to help him. Schrettner had his hands full with other investigations, he told Gordon, and his supervisors weren't letting him spend much time on the Blandón case. All he could do for him was pass along what little information he had and let the L.A. detectives take it from there. 

In retrospect, Gordon said, that should have set off some alarms. The DEA was notorious among local lawmen for coming in and stealing the best cases, mainly for the publicity value. It almost never handed off a big case to a smaller department. Yet here was a case involving major international cocaine traffickers, crack in the ghettos, multi kilo shipments, and hundreds of millions of dollars—the kind of case the DEA exists for—and the agency didn't want to investigate it? 

At the time, though, Gordon thought Schrettner's offer was a clever way to get around a bureaucratic roadblock and still bring a dope dealer to justice. And when Schrettner sent Gordon a copy of his report on the investigation, the detective quickly forgot his concerns about the unusual behavior of the federal agents. The case was everything Gordon imagined it would be. It was worldwide. 

In late August 1986 Schrettner had debriefed a Nicaraguan informant who'd known Blandón since meeting him in Miami in 1983. The informant admitted hauling cocaine and millions of dollars across the country for Blandón during 1984 and 1985, but said he felt bad about doing it and was planning to turn Danilo in eventually. As a matter of fact, he said, he'd already tried to turn him in once. Before starting a drug-hauling trip to the West Coast, the informant said, he "informed the FBI in Miami of the shipment and route but no action was taken." 

Schrettner's informant described the drug ring as consisting of "loosely associated Nicaraguans located principally in the Southern California area. Said groups together purchase/distribute approximately 400 kilos of cocaine per month. . .. Cocaine is often transported to the Blandón organization and then from Blandón to Meneses in San Francisco." For Gordon, that information held special meaning. It provided an independent verification of the accuracy of the information that Guzzetta had gotten from the Torres brothers and the data he'd pulled off NADDIS. 

According to Schrettner's informant, Norwin Meneses was involved. Roger Sandino was involved. So were Jacinto Torres, Ronald Lister, and Anastasio Somoza's former bank chairman, Orlando Murillo, who was allegedly laundering Blandón's cash in Miami and serving as a front man in property deals. 

The informant told the DEA that Blandón's millions were being driven to Florida in motor homes and taken to the Fontainebleau Apartment Complex between Miami and Sweetwater, "which had been purchased for Blandón by Orlando Murillo." 

Murillo was identified as working at the Government Security Bank in Coral Gables, and acting as "the principal money-launderer" for Blandón and Meneses. While Murillo denied those accusations, Blandón admitted under oath that Murillo had handled cash transfers to Panama for him, and put his name on deeds to properties that Blandón owned but he said Murillo didn't know he was handling drug money. However, in an interview with the author Murillo said he'd known Blandón was a drug dealer since early 1981. 

According to the Schrettner's informant, the Nicaraguan drug ring was made up of "two separate organizations. The principal group is controlled by Blandón and is the focal point for drug supply and money-laundering for the others. Blandón utilizes the nickname 'Chanchin' [fat pig] and works closely with his wife Chepita in his trafficking. The other group is run by Meneses and is located principally in the San Francisco Bay Area." 

The informant filled seven pages with names, dates, cash deliveries, stash house locations, drug storehouses, and business fronts. History has proven that nearly all of the information was accurate. Among those named as members of Blandón's operation were Claudio Villavicencio, aka Ivan Arguelles, Rick Ross's first major supplier. Another one of Blandón's employees, a cocaine distributor named Ivan Torres, was listed as having "political connections with the FDN." 

Then Schrettner dropped a real bombshell on Tom Gordon. The DEA wasn't the only federal agency with its eye on Blandón. Just a few days earlier, Schrettner related, he'd met with an FBI agent named Douglas Aukland, whose office was just down the hall from Schrettner's. The FBI agent had told him a story that was dead-bang the same as what had just happened to Schrettner: Aukland was sitting in his office, minding his own business, when a stranger ambled in off the streets with story right out of the movies: A monster drug ring, run by high-ranking Contras, pouring cocaine into the ghettos of Los Angeles, where it was being turned into crack and marketed through crack houses. 

According to Aukland's official report of the encounter, the man said the ring was being run by Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who "imported cocaine from Colombia, through Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, and was one of the largest distributors of cocaine on the West Coast. A pilot named 'Oklahoma Dick,' who possibly lived in the Tulsa area, regularly flew to South America to obtain this cocaine. . .among the members of Blandón's organization were his wife [Chepita], Orlando Murillo [who routinely laundered cocaine funds for Blandón] and Ronald Lister, a former Laguna Beach, California, police officer who, in September 1985, allegedly drove with Blandón to deliver 100 kilos of cocaine to major suppliers of LA. 'rock houses' in exchange for $2.6 million." 

And these weren't your everyday, run-of-the-mill drug dealers, the informant had warned Aukland. They had. . .connections. 

"Blandón and Meneses were founding members of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), a wing of the Contra movement headed by Calcro, and Blandón and Meneses used their drug profits to help fund the FDN," the FBI report states. "In January 1985, Eden Pastora, another Contra leader, had met with Blandón in Miami in an effort to seek cocaine funds from Blandón to fund Contra operations but no deals were struck during that meeting." 

For the first time, the pieces were falling together to form a complete and utterly horrifying picture. All the blanks were filling in. The CIA's secret warriors were not only killing the citizens of Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, but if the two federal informants were right, they were using L.A.'s inner city as an addict base from which to draw money to buy their guns. At the same time the Contras was being sold to American citizens as their great, shining hope for freedom and democracy in Latin America, they were providing the demons for the Reagan Administration's hyperbolic War on Drugs at home. The Contras were largely to blame for the birth of the L.A. crack market. They were part of why the L.A. gangs had gotten so powerful and fearsome. And those developments were part of the reason for the Draconian anti-crack laws that came out of Washington that summer, a product of the Congressional stampede whipped up by all the lurid anti-crack propaganda the media was carrying. It was a self-perpetuating cycle, nice and neat, with obvious benefits for both foreign and domestic policy initiatives. 

Though FBI agent Douglas Aukland had never worked a dope case in his life, he knew a major crime when he saw one. His informant was believable; he had lots of details, lots of valuable information, things that could only have come from inside. 

Aukland checked on Meneses with his counterparts in the San Francisco FBI office and got an earful from agent Donald Hale, who had been following Norwin's exploits in the Bay Area for many frustrating years. No one had been able to catch the drug lord with dope, or get anyone inside of his operation, Aukland learned. But Hale told him he'd recently gotten permission from the U.S. Attorney's Office to build a "historical" case against Meneses, in anticipation of an indictment for running a continuing criminal enterprise. 

"Hale said he had three informants willing to testify against Meneses," Aukland related to Justice Department inspectors. And Hale, too, had been hearing stories of drug profits going to Nicaragua, for both the Contras and the Sandinistas. 

Convinced that his informant was reliable, Aukland went to his supervisors in Riverside, and to their supervisors in Los Angeles, and pleaded for permission to open an investigation. For a probe this big and this sensitive, Aukland told them, he'd need an "off-site" location from which to operate; he couldn't work on something like this in the FBI office. He also wanted pen registers put on Blandón's phones, and he would need surveillance teams set up at the stash locations the informant had named. 

Aukland got permission to start an investigation, along with $10,000 to pay his informant, and that was about it. If he wanted to look into this, his bosses said, fine. And, by the way, you're on your own. 

"Aukland said he did not get much help on the case from his supervisors or other agents, who were already spread thin handling other matters," the Justice Department's Inspector General later wrote. Nor was the DEA particularly eager to assist. Except when he could steal an hour or two, Tom Schrettner wasn't allowed to work on the Blandón investigation at all. He was told to keep his eyes on his heroin cases, and let the FBI worry about the Contras. (In hindsight, the FBI's and DEA's refusal to assign more than one rookie drug agent to a case this grave seems almost incredible. It is evidence either of amazing incompetence, amazing cowardice, or obstruction of justice.) 

After L.A. Deputy Tom Gordon saw the lay of the land, he decided the Majors weren't going to wait for the feds to get off their duffs. His crew could handle these bad boys themselves. But Aukland objected. The Majors should step aside, he told Gordon. This was a federal case, the FBI was on it first, and their informant was in the best position of any to help them take this operation down. But Gordon was adamant. The Majors were going ahead and if the FBI didn't like it, too had. The drug ring was bringing in too much dope for them to sit around and wait until a lone FBI agent nobody wanted to help could pull a federal case together. The Majors didn't need the feds. They could make their own case, (pick up with "He now had. . .)" He now had three independent sources telling the same story. The Majors had enough evidence to obtain a search warrant and bust the whole operation, Gordon told the FBI agent, and that was what they were going to do. 

Once it became clear that Gordon was not going to back off, Aukland said, he agreed to help the Majors with their probe. "Agent Aukland thought very highly of LASD Deputy Tom Gordon," police investigators reported later. "He said it was obvious Gordon was very knowledgeable and had extensive narcotics experience." 

Gordon also had enough bureaucratic experience to know he was heading into some very dangerous political territory. Anyone who read the papers knew what the Contras were and just how strongly the U.S. government felt about them, particularly then. Congress had just approved Reagan's $100 million aid package, and Reagan was getting ready to sign the bill. 

If Gordon was going to end up investigating his own government or its proxy army for drug trafficking, he realized, he'd better get someone to sign off on it. He approached Lieutenant Mike Fossey, the acting captain of the bureau, and laid out the whole scenario. "The allegations were that the Contras were selling cocaine throughout the United States and in Southern California in particular," Fossey recalled in a 1996 interview with police investigators. Fossey recalled being told "that the CIA was involved with them, screened them, and protected their operation." He considered Gordon's claims to be "a major accusation," and told the detective to keep after it. 

Gordon's immediate supervisor, Sergeant Ed Huffman, decided to brief the commander of the Sheriff's Narcotics Bureau, Captain Robert Wilber, just to make sure the top brass had no qualms about pursuing such a sensitive case. Wilber confirmed that Huffman and his men "believed the suspects were possibly Contras. During this conversation they also said they were reluctant to work with the FBI on the case because the FBI might 'burn' them." 

Wilber wasn't sure if Huffman's suspicions were "a political thing," or if the veteran sergeant just felt uncomfortable working with the feds. During this period, Wilber told investigators in 1996, his "guys were not working with the federal agents very well and. . .he pushed his deputies to work with them on this case."

"It was a tough nut to crack," he said, "but I was constantly emphasizing that they had to work with the Feds." Huffman reluctantly agreed to bring the Justice Department's agents aboard. But had the L.A. officers known what was going on right then with the DEA office in Costa Rica, and the agents who were monitoring Meneses, Blandón, and Lister, it's doubtful they would have let the Feds anywhere near their investigation.

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