American Desperado (70 page)

F
ORMER MIAMI-DADE POLICE DETECTIVE MIKE FISTEN
:
That arrest was almost a fluke. The 1982 indictment of Max Mermelstein in the DeLorean case sat in a filing cabinet for years in a federal office in California. I served on a federal task force in Miami, and we asked the DEA every month to send us relevant information about traffickers in our area. The DeLorean arrest was a major trafficking case, but nobody sent us the Mermelstein indictment from that case until approximately five months before it expired. The squad that arrested Mermelstein had to act with haste. They didn’t have the time to properly develop an investigation. He probably would have walked except for the bag of cash they found in his house.

J
.
R
.:
My lawyers believed the original indictment against Max was going to be tossed, even after they found the money in his house. A year before they arrested Max, a judge threw out the case against DeLorean. That case was old news.

What we thought was, Max might get two years on a money-laundering charge from the cash they found in his house. Just as likely, if he kept his mouth shut, he could bond out and fight the laundering charges for years. That’s how any normal criminal deals
with a nothing arrest. They had DeLorean on tape buying kilos of cocaine, and he walked. That’s how it’s done.

Everybody had confidence in Max. As much as I say he’s a moron, he was a smart guy. He’d survived in that psycho Colombian family for years. He of all people would know that if he crossed the Cartel, they’d slaughter him. Being related to Pablo by marriage wouldn’t save him. It would make them despise him more for his personal betrayal.

Mickey and I were confident of another thing. Max didn’t know the details of the smuggling we did. He didn’t know where the farm was where we kept the planes. He didn’t know the guys driving my cars, or where the stash houses were. We made it easy for him to be ignorant if he was ever questioned by a cop.

To be safe, Mickey and I shut down everything after Max’s arrest. We turned the lights off and went dark. Neither of us was worried.

Max couldn’t be so stupid as to talk.

*
Max was arrested on August 27, 1985, while in his Jaguar, speaking on the phone with Jon.

*
The cars best known from the
Back to the Future
films.

*
Max was charged with cocaine trafficking in a sealed indictment in 1981 in California, with three men who were involved with supplying cocaine to DeLorean. It is unclear from the record whether Max supplied the cocaine involved in the DeLorean matter, or whether his co-defendants later cooperated in the sting operation aimed at DeLorean. Either way, Max was unaware of the indictment, and the federal law-enforcement agencies who brought the indictment failed to prosecute or investigate Max for nearly five years.

†
John DeLorean was a former GM executive who founded DeLorean Motors. He was arrested in 1982 in a sting in which he was videotaped doing a coke deal to raise cash for his car company after Wall Street financing had dried up. DeLorean was charged with narcotics trafficking but was found not guilty after his defense argued he’d been entrapped by the FBI.

†
DeLorean was spoofed on
Saturday Night Live
regularly after his arrest in 1982. He then became a featured character in Garry Trudeau’s
Doonesbury
comic. In 1983
Hustler
magazine publisher Larry Flynt leaked FBI tapes to the media of DeLorean’s arrest, resulting in Flynt’s trial for theft regarding the government’s DeLorean tapes, which became its own media event when Flynt showed up in court dressed only in a diaper made of the American flag.

72

J
.
R
.:
After Max’s arrest I had unfinished business with Barry Seal. Fabito slipped into Miami to emphasize how important it was to kill him. Whatever damage Barry had done to the Cartel was done. He’d spoken. At this point, getting rid of him was symbolic. Any successful group of criminals has to kill guys like Seal on principle—just to show what happens to a rat.

The Cartel wasn’t the only group that wanted Barry Seal dead. The U.S. government gave him a death sentence, too. Look how they treated this guy. They bust him for flying in some Quaaludes, and so he can work off his charges, they get him and me flying guns to freedom fighters. Then they send him to Nicaragua in a plane with hidden cameras to take pictures of Pablo Escobar loading cocaine. Pablo’s supposed to be the most dangerous man in the world, and they parade Barry Seal on the news as the guy who ratted him out? A normal guy who sets up a top criminal gets witness protection.
What do they give Barry? A federal judge in his Quaalude case orders Barry to move into a Salvation Army halfway house a couple miles from the airport where he used to meet the guys who are now coming to kill him. The government did everything but put a bull’s-eye on Barry’s back.

Barry was a freewheeling guy. He didn’t worry about personal protection. But even with a guy who doesn’t want security, if he’s an important witness, the government will order him into protective custody. Not Barry. The government practically put the gun in our hands.

I knew why we wanted him dead. I don’t know why they wanted him dead. Was it for smuggling guns to Nicaragua? They never came after me for that. I don’t know what Barry did to piss them off, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he went on TV and talked about flying our C-123s for the CIA.
^*

When Rafa brought hit men from Colombia to kill him, I told him they could find Barry driving his Eldorado on Airport Road between the Waffle House and the Salvation Army. They were nearly across the street from each other. I had Rafa draw them a map.

M
ICKEY
:
I met the Colombians whom Rafa had brought to kill Barry Seal. They were about as bright as Huey, Dewey, and Louie or the Three Stooges. They weren’t hit men. They were gofers with guns.

J
.
R
.:
Rafa gave these wild Indians a pair of MAC-10s that he’d test-fired in Max’s garage,
^†
and they flew commercial to Baton
Rouge. They checked the guns through. They took the map we gave them and followed Barry from the Waffle House to the Salvation Army. They shot him in his Eldorado.
^*
The Colombians were arrested within hours. They all got convicted for life. They never talked. They were good Colombian rednecks.

