Authors: Pete Earley
The Salvadoran guards finished their training one week before the trial was scheduled to begin. At their “graduation,” Shur addressed them, saying they were about to embark on “a most important mission, for
without an effective system of justice, no country can survive.”
The national guardsmen’s trial attracted international attention, and the newly christened Salvadoran Judicial Protection Unit stood guard inside the courtroom in their American-made uniforms, carrying their new automatic weapons. Despite their presence, only seven of the twelve men and women chosen as jurors dared to show up. Still, the trial went off without a hitch. Defense attorneys accused the U.S. government of railroading the five national guardsmen, but evidence showed that one of them had left a fingerprint in the nuns’ van. Another guardsman confessed. They were found guilty and the judge sentenced all five to serve thirty years in prison, the maximum sentence. Although the guardsmen claimed they were carrying out orders when they raped and murdered the nuns, none of the military officers who oversaw them was ever charged. The civil war in El Salvador continued for nine more years, until December 1992, when the United Nations negotiated a peace treaty between the government and the FMLN. Fighting between the two sides ended about a year later.
“I was proud of the work we had done,” Shur recalled. “I felt the Salvadorans had proven they could protect a judge, a jury, and prosecutors in a country where bribery, intimidation, and corruption were daily occurrences. Obviously, we hadn’t solved all of the judiciary’s problems there, but we had helped them take that first step and we had brought the nuns’ murderers to justice. I remember thinking about how the mob had tried over the years to corrupt our judicial process. It reminded me of the obvious: There can be no justice if there is intimidation.”
O
rganized crime in America was so bloodied that Justice Department officials announced on the front page of
The New York Times
in 1983 that the government was on the verge of winning its war against the mob. “In every city where there is a major organized crime family, we have indicted and/or convicted the top echelons of that family, and that’s all within the past few years,” Floyd Clarke, a deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, proudly declared. David Margolis, chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, said the use of federal strike forces, the RICO Act, legal wiretaps, and WITSEC had effectively turned the tide. But the government had little time to celebrate. A new criminal element quickly filled the void, and Gerald Shur suddenly found himself the target of a twisted kidnap plot.
• • •
Less than $10 million worth of cocaine was smuggled into the United States during 1975. Nine years later, an estimated $1 billion worth was being dumped here. Eighty percent of it came from a single source: the Medellín cartel in Colombia, the richest and most deadly criminal gang in the world in the early 1980s. It
was run by Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Carlos Ledher Rivas, and the Ochoa family, which included brothers Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Fabio. Their fingers reached across most of the Americas. Workers harvested leaves and turned them into coca paste in Bolivia and Peru, which was delivered by “mules” to secret laboratories in Colombia, Nicaragua, and Panama. The final product was shipped to warehouses in the Bahamas, Mexico, and the Turks and Caicos Islands for delivery to the United States. Both the Reagan and Bush administrations declared war on the so-called narco kingpins. It proved a bloody campaign.
The cartel’s most vicious leader was Pablo Escobar, whose personal wealth in 1983 was estimated at $2 billion. Unlike the Ochoa brothers, who were from the privileged class in Colombia and viewed themselves as refined playboys, Escobar was a vicious, poorly educated street thug. He first made a name for himself by stealing cars but quickly graduated to the more lucrative crimes of extortion, kidnapping, and murder, all committed before he became a cocaine trafficker. His trademark was
plata o plomo
—anyone he couldn’t bribe with
plata
(silver), he killed with
plomo
(lead).
The DEA got its first break in going after him and the cartel when it arrested Adler “Barry” Seal, a three-hundred-pound ex–Green Beret and self-proclaimed adventurer, in Miami during a 1982 sting operation code-named Screamer. Clever and brash, in the 1970s Seal had been the youngest pilot ever to captain a 747 airplane, but he had gotten bored and had turned to gunrunning and later dope smuggling, as much for the thrill as for the cash. Now faced with a possible sixty-year prison sentence, Seal offered to help the DEA go after the cartel if the charges filed against him were put
on hold. Overnight, he became the DEA’s most prized informant.
Unaware that Seal had switched sides, the Ochoa family hired him to smuggle three thousand pounds of cocaine into the United States. But he ran into trouble after he flew to a concealed airfield owned by the Ochoas in the Colombian jungle in June 1984 to pick up the first fifteen-hundred-pound installment. So many pounds of cocaine were crammed into his airplane that it couldn’t clear the jungle, and crashed when taking off. Seal was unhurt, and the Ochoas provided him with a second airplane filled with cocaine. This time he got off the ground.
After a quick refueling stop in Managua, Seal was starting the last leg of his flight into the United States when one of the plane’s engines caught on fire and he was forced to return to the Nicaraguan airport. Soldiers from Nicaragua’s Sandinista army were waiting to arrest him. Seal spent three days in jail before he was taken back to his damaged airplane. The Ochoas had sprung him and arranged for the Sandinistas to unload and watch over his cargo. He was instructed to return to the United States in the damaged airplane. Meanwhile, the Ochoas were lining up a third airplane for him, this time a C-132 cargo plane, big and strong enough for him to retrieve the cocaine that he had been forced to stash in Nicaragua.
As soon as the DEA learned from Seal that the Sandinista army was protecting the Ochoas’ cocaine, it contacted the CIA, which in turn notified the White House. President Reagan and CIA director William Casey were trying to whip up support in Congress for the contras, rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Linking the Marxist Sandinistas to the Medellín drug lords would be a major public relations coup.
As promised, the Ochoas arranged for a C-132 cargo airplane to be delivered to Seal, and as soon as he took possession, the CIA hurried in and hid a camera inside it. Seal then returned to Nicaragua and secretly photographed several of the men who loaded the duffel-size bags of cocaine into the airplane’s belly. When he returned to the United States, federal agents confiscated the drugs and developed the film. White House officials were ecstatic when they saw the snapshots. Not only had Seal photographed Sandinista soldiers, he had also caught a top Sandinista government official on film. But the real prize was a picture of Pablo Escobar himself, toting bags of cocaine into the airplane.
Reagan would later successfully use Seal’s photographs to convince Congress to lift a ban that it had imposed on U.S. funding for the contras. The rebels would be sent another $100 million in aid. The Justice Department, meanwhile, issued indictments based on Seal’s undercover work for the arrest of Escobar and the Ochoas. However, they were not arrested.
Although the United States and Colombia had signed an extradition treaty in 1979, no one in the Colombian government wanted to risk handing over the drug lords to the United States. Everyone was afraid because Escobar had unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror. Judges, politicians, and journalists who spoke out in favor of turning him over to the United States were assassinated. No one was safe, no matter how important. Colombia’s justice minister, the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general, was gunned down by Escobar’s assassins. More than thirty other judges were slaughtered. At one point Escobar paid a band of rebels to storm the Palace of Justice in Bogotá and hold the entire Colombian Supreme Court hostage.
The guerrillas, who received a million dollars from Escobar, murdered eleven of the twenty-four justices. After a bloody fight, the Colombian military reclaimed the building and freed the remaining thirteen justices. But by then, Escobar’s campaign had worked. The court declared the 1979 extradition treaty illegal, based on a technicality. At least for the moment, Escobar and the other cartel members were safe as long as they stayed in Colombia.
Escobar now turned his sights on revenge and Barry Seal.
• • •
In 1984, Seal was living with his wife in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was a city with few Latin residents, so Escobar was reluctant to send Colombian assassins after him because they would be conspicuous. Instead, the cartel offered a million dollars to a Miami man named Max Mermelstein to kidnap Seal and bring him to Colombia, or half that figure simply to murder him. Mermelstein ran the cartel’s U.S. distribution operations from a series of pay telephones and dummy offices in Miami. He recruited smugglers, scheduled flights, kept track of inventory, repackaged drugs, and laundered cash.
Mermelstein had been introduced into the cocaine business six years earlier through his wife, a Colombian beauty named Cristina Jaramillo. At the time, he had been working as chief engineer at a Miami country club, a self-described Jewish kid from Brooklyn with no criminal record. One afternoon, Cristina arranged for him to meet Rafael Cardona Salazar, a Colombian with ties to Medellín smugglers. Cristina was pregnant, and Mermelstein’s job didn’t pay much. Cardona offered him some quick and easy money. A member of the country
club where Mermelstein worked was a regular customer, so Cardona gave Mermelstein $1,500 to deliver a kilo of cocaine to him. Soon Mermelstein made two more deliveries. He would later claim that his fate had been sealed a few weeks later, on Christmas day in 1978, while he was riding in a van with Cardona. Both men had been at a party, and Cardona had gotten stoned on drugs. Without warning, he pulled out his handgun and blew out the brains of a third passenger riding with them in the van. “At that point,” Mermelstein recalled, “I knew I was either in with Cardona or I was dead.”
Cardona became a rising star in the Medellín cartel, and Mermelstein moved up with him. Unfamiliar with U.S. culture, the cartel depended on Mermelstein for advice about how best to exploit the booming cocaine trade in the states. Mermelstein would later brag that he was personally responsible for bringing some sixty-six tons of cocaine into the country during the early 1980s and sending $300 million in profits back to Medellín.
While Mermelstein didn’t object to cocaine trafficking, he would later insist that he had no taste for bloodshed. So in December 1984, when he was given the Seal murder contract, he began to stall and look for some way to get out of the assignment. He soon got “lucky.” The DEA, which had been watching him for months, arrested him under the RICO Act for “running a continuing criminal enterprise,” a crime punishable by life in prison.
• • •
Barry Seal had had enough dealings with Escobar and the cartel to know he needed to keep quiet and lie low after his cover was blown. But his daring and ego proved to be even bigger than his waistline. Seal refused
to enter WITSEC, saying he didn’t want to disrupt his family, and then he did something even stupider. The DEA had not been the only law enforcement agency after Seal in 1982, when he was arrested as part of the Screamer sting. Federal and state agents in Louisiana also had been trying to catch him smuggling drugs. After Seal became a DEA informant, he assumed Louisiana investigators would ease off. But he was wrong.
In Baton Rouge, U.S. attorney Stanford Bardwell still considered Seal a menace and continued to search for ways to arrest him. An outraged Seal decided to take his fight public in late 1984 by calling a local television reporter and publicly attacking Bardwell in an hour-long special about drug smuggling and the government’s practice of “targeting” suspects. Bardwell reacted by indicting Seal on a minor drug charge and for some banking irregularities. Their feud put the Justice Department in an awkward position. In Miami, where federal prosecutors were planning to call Seal as their star witness in several big drug cases, Seal was being portrayed as a heroic informant who had reformed. But in Baton Rouge, Bardwell was claiming he was still an unrepentant smuggler. Worried that the Baton Rouge charges might undermine Seal’s reputation when he testified in Miami, the Justice Department ordered a truce.
In order to appease Bardwell, Seal pleaded guilty to the two minor charges filed against him in Louisiana. In return, Bardwell promised that Seal’s sentence would “not exceed” whatever prison time he received in Florida, where the DEA was still holding the 1982 Screamer indictment over him. At first, it looked as if Bardwell had won. He told reporters that he expected Seal to be sentenced to ten years in prison. But when
Seal appeared before a Miami judge, the DEA rushed in to defend him, and based on its recommendation, the judge put Seal on probation without requiring him to spend a single day in jail. It seemed as if Bardwell had been outfoxed, since he had promised to recommend that Seal receive the identical sentence in Baton Rouge as in Miami.
But when a confident Seal appeared in Louisiana for sentencing, Judge Frank Polozola added an unforeseen twist. Although he couldn’t send Seal to jail, the judge said that as part of his probation, he was requiring Seal to report to a halfway house at six o’clock every afternoon for six months. Seal’s lawyers immediately jumped to their feet to object. Their client would be an easy target for the Medellín cartel if assassins knew where he was going to be each night. But Polozola refused to budge. “You take your chances, Mr. Seal,” he said.
Once again Seal was offered protection in WITSEC, and once again he refused. He told reporters, “Life isn’t exciting unless you put yourself into life-threatening situations.” Twenty-nine days later, on February 19, 1986, Seal drove into the parking lot at the Salvation Army halfway house at six o’clock, just as he had been doing religiously every day. But this time, two Colombian assassins were waiting. They rushed up to his white Cadillac and opened fire with Mac-10 machine guns before Seal could open the door. He was killed instantly. The assassins, who were caught within hours of the hit, both admitted that they had been sent by Escobar.