by Jon Roberts
The government people had twisted my arm by saying that Ricky Prado had recommended me for the job. They probably had twisted Barry’s arm with that Quaalude bust hanging over his head. Maybe Barry thought he could score brownie points with the government by flying the guns and get out of his trouble with the Quaalude bust.
I was glad when they told me they didn’t need me anymore. Obviously, they did not let go of Barry Seal. They used him to set up the Cartel. It made no sense to me that Barry was able to fly one of our C-123s to Nicaragua and load it with cocaine, with Pablo Escobar personally helping him. Even today, it makes no sense. I never heard of flying cocaine out of Nicaragua. I never heard of Pablo personally loading one of our planes. But it’s a fact Barry got him to do this and took pictures of it.
I couldn’t care less that Barry Seal was still flying around in a C-123 after we’d ended our arms-smuggling partnership. Barry could do anything he wanted with those planes except set up Pablo Escobar.* For that, Barry would have to be killed.
MAX WAS beside himself when the Barry Seal situation came up because it made it more difficult to be around Rafa. He was very angry about Barry Seal setting up Pablo. He took it personally because Pablo was his boss. Plus, Rafa, like other Colombians, had an inflated view of Americans. Rafa never imagined that a trusted gringo would be a rat. What Barry did had lowered Rafa’s opinion of all gringos.
Rafa did more and more things to fuck with Max. I went to Max’s house in Sunny Isles, and Rafa had set up an ice chest in the garage that he filled with wet phone books. He used these to catch bullets he was test-firing from MAC-10s. The whole house was filled with smoke. We’re on a suburban street, and Rafa’s in the garage shooting machine guns. Even with silencers, they make an awful racket. I go in, and Rafa’s smoking a bazooka and lecturing Max while ripping rounds from the guns. “It’s your job, Max”—brrrp! “You’re the boss”—brrrp! “You got to take care of the traitor”—brrrp!
Max ran to me with a shoebox filled with $250,000 and asked me to hire a hit man. Of course, it’s never that easy.
By late 1984 Barry Seal was like a celebrity. He was facing trial in Baton Rouge for his Quaalude bust, but he was testifying to Congress about the Cartel and on the news every night. Professional hitters didn’t want to kill a guy testifying to Congress. The truth is, most professionals like to go after low-hanging fruit, like some bookie or accountant no one’s ever heard of.
I sent a couple different shooters to Baton Rouge to look for Seal. He was out on bond, but they claimed they couldn’t find him. Max kept crying to me that we had to find him. I said, “I’ll go to Baton Rouge myself and find out where he is.”
“I’m coming with you,” Max said.
“What are you going to do, stand over my shoulder and tell me to adjust my aim because the breeze is blowing five degrees to the west?”
“You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”
“Of course not, you fat piece of shit. I’m not taking no gun.”
“Then I’m coming.”
I HATED traveling with Max. Soon as we hit the Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge, he wanted to get a whore.
“Baton Rouge hookers, Max? I’ll take you to the dog pound. Anything you fuck there will be better than the escort they’ll send from the Baton Rouge Yellow Pages, trust me.”
I made Max drive around with me for two days, so he could do some work for once. I didn’t know where Barry was staying, if he had U.S. marshals with him, or what. I went to restaurants he and I had been to, gas stations, a propeller shop. Not a hair of the man did we see. All I got was the smoke of 20 million cigarettes smoked by Max in our rental car.
Every time we crossed the town, I’d swing past the Airport Road Waffle House. Barry loved that greasy southern fast food. On the third day I see him walk out of the Waffle House and get into his Eldorado. The only secretive thing about him is that he’d replaced his convertible with a coupe. I jam the gas and drive after him. I don’t see any protection on him. I get excited. “Boy, I wish we had a gun.”
“Are you crazy?” Max says.
“Just think of him as a beefalo.”
I let Barry drive way ahead. I don’t have a Ricky Prado disguise kit on me, and I don’t want him to see me. Barry had good eyes. I knew that from flying with him.
He makes a quick turn on a side street. I speed up to catch him.
