Blow (49 page)

It took six weeks before George convinced the authorities of their mistake and got himself transferred back to North Dade. That was when he decided finally to send one of the lawyers who'd been paying him court down to check on his money in Panama. If he was going to do the time, he wanted to be sure there was something pleasant to think about as it went by, to know there'd be a happy ending to his life story, at least on the material side of things. He found a lawyer who'd been recommended by Maurice Graham; he was a big man with a bushy beard who smoked a Meerschaum pipe. Even though back at Danbury Fat Harry had told him one of the things he'd learned long ago was never to trust anyone who smoked a pipe, no matter what kind it was, George gave the lawyer the account number and sent him to Panama City. The lawyer was gone for about ten days. When he got back, he told George he'd found the account all right, still active. And it had had an awful lot of money in it during the time George was shipping cash down in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But checking the bank's calculations, setting off the money that went in against the money that got withdrawn at various points, he came up with the same result the bank did, which was a balance of zero. There was nothing there, George. Just a big double aught. The motor sailer, the beaches on Ibiza, just a life without having to go to work and slave for a dollar—he could pack all that away, put it into the category of a dream he'd had during the night and woken up from early in the morning and found that it was all gone and that, indeed, it never was.

So there he had it, the empty bank account to ponder. He'd heard of this happening to other guys who'd sent money down to Noriega-land, but knowing he had company in his expanding sense of misery gave him precious small comfort now. Then he found out about the letter. He saw it in a story in the
Miami Herald
one morning. It was written to Vice President George Bush from Carlos, sitting in the Atlanta penitentiary, where a whole tier had been emptied of prisoners so he could have the thing entirely to himself. Carlos told the head of the war on drugs that he wanted to make a deal. In return for immunity from prosecution, he'd tell everything he knew about the drug business. He'd turn in all the operatives he'd relied on in his network, the hundreds of Colombians and Americans he'd dealt with from Miami to Los Angeles. He'd tell the police anything they wanted to know about Escobar and the other cartel figures. He'd say anything they wanted him to say in court, against anyone they wanted to put up. Just let him get out of jail free, let him leave the country, and he'd promise never to smuggle drugs again.

The Reagan administration making a deal on the eve of an election year with the biggest cartel figure they'd ever caught, a man they'd billed as evil incarnate, seemed about as likely a prospect as Carlos had of levitating the walls around Atlanta and crawling out from underneath. But to George, the letter itself, just the brashness of it, came as the final insult. Given even the remotest possibility that at any time in the future Carlos might be walking the streets somewhere as a free man, while George was rotting in a place like Lewisburg, making conversation with people covered with skulls and daggers, moved his hand as if it had a will of its own toward the pay phone in the dayroom at North Dade to begin the negotiations on a deal. The first person he called was Mirtha, out on the West Coast. He told her to call down to Humberto in Medellín, and to have Humberto call Pablo Escobar and tell him the circumstances, and ask if it would be okay with him if George took the stand against Carlos. In two days the word came back from Pablo, through the same network in reverse. It was actually two words: “Fuck him.”

Thus it was that George next placed a phone call to Agent Richard Garcia at the FBI. He'd had some time now to think over what Garcia had said to him right after Carlos's capture, and he'd concluded that Richie was right, that testifying against Carlos was the right thing to do. He told Garcia to tell Merkle, the U.S. attorney in Jacksonville who would be prosecuting the case, that George Jung was on the team. “Maybe I might have testified eventually anyway, but I don't think so, not without that letter,” says George. “It was too much. I mean, looking back, the first person Carlos put in the box, the ‘fuck-you box,' was me. Then he put Richard Barile in the fuck-you box. Then he put Nick Hunter in the fuck-you box. Then he put Barry Kane in the fuck-you box. Then he put Ed Ward and all the people on Norman Cay in the fuck-you box. And pretty soon the box was filled up with 150 people, looking like a bunch of broken rag dolls in a toy chest with their stuffing all coming out. Then one day it was as if they all got out of the box at once, and now Carlos was in the box, and they all came to his trial and said,
fuck you.
'”

The trial itself, in the U.S. courthouse in Jacksonville, rated easily as one of the most exciting events in the city's history. Parking was banned on all the adjacent streets. Snipers patrolled the rooftop, alert for an attack by narcoterrorists. Dogs with the ability to sniff out bombs patrolled the corridors inside the building. Metal detectors at the entrances were cranked down so low you had to take off your shoes so the metal eyelets and the nails in the soles wouldn't set off the alarm.

