Blow (43 page)

What seizures they did manage to make were weighted heavily toward the marijuana end of the business, the blizzard of incoming cocaine being nearly invisible as far as the police were concerned. Up until March of 1985, the biggest cocaine seizure by the Fort Lauderdale Police Department was a four-kilo bust back in 1983, and that occasioned a big party in the squad room. Yet that bust came a full six years after Barry Kane alone smuggled over half a ton of cocaine into the city, when the business was still in its infancy, smugglers not yet getting up to speed.

That was the situation in the spring of 1985, when two detectives for the Fort Lauderdale police department had the good fortune to stumble into a mother lode of a cocaine deal. The case would prove remarkable in many respects, but the first thing that struck everybody involved was how such an important tip could come in off the street from such a small-time hood. Billy Fitzgerald, forty-one, was a scraggly alcoholic, one rung above wino status, who hung out at redneck dives in the featureless and desolate farming country west of Fort Lauderdale. As a low-level dope pusher, he dealt just enough coke or marijuana to pay for his own needs, and earned a little extra as a snitch, selling information to the police. “We took him out to dinner, he's got spaghetti all over his face, picking up food with his hands, it was hard to watch while you were eating,” says Tom Tiderington, who worked at the time as an undercover narcotics detective for the department's Organized Crime Division. He and his partner, Greg Kridos, had been together for about two years, doing mostly buy-and-bust stings, a kilo here, a kilo there. “One of the officers who knew this guy said he had something interesting to tell us. We didn't expect much, but we figured, what the hell. Then suddenly he's going on about how he can introduce us to members of the Medellín cartel!” Billy told Tom and Greg that there was this old farmer who lived out toward the Everglades, bred and raised horses on a small spread. “He told us this old man had an important connection down in Colombia and was looking for someone to bring in a big load of cocaine. We're thinking, ‘In his seventies? Doing a cocaine run?'”

Billy said he'd gotten the information from another man named McWilliams, who was working on the deal directly with the farmer, looking to find someone who could help them out. Billy said if they wanted him to, he could set up a meeting with this guy. Tom and Greg told him okay. The story they wanted him to tell McWilliams was that he knew a couple of guys this farmer might be interested in meeting. Tell him these two guys are in the transportation business. Tell him they have access to boats and airplanes, and, from what you've heard about their operation, they've got the knowledge and the wherewithal to handle heavy loads.

This was the last time Tom and Greg saw Billy alive. A couple of months later they heard he'd stolen some drugs from a group of black cocaine dealers in the northwest part of Fort Lauderdale, an ill-advised move they assumed had some connection with the fact that shortly afterward a couple of police officers investigating a nasty smell in the neighborhood found that it came from Billy having been shot to death and stuffed into the trunk of a car. But although his story about the farmer had sounded a little implausible, even the vague prospect of pulling off a victory on the cocaine front provided incentive enough to follow up any lead they had.

Several days after talking to Billy, Tom and Greg met with the go-between, McWilliams, at a cowboy bar out in Davie. McWilliams drove semis for a living, and he repeated Billy's story that this farmer was looking for transportation, adding that the amount he wanted flown in was five hundred kilos, a startling quantity considering the stir their little four-kilo bust had caused. The next day McWilliams introduced them to the principal himself, at another redneck bar out toward the Everglades. The man's name was Leon Harbuck. Checking afterward on the registration for the long-bed pick-up he'd driven to the bar, they found out that Harbuck was sixty-one years old, not seventy, and he had a police record, but not for drugs. Besides a speeding ticket the previous year, he'd been arrested back in 1981 for “reckless display of a weapon,” that is, waving a shotgun at somebody in a menacing fashion, and had been given six months on probation.

“He didn't feel comfortable with us right away,” says Greg Kridos, a former state trooper in New Hampshire who joined the Fort Lauderdale force in 1980 after growing weary of doing nothing but writing speeding tickets. “They wanted to know a lot about what we had as an operation. We were pretty vague at first. You never want to be too specific about what you have because you don't really have all those resources at the time that you're purporting to have them. Being too specific can mess you up in the end if you have to change plans or can't come up with something. So we told them just generally that we'd been doing this awhile, we had a good safe house, good transportation, solid planes that could go to Colombia and pick up what you needed. Our pilots were excellent, they'd flown down there before.”

