October 21, 2006

Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela

The sentencing of Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela brought down the world's most successful drug cartel, but did little if anything to halt the flow of drugs to the United States.

by Ron Chepesiuk

U.S. justice was finally served on Sept. 26, 2006 in a Miami court when the godfathers of the Cali Cartel, Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, and his brother Miguel, pled guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The plea, which came after months of intense negotiations with several U.S. agencies, marked the end of the largest running and most important investigation in U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency history.

The 67-year-old Gilberto, known as the "Chess Player' for his brilliance, and the 62-year-old Miguel, "El Senor" for his no-nonsense style of criminal management, were the co-founders of Colombia's Cali Cartel, history's biggest and most powerful drug-trafficking organization and arguably its most significant organized crime syndicate. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the brothers made billions of dollars building the cartel into the world's top supplier of cocaine. Along the way, they destroyed thousands of lives in the United States and other countries around the world distributing their poison. In the process, the brothers revolutionized the way criminals did business, and in 1994, nearly turned Colombia into a narco-democracy by almost buying the presidency with an illegal $6.2 million donation to the campaign of presidential candidate Ernesto Samper, who was eventually elected.

It is no overstatement to say that Cali Cartel succeeded in the drug trade and organized crime like no other criminal group before or since. In the early 1990s, the cartel supplied more than 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled in the United States, and was raking in between $5 and $7 billion annually, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

June 20, 2007

An excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk's Drug Lords: the Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel, chronicling how the longest running and most important investigation in DEA history began. Originally published in 2005 in paperback by Milo Books, the book has been expanded and updated to include information about the successful completion of the Cali Cartel takedown. It will be available for purchase this July (2007). For background see Crime Magazine's The Fall of the Cali Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk.

by Ron Chepesiuk

No one had ever seen 44 pounds of cocaine in New York City before.

–Ken Robinson, DEA agent

 In the summer of 1978, the DEA's New York City branch office received a letter from a citizen's committee representing the Jackson Heights neighborhood in the borough of Queens. "I'm concerned about the violence in our district and the crime wave the cocaine traffic is causing," the letter read. "The DEA is the government agency responsible for investigating drugs. You need to do something about it."

As heroin was the DEA's focus at the time, the letter didn't cause a ripple. The agency, in fact, had yet to do a major cocaine trafficking investigation. "The DEA didn't want to mess with cocaine," recalled Ken Robinson, who was then a member of the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force (NYDETF). "The agency thought the drug was small time, so they turned the matter over to the NYDETF for investigation."

The NYDETF was established in 1970 as a way of better coordinating drug investigations among government and law enforcement agencies. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the DEA's predecessor), the New York State Police, and the New York City Police each contributed to the Task Force, which worked closely with Department of Justice lawyers and support staff. The NYDETF started off with 43 members; one year later, it had 172.

The NYDETF was split into divisions, with each division consisting of groups. Group Five, which, along with Groups Four and Six made up one division, was given responsibility for investigating the complaint from the Jackson Heights residents. Bill Mockler supervised Group Five's seven members, which included Ken Robinson, a streetwise New York City police detective, and Rich Crawford, a young DEA agent and former Vietnam veteran.

Prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York handled most of the Task Force's cases, but according to former New York prosecutor Jessica de Grazia, they shied away from what they considered to be "kiddie dope" cases, even when a suspect was charged with possessing a kilo of cocaine. The DEA's lack of interest reflected the attitude of the government at all levels toward cocaine at the time. A drug abuse task force established by President Gerald Ford in September 1975 issued a report concluding that it was not a problem. "Cocaine," the report declared, "is not physically addictive. . . and usually does not result in serious social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions, or both." The task force recommended that law enforcement focus on drugs such as heroin, amphetamines, and mixed barbiturates, which posed more risk.

Official statistics painted a different picture. By 1974, 5.4 million Americans had acknowledged that they tried using the drug at least once. While law enforcement continued to focus on heroin in the late 1970s, the statistics documenting cocaine use shot up; by 1979, according to one estimate, at least 20 percent of Americans had used cocaine in the past year and 7.3 percent had used it during the previous month.

When President Jimmy Carter took office in 1976, his administration also didn't view cocaine use and abuse seriously. "Cocaine. . . is the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use," wrote Dr. Peter Bourne, drug advisor to President Carter and his special assistant for health issues.  "Short acting, not physically addicting and acutely pleasurable, cocaine has found increasing favor at all socio-economic levels."

The government's benign attitude set the tone. "When the public heard government officials like Bourne downplay cocaine, they thought, 'Hey, cocaine is a recreational drug. I have nothing to worry about,' " said Michael Kuhlman, a DEA agent who joined the agency in 1970.

From what he had seen on the street, Ken Robinson concluded there couldn't be much of a cocaine problem in Jackson Heights either. For two years prior to joining NYDETF, Robinson had worked in Brooklyn, and he remembered how the cocaine arrived in the Brooklyn Harbor aboard a shipping line, the Grancolombiana. The cocaine would be thrown overboard and picked up by swimmers, Colombians, who brought it ashore and sold it in the bars of Jackson Heights. That's not the kind of distribution network that can cause a huge problem, Robinson figured.

A few weeks passed and nothing much happened with Group Five and its cocaine investigation. Then, in September, a Colombian walked unannounced into the NYDETF office with some important information. What he told the Task Force would make him one of the most important confidential informants (CIs) in New York City history. He described a big cocaine ring from Colombia that was operating in Queens but had a distribution network in other parts of the country. The ring, the CI elaborated, was well organized and had an unlimited supply. They used beepers to communicate as they moved the drugs.

Robinson was skeptical. He had listened before to CIs who came to the Task Force and spun tall tales. There was no way to corroborate his story. Besides, if the ring was so big, how come the Task Force had not heard about it? "Let us know when something is happening," Robinson told the CI.

A few days later, the CI called again with an urgent message: A drug deal was going down at 5:30 p.m. that afternoon on Queens Boulevard in Jackson Heights. The informant even described the customer: a Colombian, 6'3", 170 pounds, black hair, mustache, and wearing sunglasses. And, oh yes, the CI added, the dealer would drive a red Chevrolet and the customer would drive a white car.

Robinson rounded up three other Task Force investigators and headed for Queens. It was rush hour; the traffic was heavy, but the investigators made it to Queens Boulevard a few minutes before the deal was supposed to go down. Yes, a man fitting the CI's description pulled up in a red Chevy Impala close to where the investigators were parked. Then the white car pulled up about 100 yards away. A man stepped out of the white car with a leather jacket slung over his arm and looked around nervously. He fit the description for the customer that the CI gave. It's a warm sunny day, so why is he carrying a jacket? Robinson wondered.

The man passed Robinson's car, walked over to the driver side of the white car, took a package from inside and stuck it in his jacket. He looked around and walked quickly back toward Robinson's car. The investigators stepped out of their cars and walked slowly toward the man, hoping they wouldn't have to chase him. But he realized they were cops. Turning around quickly, the suspect bolted in the opposite direction. The agents gave chase and caught him. They opened the man's jacket and found a brown paper bag with a one-kilo brick of cocaine bound tight with masking tape. They arrested the man, whose name was Nelson Gomez, and hauled him back to the Task Force office for questioning. Meanwhile, the dealer in the red Impala fled.

The CI called again and told Robinson that the dealer had ditched his Impala. "Don't look for it," the CI advised. "You'll never find it." The dealer had escaped, but Robinson had alertly taken down the Impala's license number during the stakeout. A check of the state motor vehicle records revealed that the car's owner lived on Long Island. Robinson went to the address, but found it to be bogus. In the coming months, Group Five learned that much of what they uncovered during the course of the investigation – names, license plates, addresses – would be bogus.

Robinson was a tenacious cop, who loved the hunt as much as the catch. He never gave up on a case so long as he had a lead. In describing Robinson's relentless pursuit of criminals, one DEA agent who worked with Robinson said, "I'd hate to be a criminal and have Kenny after me." He checked the records at the Parking Violations Bureau in Manhattan to see if any summonses had been issued for the vehicle. Sure enough, there were over 50 parking violations. Robinson began to check out the places where the Chevy had been parked.

Robinson couldn't find the red Chevy, but a blue Buick parked in one of the spots where the red Chevy had been ticketed caught his attention. It, too, was parked illegally, and a stack of tickets was tucked under one of the windshield wipers. Robinson looked around. Across the street was a six-story brick building. He had a hunch and walked over to see the building superintendent.

When the superintendent came to the door, Robinson showed him his identification. Using his Irish charm, he smiled and asked in a casual manner, "Would you know who owns that blue Buick on the street?"

"Sure do," said the superintendent. "A couple of Colombians. They keep another car in the basement."

Robinson followed up. "What kind is it?"

"A red Chevy," the super said.

"Do you mind if we take a look at it?" asked Robinson the adrenalin starting to pump.

The car was a red Chevy all right, but something didn't fit. The license plate on the Chevy in the garage belonged to the Buick in front of the building. Robinson looked at the Chevy's VIN, the unique identification number affixed to the dashboard, and got on the phone. He found out that the blue Buick was associated with the license of the red Chevy that had delivered the cocaine on September 28.

Robinson ran checks on the license plates of the blue car on the street and the red Chevy in the garage. Bingo! It all fit now. The Chevy's plates were registered to the blue Buick in the street, and the Buick's plates belonged to a third, unknown car. The red Chevy had not been abandoned as the CI had said. Rather, the driver had gotten rid of its plates and replaced them with the Buick plates.

The investigation began in earnest. For several months, Group Five conducted round-the-clock surveillance on the red Chevy and blue Buick. Robinson began to spend much of his time in Queens, and he could see the cocaine problem that the Jackson Heights citizen's committee had written about. Dealers prowled the streets, and showed no fear of being busted. Indeed, many sold cocaine directly from their cars.

Despite the problem, the Task Force's brass was still unwilling to allocate resources to the case, and the investigators had to work on it on their own time. They didn't complain because they felt they were on to something big. Finally the long hours and chilly nights spent on stakeout began to pay off. In October, Group Five seized six pounds of cocaine and some financial ledgers. The investigators had their first inkling of the size of the trafficking organization they were up against. It was pulling in at least a $1 million a month. The investigators were stunned. Criminals made that kind of money trafficking heroin, not cocaine.

Group Five continued its surveillance. In January 1979 they identified a man named Jose Patino as a major player in the organization, and tailed him out to John F. Kennedy International Airport. There, he met a stocky man with thick black hair and flaky patches of skin on his face, who had arrived on a flight from Colombia. The well-dressed man left the airport and the detectives stopped him in the parking lot. He produced a passport. His name was Jose Santacruz Londono. The detectives let him go.

The investigators followed the two men to a penthouse apartment in Queens and staked it out for several days. They tailed Patino and his associate to the airport in Farmingdale, Long Island, where Santacruztook a private plane to Philadelphia.

In July Robinson identified one of the apartments Patino was using on Union Street in Flushing, Queens. He befriended the superintendent, an Eastern European immigrant, who let him use the empty apartment facing Patino's for surveillance. The blinds on the apartment's windows were shuttered noon and night and Patino never appeared. Robinson continued to stake out the place, but he had other work to do. He left his card with the superintendent and asked him to call if Patino showed.

One day, Robinson's phone rang. "The man you're looking for is in the apartment right now," said the superintendent. Robinson and Mockler rushed over to Patino's place and stopped him as he was leaving the apartment. The two investigators showed Patino their badges and asked for his identification. "What you got in the bag?" Robinson asked. The bag was black leather and slung over Patino's shoulder.

"Could we search your apartment?" Mockler asked. Incredibly, Patino shrugged his shoulders to indicate, why not? Ignorant of his First Amendment rights, Patino didn't even ask if the investigators had a search warrant. Inside the apartment, the detectives opened the bag. "What's this electric money counter for?" They pulled out a bunch of rubber bands. "Why are there so many of them? What are you going to use them for?"

The phone rang. When they picked it up, they heard a loud, excited voice speaking in Spanish. "Pepe, what's happening? Call me! Call me!" A call-back number appeared on the screen, but the two detectives already had enough to do without trying to trace the call. Robinson figured that the guy who called was expecting Patino to bring him the money-counting machine.

They found a series of rent receipts for a number of apartments. Mockler and Robinson took Patino first to an apartment on Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd Street. When they entered the lobby, Patino began sweating and turned pale. The detectives woke up the superintendent. When Patino saw him, he blurted: "This is where I live, right? Tell them this is where I live." The verbal barrage confused and frightened the super, but he whispered to one of the agents, "No, he doesn't."

The detectives showed the super a photo. "Yeah, that's Victor Crespo," he confirmed. "I've seen him and the guy you're with together. They sure keep strange hours, but they don't cause any problems." The super directed the two detectives to the ground floor apartment, where they found a fake passport in the name of Victor Crespo and discovered he had been receiving mail there. Group Five had hit a home run.

When investigators got to the apartment on Burns Court, they had to kick down the door. The sickly smell of cocaine in the apartment almost knocked them out. The windows were barred and the agents couldn't open them. Some of them left the apartment to get some air. The rugs were infested with coke and the bathtub was crammed with kilo packages of white powder.

The occupants had fled, but the investigators hit another home run. They found 44 pounds of cocaine in a huge safe, machine guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, bullet-proof vests, drivers' licenses, business cards, an aircraft registration, an automobile registration, coded customer lists, and more financial records.26 Group Five seized books and manuals that explained how to use firearms, including a Marine Corps manual entitled Destruction by Demolition, Incendiaries and Sabotage. "Nobody had ever seen 44 pounds of cocaine in New York City before," Robinson recalled.

John Fallon, the DEA's Northeast regional director, said the weapons collection was the largest ever taken by authorities in a coke bust. Fallon publicly worried that a war for dominance of the Big Apple's cocaine market, similar to the one going on Miami, would break out among local criminal gangs.

The publicity generated by the Burns Court bust was a wake-up call. "The DEA brass in New York City sent the Washington headquarters information providing evidence that cocaine was becoming a problem, not just in Miami but also New York City," Crawford recalled. "The DEA started to take the drug seriously. It began assigning more agents to cocaine investigations."

While Burns Court was being inspected, Rich Crawford and another investigator checked out The Towers, a high-rise apartment overlooking Long Island Sound in Bayside, Queens. There, they found Santacruz's authentic Colombian passport. And all along they had thought Victor Crespo was Santacruz's real name. The detectives also found bank records of Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez connecting them directly to drug sales in New York.

Inside the safe houses and stash pads, the detectives found a mountain of evidence: adding machines, money wrappers, coded customer lists, counterfeit bill detection equipment, and adding machine tape with a total of $700,740. Group Five could now begin an in-depth financial investigation of the organization. The investigators hauled the evidence back to headquarters, where they split it up and spent several months going through every scrap of paper, tracing bank records, breaking codes and trying to see what other stashes they could uncover.

When Group Five investigators finally decoded the financial records, they found it hard to comprehend the amount of money involved. In three weeks, Patino had collected $6,932,000 from just 13 customers, and the organization had made 47 cash deliveries to money couriers. The amounts of cash delivered were staggering: $824,000, $722,000, $798,000, and in one instance $1,721,000. And where was the money going? All over the globe, to safe havens in Colombia, Panama, and Peru, as well as banking institutions in Europe, Asia, and the Bahamas.

The investigation uncovered some gold nuggets. The agents had seen a photo of Victor Crespo. He was the man they had stopped in the parking lot at JFK airport. When Crespo's name was put through the DEA's Naddis computer system, routine details of the life of mystery trafficker Jose Santacruz began to emerge. He was an unmarried, 35-year-old Puerto Rican whom the Argentine Interpol had connected to an attempted murder. Authorities also tied Santacruz to another rising drug trafficker named Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, who was making quite a name for himself in his native Cali as an entrepreneur, banker and businessman.

The group went back through some of the old cases and began to make connections as early as 1976. For instance, they pulled up a file providing details about the police seizure of 280 kilograms of cocaine paste and a Lodestar aircraft and the arrest of nine members of the Victor Crespo organization. Most important for later in the investigation, the records revealed a stamp for the T.E.A. Manufacturing Company and deposits in the name of a company named Sandra Ana S.A., registered in Panama. T.E.A., it turned out, was the front company, while Sandra Ana S.A. was merely used as a post office box for receiving bank balances. The sole owner? Jose Santacruz.

The surveillance, long hours, digging and persistence had paid off. They had finally uncovered the organization responsible for the growing cocaine problem in New York City. It was based in Cali and its leaders were Jose Santacruz and Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez. They headed a complex international criminal enterprise, reaching from the coca fields in Peru and Bolivia to the processing labs in Colombia to the streets of New York and other U.S. cities.

As the investigation continued, Robinson, who knew no Spanish, joked that he was getting punch-drunk with all the Spanish surnames swirling around in his head. To add to the confusion, some of the bad guys had more code names than CIA spies in a major intelligence operation. Robinson and Crawford normally didn't have a problem finding confidential informants to further their investigations, but the Colombians didn't trust outsiders, so the investigators had to gather most of their evidence the time-consuming, old-fashioned way: through surveillance.

Group Five continued to make arrests, but they didn't seem to make a dent in the organization's supply of available people. Those arrested and convicted kept their mouths shut and went to jail for 10-to-15 years, ignoring offers of lighter sentences in return for cooperation. Even if they'd wanted to sing, they really couldn't tell much. "The organization operated through independent cells, and the members of each cell didn't know each other," Robinson explained. "When we arrested someone, he would say, 'I don't know anything. I've just been dealing with one guy.'"

If suspects made bail, Group Five never saw them again, and this would drive Robinson nuts. The Colombians were flight risks and menaces to society, Robinson would tell the judges. They shouldn't be allowed bail. "It took them [the judges] about a year after we began the investigation to realize this," Robinson recalled. "We named the arrangement 'the Colombian Acquittal Bail.' The bail was automatic acquittal for any member of the organization because they would flee to Colombia."

Arranging the bail for the organization was a group of American attorneys who, beginning in the late 1970s, had no problem taking drug dollars for their services as the Colombian version of house counsel for the mob. In 1979, one attorney met with Santacruz in Miami to discuss a trial in progress in New York City involving Santacruz's men. Santacruz asked the attorney to gather information for him about the arrest of one of his distributors in the city. The two discussed and agreed a fee for the work. This same attorney, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York, was usually the first to be concerned about any potential names of informants and statements during pre-trial discussions with the U.S. Attorney's Office. Four years later, an informant told law enforcement that this same attorney was providing Santacruz with trial and hearing information after gang members were arrested. The lawyers wanted their clients from the Cali organization to go to trial so they could find out during the discovery phase what kind of evidence the prosecutors had.

