Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  For example, Steve Ravenel, a smuggler who had called on both Foy and Lee Harvey to salvage smuggling ventures gone awry, testified about traveling from Key West to the Bahamas in 1979 aboard a shrimp boat provided by Foy. In the Bahamas the boat picked up eight thousand pounds of marijuana from a tiny island, along with the three Colombians who had been guarding the drugs. The boat then left for McClellanville. Ravenel spent more than a week on the boat with the men, and recalled the captain of the boat was heavyset, had curly hair, and was named Kenny. Still, his memory of that trip four years ago was fuzzy, and he offered an explanation why.

  “There was a captain and two crew members, none of which I had known prior and none of which I would know after, just three people that [Foy] probably drug off the streets at the last minute to put on there. It was no real big formal introduction. It was three o’clock in the morning and we just cranked it up and left,” Ravenel said of boarding the shrimp boat in Key West.

  “We had these three, plus three more Colombians on board,” Ravenel continued. “I was really not interested in really getting to know these people, because I knew that would be the end of it as soon as we got off, and I just wanted to get it over with and get in.”

  The government hoped Ravenel would finger defendant Kenny Thomas as the “Kenny” referenced in his testimony, and a prosecutor asked Ravenel to stand and identify the captain of the shrimp boat. Looking around the courtroom, however, the witness faltered, perhaps out of loyalty to a friend.

  “I don’t know,” Ravenel testified. “I don’t see anybody that looks like him.”

  Other defendants had similar difficulty making identifications, and it was soon apparent to those attending the trial that witnesses’ memories were not always accurate. On the second day of trial the government dropped charges against defendant Kenny Gunn after it was discovered that a witness had confused him with Kenny Thomas. The next day, charges against another defendant, Charles Wallace Martin, were dropped, too, for lack of evidence, leaving eight defendants.

  Defense attorneys, meanwhile, argued that many of the government witnesses’ memories were flawed because of drug and alcohol abuse. Government witness Jimmy MacNeal testified about various smuggling ventures in Beaufort, Edisto Island, and McClellanville before admitting, under cross-examination, to snorting cocaine less than twenty-four hours earlier. Another government witness’s drug use was not quite as recent, but similarly extensive. Julian “Bunny” Morse Jr. owned up to a fast lifestyle when Charleston defense attorney Arthur Howe asked the McClellanville smuggler how he spent the hundreds of thousand dollars he made smuggling.

  “Threw it away,” Morse said. “Drugs, fast cars, just lived like a fool.”

  “Lived like a fool,” Howe responded. “And you were coked up half the time, weren’t you?”

  “Maybe not half the time,” Morse answered. “Sometimes all of the time.”

  After the close of the second day of trial, defense attorney Michael J. Cox asked Hawkins if they could work through the weekend and wrap the case up. The judge responded that the government anticipated having a few days of testimony ahead, prompting Cox to quip that “there must be some witnesses coming up who know something about this case.”

  Hawkins was not amused by the remark.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that, but anyway be here promptly with your clients, and I will remind the U.S. attorney, too, nine-thirty, ready to go.”

  The next day, Cox apologized to the court.

  If the quip was inappropriate, it was not completely inaccurate, as the government was paying a heavy price for the witnesses they called to the stand. Their dubious choices culminated with the testimony of Maura Mooney, Rhoad’s former girlfriend. Mooney, known as the “Space Cadet” and the “Sea Monkey” by some of the gentlemen smugglers, was a risky witness for the prosecution. On the one hand she was familiar with at least six of the remaining eight defendants through her relationship with Rhoad, and she could place them on the scene of various smuggling ventures. On the other hand she was easily confused about past events, had acknowledged a $500-a-week cocaine addiction, had admitted to being institutionalized and under psychiatric care, had pleaded guilty to embezzling from a Vermont ski resort, and had worked for the DEA as a paid informant and participated with federal agents in a failed setup against Rhoad.

