American Desperado (64 page)

When the coke was on the water, Mickey’s idea was to send out
a fishing boat to pick it up. If a boat went twenty or thirty miles out on the water, fished for a day, and came back, it didn’t look suspicious to the government because the boat hadn’t stopped at an island or met a seaplane on the water like it would have done if it were picking up coke.

Nobody imagined we could drop coke thirty miles out on the ocean and find it a day later. It was impossible to do that—for anyone but Mickey.

M
ICKEY
:
The easy part was dropping the cocaine in the water. As long as it’s in waterproof wrapping, cocaine will float. The hard part is finding it. Even if your pilot and kicker knew the exact coordinates where they dropped the coke bales, the bales would drift several miles in a few hours.

So I built radio beacons in buoys that we could track from the radios in our boats. At that time I’d also started working with military night-vision goggles. These weren’t easy to get, but I obtained a few sets to help find our way to airstrips when we were moving at night. The other nice feature of night-vision goggles is that they pick up infrared light that’s invisible to the naked eye. When I built my beacons, I attached an infrared strobe light to each one. When you put on the night-vision goggles, you could see the infrared strobe lights flashing from nearly a quarter-mile away on the water.

After I built my beacons, the ocean drops were simple. We bundled the coke into 50-kilo bales, tethered them together, and attached the beacons that we could track no matter how far they drifted on the water. It was basic American ingenuity at work.

J
.
R
.:
The one problem we had was that the coke packages the Colombians wrapped for us leaked in the ocean. Mickey tested all kinds of ways to wrap the product. He came up with the exact type of plastic to use, how to fold it and seal it, but he couldn’t get the Colombians to follow his directions.

M
ICKEY
:
I made a comic book showing every step needed to seal the packages. I found a Colombian girl with a very sultry voice. She was so sexy, when you rang her up and she said hello, your ear would just melt. I had this gal narrate into a tape recorder the directions that I’d laid out in the comic book. I had her talk like wrapping coke was an erotic experience: “Slide your finger under the flaps. It’s tight, isn’t it?” I sent my books and the tapes of this girl narrating them to Colombia, but the guys who did the wrapping still didn’t get it right.

J
.
R
.:
That’s because they were too busy jerking off to those stupid tapes Mickey made. Because Mickey didn’t speak Spanish, he didn’t get the girl to explain properly in Spanish. The tapes were gibberish. I flew to Colombia and went to Pablo’s guys in a coke factory and showed them in person how to wrap the coke. Once I did that, we had no more problems.

M
ICKEY
:
Then I decided to take it to the next level. The Competition began conducting random stops of boats as they were coming into the harbors. So I built a stealth boat that I could sneak in at night. I saw an article in an aviation magazine about a new kind of airplane the military was building, the stealth plane. It had a low profile and asymmetrical carbon fiber surfaces that reduced its radar signature.

I decided to build a boat that followed the same principles. It was probably the neatest toy I ever made. My boat was twenty feet long and eighteen inches high. She was like a pancake. I rigged her with a racing car seat that had me lying back, like I was on a luge. I hung a pair of 300-horsepower engines off the back with twin-reverse screws, and I built asymmetrical carbon fiber cowlings to go over them. I put in reversible bilges so if I was spotted, I could flood my boat and sink her in under five minutes. When I ran her, I wore
a wet suit and had a scuba tank. If I had to scuttle her, I could swim away.

She could hold 400 kilos of cocaine and do 80 miles an hour, and I’d wired her with a state-of-the-art stereo, integrated with my radios, so I could listen to tunes through my headphones while monitoring my communications. For my first run, I made a ninety-minute extended mix tape of my favorite Phil Collins song, “In the Air Tonight,” and took off. That boat was a rocket. When you’re eighteen inches on the water doing 80 miles an hour, you can see your speed in the waves whipping past your eyes. It’s like Scotty
^*
jamming the
Enterprise
into warp speed on
Star Trek
. Everything melts.

We ran water-drop missions for an intense three-month period when the Competition had deployed all their resources to seal off the coast. After they caught a bunch of other smugglers and held some press conferences, they declared victory. They stood down their effort to block off the coast, and we went back to landing our planes at the Nike sites.

J
.
R
.:
Great as Mickey was when it came to basic things, he was very obstinate. One time I needed to fly a bunch of coke from Florida to Los Angeles. It was a simple domestic flight. I asked Mickey if his pilot could do it. He said, “No. That’s impossible right now.”

It was easy for Mickey to say no because he was insulated from the Colombians. For me, it wasn’t so easy. I’d already promised Fabito I’d get the coke moved. Luckily, I had a brainstorm: air ambulances. I saw them at airports all the time when I flew on horse-buying trips. An air ambulance resembled a regular plane, but it was outfitted with a stretcher. All you needed to make it legit was a nurse, a sick person, and a note from a doctor saying the medical team had to get to a hospital in the city they were landing in.

I got a crooked doctor friend in Miami to fill out all the papers. He gave me his nurse. We dressed one of my drivers in bandages, and we put the coke in medical trunks that we drove out to the airport in an ambulance. The pilot of the plane we hired didn’t even know he was flying coke for us. It worked out so good, I must have done it eight or ten times. We flew out of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood airport. One time we even dressed up Bryan in the bandages, but he was so big, they had a hard time rolling him on the stretcher. Mostly I was just happy to prove to Mickey that the thing he said was impossible could be done.

Every time the thought came to me that I should quit smuggling, a new challenge came along. With Mickey and me combining our ideas, there was very little anyone could do to stop us. And we couldn’t stop ourselves because we were having so much fun.

*
Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, played by James Doohan in the original
Star Trek
series.

65

J
.
R
.:
When I visited Don Ochoa at his ranch in late 1982, he told me he was having a terrible problem with Communists. They were coming down from the hills and stealing his cows and trying to stir up the people against him. They even kidnapped one of his daughters. This made the Cartel stronger because the families in it banded together to fight the Communists.
^*
To do this, they needed guns. They also needed guns to protect coke factories and fight little wars in the streets. The Colombians couldn’t get enough guns. They wanted guns from America because here they’re easier to get than in Colombia. Plus, many gun dealers in Florida took cash.
The Colombians could launder money with guns the same way I did with racehorses.

Mickey would not fly guns. It went against his philosophy of nonviolence. So I got into this business with Max. The one thing Max proved good at was buying guns. He obtained caseloads of AR-15s and other excellent weapons.
^*
Max had an in with a dirty cop on the Miami Police Department bomb squad. When the cops impounded exotic weapons such as plastic explosive or machine guns, they sold them to Max out the back door of the station.

Once a month I’d have Roger come down with his King Air and fly guns to Colombia. The flights were easy. The heat was looking for drugs coming in, but nobody cared about guns going out.

W
HEN
I earned more trust with the Cartel by shipping the guns, they asked me to help fly their money out of Florida. Up until about 1982 the Colombians had crooked banks in Miami that they could walk into with trash bags full of cash and make deposits. Everybody did this. In the late 1970s my friend Bebe Rebozo had a bank where he let me deposit shoeboxes of cash, no questions asked.
^†
By the early 1980s the heat was starting to watch Florida banks because of all the cash coming in.
^‡
There were many months when I brought Rafa a half ton of cash—hundreds of millions of dollars—as payment from the distributors. Stash houses were overflowing.

Finally, General Noriega, who was friends with Pablo Escobar, said the Cartel could use his banks in Panama to hold their dollars. Laundering money was his specialty.
^§
Rafa asked me to run cash flights to Panama. He promised it would be easy to land there. Noriega would give our planes military protection at the airport.

I used Roger on the first run. We took a few boxes with $50 million as a test load. As soon as we landed, army trucks surrounded our plane. Soldiers got out showing guns. A big guy with acne grooves in his face came forward. Then a nasty little woman in a military uniform walked in front of him. This did not look promising. But the woman said, “We will take you to the bank.”

The soldiers unloaded the plane, and we drove to the bank in a motorcade with sirens blaring. Then the guy with grooves on his face drove Roger and me across town to a big house. He walked us into an office to meet General Noriega. Like our escort, Noriega had holes in his face from bad skin, and I wondered if the two men were related. But Noriega was short. He was a troll. He wanted me in his office to witness his signing off on the bank deposit, so I could tell the Colombians how serious he took his job as a banker.

On my next trip Noriega warmed up to me. He invited me to his house. He wanted to show me a room where he kept some of his favorite mementos. He had shelves of pictures showing him in military school in America
^*
and a couple of paintings that looked expensive. I told the general how nice his paintings were and asked where he got them.

He made a funny smile and said, “I stole them.”

His most prized possessions were photographs of him with Vice President Bush.
^†
Noriega’s favorite one was really strange. It showed
him sitting in Bush’s lap.
^*
He’d point to the picture and laugh. “See? I am America’s best friend. Bush is my boss.”

I didn’t care who his friends were, Noriega was a disgusting person. On one trip to Panama, I went to a party at a government mansion. It started off normal—everybody was doing lines, beautiful Latin women everywhere. I walked into a corner, and there was Noriega on a couch with a couple of little girls, maybe nine years old, on either side of him, and he was petting them. He had a funny smile on his face like when he showed me his stolen art.

But whatever his faults, the U.S. government believed he was dependable. He was Bush’s friend, and at his parties, when he wasn’t putting the moves on nine-year-old children, you’d see him talking to clean-cut Americans from the embassy.

When Noriega told me I could open my own accounts at his banks and that he’d personally take care of me, I saw it as an opportunity. Over the next two to three years, I gave him $150 million of my own money—cash that I dug up from hiding spots around Delray. I had the trusted dictator of an important country working as my personal banker. The only thing crazier would be if the U.S. government hired me to be a smuggler.

But that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?

*
In 1981 Don Ochoa’s daughter, Martha Nieves, was kidnapped by M-19, a left-wing revolutionary group. In response to the kidnapping, the Ochoas joined with other Cartel leaders and wealthy landowners to create a paramilitary force called
Muertas a Sequestradores
—Death to Kidnappers. The rise of this and other private armies helped destabilize Colombia for the next two decades.

*
The AR-15 is the civilian version of the U.S. military’s M-16 infantry rifle.

*
As a young Panamanian military officer in the 1960s, Noriega received U.S. military training at bases in Panama and in the United States at Fort Bragg.

*
Jon is likely referring to a photo of Bush and Noriega taken in the 1970s. In the photo, Bush and Noriega are seated extremely close together on a couch, and perhaps through an accident of perspective Noriega appears to be sitting in Bush’s lap.

†
The banker and close confidant of former President Nixon whom Jon spoke about in chapter 37.

†
Bush the elder met frequently with Noriega beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was the director of the CIA. As reported in the May 16, 1991,
Chicago Tribune
article “Files Detail Noriega CIA Connection,” prior to Noriega’s 1992 trial for racketeering, trafficking, and money laundering, his defense claimed he had been paid more than $10 million by the CIA. During the trial, the U.S. government’s lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, disputed that figure, arguing that Noriega had been paid only about $300,000 in the form of monthly paychecks that he received from approximately 1971 to 1986—meaning it cost about $1,500 a month to bribe the dictator of a third world country in that era.