People say that a search of the briefcase Barry Seal was holding turned up a piece of paper with Vice President Bush’s direct phone number written on it.
^†
A lot of good that did Barry.

*
In 1985 Peabody-award-winning journalist John Camp filmed Seal in an interview he gave aboard a C-123. Seal disclosed details of his role in the CIA sting against the government of Nicaragua, and the interview aired on WBRZ in Baton Rouge in 1985.

*
Seal was shot to death on February 19, 1986.

†
Ballistic tests matched the guns used to kill Seal with shell fragments found in Mermelstein’s garage.

†
The story of Bush’s phone number being on Seal when he died was widely reported but has never been verified.

73

J
.
R
.:
Everything quieted down after Barry Seal was killed, and eventually Mickey and I both got restless. We wanted to get back into smuggling. I flew down to Colombia and met with a new group of Colombians. Despite the war on the Cartel, they still had their factories going. These other guys were helping the Cartel move its coke.
^*
So I got into business with them.

M
ICKEY
:
I never thought about quitting. I still wanted to run the ideal mission. I wanted to use some small islands that are in Biscayne Bay, so close to Miami that nobody believed anyone could smuggle on them. My
fantasy was to drop coke in the water behind the islands and race out from the beach in my stealth boat to get it. I wanted to say I did it. But I never got the chance.

J
.
R
.:
We did a dozen smuggling flights after Max got arrested. One night in 1986 I was working in the radio room at Ultimate Boats when Delmer came in and offered to take over. Mickey was at the farm that night, where we had a pilot bringing in a load from Colombia. The plane wasn’t due for another few hours, so I left.

But I didn’t feel like going home to Toni in Delray. I decided to go back to the radio room. I wanted be there when the plane came in and we stuck our thumbs in the government’s eye one more time.

At four
A.M
. I started to get excited. The plane was coming. Then there was an explosion. The building shook. A bunch of cops in their stupid Darth Vader suits drove an armored truck through the doors of our shop. They charged up the staircase with their guns out.

You should take it calmly when they come for you. I saw my dad do that when the government men came to our house and deported him out of our living room.

They handcuffed me on the ground. All these cops had radios on their belts. I could hear other cops talking on the radios about raids they were doing all over.
^*
I heard them say they were moving on our farm. I’m wondering how they’d found our farm.

Then, over their radios, I hear all hell break loose. Cops are screaming about a helicopter crashing, fires, a shoot-out. The cops arresting us look a little freaked out. They pick up their radios and ask cops on the other end what’s going on.

We hear cops yelling, “He’s getting away. He’s escaped. We lost him.”

I don’t know what the hell is going on. But I realize they are talking about Mickey. He got away.

I’m sitting there chained on the floor, and that makes me laugh my ass off.
^*

*
By this time, Jorge Ochoa had been arrested in Spain. He was extradited to Colombia, where the government subsequently released him. But the Medellín Cartel was in disarray. Jorge would be rearrested in 1991 and would serve just five years in prison. Pablo Escobar was gunned down in a joint Colombian-U.S. military raid on his hideout in 1993.

*
More than 250 local and federal law-enforcement personnel were involved in coordinated raids on facilities used by Jon and Mickey. They hit a total of 17 locations and seized 12 airplanes, 21 cars and trucks, and 28 boats used in their smuggling operations.

*
Jon was arrested on September 21, 1986, in the radio room of Ultimate Boats. Keeping with his habit of not identifying himself by name when he was working, other men arrested in the boat shop claimed not to know who he was. Jon initially refused to provide his name to arresting officers. In initial reports he was simply identified as “an individual with a beard and pelicans on his T-shirt.”

74

MAY 2009—MIAMI

E
.
W
.:
A warm, blue-sky day. Jon pulls into a line of mostly Range Rovers jamming a narrow road outside an exclusive private school in Miami. The parents create a minor traffic jam every afternoon as they arrive to pick up their children. Jon drives Noemi’s Cadillac SUV because it has enough space for Julian’s hockey gear. The boy has practice every afternoon. Sometimes Jon drives other boys on the team. “I’m a hockey dad,” Jon says.

“Julian can’t stay late. He has extra math homework,” Noemi says from the passenger seat.

Jon curses the Range Rover ahead. “Wait all day, you stupid moron.”

“Take a breath, Jon.”

Noemi tries to calm Jon with tips learned in a parenting class they recently took. Jon prevailed against a suit his previous wife had filed to alter their custody arrangement with Julian, but he, Noemi, and his previous wife were ordered to attend parenting classes. Since finishing
the class, Jon has complained that one of the evaluators described him as “domineering and aggressive.” Or as Jon puts it, “Can you believe I had to pay that cocksucker to tell me I’m a bully?”

“Jon, you are a bully sometimes,” Noemi says.

“I am?” Jon seems surprised. Then, without warning, he jabs the accelerator, turns sharply, and speeds past the line of cars, driving on the grass to grab a parking spot that has opened up. Jon says, “You said Julian’s got extra math homework. We can’t wait in the line all day with those jerks.”

As Jon and Noemi get out, I’m curious to see how they will blend in with the other parents. Jon has recently been hanging out with his friend Akon and the rapper Lil Wayne, and he wears baggy shorts, a cap, and gold chains that show the hip-hop influence. Noemi recently shaved her head into a Mohawk and is wearing a plunging tank top with tiny red shorts that seem painted on.