In his three-hour opening statement to the jury of nine women and three men, Merkle charged that “Carlos Lehder was to cocaine transportation as Henry Ford was to automobiles.” As George's contribution toward proving that contention, he sat in the witness box for three days and gave testimony about Carlos that filled up 564 pages of transcript. He told all about their meeting at Danbury and the dream they shared of cornering the transportation market. He told about hooking up with Carlos after prison. He told about the first suitcase trip from Antigua. He told about introducing Carlos to Barry Kane. To show how close George had been to Carlos, Merkle introduced into evidence Carlos's marriage license from Canada, when George had stood up as his best man. “And does your signature appear on that document, sir?” Merkle asked with some theatricality.

“Yes, it does,” George answered. “Approximately an inch above the date.”

Merkle led him through Carlos's tramp through the Vermont woods, even produced one of the customs people to bolster the story. George told the jury all about the red-eye flights to Los Angeles, the hundreds of kilos they unloaded through Barile, the heavy amount of money that was beginning to roll in. That BMW Carlos had bought for cash in Hyannis? Just as George had warned, it returned to haunt him when Merkle produced the manager of the dealership so he could point the guy out to the jury who'd given him eleven thousand dollars in a paper bag. George told them about his trip to Norman Cay, their falling-out, about going to see Fat Harry when George wanted to set up a hit. In all, Merkle paraded 115 witnesses past the jury, along with providing them stacks and stacks of documents, so they could see the aircraft and boats that Carlos owned, the dummy corporations he'd set up. Merkle even put Walter Cronkite, the former CBS anchorman, on the stand, to describe how abruptly he'd been run off of Norman Cay. At the close of this piece of testimony, Merkle lowered his voice an octave or two, gearing it down to broadcast level, and asked, “Was that the way it was, Mr. Cronkite?”

“Yes,” Cronkite answered. “That's the way it was.”

For a fee reputed to be somewhere between $1.5 and $2 million, Carlos had hired two Miami defense lawyers who were already well known in the society of moneyed cocaine defendants, Edward Shohat and José Quiñón. “This is the type of case that represents to us the highest mountain, and we're going after it,” Quiñón was quoted as saying, “This is our Everest.” Throughout the trial they referred to their client as “Joe” Lehder, an early alias of Carlos's, in an apparent effort to de-Colombianize him for the jury. Their basic argument turned out to be that Joe was a much maligned and misunderstood businessman, whose activities on Norman Cay had nothing to do with cocaine whatsoever. Lengthening the airstrip, building the hangars and such, that was all part of a plan to make the island into a tourist resort. All this testimony to the contrary, they said, that was just part of “Pick-on-Joe-Lehder Month.” Carlos himself never took the stand during his trial, and his lawyers presented not a single witness in his defense. Instead, they concentrated their guns on the cross-examination, grilling the prosecution witnesses, twenty-nine of whom had been convicted of one drug offense or another, in an effort to show the jury that these people were all lying about Carlos in order to get a reduction in their sentences or get out of jail altogether. One of the worst of these, they said in their opening statement, was George Jung. Yet when his turn came to be cross-examined, on the fourth day of the trial, George not only managed to keep his story well intact, but in the fencing battle with Quiñón, he gave just about as good as he got.

Q: Knowing you to have used people before when it fits your interest, would you be using Mr. Lehder in this case in order to lower your prison sentence maybe?

A: Do you really believe that?

Q: I'm asking the questions.

A: Then, no.…

Q: And when you wrote down that you had been to Pablo Escobar's farm numerous times weren't you trying to sort of puff up your importance in this case, to see if you can get a better deal, better letter from the government, to see if they will reduce your parole and your sentence? Were you trying to do that, knowing Pablo Escobar to be somebody who has been publicized?

A: No. I didn't have to expand my role. I was married into a Colombian family that is tied in to people down there. That was well known. I didn't have to exaggerate my role. I mean, I was arrested in 1985 with 660 pounds of cocaine, and, in essence, they suddenly confiscated more on the airstrip, close to 3,000 pounds of cocaine. I don't believe that I had to exaggerate my role with 3,000 pounds of cocaine.

