A History of Smuggling in Florida: Rumrunners and Cocaine Cowboys

A visit to Florida in the summer of 1565 by a pirate and smuggler determined the course of European civilization. The visitor was John Hawkins, later to become a famous British fighting admiral. He also was the first Florida arms smuggler, starting a legacy that lasts to this day.

Hawkins hated the Spanish for personal and religious reasons. As a trader, he repeatedly defied their authority by trading in the New World despite laws restricting commerce to Spanish merchants. In addition he also seized their ships, an act the Spanish considered piracy. Hawkins and other British pirate-traders brought badly needed supplies to various Spanish outposts in the Caribbean and Central America.

On his way home from such a voyage, Hawkins searched for a rumored colony along the Florida coast to replenish his supply of fresh water. While Florida was claimed by Spain, the first settlement on the peninsula was French. Protestant refugees from the religious wars in Europe had established Fort Caroline at the mouth of the St. Johns River in 1563 (east of present-day Jacksonville). It was the first European settlement in what would become the United States.

When Hawkins arrived at Fort Caroline on August 3, 1565, the French colonists were in desperate conditions. They had waited two years for resupply from France, their provisions were exhausted and the Native Americans grew tired of the novelty of feeding foreigners. The French were making preparations to abandon the colony and return home. The young colony had been struck by mutiny and hunger from the beginning. Some of the French Protestants had seized three of the colony’s ships and sailed away from Fort Caroline to embark on a life of piracy against Catholic Spain.

News of this French settlement and its pirates soon reached Spain, which reacted with alarm. Spain’s financial lifeline—the annual treasure fleet—sailed right by Fort Caroline, following the route pioneered by Alaminos along the Gulf Stream. A French pirate base on the peninsula was a dagger aimed at the Spanish financial jugular vein.

Sir John Hawkins revolutionized naval warfare after visiting Florida in 1565. He returned to England and designed warships capable of using cannon at sea effectively. Both a skilled sea captain and an accomplished bureaucrat, Hawkins rebuilt the British navy and was second-in-command when it defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. Courtesy National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK.

The Spanish King, Philip II, contracted with Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to destroy the French settlement and establish a Spanish colony on the Florida peninsula. On June 27, Menéndez left Cadiz with ten ships, three hundred battle-hardened soldiers and his colonists.

Meanwhile the French King, Charles IX, authorized five hundred soldiers and two hundred cannons to reinforce Fort Caroline. The fleet left Dieppe on May 26 but didn’t get far as a storm forced it to seek shelter at the Isle of Wight. It would take them more than three months to arrive in Florida.

Hawkins could not know he was sailing into a battle zone. And the Protestants at Fort Caroline could not know a relief expedition was heading their way. So on that lazy summer day in early August, John Hawkins anchored offshore of the French colony and went to visit.

Several of the French pirates had returned the previous May, making food shortages more acute. Hawkins made a fateful deal—French cannon for British food—and became Florida’s first arms smuggler. Always interested in seizing Spanish ships, Hawkins undoubtedly talked with the French pirates. As sailors will, they talked shop, including Spanish tactics, armaments and the sailing characteristics of different vessels.

Spanish caravels of 1565 differed little from the ships sailed by Columbus in 1492. They featured three or four masts, with high “castles” fore and aft. Spanish naval tactics were still based on the experience of fighting Muslims and Turks in the Mediterranean. The decisive weapon was the sword, as ship-borne soldiers boarded enemy vessels. Defenders could retreat to the high castles fore and aft and fire down on the attackers with arquebuses (a muzzle-loading firearm) and crossbows.

Spanish ships were not designed to withstand the recoil of a cannon, which were mounted on two-wheeled carriages like shore-side artillery. Cannon fire was used more for psychological effect than any ability to damage enemy ships.

The high castles impeded the ability of ships to sail effectively. They created what sailors call “windage” where the hull of the ship catches the wind, which pushes the ship sideways. Thus Spanish ships sailed to windward very poorly. The French pirates at Fort Caroline reported success in seizing small Spanish vessels without castles and remarked on how agile they seemed to be compared to the larger caravels.