  During her testimony she recalled traveling with Rhoad to Hawaii and St. Barts for pleasure, and the Bahamas and the Channel Islands to deposit money. She was familiar with the major kingpins targeted by Operation Jackpot, including Foy, Harvey, and Les Riley, and even helped Rhoad sell pot, earning a commission from her lover. She also claimed to have cooked a meal for an unloading crew before a shipment of hashish arrived on Hilton Head. Despite her familiarity with many of the defendants, she couldn’t keep them straight and confused defendants Mike McEachern and Glenn Cappleman, perhaps because the men purposefully switched shirts before she attempted the identification. She became agitated on the stand—“I can’t stand this,” she said at one point—and was unable to identify another defendant, “Disco Don” Powe. All this led to attacks by defense attorneys under cross-examination.

  “You got a lot of names mixed up, didn’t you,” asked Moss.

  “How do they pay you, like Mr. Rhoad in cash, or do they pay you by check? The government I’m talking about,” said attorney Stephen Scaring.

  When the defense attorneys were finished, Mooney stepped down from the stand and proceeded to cause an uproar. Among the many asides during her testimony, she said that she had suddenly seen the defendant Powe, and could in fact identify him. That comment, made when the jury was temporarily out of the courtroom, had gone either ignored or unheard by all but the court reporter. But now, while leaving the stand, Mooney bent down and leaned in close to Powe and whispered “Hey, Don.” The defense attorneys went berserk.

  “Judge … she went up to Mr. Powe and said something to him … it almost looked like she gave him a kiss,” said Scaring. “The jury was looking at it, I don’t know if counsel observed that. That was very improper of that witness to do that.”

  Hawkins was at a loss for how to remediate Mooney’s bizarre action, and said such an interaction was not unusual, even recalling a woman who once hit Scaring’s fellow attorney, Howe, in the head with a pocketbook after stepping down from the stand.

  “What do you want me to do?” replied Hawkins. “To call back the jury in and tell them to please disregard the witness about the kissing.”

  Powe’s lawyer moved for a mistrial, but Hawkins denied his motion. The judge pleased the defense attorneys, however, by forbidding the government from allowing their final witness, Customs agent Claude McDonald, to present the jury with a chart summarizing different smuggling ventures and which defendants were allegedly involved. Hawkins also dismissed ten charges against seven of the defendants, further reducing the government’s case. After the government rested, only a few defense attorneys called witnesses, most opting to argue simply that the government had made an altogether unconvincing case riddled with inconsistencies.

  “This Operation Jackpot is really ‘Operation Crackpot,’ ” said Sanders’s attorney, Ed Bell. “The case is falling apart. If you allow these defendants to be convicted on half truths than you’re giving them half justice.

  “The entire case,” he added, “is people who are in the prosecutor’s noose.”

  After more than thirteen hours of deliberation, the jury returned with verdicts, convicting five of the defendants and acquitting three. While Sanders was elated to be found not guilty of conspiracy charges, Thomas, the boat captain, was among the less fortunate, convicted of two separate smuggling ventures.

  For as much publicity as Operation Jackpot attracted, critics considered the five convictions underwhelming, if not humiliating. The biggest crooks were still on the loose, they said, and the government fumbled its case against the men they did manage to get in the courtroom. The trial’s chief prosecutor, Assistant
U.S. Attorney Cam Littlejohn, concedes that things did not go smoothly. It was a nightmare, he says, considering the number of defendants who were dismissed and the fact that witnesses could not keep their memories straight. Littlejohn was assigned to the Jackpot case just three weeks before trial, introduced to an overwhelming amount of detail concerning nearly a decade’s worth of smuggling.

  “It was just a mess,” Littlejohn says, “because no one had done a historical investigation.”

  U.S. Attorney Henry McMaster told reporters the trial was difficult, but dismissed criticism that the government netted no big fish.

  “As far as the Operation Jackpot team is concerned, everybody who is involved in drug smuggling to any degree is a major criminal,” said McMaster. “It’s a matter of opinion as to which of these defendants was on a higher rung on the ladder.”

  Besides, he said, another trial was on the horizon.

  “These convictions mark significant progress for Operation Jackpot,” said McMaster, “but we still have a long way to go.”

