Witsec

by Pete Earley

  Deputy Almanza greeted Shur with bad news. There were no helicopters available. The embassy was sending over two cars. “What about the land mines?” Shur asked. “The drivers are supposed to know how to miss them,” Almanza replied.

  Within an hour, they had left the city and were weaving through the lush mountain terrain along a rutty road when a tire on the lead car went flat. Shur and the deputies stepped from the two cars to stretch their legs while the driver began changing the tire. Suddenly Shur spotted someone moving in the brush. Then another. They were soldiers, but he couldn’t tell if they were rebels or national guardsmen. The deputy marshals had seen those two and more hiding in the jungle. “Don’t draw,” Shur said. “Let’s see if they are friendly.” Almanza called out, and a soldier stepped from behind a tree. Instinctively the deputies formed a protective shield around Shur. The soldier asked what they were doing and where they were going. Almanza motioned to the flat tire and said they were U.S. health workers going to help some sick children up the highway. Shur glanced over at the car he had been riding in. The Uzi submachine gun was on the backseat. He didn’t think health workers usually carried machine guns, and he knew the weapons would be prizes worth the soldiers’ taking. Shur nodded toward the gun, and one of the deputies began easing toward the car to hide it. As Almanza continued talking to the soldier, the spare tire was quickly bolted into place.

  “Got it,” the driver called out as he tossed the flat tire into the car trunk. “Let’s get out of here.” The men eased into the cars. Almanza was the last. If the soldiers were going to attack, they would have to do it now. Shur felt like a sitting duck as Almanza slipped into the space next to him. The two cars moved forward. One of the soldiers waved from the bushes. Shur began to relax.

  Before they reached Zacatecoluca, the delegation stopped in a village to inspect its courtroom. It was inside a building that had housed a grocery store. The floor was dirt, and there was no electricity. Because it was hard to see inside the building, the local judge sat near the building’s huge front window. There was no glass, and anyone walking by could have reached through it and tapped the judge on the shoulder or, Shur thought, just as easily shot him in the head. With Almanza serving as an interpreter, Shur interviewed the local judge. He told them that soldiers in the area would often walk into the courtroom while a trial was in session and take a witness or a spectator away. Some were beaten; others never returned from the jungle. “They’re watching you right now,” he warned them, motioning down the street. Four soldiers were lingering outside a store about a block away. Noticing that the courtroom contained only a desk and a few wooden chairs, Shur asked the judge where he kept his court files and records. “The trunk of my car,” he answered. “It has a lock.” The delegation stopped at another village and found the courtroom there just as barren. Yet Shur was impressed by the commitment of the local magistrate. He said he didn’t believe anyone could really protect him from the rebels or the national security force, yet he continued to hold court.

  By the time Shur’s squad reached the Zacatecoluca courtroom where the national guardsmen were going to be tried, he felt a sense of inspiration. “Those of us who stand up for justice are the true soldiers,” he told Judge Bernardo Rauda Murcia. “We are the soldiers of truth.” Later, he would say that he had become caught up in the moment. “My sermonizing and theatrics caught the deputies by surprise, but I was truly moved. It is much easier to dispense justice in some marble federal courthouse that is well guarded in a nation like ours, which has a history of respect for the judiciary and law and order, than it is in a barren store in an impoverished, war-torn country. It was clear during our brief mission that even though guns were more powerful than the law, they could not deter these judges.”

  When the judge asked Shur if he had any ideas about how to protect jurors, he replied: “Begin sequestering them.” A look of horror formed on the judge’s face. Almanza explained that the judge had interpreted the word sequester to mean “kidnap.” Shur apologized. “Here I had been lecturing him about how we were soldiers of truth and then he thought I wanted him to begin kidnapping jurors. In a country where the national security forces were snatching up people every day, it had made him wonder just how concerned about justice I really was.”

  Rauda Murcia’s courtroom was a large oblong room that had been divided into three sections. The judge sat behind a desk in front of a waist-high wooden railing. The defendants sat on a plain wooden bench behind the railing, which enclosed them like a box. Spectators sat closest to the door, behind the defendants.

  “Where are the light switches?” Almanza asked.

  There were none. “We don’t need them because we don’t hold court at night,” the judge replied.

  The deputies quickly decided the best way to protect the court was by having two armed men stationed next to the judge, two more stationed inside the railing with the defendants, and several more at the room’s entrance. Now all they had to do was find guards brave enough to attend the trial. “When we returned to San Salvador, we asked officials from every component of the Salvadoran government whom they trusted most, and all said, without hesitation, the prison guards,” Shur recalled, “so we recommended that they be used for the trial of the nuns’ killers.”

  The next morning they headed back to the airport. Shur flashed his diplomatic passport at the gate but the guard there wouldn’t let him pass without having him open his carry-on bag and step through a metal detector. Shur explained that he was carrying a gun—they all were—and they didn’t want to surrender it. They’d already lost a magnetometer to Guatemalan customs officials, and Shur didn’t want the weapons, especially the Uzi, to disappear. He also didn’t want to be sitting in the gate area unarmed while waiting for the flight. Almanza and the security guard argued for several moments in Spanish, then the deputy told Shur that everyone could hang on to their weapons until it was time to board. Shur scanned the crowd. He was eager to get home to Miriam. Then Almanza had everyone put their guns into a bag, and with the security guard at his side, Almanza carried the bag onto the airplane and put it in the cockpit. After the airplane had pulled away from the terminal, he fetched it and walked through the cabin handing out pistols to his fellow deputies and Shur. He left the Uzi in the bag. Not a single passenger said a word.

  “How’d you get that guard in the airport to let us keep the guns?” Shur asked.

  “His bullets were old, so I gave him two of mine.”

  Shur had to work fast back in Washington. The trial was scheduled to begin in less than seven weeks. He spent hours on the telephone handling logistics. Sixty Salvadoran prison guards had been chosen in San Salvador and were waiting to hear from him. Shur arranged for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, to fit the guards into its packed training schedule and give them courses in basic courtroom security, automatic-weapons firing, and evasive driving techniques. None of the guards spoke English, so the center’s training manuals had to be translated into Spanish. The deputies who had gone with Shur to El Salvador recommended the guards be given the best new equipment available so they could make a “show of force” that would cause national security forces and rebels to think twice before attacking the courtroom. The Marshals Service recommended they be provided with two dozen bulletproof vests, several cases of gas grenades, eighteen heavy-duty police cars, two bulletproof SUVs, and two nine-passenger vans specially equipped to transport prisoners, along with a number of firearms. Money wasn’t a problem. The State Department and the Agency for International Development had set aside $800,000 for the purpose. The trouble was petty politics. While making arrangements, Shur learned there wasn’t enough ammunition at the Georgia training center for the M-16 rifles the guards were going to be shooting, and the ammunition manufacturer couldn’t deliver enough rounds in time for the training course. Shur was stymied until he learned the State Department had several crates of ammunition in a warehouse. Its security division didn’t want to
share their bullets, and it took Shur a day of infuriating telephone calls and finally the intervention of a senior State Department official to get the crates delivered. Then, just when it seemed everything was falling into place, Shur was told by an Agency for International Development (AID) officer that her budget chief was refusing to charter an airplane to fly the prison guards to Georgia. Shur lost his temper. “Everything was ready to go,” he said later. “We had managed to do the impossible by getting the training center, which is booked months in advance, to find room for the guards. We had hired interpreters and found equipment, and now, because someone didn’t want to sign an authorization form, we couldn’t get the guards flown here.” Shur telephoned an airline charter service and hired a pilot, crew, and airplane for the trip, charging the entire bill to his credit card. Two days later, an AID official sheepishly agreed to pay for the flight.

  The Salvadoran guards finished their training one week before the trial was scheduled to begin. At their “graduation,” Shur addressed them, saying they were about to embark on “a most important mission, for without an effective system of justice, no country can survive.”

  The national guardsmen’s trial attracted international attention, and the newly christened Salvadoran Judicial Protection Unit stood guard inside the courtroom in their American-made uniforms, carrying their new automatic weapons. Despite their presence, only seven of the twelve men and women chosen as jurors dared to show up. Still, the trial went off without a hitch. Defense attorneys accused the U.S. government of railroading the five national guardsmen, but evidence showed that one of them had left a fingerprint in the nuns’ van. Another guardsman confessed. They were found guilty and the judge sentenced all five to serve thirty years in prison, the maximum sentence. Although the guardsmen claimed they were carrying out orders when they raped and murdered the nuns, none of the military officers who oversaw them was ever charged. The civil war in El Salvador continued for nine more years, until December 1992, when the United Nations negotiated a peace treaty between the government and the FMLN. Fighting between the two sides ended about a year later.

  “I was proud of the work we had done,” Shur recalled. “I felt the Salvadorans had proven they could protect a judge, a jury, and prosecutors in a country where bribery, intimidation, and corruption were daily occurrences. Obviously, we hadn’t solved all of the judiciary’s problems there, but we had helped them take that first step and we had brought the nuns’ murderers to justice. I remember thinking about how the mob had tried over the years to corrupt our judicial process. It reminded me of the obvious: There can be no justice if there is intimidation.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Organized crime in America was so bloodied that Justice Department officials announced on the front page of The New York Times in 1983 that the government was on the verge of winning its war against the mob. “In every city where there is a major organized crime family, we have indicted and/or convicted the top echelons of that family, and that’s all within the past few years,” Floyd Clarke, a deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, proudly declared. David Margolis, chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, said the use of federal strike forces, the RICO Act, legal wiretaps, and WITSEC had effectively turned the tide. But the government had little time to celebrate. A new criminal element quickly filled the void, and Gerald Shur suddenly found himself the target of a twisted kidnap plot.

  • • •

  Less than $10 million worth of cocaine was smuggled into the United States during 1975. Nine years later, an estimated $1 billion worth was being dumped here. Eighty percent of it came from a single source: the Medellín cartel in Colombia, the richest and most deadly criminal gang in the world in the early 1980s. It was run by Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Carlos Ledher Rivas, and the Ochoa family, which included brothers Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Fabio. Their fingers reached across most of the Americas. Workers harvested leaves and turned them into coca paste in Bolivia and Peru, which was delivered by “mules” to secret laboratories in Colombia, Nicaragua, and Panama. The final product was shipped to warehouses in the Bahamas, Mexico, and the Turks and Caicos Islands for delivery to the United States. Both the Reagan and Bush administrations declared war on the so-called narco kingpins. It proved a bloody campaign.

  The cartel’s most vicious leader was Pablo Escobar, whose personal wealth in 1983 was estimated at $2 billion. Unlike the Ochoa brothers, who were from the privileged class in Colombia and viewed themselves as refined playboys, Escobar was a vicious, poorly educated street thug. He first made a name for himself by stealing cars but quickly graduated to the more lucrative crimes of extortion, kidnapping, and murder, all committed before he became a cocaine trafficker. His trademark was plata o plomo—anyone he couldn’t bribe with plata (silver), he killed with plomo (lead).

  The DEA got its first break in going after him and the cartel when it arrested Adler “Barry” Seal, a three-hundred-pound ex–Green Beret and self-proclaimed adventurer, in Miami during a 1982 sting operation code-named Screamer. Clever and brash, in the 1970s Seal had been the youngest pilot ever to captain a 747 airplane, but he had gotten bored and had turned to gunrunning and later dope smuggling, as much for the thrill as for the cash. Now faced with a possible sixty-year prison sentence, Seal offered to help the DEA go after the cartel if the charges filed against him were put on hold. Overnight, he became the DEA’s most prized informant.

  Unaware that Seal had switched sides, the Ochoa family hired him to smuggle three thousand pounds of cocaine into the United States. But he ran into trouble after he flew to a concealed airfield owned by the Ochoas in the Colombian jungle in June 1984 to pick up the first fifteen-hundred-pound installment. So many pounds of cocaine were crammed into his airplane that it couldn’t clear the jungle, and crashed when taking off. Seal was unhurt, and the Ochoas provided him with a second airplane filled with cocaine. This time he got off the ground.

  After a quick refueling stop in Managua, Seal was starting the last leg of his flight into the United States when one of the plane’s engines caught on fire and he was forced to return to the Nicaraguan airport. Soldiers from Nicaragua’s Sandinista army were waiting to arrest him. Seal spent three days in jail before he was taken back to his damaged airplane. The Ochoas had sprung him and arranged for the Sandinistas to unload and watch over his cargo. He was instructed to return to the United States in the damaged airplane. Meanwhile, the Ochoas were lining up a third airplane for him, this time a C-132 cargo plane, big and strong enough for him to retrieve the cocaine that he had been forced to stash in Nicaragua.

  As soon as the DEA learned from Seal that the Sandinista army was protecting the Ochoas’ cocaine, it contacted the CIA, which in turn notified the White House. President Reagan and CIA director William Casey were trying to whip up support in Congress for the contras, rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Linking the Marxist Sandinistas to the Medellín drug lords would be a major public relations coup.

  As promised, the Ochoas arranged for a C-132 cargo airplane to be delivered to Seal, and as soon as he took possession, the CIA hurried in and hid a camera inside it. Seal then returned to Nicaragua and secretly photographed several of the men who loaded the duffel-size bags of cocaine into the airplane’s belly. When he returned to the United States, federal agents confiscated the drugs and developed the film. White House officials were ecstatic when they saw the snapshots. Not only had Seal photographed Sandinista soldiers, he had also caught a top Sandinista government official on film. But the real prize was a picture of Pablo Escobar himself, toting bags of cocaine into the airplane.

  Reagan would later successfully use Seal’s photographs to convince Congress to lift a ban that it had imposed on U.S. funding for the contras. The rebels would be sent another $100 million in aid. The Justice Department, meanwhile, issued indictments based on Seal’s undercover work for the arrest of Escobar and the Ochoas.
However, they were not arrested.

  Although the United States and Colombia had signed an extradition treaty in 1979, no one in the Colombian government wanted to risk handing over the drug lords to the United States. Everyone was afraid because Escobar had unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror. Judges, politicians, and journalists who spoke out in favor of turning him over to the United States were assassinated. No one was safe, no matter how important. Colombia’s justice minister, the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general, was gunned down by Escobar’s assassins. More than thirty other judges were slaughtered. At one point Escobar paid a band of rebels to storm the Palace of Justice in Bogotá and hold the entire Colombian Supreme Court hostage. The guerrillas, who received a million dollars from Escobar, murdered eleven of the twenty-four justices. After a bloody fight, the Colombian military reclaimed the building and freed the remaining thirteen justices. But by then, Escobar’s campaign had worked. The court declared the 1979 extradition treaty illegal, based on a technicality. At least for the moment, Escobar and the other cartel members were safe as long as they stayed in Colombia.

  Escobar now turned his sights on revenge and Barry Seal.

  • • •

  In 1984, Seal was living with his wife in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was a city with few Latin residents, so Escobar was reluctant to send Colombian assassins after him because they would be conspicuous. Instead, the cartel offered a million dollars to a Miami man named Max Mermelstein to kidnap Seal and bring him to Colombia, or half that figure simply to murder him. Mermelstein ran the cartel’s U.S. distribution operations from a series of pay telephones and dummy offices in Miami. He recruited smugglers, scheduled flights, kept track of inventory, repackaged drugs, and laundered cash.