Agents had to be creative in their investigative techniques, given the limitations of the technology of the day. The NYDETF, for example, didn't have ways of wiretapping public telephones. "You could give us a number and we could tell you it's a pay phone, but we didn't have any technology for it," said Robinson. Group Five made extensive use of pen registers. "We didn't need a court order for a pen register as we did for a wire tap," Crawford said. "We would see that a call was being made and then the person would leave the apartment. We would follow them, get the information off the phone records, check them, and find out where the call was going to."

The organization was clever, to be sure, but it also could be as ruthless as it needed to be. One Colombian suspected of talking to the police returned to her apartment to find her babysitter gone and her three children in the cellar, stabbed to death. Later the Group Five investigation learned that prospective employees had to give the names of relatives in Colombia. There was no doubt that if you betrayed the bosses of Cali, someone in your family was going to pay dearly.

The organization was cocky, too. In September Group Five investigators followed Fernando Carmona and some of his associates to JFK airport, but the Colombians spotted the detectives and in turn began following them. Then they took photos. Robinson's jaw dropped; one of them even had a video camera. It wouldn't be the last time that would happen. "They had no respect for law enforcement, so at times they got sloppy and made mistakes and that gave us a chance to catch up to them," Crawford said.

Over time, the investigators discerned a pattern to the organization's modus operandi, but in its sophistication it was unlike any they had seen in their professional careers. The Colombians used a seemingly endless supply of false passports, they changed phones and residences as often as changing their underwear, and they maintained separate apartments and stash houses for drugs, money and weapons.

By tracing telephone numbers in the records seized in the Patino bust, Group Five was able to connect the airline registration for T.E.A. Manufacturing to a Tulio E. Ayerbe. Further investigation of the airline registration revealed that the plane had been modified for what looked like drug transportation: short runways and long-range flights. Further digging revealed that Ayerbe, under the name of Juan Baez, had bought a Lockheed Lodestar that had been seized in Peru with 192 pounds of cocaine paste. The follow-up police investigation connected the airplane to a Victor Crespo.

Meanwhile, Group Five put Ayerbe under surveillance and hooked a pen register on his telephone. He was making a lot of calls to a condominium complex on Grove Island on the South Florida coast near Miami. In February 1980, Group Five agents went to Miami to follow up. When shown a photo of Jose Santacruz (aka Victor Crespo), the superintendent said, yes, he was with Mr. Fernando Guiterrez, the man who rented the apartment when he signed the papers. Crawford pulled out another photo. "Yes, that's Mister Guiterrez," the super confirmed. Mr. Guiterrez was none other than Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela.

Group Five was now on a roll. The investigators uncovered another Ayerbe apartment in Hallendale, Fla., under a phony name. They connected Ayerbe to the purchase and delivery of two safes to a warehouse near a private airfield in Opa-Locka, a rural community close to Miami Beach. Twenty-six days after arriving from New York, Robinson and other Group Five investigators raided the warehouse. The hits just kept getting better – 285 kilos of cocaine valued at $7.5 million was seized, the biggest bust ever at that time.

Gilberto Rodriguez realized he had a serious problem and decided to move his operation to a much quieter place. He ordered his subordinate Jaime Munera to pay $800,000 for a 622-acre cattle ranch in Hope Hull, Alabama. Munera built a 3,600-foot airstrip on the Bar-J Ranch, but he blew his cover by doing a stupid thing: buying 200 head of cattle for cash and at a price well above the herd's market value. The man who sold Munera the cattle mentioned the sale to his cousin, who just happened to work for the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. A computer check revealed that the DEA was investigating Munera, so Alabama police notified the NYDETF, and once again Group Five detectives left New York City for long hours, boring nights, and no extra pay to help their colleagues in Alabama pursue the Colombian connection.

In September 1981, authorities seized the ranch, charging that the property had been bought with money generated by a multi-million-dollar Colombian drug trafficking gang and was intended to serve as a base for shipping cocaine. The seizure included machinery, equipment, livestock, a private plane, and the proceeds of two bank accounts belonging to Munera. The property was valued at $1 million.

Group Five had much to show for its hard work: an impressive list of successful inroads into the cartel's drug operations. Since September 1978, NYDETF had been responsible for seizing $2 million in cash, 70 weapons, and more than 430 pounds of cocaine with a street value of $50 million. Law enforcement officers had identified some 40 members of the organization and prosecutors had convicted many of them on cocaine trafficking charges. Group Five had exposed a drug ring with the organization, resources and nerve to turn their city into Cocaine Central of the United States. The three major godfathers – Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and Jose Santacruz – had been identified and their carefully woven cover was blown.

But three years after Group Five had followed up on the confidential informant's lead that took them to Nelson Gomez and the red Chevy Impala, the reality was this – they had stung the men from Cali but not crippled them.

Note: This article is an excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk's Drug Lords: the Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel, chronicling how the longest running and most important investigation in DEA history began. Originally published in 2005 in paperback by Milo Books, the book has been expanded and updated to include information about the successful completion of the Cali Cartel takedown. It will be available for purchase this July (2007). For background see Crime Magazine's The Fall of the Cali Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk.

Ron Chepesiuk (www.ronchepesiuk.com) is also the author of Gangsters of Harlem(www.gangstersofharlem.com) and Black Gangsters of Chicago (www.blackgangstersofchicago.com), to be published this August (2007).

October 14, 2007

The prologue from Ron Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez's upcoming book, Superfly: The True Untold Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster. (A major movie about Lucas entitled American Gangster and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe will be in theaters beginning Nov. 2, 2007.) The book investigates Lucas's life and criminal career and the claims to fame the movie makes about him. This includes Lucas's relationship with legendary Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, his connection to La Cosa Nostra, the money he made in the drug trade and the development of the Asian drug pipeline. Lucas's life as a government informant is also examined. Beginning Oct. 25, 2007, Superfly can be purchased from the web site franklucasamericangangster.com. A documentary is also available.

by Ron Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez

Prologue

The law enforcement raid came on a crisp, cold night in late January, 1975, without a high profile. No involved planning. No SWAT team. No large show of force. No TV cameras. There was plenty of man power, though: a task force consisting of 10 agents from Group 22 of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and 10 New York Police Department detectives attached to the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB).

The task force felt confident that it would face little resistance and certainly no bodyguards wanting to disrupt the raid and cause trouble. After all, it was the personal residence of the drug dealer and his family lived with him.

Group 22 had been investigating the Gambino crime family of East Harlem for some time, and now the long hours and hard work were about to pay off. In 1975 the Gambino family was one of the five families that ruled the powerful Italian American mob, La Cosa Nostra, and controlled organized crime in New York City

The Gambino godfather, the "Boss of all Bosses," was the 5'7" hawk nosed, unassuming legendary mobster and close friend of popular crooner, Frank Sinatra, named Carlos Gambino. Four years before, after Carlos's wife died of cancer, Uncle Sam tried to deport him to Sicily in Italy, but the godfather's lawyers convinced the court that their client had heart trouble and would not survive the trip. The deportation was stopped, but the OCCB put Gambino under constant surveillance, some would say harassment; they even parked a car round the clock in front of his home.

Under Gambino's leadership, his family became involved in large scale drug trafficking. The police, however, arrested two Gambino soldiers on drug trafficking charges, and, facing the prospect of long prison sentences, they began to sing like the proverbial canary. The soldiers revealed that one of their biggest customers for heroin was a prominent and flamboyant black drug dealer named Frank Lucas, who liked to call himself "Superfly."

The informants' information allowed the authorities to obtain a search warrant, which authorized the raid that was about to begin on Lucas's house at 933 Sheffield Road in Teaneck, a small comfortable suburb in New Jersey. With a population of about 42,500, Teaneck had the distinction of being the first town in America where a white majority had voluntarily voted for the integration of the community's schools. But tensions flared in Teaneck in the late 1960s, as African-Americans moved into town, and whites began fleeing for parts Caucasian.

The racial tension did not bother Frank "Superfly" Lucas, who enjoyed the quiet suburban life after long nights on the streets of Harlem peddling his heroin. Business was booming and he had more money than he could spend and hide. Moreover, he had beaten a big rap that could have sent him to prison well into the next century.

On this January evening, however, Superfly's world was about to be turned upside down. The strike task force knew that Lucas had a gardener, but the lawn looked in bad shape. A silver Mercedes Benz and baby blue Thunderbird were parked in front.

After descending on Lucas's house, several members of the 20-man strike force fanned out and surrounded the house. It was normal police procedure. "We used to say to each other when we went on a raid: "take your baseball glove with you,'" Joe Sullivan, then a young DEA agent with three years' experience, recalled with a laugh. "People inside the house would rush up to the attic and throw drugs, handguns and money out the window, if they heard the agents at the door announcing their authority. It was a common headache for us."

The strike task force banged on the front door. "This is the police! Open up! We have a search warrant." The strike task force could hear panic and rapid movement inside and then a female screeching: "Where's the money!" We got to get rid of it." One of the people inside began bounding up the stairs. Outside the house, strike task force members watched as bags were thrown out the window.

When the task force barged through the door, they saw a big black man dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt shuffling cautiously towards them. The team identified the man from a mug shot as Frank "Superfly" Lucas. He looked as if his life had just flashed by him. "Let's see the warrants, officers," Lucas drawled in a strong southern accent.

Joe Rollo, a NYPD supervisor, handed the warrant to Lucas. "We're going to search your house," Rollo said. "We want everybody to go and wait in the dining room."

Lucas, two kids and a woman, who looked like a nanny or housekeeper, obeyed the order A few minutes later, they were joined by Julie, Lucas's petite, 28-year Puerto Rican wife, who had tried to sneak downstairs undetected. The team allowed Julie to go to the kitchen to get some milk for the kids. One officer followed her just to be sure she did not grab a gun. Julie turned around and snapped: "Why the hell are you following me? Where the hell can I go?"

Lucas barked in a deep, booming voice: "Calm down, woman! You're making too much noise." Julia was pretty, to be sure, sexy, in fact, and some of the task force members watched as she returned in a huff to the living room with the milk.

The house inside was larger than it appeared from the front. Lucas had built some extensions, including a huge playroom with a pool table, a ping pong table and a bar. In the master bedroom was a large closet containing shelves about 18 to 20 feet long. Joe Sullivan peaked inside the closet and was dazzled by a rainbow of colors: at least 200 pairs of lilac, purple, lime green shoes….alligator shoes, snake skin shoes, platform shoes…. "I had never seen anything like that in my life," Sullivan recalled. "I was a poor kid from Queen's (New York), who was lucky to wear one pair of shoes to school. Lucas had more shoes than he needed in a lifetime. It really said something about the guy."

Finding evidence was surprisingly easy. There were no guns or dope, but scattered throughout the house were bags of what Sullivan called "chump change," paper bags stuffed with "street money" in mostly $1 to $20 bills, with the occasional $100 thrown in.

Obviously, the money had not been counted, and the strike task force knew that the evidence would strengthen the charge that the house's owner was involved in a criminal conspiracy to sell drugs. "Lucas had no means of employment and a jury would think: 'What does this guy do?'" Sullivan explained. "'He does not work, but he's got all this money in the house.'"

Counting the money made the raid seem as if it had lasted a lifetime. And it did not help matters that agents who had surrounded the house brought in more of the green stuff in the bags that Julie had tossed through the second floor bathroom window.

Julie became agitated again when asked the obvious question: "I didn't throw any god damn money out of the window," she insisted.

In looking for evidence, the strike task force divided into teams of three. One member looked for drugs, money and guns. A second agent took notes when evidence was found and recorded the seizure in a notebook. A third agent acted as a witness. As the agents found money, they brought it into the center of the living room. There, several task force members made a big circle around the pile. Everybody was in plain view of all the others present, and they were able to observe each other.

If an outside observer had encountered the scene, he might have thought that the authorities did not trust its task force to do the honest thing. Actually, the authorities were just protecting themselves against the potential charge off corruption. In April 1970, New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay had formed the five-member Knapp Commission to investigate corruption charges in the NYPD.

In the public hearings that began in October, 1971, the public heard shocking testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Police Commission Howard R. Leary, corrupt policemen, victims of police shakedowns and whistle blowers like Sgt. David Durk and Frank Serpico, who later became famous as model for the character in the 1973 movie, Serpico, starring Al Pacino in the lead role.

One of the Knapp Commission witnesses was Waverly Logan, a member of the NYPD's Preventive Enforcement Patrol, an elite unit of 20 black and Puerto Rican patrolmen with the specific assignment of reducing crime. Logan testified he took $1,500 a month in bribes and that police officers in Harlem routinely paid off informants with heroin in return for such stolen goods as cigarettes and whiskey. The NYPD subsequently dismissed the former policeman for taking a $100 bribe.

On Nov. 19, 1971, New York City established the OCCB to centralize organized crime enforcement. The objective: Combat potential corruption problems and unify under the bureau all operations of enforcement prone to corruption, such as vice, narcotics and organized crime. Still, law enforcement remained under intense scrutiny. "The Knapp Commission hearings forced law enforcement in (New York City) to be extra careful about how we investigated crime," Sullivan recalled.

It took the strike task force several hours to count the money in Lucas' house. Meanwhile, the streetwise gangster knew it was best to stay quiet, and he looked on impassively. Julie fell silent, resigned to the fact that the evening would not have a happy ending.

Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the strike task force told Lucas the money they had counted totaled $584,683. The gangster nodded; he did not appear to have a problem with the count. "We have enough evidence to arrest you," Rollo told Lucas and then read him his Miranda rights. Julia was also arrested for obstruction of justice. Throwing the money out of the window had not been the brightest of moves.

With Lucas and Julie handcuffed and in tow, the strike task force began streaming out of the house. To their surprise, outside waiting for them were the number two and number three officials in the DEA's New York office: Frank Monastero, the deputy director, and Jim Hunt, the head of enforcement. It was not a high profile bust, so something important must be up to get those two suits out of bed late at night

Both of them were no-nonsense type of guys. Reserved and always impeccably dressed, Monastero had served as an Internal Revenue Service inspector for several years before joining the DEA's predecessor, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where he worked in Internal Affairs. The burly Hunt was a World War II veteran who had survived German machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy in France. Jesuit educated, Hunt was a good amateur boxer and a graduate of Fordham University. "I remember Hunt as an intellectual tough guy," Sullivan recalled. "He liked to mix expletives with choice six syllable words that you had to look up in Webster's dictionary."

It was now biting cold outside, and the strike task force members could see their breath. But the two DEA officials stopped them and gave explicit orders. "I want you to line up and turn around and search the man behind you," Monastero instructed. "I'll start by searching the first man in line."

Some of the men laughed and thought their bosses were joking. Sullivan, though, was not one of them. He felt insulted. Here the strike task force had spent hours taking extraordinary precautions in collecting and counting Lucas's dirty money and their bosses upstairs still did not trust them. The pat down revealed nothing; no one had as much as a nickel in his pockets. Yet, years later, Sullivan recognized the procedure as the best move his bosses could have made. It provided irrefutable proof that the raid was squeaky clean.

The next day, Lucas had a chance to talk to his lawyer, and he began to change his tune. Now he said that the money count was not right; in fact, a lot of the money was missing. The strike task force had ripped him off, Superfly complained to the press. It had to be as much $10 million, he later told Mark Jacobson, the journalist who would make Lucas Hollywood material and famous as the mythical embodiment of the black-American gangster.

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand. What's that?" Superfly boasted. "Shit. In Las Vegas I lost 500 Gs in half an hour playing baccarat with a green haired whore." Later, Superfly would tell a television interviewer that the figure was actually $20 million. With time, the story has kept getting longer like Pinocchio's nose.

Today, Joe Sullivan and other DEA agents who investigated Lucas say anybody willing to look objectively at the details of the raid on Lucas's New Jersey residence can see that nobody ripped off $10 million, let alone $20 million. Strict precautions were in place and imagine trying to move and hide that huge amount of money.

Lucas has always been adamant that the strike task force stole his money, so some DEA agents suggest a different explanation. Maybe someone close to Superfly, who had access to his home, stole the money. It's an explanation that Superfly, a gangster who has claimed to be the biggest, smartest and baddest dope dealer in the history of the planet, would not want to hear.

Our investigation into Lucas's legendary career follows. It reveals a lot of things that Superfly, nearly a quarter of a century removed from the scene of his crimes, does not want to hear, nor does he want the public to know, given the Hollywood movie that will make him famous.

The Raid in Teaneck is the prologue from Ron Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez's upcoming book, Superfly: The True Untold Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster. (A major movie about Lucas entitled American Gangster and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe will be in theaters beginning Nov. 2, 2007.) The book investigates Lucas's life and criminal career and the claims to fame the movie makes about him. This includes Lucas's relationship with legendary Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, his connection to La Cosa Nostra, the money he made in the drug trade and the development of the Asian drug pipeline. Lucas's life as a government informant is also examined. Beginning Oct. 25, 2007, Superfly can be purchased from the web site franklucasamericangangster.com. A documentary is also available.

Ron Chepesiuk is the co-founder of Street Certified Entertainment, a media company specializing in true crime and gangster books and documentaries and new media products. He is also a Fulbright Scholar and investigative journalist specializing in true and organized crime, who has authored 23 books and more than 3,500 articles. His true and organized crime books include Drug Lords: the Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel, Gangsters of Harlem: The Gritty Underworld of New York's Most Famous Neighborhood, and Black Gangsters of Chicago. He is currently serving an expert consultant to the History Channel's "Gangland" documentary series.

Anthony Gonzalez is the co-founder of Street Certified Entertainment. He has also directed numerous, music videos for rap artists, produced and directed the documentary, "Hell Up in East Harlem," and served as an assistant director for several documentaries, including a best-selling one about Guy Fisher, a legendary organized crime figure from Harlem, and "The Larry Davis Story," a HBO Urban World film festival documentary winner.

February 20, 2007

Frank Mathews

by Ron Chepesiuk

 In May of 1969, detective Joe Kowalski, a seven-year veteran with the New York Police Department, was living at 130 Clarkson Avenue in a quiet, low-to-middle income neighborhood in Brooklyn. One day, the apartment building's parking lot began to look like a luxury car sales lot, as people began streaming into the building at all hours of the day to see a new resident who had moved into a three-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. "I didn't like him the first time I saw him," Kowalski recalled in reference to his new neighbor. "He was loud and flashy, drove fancy cars and had no visible means of support. His friends would block the driveway with their cars and park in other people's parking spaces. Some of them carried paper bags that looked as if they might contain money. As a cop, I knew I needed to pay attention to them."

Kowalski put the new neighbor and his visitors under surveillance and began taking down license plate numbers. As a detective in the NYPD's Intelligence Division, Kowalski had no problem doing background checks. When he put the license plate numbers through Motor Vehicles, he was not surprised to learn that many of the cars were registered to known drug dealers living not just in the Big Apple but also in cities throughout the eastern U.S., including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, and in Durham, N.C.

September 7, 2007

Salvatore Giancana

by Ron Chepesiuk

Editor's Note: "Policy" is a form of lottery in which a ticket is purchased and numbers selected, with the winning numbers announced at a drawing. No one knows for sure how the policy game began, but the Sixteenth century European countries were using the lottery to raise money for the state. In the United States, Virginia first introduced a lottery game in the Seventeenth century, and it spread across the country during the next century.

The policy game first appeared in the 1880s in New Orleans, and then spread to New York, Chicago and other cities with large African-American populations. Some historians believe that the name "policy" derives from the practice of blacks playing the game with money meant for insurance policies.

In the policy game, 78 numbers (1 to 78) are wrapped in special containers and dropped in a drum-shaped container or "wheel" from which numbers are drawn. The player selects a certain amount of numbers, the most common being three numbers, or a "gig," betting that the combination of numbers chosen will "fall" or win in the next drawing of winning numbers. The policy operator was known as a "banker" and the games they ran as "banks."

Once back on the streets, Sam "Mooney" Giancana wasted no time pursuing his take over plan for the Black Belt policy racket. He followed up on Ed Jones's jailhouse offer to help set him up in policy and arranged a meeting with Ed's brother, George, at the family's Ben Franklin store. The following evening, he met with Paul Ricca and Jake Guzik, two leading members of The Outfit, Chicago's powerful white mafia.

Giancana was confident that the mob bosses would see the light. "Once those guys see there's money in this. Money…big money…Well, shit. I'll be on my way," Sam told his brother Chuck.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Ricca and Guzik were part of the so called "Big Six" who ruled The Outfit. The other heavyweight godfathers included Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky and Longy Zwillman. As a young and ambitious gangster, Guzik developed a close relationship with Al Capone, who came to depend on him while organizing the Chicago underworld. Guzik was the Chicago mob's financial wizard for nearly two decades, and his role in arranging payoffs to police and politicians was so valuable that his mob colleagues nicknamed him the "Greasy Thumb."

April 18, 2010 Special to Crime Magazine

This is an excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk’s book:The Trafficantes: Godfathers from Tampa, Florida: The Mafia, the CIA and the JFK Assassination. The book is available for purchase from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and www.ronchepesiuk.com.

by Ron Chepesiuk

When the Mob put a $100,000 contract on his life, Joe Valachi decided to tell all to the authorities, and in 1962 he turned informant. Valachi became one of the most valuable federal witnesses ever, compelling the U.S. government to put Valachi in the Federal Witness Protection program and to guard him with up to 200 U.S. marshals.

In his nationally televised appearance before the McClellan Committee in 1963, Valachi formally identified 317 organized crime members, including Santo Trafficante. During the hearings, Trafficante’s photo appeared at the top of a chart depicting the organizational structure of the Tampa crime family. Santo liked to keep a low profile, but the American public now knew him as one of the country’s most important mobsters.

Tampa Bay Florida

But by the time Valachi testified, the FBI already knew that Santo Trafficante Jr. was a major force in the Mafia. The Bureau had him under constant surveillance while it gathered intelligence on him. The FBI’s Tampa field office was opened in 1960 to monitor the Tampa Mafia. Joseph F. Santoima headed the office until his retirement in 1973 after 33 years of service with the FBI. Under Santoima’s leadership, the Tampa office spent considerable resources monitoring Santo Trafficante, Jr. Wherever the godfather went, the FBI was sure to follow, and they had no problem letting its target know it. Files released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that the FBI’s field offices in Miami and Tampa played the major role in the surveillance. For nearly three decades, the field offices kept voluminous files, containing memos, reports, newspaper clippings, telegrams, coded messages and other records. In all the FBI collected more than 38,000 pages of information on Trafficante.

The intelligence gathering began in earnest about 1958 when Alberto Anastasia was shot to death as he sat in a barber’s chair in New York City. The files confirm that Trafficante had been at Anastasia’s dinner party the night before and that Trafficante had checked out of the hotel two hours before Anastasia was hit. The files cover Trafficante’s days in pre-revolutionary war Cuba, including his arrest and incarceration in Trescornia prison, which, the field reports noted, was more Club Med than Alcatraz. As the files reveal, Trafficante’s family and friends could bring food in and even enjoy entertainment with the prisoner.

Santo Terfficante Jr.

The St. Petersburg Times newspaper, which got the FOIA files released, reported that FBI agents tailing Trafficante often recorded the mileage of his Dodge Dart or Chevy whenever they found the cars unattended. Agents would look inside Trafficante’s car even though they did not have a warrant. One time, agents found four sealed thank you notes, a bank envelope and a car service center receipt, indicating that Trafficante had paid $110 for four Atlas tires. The FBI was a stickler for detail. For instance, in one 1966 report, an agent spent considerable space in a report describing how Trafficante got a flat tire on a trip to Miami.

His report recorded that it took him from 3:10 p.m. to 3:24 p.m. to change the Dodge Dart’s front left tire. The authorities were interested in every little detail of Trafficante’s life and in every move he made. In making his report for August 21, 1961, narcotics agent Oscar Leon Davis wrote that on his most recent visit to Miami, Trafficante purchased a pair of contact lenses and 12 pair of prescription glasses, all with different frames. Davis wrote: “The Miami Police Department’s Intelligence Unit is of the opinion that the purchase of those glasses of different frames could be that he wishes to change his appearance or that he plans to leave the country and wants to take an ample supply with him.”

No part of Trafficante’s life was out of bounds for the FBI’s investigation. For instance, when Trafficante’s wife was hospitalized at Tampa’s St. Joseph’s Hospital in 1966, the agents tailed the godfather on his daily visits to see her. The agents would follow him to the airport where they watched him buy newspapers before boarding a plane. Trafficante would sometimes try and shake the FBI tail by buying the airline tickets under an assumed name. On one occasion, he exhibited a sense of humor using the name of the agent who was following him to purchase a ticket.

But files show that the FBI seemed to know when Trafficante was scheduled to return to Tampa. When his plane landed, they would resume the surveillance and continue tailing him once again, as he made his daily rounds about Tampa before returning to his home on Bristol Street. Trafficante would also play games with FBI agents by talking in Italian when he knew they were nearby trying to ease drop on his conversations. Apparently, none of the agents tailing him understood Italian.

But on one occasion the normally low-key mobster blew his top. In 1967, the local police met Trafficante at the Miami International Airport and told him that he was no longer welcome in South Florida. A livid Trafficante shouted at the police officers after they asked for identification: “You sons of a bitch! You can’t do this to me. This isn’t Russia!” As a Miami Herald reporter and a photographer looked on, Trafficante was arrested and charged with vagrancy, disorderly conduct and possession of drugs, which turned out to be diet pills his doctor had prescribed.

According to Tampa Mob historian Scott M. Deitche, “This was just one of many examples of the bullish tactics law enforcement used in their attempts to rattle mobsters under their surveillance.” The police eventually dropped the charges when Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano, threatened legal action after a photo of his client appeared in The Miami Herald. Trafficante did sue the Miami police for $1 in damages for violating his civil rights, but the lawsuit got tied up in the courts, and the mobster eventually dropped it.

J. Edgar Hoover was made aware that the Trafficante surveillance had the potential for legal problems. In 1967 he wrote a memo to his Tampa and Miami field offices, warning his agents to be “circumspect and discrete…so there can be no basis for any allegations of harassment and to avoid, in so far as possible, any attacks on the FBI’s investigative procedures by the hoodlums and their attorneys.”

The FBI’s Trafficante investigation, however, was hampered by internal struggles within the FBI over who would be responsible for the surveillance. Eventually, the surveillance was split, with the Tampa office responsible for central Florida and the Miami office for the South Florida area. As part of its intelligence gathering operation, the FBI read the local newspaper regularly for any news about Trafficante’s activities. This included weekly wedding announcements and funeral notices. “Whenever a paper in Tampa, St. Petersburg or Miami wrote about Trafficante, the FBI would immediately wire the story to other FBI field offices nationwide,” The St. Petersburg Times revealed.   

One newspaper article from the file described Trafficante as a Tampa mobster whose “influence extended throughout Florida.” Despite the intense surveillance, Trafficante tried to carry on with business as usual. On September 22, 1966, he was attending a Mob meeting at the La Stella Italian restaurant in Queens, New York, when two NYPD officers walked in. Trafficante was in the company of some of the city’s biggest crime bosses, including Carlo Gambino, boss of the Gambino crime family; Joe Colombo, boss of the Profaci crime family, Thomas Eboli, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carlo Marcello and his brother Joe of New Orleans.

“What’s the meeting about?” the police officers asked the gathering. Marcello answered: “I decided to see some of my old friends so we all got together for lunch. Sure, some of these fellows have been in the rackets, but if they’re in the Mafia, I don’t know a damn thing about that. This was strictly a social gathering. That’s all there was to it.”

The powerful godfathers were meeting, the authorities learned later, to decide who would be the big godfather in New Orleans. Carlos Marcello controlled the scene, but Anthony Carolla, an ambitious up-and-coming scion of a New Orleans godfather, wanted a bigger share of the action. The Mafia dons had actually made their decision in favor of Carlos Marchello at an earlier meeting, and this was, as Marcello said, a social gathering.

The police officers, however, did not like the answer, and they arrested the 13 men present at the meeting. The charge – consorting with known criminals. They were taken to a local police precinct, stripped down to their underwear, fingerprinted and held on $100,000 bond. The mobsters were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, but each of them invoked the Fifth Amendment. Unable to bring any charges that would stick, the police had to release them.

Undeterred, Trafficante and Marcello consorted once again by going to lunch together the afternoon of their release. Trafficante was allowed to return to Florida, but he had to travel to New York five times to appear before a grand jury. In true godfather fashion, he said nothing to the jury except when he invoked the Fifth Amendment.

In October 1967, another grand jury began hearings into organized crime’s relationship with Tampa’s liquor industry. Several suspected mobsters, including members of the Trafficante crime family, had to appear before the panel.

All of them invoked the Fifth Amendment or gave evasive answers. Trafficante took the Fifth 80 times. On October 26, 1967, the grand jury indicted Frank Albano, the son-in-law of Santo’s brother Sam, and one of Santo’s brothers, Henry Trafficante. The court charged the defendants with unlawfully labeling liquor bottles and released them on $76,500 bail.

The authorities were trying to rattle the Tampa crime boss and to force him into making a mistake, but they were not succeeding. Despite the close surveillance, Trafficante continued to travel the country on Mob business. A July 10, 1968 Dade County OCB memo noted that he had traveled to Hong Kong, Thailand and other Asian countries and that various intelligence sources were fairly certain that a large scale narcotics operation was the reason.

An informant advised the OCB that on July 8, 1968, Trafficante had visited the residence of Evaristo Garcia and advised him to be careful in moving ahead with the plans for Ecuador. Trafficante told Garcia that a $10 million deal had “fallen through.” That remark about their Ecuador plans, the OCB speculated, most likely referred to the proposed construction of a casino at Guayaguil, Ecuador, which was to be used as a center for organized crime activities in Latin America.

The FBI began investigating the disappearance of an associate of Trafficante named Luigi Pietro Coliachin, also known as Louis P. Brady. A FBI report noted that a special agent of the FBI’s Miami office last saw Brady on August 9, 1963. Brady’s wife, Frances, told the FBI that she had last been with her husband at the Capra Restaurant in Miami Beach. The Bradys and their son were dining with friends, awaiting Santo Trafficante, who telephoned to say he would be arriving shortly. Before that happened, though, Brady sent his family home.

The wife never saw her husband again. In its report, the FBI noted: “Mrs. Brady is of the opinion that Trafficante is responsible for her husband’s disappearance.” The intelligence reports show that the authorities were certainly aware of Trafficante’s movements and activities, but it did not seem to make a difference. Despite all the information being collected, they were still far from building a solid case against the mobster. As the 1960s came to a close, the authorities were no closer to nabbing the Tampa godfather than they were a decade before when their surveillance first began.

-- Ron Chepesiuk is an award winning freelance journalist and Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh and consultant to the History Channel’s “Gangland” television series. He is the author of several true crime books, including “Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel” and “Gangsters of Harlem.”  His next book, Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and His Band of Brothers, will appear as an e-book in late April and print book in late June. Go to www.ikeatkinsonkingpin.com/

June, 15, 2010 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk’s new book, Sergeant Smack, The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson., Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers. (www.ikeatkinsonkingpin.com)

by Ron Chepesiuk

PROLOGUE

December 9, 1972—Itwas to be a routine flight, one of dozens the retired U.S. Army Master Sergeant had taken since 1966 when he first arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. Given the colorful nickname “Sergeant Smack” by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 47-year old Leslie “Ike” Atkinson, the squat retired U.S. Army master sergeant, was dressed appropriately for the long flight to the U.S. mainland: khaki pants, casual loafers and a loose white short-sleeve sports shirt. With his short-cropped curly black hair and military bearing, Atkinson looked like one of the scores of American servicemen, active and retired, black and white, who came to Bangkok in search of romance and excitement.

With Atkinson in the black Mercedes that sped through the chaotic streets of Bangkok was 30-year-old Thomas Southerland, a friend and fellow African American from Wilmington, North Carolina, whom Atkinson had known for nearly a decade. Like his companion, the trim, tight-lipped Southerland, or Sonny, as friends knew him, was a gambler—a card shark and hustler—and, their paths had crossed often in the numerous craps and poker games common in the black communities of eastern North Carolina. Southerland had visited Bangkok frequently, and over time Atkinson had become almost like an older brother to him.

Relaxing in the car, Ike assessed Southerland and could not help but admire what he saw. Fitted resplendent in an Army uniform complete with battle and service ribbons, Sonny looked like a war hero. He carried a military card that identified his rank as sergeant. His special orders explained that he had served a 12-year hitch in the Army, and they instructed anyone reading the orders to please accord all privileges worthy of such service. In reality, Southerland’s orders were totally bogus, forged by Atkinson himself, who, as a retired 20-year service veteran, knew the military system inside and out. His “privileges” made obtaining military uniforms, NCO stripes and badges as easy as shopping for groceries.

Forging IDs was so easy to do, in fact, that Atkinson did it himself in the comfort of his bungalow on a klong (a small canal), located in the heart of Bangkok. Southerland could spend several years in prison for impersonating a U.S. military non-commissioned officer; it was a serious criminal offense. But he looked confident; after all, he had performed this role before—as a courier, carrying heroin in the standard army AWOL bags. Specifically designed for military travel, the bags looked like gym bags, except that they folded out like an accordion and contained hidden pockets. The false bottom of the AWOL bag had been stitched and fitted to carry two kilos each of a potent type of heroin commonly known on the “street” as “China White.”

On this particular flight, Atkinson and Southerland each carried an AWOL bag, in addition to a suitcase. One kilo of heroin could fetch as much $50,000 in the U.S. Not bad for a $16,000 investment and a flight’s work. Military servicemen can fly on a military flight or “hop,” so long as space is available. The delays between flights can vary from an hour or two to as many as 24 hours. At times the wait and uncertainty can be aggravating, but invariably, the serviceman will get to his destination safely. And, of course, the best thing about the hops—they are free.

On this typically sweltering Bangkok day, the two travelers found space available for a grueling trans-Atlantic flight that would take them to Honolulu, Hawaii, via a relatively short hop to Okinawa and on to Travis Air Force Base in the San Francisco Bay area before flying cross-continent to the airbase at Dover, Delaware. The tired travelers would then rent a car and drive the 10-hour trip to Goldsboro, North Carolina, Atkinson’s hometown.

Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport had a U.S. military air base, but Atkinson preferred to fly from the U-Tapao air base in Sattihip, Thailand, located 100 miles to the south of Bangkok. Don Muang was always frantically busy and it was much easier to get a hop out of U-Tapao.

Sure enough, space was available at U-Tapao, at least for the first leg to Okinawa, and Ike and Sonny had no problem moving through security. There were no X-rays machines in those days and security guards often did not hand-check the luggage. Besides, it was almost impossible to detect the contraband stitched into the bottom of the AWOL bags. They boarded a large Lockheed C-5A Galaxy double-decker transport cargo plane, an enormous bird that could carry a payload of 125,000 pounds over a distance of 8,000 miles, take off and land in relatively short distances and taxi on substandard surfaces during emergencies. Shortly, Ike Atkinson would be very happy that he had flown this fortress-like military transport aircraft, which seemingly had an inexhaustible fuel supply.

After the plane reached cruising speed, the two pilots began taking turns coming back to chat with the passengers. Fresh from a war zone, the passengers had some first-hand knowledge of the situation, and the pilots were eager to learn what they knew. The United States Air Force (USAF) had deployed combat aircraft in Thailand since 1961, and its units trained annually with other Asian air forces. The U-Tapao base was activated in June 1966, and the following April, as the American presence in Southeast Asia increased, the number of aircraft based there swelled. B-52 bombers began raids over Vietnam. In fact, more than 80 percent of all USAF air strikes over North Vietnam originated from there and from other air bases in Thailand, and by 1970 Thailand had become part of the secret bombing of Cambodia.

A month before this flight, Richard Nixon won his second term as president, defeating Democrat George McGovern in the biggest landslide in U.S. history. Three weeks later, the U.S. troop withdrawal from Vietnam was completed under Nixon’s watch, although 16,000 military advisors and other government and civilian administrators remained to assist South Vietnamese military forces. Two days after Atkinson’s flight was scheduled to land at Dover Air Force Base, the U.S.-North Vietnam peace negotiations collapsed in Paris. So it was a pivotal time in the Vietnam War and inquiring pilots wanted to know: Do you think we are winning the war? How long do you think the war will last? Nobody on board really discussed the merits of the seemingly never-ending war because most of the passengers, given their backgrounds, supported it.

For Ike Atkinson, the war was more of an opportunity—that is, something to be exploited as he pursued his criminal objectives. He ignored the conversation around him and napped, dreaming of the stuff that drug trafficking empires are made of. It was a typical flight, but then as the plane approached the Okinawa air field and the pilots prepared for landing, Atkinson was jolted out of his reverie by an announcement that came over the intercom: “We have problems with our landing gear, but we expect to correct the problem shortly.” A collective gasp rippled through the cabin. Never completely comfortable with flying, Atkinson asked himself: “Did the Lord bring me up here to die?” Ike looked at Sonny; his friend was so cool and collected he looked as if he had taken a tranquillizer. The passengers tried to stay calm as the plane flew in circles, seemingly endlessly. Then another announcement came: the crew was dropping fuel.