“What are you doing?”
“Maybe we can do something here, Max.”
“But he’s under federal protection.”
“So was Kennedy, you asshole.”
I’m not the greatest follower, but we pick up Barry’s car again. We’re on a street of metal shops where they sell parts for planes. Barry is slowing down. He’s a block ahead. There’s no moving traffic, just workers’ cars parked by the little factories. I floor it.
Max starts to whimper.
I’ve decided to run into Barry. I’m thinking: We’ll smash his car. I’ll jump out and kill him with my hands, and then we get away before an ambulance comes.
“What are we doing?”
“Shut up. We’re running him over.”
Max screams “No!” like he’s being thrown off a cliff.
He locks his hand on my wheel. I punch him in the face. He can’t fight, but Max is a fat pig, and he has all 280 of his pounds hanging on the wheel, and he isn’t letting go.
Max won. I slowed down, and Barry turned into the shop. We drove past and that was that. Barry got to live another day.
* Following his 1983 arrest, Seal’s name was published in local Florida papers, but they printed his legal name, “Adler Berriman Seal,” which neither Jon nor his Colombian cohorts recognized at the time, since they knew him as “Barry,” or by another alias, “Mackenzie.” Criminal aliases used to confuse police may also confuse criminals. Had the Cartel known Seal was arrested in 1983, they would have killed him then.
* As Jon said on the previous page, in 1984 Barry Seal flew a C-123 to Nicaragua. Instead of delivering guns to the Contras as he had been doing, he landed at a government airfield. The CIA, working with the DEA, had equipped Seal’s plane with concealed cameras. As the cameras snapped photos, Pablo Escobar and members of the Nicaraguan government loaded the plane with cocaine. Seal had set them up on behalf of the U.S. government. He delivered the plane and the photos to Homestead Air Force Base. Two stories were published about Seal’s CIA-backed sting operation of July 1984, in The Wall Street Journal and in The Washington Times. It was picked up on television news outlets, and on March 16, 1986, President Reagan displayed the photographs taken by the C-123 cameras during an Oval Office speech in which he exposed the Nicaraguan government’s role in cocaine smuggling.
* Perhaps Jon should have taken him literally. Richard Ben-Veniste, esteemed Washington attorney who was President Clinton’s chief counsel during the Senate Whitewater hearings and later served on the 9/11 Commission, also represented Barry Seal after his 1983 Quaalude bust. Ben-Veniste claims he introduced Seal to Vice President Bush after Seal’s 1983 Quaalude arrest, believing the smuggler could be a useful asset. Speaking of Seal in a 2004 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ben-Veniste said, “I did my part by launching him into the arms of Vice President Bush, who embraced him as an undercover operative.”
* There is no dispute that Barry Seal set up Pablo Escobar, and that he did so in a sting operation probably run jointly by the CIA and DEA. The sting not only satisfied the U.S. government’s objective of discrediting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, it also nailed Escobar, a top enemy in the nation’s “War on Drugs.” As a clandestine operation, it was a stunning success. Jon’s assertion that Seal also flew weapons for the CIA Contra program has been widely speculated about since the 1980s. Adding fuel to this speculation is the fact that on October 5, 1986, a C-123, like that flown by Seal to set up Escobar—possibly the same plane—was shot down while delivering arms to the Contras. That Seal seems to have played a critical role in several major U.S. intellig
ence operations being run at the same time is astounding. But the most baffling part of Seal’s story is simply that after serving as an instrument of American clandestine policies, the case against him for Quaalude smuggling pressed ahead, with the result that Seal was ordered to live in a Baton Rouge halfway house for drug addicts, with scant police or federal protection. As Seal put it, he felt the government had made him a “clay pigeon”—a marked target.
71
J.R.: You know the comic book with the four superheroes? The chick who could make herself invisible, the guy who could skate on ice across the sky, the old guy whose arms could reach to the moon, and the kid who could burn shit with his eyes? Max was like the opposite of all them combined. His superhero power was to sit at home on his fat ass, stick his face into boxes of money, and fuck everything up.
One day in 1985 Max called me from his Jaguar. He always thought he was being followed, but this day he sounded more scared than usual. “Jon, there’s a car coming after me. There’s a roadblock. They’re getting me.”*
That’s how I heard they arrested Max. The moron called me on my phone to tell me. The phone was not in my name, but please—don’t give the cops more little clues to help them investigate me.
Why did they arrest Max? It wasn’t because they caught a single plane, boat, or car that Mickey or I had moved. It wasn’t because any of the hundred guys who worked for Mickey or me had been caught doing something. Nobody found a stash house with $100 million in it or a money plane flying to Panama. It was nothing we did. Mickey and I had a perfect record. So did Roger.
Not even Barry Seal, testifying to Congress, ratted Max or me out.
Max got arrested because he was an idiot, and that is a statement of fact.
WHEN I first met Max in the happy times when he was sending me swing sets and beefalo meat, he came to me once and asked if I wanted to get into the exotic-car business. I’d just sold off a car lot I ran with Ron Tobachnik, but Max told me he had a line on a new kind of car. They were going to call them DeLoreans.*
Max wanted to go into business selling DeLoreans. When he asked me, I said, “That car’s a piece of shit. It’s got a slow engine.
Who needs it?”
I never thought of DeLorean cars again until after Max’s arrest in 1985. That was when I found out DeLorean was the reason Max got arrested.
John DeLorean was the businessman who got caught in 1982 trying to move coke to raise money for his car factory.† It turned out that the guy who sold DeLorean his coke had bought it from Max. Every time Max went out on his own to do a business deal, it always blew up in his face. The DeLorean deal was no different. After DeLorean got arrested, Max’s guy ratted on him.
They indicted Max in 1981. It was a sealed indictment. That’s an indictment that they keep secret until right before they arrest you.* But there’s no way Max couldn’t have known something might be up. The DeLorean case was all over the news.† Max must have known his guy had been arrested.
All of this explained why Max was so terrified all the time—beyond just being a normal pussy. That mystery was solved.
Every person in an illegal business encounters problems. I was wrong to say my cocaine-trafficking record was completely perfect. One time Toni’s brother, Lee, got arrested outside the airport in Chicago with forty kilos he was moving for me. But I took care of it. I called my friend in Chicago, Judge Rosenberg, and found out which lawyer to hire. I found out who to pay off. I made the charges go away. Lee never went back to Chicago. We never shipped cocaine there the same way again. That’s how you deal with problems.
When you’re a professional criminal, being indicted for one thing or another is not the end of the world. Look at Meyer Lansky. The guy had federal indictments on him for decades. He fought the government in the courts. He was very careful how he did his business, and he died a free man, running his empire to his last breath.
What Max did, though, made no sense. After DeLorean got in the news, Max never hired a lawyer. He never put out feelers to the prosecutors or to his partners who were on trial. He did nothing. He rode around in his cowboy suit on his farm in Davie and played make-believe El Jefe.
But that’s why if you tapped him on his shoulder, he’d nearly shit his pants every time. He feared he was a marked man.
WHEN THEY arrested Max, they didn’t know who he was. They arrested him on a four-and-a-half-year-old indictment from the DeLorean case. When they went to Max’s house, they were fishing. Unfortunately, Max gave them something. They found a bag with $250,000 in unlaundered drug cash in his bedroom. A bag of unreported cash, even if the cops have nothing else on you, is almost an automatic money-laundering charge.
FORMER MIAMI-DADE POLICE DETECTIVE MIKE FISTEN: That arrest was almost a fluke. The 1982 indictment of Max Mermelstein in the DeLorean case sat in a filing cabinet for years in a federal office in California. I served on a federal task force in Miami, and we asked the DEA every month to send us relevant information about traffickers in our area. The DeLorean arrest was a major trafficking case, but nobody sent us the Mermelstein indictment from that case until approximately five months before it expired. The squad that arrested Mermelstein had to act with haste. They didn’t have the time to properly develop an investigation. He probably would have walked except for the bag of cash they found in his house.
J.R.: My lawyers believed the original indictment against Max was going to be tossed, even after they found the money in his house. A year before they arrested Max, a judge threw out the case against DeLorean. That case was old news.
What we thought was, Max might get two years on a money-laundering charge from the cash they found in his house. Just as likely, if he kept his mouth shut, he could bond out and fight the laundering charges for years. That’s how any normal criminal deals with a nothing arrest. They had DeLorean on tape buying kilos of cocaine, and he walked. That’s how it’s done.
Everybody had confidence in Max. As much as I say he’s a moron, he was a smart guy. He’d survived in that psycho Colombian family for years. He of all people would know that if he crossed the Cartel, they’d slaughter him. Being related to Pablo by marriage wouldn’t save him. It would make them despise him more for his personal betrayal.
Mickey and I were confident of another thing. Max didn’t know the details of the smuggling we did. He didn’t know where the farm was where we kept the planes. He didn’t know the guys driving my cars, or where the stash houses were. We made it easy for him to be ignorant if he was ever questioned by a cop.
To be safe, Mickey and I shut down everything after Max’s arrest. We turned the lights off and went dark. Neither of us was worried.
Max couldn’t be so stupid as to talk.
* Max was arrested on August 27, 1985, while in his Jaguar, speaking on the phone with Jon.
* The cars best known from the Back to the Future films.
* Max was charged with cocaine trafficking in a sealed indictment in 1981 in California, with three men who were involved with supplying cocaine to DeLorean. It is unclear from the record whether Max supplied the cocaine involved in the DeLorean matter, or whether his co-defendants later cooperated in the sting operation aimed at DeLorean. Either way, Max was unaware of the indictment, and the federal law-enforcement agencies who brought the indictment failed to prosecute or investigate Max for nearly five years.
† John DeLorean was a former GM executive who founded DeLorean Motors. He was arrested in 1982 in a sting in which he was videotaped doing a coke deal to raise cash for his car company after Wall Street financing had dried up. DeLorean was charged with narcotics trafficking but was found not guilty after his defense argued he’d been entrapped by the FBI.
† DeLorean was spoofed on Saturday Night Live regularly after his arrest in 1982. He then became a featured character in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic. In 1983 Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt leaked FBI tapes to the media of DeLorean’s arrest, resulting in Flynt’s trial for theft regarding the go
vernment’s DeLorean tapes, which became its own media event when Flynt showed up in court dressed only in a diaper made of the American flag.
72
J.R.: After Max’s arrest I had unfinished business with Barry Seal. Fabito slipped into Miami to emphasize how important it was to kill him. Whatever damage Barry had done to the Cartel was done. He’d spoken. At this point, getting rid of him was symbolic. Any successful group of criminals has to kill guys like Seal on principle—just to show what happens to a rat.
The Cartel wasn’t the only group that wanted Barry Seal dead. The U.S. government gave him a death sentence, too. Look how they treated this guy. They bust him for flying in some Quaaludes, and so he can work off his charges, they get him and me flying guns to freedom fighters. Then they send him to Nicaragua in a plane with hidden cameras to take pictures of Pablo Escobar loading cocaine. Pablo’s supposed to be the most dangerous man in the world, and they parade Barry Seal on the news as the guy who ratted him out? A normal guy who sets up a top criminal gets witness protection. What do they give Barry? A federal judge in his Quaalude case orders Barry to move into a Salvation Army halfway house a couple miles from the airport where he used to meet the guys who are now coming to kill him. The government did everything but put a bull’s-eye on Barry’s back.
Barry was a freewheeling guy. He didn’t worry about personal protection. But even with a guy who doesn’t want security, if he’s an important witness, the government will order him into protective custody. Not Barry. The government practically put the gun in our hands.
I knew why we wanted him dead. I don’t know why they wanted him dead. Was it for smuggling guns to Nicaragua? They never came after me for that. I don’t know what Barry did to piss them off, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he went on TV and talked about flying our C-123s for the CIA.*
