by Sally Denton
Bradley and Drew had formed Executive Protection Ltd. in 1975—a corporation owned and operated by Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton to which they would refer in private conversations as “the Company.” But it wasn’t until 1977 that the two men felt capable of putting “the Company” into full-scale action. They recruited operatives, drawing from a pool of former police officers and drug agents from various state, local, and federal agencies.
“The Company” could serve two purposes for them: to provide cover for drug-smuggling ventures and to serve as a legitimate private security service. Bradley had met dozens of people, through Chandler in Vegas and through Halloran in Philadelphia, who had the need and wherewithal to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for sophisticated bodyguard protection. Through their allies in the law enforcement and SOF world, they had plenty of contract employees to perform both security and drug-trafficking services.
Meanwhile the security company provided a perfect cover for acquiring weapons, assimilating a private army of enforcers and obtaining airplanes ostensibly needed to shuttle clients into foreign countries, from which Bradley and Drew could then import marijuana back to the United States.
Their first major purchase for “the Company” would be an airplane, which they would modify by removing the seats, adding extra fuel tanks for long-range flights, and modernizing the radar equipment.
They had spent several years amassing the tools of their trade: AR15s, Uzis, AK-47s, Ingrams, Walther PPKs, cartons of ammo, electronic surveillance equipment, nightscopes, explosives, night-vision goggles. Now it was time to put them to use.
Bradley claimed that his cousin, Larry Bryant, would help them add to their cache of arms, using his top-secret Defense Department security clearance to embezzle scopes and radar equipment from the highly restricted Navy weapons-testing center at China Lake in California’s Mojave Desert.
Forging a subsidiary partnership with his police colleague, Bill Canan, Drew bought a remote farm on a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, where they would train their employees in guerrilla war tactics and hide their growing stash of weapons.
Bradley and Drew also had a ready-made client base to buy their product. They had access to Kentucky’s big-money horse crowd, the Philadelphia Main Line group, and the Vegas gamblers. Their blue-blood connections proved even stronger than they had anticipated, as they found Lexington society to be a huge market for illicit drugs. In fact, it was a larger market than they could supply.
Both men considered Kentucky their strong and secret asset. Kentucky was a haven of remote landing strips, nonexistent law enforcement, crooked politicians, lax airports, and rivers leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
Between the two of them, they believed they had covered nearly every base for a fail-safe organization. At their company meetings, it was understood that Drew was in charge of procurement and transportation. He was responsible for the supply side of the operation through the drug traffickers he had met while working as a narc. But Drew didn’t like being reliant upon middlemen for his supply of pot.
He knew that if he and Bradley had their own “source” in Colombia or Mexico, they would be able to buy a kilo of marijuana for as little as a couple of hundred dollars, marking it up threefold once it arrived in the United States.
It irked both men to pay a cut to some scumbag trafficker. Through his contacts Drew set out on a task of finding a South American contact who would “front” him a load of pot, without which Drew and Bradley would be forever dependent upon brokers.
Bradley, it was agreed, would find investors, set up a distribution network in Lexington, Philadelphia, and Vegas, and arrange to launder the profits through casinos. While Drew searched for a supplier, Bradley would round up some seed money to help get their larger dreams off the ground.
Bradley’s, and therefore Drew’s life took a significant turn in the fall of 1978, when a midnight fire swept through the Bryants’ Pennsylvania mansion. Bradley had taken his family to Disney World in Florida, and neither the butler nor the maid was present when the blaze demolished the house.
Many valuable items, including Bradley’s stockpile of weapons, had conveniently been removed prior to the fire, prompting insurance investigators to suspect arson. State Farm Insurance Company detectives had contacted Ralph Ross, seeking information on Bradley and his associates, and seemed particularly interested in Drew, who they believed, had torched the house. Local investigators, however, blamed the fire on faulty wiring, leaving State Farm with little recourse but to quietly settle with the Bryants. Paying $400,000 for the loss, the settlement became the single largest homeowner insurance payment ever made in the state of Pennsylvania. Callie, who was devastated by the incident, filed for divorce almost immediately. She moved her three children to another Philadelphia suburb and remarried.
Now, it would seem, “the Company” had the needed capital to finance its operation.
Forging Callie’s name on the insurance check that had been issued to both of them, Bradley used the $400,000 to purchase an International Harvester truck dealership in Savannah, Georgia. The truck company would provide “the Company” with the heavy equipment necessary to offload their bulky aircraft shipments of pot.
Bradley moved to Savannah when he split with Callie, and a large part of “the Company’s” business was transacted out of the historic 1790 Inn. At the corner of President and Lincoln, its parking area full of Jaguars, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benzes, the 1790 was an in place for the young entrepreneurs of the South.
Bradley took to holding court in the dining room of the 1790. Round and square tables placed a discreet distance from each other filled the room built of stone. Bradley’s table—a round one at the back of the room with a panoramic view of the restaurant—was always set with linens, crystal, and a lantern.
Chris Jurgenson, the German-born owner of the 1790, took very good care of his best customer, Bradley Bryant. Jurgenson made sure that the well-dressed gentleman, whose trademark seemed to be his expensive cowboy boots, received first-class treatment. Jurgenson saw to it that Bradley’s special table remained vacant except for Bradley, recognizing Bradley’s great desire to keep his eye on the door. Jurgenson claimed he knew nothing about Bradley’s business and thought Bradley was the most generous man he had known. He was a lavish tipper, inspiring attentive service by the waiters and waitresses. He once surprised Jurgenson with a private flight to Tampa to view the World Cup via satellite because he knew of Jurgenson’s strong wish to see the games.
When Bradley first moved to Savannah, he rented a house from Jurgenson and surrounded the entire property with a fence. At the same time, Jurgenson began construction on a room at the inn to be used exclusively by Bradley. A striking blonde named Wendy had the dubious distinction of being known as Bradley’s girlfriend, but it was not a monogamous relationship, as he also dated other women in Lexington, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia. “When Bradley first moved to Savannah, he seemed to be in pain from his divorce,” Jurgenson recalled. “He missed his wife and kids a lot. He was extremely jealous and protective of Wendy, who was completely devoted to him. He kept her locked up, away from other men. No one envied Wendy’s position.”
Over a period of several months, Jurgenson saw Bradley on a daily basis, and was struck by some of Bradley’s peculiar characteristics. He had an absolute phobia about being touched physically, by either a man or a woman, making it difficult for friends to imagine that his sexual relationships were normal.
He also had a violent temper that usually flared up when his subordinates disobeyed him. Jurgenson witnessed an incident when Bradley lost a bet—a substantial amount over something incredibly insignificant. “He took a pile of money, hundred-dollar bills, and began throwing them into the fireplace in the 1790 dining room,” Jurgenson remembered. Jan Fisher, one of Bradley’s errand boys, jumped up and began retrieving the money. Disregarding Bradley’s commands t
o let the money burn, Fisher said: “It’s stupid to burn cash, Brad!” With that, Bradley grabbed Fisher and ordered him to throw the money back into the fire or “I’ll throw you in.”
Fisher obeyed, but Bradley never forgave Fisher for his perfidiousness.
Fisher, a former Lexington civilian police employee, believed that Bradley would have killed him there on the spot had he continued to defy Bradley’s order. Though Fisher despised the groveling characteristics Bradley required from the employees in his organization, he didn’t have the courage to walk away from such lucrative employment.
Though Drew regularly accompanied Bradley to the 1790, there was never any question in Jurgenson’s mind that Bradley was the main man. Jurgenson had no reason to believe that Drew was any higher on the ladder of Bradley’s group than the other Lexingtonians who visited
Bradley at the 1790, nightclub owner Jimmy Lambert, and the Kentucky governor’s aide, Henry Vance.
When he witnessed Bradley and Drew toasting each other with champagne, Jurgenson had no comprehension of the depth and complexity of their partnership. With Bradley ensconced in Savannah, and Drew flying in and out for his missions abroad, reporting the results of his activities to Bradley, their patchwork pasts of Melanie Flynn, Ray Ryan, Sewanee, Callie, and Betty seemed far behind them. Like the adolescents they had once been—enamored with the drills, the marches, the war games, the rituals, the guns, the discipline of military school—they translated their proclivities into grown-up life. Best of all, they made up the rules as they went along.
Bradley and Drew proved to be a formidable team for law enforcement, so connected were they to various police agencies. They used their police employees to run counterintelligence in order to detect infiltration by cops or competing drug groups and to install private wiretaps.
Educating and familiarizing themselves with such laws as the Bank Secrecy Act, they learned that as long as their deposits in “friendly” Kentucky banks totaled less than $10,000 per transaction, no one would tip off U.S. Treasury officials about their money-laundering activities. Lexington bank tellers began gossiping about Drew Thornton carrying briefcases containing $9,999.00 in cash to their windows.
Their contacts in the DEA and Lexington Police tipped them off to any ongoing investigations of them or their associates and of any inquiries from other agencies.
It is not known how many loads of marijuana Drew and Bradley smuggled into the United States in the one-year period from 1977 to the fall of 1978, but they had apparently been successful enough to focus on more long-term goals. They planned to acquire marijuana plantations and cocaine-processing laboratories of their own.
Through Bradley’s contacts in the mob—some of whom he had met while visiting his brother-in-law Chandler in Vegas and others through his Philadelphia associates—the two felt confident that they had a receptive market.
In the fall of 1978, Bradley Bryant, dressed like a transplanted East Coast cowboy with alligator boots and eel-skin belt, and his preppy-looking partner, Andrew Carter Thornton II, set out to translate their New Age fantasies into reality.
The warm desert air slapped Bradley Bryant’s face as he emerged from McCarran International Airport terminal. The dry heat was a change from the Savannah humidity. Finally, it seemed, “the Company” was about to acquire what they most needed: a good connection in Colombia.
A limousine greeted him and his bodyguard, and whisked them down the Strip toward Caesars Palace, where Dan Chandler had promised him he would meet two men who would change his life— Lee and Jimmy Chagra.
Lee Chagra was an El Paso attorney famous throughout the Southwest for his successful defense of drug dealers. Wearing a black cowboy hat and gold necklace that spelled “Freedom,” the Texan known as the Black Striker was one of the Strip’s most flamboyant high rollers. The flashy gambler was also thought by drug agents to have masterminded hundreds of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana deals—many of which originated in Lebanon, the homeland of Chagra’s ancestors.
“F. Lee” Chagra, so nicknamed for his brilliant courtroom antics, had defended a multitude of international smuggling rings, continually locking horns with Justice Department prosecutors and DEA agents. The federal government had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars compiling a dossier on Lee Chagra, but the closest they ever came to prosecution was a 1973 indictment against him for his participation in a marijuana operation based in Tennessee. The case against him was dropped and Chagra went on to represent members of the “Columbus Air Force”—a brigade of self-styled cowboys who supplied the Southwest with regular loads of marijuana and cocaine.
His black Stetson, his small-town country affability, his reputation as a freedom-fighter for the downtrodden, his leadership in the tightly knit Lebanese clan of south Texas, combined with his astute legal mind, won the hearts of many a jury, and made him a formidable adversary for government prosecutors.
Lee was said to be powerful enough to pick up the telephone and order a man killed. But Lee had so much heat on him that he was forced to consider passing the torch to one of his younger brothers.
Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra had been envious and jealous of Lee since their childhood. Other family members say that Jimmy took secret pleasure in Lee’s sudden turn of fortune. Under federal investigation in Texas for his role in smuggling activities, Lee’s once-flourishing law practice was on the skids as a result. Potential clients knew the feds wanted Lee badly—so badly that it became anathema for anyone to seek his legal expertise. To be associated with Lee Chagra—every smuggler came to believe—was the kiss of death.
Reluctantly entrusting Jimmy with more control over the daily activities of his operations, Lee had serious doubts about Jimmy’s competence. Jimmy had always had a big mouth, and, Lee knew such lack of discretion in the drug business carried a particularly high price.
But Jimmy proved to be a quick study, and he seemed to relish the role of emulating his brother. Lee introduced Jimmy to the people in Vegas who had always taken care of him—the casino hosts and executives at his favorite money-laundering spots. Caesars had long been Lee’s most steady hangout, where he received VIP treatment from casino bigwigs.
Through Lee, Jimmy met Dan Chandler, who arranged for an $8 million credit line in Jimmy’s name. Chandler also provided Jimmy with several Caesars credit cards in the names of aliases—a mechanism that facilitated the laundering of illegal drug proceeds at the gaming tables. Caesars furnished him with a limousine and Lear Jet, and an army of security. Sporting a black mustache, diamond rings, heavy gold chains, a cigar, and cowboy boots, Jimmy played blackjack or baccarat at tables the casino roped off for him and his entourage. Before long, Jimmy was attracting even more attention to himself than Lee had.
“We knew he was laundering millions of drug dollars through the casino,” said a DEA agent who was on Jimmy Chagra’s trail, “but we couldn’t get near him.”
During an undercover investigation of Chagra code-named Operation Jaeger, one DEA agent reported, “It was impossible to wiretap or trail Chagra, since Caesars provided him with residency, the use of various aliases to record his casino transactions, armed guards, and a secluded penthouse suite.” The DEA believed that Jimmy had become the kingpin in a criminal organization that imported heroin from Lebanon and cocaine from South America, and that Caesars facilitated Chagra’s illegal activities by offering him safe harbor. They documented numerous incidents in which Chagra was flown by charter jet from Mexico to Las Vegas, where he was met on the tarmac by a Caesars Palace limousine and taken directly to the casino—thereby avoiding U.S. Customs. The Chagra family’s ties to organized crime figures throughout the U.S.—particularly to Raymond Patriarca in New England and Tony Spilotro in Chicago—were well known to the feds. Yet they couldn’t make a case against either Jimmy or Lee Chagra or Caesars executives. In an internal investigative report the DEA ultimately admitted that “the ma
gnitude, scope, and complexity of the [Chagra/Caesars] operations exceeds DEA field capabilities.”
Bradley Bryant must have been elated that Chandler had agreed to introduce him to the legendary pair of Texans. At his first meeting Bradley watched an ecstatic Jimmy Chagra scoop up half a million dollars from the green-felt craps table. Corporate security then escorted the two men to Chagra’s car, a polished black Cadillac. Sliding into the driver’s seat, Jimmy headed the car past the fountains and neon glitter toward the $900,000 home he had built in Paradise Valley. He told Bradley he was lucky that night. Not only at craps, but he had also won several hundred thousand dollars on sports bets. Jimmy bragged about his winnings from “Amarillo Slim” Preston’s recent high-stakes poker game. Bradley was apparently impressed by Chagra’s vulgar display of wealth.
The meeting of Bradley Bryant and Jimmy Chagra was a fortuitous combination of like-minded souls. Though the organization of Bradley and Drew had met with success, they couldn’t have dreamed up a better association. In 1978 the Chagras were considered by the DEA to be the kingpins in the country’s largest heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and firearms distribution system. Not only did the Chagras have their own cocaine and marijuana suppliers in Colombia, a source for Lebanese heroin, and connections to Middle Eastern terrorists, but their organized-crime connections in the United States were said to be at the highest levels of the traditional La Cosa Nostra.
The bona fides of Bradley and Drew must have carried some weight, for “the Company” and the Chagras entered into a mutually beneficial arrangement whereby the Chagras provided the dope and “the Company” provided the transportation and distribution.
At the same time, Jimmy Chagra was but one of the Caesars habitues to whom Chandler introduced Bradley. The feds suspected that Bradley had also become a trusted courier of illegal bets and payoffs for the mob, in addition to, or perhaps as part of, his drug activity.