Thinking about the consequences was chilling. “Why are they telling us all this bad news,” Ike thought? “Because they think we are brave, tough military people?” But he concluded—it’s better to meet one’s fate with eyes wide open. Finally, a few minutes later another announcement was made: the landing gear is free and the plane will be landing shortly. Some of the passengers cheered; others clapped. Ike and Sonny looked at each other and both flashed a chest high thumbs-up sign.

The landing was smooth and the big bird taxied down the landing strip before coming to a stop about 100 yards from the terminal of the Kadena Air Base. The base, which dates back to just before the Allies invaded Okinawa in 1945, spreads across Kadena Town, Chatan Town and Okinawa City in the central part of the main island of Okinawa. It is the largest and most active U.S. air base in the Orient, and today it is home to the 18th Wing, a subordinate of the U.S. Fifth Air Force.

Kadena is an airport Ike had seen often on his journeys to and from Bangkok and the U.S. In fact, Eddie Wooten, one of his best pals, had a bar in Okinawa. On his flights, Ike would stop to visit his old friend and at times plot a scheme or two on how to smuggle heroin into the U.S. But on this trip Ike knew Wooten was not in Okinawa. A bus came to retrieve the passengers and their luggage. Moving into the terminal, some of them joked about their harrowing trip. Ike and Sonny went to the service counter to check the flights. They were told space was available on the next leg of their flight, but they would have to change planes. “We want to make sure the landing gear is working properly, and it’s going to take some time to do it,” they were told. “Put your name on the flight manifest and we will get you home.”

The next flight would leave early in the morning, so the travelers went looking for a nearby hotel. On the way, Atkinson told Sonny they would have paid Eddy Wooten a visit if he had been in Okinawa. When Ike and Sonny arrived at the airport early the next morning, they could see a number of mechanics looking over the landing gear of the C-5A they had flown from Thailand. They saw a different plane taxing up the runway. Built by Lockheed, the C-141 was more of a troop carrier than a cargo plane.

In the early 1960s, Uncle Sam introduced the C-141 to replace the slower cargo planes. One of the existing C-141s, the so-called “Hanoi Taxi,” would be used in 1973 as part of Operation Homecoming, a series of diplomatic negotiations that in January 1973 made possible the return of 591 American prisoners of war held by North Vietnam. Ike was happy to ride a different plane. He would not have to worry so much about meeting his maker somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

An airman came into the airport terminal, calling out the names of those who were traveling “space available.” “Yes sir! That’s us,” Ike said cheerfully, and he and Sonny picked up their AWOL bags, checked their suitcases and headed for the door and their flight to Honolulu.

On board, Ike noted a lot of friendly faces. It seemed everybody on last night’s flight was on this one as well. Two of the faces were new though. They belonged to two high-ranking, uniformed airmen with somber expressions, who sat at the plane’s rear.

Once the plane was airborne and reached cruising speed, one of the somber airmen came to the front of the plane and made an announcement. “The curtain at the back of the plane is drawn for a reason,” he said. “On board are the bodies of two of our brave service men who have given their lives in Vietnam. Do not go to the back of the plane for any reason. If you must use the rest room, please use the one at the front of plane.”

This would be a new experience for Atkinson. He had never knowingly flown with the bodies of dead GIs aboard. He knew that, given the heavy toll in the Vietnam War, the military had flown thousands of corpses back to the U.S. for burial. But why the announcement?

Most of the dead bodies were “processed” at the main military mortuary at the Tan Son Knut Air Base just outside Saigon. On June 20, 1967, the U.S. Army opened a second, less active mortuary at the Da Nang Air Base. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam led to the deactivation of the Da Nang Mortuary by February 1972. By this time, the number of bodies processed at Tan Son Knut Mortuary had decreased significantly because of the declining U.S. troop strength in Vietnam. 

Having two corpses on board gave Ike a creepy feeling. It did not help that the airmen came back repeatedly during the flight to issue their blunt admonition: Don’t go behind the curtain! “What’s up with those damn fools?” Ike thought. “Why would we want to go behind the curtain?” What with his earlier near-death experience, Ike thought this was turning out to be one weird flight indeed. From Okinawa, the plane flew to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii. Unlike the initial leg, the flight was uneventful, but when the plane reached the tarmac at Hickam, the airport swarmed with military vehicles and personnel. Atkinson had never seen security like that before on a hop. However, after a 24-hour layover, the plane was on its way to the U.S. mainland.

The trip got more bizarre once the flight landed at Travis Air Force Base. Situated in the San Francisco Bay area and known as “the Gateway to the Pacific,” Travis handles more passenger and air traffic than any other military airbase in the U.S. On this pleasant California day in December, the tarmac swarmed with military personnel and vehicles, which moved into position around the C-141. Ike’s stomach churned; after all, he and Sonny were carrying four kilos of heroin. But would the authorities use an entire military police unit to make a bust?

Ike relaxed a little when he saw that two buses had come to pick up the passengers. They were directed to a holding area inside the terminal, where the passengers could see the C-141 through a big terminal window. Floodlights lit up the plane, and the military police remained in place. The hours slipped by; finally someone came and began to check the passengers’ identification cards.

Ike had time to think. “This trip is getting stranger and stranger. Should we switch to a civilian plane?” Ike asked Sonny. “We are almost home, man,” said Sonny. “Why should we spend the money?” Later, Ike wished he had followed his instincts instead of listening to his friend. Once again, the C-141 was airborne, this time heading cross country for Dover Air Force Base, located two miles south of Dover, Delaware’s capital. Once again, the bodies of the two dead GIs were on board and the same airmen took turns pronouncing the same stern admonition. But about an hour from Dover, an announcement was made. The plane would not land as scheduled. Instead it was going to be re-directed to Andrews Air Force Base, southeast of Washington, DC, near the town of Morningside.

“I thought what the hell is going on?” Atkinson recalled. “Why’s our flight being re-directed? The trip was getting more like the Twilight Zone by the minute. It was enough

to make me think that maybe I should buy my own plane.” The landing was routine but when the door was opened, the passengers were surprised to see several military police standing at the bottom of the walk. With them were some men in black suits, who looked like FBI types. The passengers were directed off the plane to two waiting buses. Ike’s mind raced. A military police (MP) jeep led the buses to a small terminal, where the passengers were told to disembark and go to a spartanly furnished room containing nothing but cold steel chairs to sit on. Four MPs stood guard; Ike moved quickly to take a seat besides Sonny. “What do you think is going on?” Ike asked his friend. “I don’t know but it can’t be good,” Sonny replied.

 Ike glanced at the floor and the two AWOL bags that carried the heroin. “Let’s stay cool,” Ike said. Sonny nodded. Then one of the FBI types came in and said: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I have some instructions. No one is to talk. When I call your name, come with me.” One by one, the passengers were led away. A few hours passed, and Sonny was called out. Then a MP came back and picked up Sonny’s AWOL bag. Ike’s heart nearly fell to his stomach, but he knew Sonny would not panic and could be counted on to keep his mouth shut, no matter the circumstances.

Finally, Ike was the last one left and they came for him. It was after midnight. Ike was taken to an office that contained a chair, desk, filing cabinet and a big American flag under which hung a picture of a smiling President Nixon. Behind the desk, sat one of the men in dark suits. “I see from the manifest that you are Sergeant Leslie Atkinson, retired.

Good evening, Mr. Atkinson,” the man said. “It’s been a long journey. You must be tired. Would you like a cup of coffee?” Atkinson declined the offer, wondering if the interview was about to become a mind game. “My name is Mr. Marr and I am the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. Let me get to the point. We believe you are smuggling heroin from Thailand. Where is it?”

Atkinson did not flinch; he looked Marr right in the eye. “I don’t mess with drugs. I don’t know what you are talking about.” Michael Marr made cold eye contact with Atkinson and began squeezing. “Mr. Atkinson. What did you do with the heroin on the two corpses that were on the flight coming from Travis?” Atkinson looked at the man as if he was crazy and snapped: “What?” In a strange way, he felt a little relieved. So this was not about the heroin in the AWOL bags.

Atkinson said nothing more. Marr stopped the interrogation, realizing it was going nowhere. “We have been taking the plane apart, panel by panel,” Marr said. “We will find it.”

About a half hour of awkward silence ensued and then the phone rang. Atkinson could see by Marr’s expression that he did not like the news. “What? Are you sure?” Marr asked. He listened to the answer and then hung up the phone.  Marr looked at Atkinson intently; then he sighed. “You can go now.”

Sonny was gone by then. Outside in the street, Atkinson found a waiting cab and hopped in. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his brow. He thought about the interrogation, the dead bodies and the heroin that was supposed to be in them. It made absolutely no sense, but obviously, a high ranking U.S. official would not waste his time on him unless he thought he was on to something. In the intensity of the moment, Atkinson had forgotten about Sonny and he wondered where he was. Ike concluded that his friend would have waited for him at the airport, so something must have happened. Maybe he was arrested. Atkinson told the cabby to take him to a nice hotel.

He remembered that a friend, a well-known drug dealer, lived in the Washington, D.C. area. At the hotel, he thumbed through his address book and made a call to his friend.

“I believe a friend of mine is in jail,” Atkinson explained. “I need you to find him and bail him out.”

“No problem,” said the friend. “What is his name and the charge?” “I’m not sure, but it could be possession of heroin.” It was the wee hours of the morning, but Ike could not sleep. He was exhausted and worried about Sonny. About noon, Ike heard a knock at the door. It was the drug-dealing friend who had gone looking for Sonny. With him was a man the friend identified as a bail bondsman. “We located Southerland,” Atkinson’s friend said. “He is in jail charged with using false military documents and impersonating a military non-commissioned officer. The bail hearing is tomorrow.

“What about his AWOL bag?” Ike asked anxiously. “His bags are at a local police station, stored in the property room. You can go down to the station and try to get them released to you.” Ike was relieved about the heroin but concerned about Sonny. He would not talk, no matter what charges he faced, but Ike was certain the charges would be serious. How serious, Atkinson learned later at the bond hearing. Southerland was being held on a $50,000 bond in a Baltimore jail, and magistrate Clarence E. Goetz had denied a bail reduction after military and Customs agents told him at the hearing that Southerland was involved in a “large international conspiratorial organization.” Furthermore, he had flown aboard a plane headed for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware that carried the corpses of two dead GIs, which, an informant had told authorities, might be packed with heroin.

Having to explain why the authorities did not find any heroin, Marr told the court—and later the press—that during the stopover in Honolulu, the bodies had been left in a hangar, unguarded for 16 hours. Marr further told the court that one of the bodies exhibited a recent incision and stitching.

The press jumped on the sensational “Cadaver Connection” and the headlines screamed: “Top people part of ghoulish heroin ring,” “Body heroin smuggling a puzzler” and “Feds trace route of GI bodies.” The press speculated in numerous articles, based largely on anonymous sources, theorizing that Southerland was accompanying bodies as a dry run to test the efficiency of Federal law enforcement. After all, the press speculated erroneously, he could have taken a commercial plane and not have to take the risk of wearing a military uniform and carrying bogus documents.

Since that flight, the story of the “Cadaver Connection” has persisted. More than three-and-half decades later, the speculation was rekindled with the release of the blockbuster movie, American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. The movie depicted the life of former Harlem gangster Frank Lucas, an Atkinson associate. In interviews hyping the movie, Lucas embraced the “Cadaver Connection.” In its open and shut conclusion about things cadaver, the Associated Press, which did absolutely no investigative reporting on the subject, reported in November 2007 that Lucas “bought his dope in the jungles of Vietnam, and to get his drugs back into the U.S., Lucas established the infamous “Cadaver Connection.”

Meanwhile, the press reports made Ike Atkinson guilty by association. In response, Atkinson described the cadaver connection as “the big lie…the biggest hoax ever perpetuated,” and he asked, “Will we never know who is responsible for the hoax?” It is a question that Ike Atkinson has asked himself often since that fateful trans-Pacific flight in December 1972.

            Ron Chepesiuk  (www.ronchepesiuk.com) is an award winning freelance journalist and Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh and consultant to the History Channel’s “Gangland” television series. He is the author of several true crime books, including Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel and Gangsters of Harlem.  His next book, Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and His Band of Brothers, appeared as an e-book in late April and will be published as a print book in late June. Go to www.ikeatkinsonkingpin.com/

July 6, 2011Special to Crime Magazine 

This is an excerpt from the book, Straight from the Hood: Amazing but True Gangster Tales, by Ron Chepesiuk and Scott Wilson. The book is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com) and is available from the web site, Amazon.com and other publishing outlets.

by Ron Chepesiuk and Scott Wilson

 Al “Scarface” Capone—Impresario to Chicago’s Black Musicians 

The Federal Government closed Storyville down in 1917 during World War I over the objections of New Orleans’s city hall, claiming that the district was a threat to national security. In reality, many Americans of the early 20th century were not comfortable with what they heard about Storyville. For them, it was an integrated den of sin, which, as one New Orleans guidebook explained; “held out the allure of sex across color lines, even though segregation legislation was passed in New Orleans in 1894.”

With Storyville’s closure, New Orleans’ jazz musicians had to find work, so many of them joined the flood of black migrants from the south and ended up in Chicago, the Windy City, making the metropolis America’s jazz capitol and one of the country’s most exciting cities of the 1920s. The nightlife came with gambling, alcohol and prostitution. Gangsters often owned the clubs and nightclubs in the Black Belt, and as Walter Reckless, the author of Vice in Chicago, noted: “They were important links in the chain of beer running operations conducted by different gangs.”

Al Capone

Two prominent white gangsters, the notorious Al “Scarface” Capone and his brother, Ralph, were frequent visitors to Southside night spots; in fact, they became two of the most important jazz impresarios in Chicago. In the segregated and often violent world of the early 20^th century Chicago, Al Capone became an ardent champion of some of jazz’s great black practitioners.

Born on January 17, 1899, to Italian American immigrant parents, Al grew up, along with Ralph and his other siblings, on the mean streets of Brooklyn. Denied a proper education, he grew up a near illiterate gang member who dropped out of school in the sixth grade after he slugged a teacher. By his late teens, Al was, at 5’ 10” and 225 pounds, a cocky, beefy, street smart alley-fighter. Tough men could wet their pants in his presence, knowing that he could kill within an eye blink. A few of Capone’s brawls involved vicious knife fights, and that is how he earned his nickname: “Scarface.”

Al’s mentor was Johnny Torrio, one of gangster New York’s brightest lights, who worked as a lieutenant for crime boss Paul Kelley in the Five Points Gang. With 1,500 members, the Five Points Gang was the most powerful in New York during the early 20th century.

Around 1915, Torrio moved his operations to Chicago, where his uncle Big Jim Colisimo was the godfather of organized crime. Meanwhile back in the Big Apple, Capone had brutally killed a man in a fight and was laying low from the police. Scarface accepted Torrio’s invitation to come to Chicago, and in 1919 Capone headed west with his wife and kid. Al’s brother Ralph followed him to Chicago about a year later. The two shared an apartment while they both worked for Torrio in the vice trade           

The Capones arrived in the Windy City at about the time Prohibition became the law of land. Colisimo’s extensive vice, gambling and labor racketeering operations made him Chicago’s leading gangster. The ambitious Torrio arranged a hit on Uncle Jim and took over his criminal empire. The hitman?—Al Capone. When Torrio and Capone were pulled into police headquarters for questioning about Uncle Jim’s murder, a sad faced Scarface told police officers “Mr. Colosimo and me both loved opera. He was a grand guy.”

This profitable business arrangement remained in place until January 1925, when some fellow Italian American gangsters shot and nearly killed Torrio. The godfather survived, but he decided he had enough of the gangster life. He retired and moved to Italy with his elderly grandmother. At 25 years of age, Al Capone was now head of Chicago’s biggest gang.

Prohibition was making the godfather rich and he reveled in the role of the generous godfather spending lavishly on those around him. Capone’s flamboyant style captured the imagination of main stream American, and he became a high profile celebrity, just like famous professional athlete and movie stars of the day.

What is not as well known is Scarface’s relationship with black Chicago. He bought the Plantation Cafe, a black and tan cabaret located at 338 East 38^th Street near Calumet Avenue, which Edward Fox and Al Turner initially owned. The Plantation Café, which featured King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators, had a notorious reputation as a gangster haunt for undesirables. After Scarface took charge, the ultra violent gang wars in Chicago heated up, and in the spring of 1927, the Plantation Café was bombed several times.

Many people in the jazz world of Harlem’s Black Belt, depended upon Capone for work and business and he loved it. “To the musicians burning to make names for themselves or simply desperate to work, the Capone brothers, Al and Ralph, were the men to see,” writes Capone biographer Laurence Bergreen. “Although the majority of the musicians were black, (Al) Capone, as an equal opportunity employer and corruptor, drew no racial distinctions. Everyone was welcome to join his coalition.” All Scarface asked was for “’’members’ to be loyal consumers for his bootleg booze.”

Milt “Judge” Hinton, a famous African American bassist, recalled how Capone approached his uncle, John Thomas, a bootlegger who controlled alcohol sales in his Southside neighborhood. “You buy all the alcohol from me for $6 a gallon and sell it for $18 dollars,” Capone instructed Thomas. “You keep $12 for every gallon of alcohol. I’ll handle all the police. You won’t have to worry about protection. I’ll furnish all the transportation. All you have to do is deliver the alcohol and collect the money. Just don’t buy from anybody but me.”

It was an offer many people in Chicago, black as well as white, could not refuse, especially when they knew what the consequences could be. Scarface was a tyrant with a mercurial temper who had murdered hundreds, if not thousands,  of associates and foe alike. An audience with Capone was the last thing one wanted to experience.

Fats Waller

But that is what happened one night to the legendary Fats Waller, renowned lyricist, singer and pianist, when some white men kidnapped and hustled him into a waiting limousine. Waller found himself in a lounge in the lilly-white Chicago suburb of Cicero, Capone’s stronghold. There waiting for him was your friendly, smiling godfather, who ordered the petrified Waller to sit at the piano and play. Waller began to relax, realizing he was the special entertainment at Al Capone’s birthday party.

The bash turned out to be the time of the entertainer’s life. Waller performed and partied with Scarface for three days, and then went home, exhausted, his pockets bulging with thousand of dollars. It was the first time Waller had tasted champagne.

While Scarface may have been more racially tolerant than his fellow gangsters, it would be wrong to conclude that he was an early American paragon of civil rights virtue. The white mob in Chicago and other major U.S. cities controlled the jazz scene in the 1920s and ‘30s as a musical version of a plantation system.

Capone, moreover, had designs on the policy and other gambling rackets thriving in the Black Belt. By the 1920s, an estimated 50 percent of the black population of Chicago played policy, and the game became so big and popular that one found a numbers bank on every corner and in many of the district’s markets, barbershops and the backrooms of stores. The policy banks stayed open from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. and were served by runners who meticulously recorded the gigs on tiny slips of papers.

Capone planned to make his move by first taking over the policy wheel on 35^th St. near Indiana Avenue, operated by a man named Roberletto. Sam Ettleson, the powerful senator from the second congressional district, and another senator named Marks learned of the godfather’s plans and told Capone to give up the idea. Why they did so is not known, but Capone did tell his men stay out the Southside policy racket. In return, the black gambling establishment agreed to stay out of the bootleg beer business.

Chicago’s black criminal underworld had managed to arrange a truce with young Scarface, America’s most famous gangster.

About the Authors

Ron Chepesiuk is award winning freelance investigative journalist,  documentary producer and Executive Producer and co-host of the “Crime Beat” radio show (www.artistfirst.com/crimebeat.htm/) . He is a Fulbright scholar and a consultant to the History Channel's Gangland documentary series. His true crime books include Drug Lords, Black Gangsters of Chicago, Gangsters of Harlem Gangsters of Miami and Sergeant Smack: The Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson. Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers.

Scott Wilson is a freelance journalist who has done work for publications such as Don Diva Magazine and Hip-Hop Weekly.  He currently writes for the website Planet Ill (www.planetill.com), as well as his own blog Scott’s Introspection Section (www.scottsmindfield.com).  He has also been interviewed by Rap Entertainment Television (www.rapentertainment.com) for a documentary on former heroin kingpin Leslie “Ike” Atkinson.

Jan. 16, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine:

 This is an excerpt from the book, Queenpins: Notorious Women Gangsters from the Modern Era, by Ron Chepesiuk. The book is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com) and is available from the web site, Amazon.com and other publishing outlets.       

by Ron Chepesiuk

In 1912, Pearl Adler, a 12-year old girl from the small village of Yanow, Russia, embarked on a long, perilous oceanic journey. For support, the young girl, whom her family called “Polly,” had nothing more with her than the high expectations of her large family and a potato sack that contained her belongings, some garlic, apples, four loaves of black bread and four hunks of salami that her mother Gertrude had packed for her. Joining Polly on board the good ship Naftar was a diverse mix of Poles, Italians, Danes and Swedes, all determined to make a prosperous new life for themselves in the Promised Land of America. It was a rough voyage and nearly all the passengers got sick, but not Polly. No sickness was going to impede her determination to reach America.

Unlike many of her fellow passengers, Polly did not leave a life of abject poverty. She was the eldest child in a family that included two daughters and seven sons. But her father, Morris Adler, was a tailor, a respectable occupation, and the family was well-off by Yanow standards. Still, the family’s ethnic roots were Jewish and it was a time of virulent anti Semitism in Russia. The Adler family could be a victim of a pogrom, or violent attack, at any time. It had happened frequently between 1903 and 1905. In the course of one week alone, there had been 50 anti-Jewish pogroms. In the village of Binlystok, for instance, 19 Jews were murdered and 24 injured. The Kishinew pogram left 120 dead and 500 injured, while the Odessa pogrom had 299 victims.

Until the pogroms, Morris Adler’s plan for Polly was to have her attend school in a nearby village and then complete her education under the village Rabbi’s guidance. Given the insecurities of life in Russia, the father decided that she would be the first link in a line of emigration that would bring his family to America.

The voyage was Polly’s first taste of freedom from the strictures of rural life and she was wired with excitement and anticipation. When the day of arrival finally a came and the ship glided into New York City harbor, Polly joined her fellow passengers on deck. A male passenger shouted in Yiddish: “The American Lady: The Statue of Liberty!” The passengers gazed and marveled. Polly joined in a chorus of ecstatic shouts and screams. After de-embarking, Polly caught the train to Holyoke, Massachusetts, where the Grodesky family claimed her at the depot. The Grodeskys were not friends of the Adlers, but friends of friends, and they had agreed to take care of Polly, provided the Adlers paid for her upkeep and schooling.

Polly arrived two years before the start of World War I, but the war’s outbreak cut off communication with her family and the money it provided for her, dashing the family’s hope of joining their daughter in the New World. It was a bad break, one of many Polly would have before eventually finding success in her new life. Eventually, she would make money, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle and mix with the rich and powerful. As a leading member of world’s so called oldest profession, Polly would claim as her friends not only members of New York’s elite but also some of the most prominent gangsters of her time, bringing her more notoriety than admiration.

Pearl "Polly" Adler

Polly’s first job hardly fit her vision of the American Dream. With World War I in full swing, cut off from money from home and on her own, Polly had to find a job to pay for her keep. She found one at a paper factory, a sweat shop that paid her three dollars a week. Two years later, her father decided to send Polly to Brooklyn, New York, to live with her cousins, the Rosen family. The change was a shock to Polly. As she later explained: “The Grodeskys had not been rich but compared to the Rosens their house was the Taj Mahal.”

Polly found another job in a corset factory, making five dollars a week, from which she had to pay three dollars for room and board and a $1.20 for car fare and lunches. Polly hungered for an education, and she continued to attend night school as time from her job allowed, hoping once again to get on the path to the American Dream. Money was tight and Polly had to walk a mile to and from school so she could pay for her lunches.

By 1917 the factory had closed down, but in April of that year, the United States entered the Great War and Polly found another job at a factory manufacturing soldier’s shirts. At age 17, she stood just 4’ 11’ tall and had matured physically. A new foreman at the factory named Frank noticed her. Young and naïve, Polly loved the attention. Frank invited her to go to Coney Island on a date and Polly eagerly accepted. The date turned into a nightmare. Instead of going to Coney Island, Frank took her to a cottage where they were alone. HHHHHHJHHe tried seducing Polly, but put off by his rough advances, Polly got scared and resisted.  Frank knocked her out cold and raped her.

A month went by at the factory as if nothing had happened. Polly was ashamed and afraid. Then Polly discovered she was pregnant. Sidonia, a friend and worker at the factory, took Polly to a doctor to see about an abortion. It cost $150 but all Polly had in savings was $35. Polly went to Frank but he refused to help. Sidonia found a doctor who was willing to perform the abortion for $35. When the doctor heard Polly’s sad story, he took just $ 25 for his fee and told her to use the other $10 to buy shoes and stockings.

The experience traumatized the young girl. “I went through the motions of living,” Polly Adler later recalled. “I was changed; I had lost heart.  I no longer had hope.”

Polly’s fortunes continued to decline. Frank harassed her at work and she quit her job. She met Harry Richman, a performer who later became a Broadway star, and they became friends. Harry invited Polly to a nightclub, where, for the first time in her life, she drank something stronger than soda pop. She gulped the whiskey as it was soft drink. Blind drunk and out all night, her clothes disheveled, Polly was a mess when she got back to her home in Brooklyn. The Rosens did not like what they saw and kicked Polly out of the house, telling her to leave immediately. Polly quickly wrapped her clothes in a newspaper and left.

In her autobiography, a House is not a Home, Polly summed up her life in America to this point: “So far I had certainly racked up a row of goose eggs in the Golden Land. I had failed in my quest for an education. I might have gotten back home. I had lost my virginity, my reputation and my job. All I had gotten was older.”

Polly found a cheap, $20 a month, windowless apartment at Second Avenue and North Street and began hunting for a job. She spent two tough weeks looking, hungry and frustrated, before finding another dreary, dead-end and low-paying factory job. She worked at it for about a year before bumping into a fellow Russian Jew named Abe Shornik, a man about Polly’s father’s age who worked in a dress factory. He was a gentleman who took an interest in Polly’s welfare, introducing her to a well-to-do dress manufacturer in the hope that he would hire her.

The dress manufacturer was related to the head of a big theatrical supply house, and Polly was introduced to the theater crowd. Polly became friends with a beautiful blond actress and singer whom she identified as Joan Smith. The actress brought Polly over to her apartment and introduced her to several of her friends in show business. A brand new world opened for the young girl and Polly loved it. About a month after they met, Joan invited Polly to move in with her at her nice apartment on Riverside Drive.

Polly lived with Joan through the spring of 1920, but then Joan began to change. The heroin and cocaine she used in abundance made her frequently temperamental, often sullen and sometimes violent. Joan behavior concerned Polly, but when Joan started showing tender feelings towards her, Polly knew it was time to leave. She became friends with a bookkeeper she identified as Tony and confided her troubles. Tony offered the use of his apartment, provided Polly help him out. He would pay the rent if Polly allowed him to meet a lady friend at the pad. Not really considering the implications of the offer and desperate to get out her dead end life, Polly jumped at it, and with the money Tony gave her, rented a two-room furnished apartment on Riverside.

Tony’s affair did not last long, and a few weeks after she had moved into the apartment, Tony asked Polly to find him another woman. He would pay Polly $50 and the woman she provided, $100. Polly accepted and found Tony a pretty blonde. Polly was now in a new line of work. “It was in this informal, almost casual fashion that I began my career as a madam,” Polly wrote in her autobiography. “I didn’t think of it then as a career or myself as a madam. I suppose, in the way, people do, I managed to sell myself a bill of goods—I didn’t invent sex. Nobody had to come to my apartment who didn’t want to. I was really doing them a favor—that sort of thing.”

But Polly had found her calling and her life changed dramatically. She bought nice clothes and frequented speakeasies and dance halls. She met several wealthy men, and to those whom she believed would be discrete, she gave her address. Polly hired three girls which began entertaining her acquaintances several times a week. .  Polly had no illusions about her new found career. After tasting the good life and making good money, it was a question for her of economics, not morals. No way did she want to go back to her former lifestyle that left her wondering from where her next dollar would come.

It wasn’t too long, though, before Polly was booked on suspicion of prostitution. It would be the first of 17 such arrests in her long sex-industry career. The case, like the many others that followed during Polly’s life as a madam, was dismissed because of a lack of evidence.

Polly moved ahead in her new profession with the energy and smarts of an entrepreneur, even though it was not an easy profession in which to succeed. Prostitution’s illegality made the consequences of arrest very serious. By 1917, the anti-prostitution efforts of the so-called Progressive Era had closed down every important red light district in the U.S., including the hitherto untouchable Storyville in New Orleans. The following year, prostitution was illegal in nearly every state in the Union. One of the biggest brothels in America, the Speedway Inn, was run by the notorious gangster Al “Scarface” Capone of Chicago. Capone and the criminal underworld took over much of the sex trade, and gangsters were not inclined to treat women of the night decently.

Polly was trying to run a high class house of ill repute, but she had to pay protection money to the gangsters. It was an experience shared by other madams of the day. Helen McGowan, a Detroit madam, recalled what it was like being a madam in the 1920s: “If the take was a thousand dollars for a particular night, five hundred went to the racket boys, four hundred to the girls and $100 to me. The great bulk of our funds went to hoodlums and lawyers, thanks to our righteous laws that protect the public against the world’s oldest profession.”

Polly did not have problems with the criminal element, and she began building her clientele in a discrete business like manner. At the night clubs Polly patronized, she advised headwaiters and captains that her establishment was not your typical whorehouse, and they should only send men to her bordello who could afford to pay $20 or more. For those who could pay that amount, Polly Adler was available 24 hours a day. The money began rolling in, and by the spring of 1921 she had saved $6,000.

In her mind, Polly thought her career choice would only be temporary until she found success in a legitimate business. Polly saw an opportunity and she and a friend opened a lingerie shop at 2487 Broadway. The business broke even at first, but, unfortunately for Polly, she and her partner were inexperienced business-wise and they had no cash in reserve to cover the lean times a start up can experience. Meanwhile, their business became prey to crafty shoplifters who stole the owners blind. The business closed after a year.

Once again, Polly was broke. Her total assets consisted of her furniture, a dog named Nicko and $800 in cash. Her financial situation continued to deteriorate, and when she was down to her last $100, Polly once again entered the prostitution business. This time it would be for good; however, her clientele was different. Many of her new clients were gangsters, some of whom would become the country’s biggest mobsters of the 1920s and ‘30s. They were often drunk and unruly. When some of the gangsters roughed up one of her girls, she decided to move, hoping to attract a more civil clientele. To stay ahead of the law, Polly adopted the tactic of moving from apartment to apartment, before eventually settling into a large rented apartment near 7^th Avenue.

She now set out to be, in her paraphrased words, “The best goddamn madam in America.” Once again, she exhibited the Midas touch when it came to whoredom. She could now afford the sumptuous style of a successful madam and hired an interior decorator, spending lavishly on furnishings, and carpets, while lining her walls with books. Much of the expensive décor in her bordello was in the style of Louis XV and Louis XVI. She also hired a cook, maid and hairdresser.

In the late 1920s she set up shop at the majestic Tower at 215 West 75^th Street, an edifice the firm of Schwartz and Gross, one of the major designers of hotels and high rise buildings in the early 20^th century, erected. In an interview with writer Lisa Jacobs, James Nassy, a long time resident of the Majestic Towers, revealed that the building, with its many hidden stairways and secret door ways, was designed as a bordello. “The layout was conceived to protect secretive behavior,” Nassy explained.

Given her hours of operation and her business success, Adler did not have much of a personal life. She was in her 20s and single but stayed to herself and rarely dated. Later Polly recalled: “I couldn’t behave like other women and the house was forever uppermost in my mind and it was too much to expect a man to take out a woman who can’t keep her mind on the date, who remains a business machine even off duty and even in an ostentatiously hilarious mood. So I decided the best thing I could do was put me as a private citizen in cold storage, and so long as I was madam, ‘temporarily disconnect’ my life.”

Polly’s life was her work, and her bordello became a kind of clubhouse where the women were not necessarily the main attraction. Patrons from the elite and privileged class began to frequent her bordello, coming as much for the drinks, the socializing and the card games as for the prostitutes. The clientele included members of the famous Algonquin Roundtable, a group of influential New York City intellectuals, journalists, editors, writers and artists that began lunching together at the Algonquin Hotel in June 1919 and continued on a regular basis for the next eight years. In their articles and columns, the journalists in the group disseminated the gist of their conversations across the country.

Algonquin Roundtable members included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kauffman and Edna Farber. Benchley was a wit, writer and humorist who wrote essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker magazines. He was also a film director whose movie, How to Sleep, won in the Best Short Subject category at the 1933 Academy Awards.

Benchley liked to rent Polly’s establishment for lavish parties. At one of them, a despondent prostitute jumped out of an open window. Benchley checked to see that she was okay and insisted that the party goers keep celebrating. Polly remembered Benchley fondly, describing him as “one of the kindest, warmest hearted man in the world.”

Benchley’s friend, Dorothy Parker, a poet and writer, also frequented Polly’s bordello. Following the breakup of the Roundtable, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue a screenwriting career. She received two Oscar nominations for her work, but as a result of her left-wing political activism, was placed on Hollywood’s Black List. Both Parker and Benchley helped Polly pick out books for her bordello. Roundtable member George S. Kaufman, who was lauded as Broadway’s greatest comic dramatist, reportedly had a charge account with Polly.

Jimmy Walker, another client, was mayor of New York City from 1925 to 1932 when he was charged with corruption and resigned. When Mickey Walker started frequenting Polly’s bordello, he was the world’s middleweight boxing champion. Naïve about the role of a madam, Walker kept propositioning Polly to go to bed with him. Polly had to take one of Mickey’s handlers aside and tell him that she was the madam of the establishment and was not available. Further, if the champ kept badgering her, he would have to leave. Walker got the message, straightened up, and eventually, Polly became fond of him.

In addition to the intellectual elite, some of the most notorious gangsters in American history frequented Adler’s bordello. The most powerful, no doubt, was Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a Sicilian mobster who by 1925 was grossing more than $300,000 annually from overseeing the Big Apple’s largest bootleg operation. In a power struggle within La Cosa Nostra, Luciano outmaneuvered two other prominent mobsters, Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, to become the most dominant godfather in America. Luciano headed a Mob Commission that oversaw its nationwide activities.

Polly considered Lucky a gentleman and recalled that success did not change him. During their friendship, Lucky remained quiet, polite and considerate of her girls. The feeling was mutual. In his 1962 autobiography, Luciano spoke warmly of Polly, the madame, enthusing that Polly ran “the best damn whorehouse in New York.”

In 1936, New York State Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey, a future Republican presidential candidate, successfully prosecuted Luciano for operating a prostitution ring. Polly expressed amazement that Luciano had been linked to prostitution since she often supplied Luciano with girls when he entertained. “I think Dewey never called me as witness because the only testimony I could possibly give was in favor of the defense (Luciano),” she later recalled.

Adler’s relationship with another prominent gangster, Dutch Schultz, was much more complicated. By the time Polly met Dutch, he was one of the most influential gangsters in New York City. Born Arthur Flegenheimer in 1902, Schultz was known as “The Beer Baron of the Bronx” for his phenomenal success in the illegal bootlegging industry, which made him a fortune and one of the richest gangsters in New York City during Prohibition. In the early to mid 1930s, Dutch took over the Harlem numbers racket after a bitter battle with a Queen Pin named Stephanie St. Clair and became even richer.

When Polly first met Dutch, she was still trying to recover financially from the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In their initial meeting, Dutch gave Polly a thousand dollars, instructing her to “Use the money to get a bigger apartment. You will be seeing a lot of me.” With that revelation, Schultz proceeded to Polly’s bedroom and fell asleep on her bed. After Adler moved into the new apartment, Dutch used the bedroom to run his criminal business.

Polly later recalled: “I realized this was the first of many nights. By taking Dutch’s money, I was on my way out of my financial hole, but in return, I had put myself in bondage – from now on my life will be ruled by fear.”

Polly viewed Schultz as a psychopath who could go ballistic at the slightest provocation, and she knew well his reputation for violence. Schultz’s henchmen once kidnapped a stubborn wholesale beer distributor named Joe Rock, who had refused to let the Dutchman bully him out of business. The thugs beat Rock, strung him up by his thumbs, and then put a strip of gauze smeared with infectious material across his eyes and taped the gauze securely. By the time they tossed Rock out in the street, the hapless wholesaler was probably blind and crippled by the severe beating. The message was clear: Do not mess with the Dutchman.

Polly would never know when the unpredictable gangster would show up at her apartment. The strain was intense, but she never did get up the nerve to tell Schultz to take his patronage elsewhere.

Polly was also in fear of Dutch’s rivals, especially a gangster named Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. Coll earned the name, “Mad Dog,” from the media after he had killed a child in a botched assassination attempt. Coll had been a Schultz enforcer but decided to organize his own gang. The ambitious Mad Dog had tried to kill Dutch, and Polly worried that the gangster might get the wrong idea if he learned Dutch was hanging out at her apartment. Polly’s anxiety ended when Schultz had Coll murdered.

Schultz tried to dominate Polly’s life. Punctually around 7 at night, the gangster would take a bath, commanding Polly to scrub his back. He once ordered her never to drink, fearing that, if she did, she might get careless and talk too much. But one day Polly returned home inebriated. Schultz got angry and asked her where she had been. He didn’t like Polly’s answer and decided to teach her a lesson. He punched Polly on top of the head, knocking her to the floor, and stormed out of the apartment.

Terrified, Polly moved to West 54^th Street, hoping to break free of the Dutchman, but a few weeks later, he showed up again. He didn’t apologize for beating her but gave her $500. “Next week is Christmas,” the gangster said. “Buy yourself a gift.”

As Adler grew in prominence in the New York bordello scene, Dutch Schultz was not her biggest worry. Polly’s association with major underworld figures had drawn the attention of the authorities. Adler had entertained many members of the court, law enforcement officers and officials in city government agencies, and she had paid thousands of dollars in bribes—half of her income by some estimates—to keep her bordello running smoothly and to keep her call girls out of jail. She had made sure all of her bases were covered. For instance, half of the head waiters in Manhattan were said to be on her payroll.

So Polly was not particularly worried when ex-judge Samuel Seabury began conducting an investigation into the New York sex trade in 1929. The Magistrate’s Court of the City of New York was the court in which many people charged with crimes first encountered the legal system. Seabury headed the Commission investigating the charges of widespread corruption within the municipal court system as well as the police force. Among the allegations found to be true—hundreds of women had to pay exorbitant bonds or go to prison on dubious convictions for prostitution. Throughout the autumn of 1930, the Seabury Commission heard testimony from more than 1,000 witnesses.—judges, lawyers, police officers and former defendants—describe and document the corruption.

Polly did not want to testify, but the Seabury Commission wanted to know why she had never been convicted of prostitution, even though she had been arrested 11 times. Polly’s name had come up in the testimony of John C. Weston, a former official in the New York City’s District’s Attorney’s Office. Weston admitted to being bribed twice to “go easy” when Polly appeared before the Magistrate Court judges. According to a New York Herald report, “Weston testified that Adler is represented by lawyers who were in the habit of bribing him to lay down when their client’s interests were concerned.” Weston further stated that Polly’s power and influence was so great that a prosecutor could be removed unless “he laid down” when prosecuting a charge against her.

Then Polly received a call from an anonymous source warning her to leave the house immediately because representatives of the court were on their way to serve her a subpoena. Polly threw her clothes in a bag, dashed out of her apartment and hailed a cab. Polly headed for Newark, New Jersey, where she checked into a hotel. Later Adler explained her reasoning for leaving town: “I had to get out of town because I wasn’t going to squeal; if I accepted a subpoena, a lot of people might be dubious about my ability to keep clammed up and decide to insure my silence in ways I didn’t care to dwell on.”

Polly eventually fled to Miami, Florida, where she checked into a hotel under an assumed name. Polly knew she could not be extradited from Florida so long as she stayed out of New York State. Polly was a celebrity—the Big Apple’s most famous madam. The New York newspapers reported on rumors speculating on where she was hiding. Meanwhile, representatives of 13 of New York’s best known and respected hotels, including the Biltmore, the Ritz, the Carleton and the Vanderbilt, were summoned before the Seabury Commission in the hope they could help the authorities trace Polly’s calls.

Eventually, Adler tired of life on the lam. In need of money, she returned to New York City and turned herself in. Surrendering on May 7, 1930, Polly publicly vowed never to tell what she knew about the New York City vice trade. Adler was grilled about her financial affairs and her dealings with an Irwin O’Brien, a former member of the New York City vice squad. Charges were brought against many corrupt officials, but not because of Adler’s testimony. The madam did not wilt under the questioning and denied everything.

Ironically, Polly Adler believed the Seabury Commission investigation actually helped her illicit business. In her memoir, she recalled: “I found when I got back to business that the Seabury investigation has sure as hell made my life easier. The police no longer were a headache; there was no more kowtowing to double crossing Vice Squad men. No more hundred dollar handshakes, no more police raids to up the month’s quota. In fact, thanks to Judge Seabury and his not very merry men, I was able to operate three years without breaking a lease.”

Pearl "Polly" Adler

For the next five years, Polly continued to be one of the country‘s most successful and high profile madams. Then New York City began another anti-corruption campaign under Fiorello LaGuardia, the New York City mayor from 1934 to 1945. LaGuardia went after Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and other mob bosses, declaring: “Let’s drive the bums out of town.”  LaGuardia had well known gangsters arrested whenever they appeared in public and waged war against the gambling rackets.

On July 10, 1936, police and city officials knocked down the doors of Adler’s sixth floor Central Park West apartment. The officials found Adler, a 25-year old Black woman and two men sitting at a table, drinking. Under questioning, the two men revealed that Adler had “procured” two women for them. Adler was arrested and arraigned; bail was set at $1,000. It was Adler’s 16^th arrest in her career as a madam. “I can’t possibly furnish that much,” Adler complained to the magistrate. “I’m broke now and I owe a lot. Besides, I’m innocent of this charge.”

The case was continuously postponed, but whenever Polly appeared in court, the press would report about her, often with sympathetic observations. The New York Daily News, for example, wrote: “the police tap this woman’s wires…. and in other ways keep her under surveillance as if they suspected her of being the Lindbergh kidnapper.”

Polly pled guilty and received a sentence of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine. In her autobiography, Adler claimed that a well-known gangster helped get the charge reduced from what could have been a three-year sentence. She felt lucky to spend only 24 days of her sentence in jail, given that she was at center stage of La Guardia’s anti-corruption campaign.

Yet, jail time traumatized Adler. The madam had confidence that she could always beat the legal system now began to have doubts, fears and insecurities. It didn’t help Polly’s state of mind to learn that the police had tapped her phone when she moved into her new apartment on East 54^th Street. The cops were still after her. The experience of being under constant scrutiny was getting old. Still Polly felt lucky. When the State of New York launched another corruption investigation in 1936 under Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey, the police raided bordellos, rounding up and arresting call girls. Despite the crackdown, Polly was never arrested or called as a witness. But her friend, Lucky Luciano, was busted.

Polly remained in the prostitution business until the early 1940s, opening and closing her bordello many times. Polly, however, had become disillusioned about the business, and her heart was not in it any more. In 1941 she was arrested for the 17^th and final time, but the judge dismissed the charge because the prosecution failed to establish a case against her. In 1943, the Teflon Madam retired from the sex racket altogether and moved to Burbank, California, where she completed high school at age 50 and enrolled in college courses. In 1953, Polly Adler published her best selling autobiography, A House is Not Home. In 1964 a forgettable film starring Shelley Winters as Polly brought the legendary madam’s life to the big screen. In 1962, Polly Adler died of pancreatic cancer. When the Museum of Sex opened up in New York City in 1964, its premier exhibit included material on the legendary life and career of Pearl “Polly” Adler.

It was a remarkable life for a woman who once said of herself: “I’m one of those people who just can’t help getting a kick even when it’s a kick in the teeth.”

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Ron Chepesiuk is an award winning freelance investigative journalist,  documentary producer and executive producer and co-host of the “Crime Beat” radio show (www.artistfirst.com/crimebeat.htm/) . He is a Fulbright scholar and a consultant to the History Channel's Gangland documentary series. His true crime books include Drug Lords, Black Gangsters of Chicago, Gangsters of Harlem, Gangsters of Miami and Sergeant Smack: The Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers.

Nov. 30, 2009Special to Crime Magazine

(This excerpt is from Ron Chepesiuk’s book, Gangsters of Miami, True Tales of Mobsters, Gamblers, Hitmen, Con Men and Gang Bangers from the Magic City, which Barricade Books (Barricadebook.com) published in November 2009. Available on Amazon.com. All rights reserved.)

by Ron Chepesiuk

In 1928 Al“Scarface” Caponebecame the first big-time mobster to journey to Miami and stay, at least for part of the year. Capone was at the pinnacle of a criminal career that was making him the most famous gangster in America history.  By the late 1920s, Capone’s flamboyant style had captured the imagination of mainstream America, and he was a high-profile celebrity, just like the famous athletes and movie stars of his day.

Born on January 17, 1899, to Italian-American parents, Al grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn. At 5’ 10’ tall and 225 pounds, the beefy gangster was a born street fighter. More than a few times Capone ended up in a vicious knife fight, which explains how Capone got his nickname. Tough men could wet their pants in his presence, knowing Scarface could have them killed with an eye blink.

Al Capone

Jack Woodford, a writer of pulp fiction and Scarface’s friend, was interviewed at length about his recollections of Capone. The interview was published in 1985 as a book titled My Years with Capone: Jack Woodford and Al Capone, 1924-1932. Woodford remembered Capone as “not an overly a brave man… with many different personalities.” Woodford elaborated: “He was at his best when a couple of guys were holding his victim so that he was free to wield a baseball bat without fear of retaliation. Occasionally, he lost his head out of shear fury. Al had a terrible temper.  He was a classic temperamental artist. He would go into a rage when thwarted, though most of the time he was sweet and reasonable as a lamb. People with the artistic temperament always have several different personalities.”

Capone’s criminal career soared when he came under the wing of Johnny Torrio, one of the bright lights in New York City’s criminal world, who taught him the ropes of the gangster life. Around 1915, Torrio moved his operations to Chicago, where his uncle, Big Jim Colosimo, was the godfather of organized crime. Meanwhile, back in New York City, Scarface had brutally killed a man in a brawl. Fearing arrest by the police, Capone accepted Torrio’s invitation to come to Chicago, and in 1919, he headed west with his wife and child.  About a year later, Al’s brother Ralph followed him to Chicago, where the Capone family shared an apartment while the brothers worked for Torrio in the vice trade.

The Capones arrived in the Windy City at about the time Prohibition became the law of the land. Colisimo’s extensive vice, gambling and labor racketeering operations made him Chicago’s leading gangster. Big Jim was a large man and an imposing presence who liked to flash his wealth, especially the many expensive diamonds he wore. The ambitious Torrio prodded Colisimo to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities that Prohibition provided. Buy breweries, begin setting up illegal stalls and establish a bootleg distribution network, the nephew urged his uncle, but to no avail. Big Jim was content to make his money the old fashion way: through, gambling, extortion, and so forth.  For Torrio, Uncle Jim had become a roadblock to his ambition and he had to go.

Torrio selected trusted lieutenant Al Capone to do the hit. At 3 p.m. on May 11, 1920, Colosimo arrived at his restaurant, the Colosimo Café, which served as the epicenter of his criminal empire. At 4:25 p.m., Colosimo left his office in the café and made his way to the other side of the restaurant, where he entered a vestibule that was closed off by glass. A few minutes later, shots rang out. Big Jim’s private secretary found her boss in the vestibule, dying with a bullet behind his ear. Later it was learned that the hit man, Al Capone, took time to rifle through Colosimo’s pants and flee with a large wad of cash. Torrio and Capone were pulled into police headquarters for questioning. “Mr. Colosimo and me both loved opera,” a sad faced Scarface told police officers. “He was a grand guy.”

Torrio remained in charge until January 1925, when some fellow Italian American gangsters shot and nearly killed him. The godfather survived but decided he had enough of the gangster life. He retired and moved to Italy with his elderly grandmother.

At 25 years of age, Al Capone was now head of Chicago’s biggest gang. The young gangster rose to the occasion. Two years later, The New Yorker magazine was calling him “the greatest gang leader in history.” The authorities suspected that he was behind numerous murders and were certain he operated several successful speakeasies and prostitution rings, but they could not prove anything. Capone cleverly portrayed himself as a civic leader and family man who looked out for the poor and led his neighbors to believe he worked as a second-hand furniture dealer.

From 1925 to 1929, Scarface literally ran Chicago. “The Capone gang became strong and powerful,” recalled Virgil Peterson, the operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission, in a 1948 article he wrote for the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.“Officials in city, county and state government owed their positions to this organized group of criminals. The police department completely capitulated to this lawless element. Legitimate businesses took Al Capone into partnership in order to obtain the protection from violence, which the duly constituted authorities were unable or unwilling to provide. A large number of businessmen paid tribute to this gang of outlaws.”

In late 1927, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago’s mayor, embarked on a cross-country tour in the hope that he could drum up support for a possible presidential bid. Thompson was an unpredictable, eccentric character. During the 1927 mayoral election, Thompson held a debate between himself and two live rats, which he portrayed as his opponents. Al Capone had supported Thompson’s bid for mayor and probably played an important role in helping him win, but when Big Bill took office, he announced his intention to clean up the Windy City of vice and crime.

According to Woodford, Thompson planned to “stick it to Al by encouraging the Chicago police to harass Al’s organization regardless of its largesse. Consequently, Al decided to stay low until Big Bill had gotten this presidential nonsense out of his system. To this end, we held a press conference in December 5, 1927, to announce that Al was going on a vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida. All the newspapermen came up to the Metropole (the Chicago hotel serving as Capone’s headquarters). We fed them caviar and champagne and unmarked envelops containing thousand-dollar bills. Al told the news dogs that while he was on vacation the town’s imbibers were going to have to make their own liquor arrangements.”

The press conference was a diversionary move. Scarface had actually headed for Los Angeles. The Chicago police, however, were on to Scarface and they tipped off their Los Angeles colleagues. Capone tried to register at the swank Biltmore Hotel, but the manager had the temerity to ask the most dangerous gangster in America and his entourage to leave. Scarface blew his top, tried to intimidate the manager, and when that did not work, told the manager to stick it. The Chicago police warned Scarface he was not welcome back in Chicago. Given the heat, the gangster thought it best that he begin looking for a temporary sanctuary. He visited the Bahamas, New Orleans, and St. Petersburg, Florida, but holing up in of those locales did not seem like a good move.

Finally, Capone decided to stop in Miami for a few days while he planned his next move. He liked the city and decided to stay at least for a while. For $2,500, he rented a bungalow on Miami Beach for the winter season and made a couple of big deposits in some local banks using the alias “A. Brown.”

It did nottake long for Miami to learn of the famous gangster’s arrival. A Mrs. Sterns owned the property that Capone had rented through her real estate agent. The woman was dismayed to learn that her tenant, A. Brown, was actually none other than the legendary gangster from Chicago, Al Capone. She waited anxiously through the winter season fully expecting the mobster, his family and associates to turn her property into an animal house. But after the Capones left and she inspected her property, she was surprised to learn that her tenants had done no damage. Indeed, they had even left her gift sets of fancy chinaware and silverware, as well as several unopened bottles of wine.

Then Mrs. Sterns learned that the Capones had stuck her with an unpaid $780 telephone bill. Or so she thought. One day soon after, an attractive, well-dressed blond women pulled up to Mrs. Sterns’ door in a Cadillac. It was Mrs. Al Capone. “So sorry, I completely forgot about the bill,” Mrs. Capone explained. “I want to pay it now.” Mrs. Capone handed Mrs. Sterns a $1,000 bill and said: “Never mind the difference. We may have broken a few things, but this should cover it.”

In addition to the beach bungalow, Capone rented a suite on the top floor of the nine-story Ponce de Leon Hotel in downtown Miami. Scarface befriended 24-year old Parker Henderson Jr., the hotel manager, whose father had once served as Miami’s mayor. The young man became Scarface’s gofer and helped the mobster get money when he needed, thereby keeping the local authorities in the dark about the mobster’s finances. John Kobler, Capone biographer and the author of Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, described how the arrangement worked: “From Chicago, one of Capone’s associates would send a Western Union money transfer to “Albert Costa,” an alias adopted for that purpose. Henderson would then trot down to the Miami Western Union office, sign in for the transfer, disguising his handwriting, cash it, and deliver the money to Capone.” Between January and April l928, Henderson collected $31,000 for Scarface in this manner.

Miami reacted toScarface’s arrival as if he had brought along the Bubonic Plague. James M. Cox Sr., a former Ohio governor, a 1920 U.S. presidential candidate, and owner of the Miami Daily News (formerly known at the Miami Metropolis), launched a page one editorial campaign to help keep Capone out of the greater Miami area. The newspaper seemed to follow Scarface’s every known move. Some of the headlines read: “No, Miami is not for sale;” “Capone seeks U.S. protection while in Miami;” and “Mrs. Scarface is here as Scarface plans to arrive Tuesday.”

In Tallahassee, Florida’s capitol, Gov. Doyle E. Carlton issued an order to all the sheriffs in the state, informing them that Mr. Capone was to be arrested on sight and tossed into the slammer. Capone hired Vincent Giblin and J. Fritz Gordon, two of Miami’s best lawyers and later to be circuit court judges, and the legal battle was on.

Scarface devised astrategy of divide and conquer. He knew Miami was hurting economically. The real estate market had still not recovered and the tourists were staying home. He met with Miami’s Chief of Police Leslie Quigg. “I have no intention of engaging in criminal activity,” Capone told the police chief. “But I need to know if I should stay or leave.” Quigg’s answer: “You can stay as long as you behave yourself.”

Capone held a press conference where he tried to charm Miami’s city fathers. Capone showed why he had reached the pinnacle of Chicago’s criminal underworld. The godfather waxed lyrical about Miami, hailing it as “the garden of America, the sunny Italy of the New World” and announced his intention of buying a home. Moreover, he hinted, many of his friends may come to Miami and bring money with them. If permitted, he would open a restaurant, and if invited, join the Rotary Club.

Later James Sewell, a Republican campaign worker, told a federal investigator:

“I don’t believe there is a politician in town who didn’t solicit Capone’s financial aid.” Sewell alleged that Capone gave money to all kinds of Miami politicians.  In his 1946 autobiography, “Journey Through My Years,” Miami Daily News publisher Cox wrote: “Capone spent money like water when business in every channel was depressed. He made large contributions to the campaigns of candidates for office. It was the law-enforcing brands of government, of course, which claimed his attention. It was pretty well established that to one candidate he donated $30,000.”

Cox recalled how one day a well-dressed man walked into his office and laid a $500,000 check down on his desk. It was to be the first payment on the purchase of Cox’s Miami Daily News newspaper for $5 million. “The property was not worth that amount at the time, and there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that Capone interests were behind the offer,” Cox wrote. He rejected the offer and the emissary left without incident.

Scarface used Parker Henderson as a front man to buy a permanent residence: a $40,000, 14-room Spanish style bayfront estate at 93 Palm Avenue that beer brewer Clarence Bush had built in 1922. Henderson took the property in his own name and then leased it to Capone. Capone gave Henderson $2,000 as a binder and soon gave him an additional $2,000, the first of four annual payments.