Harbuck took it all in. He told them he was thinking about something like an airdrop, rather than actually landing a plane. He had a trailer he was living in in the middle of a horse pasture out in Sunrise, two miles north of Lauderdale and twelve to fourteen miles west. Right nearby was a cornfield. His idea was to have a plane fly in low, make two or three passes close off the ground, and kick the duffel bags out the cargo door so they fell into a field of six-foot-high cornstalks. He'd have four or five guys go through the field like a human chain, pick up the bags and hide them in the neighboring woods, then exit the area in a couple of pick-ups, riding empty. That way, if they were stopped on the way out by any police who might have been alerted by the low-flying aircraft, they'd be free and clear, and could go back later and get the dope. Harbuck told them he'd done a dry run on the idea, sending some guys into the woods with bales of hay, and he thought the whole operation would take only a few minutes.

By the time they left the bar, having told Harbuck they needed to check on a few things and would get back to him on the details, Tom and Greg knew they'd need a good deal of help. Not for the human-relations part; after working together for two years now, they were confident enough of handling that end pretty smoothly. A graduate of Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Greg played the low-key partner, never getting very excited, handling matter-of-factly all the numerous problems that arose in any drug deal. His olive complexion also gave him a distinct advantage. Although derived from Greek ancestors, it created the impression in people's minds that he had roots somewhere south of the border, an assumption he gladly let stand. Tom Tiderington came from up in Michigan, and looked it—fresh-faced with clean features, his expression frozen in a state of eagerness. Perhaps because he appeared less like a smuggler than Kridos did, he played the more aggressive half of the team, the one more prone to push people, quick to get irritated if things didn't go right. The object was to distract people with his hard-nosed personality so they'd forget he didn't look right for the part. His cover story was that his father was a wealthy businessman from Detroit, and when not smuggling cocaine, Tom worked as a charter fishing-boat captain.

It was the resource end of the thing that posed the problem. The Fort Lauderdale Police Department had a few accoutrements—flashy cars such as Mercedes Benzes and BMW's that had been confiscated in drug busts. They'd also acquired a couple of marine vessels, a fifty-eight-foot Hatteras sportfisherman and a sixty-three-foot trawler, which could double as drug runners. But as for the flying part—the planes and the pilots, being able to demonstrate the kind of know-how expected of veteran cocaine transporters—they possessed nothing in this area whatsoever. “This was the first importation case we'd worked on at that level, so our expertise only went to a certain point,” Greg recalls. “We didn't know what type of plane we'd need, for instance. He was talking of flying in at a low altitude to air-drop the cocaine. Well, you can't drop it too high or it'll burst all over. You have to fly in maybe at 150 feet. You needed a particular plane that, first, would fly low enough to do that, and, second, that you could get the coke out of easily, with the right kind of cargo doors. They were talking five hundred kilos here.”

This was why, right after the first meeting with Harbuck, they put in a call to the local office of the DEA, to Mike McManus, to tell him what they seemed to have glommed onto. McManus, a short, compact Audie Murphy lookalike, a graduate of Florida State University, had grown up in the nearby town of Plantation and had worked undercover for that police department before joining the DEA. He got so good at posing as a drug dealer that more than once he sat in a bar in Plantation buying tabs of LSD and ounces of grass from dealers who felt compelled to warn him that “there's an undercover cop around here named Mike that you've really got to watch out for.” The father of three girls, McManus took a fifteen-thousand-dollar pay cut to join the DEA and harbors something of a messianic attitude toward the job of catching smugglers. “I realized after getting in that I'm not going to change the world,” he says. “I'm a firm believer in education, and until you make it not a socially acceptable thing to do, you're not going to solve the drug problem. But I do believe that I can make a difference. The role of the DEA is to locate, identify, successfully penetrate, and arrest, and, I would add,
destroy
the major smuggling networks. If I just take a load, I can hurt them, but if I take down the whole organization, I've destroyed them.” So there's that, he says, but he also went into undercover work “because I love the excitement. I can't stand sitting behind a desk. I look at it as a game. I've got a set of rules, and the bad guys have no rules. But I beat them at their own game and in their own ballpark. They don't play by the rules, and I do, and I still beat them.”

