How to Get Away With Murder in America (8 page)

The OCS obtained Ricky’s employment files and a photograph from the fire department, to create a court-admissible photo lineup. When they showed it to Valdez, the drug runner who’d spoken of a “quiet and muscular” man at a 1983 meeting to plan cocaine trafficking, he picked Ricky from the lineup.

Two investigators called on Ricky’s ex-wife. His daughter, who was thirteen, answered the door. When one of them asked where her daddy was, she answered, “He’s in the Philippines. He works for the CIA.”

The OCS went through Albert’s phone records since his release from jail in 1989 and discovered that he had frequently called the U.S. embassy in the Philippines, as well as a number in Virginia that was associated with the CIA. The investigators queried the CIA about Ricky and received confirmation that he was an employee. After they informed the agency that he was a subject in a RICO investigation, a CIA associate general counsel named E. Page Moffett began handling the matter. Through the 1980s, Moffett had defended the agency in legal actions related to its covert wars in Central America. Moffett arranged for Ricky to fly in from the Philippines and sit for an interview with OCS investigators at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

On June 29, 1991, the OCS sent two of its members, Detective McGruff and special agent Fred Harden of the FBI, as well as an MDPD homicide sergeant, Al Singleton, to Langley. Moffett led them to a conference room and left them alone with Ricky. He was forty-one. His hairline was receding, but he was visibly muscle-bound even in a suit. He carried himself with almost exaggerated military precision. Singleton recalls, “He was polite, but underneath it I sensed he was indignant at being questioned.”

When Harden asked Ricky about his relationship with Albert, he said they were “close friends” and admitted working for him as a bodyguard, but only for a brief period. He insisted he had no knowledge of Albert’s cocaine trafficking and had never committed any violent acts for him. When McGruff asked about contacts he’d had with Albert, Ricky surprised them by saying he’d met Albert shortly before his latest arrest, then said, as noted in the OCS interview summary:

McGruff then confronted Ricky with El Oso’s statements that they had extorted money and property and set arsons for Albert. According to Singleton, Ricky lost his temper. He denied every allegation and, as noted in the OCS report, called El Oso a “lying scumbag.”

McGruff’s provocation had been a trap. The forged title document from Revuelta’s car was compelling evidence that Ricky had extorted property. His denials opened him to indictment for a “1001 violation”—making a false statement to a federal agent. Ricky quieted down but seemed to realize he was boxed in. When Singleton pitched him the idea of cooperating against Albert in exchange for immunity, Ricky’s response floored the investigators. As noted in the OCS report:

The investigators had been asking about extortion, and Ricky had changed the topic to murder, even if only hypothetical, and broached the idea of entering witness protection. They believed he was ready to cooperate. Harden served Ricky with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury in Miami and advised him to have his attorney contact federal prosecutors to negotiate his cooperation.

But Ricky never appeared before the grand jury. Instead, the CIA sent its attorney Moffett to the U.S attorney’s office in Miami to quash Ricky’s subpoena. According to OCS investigators, Moffett warned federal prosecutors that pursuing Ricky risked exposing national-security secrets. Fisten says, “We were told Ricky was involved with the contras and Ollie North, and those wounds had just closed. The CIA didn’t want us to reopen them.”

While there are records that confirm Ricky was served with a subpoena, I could find no record that it was quashed—a judicial action that normally leaves a paper trail. Two former federal prosecutors familiar with the case declined to speak to me about it. A third source, still employed as a federal prosecutor, told me he was bound by confidentiality rules, but when I asked if he’d met with Moffett to discuss Ricky, he said, “I can answer that. I remember Moffett because—how crazy is this?—when he came to Miami, he was the preppiest guy I’ve ever met in my life. He was one step removed from having sailboats on his pants.”

Other than the pants, he could provide no other details. When I asked Dexter Lehtinen about CIA interference, he said, “That never would have happened.”

“It happened,” says Hinman. “All you have to do is see what went on. We served Ricky with a subpoena, and he never showed up.”

