by Gerard Colby
From ports along the Amazon route, a unique improvement over the airplane emerged for smuggling huge amounts of cocaine: shiploads of Amazonian cedar and mahogany. Hollowed out and stuffed with wrapped cocaine, the boards were mixed with regular planks. Emerging into the open sea, the ships headed north to Panama, where money was exchanged and laundered, or they sailed farther north into the Caribbean, where “brass-plate” banks, one-office affairs, flourished. Sometimes, the tropical hardwoods were shipped directly to Miami, the new “Little Havana,” since Fidel Castro chased Florida mobsters Meyer Lansky and Santos Trafficante out of Cuba in 1958.
The influx of thousands of refugees into Miami was difficult enough, but the added influx of mobsters and the CIA, huge amounts of money and material for anti-Castro raids, and now drug smugglers was too much for Miami’s political infrastructure to cope with. Real estate prices soared, corruption became rampant, and in the midst of the social crisis, the birth of the “Amazon connection” to Miami drug smuggling passed unnoticed.
Amazon’s River Routes for Cocaine Smuggling
During the 1960s, cocaine smuggling found a new route down the Amazon toward Leticia, where U.S. Consul Mike Tsalickis built a fortune in tourism and the exporting of exotic fish, animals, and cocaine.
Sources: Smuggling routes–Authors’ interviews; Coca leaf belt–Edmundo Morales, Cocaine: White Gold Rush in Peru; James Painter, Bolivia and Coca: A Study in Dependency (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner, 1994).
In 1963, a mysterious middle-aged German appeared in Leticia. He planned to purchase the region’s only large sawmill, he explained. He called himself Rafael von Steinbeck, but actually he had many names. He had entered South America after World War II through Peronist Argentina, exactly when King was serving in Buenos Aires as the assistant military attaché charged with monitoring Nazi corporate assets and spy networks. It would be three decades before the world would learn of the protection provided by U.S. intelligence agencies for Nazi war criminals who were willing to collaborate in the Cold War against communism.8
Von Steinbeck had escaped from Poland via the Vatican “rat line” run by a Croatian priest, Father Dragonovic. Apparently well connected and financed, he went from Argentina to Panama, where he was given Panamanian citizenship by dictator Simón Vallarino. But Vallarino’s fascist leanings did not sit well in Washington, and Vallarino’s subsequent fall forced von Steinbeck to seek protection next from Peru’s right-wing dictator, General Odría.
Using the alias José Marie Still Georges, he became well known as Peru’s premier smuggler of oro blanco, the “white gold.” In 1958, following Odría’s fall, 71/2 kilos of cocaine discovered en route to Panama were traced back to Still Georges. Fleeing to remote Iquitos, he was given false identity papers by a sympathetic Capuchin superior and continued north through the jungle that fueled the rubber boom of half a century earlier, working his way up to the Putumayo River and west to Brazil.9
Still Georges found refuge downriver in another Capuchin mission at Manaus. After a decent interval, he returned to Leticia. There, yet another Capuchin friar with a pro-Franco Falangist background awaited. Bishop Marceliano Canyes was the same Catalan Capuchin who, charged anthropologist Victor Daniel Bonilla, had won infamy in the Putumayo region for fleecing the Sibundoy valley tribes of their lands.10 He was now apostolic vicar of the Amazonas commissariat. Canyes appointed Still Georges the engineer of the apostolic prefect and let him acquire an identity card in the name of Rafael von Steinbeck.11
Von Steinbeck obtained a loan from a local government bank of which Canyes was a director. Then, in 1963, he joined two of Canyes’s friends in forming a company to sell fish and hides and to export mahogany, cedar, and rosewood from Santa Clara, north of Leticia.
This region offered von Steinbeck some ethnic conviviality. It had been frequented by Germans since 1905, and after World War II, Leticia was the source of reported sightings of Nazi refugees.
Von Steinbeck named his firm the Amazon Rosewood and Commerce Society. Well financed, he took over Santa Clara’s abandoned sawmill and made plans to hire over 400 men, including Indians, to provide wood and hides. He was buying supplies to begin operations, when into the Santa Clara picture walked a thin, dark-haired American whom Life magazine called “The Tarzan of the Amazon.”
