Republican Party Reptile

by P. J. O'Rourke

  I got ahold of a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office document stamped “RESTRICTED” (though it had been marked down to “Confidential”). This detailed several meetings in London between JAGS and British minister of state Nicholas Ridley. Ridley offered the Turks and Caicos £12 million to become an independent country. JAGS said they wouldn’t do it for less than £40 million. Secretary of State Lord Carrington popped in on the conference and “expressed surprise” that the Turks and Caicos were turning down such a generous offer as £12 million “and wondered that the Treasury had agreed to it.” JAGS hung tough. The meeting ended on a testy note. “Mr. Ridley . . . offered them a deal, which they could either take or leave. Mr. McCartney said that he would not accept that. Britain was, he said, the captain of the boat and should pay the crew. Mr. Ridley pointed out that we might reduce the crew’s wages.” JAGS “retorted that in that case, we might have a mutiny. . . . Mr. Ridley made it clear . . . that the problem could be solved by starting again with new people.”

  In the end the islands got their £12 million and didn’t have to be independent either. I asked the British governor what had happened. “It’s the post-Falklands era,” he sighed.

  Anyway, the political system in the Ts and Cs—whether created by narcotics money, crabby twits in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or plain old vote-grabbing—is certainly different from ours. Ariel Misick, the minister of commerce, development, and tourism, wanted to talk about commerce, development, and tourism. Imagine a system of governance so unsophisticated that the head of a department knows what his department does. Misick (a distant relation to busted ex-minister Missick-with-two-s’s) said there are two hundred square miles of empty Crown Lands in the Turks and Caicos. Two of the largest islands are uninhabited. There is half a mile of beach for every hotel room. The Ts and Cs are a last frontier for commercial development in the Caribbean.

  What about drug-trade fracas and Saunders et al.? Well, there had been two people with protest signs on their cars. One of the cars belonged to the contractor who’d built Norman Saunders’s new house. It was six months since the last crime of note. “As a lawyer,” said Misick, “if I had to depend on going to court to defend people, I’d starve.” The only major robbery in Turks and Caicos history was a $600 Cable and Wireless Company payroll heist in 1931.

  Governor Christopher J. Turner wanted to talk about development too. Balanced development—nice tourists in big boats, cruising, diving, sport fishing. His other points of hope for the underemployed: the fishing industry, financial services, and agronite mining. (Agronite being a kind of sea dirt useful in making driveways and chemical things. There’s lots of it around the place.) Turner was also hipped on some Smithsonian Institution research being done about algae farming. It would be exactly like cattle ranching except underwater with algae instead of hay and with Caribbean king crabs as the cows. At least this is what I have in my notes.

  What about drugs? Turner, a career civil servant appointed from London with responsibility for the islands’ foreign relations and internal security, said, “Yes.” A simple fact of geography. The Turks and Caicos are 600 miles from Colombia, 575 miles from Miami. “We’ll always remain an interesting possibility to people engaged in the drug trade.” Are the Ts and Cs a hotbed of international dope crime? “No. A refueling option.” But, said Turner, “In a British dependent territory things like this aren’t supposed to go on.” He was the one who’d called in the DEA for a “straightforward double sting operation” which stung his own chief minister. Was Turner shocked? Satisfied? Incredulous? Cheesed off? The governor plays the cards close to his chest. “In the event of his being found guilty it would be a personal tragedy and a tragedy for the islands. Saunders had managerial skills.” Any turmoil? Turner said, “I told a reporter, There’s been no protest, no public demonstrations, and nobody has taken to the streets.’ This was reported as ‘British Governor Urges Populace Not to Take to the Streets.’” Alas, that’s what comes of using understatement on the press.

  One languid guard in full dress uniform was reading a magazine under a picture of Princess Di in the governor’s waiting room. His walkie-talkie crackled with a report of an impending possible rain shower. “Just hang in and hold tight, ten-four,” said the guard into his radio.

