Blow (48 page)

Instead of just
talking
about Carlos Lehder, why not try to catch him? Wasn't that the object here—to actually lay their hands on the guy? It was a day Garcia remembers very well, when the purpose of these little sessions at the Omni switched from gathering intelligence on the cartel to discussing how to launch an actual operation against it. “Levinson said, ‘Well, I don't know.' And I asked George, ‘Okay, but will Carlos Lehder leave Colombia?' And George says, ‘Yeah, he'll leave Colombia, if he has a reason to leave.' So, like what? we're thinking. Women? Money? No, it has to be something real big. ‘Well,' I said, ‘what about if we had a way to offer him Stinger missiles? He's that type of military guy, be into that kind of thing.'

“George's eyes light up. ‘Yeah! But how do we do it?' ‘No problem. For instance, we get you out, and we get you down to Colombia. You make friends with Carlos again, and you tell him you've got a contact for Stinger missiles. This guy has these Stinger missiles. And you meet him out at sea. You call him up to the Bahamas, you'd be on a sailboat, in international waters, with Stinger missiles. And we get Carlos on the boat. Maybe we even have a Stinger he can hold on to, give him a dummy that you can't fire. After we get him on the boat and verify him, the Coast Guard, navy, whatever, a Seal team, come by and we take him. We got him!'”

It took several more sessions for them to figure out how exactly it might work. There was no doubt, once they'd been mentioned, that the Stingers were the proper draw. “You had all these revolutionary groups down there, FARC and M-19, having a constant war and such,” says Garcia. “Stinger missiles would go over pretty big. They had good press from the Afghan war at the time. That's where I really thought of the idea from. It's portable. Carlos would be like the new kid on the block with a better weapon. We knew from sources that Carlos Lehder was in the jungle at the time. Sources we were talking to said he really wanted to battle it out with the government. We had a source who said one time Lehder showed up at a meeting the Ochoas and Escobar were at with crossed
bandoleras
and hand grenades hanging off his belt, yelling and screaming, ‘We ought to kill these people! Go in fighting!' We figure George goes down there saying he's got a guy with a load of Stingers, Carlos would light up and come right out and get them, especially since he's being chased by the Colombian military and their helicopters. They'd figure now they could shoot them down.”

Garcia thought of luring him on to a sailboat rather than a big powerboat, he says, because powerboats got heavy attention from law-enforcement types in the area. Sailboats fitted right in with the tourist traffic. He had in mind a Morgan 45 sloop, which he'd sailed himself when stationed in the Bureau's Puerto Rico office. “You didn't want something that would flag attention to us. The Morgan 45 is a beautiful boat, teak deck, teak finish, nice stereo system. It could hold five or ten missiles. But it's not something out of James Bond. It was less likely to be boarded by the Coast Guard or the DEA.” But wouldn't the DEA be let in on the deal, help the FBI bring off the sting? he was asked. Garcia's expression went a little stony at this suggestion. “The DEA?”

The mechanics would need to be finely tuned. They'd have to decide whether to stage an actual break at an armory, for instance, or just feed a phony story to the press, to convince them down in Colombia that the missiles were on the street. The plan would have to be pushed up through channels, first at FBI headquarters in Washington, and, if approved there, at the Department of Justice. Something this big would need the express approval of Attorney General Edwin Meese. Then they had to devise a way to bolster George's credibility. The Colombians would have to feel good enough about him to take him to Carlos. After all, George had hated Carlos for so long, and here he's just been busted for three hundred kilos. The first thing anyone's going to think is that he's turned into a fink to save his skin, which, of course, he had.

That's when they arrived at the escape. It would happen in Miami, while Garcia and Levinson were transporting George and Danny McGinniss from jail to one of their supposed court hearings. And it must be totally believable, even inside the Bureau. “It would have to be done where myself and Mr. Levinson would be the persons actually called on the carpet for losing a prisoner. In order to make it so believable the agents themselves that we worked with would have to believe that we screwed up. We'd have to go through the whole nine yards, of an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the internal-affairs unit. We'd probably get time on the bricks, time off without pay. Censored, for whatever negligence there was.”

