Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb
19
"He Reports to People
Reporting to Bush" ...
By Gary Webb
19
"He Reports to People
Reporting to Bush" ...
It really didn't take an FBI agent to figure out who or what Scott Weekly was. A
librarian could have done it. Weekly had been something of an inadvertent
celebrity back in 1983. A story in the Los Angeles Times, in fact, gave him the
nickname that would stick with him for years: Doctor Death.
"Scott's kind of a tough little guy," said Ronald Lister's longtime attorney,
Lynn Ball. "He got busted out of the Naval Academy and entered the service as
an enlisted man. Went on to become a SEAL. Then after he got out, he had some
friends in Virginia. Essentially, Scott was involved in the same kind of bullshit
that Ron was—providing security."
A federal public defender told a judge in 1987 that Weekly was "some sort of
a combination between John Wayne and Rambo and Oliver North, perhaps, and
James Bond. . .. He does have an involvement, a lengthy involvement, in some
rather mysterious activities."
Weekly, a classmate of North's at Annapolis, would later say he was kicked
out of the Naval Academy in 1968 "because of the buildup of a large number of
demerits." He joined the SEALs—the navy's most elite band of fighters—and
became a demolition and weapons expert, thus earning his macabre sobriquet.
He was awarded two Bronze Stars in Vietnam, where, according to his lawyer,
he was involved in "extensive combat duty and numerous intelligence
operations." He later married the daughter of an admiral.
A U.S. Customs agent told federal investigators that Weekly's stint with the
SEALS gave him "contacts in the intelligence community, including the CIA and
NSA (National Security Agency)."
In 1983, he and several other Americans were arrested in Nakhon Phanom, a
small Thai village near the border of Laos, while on a covert mission to gather
intelligence on American soldiers missing from the Vietnam war. The head of
the Defense Intelligence Agency had wanted to find out, once and for all, if
rumors of American POWs being held in Laotian prison camps were true. (It
was from this incident that the Sylvester Stallone movie Rambo took its
inspiration.)
Leading the expedition was former Army Green Beret lieutenant colonel
James "Bo" Gritz, a decorated Vietnam war hero and former commander of the
U.S. Special Forces in the Panama Canal Zone. Though he ostensibly retired
from the military in 1979, Gritz said that for several years afterward he worked
with an army intelligence unit known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA),
trying to locate American POWs in Southeast Asia. According to author Steven
Emerson, the ISA, known in military intelligence circles as "the Activity,"
provided Gritz with "tens of thousands of dollars' worth of cameras, polygraph
equipment (to check the veracity of Indochinese sources), radio communications
systems and plane tickets to Bangkok. Gritz was also given satellite photos and
other intelligence data." The operation was code-named "Grand Eagle." Dr.
Death was Gritz's right-hand man.
In congressional testimony, Gritz said "Grand Eagle" was officially shelved
after a bureaucratic dispute between "the Activity" and the DIA. Deputy DIA
director Admiral Allan Paulson confirmed to Congress that a "Department of
Defense organization. . .proposed an operation using Mr. Gritz in a collection
capacity," but Paulson said the operation was turned down "at the first level of
the approval process."
The official rejection didn't end the mission, however. With the ISA's
equipment and money at their disposal, Gritz and Weekly proceeded under the
ironic code name "Operation Lazarus." Weekly's contributions, according to a
1983 Soldier of Fortune magazine story, included "having silencers altered to fit
the 9-mm submachine guns to be used by Gritz and the team."
The first mission, in November 1982, resulted in a firefight with Laotian
forces, and one member of Gritz's team was killed. As he prepared to make
another stab at infiltrating Laos in early 1983, word of his mission was leaked to
Soldier of Fortune magazine and picked up by the Los Angeles Times and the
Boston Globe. Exposed, Gritz and his squad were arrested by Thai police at the
edge of the Mekong River and charged with possession of an illegal radio
transmitter. Gritz, Weekly, and two others—an antiterrorism expert and the
daughter of a missing U.S. pilot—were jailed and held for trial.
In a letter to the L.A. Times, Gritz said that "CIA-DIA knew" of the mission
and provided him with a variety of high-tech gear. Both agencies disavowed any
knowledge of Gritz's missions but the denials were difficult to believe. "U.S.
sources in Bangkok said the radio was the latest in U.S.-made spy gear with a
powerful transmitter that was to have been used to send messages from Laos
straight to Washington," United Press International reported. "The disclosure of
the radio's type and purpose bolstered the credibility of Gritz's statements that
his first mission into Laos last November and his apparently just-completed
second mission was carried out with the blessing of U.S. intelligence officials."
UPI's perceptiveness was short-lived. Those telling paragraphs were cut from
the UPI story that moved later that afternoon, and from then on most press
reports uncritically accepted the government's denials. Gritz and Weekly were
dismissed as beer-can commandos off on their own private mission.
A year later, however, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported that
Gritz's team had been sent into Southeast Asia "with at least initial support from
the CIA and the Pentagon." Anderson based that conclusion on confidential
court records filed in a federal fraud case in Honolulu, Hawaii, involving a polo playing investment banker named Ronald Ray Rewald, who was accused of
stealing millions from his bankrupt company's clients. Rewald claimed his
investment company had been a conduit for the CIA to secretly funnel money to
covert operations around the world, and that the agency had suddenly yanked its
accounts, causing the firm to collapse.
The CIA admitted to Congress that Rewald's company "had some ties to the
CIA" and that several CIA officials had investment accounts there. Anderson put
it more bluntly: "Rewald's investment firm was hip-deep in active or retired CIA
employees."
In an affidavit, Rewald said the CIA "had originally committed its support" to
Gritz's mission and that Rewald "did supply a few thousand dollars to support
the mission at the CIA's behest." According to Anderson, the "bombshell of
Rewald's exhibits is a confidential letter to Gritz on official DIA stationery"
instructing Gritz, to "pull together evidence to convince political skeptics of the
POW existence."
(As an aside, Rewald also told Anderson that he was approached in 1982 by
"a senior CIA official and asked if he would help in a CIA drug-smuggling
operation. When Rewald told the CIA official that he had no one in his firm with
experience in drug operations, the CIA man contradicted him and named [a
Rewald] employee who had been a longtime CIA contract agent active in
Southeast Asia." The CIA disputed Anderson's column, but the columnist never
backed down. Rewald was convicted of fraud and sentenced to an astonishing
eighty years in federal prison.)
When a police investigator asked Scott Weekly in 1996 about his relationship
with the CIA, Weekly replied that it really didn't matter what answer he gave.
There was no way the police could ever confirm it. "He also agreed that if he
was in the CIA, he wouldn't tell me anyway," the officer wrote. In 1998, the CIA
Inspector General reported it could find no evidence that Weekly "had any
relationship with the CIA."
Another officer tried to check out Weekly's military background by calling
the Office of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles. According to his report, an odd
thing happened: "Scott Weekly's name was found in the database. The person on
the telephone calmly read Weekly's name to me and suddenly exclaimed,
'Whoa!' He quickly informed me that due to provisions of the Privacy Act, only
the fact that he was a veteran could be confirmed. No information about length
of service, branch, or MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] could be released
without a subpoena or the consent of Weekly."
Notwithstanding Lister's claim to the Majors that "Mr. Weekly knows what
I'm doing," it is difficult to say with certainty if Weekly knew of Lister's cocaine
dealings with Danilo Blandón. Weekly denies it. But there is no doubt that
between 1982 and 1986, Scott Weekly was helping out on the flip side of
Blandón's criminal enterprise: the sale of exotic weapons and communications
gear, some of which was being sold to Freeway Rick and his fellow crack
dealers in South Central Los Angeles. A U.S. Customs agent, John Kellogg,
testified in 1988 that he believed Weekly was an arms merchant who "was
involved in international munitions deals."
"And how did you come to that belief?" Kellogg was asked by a federal
judge.
"Though his various contacts with me and his foreign travels," Kellogg
replied. "He would come back after several months' absence and come into my
office and say, 'I believe you need to know about this,' and then detail very
specific information concerning munitions dealers that were under investigation
by the Customs Service and others."
According to interviews Weekly did with ATF agents in 1987, he admitted
"that he had been involved with the Contras in the past, when Pastora was in
power." A U.S. Customs official told the ATF "that Weekly was acting at the
direction of Customs when he was involved with the Contras."
Lister confirmed that he "often met with Scott Weekly because Weekly was
very knowledgeable in the area of commercially available military related
systems." He said Weekly was "a dependable source of information as to which
systems were declassified and, hence, legal to sell."
In the final weeks of 1986, less than a month after Lister identified "Mr.
Weekly" to the sheriff's raid team as his CIA contact, evidence surfaced
suggesting that Lister's description wasn't far off the mark.
At the time Lister made that claim, Scott Weekly was participating in at least
two covert operations involving the National Security Council and a special unit
inside the U.S. State Department that was working closely with Oliver North and
the CIA.
Both Weekly and Gritz have testified that in early 1986 they were asked to
conduct training exercises for another of the CIA's secret armies: the anti-Communist Afghan resistance movement—the Mujahideen. Before undertaking
that mission, they said, they sought and obtained the approval of two State
Department officials in Washington: William R. Bode, a special assistant to the
undersecretary of state for security assistance, and Bode's aide, army colonel
Nestor Pino Marina.
Eugene Wheaton, a former air force security expert who knows both men
personally, believes Bode and Pino were CIA agents working under State
Department cover on the Contra project with Oliver North. "That office. . .was
CIA through and through," says Wheaton, whose name shows up repeatedly in
Bode's daily agendas and Oliver North's notebooks during 1985–86. There is
some independent evidence to support Wheaton's conclusions. In an interview
with Iran-Contra investigators, former CIA Central American Task Force chief
Alan Fiers Jr. admitted that he and North in late 1985 discussed an unnamed
"paramilitary covert action program" involving Pino and Bode and a company
called Falcon Wings Inc. What that program involved is not known; the rest of
Fiers's interview was censored on national security grounds.
Undersecretary of State William Schneider told the FBI in 1988 that Bode
and Pino were responsible for Central America and their jobs involved "keeping
in touch with DOD [Department of Defense] and other government agencies to
determine if U.S. assistance programs to the area were working." One of those
programs appears to have been the secret Contra maritime operations North and
CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez were running in Costa Rica, using Kevlar
speedboats and offshore shrimp trawlers as motherships. As discussed in an
earlier chapter, those murky missions were being spearheaded by two CIA linked drug traffickers working with the Southern Front Contras—Bay of Pigs
veterans Felipe Vidal and Dagoberto Nunez. In an interview with Iran-Contra
prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's office, Pino confirmed that he and Bode met with
North to discuss the purchase of the speedboats. During that meeting, Pino said,
North unexpectedly announced that he could wind up behind bars. "North did
refer to going to jail," Pino confirmed, but he said his "impression was that the
phrase was common usage in the military before an inspection."
Colonel Pino, another Bay of Pigs veteran, has a history of involvement with
the CIA and covert operations. In 1982 he became the U.S. Army's "action
officer" on the civil war in El Salvador. Pino was a close friend of former CIA
agent Felix Rodriguez, who was overseeing North's Contra resupply operation at
Ilopango air base in El Salvador at the time. Rodriguez, in fact, says he first met Ollie North through Bode and Pino. Like Rodriguez, Pino was close to
Salvadoran Air Force general Rafael Bustillo, who ran the Ilopango base. Pino
referred to Bustillo as "family," and the Salvadoran general sometimes stayed at
Pino's house in Virginia while visiting Washington.
As for Bode, he was described by his boss, Undersecretary Schneider, as "a
deployable asset. . .who was used on non-routine projects." Bode's desk
calendars, obtained from the National Archives, show frequent meetings in 1985
and 1986 with North and CIA operative Robert Owen, North's liaison to the
Contras and the Cuban mercenaries working on the Southern Front.
Gritz testified that he approached Bode and Pino to discuss the Afghan
training program he and Weekly were asked to conduct because "I've worked for
intelligence agencies and I wanted to make sure that we weren't doing something
that was illegal. . .Mr. Bode was enthusiastic, as a matter of fact, I would call
him excited. He said that not only did he approve of the proposal but that he
would provide other Afghan groups, since there was a division of about six or
seven subgroups, that he would provide other people for us to train also. Later, in
further meetings, I did provide him with a detailed training proposal. Initially I
gave him an outline for a training proposal of seventy-six days." Gritz said Bode
shortened the training schedule to thirty days "and eliminated some of the classes
that he felt were too sensitive for the Mujahideen at the time. It included various
secure communications [courses] that we had planned to give."
In a 1987 interview, Bode confirmed that he had met with Gritz about the
training program and "gave him the names of one or two people to talk to," but
he denied he authorized the operation. "Just the fact that we met and had talks
didn't authorize anything," Bode insisted. "The Afghan program is a covert
program, okay? All CIA, or perhaps a little bit of Defense Department. The State
Department does not get involved in those things." (As anyone who has studied
the CIA can attest, the State Department has provided cover for more CIA
officers over the years than any other section of government save the military.)
Bode's assistant, Nestor Pino, also denied that he had officially authorized the missions, but said he was "convinced that the efforts taken by Colonel Gritz to train Afghan Freedom Fighters are in consonance with and complimentary of U.S. policy for Afghanistan and that Colonel Gritz and Mr. Weekly saw it that way." Their activities, Pino declared, "were inspired by a strong desire to support the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation and by an even stronger desire to advance the interests of the United States."
In federal court, Weekly and Gritz testified that the money to pay for the Afghan training exercises came from Stanford Technology, one of the companies fronting for Oliver North's "Enterprise," the quasi-governmental arms dealership at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. Stanford Technology was used by North and his agents to launder the profits of the Iranian missile sales. During the Iran/Contra deposition of Stanford Technology's owner, Albert Hakim, he admitted that approximately $900,000 from his various front companies was paid out "for miscellaneous projects at the request of Lt. Col. North."
In late 1986 Gritz and Weekly's training program—conducted in the Nevada desert on land owned by the federal government—was accidentally exposed by a law student in Oklahoma City who was married to a policeman. "She was sitting in her apartment one night when Weekly and this cop show up with 200 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives," recalled former federal prosecutor Stephen Korotash, who handled the case. "They were looking to store it somewhere. She happened to mention it to her father and Dad called the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms]." The ATF learned that Weekly had loaded the C-4 aboard two commercial passenger flights to Las Vegas and then left the country. An ATF report on the Weekly investigation, found in the CIA's files during an internal probe in 1997, "indicated that Weekly claimed he had done this for CIA."
ATF agents initially suspected that Weekly might be a terrorist until they got a look at his long-distance telephone records for September and October of 1986. Among other things, they found calls to Colonel Pino at the State Department; to William Logan, southwest regional director of the U.S. Customs Service; to the National Security Council; and to defense contractor United Technologies.
The agents broke the news to federal prosecutor Korotash, who was not pleased. The storm over the Iran-Contra scandal was then reaching a crescendo and the last thing Korotash wanted was to be dragged into that maelstrom. "My first thought was: 'Oh, great. Here I am picking my nose in Oklahoma and now I've stumbled into a Contra deal.' That's what I thought this was and I can remember thinking, 'How in the hell did I get ahold of a case like this?'"
No stranger to the workings of government, Korotash bounced the Weekly investigation up the bureaucratic ladder, and it kept right on bouncing, all the way to the top of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington. Records show that on December 2, 1986, Assistant U.S. Attorney General William F. Weld was briefed on the case. According to Weld's notes of the briefing, Weekly was somehow connected to the U.S. State Department and had made long-distance phone calls to a Lieutenant Colonel Tom Harvey, who was on the staff of the National Security Council. (Gritz has said Harvey was supervising the POW hunt he and Weekly were on at the time and provided them with White House and NSC credentials. Harvey has denied that.)
