Blow (47 page)

In talking to George, Graham gave some of the same spiel as the others did, about how the case might actually be won. Entrapment wasn't much of a defense here, because with George's smuggling history it would be difficult to show he harbored no predisposition to commit the crime. Nevertheless, he said, the authorities had behaved disgracefully during the sting, having made several significant gaffes that could prove useful in muddying up the prosecution case before a jury. “In the first place, the guys George had fallen in with here were hopelessly inept smugglers who couldn't possibly have committed the crime without the help of the police.” The police provided George a place to stay, on their own boat and then at hotels. They gave him money for meals and also for booze. They'd gotten him the airplane. They'd found him the pilot, a place to land. “Here's a guy who's just gotten out of prison, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He knew people in South America who had cocaine, but he could never have pulled it off by himself.” Then there was the fact that the police, together with those who worked for them, that is, Cliff Guttersrud, had come very close to committing some serious crimes themselves. One instance Graham planned to bring up was their involvement in the Harbuck kidnapping caper—which amounted to tolerating the commission of a major felony in order to keep the sting alive. According to George, Cliff had also lent him his 9-millimeter Mauser pistol to carry around for protection while they were both living on the boat. He'd gotten George some pot to smoke, helped him meet girls. The way Graham would have put it, the police had supplied guns and drugs and women to a known escaped fugitive from a state prison. Where do you draw the line? “In view of the tremendous sentence George was faced with,” Graham recounts, “I felt we had to try it. Either that, or use it to the extent we could to convince the prosecutor that it was going to be a long and expensive case to win.” Not to mention hugely embarrassing.

This latter strategy struck George as the smart way to go in this instance, especially since Graham assured him he had good relations with Lurana Snow, the assistant United States attorney who would be prosecuting the case. “What I liked about Graham is he didn't give me any of the bullshit about going before a jury,” says George. “He said Lurana Snow was a friend of his and that he could make a deal. That's what I listened to.” Which is eventually what happened. It took the better part of a year, but in the end, considering his record, George got better than he had any right to expect. In the indictment he had been accused on four counts, two of importing and possession of cocaine with the intention to distribute and two more of conspiring with others to import and distribute. Coming up, as he would be, before Judge Norman Roettger, the hangingest federal judge in the whole Southeast, each count could have brought him a sentence of fifteen years in prison, a total of sixty years, with George walking out a free man at around age 104. But Graham's presentation to the prosecutor, emphasizing George's willingness to help with the other busts, the arguably questionable police conduct during the sting, and the expense and trouble involved in taking the case to trial, succeeded in getting the charges reduced to a single count. George would do fifteen years.

“He knew I was fucked,” George says. “And I knew I was fucked. This was the best way out of it. Fifteen years is no walk in the park, but it's better than sixty. And there was the money sitting in Panama. So I was prepared to do it.” At least up until he got wind of a couple of FBI agents named Richie Garcia and Bobby Levinson, and heard what they were shopping around for.

*   *   *

As much as George's circumstances had altered in the past eight years, so had those of his old
compadre
in crime, Carlos Lehder. Norman Cay had received so much notoriety in the press, including being featured in an outraged documentary by NBC News, that the Bahamian parliament was embarrassed into funding an investigation by a royal commission into bribery and drug-running throughout the islands. Where payoffs were concerned, the commission found out readily enough that Prime Minister Lynden Pindling's expenditures had far exceeded his income, but it couldn't prove that the overage came from drug smugglers. In any event, Norman Cay was becoming too hot for Carlos in the early 1980s, and by 1983 he'd returned to Colombia, where he bought a cattle ranch and began spending his millions to further his dreams of achieving national power. About 125 miles south of Medellín, on the outskirts of his native Armenia, he built a sprawling alpine resort named Posada Alemana, to rival the Hacienda Veracruz owned by the Ochoas and also Pablo Escobar's Hacienda los Nápoles, where George had seen the police informer shot several years earlier. Built at a cost of $3 million, the complex contained a restaurant of gourmet pretensions, a good-sized zoo and wired-in aviary, swimming pools, and thirty separate guest villas, two stories tall and covered in thatch. Carlos also built a discotheque at the place, naming it after his musical muse, John Lennon, whose utopian reverie “Imagine” had been Carlos's all-time favorite song. He hired the noted Colombian architect, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, to design a life-size statue of the late Beatle and installed it at the entrance to the
posada.
The statue shows Lennon standing naked, his right hand holding on to a guitar, his left displaying the letters
PAZ
for “peace,” and the assassin's bullet wound visible in his back.

On the political side, Carlos organized the Movimento Latino Nacional, a party that used Colombian nationalism as a guise for railing against extraditing drug traffickers to the United States. He assigned to himself the title of “maximum chief” and installed a twelve-foot-high poster of himself at the party's headquarters in downtown Armenia. In speeches to the faithful he would rant on like a junior-varsity Hitler, saying that the rabbis collected taxes for Israel and laying blame for all the terrorism and oppression in Latin America at the feet of “international Zionism.” A bunch of youthful thugs called Woodchoppers maintained decorum at party rallies, marching around in khaki uniforms and hard hats and brandishing four-foot truncheons. In a weekly newspaper published by the party,
Quindio Libre,
the editor regularly praised Carlos as “a man of a new era, captain of the seas and the skies.”

It all didn't last very long. Unbeknownst to Carlos, in the late 1970s and 1980, the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida, based in Jacksonville, had been gathering evidence about Carlos's activities in the States, as well as the drug operation on Norman Cay. In January of 1981 he'd succeeded in getting a federal grand jury to indict Carlos and thirteen of his American confederates and pilots on thirty-nine counts of cocaine smuggling and income-tax evasion. The prosecutor, a 245-pound former running back at Notre Dame named Robert W. Merkle, had flown the indictments down to Colombia himself and presented them to the supreme court in Bogotá for a ruling on their constitutionality. On September 2, 1983, the court decided in favor of the United States. Immediately afterward, the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, signed the papers, sent them on to President Belisario Betancur for his signature, and promptly issued a warrant for Carlos's arrest. Almost overnight the maximum chief had become a fugitive from justice and took himself off into hiding. His political party collapsed, his zoo animals were taken away to save them from starving, the
posada
fell into ruins, and a year later it was all but destroyed by an unexplained fire.

George wasn't the only one who'd experienced a comedown.

*   *   *

In 1986 agents Garcia and Levinson were stationed in the Miami office of the FBI as part of something called the Joint Drug Intelligence Group, working with their counterparts at the DEA to develop knowledge about the Medellín cartel and other South American drug operations. Normally the two agencies get along about as nicely as Israelis and Arabs, but here the object was to develop intelligence jointly, then take it back to their respective organizations for use in whatever way seemed appropriate, so there was little opportunity for rivalry. “Part of the assignment involved debriefing people in prison in an attempt to get together all the pieces of the puzzle so we could see the big picture,” says Garcia, the senior partner on the team, whose darkish complexion, brush-cut mustache, and stern eyes make him resemble Burt Reynolds. Garcia had earned a B.S. in law enforcement from Southwest Texas State University, an M.S. in management and human relations from Abilene Christian University, and he came to the Bureau after five years on the Dallas Police Department. Both his wife and his brother are FBI agents. He wears white shirts and conservative dark suits and speaks fluent Spanish.

“We were getting every little bit of information we could, every little scribble and piece,” he says. “As one person put it, we debrief people by putting a vacuum to their head and in two or three days sucking out every bit of knowledge they have.” At this point the FBI was treating drug traffickers like agents of a foreign power, and when they found one who agreed to talk, they grilled him as they would have a Communist defector. “‘What is your part in the organization? Who did you report to? Who did that person report to? What forms of communications do you use? How do you recruit people?' We'd get all the names, full descriptions, who they were related to, addresses, phone numbers. ‘What numbers did they know you had?' Step by step by step, until we got to the point where they start to say, ‘I think,' or, ‘It could be.' And we put that part over on the fuzzy side.”

To mask the identity of those they talked to, Garcia and Levinson would arrange for federal marshals to take the people out of the two major lockups in the region, North Dade and the Miami Metropolitan Correctional Center, and escort them to the federal courthouse, supposedly for a hearing on their cases, then they would whisk them down another corridor, where the two agents would be waiting in a borrowed office. George showed up one day as a surprise. He came in with another North Dade inmate they'd been talking to named Danny McGinniss. Danny had been arrested as part of what to law-enforcement people was a famous marijuana sting conducted by the DEA called Operation Grouper, named for the way the bales of pot dropped into water by drug planes had resembled fish of that name. For his involvement, Danny had been convicted of being part of a continuing criminal enterprise, or CCE, and sentenced to sixty years in prison. He'd been talking to the FBI for a while now in a fruitless attempt to shave some years off the sentence, when one day at North Dade he met this celebrity prisoner who was related to high-ups in the cartel and had been picked up in a big cocaine bust up in Fort Lauderdale.

“Danny's problem,” says George, “was he waited too long to play the game. By the time he was ready to talk, they knew everything he knew, and anyway, it was only marijuana, whereas I had the fucking cartel in my pocket. He was a streetwise Irishman from Connecticut, I think it was, and he thought by getting me involved he could help himself out. So he came over one day and asked me if I'd be interested in talking to some friends of his. And I said, sure.”

“My first impression of George was that he'd been ‘rode hard,' he'd been through the mill,” recalls Garcia. “He looked a lot older than he was, and I think he was getting at his wit's end. So when he showed up with McGinniss, he didn't know
why
he was here, but he knew he wanted to
be
here. He knew he had got arrested with three hundred kilos and he knew he had to do something to try to get out of that.” The agents were certainly right that George had a goal, but not so right in thinking he didn't have any idea about how to reach it. He did. And not long after he began talking to Garcia and Levinson, he made it clearly known to them in only two words: Carlos Lehder.

They knew in a vague way that George had once done some work with Carlos, but they were ignorant of the Danbury connection and the closeness the two of them once shared. And they knew nothing about the depth of George's fury at being thrown over back in 1977, a humiliation now nearly nine years old, but which George had never managed to overcome. The FBI certainly didn't know about the hit he'd almost attempted, and George wasn't going to tell them. He'd give them just enough now to dwell on the falling-out they'd had, give himself a plausible reason to be sitting there in the first place, willing to tell them what they wanted to know. “I get the sense he didn't know how far to take this with us,” Garcia recalls. “He didn't know what was in it for him, deal-wise. We said we couldn't promise anything, of course. The three hundred kilos was between him and the DEA. ‘But any information you give us we will make known to the judge, and you go from there.'”

Garcia and Levinson knew that here in their grasp was one of the best information sources they'd ever turned up on the cartel; it was difficult to fathom how the DEA had passed this one up. “Here we had a source, not like someone who'd worked as just a pilot at one point in time. This was a different caliber of individual we had. He wasn't a runner. He was actually one of the founders of this thing. And we had no reason to doubt what he was saying. We were checking the details he'd tell us as we went along, and it was all coming back right.”

So they took out Danny and George on a daily basis now, Danny more or less so he wouldn't feel left out of the deal and spread the word on what was going on around the lockup. They had the marshals switch the delivery site from the courthouse to a plush suite at the Omni Hotel in downtown Miami, where the agents supplied them little nips of Scotch from the bar, ordered up steak and lobster for lunch and dinner. And where they'd talk. And talk. Ten or fifteen days of solid grilling went by, during which George told them more than even he realized he knew about Carlos, how the cocaine business worked, what he'd seen on his trips down to Medellín. It went on like that until the day arrived when he told them he'd just about depleted all his knowledge on the subject, but now he had another idea.