by Bruce Porter
By the time they left the bar, having told Harbuck they needed to check on a few things and would get back to him on the details, Tom and Greg knew they’d need a good deal of help. Not for the human-relations part; after working together for two years now, they were confident enough of handling that end pretty smoothly. A graduate of Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Greg played the low-key partner, never getting very excited, handling matter-of-factly all the numerous problems that arose in any drug deal. His olive complexion also gave him a distinct advantage. Although derived from Greek ancestors, it created the impression in people’s minds that he had roots somewhere south of the border, an assumption he gladly let stand. Tom Tiderington came from up in Michigan, and looked it—fresh-faced with clean features, his expression frozen in a state of eagerness. Perhaps because he appeared less like a smuggler than Kridos did, he played the more aggressive half of the team, the one more prone to push people, quick to get irritated if things didn’t go right. The object was to distract people with his hard-nosed personality so they’d forget he didn’t look right for the part. His cover story was that his father was a wealthy businessman from Detroit, and when not smuggling cocaine, Tom worked as a charter fishing-boat captain.
It was the resource end of the thing that posed the problem. The Fort Lauderdale Police Department had a few accoutrements—flashy cars such as Mercedes Benzes and BMW’s that had been confiscated in drug busts. They’d also acquired a couple of marine vessels, a fifty-eight-foot Hatteras sportfisherman and a sixty-three-foot trawler, which could double as drug runners. But as for the flying part—the planes and the pilots, being able to demonstrate the kind of know-how expected of veteran cocaine transporters—they possessed nothing in this area whatsoever. “This was the first importation case we’d worked on at that level, so our expertise only went to a certain point,” Greg recalls. “We didn’t know what type of plane we’d need, for instance. He was talking of flying in at a low altitude to air-drop the cocaine. Well, you can’t drop it too high or it’ll burst all over. You have to fly in maybe at 150 feet. You needed a particular plane that, first, would fly low enough to do that, and, second, that you could get the coke out of easily, with the right kind of cargo doors. They were talking five hundred kilos here.”
This was why, right after the first meeting with Harbuck, they put in a call to the local office of the DEA, to Mike McManus, to tell him what they seemed to have glommed onto. McManus, a short, compact Audie Murphy lookalike, a graduate of Florida State University, had grown up in the nearby town of Plantation and had worked undercover for that police department before joining the DEA. He got so good at posing as a drug dealer that more than once he sat in a bar in Plantation buying tabs of LSD and ounces of grass from dealers who felt compelled to warn him that “there’s an undercover cop around here named Mike that you’ve really got to watch out for.” The father of three girls, McManus took a fifteen-thousand-dollar pay cut to join the DEA and harbors something of a messianic attitude toward the job of catching smugglers. “I realized after getting in that I’m not going to change the world,” he says. “I’m a firm believer in education, and until you make it not a socially acceptable thing to do, you’re not going to solve the drug problem. But I do believe that I can make a difference. The role of the DEA is to locate, identify, successfully penetrate, and arrest, and, I would add, destroy the major smuggling networks. If I just take a load, I can hurt them, but if I take down the whole organization, I’ve destroyed them.” So there’s that, he says, but he also went into undercover work “because I love the excitement. I can’t stand sitting behind a desk. I look at it as a game. I’ve got a set of rules, and the bad guys have no rules. But I beat them at their own game and in their own ballpark. They don’t play by the rules, and I do, and I still beat them.”
The three of them, Mike, Tom, and Greg, had worked together before, on much smaller cases. If Harbuck wasn’t living in Fantasy Land here, they were staring at an unprecedented opportunity, ideal for the tactic McManus terms the “controlled delivery”—posing as smugglers, Tom and Greg would organize the airlift, and the dope would be flown in on their own airplane and by their own contract pilot. Once it landed back in Fort Lauderdale, it would be trucked by Tom and Greg to a safe house that would be guarded by police officers hiding in the bushes. Doing it this way, they would not only confiscate the dope and arrest people involved in its delivery, but they’d score an intelligence coup as well. By negotiating with the people who owned the cocaine back in Colombia, they’d see to some extent how that end of the operation worked. By flying to the landing strip outside Medellín, they’d get information on the actual operations of the cartel. And by holding the dope in the States and dealing with the Colombians in Miami for its delivery, they’d have a chance to penetrate that part of the network as well. “If you do it right, with a controlled delivery you can identify who’s in the organization that owns the stuff and the organization that distributes the stuff back in the States, because you’ve got something both groups want and you’re negotiating on both ends of the deal.” As a DEA agent, McManus had access to a lot of resources, most important of which were airplanes and pilots. Many of the latter were former drug pilots who either were doing penance for a bust or had done their prison time and were now earning a living working on stings. McManus told them he had a line on a special pilot who’d done work for the DEA on other deals just like this. The pilot’s name was Cliff Guttersrud.
For the next meeting, Tom and Greg told Harbuck to meet them on the Land’s End, the department’s trawler anchored in the New River near Port Everglades, which Tom now passed off as one of the boats he chartered out on as a fishing captain. The whole place was wired for sound and video, so McManus could get a good view of things in absentia. The news they had to tell Harbuck was that the plane they’d be using was a twin-engine Beechcraft Queen Air, which had plenty of range to make it to Colombia, as well as cargo doors so they could easily jettison the bags into his cornfield. The pilot who’d be bringing in the load was named Cliff. He’d made the trip to Colombia several times before and would be flying the plane in shortly from the West Coast so Harbuck could meet him and inspect the aircraft. For his part, Harbuck also had a little news for them. He could now divulge that he wasn’t really the one in charge here. His task had been simply to find someone who could do the transportation. The man running the show was an American and was coming to Fort Lauderdale in two days, and he’d like to meet them, and he also wanted to meet the pilot. They asked where the meeting was going to be held. Harbuck said he couldn’t tell them. He’d take them there at the appointed time.
That was Monday. At about seven-thirty Wednesday night Harbuck came by to collect Tom, Greg, and Cliff. With him was another man named Steve, his son-in-law. “It was something you’d expect to see on TV,” says Greg. “He was very secretive, he wouldn’t tell us where we were going. He took us two miles north to a Days Inn off Route 84 at I-95 and brought us up to this guy’s room. It was dark in there, and the guy we were supposed to meet was standing at the extreme end of the room. He had the TV on, and he stood behind it with closed curtains at his back. The TV illuminated us, but we couldn’t really see him.” As recorded in one of the “dailies,” the detailed accounts of their activities the two detectives wrote up at the end of each shift, the stranger introduced himself as George, and during the meeting he asked most of the questions and did most of the talking.
After these detectives were let into the room by Leon Harbuck and they were introduced to the subject identified as George, he asked who the pilot was. After stating that the subject with these detectives was the pilot, George began to ask these detectives and the pilot questions. The subject then told these detectives that he had married into a Colombian family, that his wife is Colombian.… George further stated that the Colombian who was the connection for the cocaine, and whose family George was now a part of, was presently in Colombia getting the coordinates for the landing stri
p. George stated that he had sent his nephew who is Colombian down with maps showing the flight pattern from South Florida to Colombia and that he was coming back with the coordinates.… George asked these detectives and the pilot, “If everything goes smooth the first time, are you willing to make several trips?” George stated he was out of circulation for a while but now he was back in it.
The meeting lasted an hour and twenty minutes, after which Harbuck and his son-in-law headed out westbound in separate cars; Tom, Greg, and Cliff drove back toward the city, leaving George alone in the hotel. So far the detectives had been able to identify everyone involved in the operation, either because they gave their names voluntarily or through the license plates on their cars. But George had no car. He hadn’t given his last name. And the room was registered to a Delbert Lapham, a name they assumed, correctly, was an alias.