Korotash's supervisor, Oklahoma City U.S. attorney William Price, asked Weld, if he should "proceed with such cases?" Weld told him to go ahead, and then asked one of his aides, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark M. Richard, to look into the case.
Richard already had some background in this area. Earlier that year he'd been given an award by the CIA for "Protection of National Security during Criminal Prosecutions." A CIA spokesman said Richard was honored for "his outstanding work in the case against Ronald Rewald," the Honolulu investment banker who claims his investment firm funneled CIA money to covert operations, including Weekly and Gritz's earliest POW missions. Thanks to Richard's efforts, Rewald's ties to the CIA were not permitted to surface publicly at his criminal trial.
Richard called U.S. Attorney Bill Price on December 11, 1986, and was briefed on the investigation. Several months later, Richard was grilled about that briefing in a deposition taken by Iran-Contra committee lawyer Pamela Naughton. According to a transcript of the deposition, Naughton confronted Richard with two sheets of lined paper filled with handwritten notes.
"Tell me what that is," Naughton said. "Is that your handwriting, first of all?"
"I'd plead guilty to that," Richard cracked. "This is the gist of the conversation I had with Mr. Price and his briefing of me regarding an individual who had been arrested and his possible involvement in some CIA/Contra-related activities."
"Now, about a third of the way down—individual's name was Weekly? Is that —am I reading that correctly?" Naughton asked. "W-E-E-K-L-Y?"
"Yes."
"About a third of the way down it says—if I'm reading correctly—'Weekly posts on tape that he's tied into CIA and Hasenfus. Said he reports to people reporting to Bush.' What does that mean?"
"I don't know what the 'post' means, but apparently there was a tape recording," Richard answered. "This is a matter which had just arisen in the U.S. Attorney's office. I was getting briefed. . .it's an individual who had been arrested and is asserting, or there is a suggestion of, a relationship to the CIA and Hasenfus and the exportation of explosives to the countries." (At the time of Richard's conversation with Bill Price, Weekly was actually about two weeks away from being arrested; he was still in Burma with Bo Gritz on their latest POW hunt. Price was apparently briefing Richard on the tapes of intercontinental telephone conversations Weekly was having with his police officer friend in Oklahoma City. Who made the tapes and how the Justice Department obtained them isn't clear.)
"And he's alleging or indicating to someone that he's connected with the CIA and that he is reporting to people who report to Bush?" Naughton asked.
"That's what he's asserting," Richard agreed.
"What is the current status, if you know?"
"I cannot—as far as I recall, it was referred to the—"
"Referred to the Independent Counsel?" Naughton asked.
"To the IC," Richard confirmed. "And I just don't know the status."
Because the case had been turned over to Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra committees didn't pursue the Weekly matter further, Naughton said. Unfortunately, neither did Walsh, because Walsh had nothing but the sketchiest details about the Weekly case. The tapes on which Weekly discusses the CIA, Hasenfus, and George Bush do not appear to have been turned over, nor were Weekly's phone records made available to Walsh's office.
While no evidence has surfaced suggesting that State Department officials Bode and Pino knew of Blandón's criminal enterprises, records show that they were not neophytes on the subject of the Contras and cocaine. At the same time they were dealing with Scott Weekly, the two men were trying desperately to get another CIA-linked cocaine trafficker out of prison because of his past assistance to the Contras.
The federal prisoner, Jose Bueso Rosa, had been indicted in 1984 for his part in a bizarre scheme to assassinate the president of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordova, and stage a coup d'etat, using the proceeds of a giant cocaine sale to finance it. President Suazo had drawn Bueso Rosa's wrath by dumping Honduran Army chief General Gustavo Álvarez, a fanatical anti-Communist who was one of the fathers and chief supporters of the Contras. Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, had been one of Álvarez's top aides, and the cocaine coup was intended to restore Álvarez and his men to power.
Unfortunately for the plotters, the two American military officers they hired to murder Suazo went to the FBI. In late October 1984, a collection of Cubans and Honduran arms merchants was arrested at a remote inland airstrip in Florida with 764 pounds of cocaine, valued at between $10 million and $40 million wholesale. "The announcements at the time of the arrests made by the Departments of State and Justice quite properly categorized this case as a triumph for the Administration's policy against terrorism and against narcotics," former State Department official Francis J. McNeil would later testify. But not everyone in the Reagan administration was happy about it. Bueso Rosa was one of the CIA's main collaborators in Honduras on the Contra project, working closely with the agency in setting up Contra bases, supply lines, aircraft repairs, and a host of other, still classified, activities.
In the summer of 1986 the Honduran's attorney flew to Washington and met with Colonel Pino, who began a vigorous lobbying campaign at State and Justice to turn Bueso Rosa loose, even though he had been indicted for racketeering, conspiracy, and attempted murder-for-hire. "The colonel asserted an American intelligence interest in Bueso Rosa, in getting Bueso Rosa off," McNeil testified. As Pino explained to Iran-Contra investigators, "General Bueso Rosa. . .had information which he could use against us, as he had been privy to a large amount of specific information."
To get Washington's attention, Bueso Rosa's lawyers subpoenaed Oliver North, CIA officer Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte, and former U.S. Army general Paul Gorman to testify at the Honduran's racketeering trial as defense witnesses. In several computer messages to NSC chief John Poindexter in September 1986, North fretted that the case could become a major headache for the Administration. "The problem with the Bueso case is that Bueso was the man whom Negroponte, Gorman, Clarridge and I worked out arrangements [censored]," North wrote. "Only Gorman, Clarridge and I were fully aware of all that Bueso was doing on our behalf."
North's computer messages about Bueso Rosa are revealing for another reason: they illustrate just how skewed the Reagan administration's sense of justice had become regarding its "War on Drugs." At the same time Reagan and Bush were whipping the American public into a frenzy over street-corner crack dealers, North and other top administration officials were livid that Bueso Rosa had even been charged with a crime. "Justice is justifiably upset that none of this info was made available to them prior to indictment or before/during trial," North griped. "Clarridge was totally unaware that CIA had responded to a Justice query on the case with the terse comment that they 'had no interest in the case.' Elliott [Abrams] was also somewhat chagrined to learn that some at State had been urging rigorous prosecution and sentencing." Bueso Rosa was advised to "keep his mouth shut and everything would be worked out," North wrote.
The general later agreed to drop the subpoenas and pleaded guilty with the understanding that he would be sentenced to a minimum security facility at Eglin Air Force base in Florida, North wrote, "for a short period (days or weeks) and then walk free." Justice Department official Mark Richard, who met with North to discuss the case, said he was told that Bueso Rosa "was going to go in from one entrance and out the other entrance, you know, out the rear." An all-star collection of U.S. government officials, including Colonel Nestor Pino, Bill Bode, and the former head of the DIA, appeared as character witnesses or sent glowing letters to Bueso Rosa's judge, urging him to go easy on the admitted racketeer. But since Bueso Rosa's co conspirators had been hit with sentences of up to thirty years, it was impossible to let the ringleader off scot-free. He was given a five-year sentence and assigned to a federal prison in Tallahassee, a much harsher environment than the "country club" camp at Eglin he'd been promised.
In North's view, that only made things worse. "Our major concern—Gorman, North, Clarridge—is that when Bueso Rosa finds out what is really happening to him, he will break his longstanding silence about the Nicaraguan Resistance and other sensitive operations," North wrote to Poindexter. "Gorman, North, Clarridge, Revell [an FBI official], [Steven] Trott and [Elliott] Abrams will cabal quietly in the morning to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process and start spilling the beans. Will advise."
The next day, North told Poindexter there had been "a good meeting this morning with all concerned." The Justice Department had graciously agreed to transfer Bueso Rosa to Eglin, work out a deal to reduce his sentence, and buttonhole the federal judge to "explain. . .our equities in this matter. Revell/Trott both believe this will result in approval of the petition for probationary release and deportation to Honduras. Discretely briefing Bueso and his attorney on this whole process should alleviate concerns. . .that Bueso will start singing songs that nobody wants to hear," North advised. "Bottom line: all now seems headed in the right direction."
But Colonel Pino and the Defense Intelligence Agency got a little too happy. A few days before Bueso Rosa was to report to prison, State Department official McNeil got a call from an upset justice Department official, informing him that the DIA had scheduled a luncheon honoring the would-be assassin in the Pentagon's Executive Dining Room. McNeil, outraged by the news, called a meeting between State, the Justice Department, the DIA, and the CIA to get the invitation squelched. The ceremony was eventually canceled, but McNeil said he was warned by a superior that he was "looking for trouble" if he kept sticking his nose into the Bueso Rosa affair. "It was very nasty business," McNeil, a former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, would later testify. He told Congress he suspected something sinister was behind the frantic machinations of North and company to get the Honduran out of the United States.
"I must tell you this is circumstantial, but it seems to me that the circumstantial evidence is such that one has to wonder if there is not a narcotics angle," McNeil testified. "What was so embarrassing that at least eight senior officers of the U.S. government would think it necessary to get this man off?" In a deposition, Justice Department official Steve Trott claimed he didn't know why he went through such contortions for Bueso Rosa, other than that North had told him about the possible release of "sensitive" information.
And what information was that? "I never got into the substance of what it was," Trott claimed. Whatever it was, Bueso Rosa held his tongue, and after doing three years at Eglin he was shipped back to Honduras. In a 1995 interview with the Baltimore Sun, he gave a chilling insight into the kinds of secrets he possessed: he disclosed that the CIA had equipped and trained the Honduran army's official death squad, the 316 Battalion, which was blamed for the torture, disappearance, and murders of hundreds of Hondurans in the 1980s.
Bode's assistant, Nestor Pino, also denied that he had officially authorized the missions, but said he was "convinced that the efforts taken by Colonel Gritz to train Afghan Freedom Fighters are in consonance with and complimentary of U.S. policy for Afghanistan and that Colonel Gritz and Mr. Weekly saw it that way." Their activities, Pino declared, "were inspired by a strong desire to support the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation and by an even stronger desire to advance the interests of the United States."
In federal court, Weekly and Gritz testified that the money to pay for the Afghan training exercises came from Stanford Technology, one of the companies fronting for Oliver North's "Enterprise," the quasi-governmental arms dealership at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. Stanford Technology was used by North and his agents to launder the profits of the Iranian missile sales. During the Iran/Contra deposition of Stanford Technology's owner, Albert Hakim, he admitted that approximately $900,000 from his various front companies was paid out "for miscellaneous projects at the request of Lt. Col. North."
In late 1986 Gritz and Weekly's training program—conducted in the Nevada desert on land owned by the federal government—was accidentally exposed by a law student in Oklahoma City who was married to a policeman. "She was sitting in her apartment one night when Weekly and this cop show up with 200 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives," recalled former federal prosecutor Stephen Korotash, who handled the case. "They were looking to store it somewhere. She happened to mention it to her father and Dad called the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms]." The ATF learned that Weekly had loaded the C-4 aboard two commercial passenger flights to Las Vegas and then left the country. An ATF report on the Weekly investigation, found in the CIA's files during an internal probe in 1997, "indicated that Weekly claimed he had done this for CIA."
ATF agents initially suspected that Weekly might be a terrorist until they got a look at his long-distance telephone records for September and October of 1986. Among other things, they found calls to Colonel Pino at the State Department; to William Logan, southwest regional director of the U.S. Customs Service; to the National Security Council; and to defense contractor United Technologies.
The agents broke the news to federal prosecutor Korotash, who was not pleased. The storm over the Iran-Contra scandal was then reaching a crescendo and the last thing Korotash wanted was to be dragged into that maelstrom. "My first thought was: 'Oh, great. Here I am picking my nose in Oklahoma and now I've stumbled into a Contra deal.' That's what I thought this was and I can remember thinking, 'How in the hell did I get ahold of a case like this?'"
No stranger to the workings of government, Korotash bounced the Weekly investigation up the bureaucratic ladder, and it kept right on bouncing, all the way to the top of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington. Records show that on December 2, 1986, Assistant U.S. Attorney General William F. Weld was briefed on the case. According to Weld's notes of the briefing, Weekly was somehow connected to the U.S. State Department and had made long-distance phone calls to a Lieutenant Colonel Tom Harvey, who was on the staff of the National Security Council. (Gritz has said Harvey was supervising the POW hunt he and Weekly were on at the time and provided them with White House and NSC credentials. Harvey has denied that.)
Korotash's supervisor, Oklahoma City U.S. attorney William Price, asked Weld, if he should "proceed with such cases?" Weld told him to go ahead, and then asked one of his aides, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark M. Richard, to look into the case.
Richard already had some background in this area. Earlier that year he'd been given an award by the CIA for "Protection of National Security during Criminal Prosecutions." A CIA spokesman said Richard was honored for "his outstanding work in the case against Ronald Rewald," the Honolulu investment banker who claims his investment firm funneled CIA money to covert operations, including Weekly and Gritz's earliest POW missions. Thanks to Richard's efforts, Rewald's ties to the CIA were not permitted to surface publicly at his criminal trial.
Richard called U.S. Attorney Bill Price on December 11, 1986, and was briefed on the investigation. Several months later, Richard was grilled about that briefing in a deposition taken by Iran-Contra committee lawyer Pamela Naughton. According to a transcript of the deposition, Naughton confronted Richard with two sheets of lined paper filled with handwritten notes.
"Tell me what that is," Naughton said. "Is that your handwriting, first of all?"
"I'd plead guilty to that," Richard cracked. "This is the gist of the conversation I had with Mr. Price and his briefing of me regarding an individual who had been arrested and his possible involvement in some CIA/Contra-related activities."
"Now, about a third of the way down—individual's name was Weekly? Is that —am I reading that correctly?" Naughton asked. "W-E-E-K-L-Y?"
"Yes."
"About a third of the way down it says—if I'm reading correctly—'Weekly posts on tape that he's tied into CIA and Hasenfus. Said he reports to people reporting to Bush.' What does that mean?"
"I don't know what the 'post' means, but apparently there was a tape recording," Richard answered. "This is a matter which had just arisen in the U.S. Attorney's office. I was getting briefed. . .it's an individual who had been arrested and is asserting, or there is a suggestion of, a relationship to the CIA and Hasenfus and the exportation of explosives to the countries." (At the time of Richard's conversation with Bill Price, Weekly was actually about two weeks away from being arrested; he was still in Burma with Bo Gritz on their latest POW hunt. Price was apparently briefing Richard on the tapes of intercontinental telephone conversations Weekly was having with his police officer friend in Oklahoma City. Who made the tapes and how the Justice Department obtained them isn't clear.)
"And he's alleging or indicating to someone that he's connected with the CIA and that he is reporting to people who report to Bush?" Naughton asked.
"That's what he's asserting," Richard agreed.
"What is the current status, if you know?"
"I cannot—as far as I recall, it was referred to the—"
"Referred to the Independent Counsel?" Naughton asked.
"To the IC," Richard confirmed. "And I just don't know the status."
Because the case had been turned over to Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra committees didn't pursue the Weekly matter further, Naughton said. Unfortunately, neither did Walsh, because Walsh had nothing but the sketchiest details about the Weekly case. The tapes on which Weekly discusses the CIA, Hasenfus, and George Bush do not appear to have been turned over, nor were Weekly's phone records made available to Walsh's office.
While no evidence has surfaced suggesting that State Department officials Bode and Pino knew of Blandón's criminal enterprises, records show that they were not neophytes on the subject of the Contras and cocaine. At the same time they were dealing with Scott Weekly, the two men were trying desperately to get another CIA-linked cocaine trafficker out of prison because of his past assistance to the Contras.
