THE POLITICAL SCANDAL that would come to define the 1980s was, of course, the Iran-Contra affair, Washington’s covert scheme to sell arms to the embargoed regime of Iran to secure the release of American hostages and fund antileftist Contra rebels in Central America.
Miami’s peculiar role in that imbroglio was now a priority for a newly elected Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry.
Opposition to aiding the often-ruthless Contras had been a liberal cause célèbre for a while now, with publications like The Nation running ads for charities that helped victims of the rebels’ atrocities in Central America. For the most part, however, with Ronald Reagan still glowing from his landslide 1984 win, Democrats were fearful of taking on leftist-seeming issues.
In Miami, home to the country’s biggest Nicaraguan population, the Contras were, to Cuban exiles and Cold War hawks, all but synonymous with the Bay of Pigs Brigade. The prevailing belief in South Florida’s exile community was that a proxy rematch against Fidel Castro and Latin American leftism could be waged in and around Nicaragua: wrest back Central America from the Commies, and the US could exert new leverage in the region to pressure Fidel Castro.
In December of 1985, the Associated Press reported that certain Contra units were “engaged in cocaine smuggling, using some of the profits to finance their war against Nicaragua’s leftist government.” Senator Kerry, a former prosecutor, was intrigued. One of his senior staffers was the sister of attorney John Mattes, who himself was following this trail down in Miami. She tipped off the senator.
You might recall Mattes from his first day in Miami in 1981, when, while sitting in a café just yards from the Mutiny, the law school rookie encountered a man who’d had his throat slit.
Mattes had since graduated and was now a public defender with a client in jail on machine-gun possession charges. The inmate protested that he believed he was working for the US government all along, having also loaded military-grade cannons onto camouflaged military planes at Miami International Airport. How, he asked, was no one asking or doing anything about that?
Mattes repeatedly met with the client at Miami’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC). “The place was like one big fraternity reunion for anyone involved in running cocaine or arms in 1980s Miami,” he said. Juan Cid, the prolific pot smuggler, was there. Carlos Quesada and Rudy Redbeard, the old pals from Mutiny Table 14, passed through the forty-two-acre penitentiary. Upper Deck speedboating phenom, George Morales, was at MCC after getting busted attempting to smuggle upward of a ton of cocaine into Miami.
Had the Feds much cared about the Muchachos’ growing cocaine empire, George Morales might have been in a good position to trade information for leniency. In his 1985 record-breaking boat race from Miami to New York, the Colombian was assisted from the air by Ralph “Cabeza” Linero, the Muchachos’ pilot—who himself had set a record in 1978, albeit in a lighter class of craft. George Morales’s throttle man was Gustavo “Taby” Falcon, Willie’s brother and cosmuggler. “We were friends,” said Linero.
But Willie and Sal were at this point still tiny footnotes in the War on Drugs: a pair of young exiles who were still appealing a 1980 cocaine charge in between appearances at speedboat races.
Inside MCC, Morales and Mattes’s client commiserated about how they believed they’d been screwed by intelligence agents. At the client’s suggestion, Morales buttonholed John Mattes: “Son,” said the flamboyant doper, “I hear so much about you. We have so much to share. You’re going to represent me.”
“Why?” replied Mattes. Morales, after all, was a drug lord and Mattes was looking into illegal arms exports. He didn’t get it.
Morales laughed and put his hand on the lawyer’s shoulder. “You will,” he said. “And you won’t believe what you’ve walked into.”
The Colombian then gleefully recounted his story. Rewind back to the Mutiny: After Operation Tick-Talks blew up in late 1982, anticommunist exiles joined a new scheme. With the help of a CIA-linked rancher, they would work Miami’s drug smugglers into the effort to arm the Contras in Nicaragua. While Congress forbade the Reagan administration to fund the rebels, the White House’s body language suggested it would look the other way if friends of the Contra cause came up with innovative off-the-books methods of fund-raising.
