How to Get Away With Murder in America (10 page)

After Fisten and Hinman interviewed Jon Roberts, they made a request to the CIA to reinterview Ricky about the Schwartz murder. The CIA, Hinman says, informed them that he was “unavailable.” Fisten says, “We believed they kept him out of the country because they were afraid we would arrest him.” (Fisten also points out that had the CIA provided evidence, such as Ricky’s major case prints, it may well have cleared him from crimes in which he was a suspect.)

Fisten’s drive to build a new case, targeting the same suspects from the failed Teriaca murder case, struck some as dangerously quixotic. “When they called him Detective Fiction, they were right,” says McGruff. “His work was honest, but he oversold what was possible.”

After the Teriaca prosecution was dropped, the tide shifted against the OCS. In 1993, President Clinton chose Janet Reno as U.S. attorney general. Although Reno didn’t take her most loyal acolyte, Abe Leaser, with her to Washington, his relationship with her increased his sway within the Dade County state attorney’s office. Leaser says that before her departure, “I spoke to Ms. Reno, and we worked out something with the chief of the MDPD that this guy [Fisten] would be taken out of investigative work.” Leaser also wrote a memo to the Los Angeles prosecutors who were building a case against Albert for the Mirabal murder, and warned them of his concerns about evidence the OCS had gathered. The prosecutors backed off the case, as did prosecutors in Colorado working on the Steven Grabow murder. The OCS was disbanded. Fisten was investigated by internal affairs, and Albert filed a lawsuit charging Fisten and Diane Fernandez, the federal prosecutor who had grilled him in front of the grand jury, with violating his civil rights.

The internal affairs investigation of Fisten failed to yield the results Leaser had apparently hoped for. After going through some 3,500 arrests he’d made since joining the force, Internal Affairs found he had committed a single infraction a decade earlier: losing a photograph from a case file he’d signed out before testifying in a trial. Albert’s lawsuit was tossed; his lawyer, Fred Schwartz, was subsequently disbarred for financial improprieties unrelated to the case.

Fisten was now assigned to the MDPD Organized Crime Bureau, where he celebrated his exoneration by opening a new RICO case. Acting on information that Erra, from a federal prison near Detroit, was using accomplices to operate an illegal sports-betting line, he sought a warrant for a wiretap. Federal prosecutors and the FBI helped write the warrant, but there was a problem: Preliminary evidence suggested that some calls into the alleged gambling line originated from the private residence of Bob Graham, who by then had become a U.S. senator. Although Fisten had been federalized for the RICO case, it was run jointly with the MDPD’s Organized Crime Bureau. According to Fisten, he warned superiors at the MDPD of a possible link to the governor’s home that might emerge in the wiretap. Within twenty-four hours the department had dissolved the entire Organized Crime Bureau, scuttling the new RICO case. Fisten was ordered to stay at his desk and commanded in writing: “You are directed not to contact anyone either verbally or via any other form of communication regarding the case.”

All of the detectives were transferred from the now defunct Organized Crime Bureau, and Fisten was stripped of his detective rank. Because he had committed no infraction, the department employed a time-honored bureaucratic method for removing difficult but honest cops: Fisten was promoted to sergeant and assigned to a uniform patrol unit in Liberty City. His former OCS partner Mel Velez, although he had no role in the aborted gambling case, was also drummed out of detective work. A few days later, Velez killed himself. “Mel just didn’t want to fail,” Fisten says.

Some OCS members who saw their careers sidelined blamed Fisten for pushing too hard in too many directions. But Morciego, who was shunted into a cargo inspection unit, says, “When you finish your police academy, you want to solve every crime. You find bad guys doing bad things to society. Every time you reach for them, your department throws obstacles. Fisten always took the obstacles and threw them back. To me, that was a good cop.”

In 1996, shortly after Fisten began street patrols in Liberty City, Albert beat his perjury charge and won his release. He returned home, divorced Lourdes, and married a younger woman. That same year, Ricky came stateside to accept a post at CIA headquarters. Fisten maintains that Ricky was able to accept the domestic assignment only because “we were gone. The coast was clear.”

In 2010, I met a former spy—a CIA classmate of Valerie Plame’s—at a Maryland country club to talk about Ricky. I gave him the OCS version of Ricky as a murderous criminal. Although he’d never met Ricky, my source—a cheerful, sixtyish, mustached ex-Mormon who served in Latin America, “first as a missionary, then as a CIA officer”—didn’t believe a word of the reports. “The box is very good,” he said, referring to the agency’s lie detector test. “The CIA knows how to use the box, and every officer is put on the box all the time. If a person like this Prado character you describe had slithered in, he wouldn’t have lasted.”

