Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  Bandy, the political writer, commented that McMaster produced more news releases and press conferences than all his predecessors combined, and “no one can recall any other U.S. attorney being so public-relations conscious.” Other critics pointed out that Operation Jackpot intercepted no drugs and rounded up smugglers who almost exclusively trafficked marijuana and hashish, not hard drugs like cocaine and heroin.

  McMaster had critics within the government, too, and at least two veteran assistant U.S. attorneys in his office quit out of frustration with their boss. After McMaster finished his term, one of his staff members circulated a poem, which included this verse:

  Oh, Henry—

  You leave behind a grateful public

  Who thinks you’re greater than the Pope

  Because of Operation Crackpot,

  But, Henry, we’re stuck with the DOPE.

  McMaster’s successor, Vinton D. Lide, made numerous changes regarding the drug investigation task force when he took over. Most noticeably, the task force was no longer called Operation Jackpot, but the much more prosaic Presidential Drug Task Force for the District of South Carolina. Lide said the Jackpot moniker did not give proper credit to Reagan’s drug enforcement initiatives. McMaster had argued that the catchy handle was crucial in helping create a success story the public could rally around. Another difference between the two men was their conduct during press conferences and the way they presented their charges against the smugglers to the public. Speaking of Riley and Butler, Lide said in 1985 that, “Of course, everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and these charges are merely accusations right now.”

  Such a comment stands in stark contrast to one McMaster made two years earlier when discussing Les Riley and his brother Roy, neither of whom had been tried in court.

  “They’re criminals. They’re both criminals,” said McMaster. “Of course, they’re not criminals until they’re convicted, but they’re still criminals.”

  If McMaster took his lumps from all sides, it was to be expected. He disturbed extensive smuggling networks, annoyed defense attorneys, and bucked bureaucrats and naysayers, delivering conviction after conviction. To mount Operation Jackpot, it probably required a bit of arrogance and entitlement, just as smuggling marijuana required those traits. McMaster was unapologetic about his performance:

  If I could look back and point to anything I’m proud of, it’s being part of Operation Jackpot. I think it is one of the singular most important achievements in law enforcement history, and the future investigation and prosecution of drug smugglers and drug dealers will profit from the financial approach we took in Operation Jackpot.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Jackpot has changed the way these cases will be handled, and I sincerely believed it has crippled the drug smugglers’ operations.

  For nearly four years Lee “Smiley” Harvey had been a wanted man. Despite losing tons of hashish to the Atlantic Ocean and the police in 1981, he kept smuggling. Despite the arrests of Julian “Doc” Pernell, Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs, and dozens of others in Virginia in 1982, he kept smuggling. Despite Operation Jackpot and the arrest of his partner, Riley, in 1983, he kept smuggling. Toombs says Harvey moved beyond running drugs, that he was wrapped up with the mob, that the Lebanese were asking him to smuggle more than a billion dollars in gold and jewels outside their war-torn country to the Bahamas, the valuables concealed in slabs of hashish. It’s hard to know if this is true.

  Harvey outlasted almost every other kingpin he worked with, at least among the gentlemen smugglers. But not even Smiley could run forever, not if he kept visiting the same old haunts, as he was doing in Miami in 1985, with the DEA updating its files with every lead they received. When one vague tip came through to DEA agent Frank Hildebrandt from an anonymous caller on August 30, 1985, it was over for the kingpin. Hildebrandt entered the tip into the computer and, after chasing a few leads on his machine for a few days, determined he might be onto Harvey. Everyone but the CIA, it seemed, had a warrant out for the man.

  Hildebrandt was a young agent at the time, with a sharp memory, and he recalled hearing about Virginia marijuana kingpins Harvey, Pernell, and Toombs from DEA agent Jim Mittica during a seminar at the federal law enforcement training center in Glynco, Georgia. So when the tip came through, he was interested, even though his supervisor and colleagues at the FBI dismissed it. Hildebrandt worked on it at night, though, determined to see if Harvey really was frequenting a condo on Key Biscayne, Florida, just across the bay from Miami. He introduced himself to a parking attendant, flashed his badge, and shared just enough information with the man to make him feel important. He asked the attendant to give him a call when Harvey came through. Meanwhile, Hildebrandt and other DEA agents staked out the condo complex and bars Harvey was known to frequent, looking for a sign of the kingpin. A week went by without any luck.

  On September 9, 1985, Hildebrandt got the call—Harvey was in the condo. At ten o’clock that evening police and DEA agents filled the hallway outside Key Colony unit #1036. Police evacuated the condo across the hall, and one DEA agent was stationed on a ninth-floor balcony to thwart any attempts by Harvey to escape or destroy evidence. A DEA agent then picked up the phone and called to the residence. He identified himself and explained police and DEA agents had the condo surrounded. They were looking for Harvey, he said, and nobody needed to get hurt. Could Harvey, he asked, please step into the hall and surrender?

  The door soon opened, and Harvey stepped out, along with his girlfriend and another man. Police rushed the kingpin and entered the condo, arresting Harvey without incident. Forty-five minutes later they received permission from Harvey’s girlfriend to search the apartment, finding a fake driver’s license that belonged to the fugitive, a boating manual for the vessel Ragamuffin, a cocaine freebasing pipe, and other papers. As Harvey was taken away, he asked his girlfriend to contact his family.

  By two o’clock the next morning, Harvey was booked at the DEA’s Miami office, fingerprinted, and photographed. For once he was without a smile. Instead the thirty-seven-year-old man with thick hair, a beard, a mustache, and glasses just looked tired. He said as much to the agents who arrested him, telling them he was glad it was all over. Harvey also told the agents that he knew a federal prosecutor had been gunning for him for years, that she wanted a piece of him.

  A DEA agent rattled off the myriad charges against Harvey, including drug trafficking, possession of machine guns and silencers, tax evasion, operating a continuing criminal enterprise, racketeering, intimidation of a grand jury witness, and parole violations. Federal grand juries in at least three states had indicted him.

  Harvey said nothing in response to the drug and kingpin charges. The weapons charge, however, was bogus, he told the agent. He had nothing to do with guns. Never had. Harvey, who was legendary for keeping his cool, soon became irritated. He considered the flood of allegations against him. It seemed preposterous.

  “One man could not have done all this,” he protested.

  The government felt otherwise, and they convinced a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, of the same in a non-jury trial in January 1986, though the kingpin was acquitted of the gun charges. A month later U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan sentenced Harvey to forty years in prison.

  After thirty months in Australian prisons, Riley and Butler learned their fates from the Australian High Court at Canberra on December 18, 1985, when a unanimous ruling decided the accused smugglers could be extradited under the kingpin statute and face a potential punishment of life imprisonment. Although Australia did not have a direct equivalent of the American kingpin statute, drug offenses listed in an extradition treaty were similar enough to warrant extradition on the charge, said the court, which dismissed some minor charges against Riley and Butler, including tax evasion and currency violations. The High Court’s ruling was seen as an important one in the global war on drugs, as it claimed the American kingpin statute was an extraditable offense in more than fo
rty nations in the former British Empire, including Australia, Canada, Great Britain, India, and New Zealand. American drug smugglers, it was hoped, could no longer find safe harbor in those countries.

  In January 1986 Riley and Butler were returned to the United States to face charges from Operation Jackpot. The men prepared for trial, though it seemed a hopeless case given the overwhelming testimony against the men. As one of Riley’s lawyers, Martin Bernholz, explains, “You can’t argue to a jury that all eighty-seven people are lying.”

  By April the government dropped the continuing criminal enterprise against Butler, age fifty-four, on account of his age and limited role in smuggling ventures, a concession McMaster was unwilling to make when he was U.S. attorney. Butler struck a plea agreement with the government, as did Riley, who was not so fortunate to have the kingpin charge dropped. Although Riley agreed to plead guilty and disclose his assets, he refused to be debriefed about the involvement of his smuggling associates. On this point he was adamant, though his obstinacy confounded some of his former associates.

  “We were all trying to make our time as short as possible,” says one former smuggler, “and it seemed Les was trying to make it as long as possible.”

  On June 16, 1986, Riley stood before Hawkins in a Charleston courtroom. Behind him was a small crowd that included his wife, kids, parents, and ninety-year-old grandmother. Months earlier he celebrated his fortieth birthday in prison. Given that the minimum sentence for operating a continuing criminal enterprise was ten years, he’d spend his fiftieth birthday behind bars, possibly his sixtieth, and maybe all the other ones he had left, too. Among the 180 people charged in Operation Jackpot, a prosecutor said, there was no bigger boss than Riley. The government noted that he refused to name names, and alleged he was not forthcoming regarding his assets, doubting he spent all his money on legal fees, as he claimed. Alonzo B. Coleman Jr., one of Riley’s lawyers, offered some explanation for Riley’s refusal to talk about his coconspirators.

  “That’s probably about all he’s got left in his view … the notion that even though a lot of the people had participated in ventures with him and whose names are on the records about what they have done, he leaves that to them to name their names,” said Coleman. “He will tell the government everything he has done, but he feels like he cannot ever, ever say that he is going to name names of people that he has dealt with over the years.”

  Coleman also compared his client’s life to the parable of the Prodigal Son. Riley did not leave home to seek a life of crime, he said, but rather fell into a smuggling career that, it was worth noting, was devoid of violence and involved a substance popular on college campuses across the country. He never committed a crime that he believed hurt someone.

  When Riley spoke he was brief and contrite:

  “I don’t know if there are any words, your Honor, that I can say how sorry I am for what I have done. I just hope that you will show some mercy on me.”

  As was his habit, Hawkins then began to think aloud, explaining to those gathered in his court how he considered the matter at hand, and what would be appropriate punishment. He sympathized that marijuana was a popular substance across the country, and said that if Congress chose to decriminalize the drug, he’d have no strong opinions on that decision, though he reads plenty about the harmful effects of drugs, with many people stealing money and property to support their habits.

  He sympathized, too, with the adventuresome aspects of Riley’s crimes, and appreciated that smuggling marijuana was like “being a modern day pirate on the high seas” and “something that could get into a young fellow’s blood.” On the other hand, it was also just an easy way to make fast money.

  Regarding Riley’s extended extradition fight and his decision to not fully cooperate with the government, Hawkins found no fault, and even paid a bit of tribute to the defendant:

  I don’t quarrel with Mr. Riley about fighting extradition just as hard as he could. That’s what the law is all about, and that’s [why] I am here to uphold the law. I really don’t quarrel with him about not ratting on his friends, if that’s the right word, or squealing, because he had to weigh those things, and he has weighed them, and he’s determined that he will stay on this side, even if it is a problem. It probably speaks well of Mr. Riley … When I first started practicing law, the lowest thing in the jail was a stool pigeon and informers, but times have changed. We have more educated criminals now, and he has chosen that path, and I am not going to hold that against him.

  After this, Hawkins prepared to announce his judgment, advising Riley that he regretted punishing anyone, yet it was required of him, and he spent many hours pondering an appropriate penalty. With that he delivered Riley’s sentence. For being a marijuana kingpin, Riley was to be committed to federal prison for a term of twenty-five years, with no chance of parole.

  For the final time, Hawkins addressed the gentleman smuggler, who stayed polite to the end.

  “Good luck to you, Mr. Riley”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Epilogue

  Charleston, South Carolina

  January 2011

  Sometime in the mid-1980s, a mock newspaper article was written about Operation Jackpot, claiming the thirty-ninth trial in the investigation had started in Washington, D.C., with 427 government witnesses slated to testify. Trials had been shifted to the nation’s capital, the article said, because buildings in Charleston, South Carolina had become too small. Yet even in Washington, officials were running out of space. The Capitol’s rotunda could barely contain all thirty-two defendants and their attorneys. Discovery material was held in the Library of Congress, and witnesses were housed in the chambers of the Senate and House.

  The mock article had no byline, but some say it was written by Dewey Greager, the DEA agent who was one of the five federal agents originally assigned to the Operation Jackpot task force and who went undercover to capture Bob “The Boss” Byers in Antigua in 1983. Greager died in 1997 and could not be asked about the parody, or his experiences in Operation Jackpot. Whoever wrote the article, however, communicated how overwhelming the investigation had become, especially with regard to the lengthy extradition battle concerning Les Riley and Wally Butler. To pay for the legal expenses associated with the case in Australia, the article said, the United States raised taxes by seventeen percent and Australia sold the states of “Queensland and Victoria to the Arabs.” Riley, for his part, hired the former secretary general of the United Nations for additional defense counsel and vowed to “fight extradition to the end, or longer if necessary.”

  If the article was a bit silly—it mentioned a molecular-vision camera and an Inter-Solar Police Force (INTERSOL)—it was also fairly prophetic, correctly predicting that prosecutors in the case would use their experiences in Operation Jackpot as a springboard to more prominent positions, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Daniel becoming the U.S. attorney for South Carolina in 1989, and his fellow prosecutor, Cam Littlejohn, becoming a respected defense attorney.

  But for other prosecutors involved in the case, the article’s predictions were inaccurate. Prosecutor Bob Jendron did not become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme court, but has remained an assistant U.S. attorney in South Carolina. Cam Currie is no longer a prosecutor, but now a federal judge in South Carolina. And Henry McMaster, despite the article’s prediction, has not become vice president of the United States. At least not by the time this book was written.

  McMaster, in fact, had a checkered political career after Operation Jackpot. Upon leaving the U.S. attorney’s office, he hired a campaign staff and organized an election committee, yet for months did not designate which public office he would be running for. Many speculated McMaster would run for lieutenant governor. Although he had alienated some fellow Republicans, the former prosecutor had a strong reputation in the state, thanks to the success of Operation Jackpot. More than a hundred people had been convicted of smuggling-related crimes during his tenure as U.S. attorney and Crimesto
pper programs across the state had benefited from money seized in the investigation.

  Eventually, McMaster announced he was challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings in the 1986 elections. It was an ambitious goal to unseat the former Democratic governor who, for the last twenty years, had served in the Senate alongside South Carolina’s other longstanding senator, Strom Thurmond. While campaigning, McMaster spoke often of the success of Operation Jackpot. During a televised debate, he challenged his opponent to take a drug test, allowing the senator to respond with his savage wit.

  “I’ll take a drug test,” said Hollings, “if you’ll take an IQ test.”

  McMaster lost the election.

  In subsequent years McMaster served four terms as chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. In 2002 he was elected South Carolina’s attorney general, and won reelection four years later. In 2010, however, he lost a campaign for governor after placing third in the Republican primary.

  Federal agents David Forbes and Claude McDonald are both retired, and Operation Jackpot was the case of their careers, though it wasn’t without its stresses. McDonald suffered a heart attack in June 1986, the same month Les Riley and Wally Butler were sentenced to prison. After McDonald’s open-heart surgery, he was surprised to receive a get-well card from Tom “Rolex” Rhoad, whom he had apprehended a year earlier.

  Compared to the cops, fewer of the smugglers are alive. After being released from prison in 1998, Rhoad struggled with a cocaine habit. The fifty-eight-year-old died March 10, 2005, passing away in his sleep after previously suffering an aneurysm. Boat captain Willie Frank Steele, who trained as a triathlete after leaving prison, served less than six years behind bars. He crashed his motorcycle in Columbia, South Carolina, on July 26, 2007, and died at age fifty-six. Rhoad and Steele, like many of the smugglers, did not serve their full sentences, paroled early for good behavior.