In 1983, George Morales accordingly directed his planes to start flying arms down to Central America and narcotics on the trip back to South Florida. A year later, he was arrested and indicted for trafficking in pot and Quaaludes. While he was free on bail, he told Mattes, CIA-connected agents reassured him they would have his back. So Morales continued smuggling, and upshifted to cocaine (much more money per plane trip); he duly hiked his arms loads and cash payments to the CIA-backed Contras.
In 1986, however, Morales, the defending three-time world powerboat racing champion, landed in jail when the DEA arrested him for smuggling as much as 1,500 kilos of cocaine—on top of his 1984 pot and Quaalude charges.
Long story short: Morales explained to Mattes that cocaine smuggling was the return leg of the gunrunning to Nicaragua that he was looking into. They were one and the same, inextricably related to what he and Senator John Kerry were investigating.
“He was so comfortable laying out the landscape for me,” said Mattes. “It was, ‘Look, I’m going to plead guilty to cocaine, OK? But top Contra and CIA leaders are guilty, too. Why are they outside while we are in here?’”
That summer, after George Morales refused to appear before a grand jury, he was held in contempt of court and placed in solitary confinement. The Colombian returned to court after his time in the hole with even more resolve: “Judge,” he announced, “I appreciate and respect this court, but I do not trust the men standing in this room. I will only talk to the US Senate.”
That stunt, said Mattes, won Morales the attention of Washington, as well as the ardor of various drug and arms smugglers back in the MCC. An admiring inmate offered to custom-tailor his prison-issue khakis. “He had a large personality that brought people in,” said Mattes. “He developed a reputation of confidence.”
George Morales parlayed this momentum by introducing Mattes to fellow speedboat smugglers. “They all came and shared their stories,” he said.
At MCC, Mattes received José “Coca-Cola” Yero, who had just been slapped with a four-decade prison sentence for running cocaine. “I remember the day I met him,” said Mattes. “He was so flashy, reminiscing about how much he missed his custom-painted pink Lamborghini.”
“Wait,” said Mattes. “You mean that thing out in front of the used-car lot on US-1 right across the street from my law school?” Coca-Cola told him the lot was merely a front for the speedboat warehouse behind it—an operation that belonged to Falcon and Magluta. That, said Mattes, was the first he had ever heard of Willie and Sal. “Coca-Cola was not as refined as George Morales,” he recalled. “But he definitely wanted a way out.”
The Marielito illustrated the sheer interchangeability of South Florida cocaine smuggling. “Everyone worked for everyone else,” said Mattes, whether George Morales or Sal and Willie. “I was learning all of the infrastructure of the South Florida cocaine scene, the interconnectedness. Between Miami and Bimini, it got crowded at night. You could hire an off-load crew that worked for several cocaine kingpins. It was like going to a staffing firm.”
Coca-Cola explained that the Mutiny “was like a central clearinghouse for these gigs. I mean, it’s not like you could look up those kinds of jobs on Google.”
Mattes met Fabio Ernesto Carrasco, aka “Hemingway”—as in the patron saint of the Florida Keys—one of George Morales’s most trusted cosmugglers. At night, in his leading speedboat, Hemingway would wear an Armani suit and carry a rocket launcher, threatening to “vaporize anyone in a boat who left his sight.”
The inmate told Mattes about the time he encountered General Manuel Noriega at a party thrown by Pablo Escobar in Medellín. Wasn’t Noriega supposed to be Washington’s foremost ally in the region? he asked. Why, then, would he be drinking and whoring with the world’s biggest cocaine kingpin?
Juan Cid and George Morales shared war stories at MCC. Though Cid had been a go-go Contra booster in the early 1980s, he said he had no illusions about the real Reagan-Bush agenda. “The War on Drugs,” he said, “was a big farce, for political brownie points—a marketing theme for the administration. It was a big facade. People would get arrested. But others would not, and would be getting bigger all the time.”
In December of 1986, George Morales’s attorney outright declared to a district judge that his client “was working at the behest of the government of the United States”—in the interest of national security.
Morales also introduced John Mattes—now working double duty in conjunction with Senator Kerry—to Sarkis “Merchant of Death” Soghanalian, the Middle Eastern arms dealer who used to hold court at the Mutiny. He was at MCC for selling the Iraqi army choppers with machine-gun mounts. The men talked about the arms-for-cocaine Contras connection. “Sarkis exuded an unusual confidence for a federal inmate,” said Mattes, “as if he had cards to play. He wouldn’t be in there for long.”
The prisoners all reiterated the same thing to Mattes: the roads he was looking down in his investigation all led to cocaine.
Mattes related much of what he learned to Senator John Kerry, who flew down to Miami to debrief George Morales. The publisher of the New York Times called Mattes to verify what his editors were hearing via leaks from Congress.
At MCC, George Morales also met with former federal prosecutor Jerry Sanford. They had a two-hour conversation about Panama, the CIA, Nicaragua and everything that went into running a quasi-protected global cocaine conglomerate in the 1980s.
Sanford says he got a lump in his throat when thinking back to how he nearly indicted Manuel Noriega for arms smuggling in 1980, only to be thwarted by Washington.
John Mattes upped the ante by introducing George Morales and other dopers at MCC to producers at CBS News who were covering the CIA’s campaign in Central America. In April of 1987, Morales and other inmates appeared on CBS’s evening newsmagazine West 57th to charge that the Contras and the CIA were intimately involved in drug smuggling.
Morales flew up to Washington to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“George went up to Capitol Hill, wearing his finest London Savile Row suit,” recalled Mattes. “He was so proud of how he and John Kerry both wore Ferragamo ties.”
Under oath, he told lawmakers that in 1984, after he had been busted for running pot and Quaaludes, he was approached by three Contras, two of whom identified themselves as CIA agents. Morales said the men vowed to “take care of my legal problems.”
Over the next eighteen months, he testified, he loaded his planes with their weapons. The quid pro quo: hardware down to Costa Rica and El Salvador and cocaine back to South Florida, with millions of dollars funneled to the Contras as tribute.
“He was one of the first big guys on the dark side who came over to the other side to point the finger at the CIA,” said T. R. Cimino, a fellow speedboat racer who was marine coordinator on Miami Vice.
Back down in South Florida, however, no one looked askance when, in late 1986, Fort Lauderdale’s top newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel, cast George Morales as the bad guy and Sal Magluta as the good one:
While unresolved smuggling charges against world champion George Morales remain the last prominent blemish from that period, the core of honest sportsmen has made significant strides in restoring credibility and respectability to the offshore circuit.
Another example of the racing fraternity’s emerging good-guy image is evident in Miami driver Sal Magluta’s offer to lend his best boat and a crew member to the rival Apache Racing Team for Saturday’s race. The Apache boat, second in the open-class standings, was damaged in a crash this month at Rochester, NY. Magluta, in sixth place and out of contention for the national title, made his 36-foot Seahawk and throttleman Gus [“Taby”] Falcon available to Apache driver Ben Kramer, even though Magluta’s other boat, Team Seahawk—driven by Gus’s brother, Willie Falcon—still has a mathematical chance at the championship.
“It’s a tremendous thing, a very sportsmanlike thing [Magluta] is doing,” remarked fellow racer Ben Kramer’s father to the newspaper. “You have to understand the camaraderie among these racers. They all understand the risks they face, and it brings them close together. Sal is just a good person.”
Maybe. But Sal, Willie, Taby and Ben Kramer were also prolific drug smugglers.
“Good to see white hats outnumbering the black these days in powerboat racing,” closed the piece, however cluelessly.
Unbeknownst to speedboat beat reporters, the DEA and federal prosecutors were now homing in on Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta.