Blow

by Bruce Porter

  * * *

  As much as George’s circumstances had altered in the past eight years, so had those of his old compadre in crime, Carlos Lehder. Norman Cay had received so much notoriety in the press, including being featured in an outraged documentary by NBC News, that the Bahamian parliament was embarrassed into funding an investigation by a royal commission into bribery and drug-running throughout the islands. Where payoffs were concerned, the commission found out readily enough that Prime Minister Lynden Pindling’s expenditures had far exceeded his income, but it couldn’t prove that the overage came from drug smugglers. In any event, Norman Cay was becoming too hot for Carlos in the early 1980s, and by 1983 he’d returned to Colombia, where he bought a cattle ranch and began spending his millions to further his dreams of achieving national power. About 125 miles south of Medellín, on the outskirts of his native Armenia, he built a sprawling alpine resort named Posada Alemana, to rival the Hacienda Veracruz owned by the Ochoas and also Pablo Escobar’s Hacienda los Nápoles, where George had seen the police informer shot several years earlier. Built at a cost of $3 million, the complex contained a restaurant of gourmet pretensions, a good-sized zoo and wired-in aviary, swimming pools, and thirty separate guest villas, two stories tall and covered in thatch. Carlos also built a discotheque at the place, naming it after his musical muse, John Lennon, whose utopian reverie “Imagine” had been Carlos’s all-time favorite song. He hired the noted Colombian architect, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, to design a life-size statue of the late Beatle and installed it at the entrance to the posada. The statue shows Lennon standing naked, his right hand holding on to a guitar, his left displaying the letters PAZ for “peace,” and the assassin’s bullet wound visible in his back.

  On the political side, Carlos organized the Movimento Latino Nacional, a party that used Colombian nationalism as a guise for railing against extraditing drug traffickers to the United States. He assigned to himself the title of “maximum chief” and installed a twelve-foot-high poster of himself at the party’s headquarters in downtown Armenia. In speeches to the faithful he would rant on like a junior-varsity Hitler, saying that the rabbis collected taxes for Israel and laying blame for all the terrorism and oppression in Latin America at the feet of “international Zionism.” A bunch of youthful thugs called Woodchoppers maintained decorum at party rallies, marching around in khaki uniforms and hard hats and brandishing four-foot truncheons. In a weekly newspaper published by the party, Quindio Libre, the editor regularly praised Carlos as “a man of a new era, captain of the seas and the skies.”

  It all didn’t last very long. Unbeknownst to Carlos, in the late 1970s and 1980, the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida, based in Jacksonville, had been gathering evidence about Carlos’s activities in the States, as well as the drug operation on Norman Cay. In January of 1981 he’d succeeded in getting a federal grand jury to indict Carlos and thirteen of his American confederates and pilots on thirty-nine counts of cocaine smuggling and income-tax evasion. The prosecutor, a 245-pound former running back at Notre Dame named Robert W. Merkle, had flown the indictments down to Colombia himself and presented them to the supreme court in Bogotá for a ruling on their constitutionality. On September 2, 1983, the court decided in favor of the United States. Immediately afterward, the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, signed the papers, sent them on to President Belisario Betancur for his signature, and promptly issued a warrant for Carlos’s arrest. Almost overnight the maximum chief had become a fugitive from justice and took himself off into hiding. His political party collapsed, his zoo animals were taken away to save them from starving, the posada fell into ruins, and a year later it was all but destroyed by an unexplained fire.

  George wasn’t the only one who’d experienced a comedown.

  * * *

  In 1986 agents Garcia and Levinson were stationed in the Miami office of the FBI as part of something called the Joint Drug Intelligence Group, working with their counterparts at the DEA to develop knowledge about the Medellín cartel and other South American drug operations. Normally the two agencies get along about as nicely as Israelis and Arabs, but here the object was to develop intelligence jointly, then take it back to their respective organizations for use in whatever way seemed appropriate, so there was little opportunity for rivalry. “Part of the assignment involved debriefing people in prison in an attempt to get together all the pieces of the puzzle so we could see the big picture,” says Garcia, the senior partner on the team, whose darkish complexion, brush-cut mustache, and stern eyes make him resemble Burt Reynolds. Garcia had earned a B.S. in law enforcement from Southwest Texas State University, an M.S. in management and human relations from Abilene Christian University, and he came to the Bureau after five years on the Dallas Police Department. Both his wife and his brother are FBI agents. He wears white shirts and conservative dark suits and speaks fluent Spanish.

  “We were getting every little bit of information we could, every little scribble and piece,” he says. “As one person put it, we debrief people by putting a vacuum to their head and in two or three days sucking out every bit of knowledge they have.” At this point the FBI was treating drug traffickers like agents of a foreign power, and when they found one who agreed to talk, they grilled him as they would have a Communist defector. “‘What is your part in the organization? Who did you report to? Who did that person report to? What forms of communications do you use? How do you recruit people?’ We’d get all the names, full descriptions, who they were related to, addresses, phone numbers. ‘What numbers did they know you had?’ Step by step by step, until we got to the point where they start to say, ‘I think,’ or, ‘It could be.’ And we put that part over on the fuzzy side.”

  To mask the identity of those they talked to, Garcia and Levinson would arrange for federal marshals to take the people out of the two major lockups in the region, North Dade and the Miami Metropolitan Correctional Center, and escort them to the federal courthouse, supposedly for a hearing on their cases, then they would whisk them down another corridor, where the two agents would be waiting in a borrowed office. George showed up one day as a surprise. He came in with another North Dade inmate they’d been talking to named Danny McGinniss. Danny had been arrested as part of what to law-enforcement people was a famous marijuana sting conducted by the DEA called Operation Grouper, named for the way the bales of pot dropped into water by drug planes had resembled fish of that name. For his involvement, Danny had been convicted of being part of a continuing criminal enterprise, or CCE, and sentenced to sixty years in prison. He’d been talking to the FBI for a while now in a fruitless attempt to shave some years off the sentence, when one day at North Dade he met this celebrity prisoner who was related to high-ups in the cartel and had been picked up in a big cocaine bust up in Fort Lauderdale.

  “Danny’s problem,” says George, “was he waited too long to play the game. By the time he was ready to talk, they knew everything he knew, and anyway, it was only marijuana, whereas I had the fucking cartel in my pocket. He was a streetwise Irishman from Connecticut, I think it was, and he thought by getting me involved he could help himself out. So he came over one day and asked me if I’d be interested in talking to some friends of his. And I said, sure.”

  “My first impression of George was that he’d been ‘rode hard,’ he’d been through the mill,” recalls Garcia. “He looked a lot older than he was, and I think he was getting at his wit’s end. So when he showed up with McGinniss, he didn’t know why he was here, but he knew he wanted to be here. He knew he had got arrested with three hundred kilos and he knew he had to do something to try to get out of that.” The agents were certainly right that George had a goal, but not so right in thinking he didn’t have any idea about how to reach it. He did. And not long after he began talking to Garcia and Levinson, he made it clearly known to them in only two words: Carlos Lehder.

  They knew in a vague way that George had once done some work with Carlos, but they were ignorant o
f the Danbury connection and the closeness the two of them once shared. And they knew nothing about the depth of George’s fury at being thrown over back in 1977, a humiliation now nearly nine years old, but which George had never managed to overcome. The FBI certainly didn’t know about the hit he’d almost attempted, and George wasn’t going to tell them. He’d give them just enough now to dwell on the falling-out they’d had, give himself a plausible reason to be sitting there in the first place, willing to tell them what they wanted to know. “I get the sense he didn’t know how far to take this with us,” Garcia recalls. “He didn’t know what was in it for him, deal-wise. We said we couldn’t promise anything, of course. The three hundred kilos was between him and the DEA. ‘But any information you give us we will make known to the judge, and you go from there.’”

  Garcia and Levinson knew that here in their grasp was one of the best information sources they’d ever turned up on the cartel; it was difficult to fathom how the DEA had passed this one up. “Here we had a source, not like someone who’d worked as just a pilot at one point in time. This was a different caliber of individual we had. He wasn’t a runner. He was actually one of the founders of this thing. And we had no reason to doubt what he was saying. We were checking the details he’d tell us as we went along, and it was all coming back right.”

  So they took out Danny and George on a daily basis now, Danny more or less so he wouldn’t feel left out of the deal and spread the word on what was going on around the lockup. They had the marshals switch the delivery site from the courthouse to a plush suite at the Omni Hotel in downtown Miami, where the agents supplied them little nips of Scotch from the bar, ordered up steak and lobster for lunch and dinner. And where they’d talk. And talk. Ten or fifteen days of solid grilling went by, during which George told them more than even he realized he knew about Carlos, how the cocaine business worked, what he’d seen on his trips down to Medellín. It went on like that until the day arrived when he told them he’d just about depleted all his knowledge on the subject, but now he had another idea.

  Instead of just talking about Carlos Lehder, why not try to catch him? Wasn’t that the object here—to actually lay their hands on the guy? It was a day Garcia remembers very well, when the purpose of these little sessions at the Omni switched from gathering intelligence on the cartel to discussing how to launch an actual operation against it. “Levinson said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And I asked George, ‘Okay, but will Carlos Lehder leave Colombia?’ And George says, ‘Yeah, he’ll leave Colombia, if he has a reason to leave.’ So, like what? we’re thinking. Women? Money? No, it has to be something real big. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what about if we had a way to offer him Stinger missiles? He’s that type of military guy, be into that kind of thing.’

  “George’s eyes light up. ‘Yeah! But how do we do it?’ ‘No problem. For instance, we get you out, and we get you down to Colombia. You make friends with Carlos again, and you tell him you’ve got a contact for Stinger missiles. This guy has these Stinger missiles. And you meet him out at sea. You call him up to the Bahamas, you’d be on a sailboat, in international waters, with Stinger missiles. And we get Carlos on the boat. Maybe we even have a Stinger he can hold on to, give him a dummy that you can’t fire. After we get him on the boat and verify him, the Coast Guard, navy, whatever, a Seal team, come by and we take him. We got him!’”

  It took several more sessions for them to figure out how exactly it might work. There was no doubt, once they’d been mentioned, that the Stingers were the proper draw. “You had all these revolutionary groups down there, FARC and M-19, having a constant war and such,” says Garcia. “Stinger missiles would go over pretty big. They had good press from the Afghan war at the time. That’s where I really thought of the idea from. It’s portable. Carlos would be like the new kid on the block with a better weapon. We knew from sources that Carlos Lehder was in the jungle at the time. Sources we were talking to said he really wanted to battle it out with the government. We had a source who said one time Lehder showed up at a meeting the Ochoas and Escobar were at with crossed bandoleras and hand grenades hanging off his belt, yelling and screaming, ‘We ought to kill these people! Go in fighting!’ We figure George goes down there saying he’s got a guy with a load of Stingers, Carlos would light up and come right out and get them, especially since he’s being chased by the Colombian military and their helicopters. They’d figure now they could shoot them down.”

  Garcia thought of luring him on to a sailboat rather than a big powerboat, he says, because powerboats got heavy attention from law-enforcement types in the area. Sailboats fitted right in with the tourist traffic. He had in mind a Morgan 45 sloop, which he’d sailed himself when stationed in the Bureau’s Puerto Rico office. “You didn’t want something that would flag attention to us. The Morgan 45 is a beautiful boat, teak deck, teak finish, nice stereo system. It could hold five or ten missiles. But it’s not something out of James Bond. It was less likely to be boarded by the Coast Guard or the DEA.” But wouldn’t the DEA be let in on the deal, help the FBI bring off the sting? he was asked. Garcia’s expression went a little stony at this suggestion. “The DEA?”

  The mechanics would need to be finely tuned. They’d have to decide whether to stage an actual break at an armory, for instance, or just feed a phony story to the press, to convince them down in Colombia that the missiles were on the street. The plan would have to be pushed up through channels, first at FBI headquarters in Washington, and, if approved there, at the Department of Justice. Something this big would need the express approval of Attorney General Edwin Meese. Then they had to devise a way to bolster George’s credibility. The Colombians would have to feel good enough about him to take him to Carlos. After all, George had hated Carlos for so long, and here he’s just been busted for three hundred kilos. The first thing anyone’s going to think is that he’s turned into a fink to save his skin, which, of course, he had.

  That’s when they arrived at the escape. It would happen in Miami, while Garcia and Levinson were transporting George and Danny McGinniss from jail to one of their supposed court hearings. And it must be totally believable, even inside the Bureau. “It would have to be done where myself and Mr. Levinson would be the persons actually called on the carpet for losing a prisoner. In order to make it so believable the agents themselves that we worked with would have to believe that we screwed up. We’d have to go through the whole nine yards, of an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the internal-affairs unit. We’d probably get time on the bricks, time off without pay. Censored, for whatever negligence there was.”

  But they didn’t want to go overboard. There were limits, after all, to their willingness to become the Bureau’s laughing stock. “We were going to try to work it so it wasn’t really our fault; it was circumstances that caused it to happen. The way I was thinking, we’d have Dan and George out the way we’d normally been doing, transporting them to the place. We would stage an automobile accident, crack a car up against a pole, not right on Main Street but in a neighborhood somewhere a little out of the way. Crack up the car and stage an unconsciousness, to the extent where George would escape, but not Dan. One of us would be out cold, and the other would be semi-out cold, and he’s the one who grabs McGinniss. Dan didn’t like that part of the idea too much. But I told him flat out, ‘Dan, you’ve got a sixty-year sentence. There is no way I’m going to let you go. Forget about that pipe dream.’

  “But publicity-wise, it would be in the papers, one guy out cold, everybody injured. The concept of George escaping would be credibility in itself for why he would show up in Colombia. There’d be stories all over the news. Maybe shots fired, we hadn’t worked that out yet. But George would be in the right front seat, the driver knocked out, the door pops open, and George, who’s handcuffed behind his back, gets out. The guy in the back is cushioned in the crash by the seats, so he grabs McGinniss, but George is going off and we can’t catch him. He gets away. Of course he woul
dn’t really escape. He’d be running into a net of people who’d know it was a staged deal, and would get him away from the area to another place and hide him out and smuggle him back into Colombia. We had to get him out of the area, because whoever wasn’t unconscious would grab on to the radio and be calling it in, ‘We’ve had an accident, we’ve got a prisoner on the ground, da dah, da dah, da dah.’ So you really don’t want George running around, because we don’t want him caught by the team coming out to investigate.”

  The car hits a pole? A staged unconsciousness? A phony break-in at an armory? Stinger missiles? Where’d he get this idea? “I don’t know,” he says. “I might have seen it in the movies.”

  George contributed a few suggestions of his own during the discussions, touches here and there to move the operation into the realm of high-concept, so it wouldn’t look like it was run by a bunch of pikers. “He wanted us to provide him with a nice yacht of his own for him to sail down to Colombia on from his escape, something about a hundred feet long. We’d give him all this money, and he’d have all these women on board, have access to an airplane when he got there, one he could call up when he wanted. He wanted to be set up like some millionaire. Sail down there, have access to villas at places in the Bahamas along the way, pick up Carlos himself in his boat. And his idea was it was going to be a long trip, take him a couple of months to make it down there.” The others looked on in silence as George laid out how it should really happen, if they wanted to do the thing properly. “I remember I didn’t say a word. I was just staring at George. And he finally stopped and said, ‘Ah, come on, Richard. What’s the matter?’”