American Desperado (69 page)

I wasn’t worried about having worked with Barry to fly guns to Nicaragua, either. The one time I flew with him to Nicaragua, I had told him I was uptight. Barry had laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Jon. We’re working for Vice President Bush.”

I didn’t literally believe what Barry said about working for Bush.
^*
But I understood that someone in the government had hired criminals like Barry and me to fly their guns to Nicaragua because they didn’t want the government to get caught doing what was against their own law. The last thing in the world they wanted was for us to get into trouble over flying their guns to the freedom fighters. They wanted to keep that shit out of the news.

The government people had twisted my arm by saying that Ricky Prado had recommended me for the job. They probably had twisted Barry’s arm with that Quaalude bust hanging over his head. Maybe Barry thought he could score brownie points with the government by flying the guns and get out of his trouble with the Quaalude bust.

I was glad when they told me they didn’t need me anymore. Obviously, they did not let go of Barry Seal. They used him to set up the Cartel. It made no sense to me that Barry was able to fly one of our C-123s to Nicaragua and load it with cocaine, with Pablo Escobar personally helping him. Even today, it makes no sense. I never heard of flying cocaine out of Nicaragua. I never heard of Pablo personally loading one of our planes. But it’s a fact Barry got him to do this and took pictures of it.

I couldn’t care less that Barry Seal was still flying around in
a C-123 after we’d ended our arms-smuggling partnership. Barry could do anything he wanted with those planes except set up Pablo Escobar.
^*
For that, Barry would have to be killed.

M
AX WAS
beside himself when the Barry Seal situation came up because it made it more difficult to be around Rafa. He was very angry about Barry Seal setting up Pablo. He took it personally because Pablo was his boss. Plus, Rafa, like other Colombians, had an inflated view of Americans. Rafa never imagined that a trusted gringo would be a rat. What Barry did had lowered Rafa’s opinion of all gringos.

Rafa did more and more things to fuck with Max. I went to Max’s house in Sunny Isles, and Rafa had set up an ice chest in the garage that he filled with wet phone books. He used these to catch bullets he was test-firing from MAC-10s. The whole house was filled with smoke. We’re on a suburban street, and Rafa’s in the garage shooting machine guns. Even with silencers, they make an awful racket. I go in, and Rafa’s smoking a bazooka and lecturing Max while ripping rounds from the guns. “It’s your job, Max”
—brrrp!
“You’re the boss”
—brrrp!
“You got to take care of the traitor”—
brrrp!

Max ran to me with a shoebox filled with $250,000 and asked me to hire a hit man. Of course, it’s never that easy.

By late 1984 Barry Seal was like a celebrity. He was facing trial in Baton Rouge for his Quaalude bust, but he was testifying to Congress about the Cartel and on the news every night. Professional hitters didn’t want to kill a guy testifying to Congress. The truth is, most professionals like to go after low-hanging fruit, like some bookie or accountant no one’s ever heard of.

I sent a couple different shooters to Baton Rouge to look for Seal. He was out on bond, but they claimed they couldn’t find him. Max kept crying to me that we had to find him. I said, “I’ll go to Baton Rouge myself and find out where he is.”

“I’m coming with you,” Max said.

“What are you going to do, stand over my shoulder and tell me to adjust my aim because the breeze is blowing five degrees to the west?”

“You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”

“Of course not, you fat piece of shit. I’m not taking no gun.”

“Then I’m coming.”

I
HATED
traveling with Max. Soon as we hit the Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge, he wanted to get a whore.

“Baton Rouge hookers, Max? I’ll take you to the dog pound. Anything you fuck there will be better than the escort they’ll send from the Baton Rouge Yellow Pages, trust me.”

I made Max drive around with me for two days, so he could do some work for once. I didn’t know where Barry was staying, if he had U.S. marshals with him, or what. I went to restaurants he and I had been to, gas stations, a propeller shop. Not a hair of the man did we see. All I got was the smoke of 20 million cigarettes smoked by Max in our rental car.

Every time we crossed the town, I’d swing past the Airport Road Waffle House. Barry loved that greasy southern fast food. On the third day I see him walk out of the Waffle House and get into his Eldorado. The only secretive thing about him is that he’d replaced his convertible with a coupe. I jam the gas and drive after him. I
don’t see any protection on him. I get excited. “Boy, I wish we had a gun.”

“Are you crazy?” Max says.

“Just think of him as a beefalo.”

I let Barry drive way ahead. I don’t have a Ricky Prado disguise kit on me, and I don’t want him to see me. Barry had good eyes. I knew that from flying with him.

He makes a quick turn on a side street. I speed up to catch him.

“What are you doing?”

“Maybe we can do something here, Max.”

“But he’s under federal protection.”

“So was Kennedy, you asshole.”

I’m not the greatest follower, but we pick up Barry’s car again. We’re on a street of metal shops where they sell parts for planes. Barry is slowing down. He’s a block ahead. There’s no moving traffic, just workers’ cars parked by the little factories. I floor it.

Max starts to whimper.

I’ve decided to run into Barry. I’m thinking:
We’ll smash his car. I’ll jump out and kill him with my hands, and then we get away before an ambulance comes
.

“What are we doing?”

“Shut up. We’re running him over.”

Max screams “No!” like he’s being thrown off a cliff.

He locks his hand on my wheel. I punch him in the face. He can’t fight, but Max is a fat pig, and he has all 280 of his pounds hanging on the wheel, and he isn’t letting go.

Max won. I slowed down, and Barry turned into the shop. We drove past and that was that. Barry got to live another day.

*
Following his 1983 arrest, Seal’s name was published in local Florida papers, but they printed his legal name, “Adler Berriman Seal,” which neither Jon nor his Colombian cohorts recognized at the time, since they knew him as “Barry,” or by another alias, “Mackenzie.” Criminal aliases used to confuse police may also confuse criminals. Had the Cartel known Seal was arrested in 1983, they would have killed him then.

*
As Jon said on the previous page, in 1984 Barry Seal flew a C-123 to Nicaragua. Instead of delivering guns to the Contras as he had been doing, he landed at a government airfield. The CIA, working with the DEA, had equipped Seal’s plane with concealed cameras. As the cameras snapped photos, Pablo Escobar and members of the Nicaraguan government loaded the plane with cocaine. Seal had set them up on behalf of the U.S. government. He delivered the plane and the photos to Homestead Air Force Base. Two stories were published about Seal’s CIA-backed sting operation of July 1984, in
The Wall Street Journal
and in
The Washington Times
. It was picked up on television news outlets, and on March 16, 1986, President Reagan displayed the photographs taken by the C-123 cameras during an Oval Office speech in which he exposed the Nicaraguan government’s role in cocaine smuggling.

*
Perhaps Jon should have taken him literally. Richard Ben-Veniste, esteemed Washington attorney who was President Clinton’s chief counsel during the Senate Whitewater hearings and later served on the 9/11 Commission, also represented Barry Seal after his 1983 Quaalude bust. Ben-Veniste claims he introduced Seal to Vice President Bush after Seal’s 1983 Quaalude arrest, believing the smuggler could be a useful asset. Speaking of Seal in a 2004 interview with
The Wall Street Journal
, Ben-Veniste said, “I did my part by launching him into the arms of Vice President Bush, who embraced him as an undercover operative.”

*
There is no dispute that Barry Seal set up Pablo Escobar, and that he did so in a sting operation probably run jointly by the CIA and DEA. The sting not only satisfied the U.S. government’s objective of discrediting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, it also nailed Escobar, a top enemy in the nation’s “War on Drugs.” As a clandestine operation, it was a stunning success. Jon’s assertion that Seal also flew weapons for the CIA Contra program has been widely speculated about since the 1980s. Adding fuel to this speculation is the fact that on October 5, 1986, a C-123, like that flown by Seal to set up Escobar—possibly the same plane—was shot down while delivering arms to the Contras. That Seal seems to have played a critical role in several major U.S. intelligence operations being run at the same time is astounding. But the most baffling part of Seal’s story is simply that after serving as an instrument of American clandestine policies, the case against him for Quaalude smuggling pressed ahead, with the result that Seal was ordered to live in a Baton Rouge halfway house for drug addicts, with scant police or federal protection. As Seal put it, he felt the government had made him a “clay pigeon”—a marked target.

71

J
.
R
.:
You know the comic book with the four superheroes? The chick who could make herself invisible, the guy who could skate on ice across the sky, the old guy whose arms could reach to the moon, and the kid who could burn shit with his eyes? Max was like the opposite of all them combined. His superhero power was to sit at home on his fat ass, stick his face into boxes of money, and fuck everything up.

One day in 1985 Max called me from his Jaguar. He always thought he was being followed, but this day he sounded more scared than usual. “Jon, there’s a car coming after me. There’s a roadblock. They’re getting me.”
^*

That’s how I heard they arrested Max. The moron called me on my phone to tell me. The phone was not in
my name, but please—don’t give the cops more little clues to help them investigate me.

Why did they arrest Max? It wasn’t because they caught a single plane, boat, or car that Mickey or I had moved. It wasn’t because any of the hundred guys who worked for Mickey or me had been caught doing something. Nobody found a stash house with $100 million in it or a money plane flying to Panama. It was nothing we did. Mickey and I had a perfect record. So did Roger.

Not even Barry Seal, testifying to Congress, ratted Max or me out.

Max got arrested because he was an idiot, and that is a statement of fact.

W
HEN
I first met Max in the happy times when he was sending me swing sets and beefalo meat, he came to me once and asked if I wanted to get into the exotic-car business. I’d just sold off a car lot I ran with Ron Tobachnik, but Max told me he had a line on a new kind of car. They were going to call them DeLoreans.
^*

Max wanted to go into business selling DeLoreans. When he asked me, I said, “That car’s a piece of shit. It’s got a slow engine.

Who needs it?”

I never thought of DeLorean cars again until after Max’s arrest in 1985. That was when I found out DeLorean was the reason Max got arrested.

John DeLorean was the businessman who got caught in 1982 trying to move coke to raise money for his car factory.
^†
It turned out that the guy who sold DeLorean his coke had bought it from Max. Every time Max went out on his own to do a business deal, it always blew up in his face. The DeLorean deal was no different. After DeLorean got arrested, Max’s guy ratted on him.

They indicted Max in 1981. It was a sealed indictment. That’s an indictment that they keep secret until right before they arrest you.
^*
But there’s no way Max couldn’t have known something might be up. The DeLorean case was all over the news.
^†
Max must have known his guy had been arrested.

All of this explained why Max was so terrified all the time—beyond just being a normal pussy. That mystery was solved.

Every person in an illegal business encounters problems. I was wrong to say my cocaine-trafficking record was completely perfect. One time Toni’s brother, Lee, got arrested outside the airport in Chicago with forty kilos he was moving for me. But I took care of it. I called my friend in Chicago, Judge Rosenberg, and found out which lawyer to hire. I found out who to pay off. I made the charges go away. Lee never went back to Chicago. We never shipped cocaine there the same way again. That’s how you deal with problems.

When you’re a professional criminal, being indicted for one thing or another is not the end of the world. Look at Meyer Lansky. The guy had federal indictments on him for decades. He fought the government in the courts. He was very careful how he did his business, and he died a free man, running his empire to his last breath.

What Max did, though, made no sense. After DeLorean got in the news, Max never hired a lawyer. He never put out feelers to the prosecutors or to his partners who were on trial. He did nothing.
He rode around in his cowboy suit on his farm in Davie and played make-believe
El Jefe
.

But that’s why if you tapped him on his shoulder, he’d nearly shit his pants every time. He feared he was a marked man.

W
HEN THEY
arrested Max, they didn’t know who he was. They arrested him on a four-and-a-half-year-old indictment from the DeLorean case. When they went to Max’s house, they were fishing. Unfortunately, Max gave them something. They found a bag with $250,000 in unlaundered drug cash in his bedroom. A bag of unreported cash, even if the cops have nothing else on you, is almost an automatic money-laundering charge.