The university suspended me, so I had to move home. My parents were living nearby at that time, but my residence with them didn’t last long. It lasted until my grades arrived. My father told me he loved me and then he kicked me out, and to this day I don’t blame him one bit. It was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. But at the time it kind of sucked.
* * *
I could get into some real conspiracy theory talk and say that Paul and some of the other folks in the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were working to sever my emotional ties to everything I knew. But that theorizing would take a while, and I’m not much into conspiracy theories anyway. Still, it’s true that after I left home, I rarely saw my family members. Almost never. I was embarrassed about my grades, and they were probably even more embarrassed that I’d pretty much become a drunken party animal. However, examining the psychology of all this is probably best left to another time.
I was suspended for a full semester, so I got an apartment and took on a few more jobs.
I still hung out with Paul and my Pike friends, but “officially” I was not permitted to attend any functions on campus. So Paul and I went to bars and clubs. We hung out with girls and went to off-campus parties.
A few times that semester, Paul would sneak me on campus and I’d go to the frat house during an official party. I was treated as a full active, and I even got to haze some of the new pledges from that semester. But most of the time I hung out with Paul, drank, and waited for summer.
Slowly, I was being brought into Paul’s world. And almost by osmosis, without really knowing it or studying it in any way, I learned more and more about what was going on in Nicaragua.
In April, Paul asked me if I wanted to go to Honduras with him. To “see the situation on the ground,” he said.
That was the beginning, and I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
I was ready for an adventure.
And I was going to get one.
* * *
It wasn’t until a month later, in May of 1986, that Paul and I flew to Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
I didn’t need a passport. Paul got me visa papers of some kind, and I didn’t ask questions. I’d never been out of the country before, unless you count the half dozen times some drunk friends and I had stumbled over the border into Mexico to drink at border bars.
This was an adventure, and Paul was my guide.
When we departed, we were escorted around security at the International Airport in Lubbock, Texas. Three men in plain clothes walked us around the security checkpoint, merely nodding at the light security detail there. No one looked in our bags or made sure we didn’t carry weapons on the flight. But that was only the beginning of the strange trip.
That first trip, we flew into Tegucigalpa’s Toncontín International Airport, one of the most dangerous airports to land at in all the world. After some frightening hairpin turns, we landed at the high-altitude airport, skidding to a stop only feet from the end of the ridiculously short runway.
If the crazy landing wasn’t enough, we were then picked up by dark blue American sedans and driven to a hangar where Paul handed his luggage to a sharp-dressed American. Once again, there was no security inspection for us. It was like we were exempt from the laws and practices of nations. Like we were on the inside, and everyone else couldn’t even see us.
At the time, I didn’t ask, and Paul didn’t tell.
Until I found out that in the bags were bundles of American dollars. Tens of thousands of American dollars. Hundreds of thousands probably. After learning that, I began to ask questions.
“I’m an exchange student in your country,” Paul said with a smile as we were driven to the Intercontinental Hotel. “A guest,” he said. “I fly money out of the country, and occasionally I fly… packages… back into the U.S. on my return.”
“Drugs?”
“Packages.”
“I don’t want anything to do with drugs,” I said.
Paul just smiled, but didn’t answer.
At the hotel, we were met by men who gave us keys to our rooms and vouchers for meals and drinks at the hotel.
It was all nice. Top-flight lodging and amenities. We were treated like VIPs.
Later that evening, a group of U.S. military officers (they wore plain clothes, but they were obviously military) came by our dining table in the hotel restaurant and greeted us. Paul introduced me around.
I didn’t know who he was at the time—I (and the rest of the world) would find out a few years later—but it was at that dinner when I met a smart, confident military officer named Oliver North.
Paul would tell me later that Lieutenant Colonel North was in charge of all covert means of arming the Contra army. He was the puppet master.
And it was at that meal, looking through that wall of glass at the front of the Intercontinental Hotel, when I saw Lillian for the last time.
It was right before Ollie North and his entourage left our table and walked through an arched walkway into the hotel bar.
I turned my head, and just as I was about to look down at my plate, some movement caught my eye. I glanced out through the plate glass—and saw her. Lillian. Climbing into a dark van in front of the hotel.
“I think I just saw Lillian,” I whispered to Paul.
A smile touched Paul’s lips as he cut into his steak. He put a bite into his mouth and nodded his head.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “She was probably leaving me some new clothes in my room.” As he said this, he raised his elbows off the table, looking down at the clothes he was wearing. I remembered then that the clothes he wore were all he had. He’d brought no luggage other than the bags that were filled with Contra cash.
“She takes care of me,” Paul said, “which is only right, since we’re engaged.”
As he said this, he looked up at me and then back down to his steak. The smile was still on his face.
I was through the looking glass now. And I have to admit, however disappointed I might have been to learn that Lillian was engaged to Paul (and had been all along), I was also buzzed a little on the adventure of it all. To me, it didn’t matter. A little pang in the heart was all. I was having the time of my life, and the mysteries of the world seemed to be falling down around me like walls broken down by an artillery barrage of reality. I was buzzed all right. And I liked the feeling.