But when they were alone together driving off in the car, Cliff told the detectives, Jesus, he knew that guy. From the late 1960s, in Manhattan Beach. He’d flown loads for him, kilos of marijuana out of Mexico, into the dry lake beds of Southern California. The last he heard he’d gotten busted bringing three hundred kilos of marijuana into the Playboy Club in Chicago back in 1972. That guy is Boston George! Cliff said. That guy is George Jung!
* * *
In undercover work something new happens every day, and there was plenty of action. These were two reasons why Detective Kridos considers the five years he worked as a narcotics detective for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department as “the best years I’d spent as a police officer. The standard TV image you have of what police work is like is what we were actually doing—dealing with people who were dangerous, thousands of pounds of drugs. In undercover work, the most important thing was to establish your believability. You’ve got to blend your personality with what you know to be the narcotics traffickers’ personality.” He learned early on to avoid the flashy attire associated with drug dealers in the movies. “I’d wear a watch, a single gold chain, and a wedding band, and that was it. Dopers get nervous when you wear a lot of jewelry because you’re too high-profile. I mean, I’m standing to make a million dollars here. Why would I draw attention to myself? I’d want to look just like everybody else.”
Then there’s “walking the walk and talking the talk”—knowing the price structures, falling in with the lingo. “If you’re not very comfortable with the vernacular, a guy may throw something at you that you should know and don’t. Like in a marijuana deal, ‘How much am I getting on the wrappings?’ Which means, how much is he going to take off the price of a bale of marijuana so I’m paying for net-weight marijuana, not for two and a half pounds of plastic wrap? You could be stuck and not know what he’s talking about, and they’re immediately going to think something’s funny. You also don’t jump through hoops for them. Only cops jump through hoops for people. You call a guy and he says meet him at three o’clock at the Rainbow Restaurant in Lauderdale, you show up, wait fifteen minutes, and he doesn’t show, you leave. He calls up and says something came up, he’s down in Miami, why don’t you meet him down there? You say, ‘Screw you! You want to do this deal, meet me here, or meet me halfway.’ If you jump to get the deal done, they’re going to suspect something, so you make it a little hard for them.”
One of the most crucial things Greg had to learn was the art of the “flash,” the money flash or the drug flash, usually employed to get a deal that’s become bogged down in a Mexican stand-off moving again. “Say you’re selling the cocaine. They might want to see the dope before they bring out the money. But that goes against your principles. You tell them, ‘No, you show me the money. You can’t get arrested for just showing money. But if I show you the fifty keys, first I’m heating up where the keys are. I’ve gotta have somebody go to the stash house, bring them out on the street.’ But if it’s ‘No, I’m still not showing the money until I see the coke,’ then you’ve got to do a flash. You make a phone call and have someone drive in and flash some stuff. And when you’re flashing it, particularly if you’re the buyer and you’re flashing money, the first and foremost, the cardinal rule is when you show it, you show it when this guy has no clue he’s going to see it. You may say, ‘Hey, take a ride with me.’ He hasn’t any idea where he’s going or why, and you show him the money, like, fast. You open up the bag or the suitcase, let him riffle it but not count it, then you leave right away. You can’t give him time to set something up, have some of his people around to get a countersurveillance going.”
Whether he was playing the seller, the buyer, or the transporter—the three standard roles in a drug sting—the most nerve-racking part for Greg was always the moment the deal went down, when the goods and the money actually changed hands. “Whether you’re the bad guys or the good guys, you both have the same goal in any cocaine deal, and that is to get through it alive. And here the most crucial thing is that you’re never going to put the money and the dope together. You’re going to keep them separate. If you put them together, the potential for being ripped off and shot and killed goes up immensely. The various ways the exchange happens are, ‘Give me the dope, I’ll sell it and bring you the money back’—that’s probably the worst way. Another is, ‘Give me half the dope, I’ll pay for half and sell it and come back and get the rest later.’ Third is, ‘Give me half and I’ll pay you after I sell it, but you hold the other half as collateral.’ The way the transfer works is each side sends a representative to a neutral place, and they sit down and work out how it’s going to happen. It’s usually, ‘I’ll send two of my guys with the money to meet two of your guys. I’ll send two other guys to another location to meet two other of your guys who have the dope. So then I talk to my guys on the phone who are looking at the dope, and you talk to your guys who are looking at the money. We exchange everything and we walk away.’ Of course, even doing it this way you can get ripped off, and if you’re going to get ripped off, remember, they don’t know you’re cops, they just think you’re drug dealers, so you’re probably going to get killed. They don’t want any witnesses, and they don’t want anyone coming after them.”
* * *
From the beginning Tom and Greg could hardly believe the bonanza they’d stumbled upon—a three- to four-hundred-kilo cocaine deal involving a large network of traffickers. George’s nephew, Joseph Ahmed, had appeared on the scene, so counting noses, they had six conspirators so far—McWilliams, their initial contact with Harbuck; Harbuck and his son-in-law, Steven Fuller; another gofer who popped up named Walsh; and George. And this was just on the American side. If they could use the cocaine they’d be flying in to pry into the Colombian organization in Miami, there was no telling how many they’d land. They were also going to discover, though they would not be the first ones, that in dealing with George they had a tiger by the tail.
The first surprise came when they ran George’s name through the FBI’s computer and found out that here was someone who’d just escaped from a state prison. So right away came a major problem. The Fort Lauderdale police had no proscriptions against dealing with fugitives. But Mike McManus of the DEA was operating under a strict policy that said anytime he ran across someone wanted by another jurisdiction he couldn’t fool around, he had to arrest him right away—unless he could get the jurisdiction to sign off on keeping the fugitive for the duration of the trip. McManus found the state police in Massachusetts were willing to go along with the operation, but the Department of Corrections up there wasn’t too keen on letting this guy, the “master of illusion” smart-ass, stay free any longer. “We were pleading with them that we were into a really big thing here,” says McManus, who handled all the back-up work. “This was the Medellín cartel! George was a documented heavy player, and all the names we’re coming up with are major, major players in the cartel. We had such a good handle on this guy. He was eating out of our hand.” Still, Corrections wasn’t satisfied. Hey, come on, putting George up at a hotel? He could walk away from the operation any minute. To get Corrections to cooper
ate, Fort Lauderdale at least had to put him on a tighter leash.
That was when they thought of housing George and his nephew on the boat, along with Cliff, who could help keep tabs on them. It was this fifty-eight-foot Hatteras, which the Fort Lauderdale PD had confiscated from a dirty cop who, under everyone’s noses, had been running a huge marijuana-smuggling ring, with mother ships offshore and go-fast boats ferrying the goods in at night. The Hatteras was a $750,000 lushly appointed yacht moored at a slip in the New River alongside other luxury craft. It had plenty of room below deck for five or six people. It was wired for sound, with microphones all over the boat, under the carpet. There was a video camera in one of the stereo speakers. The story they told George was that it belonged to Tom’s father in Detroit and was just sitting there unused, so they might as well stay there. “George loved the idea, he thought it was great,” says Greg. “The big yacht owner. It fit the profile he had of himself to a tee.”
As plans moved along, it became apparent that the delivery wasn’t going to happen as quickly as everyone had assumed. It was the rainy season down in Colombia, so difficulties arose with transporting the bales through the jungle. And the gravel airstrips weren’t in good shape. The longer the delay, the higher expenses mounted. Until they moved to the boat, George, Cliff, and Joseph Ahmed had been put up at hotels, and even afterward there were meals to pay for; covering George and Cliff’s bar bills alone was enough to support a family of four over quite a stretch. Joseph had to be flown down to Colombia to check on how things were going. Colombians would come up to Fort Lauderdale to look things over, check on Cliff’s plane. On that occasion, Tom and Greg took them out to eat at the Marriott Hotel, and although the Marriott boasted the most expensive restaurant in town, they still had difficulty explaining to the stingy accountants at the police department how they managed to spend five hundred dollars on lunch. Thus Tom and Greg were encouraged by the department to get as much money back as possible from the Colombians. Ideally they would make them pay for their own bust.