The three of them, Mike, Tom, and Greg, had worked together before, on much smaller cases. If Harbuck wasn't living in Fantasy Land here, they were staring at an unprecedented opportunity, ideal for the tactic McManus terms the “controlled delivery”—posing as smugglers, Tom and Greg would organize the airlift, and the dope would be flown in on their own airplane and by their own contract pilot. Once it landed back in Fort Lauderdale, it would be trucked by Tom and Greg to a safe house that would be guarded by police officers hiding in the bushes. Doing it this way, they would not only confiscate the dope and arrest people involved in its delivery, but they'd score an intelligence coup as well. By negotiating with the people who owned the cocaine back in Colombia, they'd see to some extent how that end of the operation worked. By flying to the landing strip outside Medellín, they'd get information on the actual operations of the cartel. And by holding the dope in the States and dealing with the Colombians in Miami for its delivery, they'd have a chance to penetrate that part of the network as well. “If you do it right, with a controlled delivery you can identify who's in the organization that owns the stuff and the organization that distributes the stuff back in the States, because you've got something both groups want and you're negotiating on both ends of the deal.” As a DEA agent, McManus had access to a lot of resources, most important of which were airplanes and pilots. Many of the latter were former drug pilots who either were doing penance for a bust or had done their prison time and were now earning a living working on stings. McManus told them he had a line on a special pilot who'd done work for the DEA on other deals just like this. The pilot's name was Cliff Guttersrud.

For the next meeting, Tom and Greg told Harbuck to meet them on the
Land's End,
the department's trawler anchored in the New River near Port Everglades, which Tom now passed off as one of the boats he chartered out on as a fishing captain. The whole place was wired for sound and video, so McManus could get a good view of things in absentia. The news they had to tell Harbuck was that the plane they'd be using was a twin-engine Beechcraft Queen Air, which had plenty of range to make it to Colombia, as well as cargo doors so they could easily jettison the bags into his cornfield. The pilot who'd be bringing in the load was named Cliff. He'd made the trip to Colombia several times before and would be flying the plane in shortly from the West Coast so Harbuck could meet him and inspect the aircraft. For his part, Harbuck also had a little news for them. He could now divulge that he wasn't really the one in charge here. His task had been simply to find someone who could do the transportation. The man running the show was an American and was coming to Fort Lauderdale in two days, and he'd like to meet them, and he also wanted to meet the pilot. They asked where the meeting was going to be held. Harbuck said he couldn't tell them. He'd take them there at the appointed time.

That was Monday. At about seven-thirty Wednesday night Harbuck came by to collect Tom, Greg, and Cliff. With him was another man named Steve, his son-in-law. “It was something you'd expect to see on TV,” says Greg. “He was very secretive, he wouldn't tell us where we were going. He took us two miles north to a Days Inn off Route 84 at I-95 and brought us up to this guy's room. It was dark in there, and the guy we were supposed to meet was standing at the extreme end of the room. He had the TV on, and he stood behind it with closed curtains at his back. The TV illuminated us, but we couldn't really see him.” As recorded in one of the “dailies,” the detailed accounts of their activities the two detectives wrote up at the end of each shift, the stranger introduced himself as George, and during the meeting he asked most of the questions and did most of the talking.

After these detectives were let into the room by Leon Harbuck and they were introduced to the subject identified as George, he asked who the pilot was. After stating that the subject with these detectives was the pilot, George began to ask these detectives and the pilot questions. The subject then told these detectives that he had married into a Colombian family, that his wife is Colombian.… George further stated that the Colombian who was the connection for the cocaine, and whose family George was now a part of, was presently in Colombia getting the coordinates for the landing strip. George stated that he had sent his nephew who is Colombian down with maps showing the flight pattern from South Florida to Colombia and that he was coming back with the coordinates.… George asked these detectives and the pilot, “If everything goes smooth the first time, are you willing to make several trips?” George stated he was out of circulation for a while but now he was back in it.