IN MID-OCTOBER, a federal prosecutor got an anonymous phone tip that Marilyn Bonachea, Magluta’s on-and-off mistress, had kept revealing documents about the jury-fixing conspiracy. The tipster said that she would have the papers in her car later that afternoon, en route to an attorney’s office.
The DEA and Miami cops arranged to arrest her for speeding and possession of marijuana. In the orchestrated search of her rental car, a police sergeant opened the trunk and found a cardboard box with what he recognized were drug ledgers.
In February 1997, while on trial for passport fraud, and under less-than-maximum security conditions, Magluta walked out of a downtown Miami courthouse. He never returned. Jurors convicted his empty chair the following day.
Rumors raged across Miami that Sal had finally fled the country and had his fingerprints lasered down, alongside elaborate plastic surgery to alter his appearance.
Instead, he was captured two months later during a traffic stop near Palm Beach. Just not with any kind of James Bond–caliber disguise: donning a shoulder-length salt-and-pepper wig, he was carrying twenty thousand dollars in cash and the key to a thousand-dollar-a-night oceanfront suite at a nearby Ritz-Carlton. In his car were handwritten notes regarding the whereabouts of his cash, new cars, places to store new fake IDs and land where he might build a compound.
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FAST-FORWARD TO AUGUST of 1998: ex–jury foreman Miguel Moya was indicted on charges that he took a 500-thousand-dollar bribe to vote to acquit Willie and Sal. Prosecutors alleged that Moya, with the help of his parents, spent his payoff on a Cadillac, a Rolex, a house and a boat. They taped Moya fessing up to the bribe to a 350-pound government informant posing as a Muchachos enforcer.
Though Miami Vice had been off the air for nine years, headlines like this one seemed like they were ripped right from the show:
MOYA’S “DATE” WILD AND WIRED
September 19, 1998 | By LARRY LEBOWITZ Staff Writer, Sun Sentinel
MIAMI—Miguel Moya was bragging about all his new toys to the provocatively dressed woman “dirty dancing” with him in South Beach nightclubs.
Little did the former jury foreman know that the woman in the low-cut dress was an undercover FBI agent wearing a wire.
And little did he know that the Feds would one day take those taped boasts of new cars, houses, watches, vacations and gambling trips to build a case that he accepted up to $1 million in bribes to fix the trial of reputed cocaine cowboys Augusto “Willie” Falcon and Salvador Magluta.
Prosecutors kept recruiting and leaning on more informants within the Muchachos’ sprawling conglomerate. They succeeded in flipping Marilyn Bonachea to their side. In September, she met with an associate of Magluta’s while wearing a hidden recorder. In their second meeting, she expressed concern about the outing of a bribed female juror from the 1996 trial. The associate assured Bonachea that the bribed juror was “under control” and, unlike foreman Moya, not spending her payoff ostentatiously. The Feds got it all on tape.
In September of 1998, Richard “Blondie” Passapera, a Magluta worker, personally delivered 1.2 million dollars in cash to another Magluta associate—who himself had recently become an FBI informant.
The informant handed the money over to the FBI, and flew to New York to retrieve the cash. Under surveillance, he transferred it to a pair of Magluta associates who then flew it to Israel and deposited it in an Israeli bank under a fictitious Jewish-sounding name. The FBI informant was then given eight blank checks from that Israeli account. The Feds watched him hand them to Blondie Passapera, who then got them to Sal Magluta, who then used them to pay his lawyers.
In November, just over seven years after he was captured at his Miami Beach mansion, Magluta pleaded guilty in a Miami courtroom to conspiring to use false identification and falsely presenting himself to arresting officers.
On the same day, Gilberto Barrios, the Muchachos’ head of road transport, was found guilty of trucking cocaine across the country for the conglomerate. A truck-loading deputy was also convicted, while a man in nearby Broward County who maintained a stash house for Muchachos cocaine pleaded guilty and agreed to testify.
The government mined ever deeper into Muchachos Corp.’s huge org chart to nail coconspirators with long jail sentences. That then gave it a powerful capital with prisoners: “The more you talk, the more you could walk.”