The federal prisoner, Jose Bueso Rosa, had been indicted in 1984 for his part in a bizarre scheme to assassinate the president of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordova, and stage a coup d'etat, using the proceeds of a giant cocaine sale to finance it. President Suazo had drawn Bueso Rosa's wrath by dumping Honduran Army chief General Gustavo Álvarez, a fanatical anti-Communist who was one of the fathers and chief supporters of the Contras. Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, had been one of Álvarez's top aides, and the cocaine coup was intended to restore Álvarez and his men to power.
Unfortunately for the plotters, the two American military officers they hired to murder Suazo went to the FBI. In late October 1984, a collection of Cubans and Honduran arms merchants was arrested at a remote inland airstrip in Florida with 764 pounds of cocaine, valued at between $10 million and $40 million wholesale. "The announcements at the time of the arrests made by the Departments of State and Justice quite properly categorized this case as a triumph for the Administration's policy against terrorism and against narcotics," former State Department official Francis J. McNeil would later testify. But not everyone in the Reagan administration was happy about it. Bueso Rosa was one of the CIA's main collaborators in Honduras on the Contra project, working closely with the agency in setting up Contra bases, supply lines, aircraft repairs, and a host of other, still classified, activities.
In the summer of 1986 the Honduran's attorney flew to Washington and met with Colonel Pino, who began a vigorous lobbying campaign at State and Justice to turn Bueso Rosa loose, even though he had been indicted for racketeering, conspiracy, and attempted murder-for-hire. "The colonel asserted an American intelligence interest in Bueso Rosa, in getting Bueso Rosa off," McNeil testified. As Pino explained to Iran-Contra investigators, "General Bueso Rosa. . .had information which he could use against us, as he had been privy to a large amount of specific information."
To get Washington's attention, Bueso Rosa's lawyers subpoenaed Oliver North, CIA officer Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte, and former U.S. Army general Paul Gorman to testify at the Honduran's racketeering trial as defense witnesses. In several computer messages to NSC chief John Poindexter in September 1986, North fretted that the case could become a major headache for the Administration. "The problem with the Bueso case is that Bueso was the man whom Negroponte, Gorman, Clarridge and I worked out arrangements [censored]," North wrote. "Only Gorman, Clarridge and I were fully aware of all that Bueso was doing on our behalf."
North's computer messages about Bueso Rosa are revealing for another reason: they illustrate just how skewed the Reagan administration's sense of justice had become regarding its "War on Drugs." At the same time Reagan and Bush were whipping the American public into a frenzy over street-corner crack dealers, North and other top administration officials were livid that Bueso Rosa had even been charged with a crime. "Justice is justifiably upset that none of this info was made available to them prior to indictment or before/during trial," North griped. "Clarridge was totally unaware that CIA had responded to a Justice query on the case with the terse comment that they 'had no interest in the case.' Elliott [Abrams] was also somewhat chagrined to learn that some at State had been urging rigorous prosecution and sentencing." Bueso Rosa was advised to "keep his mouth shut and everything would be worked out," North wrote.
The general later agreed to drop the subpoenas and pleaded guilty with the understanding that he would be sentenced to a minimum security facility at Eglin Air Force base in Florida, North wrote, "for a short period (days or weeks) and then walk free." Justice Department official Mark Richard, who met with North to discuss the case, said he was told that Bueso Rosa "was going to go in from one entrance and out the other entrance, you know, out the rear." An all-star collection of U.S. government officials, including Colonel Nestor Pino, Bill Bode, and the former head of the DIA, appeared as character witnesses or sent glowing letters to Bueso Rosa's judge, urging him to go easy on the admitted racketeer. But since Bueso Rosa's co conspirators had been hit with sentences of up to thirty years, it was impossible to let the ringleader off scot-free. He was given a five-year sentence and assigned to a federal prison in Tallahassee, a much harsher environment than the "country club" camp at Eglin he'd been promised.
In North's view, that only made things worse. "Our major concern—Gorman, North, Clarridge—is that when Bueso Rosa finds out what is really happening to him, he will break his longstanding silence about the Nicaraguan Resistance and other sensitive operations," North wrote to Poindexter. "Gorman, North, Clarridge, Revell [an FBI official], [Steven] Trott and [Elliott] Abrams will cabal quietly in the morning to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process and start spilling the beans. Will advise."
The next day, North told Poindexter there had been "a good meeting this morning with all concerned." The Justice Department had graciously agreed to transfer Bueso Rosa to Eglin, work out a deal to reduce his sentence, and buttonhole the federal judge to "explain. . .our equities in this matter. Revell/Trott both believe this will result in approval of the petition for probationary release and deportation to Honduras. Discretely briefing Bueso and his attorney on this whole process should alleviate concerns. . .that Bueso will start singing songs that nobody wants to hear," North advised. "Bottom line: all now seems headed in the right direction."
But Colonel Pino and the Defense Intelligence Agency got a little too happy. A few days before Bueso Rosa was to report to prison, State Department official McNeil got a call from an upset justice Department official, informing him that the DIA had scheduled a luncheon honoring the would-be assassin in the Pentagon's Executive Dining Room. McNeil, outraged by the news, called a meeting between State, the Justice Department, the DIA, and the CIA to get the invitation squelched. The ceremony was eventually canceled, but McNeil said he was warned by a superior that he was "looking for trouble" if he kept sticking his nose into the Bueso Rosa affair. "It was very nasty business," McNeil, a former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, would later testify. He told Congress he suspected something sinister was behind the frantic machinations of North and company to get the Honduran out of the United States.
"I must tell you this is circumstantial, but it seems to me that the circumstantial evidence is such that one has to wonder if there is not a narcotics angle," McNeil testified. "What was so embarrassing that at least eight senior officers of the U.S. government would think it necessary to get this man off?" In a deposition, Justice Department official Steve Trott claimed he didn't know why he went through such contortions for Bueso Rosa, other than that North had told him about the possible release of "sensitive" information.
And what information was that? "I never got into the substance of what it was," Trott claimed. Whatever it was, Bueso Rosa held his tongue, and after doing three years at Eglin he was shipped back to Honduras. In a 1995 interview with the Baltimore Sun, he gave a chilling insight into the kinds of secrets he possessed: he disclosed that the CIA had equipped and trained the Honduran army's official death squad, the 316 Battalion, which was blamed for the torture, disappearance, and murders of hundreds of Hondurans in the 1980s.
According to court records, similar promises of leniency were made to Scott
Weekly to keep him quiet about his involvement with Bode, Pino, and the
"Enterprise." As in Bueso Rosa's case, the efforts looks particularly unseemly,
given the fact that, at the time they were undertaken, Weekly was under federal
investigation in connection with Danilo Blandón's cocaine ring—something that
was known at the highest levels of the CIA, the Justice Department, and the
DIA.
On December 21, 1986, just two days after Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was appointed to investigate the burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal, Weekly got a call at his home in San Diego and was asked to meet with federal agents at a room in the downtown Holiday Inn, overlooking the harbor. Weekly had just returned from his latest ROW hunt with Bo Gritz, allegedly on behalf of the NSC, but he discovered that the agents—accompanied by Oklahoma City federal prosecutor Steve Korotash—didn't want to discuss that. They wanted to know about the C-4 he'd placed on the airliners before he departed for the Far East.
When Weekly explained that the C-4 had been safely detonated in the Nevada desert, he said the prosecutor offered him a deal: if he kept quiet and pleaded guilty to illegally transporting the C-4 to Las Vegas, he-would be released on unsupervised probation, and the case would be closed. "One of the points specifically that we agreed on was that this investigation would start and stop with me, and that it would not affect other or involve other personnel," Weekly later testified. Prosecutor Korotash denied making any such promises.
The next morning Weekly and Korotash flew to Oklahoma City, where the prosecutor "began hurriedly telling me all the answers I was to give to the officials. . .and emphatically told [me] if things got out of hand he would answer for me or direct my answers." Weekly said Korotash advised him to "lie low and keep mum."
Weekly went before a federal judge that afternoon and, without ever having spoken to a defense lawyer, tersely pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of explosives. Under Korotash's gentle questioning, he admitted to shipping plastic explosives on two commercial airliners to Las Vegas but was never asked why. Korotash helpfully pointed out that the passengers were never in danger and asked that Weekly be released from custody without having to post bail. Federal judge Ralph G. Thompson said it was "not routine that people be released on bail in cases of this kind," but he acquiesced. The hearing was over in a matter of minutes and Weekly was soon on his way home with the whole episode safely behind him. Or so he thought.
Then Bo Gritz began shooting his mouth off about the CIA and drugs.
Following his last POW foray, the superpatriot had come home radicalized. He and Weekly had trekked into the mountains of northern Burma to visit an opium warlord named Khun Sa, who commanded a tribal army estimated at 40,000 men. Gritz has said their primary mission from Colonel Harvey at the NSC was to check out a tip Vice President George Bush had received, suggesting that the warlord knew something about missing American servicemen in Laos. (As with Gritz's earlier missions, the U.S. government denies any involvement. However, no one has explained why Gritz and Weekly were meeting and speaking with an NSC official.)
After a three-day hike into the jungles, Gritz said, they found Khun Sa and discovered he knew nothing about American POWs. What he did know about, Gritz claimed, was a CIA-run heroin trafficking network that had been operating in the region for more than a decade, helping to finance a secret CIA army of anti-Communist guerillas in Laos. Gritz said Khun Sa, who controlled much of the raw opium trade in the Golden Triangle, opened up his ledger books and provided him with the names of the CIA officials allegedly involved and dates of their meetings with him.
Gritz and Weekly returned to the United States in mid-December 1986 with videotapes of their talks with the opium king, and Gritz said he immediately turned them over to Colonel Harvey of the NSC. Gritz said Harvey told him to "erase and forget" what he'd learned from the opium trafficker because the information would "hurt the government." Instead, Gritz put on his medals and his fatigues and went public, charging that U.S. government officials had been dealing heroin and that the Reagan administration was trying to cover that fact up. He pointed to Scott Weekly's recent arrest and conviction on the explosives charges as "proof" of a high-level conspiracy to silence and discredit them because of their awkward discoveries.
While the national press largely ignored the flamboyant veteran's strange tale, it received some wire service and radio coverage, particularly in Oklahoma City. Weekly's prosecutor, Steve Korotash, was driving to the supermarket one Saturday morning when he heard Gritz come over his car radio "claiming that I was retaliating against Scott Weekly because of some information Gritz, had gotten from Khun Sa," Korotash said. "I didn't know who the fuck Khun Sa was. I didn't have a clue." Korotash said he laughed off Gritz's charges as "idiotic."
But others didn't find Gritz quite so amusing. A month later, federal agents raided his house in Sandy Valley, Nevada, hauling away boxes of paperwork. Simultaneously, Weekly began receiving pressure from prosecutors to implicate Gritz in the illegal transportation of the C-4 to Nevada, he said. Weekly refused to cooperate, arguing that he'd made a deal not to finger anyone. "Weekly was protecting the hell out of Bo Gritz," former U.S. attorney Price confirmed in an interview. "I mean, that's what really pissed us off."
When Weekly's sentencing on the explosives case rolled around in April 1987, Korotash filed a confidential memorandum with the court, saying Weekly had refused to take a polygraph test and failed to cooperate with the government. A letter from the U.S. Customs Service commending Weekly for his help in other investigations was withdrawn at the last minute. Judge Wayne Alley told Weekly that it appeared he was "simply trying to protect the names of others. . .. That's your privilege but it comes at a cost." Alley sentenced Weekly to five years in federal prison, requiring him to serve a year before he could be eligible for parole, and fined him $2,000. "I got my brains fucked out," Weekly would later complain.
A month later, in May 1987, Gritz was indicted by a federal grand jury in Nevada for misusing a passport during his travels to Southeast Asia. Gritz admitted that he had used a phony passport but claimed the government had given it to him. Pointing out that Oliver North had committed the same "crime" during his overseas travels and had never been indicted for it, Gritz told UPI that the charges were "intended to silence his accusations that the CIA and Defense Department are involved in opium trafficking." Grit and his attorney vowed to turn his trial into an expose of government drug dealing, but things never got that far. The charges were dismissed by a federal judge before trial.
After spending 14 months in prison, Scott Weekly was ordered released after a hearing revealed that he had indeed been working for the U.S. government at the time of his offenses, and had also been working as a U.S. Customs informant for many years. He was placed on probation, with the unusual caveat that he report any future contact "with any officer or employee of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency or any other intelligence agency of the United States."
While the Justice Department pounced on Gritz and Weekly for what seem to be trivial violations of federal law, it showed no such zeal when it came to pursuing Danilo Blandón and the South Central L.A. drug gang. That investigation, though it involved massive amounts of cocaine and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, couldn't seem to generate any interest in the halls of justice.
Former L.A. County deputy DA Susan Bryant-Deason, now a Superior Court judge, told police in 1996 that she met several times in the weeks following the raids with Sergeant Ed Huffman of Majors II and federal agents in an effort to keep the Blandón investigation alive. Bryant-Deason, the supervising attorney on the Blandón ease, had been "cross-designated" as a special assistant U.S. attorney, which allowed her to prosecute certain federal cases as well as state crimes. She said the agents "were frustrated and wanted to do something but had insufficient evidence."
Why three grams of cocaine and a confession were insufficient to charge Blandón with a crime has never been explained, particularly since the L.A. police were hauling street dealers into court by the hundreds for possession of lesser amounts.
Despite the overall failure of the raids and the departure of the Majors, FBI agent Douglas Aukland and DEA agent Tom Schrettner kept plugging away. If they couldn't get their respective agencies to help them investigate the Nicaraguans' drug ring, they'd find someone who would. In November, the agents approached the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office and persuaded federal prosecutor Crossan Andersen to take their case to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), a special Justice Department unit that puts together agents from a variety of law enforcement entities to go after major drug trafficking organizations. The prosecutor agreed to offer the case to OCDETF, which was very selective about the cases it adopted for prosecution. They had to be big. On November 25, 1986, Andersen wrote to the IRS criminal investigation division in Laguna Niguel, asking the IRS to supply agents to help out on the case.
"As you know," Andersen wrote, "this is a narcotics investigation involving FBI, DEA, and LASO units in Riverside and Whittier, California. It is a sensitive matter since it involves allegations of drug running in support of the CONTRA movement in Nicaragua and wholly unconfirmed allegations of CIA involvement."
"Sensitive" was hardly the word for it. It was white hot. The same morning Andersen was dictating his letter to the IRS, President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese were solemnly announcing to a throng of reporters in Washington that millions of dollars from the sale of missiles to the maniacal Iranian government had been illegally diverted to the Contras by Lt. Col. Oliver North. The Iran-Contra scandal was bursting open at the seams and, suddenly, the strange papers found in Blandón's and Lister's houses that summer suggesting drugs-for-arms deals and unexplained U.S. Treasury deposits to foreign bank accounts took on a new significance. Aukland was temporarily assigned to work on "Operation Front Door," the FBI's code name for its Iran/Contra probe, and ordered to look into any possible connections between Lister and Oliver North's arms ring.
Aukland interviewed a retired Secret Service agent who told him Lister had mentioned "selling arms to the Contras and that he worked for an Iranian." The next day, Aukland questioned Lister's realtor, who told of the ex-cop buying a house last summer with two sacks full of cash. When the realtor asked Lister where the money came from, Lister had informed him that he ran a "CIA approved" security business and was raising money for the Contras, which was also "CIA-approved." When Aukland finally got to Lister, he asked him pointblank "if he was involved in training of Contras." Lister, who stoutly denied knowing anything about North, clammed up and "requested that an unidentified representative of 'another agency' be present before he would answer that question."
Despite those intriguing leads, the FBI office in Los Angeles declared there was "no connection" between Lister and the Iran-Contra scandal and precluded any further investigation. The next month the FBI would learn that Lister "had told an unidentified neighbor over drinks that he worked for Oliver North and [Richard] Secord, and had sent arms shipments to the Contras." That lead also was not pursued. [And the FBI exists for what reason?certainly not for the people, must be to protect the government because that is what I always seeing it do.Never any justice with the FBI, just does not happen. DC]
While prosecutor Andersen and FBI agent Aukland were preparing their application to the Organized Crime task force, all hell began breaking loose down in Costa Rica. The secretive CIA and Contra operations going on there were suddenly international news and the little country started crawling with American reporters looking for a scoop. They found all kinds of evidence linking North, the White House, and the CIA to illegal Contra resupply activities. Ilopango was exposed and North's operatives hastily abandoned their airplanes, their barracks, and their safe houses and fled the country. The Costa Rican government began arresting Contras and Contra supporters for violating Costa Rican neutrality.
In early December 1986, Costa Rica's biggest newspaper, La Nacion, published an extensive series on Contra connections to drug trafficking there and one installment focused squarely on Norwin Meneses, describing him as a Contra supporter and financier who was holed up in Costa Rica under some type of protection, hiding from American drug agents.
The story sent the DEA office at the U.S. Embassy into a tizzy. Their top secret informant had just been outed as a major Contra drug trafficker—and not a week had gone by since the Iran-Contra scandal had exploded. If the Costa Rican government, which was becoming increasingly hostile to the Contras, started poking around, it wouldn't take long to discover the drug kingpin's special relationship with the U.S. Embassy. Something had to be done.
Meneses' handler, DEA agent Sandy Gonzalez, frantically cabled the DEA office in Los Angeles, asking for permission for Meneses to travel to the U.S. "as soon as possible." The newspaper, Gonzalez complained, had said Meneses "was being investigated by the Costa Rican government" and the publicity and the specter of deportation had Meneses scared. He was considering going underground, Gonzalez warned, which meant the "DEA would lose what appears to be one of the best sources of information to walk into a DEA office in years."
On December 21, without waiting for DEA approval, Meneses and his new partner, the longtime CIA agent "Roberto," left Costa Rica and flew to the United States. Officially, they were on a mission for the Costa Rican DEA: penetrate Blandón's organization and gather intelligence about its activities, under the code-name "Operation Perico." But it appears there were other factors behind the DEA's sudden urge to insert Meneses and the CIA agent into Blandón's organization: to avoid the embarrassment of Meneses falling into the hands of the Costa Rican police and, more importantly, to gather intelligence on just what the impending federal task force investigation in L.A. could expose if it delved too deeply into Blandón's drug ring.
Soon after the new year, a series of strange meetings took place in Los Angeles between Blandón, Meneses, the CIA agent "Roberto," and a top FDN official named Ivan Torres. Torres, a brother of The Trees—Jacinto and Edgar— was also Blandón's chief assistant for the L.A. cocaine operations. Roberto later reported back to the DEA on those meetings and his debriefing reports must have chilled the CIA and DEA to the bone.
"Ivan Torres, a Colombian national, said that his brothers, Jacinto and Edgar Torres, were distributing up to 1,000 kilograms of cocaine on a monthly basis in Los Angeles," one of the reports state. "According to Torres, Meneses and Blandón, Torres was the head of the West Coast branch of the FDN, which was supplying the Contras with weapons. Ivan Torres claims to be in contact with FBI and CIA representatives as a result of his involvement with the FDN. He claims to have been trained by the CIA in San Bernardino in an area made to resemble Nicaraguan terrain. He said the CIA wants to know about drug trafficking but only for their own purposes and not necessarily to assist law enforcement agencies.
"Torres told [Roberto] that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities and that they don't mind. He said they have gone so far as to encourage cocaine traffic by members of the Contras because they know that it is a good source of income. Some of this income has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama. . ."
The Majors' raids, Torres reported proudly, had not interfered with their cocaine sales to "Los Angeles black organizations." They had merely caused some management changes. "Blandón was keeping a low profile and may have turned over cocaine distribution to a black group in South Los Angeles to Jacinto Torres," the DEA report says, describing Blandón's sales to blacks as "half his trade. . .Blandón apparently cleaned up all his stash houses and dealt through intermediaries, if at all."
As for the informants who snitched them off to the DEA and FBI, Blandón and Torres knew who they were, Roberto reported: "These individuals would be killed sometime in the future." Nine months later, one of the men Blandón suspected, FDN member Carlos Rocha, was shot five times in the groin and legs while sitting in a hotel room in Guatemala but survived. Blandón denied any involvement.
What is most strange about these meetings between the Contra traffickers and the CIA agent is the fact that FBI agent Doug Aukland, who was leading the investigation, was never told of them until afterwards. Under Aukland's nose, the Costa Rican DEA office secretly brought Aukland's prime suspect into the country, sent him inside a drug ring the FBI agent had been investigating for months, and sent him back to Costa Rica—all without informing him. Aukland was staking out Blandón's auto dealership, Guerra Auto Sales, at the time of the meetings and he watched for eight straight days as an "unidentified male Latin" left Blandón's car lot in Fontana every morning with FDN official Ivan Torres by his side and drove into L.A. Only later was Aukland told that the mystery man was Norwin Meneses.
"Aukland said that he was particularly angry that he did not get a chance to debrief Meneses and had only last-minute notice that he could speak to [Roberto]," the Justice Department Inspector General said. Outraged, Aukland shot a cable off to FBI headquarters and the San Francisco FBI, telling them about Meneses newfound love for the DEA. In San Francisco, FBI agent Gordon Gibler read the cable and was "surprised. . .upset that the DEA had not shared this information with the FBI." A few days later, the San Francisco FBI issued arrest warrants for both Roberto and Meneses "because the FBI suspected them of conducting drug deals in San Francisco," Roberto later recalled. They quickly beat feet back to Costa Rica.
Other DEA offices also began wondering what the hell their Costa Rican comrades were up to. The San Francisco office angrily cabled Costa Rica complaining that it had no idea "who was being targeted by Meneses and [Roberto]" or what they were supposedly investigating. An accompanying cable was sent to DEA headquarters in Washington, inquiring "whether an indictment of Meneses by the San Francisco FBI will result in national security problems with other agencies."
It must have caused some concerns to someone because once Meneses had completed his mission and was safely back in his Costa Rican mansion, the drug lord suddenly had a change of heart. He was done. He just wasn't cut out to be an informant, he decided. As long as the FBI was trying to indict him, Meneses decreed, he would never go back to the United States and would never testify against anyone.
Furious that they had been duped, the FBI decided to even things up. Agents Aukland, Don Hale, and Gordon Gibler had put together enough evidence to indict Meneses for running a continuing criminal enterprise, they believed, a racketeering offense that carries a possible life term. That would fix both his ass and the DEA's for good. Norwin's informant days would be over and he'd never set foot on U.S. soil again. In February, Aukland and San Francisco FBI agent Gibler met with San Francisco U.S. Attorney Joe Russioniello (of Frogman case fame) and presented him with a list of reasons why Meneses needed to be indicted. Their prosecution memo detailed his long history of drug dealing and noted that there were three informants willing to testify publicly, one of whom claimed Meneses was a gun runner who may have worked for the CIA.
It didn't take a week for Russioniello's office to reject the FBI agents' proposal. Meneses would not be prosecuted, the agents were told, so long as the Blandón investigation was still underway in Los Angeles. Russioniello's office had made a deal with the U.S. Attorney in L.A. Once the L.A. case was done, Meneses would then be required to plead guilty to "a cocaine-related charge as part of his cooperation agreement" and maybe even do a little time. Until then, the agents were told, their case was officially on the inactive list.
Thanks to recently released Justice Department records, it now appears that there was no such "cooperation agreement" between Meneses and the Justice Department, that it was an invention to placate the FBI agents after their racketeering case was rejected for prosecution. Justice Department investigators could find no record of any such deal and the two federal prosecutors who were reported to have agreed to this scheme—Crossan Andersen and Eric Swenson— both specifically denied that an agreement ever existed.
If no deal existed, then it means that the real reason for not indicting Meneses in January 1987 was something else entirely. More likely, it was fear of the political blow such an indictment would have dealt the Contra program and the Reagan Administration in their darkest hour. The fact that the DEA was asking if Meneses' indictment would cause "national security problems for other agencies" shows just how wise the agency was to the potential ramifications of the case. And given what else was going on in Washington then, the DEA's nervousness was understandable. Iran-Contra was becoming more scandalous every day and the chances were increasing that the Contra drug issue was going to be dragged out of the shadows and exposed to the klieg lights of a headhunting media. An item in the January 13, 1987 Washington Talk column of the New York Times, headlined "Drugs and the Contras," gives an idea of just how horrifying official Washington found that prospect.
"Some senators say that any official inquiry on this topic, and how much if anything American officials knew about it, at this time would create such an uproar that it could derail the main thrusts of the Senate inquiry: to sort out the Reagan Administration's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the Contras," the Times reported.
With the San Francisco FBI now out of the picture, it was once again up to Riverside agents Aukland and Schrettner. Though their investigation had been burned, undermined, compromised, and backstabbed every step of the way, they still thought they had a few tricks left. For instance, they had Meneses' CIA sidekick, Roberto, who had already successfully penetrated the drug ring once. If he was supposed to be working for the DEA, they wanted him back on the job. In March 1987, Tom Schrettner called DEA agent Gonzalez in Costa Rica and told him to send Roberto back to California "to infiltrate the Blandón organization." But Gonzalez had more bad news about his pair of informants. Roberto wouldn't come to California without Meneses and Meneses wouldn't come back as long as the FBI was looking for him. Gonzalez told Schrettner he was so exasperated with Meneses he'd already gotten rid of him as an informant and would have no further contact, despite having deemed him an extraordinarily productive source only a few months earlier. Sorry, boys.
The agents' investigation sputtered along in this fashion for several more months. In May, federal prosecutor Crossan Andersen called Gonzalez in Costa Rica and told him to get Mr. CIA to California so he could be questioned by the agents. Gonzalez replied that he didn't think Roberto would ever come to California but promised to pass along a message. And by the way, Gonzalez added, he was being transferred to Bolivia and someone else was going to be handling the case from now on.
Only after months of pressure from DEA headquarters did Roberto finally agree to come to Los Angeles to meet with Schrettner and Aukland. According to Aukland, the operative "quickly made it clear that he would not testify." He was "still willing to make introductions" but that was it. He was also tight lipped about anything else he'd heard of Blandón's operation and "did not appreciably add to the information he had already given." He did point out that the Majors had missed $850,000 in cash Blandón had hidden in a safe in the bottom of his swimming pool. And he said FDN official Ivan Torres was bragging that the FBI was keeping him fully informed "of any police investigations against Blandón and himself."
A few days after those dispiriting debriefings, on July 17, 1987, Crossan Andersen pulled the plug on the OCDETF investigation. It had lasted less than seven months and had accomplished nothing—except to provide a cover for Meneses and his CIA associate to visit the U.S. and create suspicions that they were dealing dope. Even though the FBI had shelved a promising case against Meneses in San Francisco to ensure his cooperation in this one, the drug lord had proven virtually worthless.
Aukland lambasted the DEA in his case closing memorandum and in later interviews with Justice Department inspectors. "This case may have been viable with the assistance of DEA," Aukland wrote on September 16, 1987. "However, without that assistance, further efforts will not be worthwhile." Aukland was so frustrated with the case, he told the Justice Department, "he was glad to get rid of it. . .he was not getting sufficient help from the FBI in Los Angeles, Miami, or elsewhere with the case. . .he did not think he was getting cooperation from the DEA in Costa Rica."
Aukland packed up his files on Blandón and shipped them to the Miami FBI office in the vain hope that an agent there might be assigned to check up on the drug dealer the next time he blew through town. No one bothered. "We found no FBI records indicating that the Miami FBI office conducted any additional investigation of Blandón," the Justice Department Inspector General wrote. But once the case was officially shelved Norwin Meneses miraculously reappeared and, even more miraculously, the DEA hired him back and began issuing him visas that allowed him to travel in and out of the U.S. at will.
It was all over. At the height of the American public's outrage over the Iran/Contra scandal, a criminal investigation involving Contra cocaine sales in Los Angeles was dropped by the Justice Department, and a lid of secrecy was clamped on the case, one which would not come off for another ten years. In 1996, when the author began looking into the 1986 raids, sheriff's department officials would initially deny that they had ever occurred.
Deputy LAPD chief Glenn A. Levant felt that it was "abundantly clear that Ross was a vital link between major drug suppliers and lower level distributors and dealers."
On January 12, 1987, the sheriff's department and the LAPD formally joined forces, creating the Freeway Rick Task Force. It was one of the few times in the history of L.A. law enforcement that a single man had been the target of a multijurisdictional police squad. Prevented from waging war on Blandón, the police lowered their sights and trained them on his best customer.
"Ricky Ross is a Seven Four Hoover Crip whose success amongst Black gang members is well known," the task force's organizational report stated. "He has developed a large organization which handles weapons sales, multi-kilo cocaine shipments, and business enterprises as a result of surplus cash. Investments are known to involve real estate, commercial and residential."
Though Ross had made a concerted effort to keep a low profile—tooling around town in a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling, for example—by 1986–87 he'd become too successful for his own good. One day, he and Ollie Newell sat down and counted up the money they had stashed in their apartment. It took most of the afternoon, but by the time they were finished, Ross said, they were looking at $2.8 million "sitting on the floor, wrapped up in rubber bands." And that was the haul from just one house. They had cash squirreled away in apartments all over Los Angeles. "All of his locations had these big, huge solid steel floor safes," said Sergeant Sobel. "We had to call a locksmith to get him to drill the things. It took a long time to get in."
Ross could no longer hide his fortune, and after a while, he no longer cared to. When he was coming up, he said, "I was like this mysterious guy that everybody heard about but nobody knew." Now he began acting like another man he'd seen and admired in the movies—the Godfather—doling out favors, buying friendship, buying respect. (One L.A. television station would later run a special report entitled Ricky Ross, Gang Godfather.)
"He's become quite a heavyweight," LAPD captain Sandy Wasson told UPI. "He's sort of a local hero in the same way the drug cartel leaders are. He employs people. He spends a lot of money in the area and he owns a lot of property either through himself or through his family."
One of Ross's lieutenants, Cornell Ward, later tried to explain it to ABC News by saying: "He was a good bad guy."
"And the whole community saw him that way?" correspondent Forrest Sawyer asked.
"Exactly."
"God, that's hard to believe," Sawyer sputtered.
"It's easy," Ward assured him. "All you have to do is just go through the neighborhood and see." So Sawyer did, interviewing people who described Ross as a "well-liked person in the area." They told of the crack king buying new hoops and backboards for the neighborhood parks, field lights, uniforms for local teams. He bought turntables and sound equipment for struggling rap artists, and supplied the eggs for the neighborhood Easter egg hunt. He paid for new pews and an air conditioner for his mother's South Central church and sponsored a semipro football team. Any panhandler on the street would walk away with a wad of bills if he was lucky enough to bump into Freeway Rick.
"Everybody likes him, man, because he helps, he helps a lot of people," one South Central resident told the ABC News crew. "And the brother ain't really done nothing. It's just that he sold dope."