The OCS prepared a thirty-four-page summary of twenty-nine predicate (and related “overt”) acts with which to indict Ricky on RICO charges, but the U.S. attorney’s office, according to Hinman and others, wouldn’t touch him. The CIA also ceased cooperating.

“People started telling me that we were pissing upstream,” says Fisten. “They said we should forget about Ricky. But my attitude was fuck the CIA. If they want to obstruct our RICO investigation, we had numerous murders to pursue with state charges against him.”

The OCS developed a list of seven murders and one attempted murder in which evidence suggested Ricky had a role. The list included: 

Salazar, thought to be one of the men who had ambushed Albert on his porch, had gone into hiding after Albert vowed to kill him. Ron Reed, nominal head of the Transworld Detective Agency, told investigators that Albert had ordered him and Ricky to surveil Salazar’s cousin in order to find him. Ricky’s employment records at the fire department revealed that during this period, he took numerous days off from work, including the day Salazar was shot to death in his home.

MDPD technicians found a partial match between Ricky’s thumbprint and a print from the crime scene. The CIA had provided Ricky’s basic prints to the OCS, but when the OCS requested Ricky’s “major case prints,” which include the edges of fingers as well as palms for more definitive matching, the CIA would not comply. 

El Oso suggested to Fisten that Ricky might have been the shooter. Months before the murder, when Schwartz killed Craig Teriaca, his brother, Gary, called on friends to donate blood in hopes of saving him. That night Ricky failed to show up at the fire department, citing an “emergency to give blood.” He also missed work the day Schwartz was killed.

Schwartz was killed with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The OCS obtained evidence suggesting that, weeks before the murder, Ricky had purchased two twelve-gauge shotguns under another person’s name and had them mailed to his aunt and uncle. 

Malnik, owner of the Forge restaurant, was enjoying an evening at a club Bobby Erra allegedly controlled when he sent his bodyguard to retrieve his Rolls-Royce. After his bodyguard drove the car about fifteen feet, it blew up. Thanks to the car’s stout undercarriage, he survived.

Mark Baer told investigators that Albert had boasted of having a role in the bombing. Malnik’s car was blown up with military explosives triggered by a type of detonator whose design was taught in special operations courses Ricky took while in the Air Force. OCS investigators believe that only two car bombings in the United States ever used such a detonator; Malnik’s was the first. 

Mirabal, a former member of Albert and Ricky’s weight-lifting fraternity, sold cocaine for him in partnership with Littman. Albert accused them of ripping him off, and on December 31, 1981, Mirabal’s home was sprayed with gunfire. Ricky took an unexcused absence from work that day, and Mirabal identified him to a family member as the gunman. After Mirabal fled to California, he was shot to death in the Angeles National Forest with a MAC-10 machine pistol. Within twenty-four hours, Littman was killed in the Florida Everglades, also with a MAC-10.

While Mirabal was in hiding, Albert allegedly paid a phone company employee to tap his parents’ phone, presumably to locate him. Albert also purchased information about Mirabal from an MDPD cop who was later convicted of corruption. In wiretapped conversations, Albert made statements suggesting he’d ordered the murders.

The OCS believed Ricky’s involvement in these two cases was limited to firing on Mirabal’s home, which occurred about two weeks before the CIA hired him.

Pesci had been involved in the 1983 coke deal in which Baer and Valdez said Ricky had represented Albert. According to both Baer and Valdez, Albert later accused Pesci of ripping him off and ordered him killed, though his body was never found. Baer attributed his murder to Ricky.

The OCS sought Ricky’s travel records from the CIA to determine if he could have been involved in either the coke deal or the murder. The CIA did not comply. 

In 1984, Grabow was arrested in Colorado for distributing $35 million worth of cocaine. OCS investigators believed that Albert and Bobby Erra began supplying him after Grabow’s original partner, Gary Teriaca, disappeared in 1981.

Grabow was free on bond the day of his death. After finishing a workout at the Aspen Club, whose motto was “Health, Fitness and Pampering,” Grabow got into his car and drove about fifteen feet before it exploded—with such intensity that his intestines were blown from his body and deposited on the car’s roof. Despite his injuries, he ran some fifty feet before he died. It was the first fatal car bombing in Colorado history.

Witnesses stated that Albert and Erra orchestrated Grabow’s killing to prevent him from talking. In a wiretapped conversation, Albert referred to putting a “boom boom” in a car in Colorado. When members of the OCS traveled to Colorado to audit surveillance tapes from the Grabow investigation, they identified the voices of Grabow’s suppliers (on wiretapped recordings made before his arrest) as Albert’s and Erra’s. The bomb used to kill Grabow had identical features to the one placed on Al Malnik’s car three years earlier. It was the second such bomb known to have been used in the United States. The OCS sought Ricky’s CIA records to determine if he had access to the types of explosives used in the bombs. The CIA did not comply.

Then there was a seventh case, in Florida, that implicated Albert, Ricky, and Erra. Having hit roadblocks in the RICO case, the OCS focused on the disappearance of Gary Teriaca.

On October 16, 1981, Vincent Teriaca reported that his son Gary was missing. When police later tried to question Vincent, he refused to cooperate, and the matter was dropped.

In 1985, after Albert began meeting with undercover cop Rosario Kennedy, he offered Kennedy $100,000 for any files related to what he called Gary Teriaca’s “murder.”

“You mean the guy who disappeared?” Kennedy said.

“No,” Albert corrected him. “He was killed. He’s dead.”

Albert’s certainty of his murder—what in legal terms is called “guilty knowledge”—and his willingness to pay for the Teriaca files piqued the interest of the MDPD, but their investigation was terminated before they could pursue it.

When the OCS began listening to the neglected tapes from that case, they discovered one that had been made by Albert’s girlfriend Roxanne Greene, whose purse the police had wired. The tape was recorded during a birthday dinner for Albert’s father. According to Greene, on intimate occasions Albert and his friends boasted “about the people they had hurt and shot.” On this night, Albert’s bodyguard Carlos Redondo spoke of assaulting someone he described as “that guy who lived at Bal Harbour”—where Teriaca lived when he disappeared. Redondo said, “He went like he should have gone. He was very strong. He grabbed like this, he knocked my breath out, and he would hit me like
pow
…
pow
!”

“I should have gone in there alone,” Albert said. “He wouldn’t let me.”

“But remember, you wanted to kill him,” said Redondo.

The year before his death, Teriaca’s coke habit was out of control. He’d broken up with his long-term heiress girlfriend, moved to Bal Harbour, an exclusive section of Miami Beach, and dated a socialite friend of Marsha Ludwig. He spent most of his time shut in his apartment behind a steel door he’d had installed. Erra told friends Teriaca was a “fuckup.” During a tennis game, the two fought, and Erra allegedly called Teriaca “rotten scum who deserved to die.” Also, witnesses told the OCS of a new twist in their relationship. After long rejecting the coke business, by 1980 Erra wanted a cut of the trade in Aspen that Teriaca had developed with Albert. Albert sided with Erra, and in early October 1981, he allegedly accused Teriaca of stealing money from a recent cocaine shipment to Grabow. A drug courier told the OCS that he had delivered a bag containing $825,000 in cash to Teriaca days before he disappeared.

Teriaca’s apartment was in a small, quiet building near the beach. When OCS investigators canvassed his neighbors a decade after his disappearance, one of them recalled a shocking event from 1981: A grenade had gone off in the parking lot. The OCS found a Miami Beach police report from October 14 noting the incident, in which a grenade was thrown at an unoccupied Volvo, severely damaging the car.

The OCS traced the Volvo to the daughter of a man who had lived across the hall from Teriaca. She told investigators that in October 1981 she was home from college visiting her father when a man, whom she identified as Albert, came to the apartment and threatened him. A few days later, her car was blown up. Her father had told her to return to school, and he had fled to Spain.

Fisten and FBI special agent Harden located her father, Teriaca’s former neighbor, in New York, where they interviewed him. He told them that one night in early October 1981, he saw several men break into Teriaca’s apartment with a crowbar. From photo lineups, he identified them as Albert, Redondo, Erra, and possibly Ricky. (According to Harden’s report, when he showed him the lineup with Ricky’s photo, the witness picked out Ricky and said it “sure looks like one of the guys who was helping Albert,” but he was not certain.) Later that night, the neighbor saw Albert and his group carry a rolled-up carpet out of Teriaca’s apartment, pry open the trunk of Teriaca’s Mercedes, and stuff the carpet inside. Days later, the car was gone.

At about this time, the neighbor said, Albert showed up at his apartment and accused him of hiding a package for Teriaca. Albert then ordered him into the bedroom of Teriaca’s apartment, which according to the neighbor was wrecked. Walls were splattered with gore, the bed soaked in blood. Albert warned him that bad things would happen unless he told him where the package was. The neighbor believed that the hand grenade thrown at the car was a message from Albert.

Harden and other OCS members tracked down Teriaca’s girlfriend, who said that after his disappearance, Albert and a bodyguard had driven her to his apartment, marched her through the bloody bedroom, and asked about a package. From Harden’s photo lineup, she identified Ricky as the bodyguard. Other witnesses also recounted being marched through the gory bedroom, and they too identified Ricky as being present as that happened.

Separately, Mark Baer told investigators that Erra had confessed to him that he and Albert had murdered Teriaca in a dispute over money. From the OCS report:

The investigators believed that Albert, Ricky, Carlos Redondo—one-third of the old weight-lifting fraternity—and Erra killed Teriaca, but perhaps by mistake. They believed they’d come to take the $825,000 from him, but beat him to death (and possibly shot him) before they discovered where he’d hidden the money. Witnesses had remained silent for years, the investigators believed, out of fear of Albert. Says Fisten, “Gary’s girlfriend was in that little group of society women with Marsha Ludwig and Adele Graham, but she kept her mouth shut the same as any hardened con.”

Witnesses told OCS investigators that Hialeah policemen—a rare sight in Bal Harbour—showed up and scrubbed Teriaca’s apartment. Construction workers repainted it. (Though Albert’s stepdaughter, Jenny, refused to speak to the OCS, in 2010 she told me that she had overheard Albert hire the painters, as well as confess to the murder during an argument with his father.) The apartment was rented, with Teriaca’s furniture, to an absentee tenant in Europe, and it remained mostly unoccupied for the next decade. When the OCS’s Detective McGruff led the first forensic team into the bedroom in 1991, he says, he concluded almost immediately that “someone got the shit beat out of him in here.” Despite the cleaning and repainting, there was evidence that large quantities of bodily fluids had dripped down Teriaca’s bed and pooled by the floor. There were pry marks, as from a crowbar, around a doorjamb. But the few bloodstains investigators recovered, though they matched Teriaca’s general blood type, were too degraded for more specific identification.

Based on the OCS’s findings, a judge ruled Teriaca’s disappearance a death, paving the way for murder indictments. The case was far from perfect—no body, no weapon. But with the recorded evidence, the number of witnesses who placed the suspects at the crime scene, and Albert’s and Erra’s shared financial motives, the investigators had confidence. They saw Ricky as an accessory, at minimum. The strongest witness placed him at the crime scene after the murder. His fire department records indicated he took a cluster of days off in October, the last of them on the fourteenth, the day of the grenade attack. Maria Prado’s statement that she had found what looked like a hand grenade among her husband’s belongings was also incriminating, though she had been unable to date her discovery.

The OCS began presenting evidence to prosecutors in the Dade County state attorney’s office in early 1991, expecting the Teriaca homicide to be the first of several murder cases to be prosecuted.