Later, he sent me an e-mail about Ricky from an officer who had worked with Ricky in the 1990s: 

Cancer. The e-mail offered another possible narrative. Maybe Ricky didn’t take a domestic post in 1996 because the “coast was clear.” Maybe he came back simply to get treatment. The Ricky described in the e-mail seemed so ordinary and likable. His postings were beyond impressive. Chief of the Northeast Asia Group put him on the front line of the nation’s most sophisticated espionage programs aimed at China. That he was a candidate for chief of station in Seoul, the front line of efforts to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, indicated that the agency saw him as a top spy.

To the e-mail’s author it seemed perfectly reasonable that Ricky might have “wandered over” to the CIA’s Counter Narcotics Center—to help fight the War on Drugs. Could the OCS reports have been hoaxes?

I make several trips to Miami to find people the OCS reports linked to Ricky. Manuel Revuelta—at the Fontainebleau when Ricky allegedly put a gun to his head, karate-kicked his friend, and stole his car in an effort to collect on Albert’s
bolita
debt—is the first I find. Revuelta has another connection with Ricky: the CIA. From his FBI file:

Revuelta’s arrest record contains a remarkable entry from February 1961. U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy signed an order dropping charges against Revuelta, who had been arrested a year earlier for trying to steal a truckload of bombs from Homestead Air Force Base. Kennedy’s intervention freed him up for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Revuelta was from the old generation of Cubans who served the CIA as “assets”—temp workers, without pension or benefits. When CIA work dried up, he tried his hand at the
bolita,
then drug smuggling, which resulted in a 1984 arrest and an eighteen-year prison sentence.

Revuelta now lives in a housing project in Carol City, in Miami. The halls are clean but smell of garbage. His apartment has a metal door. The bent, eighty-six-year-old man who opens it is slightly deaf, and looks confused when I shout that I’m writing a story about Ricky Prado, but he invites me in. Bald, with a close-cropped white beard, he wears big glasses with fish-eye lenses. Despite his frail appearance, his handshake is strong, and icy from a cold pack he clutches to one knee. He says he fell getting off the bus the other day on the way to the bagel shop where he works part-time as a cashier.

Revuelta agrees to speak, but as I soon as I turn on my recorder, he starts blasting the Carpenters’
Greatest Hits
from a boom box. We sit on a crinkly vinyl couch. When I ask about Ricky, he talks about Cuba. Before the revolution, he says, his job was to drive around, armed with a .45, collecting coins from Mafia slot machines. When he came to Miami after the revolution, Patsy Erra—Bobby’s father—got him a job as a cashier at the Fontainebleau.

One day, Revuelta says, some “white guys” came into the Fontainebleau, told him they were CIA, and “recruited me.” They got him and a bellhop involved in the scheme to steal bombs from Homestead, which were supposed to be dropped on a power plant near Havana by private pilots flying a rented plane. Revuelta was told that Air Force guards would look the other way when he and his cohort drove off with the bombs. But when a guard who wasn’t clued in to the scheme arrested them, the CIA disavowed Revuelta and left him to rot in jail. When he was released—by that order from Robert F. Kennedy—his CIA handlers sent him to Guatemala to take flight lessons so he could fly in the Bay of Pigs. The CIA subsequently employed him through the 1960s in a variety of oddball destabilization operations. The strangest involved his taking a job as cashier on a cruise ship, so he could sneak into Caribbean ports at night and firebomb Cuban-flagged vessels.

Revuelta’s story indicates the advanced levels of skulduggery that the U.S. government had already reached by 1960s. What Prado got up to for the CIA with the contras in the 1980s was old hat.

I again ask Revuelta if he’s ever heard of Ricky or Alex, and he appears confused. I turn down the volume on the boom box, still blasting the Carpenters, but Revuelta turns it back up and hisses at me like I’m a madman: “The walls can hear us!”

I finally shout, “Who stole your Pontiac from the Fontainebleau?”

Revuelta lights up. “The firefighter took my car,” he says, and then describes Ricky and his relationship with Albert in detail. Every week for about a year after taking his car, he says, Ricky collected fifty dollars from him as further payments to Albert for his
bolita
debt. In this role, Revuelta says, Ricky wasn’t so bad. “He treated me very, very nice. A couple times, I told him, ‘I ain’t have the money.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, bring it next week.’ He was that kind of guy.”

“He was a good guy?” I ask.

“He was. He told me he was a firefighter, but he lose the job, so he has to work for San Pedro. He was trying to get something better for his life.”

I tell him Ricky never actually lost his job at the fire department. I ask if he thinks Ricky made up the story about being forced to work for Albert because he was ashamed about what he was doing, if he thinks that maybe Ricky had a conscience.

Revuelta shrugs. “Maybe he is just a liar.”

Ricky is lucky. When I travel to Miami in late 2010, I find that the only witness willing to testify against him in the Schwartz murder is dying of cancer. Jon Roberts was diagnosed in 2009 (and will pass away on December 27, 2011). But he dies hard. With his colon blocked by inoperable tumors and a colostomy bag taped to his stomach, he insists on driving me to look for Bobby Erra.

Erra was released from prison in 1999 and has steadfastly denied that he was ever involved in murder—or that he was even in the Mafia. He allegedly owns interests in some of South Florida’s finer Italian restaurants, but he leads an outwardly modest life. Roberts and I drive to a forgotten-looking development of 1960s-era ranch houses near Miami Beach. Roberts stops by a small house that he says (and records suggest) belongs to Erra. The windows are dark, making it look as if no one has lived there in years. I suggest that maybe Erra has moved, but Roberts points to a powerboat on a trailer by the driveway and says, “No. That’s Bobby. All he really cares about is fishing.”

 Later, by myself, I stop by Albert’s massive house in Hialeah. Following his release from jail, his stepdaughter and common-law wife, Jenny Cartaia, testified in an immigration hearing that he had raped her throughout her childhood, and Albert was ordered deported. But due to the lack of U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, he was permitted to stay in the United States indefinitely. From the street his house has a darkened, out-of-business-movie-theater look. Maybe emptiness is a look that aging bad guys cultivate for their homes to keep visitors away. But when I approach the gate, the house appears truly uninhabited. Unable to find a buzzer, I say “hello” to the emptiness, and then leave.

When I later speak with Albert’s former attorney Fred Schwartz (who regained his law license in 2010), he tells me that Albert lives outside of Hialeah with his new family, and suggests that Albert won’t talk to me. “He’s just happy being with his wife and daughter who he dotes on,” Schwartz says. “She’s fourteen, a dancer, adorable.”

I try to picture the life of the allegedly retired crime boss and ask Schwartz what Albert does with his time. He says, “He works for a major company, helping them place billboards.”

Albert’s ex-wife Lourdes lives in a small South Miami house covered in burglar bars. I have to slide my driver’s license under the steel outer door before she’ll open it. Dressed in a terry-cloth robe, she hands my license back and explains her policy regarding visitors: “Anybody comes here with an address in Hialeah, I tell them, ‘Goodbye.’ ”

The legs that once served Albert on the street are perhaps stouter than they were, but the face, one suspects, hasn’t much changed since Albert stared at it through the Plexiglas at the Miami Metro Corrections visiting center. Not beautiful. Not ugly. It’s a face you would want on your side in a brawl. But she opens her home and reveals that she is not without a tender side.

Her life is devoted to rescuing cats, Lourdes explains, walking me to a back house she converted into a shelter for some one hundred strays. To my surprise, the rooms are rigorously clean, with cats sorted by vaccination tags. Felines run up and down Lourdes’s terry-cloth robe as she discusses her courtship with Albert. “I was naive. I was stupid.” After they married, she says, when Albert was not in jail, he regularly assaulted her. “He would beat the shit out of me, call the cops, and Baker Act me”—incarcerate her for psychiatric evaluation. “Albert beats you up, then you get Baker Acted. He Baker Acts all his women.”

Lourdes obliquely refers to her role in helping Albert influence witnesses and public officials, but she declines to speak about Abe Leaser. “The statutes of limitation are out,” she says. “But I’d rather not say anything.”

When I ask if she ever met Ricky, Lourdes says, “You know Ric worked for the government? He would come to the house at night, because he wasn’t supposed to be seen with Albert.” She claims she first met Ricky after Albert’s release from jail in 1989, then saw him throughout the latter half of the nineties. “Ric would show up at the house to talk to Albert,” she says, “but they would go in private.” She adds, “Albert used to say, ‘The CIA agents are killers. That’s how they pick them. Ric’s my killer.’ ”

I ask if she is aware of any crimes Ricky committed with Albert, and she says no, but suggests that if Ricky is in trouble now, “to get his ass out of problems, he might tell them some things about Albert.”

“I thought he was loyal to Albert.”

“Everybody’s loyal to somebody to a point. Albert and those guys all say they’re loyal, but they’ll all throw the towel at each other to save their ass.”