James Galipeau, a veteran probation officer in South Central, told the L.A. Times that Ross "was more like a Robin Hood-type guy. You never heard of him getting high or drinking or beating women or dealing dope to kids. The guy really had a reputation for helping people out and giving money back to the community." That popular opinion, along with his wealth and success, made Ross an ideal target for the L.A. law's first concerted attack on the crack suppliers of South Central. According to task force records, the police believed that cutting Ricky Ross down to size would not only be a propaganda victory for law enforcement but would "send a message to up and coming gang members that success is not guaranteed at any level."
"To successfully conclude an investigation aimed at Ricky Ross and his associates will be the genesis of future efforts directed at mid-level drug suppliers," the task force's initial report stated. "Success will send notice to others, and there are, that they are vulnerable and law enforcement can and will escalate the enforcement effort."
The cops estimated they would need sixty days "to infiltrate and conclude enforcement efforts to bring Ross's empire to a semi- or total conclusion." The sheriff's department assigned five narcotics detectives, and the LAPD contributed four, all of whom were "selected for their respective talents including knowledge of gangs and narcotics expertise."
Because Majors I had been sniffing around Ross since mid-1986, its supervisor, Sergeant Robert Sobel, was put in charge of the Freeway Rick Task Force. Sobel, a short, hard-charging narcotics detective, was nicknamed "El Diablo" by his men because of his fierce demeanor and penchant for working his detectives hard.
"He kind of fancied himself as a tough guy. Some guys, when they get a nickname, they say, 'Don't call me that.' But he kind of liked that one," said one of his former subordinates. "He'd stay out two or three days in the field. If he told you to be there at seven in the morning, he'd be there at six."
In keeping with Sobel's personal motto—"March or Die"—all nine task force detectives were put on full cash overtime, so they could keep up twenty-four hour surveillances and soften the blow by earning extra spending money. "A great many man hours are anticipated by the detectives," a January 1987 LAPD report said. "The overall investigation will require extended hours of work involving standard investigative techniques and surveillance of the primary suspect and associates."
For task force detective Steve Polak, who had been working the streets of South Central since the dawn of the crack era, nailing Ricky Ross became his personal mission in life. He made no bones about his feelings toward the young dealer: He hated him.
"What he did, he poisoned tens of thousands of people. He overdosed them. He killed them. There are a lot of crack babies out there now because of him," said Polak, who holds Ross personally responsible for starting the L.A. crack plague.
"Yeah, I could say he caused it. . .. There's no telling how many tens of thousands of people he touched. And not just in California, but like I said, it spread throughout the entire United States what he did with his organization. So he's responsible. He's responsible for a major cancer that still hasn't stopped spreading, even here in Los Angeles."
With nine detectives assigned to look after him, Freeway Rick started feeling the heat very soon. "When the task force was finally formed, we just dedicated seven days a week on him," Polak said proudly. "And we just dogged him until he couldn't take it anymore." That was putting it mildly. On January 21, 1987, Polak and his men hit the Freeway Motor Inn like a tornado. "The entire motel [all rooms] were searched," a task force report stated. "In room #5 currency and paperwork were seized in Ricky Ross's name, 31 grams of rock cocaine, $6,819 and a sophisticated 800 Mhz hand-held repeater radio was discovered. Investigation disclosed Ricky Ross had purchased six of these radios for approximately $10,000 in cash."
They raided Ross's mother's house on West Eighty-seventh Place the same day, finding "a stolen 9mm Uzi and two point blank bullet proof vests." The search on Annie Ross's house sent Rick into a tirade. He called during the raid and had it out with Polak. "Going after my mom, that was the kind of shit they was doing. Polak even went to court to get her day-care license taken away. Can you believe it?" Ross grumped. A week later, as Annie Ross and a minister friend arrived at the airport to catch a plane to Texas, the task force pulled them into a trailer, searched their luggage and their car, fired questions at them, and held them long enough so that they missed their flight. Then they let them go.
As the weeks went on, it got worse. Three task force detectives searched Ollie Newell's apartment and gave Newell a vicious beating, punching and kicking him and "smothering him with a plastic bag," court records state. Newell's friend, Robert Robertson, also got a beating and had $30,000 taken from him. "They would go raid my rental properties and break the furniture, kick holes in the walls and knock the windows out," Ross complained. "And then these renters would be mad at me, you know, and stop paying their rent."
Ross's attorney, Alan Fenster, started filing formal complaints with the department on behalf of Ross and his friends, accusing the officers of beatings, thefts, property destruction, and false arrests. Sobel and his men fired back with a search warrant for Fenster's financial records, accusing him of being a money launderer and cocaine fiend. Fenster's complaints were perfunctorily investigated by the sheriff's internal affairs branch and closed with no findings of wrongdoing. His complaints to the Justice Department's civil rights division were similarly dismissed.
By the end of January the task force had served fifteen search warrants, arrested five people connected with Ross's organization, and seized nearly eight pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $1.3 million on the street, $63,122 in cash, and twenty guns. They also seized enough paperwork and telephone records to give them an inkling of just how vast Ross's cocaine distribution system was. "The investigation has expanded to include other co-conspirators and demonstrated that Ricky Ross is resourceful, has elaborate communications and is well organized," a task force weekly activity report stated.
Sobel called Ross's enterprise "a cartel. . .it's a major cocaine dealing organization that stretches from California to Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio. We hit one place that was a lab, a full-on laboratory to make rock cocaine, just 30 gallon garbage cans full of cocaine. We seized like 28 pounds of finished product there."
Despite Danilo Blandón's reassurance to Ross that nothing would change, the Nicaraguan had already made up his mind to get out of Los Angeles. The raids on his home and other locations had blown his cover, and now his best customer was under siege. In the aftermath of the raids, Blandón's wife Chepita had begun to show signs of a nervous breakdown. "When I went to Miami to visit my family, the doctor told me. My wife was sick from the nerves. . .. The doctor called me and told me I have to change from L.A. 'If you want to have a wife. . .change from that place, [or] your wife will be in a psychiatric hospital.'"
There were business considerations as well. Blandón's attorney, Bradley Brunon, said Blandón's used car business had been extremely successful and had enjoyed "widespread patronage from the Latin community." But the raids "engendered widespread publicity in that small community and Mr. Blandón was practically out of business." After getting word in December 1986 that no criminal charges would result, he quietly began closing up shop, selling his used car lot, his restaurants, putting his house up for sale, collecting his debts, and sending Chepita and the girls ahead to Miami to stay with her uncle, Orlando Murillo, while he tied up loose ends. By the time he was ready to go, he was packing $1.6 million in cash and a whole new attitude.
"I was prepared to change my life," he testified. But that didn't mean letting a perfectly good cocaine ring go to waste. There was still quite a bit of money left for his countrymen to wring out of the streets of South Central. "I handed it to the Nicaraguans," Blandón said, referring to his drug enterprise. "I introduced my customers to them and they continued doing the business."
"Using your old contacts?"
"Yes, and my supplier and my buyers."
In other words, despite the fact that the LAPD, L.A. Sheriff's Department, FBI, DEA, CIA, DIA, and IRS were now fully aware of their cocaine ring, the Nicaraguans kept right on dealing. The only thing that changed was the man on top—and even that was not much of a difference. Blandón's successors were two of Norwin Meneses cocaine-dealing colleagues, Roger Sandino Martínez, known as "Chocoyo," and Jose "Chinito" Gonzalez.
"Roger Sandino was one of these guys from the old days, the old Contra connection," Blandón's lawyer, Bradley Brunon, said. "He was an Original Gangster Contra." He was also a veteran drug trafficker who seemed to enjoy the same kind of protection as Blandón. DEA records show that Sandino was arrested in October 1980 in Hialeah, Florida, in possession of 50,000 Quaalude tablets. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to thirty months in federal prison. Despite his conviction and the fact that he was in the U.S. illegally at the time of his arrest, Sandino was never deported, and he continued dealing drugs. In 1984 he set up an import-export business in Miami with the help of a Coral Gables attorney who was in business with several of Blandón's FDN associates, including former National Guard major general Gustavo "El Tigre" Medina and businessman Donald Barrios.
Sandino was busted again in April 1986, this time as part of the biggest cocaine case on the Atlantic Coast. DEA agents in Norfolk, Virginia, charged him and fourteen other people—including the son-in-law of Bolivian cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez-Gómez—with conspiracy to import 700 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $158 million. The dope wasn't theirs, however. It belonged to the DEA, which brought it into the United States from Bolivia to use as bait in a reverse sting, a scheme in which the police pose as cocaine sellers in order to seize money from drug buyers. In this case, they seized $1.3 million from Sandino and his associates.
The DEA has censored many of its records dealing with Roger Sandino, citing privacy reasons, so his role in the Bolivian drug operation isn't known. What is clear is that he was never brought to trial. Though arrested, Sandino somehow managed to wriggle out of custody, and the DEA issued a fugitive warrant for his capture. (When L.A. detective Tom Gordon ran Sandino's name through NADDIS several months later, however, there was no mention in his file of the Virginia indictment or the fugitive warrant.)
Months after fleeing Virginia, Sandino showed up in Los Angeles, just in time to take over the South Central drug ring from the departing Danilo Blandón. After Blandón moved, Ross said, he would call him in Miami and place his orders, and Roger Sandino's partner, Jose Gonzalez, would handle the pickups and deliveries. Blandón confirmed that he continued working with the Nicaraguan operation in L.A., solving problems, settling disputes, and collecting commissions from the drug sales. "They used to be calling me all the time if they have some problem," Blandón said. "I was the middleman, you see, like—I was making something. I was making something. . .then I had to call Rick to tell him, 'Hey, what's going on?'"
By then, Ross said, the cocaine business was losing some of its allure. His friend and mentor was three thousand miles away. He owned about $5 million worth of real estate and still had more money than he could spend. And for the first time, Ross said, he began having second thoughts about just how mellow his product really was. His current girlfriend, Mary Louise Bronner, the mother of two of his five children, was now a crack addict, thanks to him. The chickens were starting to come home.
"At first, I had never saw anybody addicted to cocaine. It took a while before —before it started to affect anybody that we dealt with. I mean nobody—at first, it was like everybody that was using cocaine drove big cars and, you know, stayed in the Baldwin Hills area and then it started to change and we started to see the effects that it was having." Ross said the first twinges of conscience came when Jocelyn Clements, a longtime friend and one of his earliest customers, turned into a raging crackhead. "I found out that she was taking all her welfare money and her food stamps and stuff and spending it on cocaine," he said.
But there were other reasons for his restiveness. By early 1987 the L.A. crack market had become saturated, so much so that many gang members were hitting the road to find greener pastures and emptier street corners. Crips and Bloods were bumping into each other in cities across the United States. "Everywhere you go, you know what I'm saying, anywhere you go, you're gonna see some people from L.A.," one Crip dealer told California Department of Justice researchers in 1988. "If they got, you know, a dope house out there or a dope street out there. . .you'll run into somebody on that street from L.A."
Said another: "Out of town where nobody else ain't at. . .that's where the money's being made because there's too much competition in Los Angeles. It's got too many dope dealers in Los Angeles competing against each other. So they take it out of town. The profits are better. Here you can sell an ounce for $600. Over there you can sell it for $1,500." Cocaine prices in L.A. had been dropping through the floor because so much of it was coming in. Kilos that had once cost Ross $50,000 were now going for $12,000, which the L.A. Times blamed partly on Ross, since he was buying in such volume.
By 1986–87, Ross said, a good chunk of his business consisted of exporting the drug to higher-priced areas, where he was able to undercut the local yokels by thousands of dollars a key. He'd made connections in Bakersfield, Fresno, St. Louis, Texas, and Alabama. Police in St. Louis said cocaine prices there went into a free fall once the Crips and Bloods arrived. "Gang members have flooded the market here with excellent cocaine at good prices. The local dealers have to succumb to these people," one detective complained to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
The L.A. market was also getting tougher. Ross was no longer the only crack dealer in South Central with Colombian connections. He had begun facing competition from Brian "Waterhead Bo" Bennett, a fast-rising young dealer who'd hooked up with a Colombian named Antonio Villabona in 1985 and started moving large amounts of cocaine. But Bennett was sloppy and obvious, carrying brown paper bags stuffed with cash around in public. Within a year the police were onto him and he was arrested in 1988. L.A. law enforcement officials held a press conference to announce that, for the first time, they had proof that the black gangs had made direct connections with the Colombian cartels.
"What they didn't realize," observed L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz, "was that Ricky had hit that level about six years earlier."
Danilo's decision to move back east made Ross think. If Danilo felt it was time to hang it up, maybe it was. He was usually right about things like that. Ross started scaling back his drug sales, gradually turning over the business to his partner, Ollie Newell, and their lieutenants, Mike Smith and Cornell Ward. He began making plans for an early retirement.
"I had slowed down on my drug activity tremendously," Ross said. "I might have been selling once a week to maybe one or two people. They would call me and say that they needed something, and I would call Mr. Blandón and get it and give it to them. So it was hard for the police to catch me doing something because I was barely doing anything. You know, they thought I was still going full bore, but I wasn't."
The Freeway Rick Task Force wasn't slowing down a bit, though. Every week another batch of search warrants would be served, another pile of cash would be seized, and another one of Ross's friends or relatives would get roughed up or hauled off to jail. "We had some very good informants that were very close to Ricky Ross and he knew it. Ricky Ross was getting upset," Sobel said.
In their rush to put Ross out of business, though, the detectives' tactics became increasingly questionable. According to federal court records, the task force ransacked an apartment owned by one of Ross's girlfriends in February 1987, picked up a doll belonging to his daughter, and then "as a threat to Ricky Ross, they plunged a knife into the doll's head, pinning it to a wall, along with a note: 'This is you, Ricky.'"
Sergeant Sobel said that "as time went on it became common knowledge among the entire Task force that [LAPD detective] Polak was carrying around a kilo of dope in the tire well of his vehicle. Polak would he bragging about a present for Ricky Ross when they ran into him. There were constant jokes made about the dope they had ready [to plant on] Ricky Ross when they found him."
One evening in mid-April 1987, Ross, Newell, and Cornell Ward closed up Rick's auto parts store on Western Avenue, the Big Palace of Wheels, and piled into the crack king's brand-new Ford station wagon, intending to cruise around for a while. "looked in the rearview mirror and I saw some cars coming up behind me with no lights on and first I thought it was somebody maybe trying to rob us or something. We didn't know. So I started speeding in the car and then a red light caught me and a car pulled up right up on the side of me and the guy let his window down."
Newell recognized the driver. It was task force detective Sergeant Robert Tolmaire, a black officer who was regarded by Ross's crew as the most dangerous and violent detective on the whole squad. "He stuck this gun out the window, pointing it at the ear," Ross said. Newell turned to Ross and asked what he intended to do. Ross said he didn't know.
"Well," Newell replied calmly, "you know they're going to kill you. They already said they're going to kill you."
Ross stomped on the gas and roared through the traffic light, with the detectives in hot pursuit. He raced down a side street and decided to make a run for it. The station wagon swerved violently into a driveway and Ross leaped out, sprinting through a yard and hopping a fence.
"Behind me, I could hear them shooting," Ross said. The shots missed him, and he managed to hitch a ride on a passing bus and escape.
Newell and Ward weren't so lucky. They said they were handcuffed and tossed into the back of a police car, and the deputies took turns beating on them with metal flashlights and leather saps. Ward was also smacked with a shotgun.
Then, according to court records, LAPD detective Steve Polak drove up, opened the trunk of his car, and "retrieved a kilo of cocaine in a black gym bag. Polak then displayed the bag to the others present, claiming that Ross had dropped the bag as he ran." Since shots had been fired that had to be explained, the deputies also agreed to accuse Ross of shooting at them.