  The high point of my trip to the Turks and Caicos was the interview with Chief Minister “Bops” Francis, or, rather, the time I spent waiting for that interview. There I was, actually “sitting in a dusty colonial outpost waiting to speak to a native official.” Breeze whispered through palm fronds above the tin-roofed Government House. Bougainvillea—or something that looked like I’ve always supposed bougainvillea should—crept along the veranda railings. Etc. One doesn’t get much of this in a modern journalism career. Next I wanted to go to the “Colonial Club,” except there wasn’t one, and have a “stingah,” whatever that is.

  Bops turned out to be a nice old man who was sick of talking to reporters. “I’ve commented all I can.” He was miffed at the way the DEA had treated Saunders, the head of a sovereign or semisovereign or something state. “Mr. Saunders,” said the chief minister, “is bitter that he was not taken into custody but to a penthouse and kept there waiting for the press to come around.” I checked with a Miami Herald reporter and this was true. The DEA called newspapers and television stations, held Saunders, Missick, and Smith at the Ramada until media got there, and then marched them, in handcuffs, to a paddy wagon. “I don’t think they would do this to a dignitary of the Caucasian race,” said Francis. Was Saunders framed? “I’ve heard it. I believe it.” He pointed out that the Turks and Caicos had failed to join the Reagan-sponsored Caribbean Basin Initiative.

  “Please do not carry the tone that I condone any actions in drugs,” said the chief. “Under my administration there will not be forwarding of any part of the drug trade.”

  And that was the extent of “Drug Arrests Raise Islands’ Tension.” I did not see any drugs. I did not smell so much as the faintest bouquet of a burning spliff. The girls all had both ends of their bathing suits on. I met a stern and dangerous-looking Jamaican colonel, but he was working for a UN agency planning hurrican-disaster relief. Nobody, not the police, not the governor’s honor guard, carried a gun. A hotel manager in Grand Turk told me there had been “threats of violence.” Threats of violence? “Well, over the telephone.” I pressed him. “There’s a rumor the governor received two crank calls.” A taxi driver talked of drug smuggling: “No. I have my children to live for. I have my grandchildren to live for. I want to make my dollar every day and go and enjoy my happy home.” A bartender said of his fellow citizens: “People will stick by you if you did right. But if you did wrong I pity you.”

  The only horror I encountered was flying the local airline. They have a little twin-prop plane. The cowling was off and a dozen mechanics were scampering around the engine. They looked to be sixteen and were working in rhythm to a portable radio. The engine caught fire. One of them ran up from somewhere with a coffee can full of water and splashed it at the burning gasoline. Then they put the cowl back on and we boarded the plane and took off. The thornbush-and-palm-scrub landscape really did breathe menace that time, let me tell you.

  The Turks and Caicos don’t even have a romantic history, maybe the only place in the Caribbean without one. A recent theory does have it that Columbus made his New World landfall on Grand Turk rather than Watlings Island in the Bahamas. But, as Turks and Caicos historian H. E. Sadler puts it, “After a weekend rest, Columbus was anxious to reach China.” There’s a note in Columbus’s log to the effect that some natives he’d taken prisoner “signed to me that there were very many islands, so many that they could not be counted, and they mentioned by their name more than a hundred”—apparently a local pastime since at least 1492.

  The Turks got their name from the French slang for “pirate,” but actual pirate activity there was desultory. Calico Jack Rackham did operate out of North Caicos after the Brits cleaned house in
New Providence. But Jack was not much as a swashbuckler. His crews twice mutinied on him because of his cowardice. He was most notable for his girlfriend Anne Bonny, a foul-mouthed vixen who dressed as a man, wore a brace of pistols, and wielded a serious cutlass in the hand-to-hand stuff. Bonny had a roving eye. She got a crush on a handsome young sailor in Rackham’s crew, made a pass, and discovered the sailor was one Mary Reid, also dressed as a man. The two became best friends. When Rackham was finally cornered by the British navy, he surrendered while Anne and Mary battled on to the last and then escaped death sentences by getting pregnant. As Calico Jack stood on the gallows, Anne Bonny said to him, “If you had fought like a man you would not now be about to hang like a dog.” They were quite a bunch. But they didn’t really spend much time in the Ts and Cs.

  Other notable events in the Turks and Caicos annals:

  • 1783—Admiral Horatio Nelson failed to recapture Turks and Caicos from the French. (In one of his less heroic dispatches Nelson stated, “With such a force and their strong situation, I did not think anything farther could be attempted.”) Later the French gave the islands back anyway.

  • 1788—Forty Tory families fled the American Revolution, bringing twelve hundred slaves with them. They tried to grow cotton, failed, and split, leaving the slaves to fend for themselves.

  • 1962—John Glenn splashed down near Grand Turk.

  • 1966—Queen Elizabeth visited. A donkey race was held in her honor.

  I did a lot of hard drinking, some deep-sea fishing, more hard drinking, much hanging out on the beach, some drinking in the daytime—all for the sake of research, mind you. And I came up with a few drug-smuggling anecdotes like the one about the South Caicos businessman who had been, I suppose, sampling his own wares and walked into the propeller of his airplane. Umptity kilos of powdered self-esteem were left sitting on the tarmac and nobody on the island slept for a month. Another smuggler, on Providenciales, tried to bring his plane in from Miami at night. There are no lights at the Provo airport, so he phoned his wife and told her to take the pickup truck, drive down to the end of the strip, and turn on the high beams. He landed on top of her. This incident didn’t exactly have anything to do with drugs. The smuggler had been in Miami to go grocery shopping. But anyway, wife and smuggler survived, though airplane and pickup were a mess.

  In 1980 the DEA launched Operation Bat, designed to intercept and disrupt boat-borne marijuana shipments. An Air Force C5A cargo plane landed unannounced at Provo, scaring the hell out of everyone. The C5A was filled with speedboats. Ten DEA agents carrying automatic weapons pitched tents in all the places with the worst mosquitoes. Within a week every speedboat had been run aground and smashed on the countless (though not nameless) cays and sandbars.

  Then there was the plane full of bootleg Quaaludes which made a fuel stop at South Caicos on its way from South America to the States. But the pilot didn’t have any cash on him. He had to leave his drug shipment as security for the gasoline. The airport employees gave the pills away. People in the Turks and Caicos had never seen a Quaalude. They’d take them three or four at a time. There was a spate of eccentric driving. Cars were smashed in trees, cars were up on porches, cars were out in the ocean all over the islands. A week later the pilot came back with the money. No ’ludes. He was pissed. He came back again a few days later with three hombres carrying M-16s. One customs agent was at the airport when they landed. He ran off down the road howling in fear. The hombres and pilot were ready for vengeance, but there was no way to get anywhere to find anyone to wreak the vengeance on. An old Volkswagen was parked at the airport, key in the ignition. But it wouldn’t start. They stood around for a while, then gave up and flew away.

  In the matter at hand—the United States of America vs. Norman Saunders, Stafford Missick, and Alden Smith a/k/a Smokey—there’s also basis in some genuine hanky-panky. Saunders owns the fuel concession at that South Caicos airport. He did a lot of night business. And Saunders was living better than he should have been on his $18,816 chief minister’s salary and the profits from an airplane gas station on a landing strip with one scheduled flight a day. He had a fair-sized house built on Grand Turk, a kind of Samoan-style peaked-roof affair looking like the Trader Vic family mausoleum. Local gossip says it cost $1.2 million, an estimate that’s surely high and outside. But it is on the beach two doors from the governor’s mansion. Saunders has a big car and a yacht. At election time there was a scad of campaign money bouncing and fluttering around in his South Caicos parliamentary district. Missick, too, has a nice house and an Oldsmobile. I don’t know about Smokey. Generally speaking, there are more items of gold jewelry, Piaget watches, and Michael Jackson fashion jackets on the local population than you’d expect in a place where the last time anybody painted a building was 1956.

  But it was ever thus all through the seedy archipelagos of the Caribbean. There never has been an unnaughty way to make a living. In the Turks and Caicos the traditional livelihood was raking up evaporated sea salt—an industry in gradual decline since 1780. In 1964 it petered out completely, leaving smelly pools of half-evaporated brine all over the islands. Other than that the only profession was salvaging the thousands of neighboring shipwrecks—most caused, probably, by distracted harbor pilots using placemats to navigate and trying to get the natives to shut up about what all the islands are called. Sometimes the locals would get overenter-prising. In 1864 an American frigate ran aground off North Caicos “and the Captain was forced to retire to his quarter deck and prevent the incursion of Salvagers with force of arms.” All through the nineteenth century there were complaints of false lights being set out to drum up business. I like to think the smuggler’s wife in the pickup truck was an unintentional party to this old tradition.

  Some islanders, mainly white ones, will tell you that it was Saunders’s predecessor, JAGS McCartney, who was involved in the drug trade and that when Saunders and the PNP came in the smugglers seemed to disappear. Certainly JAGS, who sported mild dreadlocks, looked a bit more criminal. When he and his cohorts were elected, they all flew to Haiti and had identical leisure suits made. If you fired anybody in the PDM, they’d come over to your house, all dressed alike, and glower. But JAGS is revered today, and the PDM supporters I met were the most likable people in the islands. Plus the present PDM leader, Clement Howell, has a reputation for probity standing somewhere between Lincoln’s and Mom’s. Yet JAGS died in a suspicious plane crash while flying to Atlantic City with a reputed American crime figure. However, it was also JAGS who first appealed to the British government for help in combating drug traffic. Who knows? There are no facts south of Palm Beach.

  Saunders, if he was doing anything, was doing nothing that didn’t come naturally; 250 years ago Governor Bruere of Bermuda complained, “The Caicos trade did not fail to make its devotees somewhat ferocious.” And one official replied, “Sir—you’ll have business enough upon your hands if you go about to rectify that, for there is not a man that sails from hence, but will trade with a pirate.” Especially if he’s offered a deal like the one the DEA was offering Saunders. The DEA, by its own admission, had undercover agents promise Norman Saunders $250,000 a week to refuel drug planes. We had an interesting discussion one night in the bar of the Third Turtle Inn. Everyone—foursquare businessmen on fishing vacations, fat American tourists, the kitchen help, me, honeymoon couples—I mean every one of us said we’d refuel dope planes for $250,000 a week. What wouldn’t we do for $250,000? After a certain number of drinks some pretty frightening admissions were heard.

  Later I would go back to Miami and root through complaints, indictments, affidavits, and so forth. In a sworn deposition, a DEA special agent with the unprepossessing name of Gary Sloboda said . . . well, he said all sorts of things. The document rambles on for sixteen pages, chronicling what amounts to a lot of big talk. No presence of an actual drug is mentioned anywhere. And every person who talked to Saunders about dope was some kind of DEA agent, informant, or plant except one loud
mouth French Canadian named André who stumbled into these bull sessions and began announcing what a scam artist he was. Despite the palaver about astronomy-sized payoffs, it seems Saunders was given only sixty grand and ten of that was to pay off a fuel bill run up by an informant’s business partner. Smokey got $2,500.

  The hard evidence presented to the grand jury was yet less magisterial. Various meetings were secretly tape-recorded. Here’s a sample page from the transcript:

  SMOKEY—Let’s say, lets say it was about two thousand just for them at the airport

  CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT: Huh

  SMOKEY—(Unintelligible)

  C.I.—How do you know?

  SMOKEY—(Unintel.)

  C.I.—One of those black haired

  SMOKEY—(Unintel.)

  C.I.—I don’t know a fucking thing about

  SMOKEY-(Unintel.)

  SAUNDERS—(Unintel.)

  SAUNDERS—Let’s say OK look at some figures. Lets say we’re talking about two thousand each, that’s just throwing out some numbers (Unintel.) If you give two guys in the tower four thousand, two times four is eight thousand, and (unintel.)

  SMOKEY—Alright fuck em.

  I watched the videotape where Saunders stuffs $20,000 into his pants pockets. I mean, the man’s not at the Ramada for his health. Somebody does say, “Here’s twenty thousand,” and he does stuff it into his pants pockets. Other than that it was hard to tell what was going on. The tape was shot with a pinhole lens stuck through a wall at the level of an electrical outlet. What I saw was mostly knees and behinds. The drug agent and the drug informant talked about drugs. The ratchet-jawed Canuck kept putting his two cents in. The DEA guys reiterated everything they said, obviously for the benefit of a hidden microphone. The only words from Norman Saunders that I could make out were: “We’re talking about fees. A sort of finder’s fee.” As of this writing Saunders is finding himself in prison, bail set at $1.1 million.