Regarding the matter of George's aborted hit against Carlos, Quiñón tried to suggest that he'd invented Carlos's whole betrayal of him as a way to support the fact that he'd had any meaningful relationship with Carlos in the first place.

Q: How long had you known Fat Harry?

A: In effect, I met him while in Danbury.

Q: Okay. And did you go as far as to discuss the amount of money that it would take to do a hit?

A: He was looking more to that, once Lehder was eliminated, a partnership effect, taking over where Lehder left off.

Q: And these discussions took place with Fat Harry?

A: That's correct.

Q: All right. Was anybody else present in addition to Fat Harry?

A: No. You usually don't have too many people present when you're discussing to the effect that you'd like to kill somebody.

The trial opened the week before Thanksgiving of 1987 and ended more than seven months later, in mid-May of 1988, when the jury finally received its instructions from U.S. district judge Howell W. Melton and retired to ponder the evidence. It took them seven days to reach a verdict, betraying a degree of uncertainty that surprised most of the observers, considering the overwhelming nature of Merkle's case. Part of the problem, one juror later told a reporter for the
Tampa Tribune,
was that they took to heart the complaint of Shohat and Quiñón that much of the evidence against their client came from “bought testimony” and would have preferred the government to have found some way of convicting Carlos other than turning loose half the prison population. “The more you listened to, the more you heard, you knew you could not find him innocent,” one juror was quoted as saying. Nevertheless, he said, “I sat there and ground my teeth at what the government had given them. I actually busted a crown on my tooth, I got so mad.” Of all the witnesses, he was asked, who had been the most compelling? Walter Cronkite, he said. “It surprised me when he testified. He looked like he did on the news. He was probably one of the first people you could turn around and say, ‘I haven't got a convict here.'”

The verdict came down on May 19—guilty on all eleven counts on which he'd been tried, involving the smuggling of 3.3 tons of cocaine into the United States. And two months later Carlos was brought in for sentencing. For nearly half an hour he lectured the judge on the fact that he was a political prisoner, that he'd been kidnapped out of his own country. “I feel like an Indian in a white man's court,” he said. Judge Melton listened to the speech, then sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 135 years. “This sentence is a signal,” the judge said, “that our country will do everything in its power and within the laws to battle the drug problem that threatens the very fabric of our society.”

*   *   *

Around Christmastime, about a month after George had testified, a pair of federal marshals came to where he was being held in the county jail in Jacksonville. They said that Merkle's office had just received a call from Mirtha. She had heard from George's sister, Marie, that George's father was dying. He had contracted cancer of the colon and was currently in the hospital undergoing an operation. No one was holding out hope that he would live for more than a short time after he returned home. George hadn't seen his father or mother in more than seven years, not since the arrest in Eastham. Shortly after that, Fred and Ermine had moved out to Indiana to be near their daughter and son-in-law in Greenwood, outside of Indianapolis. Marie and Otis lived in a five-bedroom, split-level house on a street named Serenity Way with ample room for them and their three children, a barbecue and a pool out back, a two-car garage, and a good-sized yard. Rather than have her parents live with them, Marie thought it more practical to put them up in a community of pre-fabs nearby. They'd have their privacy, yet they'd still be close if they needed anything.

When George heard the news, the first thing he did was to telephone Merkle and ask if he could somehow get permission to leave the jail and fly up to Greenwood and see his father for what would be the last time. Merkle said he'd not only give him permission, but he personally would take George there, drive him up to the house himself. And he promptly called Marie and Otis to see to the arrangements. No, Marie told him. She was really sorry, but she did not think it was a good idea for George to come at this time. He had already caused his father enough heartache, not to mention the pain and humiliation he'd visited on everyone else in the family. Now, at his father's deathbed, it would be much too unsettling suddenly for her brother to make an appearance. “They told Merkle they just didn't want me there,” says George. “So he got me a tape recorder and told me if I wanted to say good-bye to my father, I could do it on tape. The two marshals brought me into a little room at the jail. There was a chair and table set up, and we put the tape recorder on the table, and I talked into it.”