Later that night, the buzz went away.
A bomb went off at around two a.m. that night, blowing out the front windows of the Intercontinental Hotel. The bomb had been placed under a table not twenty feet from where I’d eaten dinner, from the exact spot where I’d met Ollie North. It seems that Sandinista intelligence agents knew that the hotel was home to the operation that was supplying their enemies with bombs, guns, and the materials to make war.
I wondered then why they chose to detonate a bomb at two in the morning instead of the evening before, when they could have taken out several high-ranking U.S. military officers, one of whom was an officer with the National Security Council. Paul laughed when I asked him.
“Even the Sandinistas don’t want to fight the U.S. directly,” he said. “They’d rather fight with the arms and tentacles of the beast in the jungles and villages of the border lands than take on the Octopus directly. This was just a message. A warning to the rest of us.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard of the Octopus, even though I’d been in its clutches for some time.
Chapter Five
The Octopus was on the move in the mid-’80s. Selling arms to Iran, bombing Libya, invading Grenada. Not to mention utilizing dictators like Manuel Noriega in Panama and groups like the Contras to pump cocaine into the United States in amounts never before seen.
Out of nowhere, it seems, the crack epidemic had exploded across America. It started in South Central Los Angeles with the Bloods and the Crips, but before long it was in every city all across the country.
While it might seem like an unconnected story, or maybe an
unintended consequence, it is notable that a man named Danilo Blandon, head of Nicaragua's agricultural imports under Anastasio Somoza and an active Contra supporter—a man who fled to the U.S. after the Somoza regime fell in ’79 to become the chief money raiser for the Contras—was the single biggest importer of cocaine to the U.S. at the time. Blandon testified under oath that he was supported and protected by the CIA, and later he became a paid employee of the DEA. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and wouldn’t learn the depths of the conspiracy behind the drug epidemic until over a decade later, but when I did read about it, it all made perfect sense to me.
While the Octopus flooded America with cocaine to be made into crack and sold on every street corner, the U.S. government had simultaneously declared a “war on drugs,” a war that would raise billions and billions of tax dollars, militarize American police forces, and create “hard” and angry borders where there used to be porous and friendly ones.
One of the fastest-growing businesses in America after the war on drugs was declared was the private prison business. Octopus front companies made most of those billions of tax dollars back by providing security, transportation, and supplies to the growing law enforcement industry in the United States.
But, like I said, I wouldn’t learn all of that until years later, when the truth would leak out… here a little and there a little, over the next couple decades.
In late May of 1986, I was back at home in the panhandle of Texas, working for a moving company for five dollars an hour and partying every weekend.
It was weird being back at home after my trip to Honduras. The whole world seemed like a different place. A darker, more dangerous place. And I hadn’t really experienced anything yet but a quick glance behind the wizard’s curtain.
Now, when I hung out with Paul, I paid better attention to what was going on. I was often at his house when people would bring him “packages.”
Money.
Paul wasn’t a drug dealer, as far as I knew. At least, he wasn’t actively in the business of selling drugs. He never took drugs or offered me any in all the time I knew him. We never went to parties where heavy drugs were in use. Paul disapproved of people we met who he knew used drugs.
But still, there were the packages.
At any time of the day or night, Paul’s doorbell would ring and someone would hand him a package. Sometimes it was just a normal-looking stranger, it could be a woman or a man, who looked like they might be a student at the university. Other times it might be the postal service, UPS, or FedEx. Only a handful of times would I consider the person who delivered a package to Paul to be a good candidate to fit the bill as a drug dealer.
* * *
A month after we’d returned to Texas, Paul asked me if I wanted to go back to Central America. We were drinking beer at a local college bar at the time, slugging down pitcher after pitcher of cheap tap beer, when Paul looked over at me and I could see that his face had gone very serious.
“So how about it? You want to go back? To go deeper this time?”
“What does deeper mean?” I asked.
“We’ll actually cross over into Nicaragua. See what’s happening on the ground.”
“Why would I do that?”
Paul sat back and tipped back his glass, draining it.
“Because you’re curious. Because you’re ideologically aligned with our cause. Because maybe someday… sometime in the future… you might be able to help.”
“How could I help?” I asked. “Y’all got money, guns, and the aid of the U.S. government. What could I do?”
“We always need people, Matthew. Blancos, like you. People who can go places and do things. People who blend in.”
I thought about the proposition for a few minutes, drank my beer, and looked around the place. It was a typical college bar, but it seemed to me like the place had shrunk just in the time we’d been there drinking. Like maybe the whole world had shrunk.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m always good for a vacation. So long as it’s safe. And maybe I look at it as research. I’ve always wanted to write a book someday. But I don’t see me ever working for you or anyone else involved in that business.”
Paul poured himself another, draining the pitcher. He waived the empty container over his head, catching the attention of the bartender, who immediately grabbed a clean one and began filling it up.
“No one’s asking you to take a job, Matt. I don’t work for these people. Not really. I work for me. I believe in what we’re doing and I think you do too. And, like me, you’d be working for yourself. You only do what you want to do, and you can bow out at any time. But I think you need to see what’s really going on. That way you can make an informed decision.”
An informed decision. I don’t remember what that phrase meant to me then, but now it seems almost laughable. There were so many secrets. So many strings being pulled by so many power brokers that there was no way anyone could truly be informed. That kind of knowledge only comes from hindsight. From seeing people get arrested, killed, “disappeared.” From reading about people like Blandon who were full-time drug dealers and were also working for the CIA, and would continue to do so for decades.
Let me explain.
The pieces are hardly ever put in one place for you. For me, in that time, I came upon them bit by bit.
Five years after that night I would be working as a juvenile officer in the Probation Department in that very city where we were drinking that day. And I’d see the gang wars up close and personal. I’d see the families and lives wrecked by crack cocaine, and I’d see, and at some level participate in, the complete militarization of our local police forces.
Even those five years later, I was only then beginning to see the veiled structure of the Octopus and how it invaded every part of our lives, with most people never knowing it even existed.
Take this little tidbit, for example. See if this story doesn’t scramble your eggs a little. Some of the bodyguards of then-Governor (and future President) Bill Clinton were ordered by him to provide cover and protection for Contra drug shipments being flown into a small airport in Mena, Arkansas (this on behalf of future President George H. W. Bush). Several of those men who knew what had gone down at Mena Airport subsequently talked to investigative reporters about what they knew. Bush Sr. later got them transferred into the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (the ATF), and in 1990 I met them at a law enforcement conference being held at a closed Air Force base outside of Lubbock, Texas. This was years after my experiences in Nicaragua. The night of the conference, I was called on stage to assist while an ATF scientist cooked crack.
Right on stage.
In front of three hundred other law enforcement officers.
The purpose of the presentation was to teach local law enforcement how to identify a crack lab and to know more about how tiny amounts of powder cocaine can be made into crack and be sold for a lot of money on the streets.
Later that night, after the conference, a bunch of LEOs and I went to a local night club for drinks. I was sitting at a table with these three ATF agents from Arkansas, the ones who’d been talking to reporters about what they knew about Mena. These men didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. I didn’t know that we were all loosely, and unknowingly, affiliated through our various interactions with the Octopus. I didn’t know that I might have seen some of these men at that airport in Mena. Anyway, I met the men. Heard their stories. Remembered their names. They even pitched me the idea of going to work for ATF, something I considered for about five minutes and then rejected.
A few years after that, these three men were part of the raid on the “compound” at Waco where the Branch Davidians faced off with the Clinton Administration. The men I met that night at a club in Lubbock were sent into the building through the upstairs window of the Davidian church, and they were all gunned down—some say by “friendly fire.”
Talk about chilling.
I keep saying it, but it’s
important to realize that I didn’t know any of this in the late spring and early summer of 1986. I just knew that the adventure was continuing, and that important people thought I had a good head on my shoulders and could be helpful in a cause that I thought then was a just one.
So I said yes. I’d go back to Central America with Paul. In my mind, we weren’t cogs in a machine that would kill thousands and fundamentally change America for the worse over the next decades. We were just college kids engaged in a philosophical battle that we both believed in. That’s what I thought then.
It’s not what I think now.
Chapter Six
A few days later we were back on a plane to Tegucigalpa. Same harrowing approach and landing at the airport. Same detours around security. Same trip to the Intercontinental Hotel. I was even given the same room.
This time, though, we didn’t meet with American military advisors, at least not until some time later. Instead we made plans to be driven due east one hundred and thirty-five miles down bumpy dirt back roads and through the mountains to a town called Catacamas. There, along with six other Contras, we boarded a small, poorly maintained and frighteningly un-airworthy plane for a short trip to Puerto Lempira on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras.
At Puerto Lempira we were outfitted in standard Contra uniforms (That’s a joke. There were no “standard” uniforms. The standard was whatever we could get. No two soldiers matched, and nothing really fit right), and we were driven from there in the back of equally decrepit American four-wheel-drive pickup trucks through the jungle on muddy, rutted roads to a crossing of the Coco River. There, we met up with the men who would comprise our mission unit going into Nicaragua. There were around twenty-seven of us.
By this point, I was frightened. I had in my mind the images of World War II soldiers being delivered via landing craft to the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima. But the Contras among us, mostly Meskitu Indians who were part of the MISURA/Steadman Fagoth branch of the Contra rebels, talked a lot and kept things light. They didn’t seem afraid, so I chose to choke down my own fears so I could continue to look at the whole experience as an adventure. Something I’d be able to brag about at the bar and tell my children someday.
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 23