THE TARZAN OF THE AMAZON
Mike Tsalickis was a native of Tarpon Springs, Florida, a community on the Gulf coast north of Tampa that was famous for its sponge industry. Mike reveled in his self-cultivated reputation as the All-American Boy Scout. He had earned more than 100 merit badges. Love of the outdoors, he explained, had led him to the Amazon and adventure in the jungle. Following a hitch in the navy, so the story goes, in 1946 he helped set up the Tarpon Springs Zoo to import animals from Latin America.
Mike Tsalickis followed the route of a fledgling St. Petersburg airline, Aerovias Sud Americana (ASA), as it built the first air-freight line between Central America and the United States. He sent back live animals to his partner, Gertrude Jerkins, for resale to pet shops and zoos. Eventually finding himself in Barranquilla, Colombia’s major Caribbean harbor, he heard stories about vast untapped animal resources along the Amazon.
In 1953, he decided to investigate. Traveling by boat through Caribbean ports in Venezuela and Guyana, he finally arrived in Belém, Brazil, at the Amazons mouth. He worked his way up the Amazon until, in August of that year, he came upon Leticia, then a sleepy river town with no hot water or electricity. But he saw an animal exporter’s paradise. He convinced ASA to try a freight line between Leticia, Bogotá, and Panama. He would bring in commercial goods and export natural rubber, hides, tropical fish, and exotic animals. The regularity of flights made ASA’s new route—and ASA agent Mike Tsalickis—a success. He was soon exporting big Amazon fish to restaurants in Bogotá and providing free ASA passes to both buyers and sellers of his animals.
But even he could not monopolize the depletion of Amazonian fauna. Other American exporters operating out of Iquitos undercut his prices, so Tsalickis made two fateful business moves around 1957. He decided to go into the exporting of research animals, especially the white-lipped marmoset and the squirrel monkey. And, after investigating the lumber industry, he also invested in the export of rosewood used in extracting perfume. Rosewood trees were cut down in the vast rain forest to the north, and the logs were floated down the Putumayo to the region’s only large sawmill, owned by von Steinbeck.
In Santa Clara, then, converged three of the most notorious figures of the Colombian Amazon: Tsalickis, Bishop Canyes, and von Steinbeck. The mix was explosive, and it did not take long for Colombia’s Liberals to light the match. Bogotá’s El Espectador began a series of articles exposing von Steinbeck’s past smuggling activities. Von Steinbeck’s ownership of the only large sawmill in Colombia’s Amazon smacked of corruption. Von Steinbeck had contacted several local politicians to lock up public-works contracts for his enterprise, including projects sponsored by the Alliance for Progress. His commercial reach extended back to Iquitos, whose refinery, tapping Sinclair Oil’s Ganso Azul field, would give his riverboats all the fuel he needed to dominate the region. But most important was the revelation that his cocaine operations in Peru had been located next to a sawmill.12 Did he plan to export more than rosewood?
Von Steinbeck disappeared. In February 1964, after having disguised himself as a Capuchin monk while living in Manaus, he resurfaced in Leticia. He tried to reorganize his company, drawing on a $35,000 loan provided by Canyes’s bank. But in 1966, at about the time when King set up ANDCO, he vanished again, never to return. He took up residence in Guayaquil, home of a bevy of cocaine-processing plants thriving under a CIA-backed military dictatorship.
The collapse of von Steinbeck’s company removed the only sawmill in Colombia’s Amazonas commissariat. Mike Tsalickis had to write off his investment in his Santa Clara rosewood operation. But it would not be the last time he would be tied to business deals with Bishop Canyes’s network
or have a close brush with the other side of the law.
That year King opened shop in Iquitos and hired Mike Tsalickis as ANDCO’s supply agent in Leticia. In May, the State Department also opened shop in Leticia, setting up a U.S. consulate with some fanfare and appointing Tsalickis as unofficial U.S. consul. The party thrown by the Bogotá embassy included Tsalickis and Bishop Canyes as guests. Tsalickis even took U.S. Ambassador Covey Oliver, fresh from his victory over Colombia’s “red” peasant republics and soon to become assistant secretary for Latin America, on a nighttime alligator hunt, complete with armed security guards. The following year Tsalickis was named U.S. consular agent. “He was doing the job anyway,” said Oliver, “so we decided to make it official.”13 Tsalickis was an old Amazon hand for the U.S. Embassy by then. When Leticia’s doctor had wanted to set up a hospital in this remote region, the U.S. military mission, which was advising the government of Alberto Lleras Camargo on antiguerilla operations, stepped in at Tsalickis’s request. A U.S. Marine colonel arranged for the U.S. Navy to fly in an unused mobile clinic from the Panama Canal Zone. The embassy arranged a $25,000 U.S. donation to this “Project Halo.”
This was not the only feat that made Mike a local celebrity. Back in 1959, the Colombian government had discovered that ASA had been using Colombian air permits to control the freight business between Leticia and Bogotá. The Lleras Camargo government canceled the permits, and Colombians moved in to replace ASA. Tsalickis did not fight it. Instead, he bought his own DC-3, invested in Leticia real estate, and launched a brick factory and a tourist hotel. He became the most prominent American in the region, billing himself as the Tarzan of the Amazon to visiting journalists. His appointment as U.S. consul in Leticia, then, came as no surprise.
Tsalickis’s involvement with ANDCO’s notorious Dee Williams, however, raised some eyebrows. Williams hired Tsalickis just as the Amazon’s Tarzan was expanding the research side of his animal export business. In 1967, Tsalickis bought an island in one of the Amazon’s remote tributaries between Leticia and Iquitos. The purpose, he explained, was to experiment in letting monkeys run wild to see if their breeding habits improved. This experiment would allow him to restock the surrounding jungle out of which he took as many as 6,000 monkeys a year. The experiment worked. Starting with 3,691 monkeys, the island would hold over 20,000 by 1971; of those, 5,690 had been deposited by Tsalickis, thanks to the labor of hundreds of hired native trappers.14
Yet the extraordinary security measures Tsalickis took inspired rumors. A staff of eighteen men armed with walkie-talkies patrolled the island, keeping out intruders and maintaining the island’s isolation. Tsalickis’s customers in the United States included the U.S. Naval Toxicology Unit, the U.S. Army, and many research institutions where scientists had been involved in MKULTRA experiments. The monkeys were used in a wide range of experiments, including tests for cancer viruses, brain tumors, poisons, and psychoactive drugs.
King occasionally stayed at Tsalickis’s Ticuna Hotel, but he never allowed himself to be seen as having the kind of relations with Tsalickis that Dee Williams did. King’s operational style was quiet. Tsalickis’s modus operandi was brash and crudely commercial, sporting everything from round glass paperweights encasing an overhead profile sketch of his head to picture postcards bearing his signature over the photographs. The photographs inadvertently painted an image of an Amazon besieged. One had the Tarzan of the Amazon wrestling knee deep in mud with a huge (and reportedly drugged) anaconda, a scene he repeated for the “Wild Kingdom” television show. Another showed him in a Tarpon Zoo sweatshirt grinning between two shy, bare-breasted Yagua Indian girls, his arms around their shoulders. National Geographic and True magazines ran feature stories about him. He was always seeking publicity for his Ticuna Hotel, his tourist services (which included hunting expeditions), and, of course, himself.
Yet he was useful. Since he knew everyone, he was a valuable source of information. He helped plant collector Nicole Maxwell during her first expedition and later provided plants and supplies for ANDCO. When King took his floating lab, the Fennewood II, on an expedition into the backwaters, Mike was always available to arrange equipment, fuel, and provisions. He seemed willing to do anything for the U.S. government.
And for friends.
Like the American missionaries, including SIL translators and JAARS pilots, who occasionally stayed at his hotel and enjoyed his famed hospitality.
Like oil companies, such as AMOCO, which, after two SIL women had conquered the Mayoruna with trinkets and love, employed his aerial services and SIL friend Jerry Cobb’s piloting skills to penetrate the tribe’s forbidding forest with drilling supplies.
Like Bishop Canyes, who used Tsalickis’s air taxi service to descend like an avenging angel on sinners in his vicariate.
Besides hides and animals, Mike’s most coveted export was cocaine. And it was cocaine that would cause his arrests in 1975 and 1988. The latter date marked one of the largest cocaine seizures in American history, 3,270 kilograms (over 7,000 pounds) of cocaine at Tsalickis’s warehouse in Tarpon Springs, Florida. The cocaine, worth an estimated $1.4 billion, was shipped from Colombia to St. Petersburg, Florida, by Tsalickis’s freighter, Amazon Shy, in 700 hollowed-out cedar boards, which were then trucked north to Tarpon Springs. More than 1,000 people, it was estimated, were involved in the packing and smuggling. Tsalickis, who owned lumber mills in Leticia and Brazil, was believed by the Drug Enforcement Agency to have been linked to the Mafia in Cali since 1984.15
But it was the 1975 arrest that revealed that more was at stake than drug smuggling. Between the arrival of Dee Williams in 1967 and Tsalickis’s first arrest eight years later, the CIA’s counterinsurgency operations in Bolivia, particularly—but also in Peru and Ecuador—greatly enhanced the power of drug-smuggling uniformed warlords and Nazi refugees. The springboard for these operations and their onerous result was the search for J. C. King’s old prey, Che Guevara.
TILLERS OF THE GRAVEYARD
Felix Rodriguez hoped that his arrival in La Paz was the beginning of better days. He had worked since 1963 running communications for CIA-funded raids out of Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua to Cuba. The raids were designed to sabotage Cuba’s socialist economy, increase shortages of goods and services, and weaken its image as an economic alternative to the “people’s capitalism” exemplified by the American corporation. Although such attacks could only stimulate the Soviet-style garrison state that could tarnish Cuba’s image abroad, the raids were meant to punish Cuba for that very dependence on the Soviet Union for survival.
Rodriguez began this work after President Kennedy’s assassination, when the CIA, nervous about all the Secret Service agents who descended on the Agency’s South Florida headquarters on November 22 looking for files on Cuban exile organizations,16 shut down its Florida base and moved its operations to more secure bases abroad. All went well until 1965, when his commandos mistakenly attacked a Spanish freighter, killing the captain and injuring the crew. In the ensuing international uproar, the CIA closed down the operation and moved ships and some of the Cuban exiles to the Congo. Che Guevara had been spotted there, leading followers of assassinated premier Patrice Lumumba against the army of Colonel Joseph Mobutu.
Now, two years later, Rodriguez was getting another crack at Cuba’s former foreign minister. Che had been sighted in a remote area south of Santa Cruz, known mostly for Indians, American missionaries, oil, and cocaine.
As in Southeast Asia and later in Southwestern Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan), the CIA’s secret war in South America led it into conflict with official U.S. policy. The CIA provided arms and equipment (including air transportation) for uniformed warlords who were financed by revenues from cash crops grown by peasants and processed into narcotics. Such operations created a network for clandestine international arms deals that could finance illegal CIA wars without congressional knowledge, much less oversight.
Behind this entanglement of the CIA with drug traffickers, i
ronically, were a handful of economic forces of more respectable appearance: multinational conglomerates that had increasing domination over the world’s commercial agriculture. The problems posed to subsistence farmers in the Third World by the growth of well-financed commercial agriculture were overwhelming: the buying up of fertile lands; the use of pesticides and herbicides that poisoned the waters; and the use of expensive fertilizers, techniques, and harvesting machinery to generate high volumes of products that, in turn, drove down the prices of farm products in the national and world markets.
On the brink of losing their lands, peasants and small farmers increasingly turned to cash crops that commanded higher prices and better income: poppy in Asia, marijuana and coca in the Americas. Laws against marijuana, cocaine, and heroin did not stem the demand or, therefore, the supply. Local warlords or military and police officials, using arms and equipment provided by the CIA and the Pentagon “to fight communism,” established protection rackets that often mushroomed into full-scale trafficking, including processing plants and laundering money through banks. As with Air America in Southeast Asia, the CIA’s aviation contractors in Latin America became indirectly involved in the trade by asking few questions about the cargo of CIA clients or became directly involved as participants in drug runs.
In 1967, the center of both the German community in Bolivia and of the country’s growing illicit cocaine trade was the Santa Cruz region, east of the Andes. One of the most powerful Germans in Bolivia at that time was a middle-aged merchant named Klaus Altmann. His real name was Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” who had escaped prosecution for mass murder in France through the assistance of the CIA, which used him as an “asset” in the Cold War.17 (It was one of Barbie’s intermediaries, according to one report, who helped doom MIR guerrillas in Peru in 1965 by supplying them with defective weapons and wrong ammunition on behalf of a Bolivian gunrunner known to MIR as Klaus Altmann.18) Barbie’s partner in “business” affairs in Lima was Friedrich Schwend, formerly Hitler’s official SS counterfeiter, and now the self-appointed minister of finance of Nazi funds smuggled out of Germany and used to finance the German exile network’s often illegal ventures, including gunrunning and cocaine trafficking.19 Like most German communities in the big cities, Santa Cruz’s Germans had supported the CIA-backed military coup of Air Force General René Barrientos in 1964. Few places could have been more hostile to the presence of the Argentine revolutionary and guerrilla ally of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara.