J.R.: When I visited Don Ochoa at his ranch in late 1982, he told me he was having a terrible problem with Communists. They were coming down from the hills and stealing his cows and trying to stir up the people against him. They even kidnapped one of his daughters. This made the Cartel stronger because the families in it banded together to fight the Communists.* To do this, they needed guns. They also needed guns to protect coke factories and fight little wars in the streets. The Colombians couldn’t get enough guns. They wanted guns from America because here they’re easier to get than in Colombia. Plus, many gun dealers in Florida took cash. The Colombians could launder money with guns the same way I did with racehorses.
Mickey would not fly guns. It went against his philosophy of nonviolence. So I got into this business with Max. The one thing Max proved good at was buying guns. He obtained caseloads of AR-15s and other excellent weapons.* Max had an in with a dirty cop on the Miami Police Department bomb squad. When the cops impounded exotic weapons such as plastic explosive or machine guns, they sold them to Max out the back door of the station.
Once a month I’d have Roger come down with his King Air and fly guns to Colombia. The flights were easy. The heat was looking for drugs coming in, but nobody cared about guns going out.
WHEN I earned more trust with the Cartel by shipping the guns, they asked me to help fly their money out of Florida. Up until about 1982 the Colombians had crooked banks in Miami that they could walk into with trash bags full of cash and make deposits. Everybody did this. In the late 1970s my friend Bebe Rebozo had a bank where he let me deposit shoeboxes of cash, no questions asked.† By the early 1980s the heat was starting to watch Florida banks because of all the cash coming in.‡ There were many months when I brought Rafa a half ton of cash—hundreds of millions of dollars—as payment from the distributors. Stash houses were overflowing.
Finally, General Noriega, who was friends with Pablo Escobar, said the Cartel could use his banks in Panama to hold their dollars. Laundering money was his specialty.§ Rafa asked me to run cash flights to Panama. He promised it would be easy to land there. Noriega would give our planes military protection at the airport.
I used Roger on the first run. We took a few boxes with $50 million as a test load. As soon as we landed, army trucks surrounded our plane. Soldiers got out showing guns. A big guy with acne grooves in his face came forward. Then a nasty little woman in a military uniform walked in front of him. This did not look promising. But the woman said, “We will take you to the bank.”
The soldiers unloaded the plane, and we drove to the bank in a motorcade with sirens blaring. Then the guy with grooves on his face drove Roger and me across town to a big house. He walked us into an office to meet General Noriega. Like our escort, Noriega had holes in his face from bad skin, and I wondered if the two men were related. But Noriega was short. He was a troll. He wanted me in his office to witness his signing off on the bank deposit, so I could tell the Colombians how serious he took his job as a banker.
On my next trip Noriega warmed up to me. He invited me to his house. He wanted to show me a room where he kept some of his favorite mementos. He had shelves of pictures showing him in military school in America* and a couple of paintings that looked expensive. I told the general how nice his paintings were and asked where he got them.
He made a funny smile and said, “I stole them.”
His most prized possessions were photographs of him with Vice President Bush.† Noriega’s favorite one was really strange. It showed him sitting in Bush’s lap.* He’d point to the picture and laugh. “See? I am America’s best friend. Bush is my boss.”
I didn’t care who his friends were, Noriega was a disgusting person. On one trip to Panama, I went to a party at a government mansion. It started off normal—everybody was doing lines, beautiful Latin women everywhere. I walked into a corner, and there was Noriega on a couch with a couple of little girls, maybe nine years old, on either side of him, and he was petting them. He had a funny smile on his face like when he showed me his stolen art.
But whatever his faults, the U.S. government believed he was dependable. He was Bush’s friend, and at his parties, when he wasn’t putting the moves on nine-year-old children, you’d see him talking to clean-cut Americans from the embassy.
When Noriega told me I could open my own accounts at his banks and that he’d personally take care of me, I saw it as an opportunity. Over the next two to three years, I gave him $150 million of my own money—cash that I dug up from hiding spots around Delray. I had the trusted dictator of an important country working as my personal banker. The only thing crazier would be if the U.S. government hired me to be a smuggler.
But that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?
* In 1981 Don Ochoa’s daughter, Martha Nieves, was kidnapped by M-19, a left-wing revolutionary group. In response to the kidnapping, the Ochoas joined with other Cartel leaders and wealthy landowners to create a paramilitary force called Muertas a Sequestradores—Death to Kidnappers. The rise of this and other private armies helped destabilize Colombia for the next two decades.
* The AR-15 is the civilian version of the U.S. military’s M-16 infantry rifle.
* As a young Panamanian military officer in the 1960s, Noriega received U.S. military training at bases in Panama and in the United States at Fort Bragg.
* Jon is likely referring to a photo of Bush and Noriega taken in the 1970s. In the photo, Bush and Noriega are seated extremely close together on a couch, and perhaps through an accident of perspective Noriega appears to be sitting in Bush’s lap.
† The banker and close confidant of former President Nixon whom Jon spoke about in chapter 37.
† Bush the elder met frequently with Noriega beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was the director of the CIA. As reported in the May 16, 1991, Chicago Tribune article “Files Detail Noriega CIA Connection,” prior to Noriega’s 1992 trial for racketeering, trafficking, and money laundering, his defense claimed he had been paid more than $10 million by the CIA. During the trial, the U.S. government’s lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, disputed that figure, arguing that Noriega had been paid only about $300,000 in the form of monthly paychecks that he received from approximately 1971 to 1986—meaning it cost about $1,500 a month to bribe the dictator of a third world country in that era.
‡ In 1982 the Federal Reserve Bank reported that Miami banks had taken in more than $2 billion of cash that couldn’t be accounted for by lawful economic activity.
§ The CIA used banks in Panama to launder money and secretly finance its activities throughout Central America in the 1980s. Noriega, who emerged as one of the Agency’s top money-laundering facilitators in Panama, offered similar services to drug smugglers, as outlined in Larry Collins’s July, 23 1991, New York Times story “Banker of Choice to the Company.”