J.R.: In early 1980 Fabito asked me to help with a new situation. His older brother Jorge had found an American pilot who was good at flying coke into the country. The Ochoas were always looking for new ways to move product. They understood that when you run something illegally, you have to always change how you do business. Over time cops get wise, snitches snitch, competitors move in. The Bahamas were getting heat from the U.S. government. On top of that, the Ochoas were leery of Carlos Lehder. I’d met him by then, and the guy was crazy. He was worse than Albert San Pedro with his voodoo. Carlos Lehder hero-worshipped Hitler. He talked about this openly. I don’t care who you are, if you talk about how you want to make a Nazi state in South America and become the new Hitler, people will lose confidence in you.
This new pilot they found could pick up their coke in Colombia and fly it into the United States, but there was one problem. He would only land his plane in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He owned a hangar at the airport there, and at the time Baton Rouge was not being watched as a drug-smuggling center.* That was a positive. The bad part was that this pilot had no interest in moving the coke once he got it into his hangar. He wanted the Colombians to pick it up. Louisiana was all rednecks. There were blacks and Cajuns in Louisiana, but no Spanish. A Colombian in Louisiana would stick out.
Fabito asked me if I’d go with him to Louisiana to meet his pilot and figure out a way to have drivers pick up his coke. We flew on a commercial flight to Baton Rouge. On our way Fabito told me his family believed the pilot was trustworthy. But Fabito did not like him. Something about the guy rubbed him the wrong way.
The pilot’s name was Barry Seal.† We met him at a coffee shop in a Ramada Inn. Barry Seal wasn’t a tall guy, but he was big, maybe 220 pounds, and he made a lot of noise. He was boisterous. He looked like a braggart. When we sat down, he cracked a joke and overlaughed, so people looked at us in the coffee shop.
Fabito jumped right to business. He said, “Barry, Jon’s my friend. He’s my compadre. He is me. And what you and him do, he don’t have to ask me. You guys just get the shit done we need done.”
I would know Barry for the next six years. He was definitely a blowhard. He drove around in an Eldorado convertible with the top down, no matter what the weather. All I ever heard him say was “I’m the best at this. I’m so good at that.”
Barry could back up his bragging. He was a great pilot. He loved to fly. For smuggling, he used propeller planes. Small planes can land in more places and fly low under radar. But for fun, Barry liked to fly a Learjet.
Soon after I met Barry, he flew to Miami for a meeting. When we finished, I told him I was heading to a horse race in New Orleans. At that time the racehorse stable I’d founded to launder money was going strong, and I went to different tracks around the country to buy horses. Barry said, “I’ll give you a ride.”
We drove out to Opa-locka.* Barry had a little Learjet. It was a sharp-looking plane. When we got in, Barry said, “I’m going to give you the best ride you’ve ever had.”
When we took off, he stood that plane on its tail. We went straight up, like in a rocket ship. When we get to the top of the sky, he said, “You think that was good? Wait until we go down.”
That motherfucker, he turned the plane nose down. Then he turned the plane upside down. I don’t normally get scared, but the motherfucker got me scared. I give him credit for that. After we landed, he said, “The Learjet is the safest plane made. The Swiss originally made this as a fighter plane. Even if we lost power, I could glide it in. It’s the only jet that will do that.”
That was Barry Seal. He loved flying like I loved robbing people. Some people said he was a cokehead, but I never saw him high. I never saw him chase women. He had a girlfriend, his secretary. She was in love with him. He was in love with her. When he was on the ground, they were inseparable. That was his whole life outside of flying.
Barry could fly in as much as a thousand kilos at a time—more than most pilots back then. After he landed, he’d stack the coke in his hangar. This used to drive Fabito crazy. He wouldn’t even close the hangar doors. Barry didn’t give a fuck. Ground work was beneath him.
That was my job—organizing the cars, the drivers, the stash houses, so Fabito’s Colombian distributors in Miami and New York could get their coke.
I BECAME the guy Fabito turned to when there was a problem. I didn’t have any special skills except that I was a gringo who could operate in America. When it came to the Ochoa family, my word was my bond. I was becoming almost like a straight businessman inside their organization.
The Colombians the Ochoas brought into the United States to be their soldiers—driving their cars, protecting their stash houses—were Indians from the mountains. They were peasants with gold teeth and guns, and they were the backbone of the Ochoas’ U.S. distribution system. They ran coke to New York, Los Angeles, and anywhere between where they found buyers. These were the guys I delivered the Ochoas’ coke to. In return, they gave me the Ochoas’ money.
Whenever you have coke flowing in one direction, you get money flowing back. Cash and coke of the same value were about the same size. The only difference was cash was about half the weight. If I moved a hundred kilos of coke, I’d get about fifty kilos of money back.
These exchanges didn’t go smooth at first. The Colombian soldiers tended to do things like they were in a gangster movie. They’d bring the money in one car, followed by five more cars loaded with guys carrying machine guns and knives. They were good guys, but one day they’re in the jungle and the next day they’re driving around Miami, heavily armed, with trunkloads of money and coke. Most were out of their minds on cocaine and aguardiente. It’s a lucky thing they didn’t have sobriety checkpoints in those days. These maniacs would have just slaughtered the police.
The first thing a Colombian mountain hick did when he landed in Miami was buy a $500 car and install a $1,000 stereo. The first exchange I did with them, I picked a quiet parking lot. These guys rolled up, drunk, heavily armed, blasting their stereos. They were going to bring the cops on a noise violation alone.
After that I met with Fabito and told him, “We got to change how your guys work. Let’s have everybody relax. Keep everything low-key. Nobody needs to drive around with guns sticking out of the car. We’re all on the same side here.”
My way to deliver coke, or pick up money, was to keep everybody anonymous and separate. If I’m delivering coke, I have my guy drive a car with it in the trunk to a normal family restaurant like Denny’s. He leaves the car in the parking lot and hides the keys in a ledge in the men’s room. He walks out and gets picked up down the street by somebody else. The guys bringing money do the same thing with their car at a different restaurant. Once we get the keys to the money car, we tell them where the car with the coke is and where the keys are hidden. This way everybody is safe.
It would be very hard for cops or a do-gooder asshole citizen at one of these restaurants to see that drug deals were happening. Our activities were invisible.
As I used more and more drivers for my cars, I avoided hiring street people. I didn’t need armed guys for this. I used kids trying to earn money for school, or working guys who needed a couple extra dollars for their mortgage. They were happy to earn a few bucks driving a car from point A to B. They didn’t want to look in the trunk or ask stupid questions. They just wanted to earn their pay. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I never had a problem with these kids. The few times I did, they were very sorry.
I gave my drivers fake licenses. I’d found a guy whose cousin worked at the state licensing bureau. For a couple hundred bucks, I could send someone in to him, and he’d take their picture and issue a license in a fake name, and put it all in the main computer so if a cop ran the license, it came up as legit. If one of my guys got arrested, they could use the fake ID. I’d bond them out, and they could skip their bail. Obviously, once a guy was arrested, the heat took their fingerprints, but the system was so slow in those days, a guy could usually get out before they figured out who he really was.
I always tried to hire people through someone else. If I found one guy who was reliable, I’d have him hire the help he needed. When you do illegal work, you’re better off to keep as much distance as you can from the guys working for you. Use your name as little as possible. Don’t try to show everybody that you’re a big shot. If I happened to pick up a car from one of the kids who didn’t know me, I’d act like I was just another driver. That way if that guy’s arrested, even if he wants to rat, he don’t know who you really are.
I handled Fabito’s Colombians the same as the Florida kids working for me. I got them fake licenses and had Danny Mones take care of any problems they had. These peasant Colombians were great guys but high-spirited. They were constantly getting arrested for bar fights, shootings, rapes—you name it. Soon as they got arrested, we’d bond them out and put them on a plane back to Colombia. You never want your guys sitting in a jail. That’s when they get the ideas to rat people out.
My philosophy was the same as the Mafia’s. Always take care of your guys.
FROM WORKING with Barry Seal, I learned there were small airports all over the United States that nobody watched. In Florida the DEA started to watch even the littlest airfields. In other states they were wide open. A small plane going from Baton Rouge to upstate New York or California could land with no problem.
Fabito had a Colombian distributor in Los Angeles whom he wanted me to supply with the coke that Barry brought into Baton Rouge. We decided to fly it to the Van Nuys airport.
My friend Joey Ippolito had his operation out there, too, with the coke he was getting from Gary and Bobby in Aspen, but the market was growing so fast, nobody worried about having more than one distributor in a city. In L.A. people snorted so much, you could carpet-bomb the city with blow and they’d ask for more. In other cities, where the Ochoas supplied more than one distributor, there were wars between them. But that was their problem, not mine.
When we flew coke into Van Nuys, we didn’t want Fabito’s guys driving into the airport, in case they brought heat with them. I talked to my lawyer Danny Mones about a good way to get coke out of the airport, and he helped me buy a small freight company in California. They had a little fleet of step trucks that they used to move things like furniture and office supplies. I renamed the company JF Transportation, for “Jon” and “Fabito.” Looking back, it was probably stupid to use our initials, but I thought it was comical at the time.
Now, when we flew coke to Van Nuys, we put it in boxes labeled “office supplies.” We had our drivers come to the airport in Van Nuys with bills of lading. Everything was proper. I started shipping coke to my friend Bernie Levine in San Francisco from Van Nuys using our trucks. He knew people with wineries up there, so our drivers would come back with wine and deliver it to restaurants in L.A.
Our delivery company actually made a profit. We sold the company after about a year, when one of our drivers drove drunk on the job and had an accident. The company got sued, and it was a nightmare. Moving coke was one thing. Dealing with lawsuits was another.
Everything I did was aimed at making things run smooth and quiet. In the late 1970s they started talking about “cocaine cowboys” overrunning the streets.* Scarface came out when I was at my peak.* The mayhem of that movie was accurate, but when I saw it, I had to laugh. My goal was to run things very differently from the way Al Pacino ran his business. The backbone of my operation was American guys who did little jobs here and there, earned a few extra dollars, and kept their mouths shut.
I always tried to do my job with the opposite of violence.
That was my wish.
* Baton Rouge was home to a large number of small aviation transport companies that serviced the gulf oil industry. Baton Rouge–bound flights entering from the Gulf of Mexico did not typically arouse suspicion.
* Opa-locka is the large general aviation and military airfield near Miami.
* Cocaine Cowboys was the title of Ulli Lommel’s 1979 cult film with Andy Warhol about rock stars battling the Mafia. Almost nobody saw the film except for perhaps an enterprising Miami reporter. Shortly after the movie’s release, the term “cocaine cowboys” began appearing in Miami papers to describe the Latin drug gangs leading a surge in violence in South Florida.
* Scarface, starring Al Pacino, chronicled the rise and fall of a fictitious Cuban coke dealer in Miami. It was released in 1983.
† Barry Seal, subject of the 1991 HBO film Doublecrossed, is one of the most storied figures of the early drug-smuggling era. In 1955, at age sixteen, Seal joined the Baton Rouge Civil Air Patrol, a flying club whose members included future presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1963 Seal had been recruited by the CIA to join Operation 40. The group, based in Mexico, included Frank Sturgis, who would later gain infamy as one of the Watergate burglars, and Porter Goss, later a Florida congressman, and then director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006. At the time Seal worked with these men, Operation 40 was a unit set up after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion to funnel arms to anti-Castro militants around Central America and the Caribbean. Seal was employed as an arms-smuggler pilot for Operation 40. Later Seal joined the U.S. Air Force and became a pilot for Special Forces operations in Vietnam. In 1966 Seal became an employee of TWA and was soon certified as the youngest 747 pilot in the world. While working as a TWA pilot, Seal continued his clandestine work for the CIA. In 1972 he was arrested in Mexico for smuggling two tons of C-4 explosive to a Cuban exile group that was planning terrorist attacks on the Castro government. Seal would claim that the CIA disavowed him after his 1972 arrest in Mexico. Seal was subsequently fired from TWA. He turned to drug smuggling to support himself. At the time Jon Roberts met him, Seal had recently been released from prison in Honduras, where he’d been held for marijuana smuggling.