  If prosecutors were smarting from the three acquittals, they quickly recovered from any disappointment. Four days after the end of the trial, on August 12, 1983, police arrested Willie Frank Steele, the boat captain of the Anonymous of Rorc, in Satellite Beach, Florida. Since being arrested nearly two years earlier on Edisto Island, South Carolina, with nearly ten thousand pounds of hashish, Steele had pleaded guilty to drug charges and was sentenced to prison. He skipped bond, however, and went on the run, living in Grenada and Florida while working with Bob “The Boss” Byers on more smuggling ventures. In lieu of full payment for these jobs, Steele agreed to captain three boats for Byers in exchange for a 50 percent ownership interest in La Cautiva, Byers’s exquisite, eighty-five-foot steel-hulled sailboat. While he continued smuggling as a fugitive, Steele was indicted as part of Riley’s smuggling ring and charged as a kingpin. Now he was in custody.

  Prosecutors were ecstatic about the arrest, and even happier when they learned Steele was willing to cut a deal and talk. He pleaded guilty to a continuing criminal enterprise charge, becoming the first Jackpot defendant to be convicted of the so-called kingpin statute, or CCE. This law, similar to a racketeering charge but specific to drug trafficking, was passed in 1970 as part of the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. To convict a defendant of continuing criminal enterprise, a prosecutor must prove the suspect’s involvement in drug felonies, demonstrate he made significant amounts of money in repeated operations, and establish that he supervised at least five different people during his illicit activities. The punishment for this offense was severe, requiring a prison term of at least ten years and up to life behind bars, without parole.

  As investigators milked Steele for valuable information, ten defendants named in the Riley indictment prepared for trial. Among them was Gunn, who had charges against him dropped weeks earlier in the first Jackpot trial. Also preparing to stand trial was Gunn’s friend and sailing partner, Christy Campbell, who had recently returned from the Bahamas to turn himself in.

  During a pretrial hearing in October 1983 regarding the suppression of evidence, two Coast Guard officers were called to the stand to testify about their arrests of Campbell, Gunn, and Ashley Brunson aboard the Love Affair in 1978. First went Commander Thomas Braithewaite, the former commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Steadfast. Then came Lieutenant Brian O’Keefe, who had boarded the sailboat and found it loaded with nearly eight thousand pounds of pot. Just before Hawkins recessed court for lunch, O’Keefe testified that prosecutors had shown him photographs of suspects that morning, but that he could not identify Gunn or Campbell, whom he had last seen five years earlier.

  Returning to the courtroom an hour or so later, O’Keefe took the stand again and informed the court that while he ate lunch at the nearby Marriott hotel “a gentleman identifying himself as Mr. Chris Campbell came up and introduced himself, said hello, basically nice to see you again. Shortly thereafter, introduced Mr. Gunn.”

  O’Keefe said he was dining with Braithewaite, his former commanding officer. Campbell introduced himself to Braithewaite, too, before telling an acquaintance that the Coast Guard officers had been “real nice guys.”

  “He asked if any of the people who were on board the ship back then were still on board,” said O’Keefe, “and he asked about another particular officer who had been on board at that time, who he had, I guess, a reasonable amount of conversation with.”

  After O’Keefe finished his testimony about the boarding, the court was stunned, with Hawkins exclaiming that “hardly ever do we get a reverse identification. Usually the agents identify the defendants. In this case, we have the defendants identifying the government agents. It’s unusual.”

  Campbell’s lawyer, Mark Kadish, asked Hawkins to go easy on him.

  “I wish the court would stop throwing the darts into my body,” said Kadish.

  Next, the government called witnesses of events surrounding Campbell’s and Gunn’s arrests in Savannah, Georgia, after docking the Caroline C. in 1981. A dockhand testified that the men drunkenly celebrated their landfall at a marina, flashed a machine gun, and paid him generously to wash the boat. Next, a U.S. Customs Patrol agent described how he and others found the main salon of the Caroline C in shambles, with dirty dishes strewn about and damp clothing and blankets piled on the floor. The ship, he said, smelled of marijuana. Then U.S Customs agent Rachel Fischer took the stand and related her encounter at the Savannah airport with Gunn, Campbell, and their crewmate Peter Millikin. As she approached the men, she said, Gunn offered her a can of beer and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She answered his advances by displaying her badge.

  Fischer identified Gunn in the courtroom, along with Campbell. Although it had been two years since the arrests, she said, she had no trouble remembering Gunn.

  “Why’s that?” asked a prosecutor.

  “I never forget a man that kisses me,” said Fischer.

  For the second Jackpot trial, Gunn’s fellow defendants included Riley’s younger brother, Roy, and two of Harvey’s younger brothers, Tom and Michael, along with seven other men. During a number of subsequent hearings held by Hawkins, the roster of defendants dwindled, both because Hawkins decided to sever the list of defendants, scheduling another trial, and because some defendants, including Steele and Campbell, struck plea agreements with the government.

  Michael Harvey remembers meeting with some remaining codefendants when his attorney, Larry Turner of Gainesville, Florida, came into the conference room, telling the men, “Guys, Christy Campbell just turned on y’all.” The news was crushing. Not only had the government gained the cooperation of a charismatic witness with firsthand knowledge of numerous smuggling ventures, but those on trial were unsettled by a friend committing what they considered a betrayal. By this point there were only four men due to be tried. Each man— Gunn, Bruce MacDougall, Sanders, and Michael Harvey—had some kind of relationship with Campbell.

  As the recent testimony of the Coast Guard officers and Customs agents attested to, Gunn had sailed often with Campbell throughout the Caribbean and twice to the Carolinas from Lebanon. Now Gunn’s friend and former captain was potentially going to finger him in court. MacDougall helped off-load boats that Campbell sailed into Massachusetts and South Carolina. Sanders and Campbell grew up in the same South Carolina town of Beaufort. And Michael Harvey knew Campbell as one of his older brother Lee’s most trusted and talented boat captains, someone he would turn to for the most daring trips. When Campbell met with some of the defendants to inform them personally of his decision, Harvey says he was not received warmly.

  “I could wring your fucking neck if you don’t get out of my sight,” said MacDougall. “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”

  Besides paring down the number of defendants, Hawkins ordered the trial be held in Columbia, where there were more spacious courtrooms. Many of the people involved in the trial chose to stay just blocks from the courthouse in the n
ew downtown Marriott hotel, including three of the defendants. There, the alleged smugglers were celebrities, and a sign hung in the lobby, pleading for the court to “Free the Marriott Four.” Sanders, the lone defendant not to stay at the Marriott, had not met his codefendants before the trial, but says they were friendly to him and often asked him to “join the party” in their suites at the hotel.

  “let me tell ya, their idea of a party scared me,” writes Sanders. “They seemed to know they were toast and I suppose decided to blow it all out. Which they did.

  “I went to their room with one of my preppie buddies one night, and [was] immediately approached by a couple hookers. real hookers. They were wide open. Strippers, I guess. Cause they stripped just for the hell of it. One of the hookers said she’d never been picked up by the fuzz. and just when I thought … well, that’s good, at least a little bit careful about this … she said, ‘but I have been slapped around by my tits a time or two.’

  “that was a wild place, boy,” writes Sanders. “not my cup of tea.”

  The hotel became even zanier when the defendants’ lawyers arrived for lodging. The legal team included Bill Moffitt and John Zwerling, two prominent criminal defense attorneys from Alexandria, Virginia, representing MacDougall and Gunn, respectively. These men, and a few of their partners and colleagues in Virginia, were famous for their sympathetic attitudes toward marijuana, advocacy for changes in drug law, and representation of highprofile drug clients. Nicknamed the “Dope Bar” by Washington, D.C.’s law enforcement community, these lawyers would often be recommended in the pages of High Times magazine, says former Virginia-based DEA agent Jim Mittica, and were “notoriously antiestablishment, anti-government and pro-legalization.” Some of these lawyers belonged to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and many pledged through NORML not to represent defendants who agreed to cooperate with the government. Mittica says their defenses never lacked spirit or creativity, though the feisty lawyers sometimes wore a judge’s patience thin. Says Mittica: