RAUL DIAZ WAS not in much of a position to enjoy the Morales-Williams show. His wife was filing for a divorce and a federal parole officer had reported Diaz for overstepping the law in his use of two key CENTAC informants. The FBI, he heard, was about to look into the affair. Speaking of affairs, Diaz had been hooking up with Nancy Cid, ex-wife of Juan Cid, the prolific pot dealer. Juan Cid’s attorney was none other than Douglas Williams. Douglas Williams was also representing the bodyguard of Amilcar, Raul Diaz’s prize catch, when he wasn’t busy grilling Ricardo Morales, Raul Diaz’s star asset. (No use drawing a Venn diagram.)
Throw in seventy-two-hour work benders, and Diaz was drinking and chain-smoking like never before. In mid-1982, as Morales dished sensational testimony in Tick-Talks, Diaz went to his doctor complaining of debilitating pain in his insides: he had an ulcer running down the length of his digestive tract, all the way down to the bleeding exit. Depressed, paranoid and full of whiskey, he kept dialing Internal Affairs and the FBI to see what, if anything, they had in store for him. At best, the Feds might curtail CENTAC’s extraordinary powers. In a worst-case scenario: Raul Diaz’s fifteen-year career as a cop would end—just as it was about to catapult him to great heights.
Operation Tick-Talks arrived at its hyperabsurd climax when Morales finally appeared to face his old pals from Mutiny Table 14. Under heavy security, in a courtroom filled with airport-grade metal detectors and stacks of deposition transcripts, the visibly heavier informant walked in wearing jeans and a loose-fitting velour shirt, with sunglasses hanging on his V-neck collar.
Taking it all in from a back bench, author John Rothchild was struck by the sheer anticlimax of the moment: Morales had once talked of cross-continental heroin routes and silencer-equipped guns; more than four dozen people had been nabbed in Tick-Talks; newspapers and magazines across the map were all over this trial.
But now its star witness walked in—the grand entrance for a role he had coveted—dressed like a bum.
Before Morales took the stand, he blindsided everyone in attendance by detouring to approach the accused, including and especially Mutineers Carlene Quesada, Frank Castro and Jorge Villaverde. He faced the men, brought himself to attention and saluted them, Bay of Pigs Brigade–style. The fellow exiles, blushing, reciprocated. “Twenty years of anti-Castro heroics,” observed Rothchild, “were caught up in that gesture.”
The codefendants reached across the wooden railing to hug Morales and pat him on the back. The prosecutor, looking disgusted, decided she had nothing to ask her star witness, Morales.
“No questions?” asked the judge, annoyed. “So why do we need Mr. Morales?”
“The prosecutor made an effort to appear impassive,” Rothchild recalled. “But any doubt about the future of Tick-Talks was now removed; we all knew the case was over. It made no sense for the state to rely on him now.”
Finally, in September, the judge overseeing Tick-Talks suppressed the thousand hours of Poop Deck gang recordings that underpinned the case. He blasted State Attorney Janet Reno and the Miami police for depending on the unreliable likes of Monkey Morales in the first place. And so unraveled the state of Florida’s largest drug case and two years of effort.
Mutiny Table 14 was officially over, even if Frank Castro and an occasional Villaverde brother stuck around.
Back in February, free on bond and awaiting trial, headline defendant Carlene Quesada was home with his wife and their two-year-old son when someone shot up his house with a semiautomatic. One of the seven rounds broke through a window of the boy’s bedroom and came within inches of his bed. This was less than three years after Quesada himself was machine-gunned and nearly killed in his sports coupe. Said Quesada: “I stayed home. I left town. No way I was going back to the Mutiny.”
When film scouts called to see if the famous doper from Table 14 wanted to advise a huge Miami movie production—something about a Cuban immigrant and the cocaine trade and the American dream—Quesada thought he was being pranked.
“You fucking keeding me?”