In the coming months, Capone spent a small fortune, about $100,000, to turn his home into a fortress with heavy wooden doors and concrete walls. Florida State Attorney Vernon Hawthorne sought a court order that would allow the authorities to padlock Capone’s estate on the grounds it was “a public nuisance and a source of annoyance to the community as a harbor for all classes of criminals and desperate characters. J. Fritz Gordon, Capone’s lawyer attacked the state attorney’s move as a scheme by Hawthorne, the state attorney, and Miami Daily News publisher James Cox to help Hawthorne’s election campaign. The court ruled in Capone’s favor, advising the gangster: “Appreciate your citizenship and aid officials in enforcing the law.” 

Amid the controversy,Capone settled in to his PalmIsland estate and began enjoying his time in the MagicCity. He drove around the area with his bodyguards and associates in his seven-ton armor plated limousine. He golfed and played tennis, although he was not good at either. He was known to go into a rage and smash his racket or club. The mobster spent much of his time at the Palm Island Club, where he had acquired a quarter interest, and the gambling room of the Villa Venice, a 14^th Street gambling casino where he retained a controlling interest. He also liked to frequent a SouthBeach dog track and the Fleetwood Hangar Room.

He bought his clothes at the Sewell Brothers’ Store on East Flagler, spending as much as $1,000 at a time on suits, silk shirts and underwear, shoes and socks, and on at least one occasion, a $100 Panama hat. Jack Sewell worked at the family store and waited on Capone and the friends he brought with him. Capone befriended Sewell and he became a frequent visitor at the mobster’s PalmIsland home. One time, while arriving at a poker game, which was in progress, Sewell saw nothing but $1,000 bills on the table. “Capone was getting up as I walked in,” Seward recalled in a June 23, 1968Miami Herald interview. ‘I’m quitting,’ Capone said. ‘These scoundrels have taken me for $250,000.’”

Sometimes, Capone would hire an airplane at $60 an hour to fly him and members of his entourage to Bimini in the Bahamas for a picnic. Pilot Eddie Nirmaier, who flew Capone, recalled: “I charged $150 for the trip to Bimini and Capone would tip me $100. Capone and his mugs would eat salami sandwiches and drink beer—the beer they bought at Bimini—and we would return. It was a pretty expensive picnic.”

While enjoying histime in Miami, Capone did not neglect his business interests in Chicago. Even though Scarface was the Windy City’s most powerful gangster, there were times when he had to show the criminal underworld who was the boss. In 1929, Capone was still involved in a vicious gang war with his most dangerous rival, George “Bugs” Moran, the boss of the North Side Gang, formerly headed by Dion O’Banion until he was murdered at his florist shop in 1926. Bugs had no doubt who killed his former boss and he had been trying to whack Scarface ever since. On one occasion, James “Machine Gun” McGurn and several other associates of the Capone gang drove six cars past a hotel in Cicero, Illinois, a Capone stronghold, where he and some of his men were having lunch, and sprayed the building with more than 1,000 bullets.

On the morningof February 14, 1929, Moran sent six of his gang members to a garage on Chicago’ North Side to pick up a liquor shipment that highjackers were ostensibly offering at a fantastic price. It was actually a trap financed by Al Capone and planned by his associate, Machine Gun McGurn. While Moran’s men waited inside for the shipment to arrive, a Cadillac carrying four men dressed as policemen and accompanied by two men in civilian clothes, arrived. “The policemen told the six waiting gangsters and a mob hanger on, who, unfortunately for him, happened to be at wrong place at the wrong time, to line up against the wall and keep their hands in the air. Believing the gunmen to be police officers, the seven men did as they were told. The phony policemen produced guns and opened fire. When the shooting stopped, the blood-splattered bodies of Moran’s men lay on the ground. Six of them were dead; Frank Gusenberg survived and was taken to hospital where he died after refusing to identify the gunmen.

But Bugs Moran, Capone’s primary target, had escaped death. When Moran received news of what became known as the St. Valentine Day Massacre, he was quoted as saying, “Only Capone kills like that.”

While the mostspectacular gangland slaying in mob history was going down in Chicago, Scarface was 1,300 miles away at a party at his Palm Island estate, providing him with a perfect alibi, at least as far as connecting him to direct involvement in the St. Valentine Day’s Massacre. Attending were 100 guests from all walks of life—gamblers, entertainers, sportsmen, gangsters and politicians—many of whom had come to Miami for the championship boxing match between Jack Sharkey and Young Stribling. The guests feasted on an elaborate buffet and drank expensive champagne served by Scarface’s bodyguards. After the party, Scarface met with the Dade County solicitor, and answered questions about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Eventually, Capone testified about the killings before a Cook County grand jury, but he was never indicted. Meanwhile, he increased his security staff in Miami from 10 to 20 bodyguards.

In May andJune 1930, Miami’s political establishment and business leaders did their best to try and force Capone to leave Miami. Proceedings were held in private in the Dade County Courthouse, where a parade of prominent Miami citizens testified about what a menace Scarface was to Miami. The first witness, “Midwife” Carl Fisher, who had lost a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, claimed Capone’s presence in Miami depressed property values. The witnesses who followed were just as unconvincing as Fisher. As Stephen C. Bousquet pointed out in a 1998 Florida Historical Quarterly article: “Under sharp questioning by Capone’s attorneys, many (of Miami’s high powered witnesses”) testified that they had never actually seen Capone and could not provide eye witness accounts of illegal acts. Most of those who testified, in fact, had formed their opinions of Capone solely based on news accounts.” On June 14, 1930, the judge threw out the petition to kick Scarface out of Miami, ruling that nothing in Florida state law allowed for the expulsion of someone from a city simply because its good citizens thought that a particular person was undesirable.

But Capone’s luck had started to run out. In 1929, he was arrested in Philadelphia for carrying concealed weapons, and within six hours, he was sentenced to one-year prison term. Nine months later, on March 17, 1930, Capone was released for good behavior.

By now, Capone was having a problem of a different kind. He, like other gangsters from the 1920s, believed that the money made from illegal gambling was not taxable income. In 1927, however, a court ruled that gambling profits could indeed be taxed. Capone had cleverly avoided a paper trail when it came to showing how much money he had raked in from his criminal activities. He kept nothing in his own name, filed no income-tax returns and declared no assets or income. Front men did all of his business for him.

But Scarface was not as clever as he thought. The Internal Revenue Service went to work, and in 1931, a Chicago court indicted Capone for income tax evasion covering the years 1925 to 1929 and for failing to file tax returns for the years 1928 and 1929. Uncle Sam charged that Capone owed $215,080.48 in taxes from his gambling interests. A third indictment charged Scarface with violating the Prohibition Law from 1922 to 1931. Capone pled guilty, mistakenly believing that, by doing so, he could plea bargain the charges. But when James H. Wilkerson, the presiding judge, said there would be no deal, Capone then changed his appeal to not guilty. He also tried to bribe the jury, but the judge changed the jury panel at the last moment. Scarface ran out of moves, and he was found guilty on 18 of the 23 counts.  Judge Wilkerson sentenced Scarface to 10 years in federal prison and one year in county jail. Capone also had to serve a six-month contempt sentence for failing to appear in court.

In May 1932, Scarface was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the country’s toughest federal prison, but he corrupted the prison authorities and was able to live comfortably. Among his accoutrements were a mirror, typewriter, rugs and even a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Later, Capone was sent to Alcatraz where security was tighter and the system treated him like a typical prisoner.

In December 1938,prison officials at Alcatraz revealed that Capone was suffering from Peresis (brain damage caused by syphilis) and was now a mental patient. No one knows for sure how Capone contracted syphilis, but it is believed he got the disease in Chicago from a prostitute before he was married. On January 17, 1939, Capone’s 40^th birthday, prison officials transferred Scarface to Terminal Island Penitentiary in Los Angeles. On November 16, he was released from custody and sent to a Baltimore hospital for brain treatment. After his release from the hospital, Capone was brought to his Palm Island home in Miami, where he lived a reclusive life with his close family members. He would only leave his estate on special occasions, such as his son’s marriage at St. Patrick’s Church on Miami Beach.

By 1942 penicillin was available in extremely limited supplies, but Capone’s doctor managed to get some for him, making Capone one of the first syphilitic patients to be treated with antibiotics. Still, Capone’s condition worsened. Capone biographer John Kobler described Capone’s last days: “The curse of neurosyphilis from which Capone was suffering is unpredictable. The victim seemed normal, now disoriented, his speech unintelligible, a prey to tremors and epilepsy-like seizures. In even his best period Capone lacked mental and physical coordination. He would skip abruptly from subject to unrelated subject, whispering, humming, and singing as he chatted. Despite his gross overweight, he walked rapidly with jerky—automan-like motions.”

On January 21, 1947, America’s most famous gangster collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.  Six days later Capone died; he was 48 years old. Miami’s unwanted citizen was buried in plot 48 in Chicago’s Mount Olive Cemetery before a small group of mourners.

The Magic City, however, had the final word. In a scathing editorial titled “Let us blush”, the Miami Daily News blasted Scarface’s legacy: In part, it read: “To the eternal disgrace of our country, he did not go to prison for the blood he spilled, the violence he perpetuated. He went to prison, the irony of it, for failing to pay his taxes on his ill-gotten gains. The man we could not crush for his robber’s racket and murderous goons, we could only reach for his failure to split his profits for ourselves, the government!”

Ron Chepesiuk (dmonitor1@yahoo.com) is award winning freelance investigative journalist and documentary producer. He is a two-time Fulbright scholar to Bangladesh and currently Indonesia and a consultant to the History Channel's Gangland documentary series. His true crime books include Drug Lords, Black Gangsters ofChicago and Gangsters of Harlem. His two forthcoming books include The Trafficantes: Godfathers from Tampa, FloridaThe Mafia, CIA and the JFK Assassination (an e-book in February, 2010) and Sergeant Smack: The Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson. Kingpin, and his Band of Brother (June 2010).

June 15, 2003

This is the prologue to the book The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia's Cali Drug Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk, the story of the rise of the powerful Cali Cartel and the long and often frustrating campaign that U.S. and international law enforcement waged to take it down. The book details the cartel's rise to international prominence and the lifestyles of its godfathers, its efforts to buy Colombia, its death struggle with legendary Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, its brilliant strategy to portray itself as the kinder, gentler drug cartel from Colombia, and the mistakes that ultimately led to the crumbling of its well-oiled organization. The book will be published by Praeger, a member of the Greenwood Publishing Group, in the fall of 2003.

 by Ron Chepesiuk

Prologue:

"It's similar to, maybe, baking a cake."
 — David Karasiewski, Forensic Chemist, DEA 

 The call that launched the biggest drug trafficking investigation in New York State Police (NYSP) history came on April 12, 1985. Bob Sears, a DEA agent in the Albany office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), groped for the switch on the bed lamp and squinted at the alarm clock on the end table. It was a little past 2 a.m. Sears fumbled with the phone and blurted: "This better be important."

The caller was Ken Cook, a friend for years, but Cook was also an investigator assigned to the Major Crime Units of Troop Six, NYSP, and he had worked with Sears on many joint investigations. This was no social call.

"There has been an explosion at a farm house in Minden," Cook explained. "We don´t know what happened. It could be a bomb factory...a meth lab. Barrels of chemicals are all over the place. It´s a mess. Maybe the DEA needs to go out and take a look."¹

Sears yawned and rubbed his warm bed. He had a better idea. "Come on, Ken, it´s almost morning. Can´t we sleep on it ´til tomorrow?"²

But Cook persisted. "No, we need to go out there tonight while the scene is still hot." Sears knew well what Cook meant. Often, he would go out to a crime scene only to find that some young cop fresh out of the academy had left his hoof and paw prints all over the place. ³

Sears dragged himself out of bed, got dressed and drove out to the State Police Barracks in downtown Albany to rendezvous with Cook. During the one-hour drive to the farm, Sears and Cook speculated about what had happened. A bomb explosion did not make much sense, but neither did the meth lab theory. Minden was a small, sleepy hamlet of a few thousand inhabitants in upstate New York that seldom gave law enforcement much trouble. In fact, Cook could not recall when an incident in the Minden area looked serious enough to have an officer forsake his sleep and come out in the dead of night to investigate. Yeah, it was some other kind of accident, all right, but what? ⁴

At the scene, the bitter smell of chemicals permeated the air and almost singed the hair in their nostrils. About 50 to 75 yards away from their car, a house or some kind of dwelling was on fire, and firemen were still trying to hose it down. It was mass confusion, and none of the professionalism they hoped to see was in evidence. The firemen, Cook and Sears learned, where volunteers from the local county. Sure enough, the cops, who looked close to auditioning for a remake of a Keystones Cops movie, had not yet secured what could be a crime scene. Meanwhile, no crime scene investigators, akin to those seen on the popular TV series "CSI" had yet arrived to find the cause of the chaos and to see if there had been any loss of life. ⁵

Sears and Cook began poking around for themselves. In the wooden shed adjacent to the farmhouse they saw dozens of 55-gallon drums filled with chemicals they did not recognize. They took a quick peek inside a couple of the drums. Sears pulled out a pen and began to write down the names of the labels on his notepad. Some labels said acetone; others ether. Several drums had no labels. Nearby, they found case after case of what was labeled hydrochloric acid. There were also fire extinguishers, filter paper, gas masks, and bunches of hoses. They checked around the back of the shed and spotted a forklift.

They inspected the single-wide trailer about 50 yards away and observed a pot burning on the stove. The pot was hot and the liquid inside, still steaming. Something had been cooking within the last couple of hours. When the two investigators reached the farmhouse, they found walkie-talkies, drying racks, and what looked like financial ledgers. ⁶

What the hell do we have here?" Sears asked Cook. "It´s time I call the lab back at headquarters to see if they can tell us what the chemicals are." Sears marched back to the car and made the call. He described the scene and read off the names from his note pad. "What is it? What are we dealing with?" he asked. The answer made Sears wish he had not left his warm bed that night: " Jesus Christ, you´re in a cocaine-processing lab! Don´t touch anything or smell anything! Get the hell out of there! You can die!"⁷

Sears and Cook lived. Later in the day, the NYSP got a search warrant. During the next several days, the NYSP and DEA worked closely together and began an extensive, professional investigation. DEA lab analysts examined the hundreds of pounds of the brown, burnt sludge found in the double-wide trailer, as well as the several pounds of the white, snowy looking material made soggy by the water from the firemen's hoses. They had a pretty good idea what it was, but it always good procedure to be thorough. ⁸

Their conclusion stunned the two law enforcement agencies. They had uncovered a massive cocaine-processing lab right in their back yard. Based on the amount of chemicals present, the lab could process about 250 kilos of cocaine, but as David Karasiewski, supervisory chemist at the DEA Mid Atlantic Laboratory in Washington, D.C., later testified, "Ether and acetone, the organic solvents used in the cocaine manufacturing process, can be used more times or several additional times. What I mean by this... if you have the proper glassware, you can continue to recycle these organic solvents."⁹

But who was responsible for the cocaine lab? Who had the nerve, the organization, the know-how, the distribution network, the criminal enterprise to radically change the way drug trafficking is done? Cocaine, after all, is processed at labs in Colombia where the big drug trafficking syndicates known as cartels operated, not in rural USA. Traffickers had set up an extensive set of labs in the plains and jungle regions of Columbia, which they used to convert cocaine base to cocaine hydrochloride, or powdered cocaine. ¹⁰ The realization that the drug traffickers, wherever they came from, had transported cocaine paste to upstate New York to manufacture cocaine was mind blowing. Don't they have it backwards? Should they not first make the cocaine in Colombia and then ship the finished product to the U.S.?

That was the way it had been traditionally done, but in 1984, as the investigation following the Minden lab explosion revealed, the Colombian drug traffickers were changing their strategy, the result of intense pressure from the Colombian and U.S. governments. Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the Colombian justice minister, had authorized a spectacular raid on a major cocaine processing plant known as Tranquilandia, located in Colombia´s barren southeast Llanos area in the Amazon Region and run by the powerful and violent Medellin Cartel. ¹¹ The DEA had heard of a major shipment to Colombia of ether, a solvent like acetone and one of the essential ingredients in cocaine production. They secretly attached radio transmitters to two of the drums in the shipment and followed the signal via satellite from Chicago to Tranquilandia. The raid caught the traffickers by surprise. Forty workers were arrested and 10,000 barrels of chemicals and a billion dollars worth of cocaine confiscated. Soon afterwards, the price of cocaine on the street shot up, a sweet indication that the Tranquilandia operation had hurt the drug lords. ¹²

The Medellin cartel leadership was furious, and it ordered sicarios, hired Colombian contract killers, to murder Lara Bonilla. Colombian President Belisario Betancourt Cuertas declared a state of siege in Colombia and a "war without quarter" on the criminals. The Medellin Cartel, with its swagger and high profile, was the obvious target of Colombian government action, but the Cali Cartel's operations were disrupted as well. The leaders of Colombia´s two biggest drug trafficking organizations went into hiding and began moving their drug processing operations to neighboring countries. The DEA received information that Jose Santacruz Londono, one of the founding members of the Cali Cartel, and, as the DEA had learned, a key figure in the cartel´s distribution network, was in Mexico, where he was trying to establish new cocaine processing laboratories. ¹³

The U.S. government attacked the cocaine supply by placing restrictions on the number of chemicals used in cocaine manufacturing process that could be exported outside the U.S. The Colombian drug traffickers adapted when they realized the chemicals were easier to get in the U.S. than to smuggle to Colombia. In 1985, ether was selling for approximately $400 to $600 per 55-gallon drug in the U.S. In South America, the price was somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000. The U.S., moreover, had no reporting requirements for chemicals that were manufactured in the U.S. and stayed there. U.S. businesses that made shipments to foreign countries, on the other hand, had to report them. ¹⁴

In early June 1984, the Santacruz Londono organization sent a team to the rural town of Gibsonville, N.C., about 20 miles from Greensboro, to build a cocaine-processing lab. A lab in the Eastern U.S. would work out nicely because the biggest market for cocaine was in New York City and Santacruz and his associates in Cali, Colombia, controlled the distribution in the city. Like any good businessman, Santacruz treated the Gibsonville lab project as experimental to see if it could work.

The Santacruz Londono organization put Freddie Aguilera in charge of the project, who, in turn, sent underling Carlos Gomez and his associate Pedro Canales, a car salesman at the Rosenthal Chevrolet Dealership in Alexandria, Va., to see Al Ditto, a farmer in Gibsonville in February, 1984. Julio Harold Fargas, a petty drug dealer, had introduced Canales to Gomez. In early 1983, Fargas came by the Chevy dealership to look at cars. He could not speak good English, but that was no problem. He was introduced to Pedro Enrique Canales, one of the car salesmen who spoke fluent Spanish. Canales sold Fargas a car; they chatted some more and became friends. Eventually, Fargas persuaded Canales to help him sell a "little" cocaine. Canales would give Fargas the keys to a car on the lot, and he would put the cocaine in the trunk. A customer would "test drive" the car, and the cocaine disappeared when the car was brought back to the lot.

One day, Fargas was at the dealership when a farmer named Al Ditto from North Carolina came by to see his nephew and sell a few tee-shirts, moonshine, and other odds and ends he had in his truck. Fargas began to ask a lot of questions about Ditto and the area where he lived. Is North Carolina a farming place? Did Ditto have a farm? Did he grow his own vegetables? ¹⁵

Not long after the Ditto interrogation, Fargas offered Canales $3,000 to arrange a meeting between Al Ditto and Carlos Gomez so they could discuss a business deal. Canales agreed, and in February 1984 he and Gomez hopped a plane in Washington, D.C., and headed to see Ditto. Gomez toured Ditto´s entire farm, checking every detail out thoroughly. "This is perfect for the lab, but we'll need to install an exhaust fan to carry away the fumes made by the chemicals," Gomez told Canales. ¹⁶

Gomez did not speak English, so he asked Canales to tell Ditto up front what the farm was going to be used for. "No problem," said Ditto, and he agreed to do the work that had to be done to install the fan and convert the outbuildings into a cocaine-processing lab. Aguilera paid $110,000 in cash for the property, no questions asked. Two to three weeks later, Carlos drove to Allentown, Pa., to pick up the acetone for the lab.

In the summer, Gomez, his mistress Evelyn Dubon, and Fargas, who acted as the interpreter for the group's non English-speaking members, journeyed to Gibsonville to set up the lab and do a trial run. They were joined by two other Americans: John Wesley Martin, a handyman who was hired to make improvements to the barn and outbuildings, and Thomas Warren Hall, Ditto´s brother-in-law, who had brought in seven keys of cocaine paste from Miami for processing. The lab was not sophisticated, but it could get the job done. Later, Karasiewski told a court that an elaborate lab isn't needed to manufacture cocaine. "It´s similar to, maybe, baking a cake," was how the forensic chemist described the process. ¹⁷ Once the farm was readied, the lab was set to go. Workers wrapped the processed cocaine in plastic bags and carried it to a U-haul trailer, where it was hidden behind a wooden panel. The cocaine was then moved to New York City and sold for $6,000 a kilo. ¹⁸

The amount of cocaine processed and sold was small, but the cartel knew the lab concept could work. They had caught the cops asleep. In no time they would be flooding New York with thousands of kilos of snow. By January 1985, a larger team of at least 15 workers from Colombia and the U.S. were working at the Gibsonville lab and manufacturing 200 kilos of cocaine paste that was sold in the Big Apple. ¹⁹

The Cali Cartel was now convinced the project should go big time, and Freddie Aguilera began looking for a location closer to New York City. Why not near his sister, Consuelo Donovan, who lived with her American husband, Thomas, in Amsterdam, N.Y.? Aguilera recruited Thomas Donovan, and he arranged a meeting with Aguilera´s point man, Carlos Gomez, and a local real estate agent to look at farms in the area around Amsterdam. Shortly afterwards, Gomez settled on a 220-acre farm and gave $2,000 to Dubon, instructing her to make the deal. Before the closing, Aquilera gave Gomez an additional $110,000 in cash to pay off the property. Thomas Hall would act as the front man, and the cartel officially registered the farm in his name. ²⁰ Hall was an U.S. citizen and his ownership of the property would raise little suspicion. Besides, the arrangement would also help shield Aguilera from potential evidence against him should the operation be exposed. He planned to use the farm to raise horses, Hall told his neighbors. ²¹

The Hauber family, who lived in Staten Island, owned the farm and had used it as a summer home, but they were ready to sell it. Fred Hauber met with Evelyn Dubon, who claimed to be an exile from Nicaragua, and Thomas Warren Hall, who posed as her infirm gringo uncle from North Carolina. The transaction took place in the second floor office of an Amsterdam lawyer. The meeting went smoothly until it came time for Dubon to make the payment. She pulled out $110,000 out of a cheap-looking airline travel bag and stacked the small denomination bills on the lawyer´s desk. Not the brightest of ideas. "At that point everything went out of the window because it was definitely out of the ordinary for that area," Huber later explained. ²²

Huber hesitated and then refused to leave with the cash, fearing he might be robbed by the group or somebody outside working for it when he was leaving the office. "Relax," Duhon said. I´ll deposit the money in an Amsterdam bank and write you (Huber) a cashier´s check."²³

The cartel could not have settled on better place to run a clandestine and illicit operation involving many Hispanic workers, almost all of whom did not speak English. The Minden locals kept to themselves, minded their own business and did not normally contact authorities, if something suspicious happened.

"I know it's kind of unusual to have people who looked Hispanic and did not speak English to show up in a small town like Minden," said Pat Hynes, a NYSP police officer, who investigated the Minden lab. "The strangers from the farm would show up at the local hardware store and nobody paid them any attention. So yes, it was a perfect place for a cocaine processing lab."²⁴

After the closing in December 1984, the drug traffickers rented a big Ryder truck in Burlington, N.C. They loaded it with the chemicals, instruments, equipment, the cooking racks, and some processed cocaine and took it to Minden. They built a shed to store the chemicals and a double-wide trailer to house the workers and brought 230, 55-gallon drums of ether, acetone, and other highly hazardous precursor chemicals used in cocaine manufacturing. ²⁵ Aguilera directed his workers to buy the building supplies needed to convert the farm into a lab. He called Bralda International and World Consultants Documentation, the storage company in New York City, where the organization stored the cocaine base and huge barrels of precursor chemicals. The gang outfitted a white 1985 Chevy van with false paneling and began transporting the materials and supplies from the storage companies to the Minden farm. ²⁶

One day Aguilera called a meeting at the New York City apartment of his mistress, Elizabeth "Nena" Andrade-Londono, and told his associates that the police had followed him on the highway on one of his trips to Minden hauling cocaine base. He was lucky not to get caught, Aquilera told the gathering. In the future, we have to be careful what we say and where we say it, he warned. Always use pay phones; the cops could be tapping our lines. ²⁷

On April 1, 1985, the Minden lab was ready. For nine days Aguilera and his associates processed about 1,539 kilograms of cocaine, which, in 1985 value, was worth more than $100 million before being cut or otherwise diluted for street sales. DEA chemists later determined that enough chemicals remained at Minden to produce 5,000 kilograms without restocking ²⁸

The Cali Cartel believed it had hit the drug traffickers´ pot of gold. It could be months, or even years, if ever, before law enforcement would be on to them. But they never factored in bad luck. On its tenth day of operation, an electrical short sparked a fire. The workers frantically tried to put it out, but the extinguishers failed to operate. In a panic they fled on foot into the countryside. When the fire spread to some of the precursor chemicals, the lab exploded. Luckily, only a small portion of the 230, 55-gallon drums was in the lab at any one time. Most of the chemicals were stored in a nearby shed, which the firemen managed to reach just ahead of the flames. ²⁹

"It could have been a disaster," revealed Craig A. Benedict, assistant U.S. attorney general for the Northern District of New York. "The chemicals at the lab had the explosive power of 63, 000 sticks of dynamite. Had they exploded, the workers, firemen, and anybody else in the area would have died."³⁰

The police picked up three of the workers trying to flag down passing motorists for a ride. All had cocaine residue on their clothing. Gomez fled on foot to Aguilera´s sister´s house, and from there, he drove to his apartment in Queens, N.Y. Aguilera had left minutes before the fire to call his bosses in Cali and report on how well the lab was doing. Returning to the farm, he spotted the fire and immediately headed for the big city. ³¹

A fire, an explosion and cops crawling around their former cocaine lab was not going to deter the Cali Cartel. Go ahead and find a good place for another lab, Santacruz instructed Aguilera. The lieutenant gathered the remnants of his Minden team and met in Gomez´s apartment. He paid off the members and began making plans for another lab. He directed Fargas to find a new farm. Within two-and-half-weeks of the Minden disaster, Aguilera had bought another site in rural Orange County, Va., for $160,000 under the name of an American, Robert Michael Cadiz. As with the Gibsonville and Minden farms, the traffickers made renovations on the Virginia property. This time workers installed sophisticated surveillance cameras at the farm´s entrance, as well as cut exhaust fans into the barn´s roof to release the ether and acetone fumes. They installed a large metal building to store the 55-gallon chemical drums. ³²

From mid May to mid January, the Virginia lab ran smoothly, producing about 3,864 kilos of cocaine, but now the authorities were hot on Aguilera´s trail. The traffickers left plenty of evidence behind at Gibsonville and Minden for the authorities to analyze. Investigators found Santacruz Londono´s Cali phone number in the records. ³³ They had confiscated record books and computer disks containing the names and addresses of dealers and customers and revealed how the product was being distributed. Evidence at Minden led authorities to Gibsonville. In analyzing the evidence found at the two places, the authorities were able to deduce that another lab was being built somewhere in Orange County, Va. ³⁴

The DEA and the NYSP tipped off police in Orange County, telling them to look for Colombian individuals who had bought a farm in their county between the time period of May and early June, 1985, probably in the name of an American. Local police investigated and quickly discovered that a farm fitting the profile had been sold on May 22. They checked out court records to determine who had bought the property and flew over the property to take photographs. They found changes had been made to the property. It looked as if the new property owners had installed two air vents on the roof of the large metal shed.

The police set up surveillance from a fire tower close to the farm and began using binoculars and 30 and 60-power spottoscopes to observe activity on and about the farmhouse and metal shed. One day, they spotted workers taking boxes out of the shed and putting them in the back of a pick up truck.

The police had seen enough. On July 1, they obtained a search warrant and the next morning raided the farm. A Virginia State Police armored vehicle sped up to the farmhouse, police men jumped out and everyone in the house was ordered to get out. When only three people obeyed the order, police used tear gas to force out three others. The police later learned that one person escaped. Inside, police found a computer, telephone, typing equipment, weapons, including a shot gun, MM-1 rifle, a .9mm pistol, a 25-automatic pistol, and a telescope pointed in the direction of the farm´s front entrance. In the shed they discovered 86 barrels of ether and acetone, more than 55 pounds of cocaine base, and a small amount of processed cocaine. Police later learned that shortly before the raid, the most recent batch of processed cocaine — about 1000 pounds, had been delivered to Aguilera. ³⁵

As the investigation continued, the authorities discovered other processing labs. Two days later, they arrested 10 Colombian nationals in clandestine cocaine labs in New York State and Virginia: a 47-acre tract at 6805 Sound Avenue in Baiting Hollow, Long Island; a 66-acre site in Fly Creek, N.Y., which is located about 90 miles west of Albany; and another property in Gordonsville, Va. The labs all fit the same pattern, and the authorities seized another pile of records, 147 pounds of cocaine, 100 pounds of cocaine base, more than 5,000 gallons of chemicals, and sophisticated equipment criminals use to monitor DEA and police activities. All 10 suspects were charged with conspiracy to import and sell cocaine and faced a maximum of 15 years in prison. ³⁶

Authorities continued to search for Aguilera and Gomez. Ten months later, DEA agents spotted Carlos Gomez and Elizabeth Dubon during surveillance in the Whitestone area of Queens. Using a search warrant, they arrested the two in their home at 1905 Clintonville Street. Inside the house, they found 33 pounds of cocaine, which the police later gave a street value of $20,250,000, a wing-master shotgun, equipment for making bricks of cocaine, a machine gun threaded with a silencer, a short-barrel shotgun labeled "law enforcement use only," a New York City police lieutenant´s badge, and fake passports and drivers licenses. ³⁷

In January 1987, Gomez and Dubon pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to distributing and manufacturing narcotics. The following May, Gomez pleaded guilty to the same charge in the Middle District Court of Eastern District of New York. Fred Aguilera, the Colombian mastermind of the biggest cocaine lab manufacturing operation ever uncovered in the U.S., fled and became a fugitive. ³⁸

In busting the labs and keeping thousands of kilos of cocaine off the streets, U.S. law enforcement had won a victory in the War on Drugs. Aguilera and Gomez, however, were two small, irreplaceable parts of a well-oiled criminal enterprise. Jose Santacruz Londono, the mastermind of the labs, would find new foot soldiers and new ways of getting his product to the streets of America. Meanwhile, law enforcement had another unsettling glimpse of the enemy that authorities were now calling the Cali Cartel. By now, many of the veteran investigators tracking the cartel had concluded it was unlike any criminal organization they had investigated: one combining the best management and marketing strategies of multinational corporations with a Mafia's ruthlessness and a terrorist organization's secrecy and compartmentalization.

"Minden reinforced our belief that cocaine was overrunning New York State," said Tom Constantine, who served as director of the NYSP from 1985-1992 and later as DEA Administrator from 1994 to 1997. "The Cali Cartel was running their operation like a legitimate business — getting as close to the market as possible. We stepped up our efforts to go after the cartel."³⁹

The labs opened everybody´s eyes," said Bill Mante, a former NYSP detective who worked on the post-Minden investigation. "Here they are now right on top of us," Mante recalled. "The balls. We felt the Cali Cartel had a good 10-year start on us. We saw a huge potential for disaster if we didn´t hit them hard and aggressively."⁴⁰

During the next decade, law enforcement would use everything in its arsenal to take down this powerful and enterprising Mafia. Indeed, the Cali Cartel would prove to be the most formidable adversary in the history of international drug trafficking.

Footnotes

1. Interviews with Bob Sears, March, 2002, and Ken Cook, March 2002
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Minden is about 60 miles from Albany, N.Y.
5. Interviews with Sears and Cook, ibid.
6. Interview with Sears and United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quinjano, Juan Aldana and Carlos Gomez, 87-CR-255, United States District Court. Northern District of New York, 1989, Trial Transcript, Trial Testimony of David Karasiewski, p. 79. Karasiewski accompanied DEA agents to Minden because its DEA policy is that a DEA chemist must accompany agents to a crime scene because of the hazardous nature of the chemicals.
7. Ibid.
8. United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quinjano and Others, ibid. Trial Testimony of Bob Sears, p. 40
9. Ibid., Trial Testimony of Karasiewski, p.79
10. Riley, Jack, Snow Job, The War Against International Drug Trafficking, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 199, p. 184.
11. Spanish-speaking people use three names, such "Rodrigo Lara Bonilla." The second name, the mother's maiden as in "Lara," is used as the last name.
12. See Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, The Kings of Cocaine, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1988, 1989, pp. 127-132 plus, for a good discussion about the bust at Tranquilandia.
13. "Case Status and Disposition of Non-Drug Evidence," Report of Investigation, DEA, March 1, 1985
14. Interviews with Bob Sears, March, 2002, and Ken Cook, March 2002
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Minden is about 60 miles from Albany, N.Y.
18. Interviews with Sears and Cook, ibid.
19. Interview with Sears and United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quinjano, Juan Aldana and Carlos Gomez, 87-CR-255, United States District Court. Northern District of New York, 1989, Trial Transcript, Trial Testimony of David Karasiewski, p. 79. Karasiewski accompanied DEA agents to Minden because its DEA policy is that a DEA chemist must accompany agents to a crime scene because of the hazardous nature of the chemicals.
20. Ibid.
21. United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quinjano and Others, ibid. Trial Testimony of Bob Sears, p. 40
22. Ibid., Trial Testimony of Karasiewski, p.79
23. Riley, Jack, Snow Job, The War Against International Drug Trafficking, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 199, p. 184.
24. Spanish-speaking people use three names, such "Rodrigo Lara Bonilla." The second name, the mother's maiden as in "Lara," is used as the last name.
25. See Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, The Kings of Cocaine, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1988, 1989, pp. 127-132 plus, for a good discussion about the bust at Tranquilandia.
26. "Case Status and Disposition of Non-Drug Evidence," Report of Investigation, DEA, March 1, 1985
27. United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quijano and Others, Trial Testimony Bob Sears, p. 40, and United States v. Fred Aguilera Quinjano, United States Court of Appeal for Second Circuit, Docket Number 89-1422, n.d., p. 2
28. Docket number 89-1422, ibid. p. 6
29. United States v. Fred Aguilera-Quinjano, ibid., Trial Testimony of Pedro Canales, pp. 381-383
30. Ibid., Trial Testimony of David Karasiewski, p. 80
31. Cathy Woodruff, "Ex-workers Say Aguilera Head of Two Cocaine Labs,"Schenectady Gazette, May 25, 1989, p. 17
    

    How is cocaine processed? First, the drug traffickers buy coca plants from coca growers in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia, pick the flowers and buds off the plant, which is then mashed and ground into a thick mesh. The paste is extracted and taken to special hidden processing labs, such as the ones at Minden and Fly Creek, where the mesh is combined with other chemicals and cooked until it becomes the highly potent white power known as cocaine. During the process, the paste is dissolved in a solvent like acetone and ether, and a precipitate, such as hydrochloric acid is added, which causes the cocaine to crystallize and fall out of solution. Heat fans and microwave ovens are used to dry the precipitant. After the cocaine is processed, it is turned into large bricks called kilos. One brick is equal to 1000 grams of cocaine. See also, Jack Riley, Snow Job: The War Against International Drug Trafficking, ibid. , p.185.

32. Cathy Woodruff, "Ex-workers Say Aguilera Head of Two Cocaine Labs," Ibid., p. 17
33. Docket Number 89-1422 p. 4.
34. Ibid., p. 5
35. "2 Billion Cocaine Trial to End for Mastermind of Upstate Lab"Syracuse Herald-Journal, August 16, 1989, p. 12A
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Interview with Pat Hynes, May 2002
39. Docket Number 89-14522, ibid., p. 5. Precursor chemicals are chemicals such as acetone and ether, which are essential to the cocaine manufacturing process.
40. United States v. Freddie Aquilera-Quintano and Others, Transcripts, ibid. p. 71

Editor's Note: The prologue appearing on Crime Magazine is an uncorrected proof of the prologue that will appear when the book is published. As a result, this version of the prologue may differ slightly from the printed version.

About the Author

Ron Chepesiuk, a Rock Hill, S.C., freelance journalist, has been reporting on international drug trafficking since 1987. He is the author of Hard Target; The U.S.'s War on International Drug Trafficking , 1992-1997 (McFarland, 1998) and The War on Drugs: An International Encyclopedia, ABC--CLIO, 1999), which contains a forward by former Colombian President (1998-2002), Andres Pastrana Arango. He is the author of 16 other books and more than 2,700 articles that have appeared in such publications as USA Today, The National Review, New York Times Syndicate and Woman' World. In 2003, Chepesiuk was a Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at Chittagong University in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Click here for the Greenwood Publishing Group's page on The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia's Cali Drug Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk.