American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  * The AR-15 is the civilian version of the U.S. military’s M-16 infantry rifle.

  * As a young Panamanian military officer in the 1960s, Noriega received U.S. military training at bases in Panama and in the United States at Fort Bragg.

  * Jon is likely referring to a photo of Bush and Noriega taken in the 1970s. In the photo, Bush and Noriega are seated extremely close together on a couch, and perhaps through an accident of perspective Noriega appears to be sitting in Bush’s lap.

  † The banker and close confidant of former President Nixon whom Jon spoke about in chapter 37.

  † Bush the elder met frequently with Noriega beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was the director of the CIA. As reported in the May 16, 1991, Chicago Tribune article “Files Detail Noriega CIA Connection,” prior to Noriega’s 1992 trial for racketeering, trafficking, and money laundering, his defense claimed he had been paid more than $10 million by the CIA. During the trial, the U.S. government’s lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, disputed that figure, arguing that Noriega had been paid only about $300,000 in the form of monthly paychecks that he received from approximately 1971 to 1986—meaning it cost about $1,500 a month to bribe the dictator of a third world country in that era.

  ‡ In 1982 the Federal Reserve Bank reported that Miami banks had taken in more than $2 billion of cash that couldn’t be accounted for by lawful economic activity.

  § The CIA used banks in Panama to launder money and secretly finance its activities throughout Central America in the 1980s. Noriega, who emerged as one of the Agency’s top money-laundering facilitators in Panama, offered similar services to drug smugglers, as outlined in Larry Collins’s July, 23 1991, New York Times story “Banker of Choice to the Company.”

  66

  Dear Mr. Roberts: I am delighted to inform you that at the last membership meeting of the National Republican Reelection League, your name was placed in nomination by Representative Ted Jones, and you were accepted for membership.

  —letter from the National Republican Reelection

  League* to Jon, 1984

  J.R.: I’ve never met a politician who didn’t put his hand out when I met him. One night in 1983, after I started running the Cartel’s money flights, I took Toni out to Joe’s Stone Crab. I’m sitting there with Toni and Bryan when the maître d’ brings over a bottle of wine. I ask who sent it, and he points to an older man at a corner table surrounded by guys in suits. “Representative Ted Jones.”*

  I said, “What’s the congressman drinking?”

  The maître d’ named a shit wine, and I told him to send the congressman two bottles.

  Then a man in a suit came over from the congressman’s table. He told me the congressman would like to meet me.

  I’d lived by Senator Smathers on Indian Creek, and he’d never caused any trouble, but he was retired. This congressman was still on the job, which meant he had power to do bad things. Sending his goon over to get me made me uptight.

  I went to his table. Congressman Jones stood. He was not a big guy, but he stuck his hand out with confidence. When I told him my name, he said, “I know all about you.”

  That made me sweat a little. Then he laughed and said it was a pleasure meeting me, but he couldn’t accept my “generous gift”—of the shit wine I’d sent to his table. He could give me a gift, but I couldn’t give him one. That was the rule. He handed me his card and said to call him anytime.

  “Okay. Nice meeting you,” I said.

  I got back to my table as fast as I could. I didn’t like a congressman saying he knew about me. I couldn’t enjoy the rest of my crabs. I noticed when the congressman left that his goons were carrying the unopened bottles of wine I’d sent. Somebody could accept gifts.

  I STARTED getting letters asking me to donate money to Congressman Jones and the National Republican Reelection League. They were form letters, but they made me uptight. I never gave out my address. I wasn’t registered to vote.

  I went to my lawyer, Danny Mones, and showed him the letters. He told me to relax. The congressman probably got intrigued when he saw me with Bryan and Toni and asked the waiters about me. Getting my address would have been easy.

  “So what do I do with these goddamn letters?”

  “Send these cocksuckers their money,” Danny said, laughing. “This congressman’s extorting you. Now that he knows who you are, you can’t tell him no. He’s got a good racket.”

  I had Danny send a check in my name for $5,000—the maximum amount allowed. Danny said, “Now you got to call him. Tell him you’re happy to help him out.”

  I called the number on the congressman’s card and got a flunky. I told him I’d made a contribution. A couple days later the congressman calls me and thanks me. Next, he asks if I like fishing. Before I know it, I’ve agreed to meet the congressman and some of his friends for a fishing trip on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina.

  When I told Danny Mones, he got very excited. “This is good. You should bring some cash money.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars is good for a U.S. congressman. It’s not a fortune, but it shows you’re sincere.”

  I flew to Hilton Head with Bryan and a tackle box with $50,000 in it. When I went to the marina, one of the congressman’s flunkies was waiting in the restaurant. He told me the congressman had had some business come up. I put the tackle box on the table and said, “Too bad. I brought something for him.”

  “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

  The congressman called me a few days later and apologized for not making the fishing trip. The flunkies in his office set up several more trips. He never showed. I always brought tackle boxes of money. On my third or fourth trip, the congressman’s flunky took my tackle box and said, “It’s better from now on if you don’t have contact with us.”

  That was fine with me. These shakedowns were an aggravation.

  BUT THE Republican bigwigs I’d sent my check to weren’t done with me. They said that I was now a member of the Reelection League. They invited me to a luncheon in Washington for all the people like me who they were squeezing so we could shake hands with Vice President Bush. It almost made sense that I should meet Bush. We had people in common. Don Aronow and General Noriega were both friends of his. Why not me?

  I flew up with Bryan. The lunch was being held at a Marriott banquet room. Inside, a couple hundred stooges milled around in suits with name tags, waiting to get their handshake with the vice president. Bryan just wanted food. As we were walking into the main room, three guys came up to me. They looked like FBI agents. The hair stood up on my neck. I’m thinking, This whole thing has been a scam to entrap me, but the main FBI-looking asshole smiles and says, “Jon? You’ve got a lot of friends. They told us about you.”

  His asshole buddies all smile like he cracked a joke. He says, “Do you mind if we talk?”

  I leave Bryan in the banquet room. We walk out in the hall. One of his guys mentions my friendship with Representative Ted Jones, and they all smile again. These are the happiest government assholes I’ve ever seen.

  “I barely know the guy,” I say.

  “What do you think about the war in Nicaragua?”

  “I don’t follow the news.”

  One of the government assholes says, “Well, Jon. There are problems in Nicaragua. Some real bad guys have taken over. Other people want to fight them—‘freedom fighters’—and they need our help. But Congress passed a law that says nobody can help them.* We don’t think that’s right.”

  “That’s very interesting. But what’s this got to do with me?”

  “We want you to help.”

  “You want me to help freedom fighters?” I’d never heard a more insane idea.

  “Would you be willing to meet some friends of ours in Miami?”

  What could I say?

  Bryan was in a bad mood when I got back to the banquet room. The food they served to League members wasn’t up to his standards. We flew back to Mi
ami that afternoon to get a decent meal.

  I never did get to shake the vice president’s hand.

  A WEEK later I met two new guys at the Fontainebleau Hotel to talk about helping the freedom fighters in Nicaragua. We met in the lobby. One of the guys looked like Steve McQueen. The other one was older. I told the older guy to get away from me. I’d only talk to one of them.

  My uncle Joe used to tell me that when you meet people connected to the government, you should only talk to one guy. Two guys from the government can make up lies against you and claim you said things that you didn’t. If you go to court, they’ll back each other up. Even if they record you on a wire, if it’s only one guy you talked to, you can claim that there’s things you said that the wire didn’t pick up, which make you look less guilty. Government assholes usually come to you in pairs. If you can separate them, not only does it give you more protection, but it also makes the guy who gets left out feel like a jerk. The more you can make people from the government envy and mistrust one another, the better.

  I walk outside with the guy who looked like Steve McQueen, and he says, “You have friends in high places.”

  “All that’s got me so far is shakedowns and shitty banquet food. What do you want?”

  “I work for an agency that thinks you can help us.”

  “With the freedom fighters?”

  “We need someone who can help with airplanes.”

  “Bro, I’m not a pilot.”

  “We want you to work with Barry Seal.”

  His naming a smuggling pilot I worked with makes me uptight.

  “Relax,” he says. “We don’t care about your business. Here’s my question: Are you a true American and a good American?”

  I say, “Stop with the American shit. Just talk frank and tell me what the fuck is going on here.”

  He says, “We’re going to give you a great deal on planes. We have some C-123s.* You can put twenty thousand pounds of anything you want in them.”

  “What do you want me to carry in them?”

  “Guns to help the freedom fighters in Nicaragua.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re a smuggler.”

  It made sense. If you’re a good guy who works for the government, and you need to break the law, you need to hire somebody like me who does illegal things. It was logical, but I wanted to know who had told these assholes I was a smuggler. When I asked him, he gave me an answer.

  “Ricky.”

  “Ricky?”

  “Ricky. He says you might remember him as ‘Albert’s guy.’ ”

  Albert San Pedro’s “guy” was Ricky Prado, who’d helped kill Richard Schwartz. This about knocked me over. I knew Ricky had left Miami. What could he have to do with these assholes? Was he an informant?

  The Steve McQueen look-alike said, “Ricky and I work together helping the freedom fighters in Nicaragua. We get them guns.† Ricky says you’re reliable. He thinks you could be a good asset.”

  This was a lot of information to take in. Ricky used to move coke and cash for Albert and me, but I’d never talked to him about smuggling. Albert knew what I did, and he and Ricky were still very close.* You never imagine that a guy you’ve worked with on the street will end up in the government. It’s dirty. Ricky could tell anybody in the government anything he knew about me from the street. Maybe he’d obtained immunity for things he did with me in the past because he worked for these guys, but I didn’t have that.

  First these rats shake me down for contributions to the Republican fund. Next they want me running guns. This was worse than dealing with my uncle Joe in the Mafia.

  THE NEXT time I met the Steve McQueen look-alike, I picked the coffee shop at the Best Western Thunderbird Hotel as the location. It was my uncle Jerry Chilli’s domain. He had a crew of old, bent-nose wiseguys who’d sit in the coffee shop playing gin all day long. I felt secure there.

  The government guy explained that they wanted me to set up a company that could get the C-123 planes to Barry Seal. The government had weapons in Texas that I had to deliver to Seal so he could fly them to a landing strip in Nicaragua. They’d give us radio codes for the planes so we could fly back into the United States with no problem. I’d get $100,000 for every load we delivered, to cover costs, including what I paid Barry.

  I still had one question. “Why did they send a congressman after me in the restaurant?”

  “Jon, we don’t send congressmen out to recruit guys. That was a coincidence. We were going to talk to you before you met him. It doesn’t hurt that he thinks you’re a good American.”

  “Do I get any protection here because of my helping you?”

  “Now, we all know you’re a good American. I think that’s a lot.”

  Tackle boxes of cash to the congressman and several checks to the Republican League, and that’s what it bought me. I’m a good American.

  I WENT to see Barry Seal in Louisiana and laid it out. “Barry, there’s government guys who want to give me some C-123 military cargo planes so we can fly guns on them to some freedom guys in Nicaragua.”

  Barry said, “Get the fuck away from me, Jon. There’s something very wrong here. Forget about this.”

  Barry usually liked a big challenge. It appealed to his blowhard personality. I was taken aback. I explained to him that I didn’t think I had any choice in the matter. I had a U.S. congressman extorting money from me. I had other guys twisting my arm, calling me a good American.

  Barry laughed. He said, “Okay, Jon. I’m no stranger to this kind of work.* Let’s get the C-123s up here. But I have one condition.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I fly guns, I’m not moving coke with you.”

  I thought his condition was weird at the time, but I let it pass.

  DANNY MONES helped set up a dummy company to take the C-123s from the government and get them to Barry in Baton Rouge. I got the codes for the radios from a guy I met at a gas station outside Homestead Air Force Base.† The codes changed every week, so every time Barry flew to Nicaragua and back, I had to drive to Homestead and get new ones.

  The guns would come from a National Guard armory in Corpus Christi, Texas.‡ They were going to be in two rental trucks parked outside a shopping center near the armory. The trucks were from a company called ATI.

  Before our first run, the Steve McQueen–looking asshole said, “You need to bring drivers who aren’t going to be drunk or fucked up.”

  I was a little offended. My drivers had moved thousands of kilos of coke all across the country for years, and I’d never had a problem. I didn’t like being treated like a stooge.

  I mapped out the route with a TripTik road map from the Automobile Club of America and flew with Bryan to Baton Rouge. We met our drivers there and drove two rental cars to Corpus Christi. When we arrived that afternoon, the ATI trucks were in their spot by the market. There was a government guy in a car parked nearby who gave me the keys. He said, “You need to get started now.”

  I said, “My guys got to eat first.”

  “Those trucks can’t sit there.”

  “How about you shove these keys up your ass and drive the trucks yourself.”

  I didn’t like getting attitude from this jerk. The more I thought about it, I was doing the government a favor. Not the other way around.

  I fed Bryan and my drivers, and we got going after dark. Bryan and I followed the trucks in the rental cars. We got back to Barry Seal’s hangar early the next morning and unloaded the trucks. The weapons we were giving to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua weren’t the kind you could buy in Miami. There were M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade guns, LAWs rockets,* and ten thousand pounds of ammo.

  We split the weapons between the two C-123s. Each plane was a little over half full, but they carried big bladders of extra fuel. Barry and his guys did one run successfully.

  The next run I flew with Barry to see Nicaragua for myself. We landed on a farm. The freedom fighters we met were dressed in rags. They
were peasants, none over five feet tall. They had women with them, tough little broads with guns. They helped unload the planes. One of the men told me the women fought by their side, even though some had babies with them. In Vietnam a girl in a village might have had a gun, but these freedom fighter broads were out living in the mud. They had heart. We stayed an extra couple hours just to see the broads test-fire an M-60. They were sensational.

  After that trip I distanced myself from the operation as much as I could. Barry moved the C-123s to a new airport he had in Arkansas. Bryan took over getting the guns from different National Guard armories. The one thing I had to do was get the radio codes from Homestead. The government guys wouldn’t give them to anyone else.

  I didn’t like smuggling guns for the government. I didn’t get any kick from it. It was the opposite of a kick. The government made everything difficult. They initially promised to pay me in a convenient bank in Panama. But they changed their minds. They paid in cash—bulky small bills. It’s probably just a coincidence, but the amount they paid me to smuggle was about equal to what I’d paid the congressman. It was as if I’d paid for them to hire me and Barry.

  I never flew cocaine for the Cartel on the government planes. The radio codes we got meant we could fly back into the United States with impunity. But I never trusted the government not to trick us. I just stuck to flying their illegal guns.* After a half-dozen runs, they told me we should leave the planes in Honduras. They were changing their smuggling operations, and they didn’t need me no more.

  I did my part for the country. I wrote checks to the Republican League. I gave cash to the congressman. I smuggled guns. Nobody could say I wasn’t a good American. I’m still waiting for my handshake from Vice President Bush.

  * The National Republican Reelection League is a pseudonym for a real Republican fund-raising organization to which Jon was a contributor. Evidence of Jon’s participation in the organization appears to be authentic, but due to the prominence of its members, the name has been changed here.