by Sally Denton
In addition to worrying about Trussell and the Queen Air deal, Bradley was waiting to hear from his cousin, Larry Bryant, about whether he had obtained the military equipment he had promised Bradley. Stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Larry Bryant possessed a national security clearance to work on classified radar systems, and had offered to provide Bradley with sophisticated electronic detection equipment from the government’s top-secret China Lake.
Bradley was especially anxious to receive several Starlight night-vision scopes and IFF Radar, called the “Green Box.” The Green Box, nicknamed “friend or foe,” is a classified device that U.S. military aircraft use for communicating with other military installations in friendly countries. Such an instrument would allow Bradley’s drug-smuggling aircraft to enter and leave numerous Central and South American countries, his planes sending a signal that they were friendly, without resorting to radio communication.
Larry and an eccentric Las Vegas weapons expert named Alvin Snapper were also under contract to Bradley to come up with various types of electronic mechanisms. Bradley hoped to have all the items in his possession by the time of his upcoming run scheduled in the next few weeks.
Bradley was waiting for the money to filter back to him from his distributors to whom he had fronted the Queen Air load. When the money arrived, he needed to go to Vegas to pay off some of the investors in his business. He hired Harold Foran, a pilot who owned a Lear Jet, to fly him and a bodyguard to Vegas from Savannah. “When we arrived at the airport, Bryant deplaned, went into the terminal, and exchanged briefcases with two thugs,” Foran said. “Bryant then turned around and reboarded the plane, without spending any time in Vegas. On the return trip, Bryant remarked that he had ‘made a lot of money on this trip.’” Foran considered the remark strange, since Bradley rarely discussed business transactions with anyone except Drew Thornton.
Lance Alworth was a San Diego businessman who owned a chain of self-storage warehouses and health spas when he first met Bradley. The baby-faced, Arkansas native had retired from professional football, having played with the Dallas Cowboys and San Diego Chargers. He was somewhat under fire at the time, following revelations by the FBI the previous summer that he had a financial relationship with Allen Glick—the former owner of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. FBI agents searching for documents linking Glick to the Chicago mob had raided click’s penthouse suite at the Stardust. Among items found were documents tying Glick to various sports figures, including Alworth and Al Davis—the owner of the Oakland Raiders. Concerned about any blatant conflict between sports figures and sports bookmakers, the FBI had widened its investigation of organized crime and casino skimming to include possible game fixing.
In September 1979, Alworth asked his friend Al Davis to get him some seats at the heavyweight boxing championship to be held at Caesars Palace. “No problem,” Davis told Alworth. His friend Dan Chandler would be happy to accommodate Alworth. When the time came for the Friday night fight between Larry Holmes and Earnie Shavers, Chandler had arranged for Alworth to be seated next to Bradley Bryant. The two men were acquainted from previous meetings in Vegas.
Bradley had been told he could trust Alworth, so it was without hesitation that Bradley initiated a conversation about drugs. Alworth would later tell federal agents that Bradley tried to persuade him to invest more than a quarter million dollars in a drug-smuggling venture. Bradley told Alworth that he performed contract assignments for the CIA, and, in turn, the CIA allowed him to smuggle drugs. Bradley’s system sounded foolproof, the way he presented it. To Alworth, the risks seemed minimal compared with the return: He could double his money in the span of a few weeks. Alworth admitted his interest in the prospect, and the men arranged follow-up meetings.
Drew Thornton saw Lance Alworth as one more potential blight on what he feared was becoming a loose, undisciplined organization. Vulnerable because he was an FBI target, Alworth didn’t seem an appropriate candidate as a financier. In fact, Drew didn’t think much of the whole Vegas crowd—Dan Chandler included.
“We don’t need them,” Drew was saying more and more frequently to Bradley, referring to Dan Chandler, Jimmy Chagra, Lance Alworth, and others.
Bradley was also throwing too much money around the 1790. Savannah was a small town, and Drew didn’t think they had it wired the way they did Lexington. He complained that the six-hundred-dollar tips, bottles of Dom Perignon every night, open talk about guns and travels, hints about the CIA—was attracting unnecessary attention. Drew was becoming increasingly alienated by Bradley’s ostentatious style. Drew remained close to his own inner circle: Bill Canan, Henry Vance, Rex Hall, Mike Kelly and Jay Silvestro. But Bradley was branching out and endangering them all, bringing new players into the fold every day.
One of those characters was a retired U.S. Army Intelligence officer named Jim Atwood, who owned a forty-acre island near Savannah. An importer of World War II relics and weapons, Atwood was the author of The Daggers and Edged Weapons of Hitler’s Germany. One of Chris Jurgenson’s oldest friends, Atwood was a regular in the 1790 bar and restaurant. He had served a tour of duty with the U.S. Marines shortly after World War II, before joining the FBI in Washington, D.C. He left the FBI in 1950, enlisting in the Army, and received his training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Like Drew Thornton, Atwood became a paratrooper.
A shadowy spook around Savannah, Atwood was known primarily for his purchases of large vessels that had been forfeited to the U.S. Government as evidence in drug and income tax evasion cases. He also owned or controlled several companies used for international gun deals, and was a manufacturer of lightweight SM-90 submachine guns—a hand-held weapon popular among gunrunners and drug smugglers.
When Atwood met Bradley and Drew, he was under investigation by the IRS for criminal tax evasion, and by ATF for arms sales to Central America. Federal law enforcement officials speculated that the CIA, making Atwood a difficult target for investigation, condoned his weapons activities by other agencies.
Bradley and Atwood had an instant affinity for each other. “We have a mutual admiration society,” Atwood said. “He’s a man’s man.”
Drew was skeptical. He told Jan Fisher he suspected Atwood was a CIA operative whose loyalties were unclear, and not someone they should trust.
A frequent visitor to Guatemala, where he owned a residence, Atwood was engaged in several enterprises in that country, including selling salt-damaged British sports cars; establishing factories to manufacture knives and prefabricated houses; and exporting canned hams from the United States to Guatemala. He also held government contracts—along with the father of Gary Scott, the Georgian who had been on the drug-laden DC-4 in Kentucky—for mosquito-control spraying. For that reason, it was necessary for Atwood to spend most of his time in Guatemala, and he wondered if Bradley would be interested in renting his Savannah Island residence, named Torshima. Attracted to the seclusion and security of the Japanese-styled home, Bradley agreed to move from Jurgenson’s to Atwood’s.
When Bradley learned that Atwood was helping the Guatemalan government bring legalized gambling into that country, Bradley suggested to Atwood that such a gambling enterprise would greatly interest his friend Dan Chandler. In the spring of 1979, Bradley arranged a meeting between himself, Chandler, Atwood, and several high-level Guatemalan officials to discuss the opening of casinos.
But a cold-blooded act in Texas shattered their grandiose plans, and sent the Company running for cover.
CHAPTER SIX
The telephone rang in Drew Thornton’s hotel room on the evening of May 29, 1979.
“The judge has been hit,” Bradley told him.
Drew felt his stomach sink, his face drain. Like Bradley, he was scared. He knew they were all in deep trouble.
“Come to an emergency summit meeting in Savannah,” Bradley said. Then Drew heard a click and the phone was dead.
U.S.
District Judge John Wood had emerged into San Antonio’s steamy air that morning. His eyes squinted from the diffused sunlight as he headed for his station wagon. Scheduled that day to preside over the trial of Jimmy Chagra, who had been indicted two months earlier on drug-trafficking charges, Wood had made it clear he intended to put Chagra away for life.
As he reached for the car door he felt the shot that ripped open his spine. Collapsing on the pavement, blood spurting from his back, he was barely conscious when his wife reached his side.
The sixty-three-year-old jurist was dead on arrival at a nearby hospital, a .243-caliber bullet, probably fired from a high-powered hunting rifle, lodged in the upper part of his chest.
John Wood, nicknamed “Maximum John” for his notoriously stiff sentencing of drug dealers, became the first federal judge to be assassinated in this century. The judge with the heaviest narcotics caseload in the country would never hand down a harsh sentence again.
Wood’s brutal murder underscored the characteristic lawlessness that federal agents in Texas were blaming on drugs. The mesquite and piñon-covered flatlands of this tough river town, home of the Alamo, have been the scene of vigilante tactics since the Mexicans first clashed with the Indians and settlers. For a law-and-order judge such as Wood to run into trouble in this kind of place was not out of context. Historically, a volley of smuggling activity has pervaded the U.S.Mexican border—undocumented workers, weapons, spare parts, vehicles, drugs, electronic equipment. The smuggling profession is bequeathed to the offspring of Chicano and Lebanese clans on both sides. Through an interrelated network of distant cousins, cherished friends, and nepotistic alliances, cartels are formed.
Wood’s murder was but one of an emerging macabre pattern of violence associated with the enterprise—only fourteen blocks away and six months earlier, the car of assistant U.S. attorney James Kerr had been ambushed. That Wood and Kerr should fall prey to the drug underworld was no surprise to court observers. Both were waging a much-publicized war against the Chagra narcotics organization.
By 1979, the government’s case against Jimmy Chagra—four counts of importing marijuana and cocaine from Colombia—was ready to go. Chagra was arrested and Maximum John Wood had set bond at a million dollars. Chagra was incredulous. Wearing prison denims and slippers to his bond-reduction hearing, he listened disbeliev-ingly as a federal magistrate refused to lower the bail. It wasn’t until he brought in a million dollars’ worth of his wife’s diamonds and jewels that the judge reluctantly agreed to lower the bail to four hundred thousand dollars. But the tension in the court had only begun to escalate. Wood vowed that despite the reduction, the slippery criminal would not escape his wrath. Chagra’s lawyers retaliated by attacking his objectivity and his close friendship with prosecutor Kerr. When Wood declared that he, not a new “impartial” judge, would hear the case, the matter was closed.
Whatever hopes for a fair trial Jimmy Chagra nurtured vanished as his May 29 trial date approached. “It’s a stacked deck,” Jimmy complained to family members.
Within hours of Judge Wood’s death, the FBI zeroed in on Chagra as the number-one suspect.
Though Bradley had a solid alibi for his own physical whereabouts at the time of the murder, he feared he would somehow be tied to the crime. He immediately dispatched Jan Fisher to El Paso to locate three individuals who were DEA informants in the case against Jimmy Chagra. Fisher knew Bradley had sent him on this mission at Chagra’s behest, and he couldn’t help wondering what type of retribution Chagra planned to take against the snitches. Fisher assumed that Chagra was somehow involved in Wood’s death because Fisher knew that Wood’s bias against Chagra had been the topic of numerous discussions among Jimmy Chagra, Bradley Bryant, and Dan Chandler. Though Fisher knew that Bradley had not killed Judge Wood—Fisher had placed a phone call to Bradley at a Denver hotel room within moments of the shooting—he felt certain Bradley knew who was responsible for the death.
At the Savannah strategy meeting, Bradley flew into a rage. Employees heard him screaming and hollering and slamming his fist during the rambunctious argument he was waging with Drew. Drew, with characteristic cool, reminded Bradley how he had warned him to disassociate from Chagra. “I’m a cop, remember? I know what’s going to happen next. They’re going to be all over us, every move we make. Jimmy Chagra is a tactless ass who’s going to drag you down with him.”
Bradley was tired of placating Drew, of constantly defending his decisions, of pointing out the necessity of associating with people such as Chagra. “The heat will be on Jimmy Chagra, not on us,” Bradley yelled.
Incredulous at Drew’s shortsightedness, Bradley was already salivating at the chance to control Jimmy’s entire organization,
“Who wants it!” Drew responded.
“Drew got up and walked out,” one employee remembered, “Didn’t say a word to anyone, Just walked out. Left town for good.”
A few minutes later Bradley summoned his employees into his inner sanctum. “From this point forward you will not talk to Andrew Thornton. You will not deal with him. No one in this building is to have anything to do with Andrew Thornton ever again.’’
Bradley immediately plotted his takeover of the Chagra drug network, anxious to take advantage of Chagra’s sudden, and potentially terminal, paralysis as a kingpin. He also set about to eliminate Drew Thornton as a competitor in—the drug trade. He dispatched Johnny Trussell to Mississippi to search for a remote airfield that was accessible to a highway, had little air traffic activity, and would be capable of accommodating large aircraft. He traded the Queen Air that Trussell had used a few months earlier to bring a load into Texas for a Twin Beech whose seats had already been removed. When Trussell returned from Mississippi and recommended using the airport located in tiny Starkville, Bradley told Trussell to prepare the plane for the smuggling trip to Bogota, Colombia, and back to Starkville. Trussell installed three steel fuel tanks, special radar equipment, and the other specialized items necessary for such a venture.
While awaiting completion of the details for the trip, Bradley made plans to move his operational headquarters to Tampa, Florida. Having filed for bankruptcy in Savannah for his International Harvester truck dealership called Bryson International, Bradley was anxious to skip out of town before the Feds decided to take a closer look at the financial shenanigans associated with Bryson International.
Bradley had been living at Torshima—Colonel Atwood’s secluded island—for several months, having surrounded it with a twelve-foot fence and installed a half-dozen phone lines. But he had had a disagreement with Atwood, apparently over the cost of renting the island, and in June Bradley ordered Trussell and Jan Fisher to move his weapons from Torshima to Tampa. Among the items moved were several AR-7s a Walther PPK pistol, two Colt .38-caliber pistols, a Mini 14 rifle, a gold-flecked shotgun, and a revolver with a gold trigger. Trussell was particularly interested in a carton of electronic dart guns, called Tasers; when he commented about the weapons to Bradley, Bradley presented him with one as a gift—a gesture that would later become significant to federal authorities.
Trussell and Fisher loaded the items into a Lincoln Continental, and Bradley’s bodyguard—Roger Barnard—drove the car to Tampa.
A few nights later, Fisher received a phone call from Colonel Atwood. Furious, Atwood claimed Bradley had stolen his guns. Atwood threatened Fisher with prosecution if the weapons were not returned. A few hours later, Atwood filed charges with the Savannah police, who issued warrants for the arrests of Fisher and Trussell.
Angry that Bradley would place him in such a compromised position, and intimidated by threats of criminal prosecution, Fisher succumbed to Atwood—an act that Fisher knew would infuriate Bradley, especially coupled with Fisher’s previous insubordination at the 1790. That same day, Bradley summoned Johnny Trussell and Don Leach to Tampa to finalize plans for a flight to Santa Marta, Colombia, where they would
rendezvous with Bradley.
The trip went off without a hitch, and after a circuitous flight path, the three men met as planned at the northern Colombian coastal town in mid-July 1979. Bradley, accompanied by three Colombians, invoked Jimmy Chagra’s name incessantly, creating the distinct impression that he was Chagra’s emissary. Bradley told Trussell that the Colombian participants in the dope operation were high-level government officials, including a senator named Orlando Lopez.
Trussell examined the airfield the group planned to use for the operation—a dirt runway camouflaged by debris and trees, located thirty miles northeast of Santa Marta on the edge of a stream and the shore of the Caribbean. Not satisfied, he selected an alternate airport situated on a fruit farm south of Santa Marta.
When their plans were completed, Bradley and Trussell departed for the United States, leaving Leach behind as collateral for a debt owed by Bradley for a previous load of marijuana—a tactic systematically used by Jimmy Chagra. Leach had been told by Bradley that his assignment in Colombia was to examine that country’s security procedures, in order to secure a hideout for Jimmy Chagra, who planned to skip out on his four-hundred-thousand-dollar bail if convicted on drug charges.
The muggy air hung in abeyance for days on end during the 1979 heat wave, Ralph Ross was accustomed to the suffocating Kentucky summers, the smell of sour mash stubbornly clinging to the atmosphere, no breezes daring to blow it away. He had endured the familiar stickiness, odor, and haze for forty-six years like an annual visit to the dentist.