Ross was charged with a variety of crimes—four counts of conspiracy, three counts of transporting controlled substances, one count of assault with a deadly weapon upon a police officer—and was declared a fugitive from justice. Assuming that every cop in L.A. would be gunning for him as a result of the assault charge, Ross went into hiding, lying low for three weeks as the task force scoured the city, tearing through his friends' houses on an all-out manhunt. On May 5, 1987, he decided things had gone far enough.
"I felt that it went past just. . .duty," Ross explained in court testimony. "My whole thing, I felt, became personal. It wasn't like just Joe the drug dealer. It had become more of a personal kind of vendetta with them and me. I didn't have no vendetta with them because if they arrested me, that was their job, but it seemed like they had a vendetta with me."
Ross drove down to the sheriff's office and turned himself in. He was locked up in the L.A. County Jail on a $1 million bond. The LAPD issued a press release, announcing the demise of Ross's "multi-million dollar mid-level rock cocaine organization. . .estimated [to have] netted over $12 million during the first four months of 1987." The body count was impressive indeed: sixty-one search warrants; thirty-nine arrests, including that of the ringleader; and $13.3 million in cocaine seized, along with $240,000 in cash and sixty-two firearms, including "revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, Uzi's, Mac-10's, a fully automatic Mac-11 machine gun" as well as "five bulletproof vests."
The investigation had also "developed comprehensive intelligence information regarding street gang involvement in rock cocaine trafficking throughout the Western United States," Deputy LAPD chief Levant wrote, and he called the Freeway Rick Task Force "a model for other jurisdictions to follow to attack mid-level cocaine trafficking in California."
But the celebrations were destined to be short. Apparently unable to resist the temptation, several members of the Freeway Rick Task Force dropped by the jail to inspect their prize. They started goading Ross about Alan Fenster, telling him that his coke-snorting lawyer had abandoned him and was leaving him to hang. His only hope, they told him, was to confess and go to work for them because if he didn't, he was going to be in jail for a very, very long time. Fenster was never going to get him out of this jam.
They'd set him up, the detectives crowed, and they'd set him up good. He was going down for the count because they had their stories worked out, and the case was tight as a virgin. "The discussion was tape recorded," U.S. Justice Department records state. "They discussed their frame-up of Ross and unsuccessfully tried to turn Ross against his Colombian cocaine source. Ultimately, Ross filed a motion to dismiss based on the encounter and the existence of the tape recording was revealed at the hearing. The judge insisted that the tape be produced."
Before it was turned over, amateurish attempts were made to doctor it. A forensic expert concluded that eleven erasures had been made in an effort to obliterate the detectives' accusations against Fenster and their discussions of a beating administered to Ross's brother, David.
After hearing the tape, the judge threw the charges out of court.
Freeway Rick was free once again.
In one month, he'd dodged bullets twice—both lead and legal—and he didn't intend to give the task force a third shot at him. Someone else could be the crack king from now on.
next
"I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope"
On December 21, 1986, just two days after Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was appointed to investigate the burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal, Weekly got a call at his home in San Diego and was asked to meet with federal agents at a room in the downtown Holiday Inn, overlooking the harbor. Weekly had just returned from his latest ROW hunt with Bo Gritz, allegedly on behalf of the NSC, but he discovered that the agents—accompanied by Oklahoma City federal prosecutor Steve Korotash—didn't want to discuss that. They wanted to know about the C-4 he'd placed on the airliners before he departed for the Far East.
When Weekly explained that the C-4 had been safely detonated in the Nevada desert, he said the prosecutor offered him a deal: if he kept quiet and pleaded guilty to illegally transporting the C-4 to Las Vegas, he-would be released on unsupervised probation, and the case would be closed. "One of the points specifically that we agreed on was that this investigation would start and stop with me, and that it would not affect other or involve other personnel," Weekly later testified. Prosecutor Korotash denied making any such promises.
The next morning Weekly and Korotash flew to Oklahoma City, where the prosecutor "began hurriedly telling me all the answers I was to give to the officials. . .and emphatically told [me] if things got out of hand he would answer for me or direct my answers." Weekly said Korotash advised him to "lie low and keep mum."
Weekly went before a federal judge that afternoon and, without ever having spoken to a defense lawyer, tersely pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of explosives. Under Korotash's gentle questioning, he admitted to shipping plastic explosives on two commercial airliners to Las Vegas but was never asked why. Korotash helpfully pointed out that the passengers were never in danger and asked that Weekly be released from custody without having to post bail. Federal judge Ralph G. Thompson said it was "not routine that people be released on bail in cases of this kind," but he acquiesced. The hearing was over in a matter of minutes and Weekly was soon on his way home with the whole episode safely behind him. Or so he thought.
Then Bo Gritz began shooting his mouth off about the CIA and drugs.
Following his last POW foray, the superpatriot had come home radicalized. He and Weekly had trekked into the mountains of northern Burma to visit an opium warlord named Khun Sa, who commanded a tribal army estimated at 40,000 men. Gritz has said their primary mission from Colonel Harvey at the NSC was to check out a tip Vice President George Bush had received, suggesting that the warlord knew something about missing American servicemen in Laos. (As with Gritz's earlier missions, the U.S. government denies any involvement. However, no one has explained why Gritz and Weekly were meeting and speaking with an NSC official.)
After a three-day hike into the jungles, Gritz said, they found Khun Sa and discovered he knew nothing about American POWs. What he did know about, Gritz claimed, was a CIA-run heroin trafficking network that had been operating in the region for more than a decade, helping to finance a secret CIA army of anti-Communist guerillas in Laos. Gritz said Khun Sa, who controlled much of the raw opium trade in the Golden Triangle, opened up his ledger books and provided him with the names of the CIA officials allegedly involved and dates of their meetings with him.
Gritz and Weekly returned to the United States in mid-December 1986 with videotapes of their talks with the opium king, and Gritz said he immediately turned them over to Colonel Harvey of the NSC. Gritz said Harvey told him to "erase and forget" what he'd learned from the opium trafficker because the information would "hurt the government." Instead, Gritz put on his medals and his fatigues and went public, charging that U.S. government officials had been dealing heroin and that the Reagan administration was trying to cover that fact up. He pointed to Scott Weekly's recent arrest and conviction on the explosives charges as "proof" of a high-level conspiracy to silence and discredit them because of their awkward discoveries.
While the national press largely ignored the flamboyant veteran's strange tale, it received some wire service and radio coverage, particularly in Oklahoma City. Weekly's prosecutor, Steve Korotash, was driving to the supermarket one Saturday morning when he heard Gritz come over his car radio "claiming that I was retaliating against Scott Weekly because of some information Gritz, had gotten from Khun Sa," Korotash said. "I didn't know who the fuck Khun Sa was. I didn't have a clue." Korotash said he laughed off Gritz's charges as "idiotic."
But others didn't find Gritz quite so amusing. A month later, federal agents raided his house in Sandy Valley, Nevada, hauling away boxes of paperwork. Simultaneously, Weekly began receiving pressure from prosecutors to implicate Gritz in the illegal transportation of the C-4 to Nevada, he said. Weekly refused to cooperate, arguing that he'd made a deal not to finger anyone. "Weekly was protecting the hell out of Bo Gritz," former U.S. attorney Price confirmed in an interview. "I mean, that's what really pissed us off."
When Weekly's sentencing on the explosives case rolled around in April 1987, Korotash filed a confidential memorandum with the court, saying Weekly had refused to take a polygraph test and failed to cooperate with the government. A letter from the U.S. Customs Service commending Weekly for his help in other investigations was withdrawn at the last minute. Judge Wayne Alley told Weekly that it appeared he was "simply trying to protect the names of others. . .. That's your privilege but it comes at a cost." Alley sentenced Weekly to five years in federal prison, requiring him to serve a year before he could be eligible for parole, and fined him $2,000. "I got my brains fucked out," Weekly would later complain.
A month later, in May 1987, Gritz was indicted by a federal grand jury in Nevada for misusing a passport during his travels to Southeast Asia. Gritz admitted that he had used a phony passport but claimed the government had given it to him. Pointing out that Oliver North had committed the same "crime" during his overseas travels and had never been indicted for it, Gritz told UPI that the charges were "intended to silence his accusations that the CIA and Defense Department are involved in opium trafficking." Grit and his attorney vowed to turn his trial into an expose of government drug dealing, but things never got that far. The charges were dismissed by a federal judge before trial.
After spending 14 months in prison, Scott Weekly was ordered released after a hearing revealed that he had indeed been working for the U.S. government at the time of his offenses, and had also been working as a U.S. Customs informant for many years. He was placed on probation, with the unusual caveat that he report any future contact "with any officer or employee of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency or any other intelligence agency of the United States."
While the Justice Department pounced on Gritz and Weekly for what seem to be trivial violations of federal law, it showed no such zeal when it came to pursuing Danilo Blandón and the South Central L.A. drug gang. That investigation, though it involved massive amounts of cocaine and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, couldn't seem to generate any interest in the halls of justice.
20
"It is a sensitive matter"
When all was said and done, the October 1986 L.A. County Sheriff's raids
were a mere irritant to the Nicaraguans. Blandón had lost a thimbleful of dope.
None of his people were arrested, and he and Chepita were out of jail in a matter
of hours. "He laughed about it," Ross said. "I thought it was some pretty bad
shit, but he told me there was nothing to worry about. Nobody'd found nothing.
Nothing was gonna change." Blandón and Ross continued buying and selling
millions of dollars worth of cocaine every week, even as the FBI watched.
Records show Blandón was under periodic surveillance through the first half of
1987. Former L.A. County deputy DA Susan Bryant-Deason, now a Superior Court judge, told police in 1996 that she met several times in the weeks following the raids with Sergeant Ed Huffman of Majors II and federal agents in an effort to keep the Blandón investigation alive. Bryant-Deason, the supervising attorney on the Blandón ease, had been "cross-designated" as a special assistant U.S. attorney, which allowed her to prosecute certain federal cases as well as state crimes. She said the agents "were frustrated and wanted to do something but had insufficient evidence."
Why three grams of cocaine and a confession were insufficient to charge Blandón with a crime has never been explained, particularly since the L.A. police were hauling street dealers into court by the hundreds for possession of lesser amounts.
Despite the overall failure of the raids and the departure of the Majors, FBI agent Douglas Aukland and DEA agent Tom Schrettner kept plugging away. If they couldn't get their respective agencies to help them investigate the Nicaraguans' drug ring, they'd find someone who would. In November, the agents approached the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office and persuaded federal prosecutor Crossan Andersen to take their case to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), a special Justice Department unit that puts together agents from a variety of law enforcement entities to go after major drug trafficking organizations. The prosecutor agreed to offer the case to OCDETF, which was very selective about the cases it adopted for prosecution. They had to be big. On November 25, 1986, Andersen wrote to the IRS criminal investigation division in Laguna Niguel, asking the IRS to supply agents to help out on the case.
"As you know," Andersen wrote, "this is a narcotics investigation involving FBI, DEA, and LASO units in Riverside and Whittier, California. It is a sensitive matter since it involves allegations of drug running in support of the CONTRA movement in Nicaragua and wholly unconfirmed allegations of CIA involvement."
"Sensitive" was hardly the word for it. It was white hot. The same morning Andersen was dictating his letter to the IRS, President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese were solemnly announcing to a throng of reporters in Washington that millions of dollars from the sale of missiles to the maniacal Iranian government had been illegally diverted to the Contras by Lt. Col. Oliver North. The Iran-Contra scandal was bursting open at the seams and, suddenly, the strange papers found in Blandón's and Lister's houses that summer suggesting drugs-for-arms deals and unexplained U.S. Treasury deposits to foreign bank accounts took on a new significance. Aukland was temporarily assigned to work on "Operation Front Door," the FBI's code name for its Iran/Contra probe, and ordered to look into any possible connections between Lister and Oliver North's arms ring.
Aukland interviewed a retired Secret Service agent who told him Lister had mentioned "selling arms to the Contras and that he worked for an Iranian." The next day, Aukland questioned Lister's realtor, who told of the ex-cop buying a house last summer with two sacks full of cash. When the realtor asked Lister where the money came from, Lister had informed him that he ran a "CIA approved" security business and was raising money for the Contras, which was also "CIA-approved." When Aukland finally got to Lister, he asked him pointblank "if he was involved in training of Contras." Lister, who stoutly denied knowing anything about North, clammed up and "requested that an unidentified representative of 'another agency' be present before he would answer that question."
Despite those intriguing leads, the FBI office in Los Angeles declared there was "no connection" between Lister and the Iran-Contra scandal and precluded any further investigation. The next month the FBI would learn that Lister "had told an unidentified neighbor over drinks that he worked for Oliver North and [Richard] Secord, and had sent arms shipments to the Contras." That lead also was not pursued. [And the FBI exists for what reason?certainly not for the people, must be to protect the government because that is what I always seeing it do.Never any justice with the FBI, just does not happen. DC]
While prosecutor Andersen and FBI agent Aukland were preparing their application to the Organized Crime task force, all hell began breaking loose down in Costa Rica. The secretive CIA and Contra operations going on there were suddenly international news and the little country started crawling with American reporters looking for a scoop. They found all kinds of evidence linking North, the White House, and the CIA to illegal Contra resupply activities. Ilopango was exposed and North's operatives hastily abandoned their airplanes, their barracks, and their safe houses and fled the country. The Costa Rican government began arresting Contras and Contra supporters for violating Costa Rican neutrality.
In early December 1986, Costa Rica's biggest newspaper, La Nacion, published an extensive series on Contra connections to drug trafficking there and one installment focused squarely on Norwin Meneses, describing him as a Contra supporter and financier who was holed up in Costa Rica under some type of protection, hiding from American drug agents.
The story sent the DEA office at the U.S. Embassy into a tizzy. Their top secret informant had just been outed as a major Contra drug trafficker—and not a week had gone by since the Iran-Contra scandal had exploded. If the Costa Rican government, which was becoming increasingly hostile to the Contras, started poking around, it wouldn't take long to discover the drug kingpin's special relationship with the U.S. Embassy. Something had to be done.
Meneses' handler, DEA agent Sandy Gonzalez, frantically cabled the DEA office in Los Angeles, asking for permission for Meneses to travel to the U.S. "as soon as possible." The newspaper, Gonzalez complained, had said Meneses "was being investigated by the Costa Rican government" and the publicity and the specter of deportation had Meneses scared. He was considering going underground, Gonzalez warned, which meant the "DEA would lose what appears to be one of the best sources of information to walk into a DEA office in years."
On December 21, without waiting for DEA approval, Meneses and his new partner, the longtime CIA agent "Roberto," left Costa Rica and flew to the United States. Officially, they were on a mission for the Costa Rican DEA: penetrate Blandón's organization and gather intelligence about its activities, under the code-name "Operation Perico." But it appears there were other factors behind the DEA's sudden urge to insert Meneses and the CIA agent into Blandón's organization: to avoid the embarrassment of Meneses falling into the hands of the Costa Rican police and, more importantly, to gather intelligence on just what the impending federal task force investigation in L.A. could expose if it delved too deeply into Blandón's drug ring.
Soon after the new year, a series of strange meetings took place in Los Angeles between Blandón, Meneses, the CIA agent "Roberto," and a top FDN official named Ivan Torres. Torres, a brother of The Trees—Jacinto and Edgar— was also Blandón's chief assistant for the L.A. cocaine operations. Roberto later reported back to the DEA on those meetings and his debriefing reports must have chilled the CIA and DEA to the bone.
"Ivan Torres, a Colombian national, said that his brothers, Jacinto and Edgar Torres, were distributing up to 1,000 kilograms of cocaine on a monthly basis in Los Angeles," one of the reports state. "According to Torres, Meneses and Blandón, Torres was the head of the West Coast branch of the FDN, which was supplying the Contras with weapons. Ivan Torres claims to be in contact with FBI and CIA representatives as a result of his involvement with the FDN. He claims to have been trained by the CIA in San Bernardino in an area made to resemble Nicaraguan terrain. He said the CIA wants to know about drug trafficking but only for their own purposes and not necessarily to assist law enforcement agencies.
"Torres told [Roberto] that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities and that they don't mind. He said they have gone so far as to encourage cocaine traffic by members of the Contras because they know that it is a good source of income. Some of this income has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama. . ."
The Majors' raids, Torres reported proudly, had not interfered with their cocaine sales to "Los Angeles black organizations." They had merely caused some management changes. "Blandón was keeping a low profile and may have turned over cocaine distribution to a black group in South Los Angeles to Jacinto Torres," the DEA report says, describing Blandón's sales to blacks as "half his trade. . .Blandón apparently cleaned up all his stash houses and dealt through intermediaries, if at all."
As for the informants who snitched them off to the DEA and FBI, Blandón and Torres knew who they were, Roberto reported: "These individuals would be killed sometime in the future." Nine months later, one of the men Blandón suspected, FDN member Carlos Rocha, was shot five times in the groin and legs while sitting in a hotel room in Guatemala but survived. Blandón denied any involvement.
What is most strange about these meetings between the Contra traffickers and the CIA agent is the fact that FBI agent Doug Aukland, who was leading the investigation, was never told of them until afterwards. Under Aukland's nose, the Costa Rican DEA office secretly brought Aukland's prime suspect into the country, sent him inside a drug ring the FBI agent had been investigating for months, and sent him back to Costa Rica—all without informing him. Aukland was staking out Blandón's auto dealership, Guerra Auto Sales, at the time of the meetings and he watched for eight straight days as an "unidentified male Latin" left Blandón's car lot in Fontana every morning with FDN official Ivan Torres by his side and drove into L.A. Only later was Aukland told that the mystery man was Norwin Meneses.
"Aukland said that he was particularly angry that he did not get a chance to debrief Meneses and had only last-minute notice that he could speak to [Roberto]," the Justice Department Inspector General said. Outraged, Aukland shot a cable off to FBI headquarters and the San Francisco FBI, telling them about Meneses newfound love for the DEA. In San Francisco, FBI agent Gordon Gibler read the cable and was "surprised. . .upset that the DEA had not shared this information with the FBI." A few days later, the San Francisco FBI issued arrest warrants for both Roberto and Meneses "because the FBI suspected them of conducting drug deals in San Francisco," Roberto later recalled. They quickly beat feet back to Costa Rica.
Other DEA offices also began wondering what the hell their Costa Rican comrades were up to. The San Francisco office angrily cabled Costa Rica complaining that it had no idea "who was being targeted by Meneses and [Roberto]" or what they were supposedly investigating. An accompanying cable was sent to DEA headquarters in Washington, inquiring "whether an indictment of Meneses by the San Francisco FBI will result in national security problems with other agencies."
It must have caused some concerns to someone because once Meneses had completed his mission and was safely back in his Costa Rican mansion, the drug lord suddenly had a change of heart. He was done. He just wasn't cut out to be an informant, he decided. As long as the FBI was trying to indict him, Meneses decreed, he would never go back to the United States and would never testify against anyone.
Furious that they had been duped, the FBI decided to even things up. Agents Aukland, Don Hale, and Gordon Gibler had put together enough evidence to indict Meneses for running a continuing criminal enterprise, they believed, a racketeering offense that carries a possible life term. That would fix both his ass and the DEA's for good. Norwin's informant days would be over and he'd never set foot on U.S. soil again. In February, Aukland and San Francisco FBI agent Gibler met with San Francisco U.S. Attorney Joe Russioniello (of Frogman case fame) and presented him with a list of reasons why Meneses needed to be indicted. Their prosecution memo detailed his long history of drug dealing and noted that there were three informants willing to testify publicly, one of whom claimed Meneses was a gun runner who may have worked for the CIA.
It didn't take a week for Russioniello's office to reject the FBI agents' proposal. Meneses would not be prosecuted, the agents were told, so long as the Blandón investigation was still underway in Los Angeles. Russioniello's office had made a deal with the U.S. Attorney in L.A. Once the L.A. case was done, Meneses would then be required to plead guilty to "a cocaine-related charge as part of his cooperation agreement" and maybe even do a little time. Until then, the agents were told, their case was officially on the inactive list.
Thanks to recently released Justice Department records, it now appears that there was no such "cooperation agreement" between Meneses and the Justice Department, that it was an invention to placate the FBI agents after their racketeering case was rejected for prosecution. Justice Department investigators could find no record of any such deal and the two federal prosecutors who were reported to have agreed to this scheme—Crossan Andersen and Eric Swenson— both specifically denied that an agreement ever existed.
If no deal existed, then it means that the real reason for not indicting Meneses in January 1987 was something else entirely. More likely, it was fear of the political blow such an indictment would have dealt the Contra program and the Reagan Administration in their darkest hour. The fact that the DEA was asking if Meneses' indictment would cause "national security problems for other agencies" shows just how wise the agency was to the potential ramifications of the case. And given what else was going on in Washington then, the DEA's nervousness was understandable. Iran-Contra was becoming more scandalous every day and the chances were increasing that the Contra drug issue was going to be dragged out of the shadows and exposed to the klieg lights of a headhunting media. An item in the January 13, 1987 Washington Talk column of the New York Times, headlined "Drugs and the Contras," gives an idea of just how horrifying official Washington found that prospect.
"Some senators say that any official inquiry on this topic, and how much if anything American officials knew about it, at this time would create such an uproar that it could derail the main thrusts of the Senate inquiry: to sort out the Reagan Administration's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the Contras," the Times reported.
With the San Francisco FBI now out of the picture, it was once again up to Riverside agents Aukland and Schrettner. Though their investigation had been burned, undermined, compromised, and backstabbed every step of the way, they still thought they had a few tricks left. For instance, they had Meneses' CIA sidekick, Roberto, who had already successfully penetrated the drug ring once. If he was supposed to be working for the DEA, they wanted him back on the job. In March 1987, Tom Schrettner called DEA agent Gonzalez in Costa Rica and told him to send Roberto back to California "to infiltrate the Blandón organization." But Gonzalez had more bad news about his pair of informants. Roberto wouldn't come to California without Meneses and Meneses wouldn't come back as long as the FBI was looking for him. Gonzalez told Schrettner he was so exasperated with Meneses he'd already gotten rid of him as an informant and would have no further contact, despite having deemed him an extraordinarily productive source only a few months earlier. Sorry, boys.
The agents' investigation sputtered along in this fashion for several more months. In May, federal prosecutor Crossan Andersen called Gonzalez in Costa Rica and told him to get Mr. CIA to California so he could be questioned by the agents. Gonzalez replied that he didn't think Roberto would ever come to California but promised to pass along a message. And by the way, Gonzalez added, he was being transferred to Bolivia and someone else was going to be handling the case from now on.
Only after months of pressure from DEA headquarters did Roberto finally agree to come to Los Angeles to meet with Schrettner and Aukland. According to Aukland, the operative "quickly made it clear that he would not testify." He was "still willing to make introductions" but that was it. He was also tight lipped about anything else he'd heard of Blandón's operation and "did not appreciably add to the information he had already given." He did point out that the Majors had missed $850,000 in cash Blandón had hidden in a safe in the bottom of his swimming pool. And he said FDN official Ivan Torres was bragging that the FBI was keeping him fully informed "of any police investigations against Blandón and himself."
A few days after those dispiriting debriefings, on July 17, 1987, Crossan Andersen pulled the plug on the OCDETF investigation. It had lasted less than seven months and had accomplished nothing—except to provide a cover for Meneses and his CIA associate to visit the U.S. and create suspicions that they were dealing dope. Even though the FBI had shelved a promising case against Meneses in San Francisco to ensure his cooperation in this one, the drug lord had proven virtually worthless.
Aukland lambasted the DEA in his case closing memorandum and in later interviews with Justice Department inspectors. "This case may have been viable with the assistance of DEA," Aukland wrote on September 16, 1987. "However, without that assistance, further efforts will not be worthwhile." Aukland was so frustrated with the case, he told the Justice Department, "he was glad to get rid of it. . .he was not getting sufficient help from the FBI in Los Angeles, Miami, or elsewhere with the case. . .he did not think he was getting cooperation from the DEA in Costa Rica."
Aukland packed up his files on Blandón and shipped them to the Miami FBI office in the vain hope that an agent there might be assigned to check up on the drug dealer the next time he blew through town. No one bothered. "We found no FBI records indicating that the Miami FBI office conducted any additional investigation of Blandón," the Justice Department Inspector General wrote. But once the case was officially shelved Norwin Meneses miraculously reappeared and, even more miraculously, the DEA hired him back and began issuing him visas that allowed him to travel in and out of the U.S. at will.
It was all over. At the height of the American public's outrage over the Iran/Contra scandal, a criminal investigation involving Contra cocaine sales in Los Angeles was dropped by the Justice Department, and a lid of secrecy was clamped on the case, one which would not come off for another ten years. In 1996, when the author began looking into the 1986 raids, sheriff's department officials would initially deny that they had ever occurred.
👮👮👮👮👮👮👮
If the Blandón investigation produced anything useful for the L.A. police, it was
the knowledge that Freeway Rick Ross was the Man in South Central. In order
to make a dent in the crack trade there, they were going to have to shut him
down. "Back then Ricky Ross was a major dealer and he was affecting South
Central L.A. He was supplying most of the dope in that region," said Sergeant
Robert Sobel, the supervisor of the Majors I squad. "We were hearing from
informants about murders and dealing cocaine directly with the Colombians and
all kinds of bad things happening in L.A." Deputy LAPD chief Glenn A. Levant felt that it was "abundantly clear that Ross was a vital link between major drug suppliers and lower level distributors and dealers."
On January 12, 1987, the sheriff's department and the LAPD formally joined forces, creating the Freeway Rick Task Force. It was one of the few times in the history of L.A. law enforcement that a single man had been the target of a multijurisdictional police squad. Prevented from waging war on Blandón, the police lowered their sights and trained them on his best customer.
"Ricky Ross is a Seven Four Hoover Crip whose success amongst Black gang members is well known," the task force's organizational report stated. "He has developed a large organization which handles weapons sales, multi-kilo cocaine shipments, and business enterprises as a result of surplus cash. Investments are known to involve real estate, commercial and residential."
Though Ross had made a concerted effort to keep a low profile—tooling around town in a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling, for example—by 1986–87 he'd become too successful for his own good. One day, he and Ollie Newell sat down and counted up the money they had stashed in their apartment. It took most of the afternoon, but by the time they were finished, Ross said, they were looking at $2.8 million "sitting on the floor, wrapped up in rubber bands." And that was the haul from just one house. They had cash squirreled away in apartments all over Los Angeles. "All of his locations had these big, huge solid steel floor safes," said Sergeant Sobel. "We had to call a locksmith to get him to drill the things. It took a long time to get in."
Ross could no longer hide his fortune, and after a while, he no longer cared to. When he was coming up, he said, "I was like this mysterious guy that everybody heard about but nobody knew." Now he began acting like another man he'd seen and admired in the movies—the Godfather—doling out favors, buying friendship, buying respect. (One L.A. television station would later run a special report entitled Ricky Ross, Gang Godfather.)
"He's become quite a heavyweight," LAPD captain Sandy Wasson told UPI. "He's sort of a local hero in the same way the drug cartel leaders are. He employs people. He spends a lot of money in the area and he owns a lot of property either through himself or through his family."
One of Ross's lieutenants, Cornell Ward, later tried to explain it to ABC News by saying: "He was a good bad guy."
"And the whole community saw him that way?" correspondent Forrest Sawyer asked.
"Exactly."
"God, that's hard to believe," Sawyer sputtered.
"It's easy," Ward assured him. "All you have to do is just go through the neighborhood and see." So Sawyer did, interviewing people who described Ross as a "well-liked person in the area." They told of the crack king buying new hoops and backboards for the neighborhood parks, field lights, uniforms for local teams. He bought turntables and sound equipment for struggling rap artists, and supplied the eggs for the neighborhood Easter egg hunt. He paid for new pews and an air conditioner for his mother's South Central church and sponsored a semipro football team. Any panhandler on the street would walk away with a wad of bills if he was lucky enough to bump into Freeway Rick.
"Everybody likes him, man, because he helps, he helps a lot of people," one South Central resident told the ABC News crew. "And the brother ain't really done nothing. It's just that he sold dope."
James Galipeau, a veteran probation officer in South Central, told the L.A. Times that Ross "was more like a Robin Hood-type guy. You never heard of him getting high or drinking or beating women or dealing dope to kids. The guy really had a reputation for helping people out and giving money back to the community." That popular opinion, along with his wealth and success, made Ross an ideal target for the L.A. law's first concerted attack on the crack suppliers of South Central. According to task force records, the police believed that cutting Ricky Ross down to size would not only be a propaganda victory for law enforcement but would "send a message to up and coming gang members that success is not guaranteed at any level."
"To successfully conclude an investigation aimed at Ricky Ross and his associates will be the genesis of future efforts directed at mid-level drug suppliers," the task force's initial report stated. "Success will send notice to others, and there are, that they are vulnerable and law enforcement can and will escalate the enforcement effort."
The cops estimated they would need sixty days "to infiltrate and conclude enforcement efforts to bring Ross's empire to a semi- or total conclusion." The sheriff's department assigned five narcotics detectives, and the LAPD contributed four, all of whom were "selected for their respective talents including knowledge of gangs and narcotics expertise."
Because Majors I had been sniffing around Ross since mid-1986, its supervisor, Sergeant Robert Sobel, was put in charge of the Freeway Rick Task Force. Sobel, a short, hard-charging narcotics detective, was nicknamed "El Diablo" by his men because of his fierce demeanor and penchant for working his detectives hard.
"He kind of fancied himself as a tough guy. Some guys, when they get a nickname, they say, 'Don't call me that.' But he kind of liked that one," said one of his former subordinates. "He'd stay out two or three days in the field. If he told you to be there at seven in the morning, he'd be there at six."
In keeping with Sobel's personal motto—"March or Die"—all nine task force detectives were put on full cash overtime, so they could keep up twenty-four hour surveillances and soften the blow by earning extra spending money. "A great many man hours are anticipated by the detectives," a January 1987 LAPD report said. "The overall investigation will require extended hours of work involving standard investigative techniques and surveillance of the primary suspect and associates."
For task force detective Steve Polak, who had been working the streets of South Central since the dawn of the crack era, nailing Ricky Ross became his personal mission in life. He made no bones about his feelings toward the young dealer: He hated him.
"What he did, he poisoned tens of thousands of people. He overdosed them. He killed them. There are a lot of crack babies out there now because of him," said Polak, who holds Ross personally responsible for starting the L.A. crack plague.
"Yeah, I could say he caused it. . .. There's no telling how many tens of thousands of people he touched. And not just in California, but like I said, it spread throughout the entire United States what he did with his organization. So he's responsible. He's responsible for a major cancer that still hasn't stopped spreading, even here in Los Angeles."
With nine detectives assigned to look after him, Freeway Rick started feeling the heat very soon. "When the task force was finally formed, we just dedicated seven days a week on him," Polak said proudly. "And we just dogged him until he couldn't take it anymore." That was putting it mildly. On January 21, 1987, Polak and his men hit the Freeway Motor Inn like a tornado. "The entire motel [all rooms] were searched," a task force report stated. "In room #5 currency and paperwork were seized in Ricky Ross's name, 31 grams of rock cocaine, $6,819 and a sophisticated 800 Mhz hand-held repeater radio was discovered. Investigation disclosed Ricky Ross had purchased six of these radios for approximately $10,000 in cash."
They raided Ross's mother's house on West Eighty-seventh Place the same day, finding "a stolen 9mm Uzi and two point blank bullet proof vests." The search on Annie Ross's house sent Rick into a tirade. He called during the raid and had it out with Polak. "Going after my mom, that was the kind of shit they was doing. Polak even went to court to get her day-care license taken away. Can you believe it?" Ross grumped. A week later, as Annie Ross and a minister friend arrived at the airport to catch a plane to Texas, the task force pulled them into a trailer, searched their luggage and their car, fired questions at them, and held them long enough so that they missed their flight. Then they let them go.
As the weeks went on, it got worse. Three task force detectives searched Ollie Newell's apartment and gave Newell a vicious beating, punching and kicking him and "smothering him with a plastic bag," court records state. Newell's friend, Robert Robertson, also got a beating and had $30,000 taken from him. "They would go raid my rental properties and break the furniture, kick holes in the walls and knock the windows out," Ross complained. "And then these renters would be mad at me, you know, and stop paying their rent."
Ross's attorney, Alan Fenster, started filing formal complaints with the department on behalf of Ross and his friends, accusing the officers of beatings, thefts, property destruction, and false arrests. Sobel and his men fired back with a search warrant for Fenster's financial records, accusing him of being a money launderer and cocaine fiend. Fenster's complaints were perfunctorily investigated by the sheriff's internal affairs branch and closed with no findings of wrongdoing. His complaints to the Justice Department's civil rights division were similarly dismissed.
By the end of January the task force had served fifteen search warrants, arrested five people connected with Ross's organization, and seized nearly eight pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $1.3 million on the street, $63,122 in cash, and twenty guns. They also seized enough paperwork and telephone records to give them an inkling of just how vast Ross's cocaine distribution system was. "The investigation has expanded to include other co-conspirators and demonstrated that Ricky Ross is resourceful, has elaborate communications and is well organized," a task force weekly activity report stated.
Sobel called Ross's enterprise "a cartel. . .it's a major cocaine dealing organization that stretches from California to Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio. We hit one place that was a lab, a full-on laboratory to make rock cocaine, just 30 gallon garbage cans full of cocaine. We seized like 28 pounds of finished product there."
Despite Danilo Blandón's reassurance to Ross that nothing would change, the Nicaraguan had already made up his mind to get out of Los Angeles. The raids on his home and other locations had blown his cover, and now his best customer was under siege. In the aftermath of the raids, Blandón's wife Chepita had begun to show signs of a nervous breakdown. "When I went to Miami to visit my family, the doctor told me. My wife was sick from the nerves. . .. The doctor called me and told me I have to change from L.A. 'If you want to have a wife. . .change from that place, [or] your wife will be in a psychiatric hospital.'"
There were business considerations as well. Blandón's attorney, Bradley Brunon, said Blandón's used car business had been extremely successful and had enjoyed "widespread patronage from the Latin community." But the raids "engendered widespread publicity in that small community and Mr. Blandón was practically out of business." After getting word in December 1986 that no criminal charges would result, he quietly began closing up shop, selling his used car lot, his restaurants, putting his house up for sale, collecting his debts, and sending Chepita and the girls ahead to Miami to stay with her uncle, Orlando Murillo, while he tied up loose ends. By the time he was ready to go, he was packing $1.6 million in cash and a whole new attitude.
"I was prepared to change my life," he testified. But that didn't mean letting a perfectly good cocaine ring go to waste. There was still quite a bit of money left for his countrymen to wring out of the streets of South Central. "I handed it to the Nicaraguans," Blandón said, referring to his drug enterprise. "I introduced my customers to them and they continued doing the business."
"Using your old contacts?"
"Yes, and my supplier and my buyers."
In other words, despite the fact that the LAPD, L.A. Sheriff's Department, FBI, DEA, CIA, DIA, and IRS were now fully aware of their cocaine ring, the Nicaraguans kept right on dealing. The only thing that changed was the man on top—and even that was not much of a difference. Blandón's successors were two of Norwin Meneses cocaine-dealing colleagues, Roger Sandino Martínez, known as "Chocoyo," and Jose "Chinito" Gonzalez.
"Roger Sandino was one of these guys from the old days, the old Contra connection," Blandón's lawyer, Bradley Brunon, said. "He was an Original Gangster Contra." He was also a veteran drug trafficker who seemed to enjoy the same kind of protection as Blandón. DEA records show that Sandino was arrested in October 1980 in Hialeah, Florida, in possession of 50,000 Quaalude tablets. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to thirty months in federal prison. Despite his conviction and the fact that he was in the U.S. illegally at the time of his arrest, Sandino was never deported, and he continued dealing drugs. In 1984 he set up an import-export business in Miami with the help of a Coral Gables attorney who was in business with several of Blandón's FDN associates, including former National Guard major general Gustavo "El Tigre" Medina and businessman Donald Barrios.
Sandino was busted again in April 1986, this time as part of the biggest cocaine case on the Atlantic Coast. DEA agents in Norfolk, Virginia, charged him and fourteen other people—including the son-in-law of Bolivian cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez-Gómez—with conspiracy to import 700 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $158 million. The dope wasn't theirs, however. It belonged to the DEA, which brought it into the United States from Bolivia to use as bait in a reverse sting, a scheme in which the police pose as cocaine sellers in order to seize money from drug buyers. In this case, they seized $1.3 million from Sandino and his associates.
The DEA has censored many of its records dealing with Roger Sandino, citing privacy reasons, so his role in the Bolivian drug operation isn't known. What is clear is that he was never brought to trial. Though arrested, Sandino somehow managed to wriggle out of custody, and the DEA issued a fugitive warrant for his capture. (When L.A. detective Tom Gordon ran Sandino's name through NADDIS several months later, however, there was no mention in his file of the Virginia indictment or the fugitive warrant.)
Months after fleeing Virginia, Sandino showed up in Los Angeles, just in time to take over the South Central drug ring from the departing Danilo Blandón. After Blandón moved, Ross said, he would call him in Miami and place his orders, and Roger Sandino's partner, Jose Gonzalez, would handle the pickups and deliveries. Blandón confirmed that he continued working with the Nicaraguan operation in L.A., solving problems, settling disputes, and collecting commissions from the drug sales. "They used to be calling me all the time if they have some problem," Blandón said. "I was the middleman, you see, like—I was making something. I was making something. . .then I had to call Rick to tell him, 'Hey, what's going on?'"
By then, Ross said, the cocaine business was losing some of its allure. His friend and mentor was three thousand miles away. He owned about $5 million worth of real estate and still had more money than he could spend. And for the first time, Ross said, he began having second thoughts about just how mellow his product really was. His current girlfriend, Mary Louise Bronner, the mother of two of his five children, was now a crack addict, thanks to him. The chickens were starting to come home.
"At first, I had never saw anybody addicted to cocaine. It took a while before —before it started to affect anybody that we dealt with. I mean nobody—at first, it was like everybody that was using cocaine drove big cars and, you know, stayed in the Baldwin Hills area and then it started to change and we started to see the effects that it was having." Ross said the first twinges of conscience came when Jocelyn Clements, a longtime friend and one of his earliest customers, turned into a raging crackhead. "I found out that she was taking all her welfare money and her food stamps and stuff and spending it on cocaine," he said.
But there were other reasons for his restiveness. By early 1987 the L.A. crack market had become saturated, so much so that many gang members were hitting the road to find greener pastures and emptier street corners. Crips and Bloods were bumping into each other in cities across the United States. "Everywhere you go, you know what I'm saying, anywhere you go, you're gonna see some people from L.A.," one Crip dealer told California Department of Justice researchers in 1988. "If they got, you know, a dope house out there or a dope street out there. . .you'll run into somebody on that street from L.A."
Said another: "Out of town where nobody else ain't at. . .that's where the money's being made because there's too much competition in Los Angeles. It's got too many dope dealers in Los Angeles competing against each other. So they take it out of town. The profits are better. Here you can sell an ounce for $600. Over there you can sell it for $1,500." Cocaine prices in L.A. had been dropping through the floor because so much of it was coming in. Kilos that had once cost Ross $50,000 were now going for $12,000, which the L.A. Times blamed partly on Ross, since he was buying in such volume.
By 1986–87, Ross said, a good chunk of his business consisted of exporting the drug to higher-priced areas, where he was able to undercut the local yokels by thousands of dollars a key. He'd made connections in Bakersfield, Fresno, St. Louis, Texas, and Alabama. Police in St. Louis said cocaine prices there went into a free fall once the Crips and Bloods arrived. "Gang members have flooded the market here with excellent cocaine at good prices. The local dealers have to succumb to these people," one detective complained to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
The L.A. market was also getting tougher. Ross was no longer the only crack dealer in South Central with Colombian connections. He had begun facing competition from Brian "Waterhead Bo" Bennett, a fast-rising young dealer who'd hooked up with a Colombian named Antonio Villabona in 1985 and started moving large amounts of cocaine. But Bennett was sloppy and obvious, carrying brown paper bags stuffed with cash around in public. Within a year the police were onto him and he was arrested in 1988. L.A. law enforcement officials held a press conference to announce that, for the first time, they had proof that the black gangs had made direct connections with the Colombian cartels.
"What they didn't realize," observed L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz, "was that Ricky had hit that level about six years earlier."
Danilo's decision to move back east made Ross think. If Danilo felt it was time to hang it up, maybe it was. He was usually right about things like that. Ross started scaling back his drug sales, gradually turning over the business to his partner, Ollie Newell, and their lieutenants, Mike Smith and Cornell Ward. He began making plans for an early retirement.
"I had slowed down on my drug activity tremendously," Ross said. "I might have been selling once a week to maybe one or two people. They would call me and say that they needed something, and I would call Mr. Blandón and get it and give it to them. So it was hard for the police to catch me doing something because I was barely doing anything. You know, they thought I was still going full bore, but I wasn't."
The Freeway Rick Task Force wasn't slowing down a bit, though. Every week another batch of search warrants would be served, another pile of cash would be seized, and another one of Ross's friends or relatives would get roughed up or hauled off to jail. "We had some very good informants that were very close to Ricky Ross and he knew it. Ricky Ross was getting upset," Sobel said.
In their rush to put Ross out of business, though, the detectives' tactics became increasingly questionable. According to federal court records, the task force ransacked an apartment owned by one of Ross's girlfriends in February 1987, picked up a doll belonging to his daughter, and then "as a threat to Ricky Ross, they plunged a knife into the doll's head, pinning it to a wall, along with a note: 'This is you, Ricky.'"
Sergeant Sobel said that "as time went on it became common knowledge among the entire Task force that [LAPD detective] Polak was carrying around a kilo of dope in the tire well of his vehicle. Polak would he bragging about a present for Ricky Ross when they ran into him. There were constant jokes made about the dope they had ready [to plant on] Ricky Ross when they found him."
One evening in mid-April 1987, Ross, Newell, and Cornell Ward closed up Rick's auto parts store on Western Avenue, the Big Palace of Wheels, and piled into the crack king's brand-new Ford station wagon, intending to cruise around for a while. "looked in the rearview mirror and I saw some cars coming up behind me with no lights on and first I thought it was somebody maybe trying to rob us or something. We didn't know. So I started speeding in the car and then a red light caught me and a car pulled up right up on the side of me and the guy let his window down."
Newell recognized the driver. It was task force detective Sergeant Robert Tolmaire, a black officer who was regarded by Ross's crew as the most dangerous and violent detective on the whole squad. "He stuck this gun out the window, pointing it at the ear," Ross said. Newell turned to Ross and asked what he intended to do. Ross said he didn't know.
"Well," Newell replied calmly, "you know they're going to kill you. They already said they're going to kill you."
Ross stomped on the gas and roared through the traffic light, with the detectives in hot pursuit. He raced down a side street and decided to make a run for it. The station wagon swerved violently into a driveway and Ross leaped out, sprinting through a yard and hopping a fence.
"Behind me, I could hear them shooting," Ross said. The shots missed him, and he managed to hitch a ride on a passing bus and escape.
Newell and Ward weren't so lucky. They said they were handcuffed and tossed into the back of a police car, and the deputies took turns beating on them with metal flashlights and leather saps. Ward was also smacked with a shotgun.
Then, according to court records, LAPD detective Steve Polak drove up, opened the trunk of his car, and "retrieved a kilo of cocaine in a black gym bag. Polak then displayed the bag to the others present, claiming that Ross had dropped the bag as he ran." Since shots had been fired that had to be explained, the deputies also agreed to accuse Ross of shooting at them.
Ross was charged with a variety of crimes—four counts of conspiracy, three counts of transporting controlled substances, one count of assault with a deadly weapon upon a police officer—and was declared a fugitive from justice. Assuming that every cop in L.A. would be gunning for him as a result of the assault charge, Ross went into hiding, lying low for three weeks as the task force scoured the city, tearing through his friends' houses on an all-out manhunt. On May 5, 1987, he decided things had gone far enough.
"I felt that it went past just. . .duty," Ross explained in court testimony. "My whole thing, I felt, became personal. It wasn't like just Joe the drug dealer. It had become more of a personal kind of vendetta with them and me. I didn't have no vendetta with them because if they arrested me, that was their job, but it seemed like they had a vendetta with me."
Ross drove down to the sheriff's office and turned himself in. He was locked up in the L.A. County Jail on a $1 million bond. The LAPD issued a press release, announcing the demise of Ross's "multi-million dollar mid-level rock cocaine organization. . .estimated [to have] netted over $12 million during the first four months of 1987." The body count was impressive indeed: sixty-one search warrants; thirty-nine arrests, including that of the ringleader; and $13.3 million in cocaine seized, along with $240,000 in cash and sixty-two firearms, including "revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, Uzi's, Mac-10's, a fully automatic Mac-11 machine gun" as well as "five bulletproof vests."
The investigation had also "developed comprehensive intelligence information regarding street gang involvement in rock cocaine trafficking throughout the Western United States," Deputy LAPD chief Levant wrote, and he called the Freeway Rick Task Force "a model for other jurisdictions to follow to attack mid-level cocaine trafficking in California."
But the celebrations were destined to be short. Apparently unable to resist the temptation, several members of the Freeway Rick Task Force dropped by the jail to inspect their prize. They started goading Ross about Alan Fenster, telling him that his coke-snorting lawyer had abandoned him and was leaving him to hang. His only hope, they told him, was to confess and go to work for them because if he didn't, he was going to be in jail for a very, very long time. Fenster was never going to get him out of this jam.
They'd set him up, the detectives crowed, and they'd set him up good. He was going down for the count because they had their stories worked out, and the case was tight as a virgin. "The discussion was tape recorded," U.S. Justice Department records state. "They discussed their frame-up of Ross and unsuccessfully tried to turn Ross against his Colombian cocaine source. Ultimately, Ross filed a motion to dismiss based on the encounter and the existence of the tape recording was revealed at the hearing. The judge insisted that the tape be produced."
Before it was turned over, amateurish attempts were made to doctor it. A forensic expert concluded that eleven erasures had been made in an effort to obliterate the detectives' accusations against Fenster and their discussions of a beating administered to Ross's brother, David.
After hearing the tape, the judge threw the charges out of court.
Freeway Rick was free once again.
In one month, he'd dodged bullets twice—both lead and legal—and he didn't intend to give the task force a third shot at him. Someone else could be the crack king from now on.
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"I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope"
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