But they didn't want to go overboard. There were limits, after all, to their willingness to become the Bureau's laughing stock. “We were going to try to work it so it wasn't really our fault; it was circumstances that caused it to happen. The way I was thinking, we'd have Dan and George out the way we'd normally been doing, transporting them to the place. We would stage an automobile accident, crack a car up against a pole, not right on Main Street but in a neighborhood somewhere a little out of the way. Crack up the car and stage an unconsciousness, to the extent where George would escape, but not Dan. One of us would be out cold, and the other would be semi-out cold, and he's the one who grabs McGinniss. Dan didn't like that part of the idea too much. But I told him flat out, ‘Dan, you've got a sixty-year sentence. There is no way I'm going to let you go. Forget about that pipe dream.'

“But publicity-wise, it would be in the papers, one guy out cold, everybody injured. The concept of George escaping would be credibility in itself for why he would show up in Colombia. There'd be stories all over the news. Maybe shots fired, we hadn't worked that out yet. But George would be in the right front seat, the driver knocked out, the door pops open, and George, who's handcuffed behind his back, gets out. The guy in the back is cushioned in the crash by the seats, so he grabs McGinniss, but George is going off and we can't catch him. He gets away. Of course he wouldn't really escape. He'd be running into a net of people who'd know it was a staged deal, and would get him away from the area to another place and hide him out and smuggle him back into Colombia. We had to get him out of the area, because whoever wasn't unconscious would grab on to the radio and be calling it in, ‘We've had an accident, we've got a prisoner on the ground, da dah, da dah, da dah.' So you really don't want George running around, because we don't want him caught by the team coming out to investigate.”

The car hits a pole? A staged unconsciousness? A phony break-in at an armory? Stinger missiles? Where'd he get this idea? “I don't know,” he says. “I might have seen it in the movies.”

George contributed a few suggestions of his own during the discussions, touches here and there to move the operation into the realm of high-concept, so it wouldn't look like it was run by a bunch of pikers. “He wanted us to provide him with a nice yacht of his own for him to sail down to Colombia on from his escape, something about a hundred feet long. We'd give him all this money, and he'd have all these women on board, have access to an airplane when he got there, one he could call up when he wanted. He wanted to be set up like some millionaire. Sail down there, have access to villas at places in the Bahamas along the way, pick up Carlos himself in his boat. And his idea was it was going to be a long trip, take him a couple of months to make it down there.” The others looked on in silence as George laid out how it should really happen, if they wanted to do the thing properly. “I remember I didn't say a word. I was just staring at George. And he finally stopped and said, ‘Ah, come on, Richard. What's the matter?'”

In the end, to everyone's dismay if not surprise, the Bureau chickened out. Garcia and Levinson had written up a brief description of their proposal, even came up with a code name, Cap-Tel, for “Capture Cartel”—and fired it on up the chain of command. In its rough outline the idea reached as far as an assistant section chief at headquarters in Washington, who told Garcia he was vetoing it on the grounds that he just couldn't picture the Justice Department signing off on something requiring such audacity. “We knew it would be a hard sell,” says Garcia. “But conservatism was taking place, where the reaction was, ‘Let's not try this right now.' The Bureau was just at the point of coming out with a national drug strategy as far as how to approach investigations. Headquarters was still growing as far as how they're going to be doing things. In Miami, you learn quickly about how far you can go. What's feasible for us in Miami is really off the wall for them in Washington, because they had not been exposed to what we'd been exposed to. With all the debriefing we'd been doing, Levinson and I thought we had a pretty good idea of what would fly and what wouldn't fly. But this was not the sort of institutional knowledge that they had in Washington.”

As it worked out, Garcia never had to inform George that their grand scheme had been nixed. For on February 4, 1987, while he was watching TV in the day room at North Dade, the same set on which he spotted Cliff Guttersrud more than a year and a half before, George caught a news story out of Bogotá, Colombia. The screen showed a bunch of DEA agents on some military installation hustling a short, tousle-haired figure in handcuffs into the body of an Aerocommander turboprop jet, which was warming up to take off for Tampa, Florida. The guy they were loading into the plane, without a single scrap of help from George, was Carlos Lehder.

*   *   *

Most people in a position to know believe that Carlos had made himself into such a loudmouthed nuisance as far as the reigning cartel members were concerned that they were the ones who turned him in. The story given out to the press was that the caretaker of a mountainside chalet in a pine forest outside Medellín had been grousing to a friend about a large party of men who had rented the house, complaining about the loud partying they were doing and the way they were messing up the place in general. The friend passed on the complaint to a local constable, and the constable called a major in the national police named William Lemus, who just happened to be in the Medellín area looking around for Carlos. Major Lemus went up to nose around and hid in the bushes until he saw a man walking the grounds who looked like Lehder. The next morning he returned with a force of men, and after a brief firefight, Lemus himself nabbed Carlos, leveling on him with his pistol. “Little chief, don't shoot me,” Carlos is supposed to have begged. That was on February 4, 1987. By 1:15
A.M
. the following morning, the DEA landed with him at the airport in Tampa.

Whether the tip on where Carlos was hiding arrived via the caretaker, the caretaker's friend, or the constable, there seems little doubt that the ultimate dime on Carlos was dropped by Escobar and the Ochoas. “From my understanding, talking to sources, the cartel members were saying to each other that Lehder was off the wall,” says Garcia. “They were under a lot of pressure. There were these extraditions involved. They'd be in danger of losing a lot of support they might have for sovereignty in Colombia, to get rid of the extradition law, if this guy keeps doing what he's doing. My personal belief is the cartel set up Lehder. The government wants someone to extradite? They want to take a token person? Let them take Carlos. He's a whacko. He should be out of here anyway. And he's gone!”

Gone from Colombia, and now in the possession of the United States government, but the task of convicting Carlos in a court of law still lay ahead. Like George, Agent Garcia had also heard the news about the capture from TV, during a trip he had to make to Boston. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, boy, I bet old Dan and George, their hearts are down in their stomachs right now.' I called George from Boston and asked him what about testifying? I told him, ‘I think you should do it. It's the right thing to do. And all the revenge you felt? You wanted to be in on his capture. Well, he's already captured. Now your best thing to do is to sit right there in the courtroom and look him straight in the eye and tell them what he did.'” George said no, he didn't think he'd do that. He told Garcia that the code he'd followed ever since he first became involved in the marijuana business mandated that you don't give people up. It was one thing to pull off a slick operation like the one they'd been planning, to go down on a boat and nab Carlos himself; it was something else to come slithering into the courtroom and open up on him from the witness chair like a rat, like a
rata.
“He didn't seem ready to change his mind,” says Garcia. “So I said, ‘Fine, George.' And that's the way we left it.”

George did testify in the end. In fact, he opened the proceedings as the leadoff witness, playing one of the two starring roles in the whole trial, along with another convicted smuggler named Ed Ward, who had worked directly for Carlos on Norman Cay. The turnaround in George's attitude had come in the spring of 1987, after a number of things happened to alter his perspective on life in general. One of them was a peek he got inside a heavy-duty federal prison, which convinced him that the existence there promised to be significantly less jovial than what he'd experienced at Danbury. In a bureaucratic mix-up, before his plea bargain had become official, he was sent off to the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, one of six maximum-security institutions on the federal roster, along with ones in Atlanta, Georgia; Leavenworth, Kansas; Lompoc, California; Terre Haute, Indiana; and Marion, Illinois. For some unexplained reason, he was thrown immediately on arrival into an administrative segregation cell, the hole, that is, along with a wiry, hyperactive Mexican-American murderer from Texas with tear-gas burns all over his body from where the guards had had to subdue him whenever he went berserk in his cell. “He's got skulls tattooed all over his arms and chest with knives sticking through the eyes, a huge Virgin Mary on his back,” recalls George. “He's jabbering to himself all the time, washing himself constantly in the toilet bowl. I said to myself, ‘Jesus, you've really done it this time.' Even once I got out of the hole, the atmosphere in that place you could cut it with a knife, nobody smiled or laughed. There weren't a lot of guys you'd want to hang around with. I had my little talk with the caseworker, and he wasn't anything like the guy at Danbury, who tried to help you. It was, ‘What I've got to say to you is, Here, you stay with your own group, you mind your own business, and you keep your back to the wall at all times. Fuck up at Lewisburg, you go to Marion, and that's the last stop on the bus.'”