Hawkins noted this and returned to England not only with his pirated Spanish loot and French cannon, but also with ideas about improving ship design. He suggested removing the forward castle and using the timber to strengthen the hull and create a strong gun deck. Five years later, in 1570 his first “galleon” was under construction. It could outsail the older medieval designs, and was able to batter them with gunfire instead of closing for hand-to-hand combat.

In 1588, a small fleet of Hawkins’s new ships—dubbed “racing galleons”—would meet and defeat the Spanish Armada. The Spanish were attempting an amphibious invasion of England to end British support for the Protestant revolt in Northern Europe. The 1588 battle between the medieval ships of Spain and redesigned galleons of Hawkins put an end to Spain’s attempt to claim Europe in the name of Catholicism. It is very likely those smuggled cannons from Florida were used aboard Hawkins’s racing galleons.

Soon after Hawkins’s departure from Fort Caroline, the 1565 race between the Spanish and French fleets to Fort Caroline ended in a tie on September 4. After a skirmish, the French fleet was scattered by a storm. Menéndez landed troops, captured Fort Caroline, killed most of the Protestants and marched south to establish a colony he called St. Augustine—the oldest continually occupied city in North America. The political fate of Florida for the next two hundred years was decided.

The French colony is also notable for another long-lasting reason. It introduced Hawkins (and the world) to tobacco. “The Floridians when they travell, have a kinde of herbe dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, wiuth fire, and the dried herbs put together, doe sucke thorow the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live four or five dayes without meat or drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose: yet do they hold the opinion withall, that it causeth water and fleame to void from their stomacks,” wrote John Sparke Jr. in “The Voyage Made by M. John Hawkins, Esq.,” in Voyages, edited by Richard Hakluyt and originally published in 1589.

Tobacco would become contraband for future smugglers worldwide, but that’s another story. In the case of Florida, tobacco smuggling became a politically charged issue four hundred years later when President John Kennedy bought up all the Cuban cigars in Washington, then signed an economic embargo against the island, opening up yet another venue for smugglers.

Because smuggling is a covert activity, records of successful smuggling do not exist. The example of the Seminole Wars in Florida is a perfect case in point. Historians are still searching for proof that the Spanish secretly supplied the Seminoles with arms, powder and shot. Certainly somebody did, for a state of war—from the Indian point of view—lasted from 1756 until the 1858 surrender of Billy Bowlegs and his forty warriors. Call it America’s Hundred Years’ War.

The British were the first to supply the Native Americans with arms because the two were allied against the Spanish during the Seven Years’ War (many Americans call it “the French and Indian War”) from 1756 to 1763. Raids against Spanish missions in the panhandle were so successful that only St. Augustine remained untouched and Florida became a British possession when the peace was signed.

During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, Native Americans in southern Georgia and Florida remained pro-British. Despite the end of the War of 1812, American General Andrew Jackson continued raids against Native Americans in British Florida. American history books call this the First Seminole War.

This 1835 map from the start of the Second Seminole War shows a wide-open frontier with little or no settlement south of the panhandle. The abundance of unpopulated waterways—with friendly Cubans amidst the islands of the western coast—provides a geographic hint of how the Seminoles obtained guns, powder and shot despite a U.S. Navy blockade. Courtesy University of South Florida.

That war ended in 1819, when the British ceded Florida to the United States. By this time, many Native American tribes in southern Georgia had been pushed out of their homelands by American settlers. Most went west, but some fled south to central Florida where they reestablished villages.

At the same time, the identity of Native Americans in Florida began to change, as a variety of southeastern tribes—mingled with escaped African American slaves—fled into central Florida. They became known as “the Seminoles.” The term has various translations. In Spanish (from “Cimarrone”) it means “runaway.” The British preferred “the wild ones,” while the Seminoles then and today preferred the translation “pioneer” or “adventurer.”

When the British ceded Florida to the United States, it was practically unoccupied. The original inhabitants were virtually wiped out by five Spanish expeditions bringing disease, pillage and death (Ponce de León, Pánfilo de Narváez, Hernando de Soto, Tristán de Luna y Arellano and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés). The British raids on the Spanish panhandle missions completed the extermination. By the beginning of the Second Seminole War in 1835, the population of the entire United States was 12.8 million. Of that total, only 34,730 lived in Florida.

With the British gone, the Seminoles found other sources of ammunition and powder for their muzzle-loading muskets. The U.S. government suspected Cuba was the source and dispatched the navy to impose a cordon. Despite years of sailing relentlessly back and forth between Cuba and Florida, the U.S. Navy did not intercept a single ship carrying arms bound for the Seminoles.

By raiding outposts and settlements, the Seminoles secured some powder and shot. For example, in a daring raid on August 6, 1840, a war party canoed thirty miles across Florida Bay and attacked the settlement on Indian Key. The amphibious Indian invasion frightened the settlers, who took to their own boats and rowed to the safety of a ship anchored in the harbor. A nearby navy detachment of twelve men rowed two barges into the fray. The Seminoles loaded up the settlement’s cannon and fired at the barges in what was perhaps the first instance of Indian use of artillery. The navy—outnumbered and outgunned—retired. The Seminoles burnt the settlement, loaded four barrels of gunpowder and a supply of musket balls into their canoes and paddled off into Florida Bay.

Those four barrels, however, were not sufficient to keep the Seminoles fully armed. It is likely their good relations with Cuban fishermen along the lower west coast of Florida—whose settlements were never harmed—were the source of their arms, but this has never been proven.

Although the number of warriors never exceeded one thousand and they rationed their munitions carefully, somebody kept the Seminoles in powder and shot for the decades after the British departed from Florida. Whether it was sympathetic Cuban individuals or a covert plan by the Spanish government is unknown. But it provides an interesting leitmotif to the major expansion in arms smuggling in the following century. Today’s insurgents face the same problem as the Seminoles: where to get arms and munitions? For Central and South America, the answer often is Florida.

As the Europeans pushed west from the eastern seaboard, some Native Americans fled south into unoccupied Florida. They accepted African runaway slaves into their emerging Seminole society, as all fought to keep their freedom. This is an engraving of “Abraham, a Negro interpreter who lived with the Seminoles.” Illustration in “The Exiles of Florida” by Joshua Reed Giddings, 1858. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1861 cartoonist Oliver Evans Woods portrayed the Confederate strategy. The North and South fight as England and Spain look on, ready to provide the South more tools, including blockade runners and steam rams. The Southern character is wielding a cudgel labeled, “British pirate steamers, British cannon etc.” Note the burning ships behind the Union fighter. Cartoon by Oliver Evans Williams, 1861, revised 1863. Courtesy Library of Congress.

For the record, the Seminole tribe signed an agreement with the United States in 1957. The U.S. government recognized Indian sovereignty over Indian lands and agreed to pay compensation for past wrongs. A formal peace treaty was never signed. The Seminoles remain America’s only unconquered native people.

Not all arms smuggling in Florida was successful. The blockade runners of the Civil War found to their dismay that smuggling guns to the Confederacy was actually a losing proposition.

When the Civil War (or the War Between the States as it is still known in the South) erupted, the Confederate States contained virtually no heavy industry. It had only eleven rolling mills and no capacity to manufacture machine tools. The entire Confederacy, in fact, had less manufacturing capacity than New York City and there was no supply of iron ore. To build a railroad line in one location, the Confederacy had to tear up another line someplace else.

The Confederate government looked abroad for help. The Union navy quickly established a blockade along the coastline and captured several Florida ports. Key West, the state’s largest city, remained in the Union and provided a vital naval base for the blockading fleet. Sensing a big customer, smugglers called “blockade runners” started running guns and munitions.

Initially the Union blockade was easy to run. A few large Federal warships were posted off the South’s major ports such as Savannah and Charleston. Four nearby neutral ports allowed blockade runners easy access to Florida without making long overseas voyages. These neutral ports were Bermuda, Nassau, Havana and Matamoros in Mexico. Nassau is only 180 miles and Havana only 90 miles away from Florida.

However, the Confederacy had no readily accessible Florida ports after early 1862 because they were all in Union hands. Those captured ports, including Fernandina and St. Augustine, served as bases for the blockading squadrons, greatly simplifying the process of fueling the Union steamers.

The captured blockade runner Teaser gives an idea of the design and cargo capacity of the ships supplying the Confederacy. The narrow hull and large “side wheels” promise a good turn of speed. Ships like Teaser would be used to transship cargoes from the Bahamas. During the Civil War, oceangoing cargo vessels continued to be sail-powered. Glass Negative. Collection of the Library of Congress, 1864.

The blockade runners adapted by choosing small inlets where boats could dash in, unload and dash out again. The Union blockade fleet patrolled the coast, looking for such “dashers.” When they were discovered, marines were sent ashore to burn the “dashers.” Each instance was of little import, but the cumulative effect was profound. Floridians found it difficult to replace so many burnt boats.

During the early years of the war, blockade runners brought in substantial quantities of arms, ammunition and other military supplies, which the Confederate government bought at fixed prices. The smugglers soon realized that vastly greater profits could be made smuggling luxury goods into Southern ports at premium prices. These luxury items, such as cloth and sewing thread, were paid for with either gold or cotton. Wars never stop fashion.

This switch in cargoes had several negative effects on the Confederacy. It reduced the amount of military supplies available as blockade runners switched from munitions to millinery goods. It cut deeply into the new nation’s gold reserves, undermining the convertibility of its currency. In turn, that started inflation, which eventually ruined the Confederate economy. The Confederacy’s concept of “fixed-price gunrunning” as a national strategy proved a disaster.

We are free, but not to be evil, not to be indifferent to human suffering, not to profit from the people, from the work created and sustained through their spirit of political association, while refusing to contribute to the political state that we profit from. We must say no once more. Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor.

—José Martí

The late nineteenth century saw guns running in the other direction—from Florida to support Cuban insurgents fighting for freedom against the Spanish. The most notable of the gunrunners would go on to become Florida’s governor.

At the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of Cubans lived in Florida. Many worked in the cigar factories of Tampa. Rolling cigars was a tedious but well-paid trade; to break the tedium, the cigar workers often hired “readers” to sit on a stage in the factory. As they daily rolled and trimmed America’s favorite tobacco product, they learned history, listened to poetry, enjoyed romance and trembled to drama—all in the Spanish language.

José Martí remains an icon in Central and South America. He was an excellent fundraiser and revolutionary poet. Cuban-American cigar workers taxed themselves to buy guns for the insurrectos trying to bring down the Spanish colonial government of Cuba. All of them—the workers, insurrectos and Martí—created the domestic political climate inside the United States that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Halftone portrait published 1890–1920. Courtesy Library of Congress.

One of the poets who enjoyed wide popularity in the cigar factories was José Martí. He was born in Havana in 1853. At the age of seventeen, he was expelled from Cuba for his political activities. He traveled to Spain and began a career as a poet, writer and democratic activist. He returned to the New World and worked through several Central and South American nations, always one step ahead of the political police. He came to New York City in 1881. If Simón Bolívar is considered the George Washington of South America, José Martí is its Thomas Jefferson.

Martí actively sought financial help from his fellow Cubans across America. Through personal appearances and the reading of his words, workers in Florida’s sixty-one Cuban cigar-making factories voted to levy a 10 percent “tax” on their wages to support the insurrection in Cuba. Cuban organizations in New York and other cities provided similar financial support.

The Cuban Revolution started on January 29, 1895, at a secret meeting in New York. A message was handwritten to Juan Gomez, leader of the insurrectos in Cuba. The message traveled to Tampa, where it was rolled inside a cigar. Cuban schoolchildren know this story as “the cigar of liberty.” Gomez was instructed to start the revolution on February 24, 1895.

The firebrand Martí went back to Cuba to join the rebellion. Only a month after it began—on March 23—he was killed in an ambush by Spanish troops. Martí to this day is revered as a Cuban patriot, a hero and a touchstone of Cuban nationalism. His poems are still in print, and in Cuba and Latin America his work remains popular.

Also in 1895, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward commissioned the construction of an oceangoing tugboat called The Three Friends. Broward was a licensed pilot for ships crossing the ever-shifting sands of the St. Johns River inlet to the Atlantic. He was also a “filibuster,” a term used in the nineteenth century to describe Americans who tried to overthrow foreign governments.

During construction, Broward was approached by a member of the Jacksonville expatriate Cuban community to run a load of guns to the insurrectos attempting to overthrow the Spanish colonial government. In 1896, The Three Friends embarked on its maiden voyage, bound for Cuba with a cargo of weapons, a trip it repeated several times.

The Spanish government demanded the United States stop Broward, yet he eluded not only the U.S. Navy but also Spanish gunboats. Several times he was intercepted by the Spanish but managed to escape.

In American waters, Broward loaded his cargoes in the dead of night along the St. Johns River from small barges provided by Cuban expatriates. He then sailed out of the river by hiding behind larger ships. Because support was strong in Florida for the insurrectos, Broward gained statewide notoriety. When the Spanish-American war began in 1898, his services as a gunrunner were no longer required.

Seldom has a smuggling activity received more publicity and acclaim than Napoleon Broward’s arms trafficking to Cuban insurgents from 1895–1898. It helped sweep him into the governor’s mansion. Broward’s powerful Three Friends tugboat repeatedly carried arms to Cuba with Broward at the helm. Courtesy the Florida Archives.

In 1903 Broward decided to run for governor. Neither Broward nor his liberal backers were wealthy. They faced Robert Davis, the well-financed candidate of railroad baron Henry Flagler. Broward stumped relentlessly through Florida’s villages and towns. “I don’t intend to go after the cities. Their newspapers are against me and they don’t take me seriously. But I’m going to stump every crossroads village between Fernandina and Pensacola,” he said.

At the time, Florida was a stronghold of the Democratic Party and elections were decided at the primary level. When the dust settled in November of 1904, Broward beat Davis by 600 votes (out of 45,000 cast) to become Florida’s nineteenth governor. Broward’s big campaign promise was drainage of the Everglades. A century later, the nation is trying to undo that mistake and still has major problems with the government of Cuba.

While Cuban smugglers brought arms to the Seminoles and blockade runners carried munitions to the Confederacy, Broward and modern arms dealers moved guns in the other direction, from Florida to Cuba and the world at large. It is a game anybody can play today, because Florida is a wide-open market for the weapons desired by criminals, rebels, insurgents and terrorists around the world.

An investigative report on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 2002 followed the curious tale of Lobster Air International. The broadcast was summarized in the December 22, 2002 issue of The Nation in an article called “The Guns of Opa-Locka.”

“In the summer of 1998 Stephen Jorgensen began buying the first of what were eventually more than eight hundred MAK-90 semiautomatic rifles at a store called Gun Land in Kissimmee, Florida. He did not have a resale permit—known as a Federal Firearms License (FFL)—and he was not required to present one,” wrote Jake Bergman and Julia Reynolds in The Nation.

“But Jorgensen wasn’t stockpiling the guns for his personal use; he was taking them to Opa-Locka airport near Miami and loading them aboard a light airplane headed for airstrips in Venezuela and Colombia, via Haiti,” they wrote.

MAK-90 stands for Modified AK, as in AK-47, the assault rifle made famous by the Viet Cong in Vietnam and later adopted worldwide by other insurgents. The “90” stands for 1990, the year the Chinese arms manufacturer Norinco modified the AK-47 to create the MAK-90. The redesign was required because in 1989, the U.S. Congress slapped an import ban on assault rifles. Norinco redesigned the AK-47 to slip through the ban, and it sold very well throughout the United States. All the AK-47 accessories fit, including the thirty-round “banana clip,” the hundred-round drum magazine and sniper scopes. The Norinco version cost only $250, about one-tenth the value of a bona fide Russian AK.

Jorgensen purchased a Rockwell Aero Commander, a high-winged, twin-engined aircraft with a cargo capacity of two thousand pounds. It was designed in the late 1940s. He established a company called “Lobster Air” because it allegedly shipped live lobsters from Haiti to Florida. But Haiti was only a stopover on the longer trip to Venezuela.

Jorgensen’s adventure came to an end when U.S. Customs agents, acting on a drug tip, showed up at Opa-Locka airport and halted his takeoff. Instead they found seventy-eight MAK-90s in blue gym bags and nine thousand rounds of ammo. The article cites sources saying the guns were intended for Colombia’s FARC rebels, a group on the U.S. Department of State’s list of terrorist organizations.

Jorgensen turned the state’s evidence against the ringleader—a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan Air Force—and received only probation. His crime was violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

These guns have had deadly consequences. In 1985 Colombian rebels from the group M-19 attacked the Palace of Justice and killed 115 people, including 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices. All the guns used were eventually traced back to Florida.

There seems to be a direct correlation between large arms shipments leaving Florida and foreign violence. The magazine article quotes Daniel McBride, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent. “We would see, all of a sudden, a rash of large gun purchases, a large quantity of gun purchases throughout South Florida. We would find that then, a month or two months later, we would see a coup take place in Haiti,” he said.

Jorgensen and his “Lobster Air” is a mere wrinkle in the fabric of Florida’s trade in arms. Until recently, Fort Lauderdale resident Jean Bernard Lasnaud could sell you a SCUD ballistic missile—or a mobile field hospital to bandage all the people injured by the machine guns, rocket launchers, fighter planes, rifles, mortars and grenades he has sold. Lasnaud lived openly in South Florida until 2002.

With his bow tie and facile smile, the French-born Lasnaud looks nothing like a merchant of death. However he has been linked to illegal arms transfers to some of the bloodiest lands of the twentieth century, including Somalia, Croatia and Ecuador, in violation of international arms embargoes.

Lasnaud was the subject of PBS investigation. The news documentary Frontline/World in May 2002 found Lasnaud was tried in 1983 and sentenced in absentia in Belgium for illegal arms transfers. Frontline/World reported:

Lasnaud now stands accused in Buenos Aires courts of brokering sales of Argentinean weapons to Croatia and Ecuador from 1992 to 1995, in violation of U.N. and international embargoes. As a result, in 1999 Interpol issued a ‘red notice’ for Lasnaud, a high-priority request for immediate arrest and extradition. ‘An Interpol red notice is the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today,’ says the U.S. Justice Department Web site. A red notice has been issued for Osama bin Laden—and for hundreds of accused arms dealers, murderers and drug traffickers most people have never heard of. For nearly three years, the Justice Department has deviated from standard extradition procedure and has refused to arrest Jean-Bernard Lasnaud, curiously citing lack of evidence. Argentinean prosecutors are stunned at this refusal; a documentary trail of faxes, money transfers and e-mail points to Lasnaud’s knowledge and participation in the sales.

A mid-1990s case in Ecuador proved Lasnaud’s undoing, along with his local partner, Argentine Navy Captain Horacio Estrada. Ecuador and Peru were in a border war in 1995. Under terms of the Rio Protocol of 1942—which ended another border war between Ecuador and Peru—Argentina pledged not to supply arms to either party. A secret shipment to Ecuador blew up into a major political scandal in Argentina. Some of the 9 million rounds of ammunition were faulty and some of the 7,500 rifles were defective. Ecuadorian officials were incensed and believed Estrada and Lasnaud were pawning off the dregs of Argentina’s armories.

By the late 1990s, Argentine prosecutors were investigating. They interviewed Estrada, who denied doing any business with Lasnaud. A few days later, Estrada was found shot dead in his Buenos Aires apartment, Frontline/World reported. Local police ruled it a suicide. Argentine authorities issued the “red notice,” but the United States paid no attention. Frontline/World reported:

Argentinean prosecutors wonder, then, why the U.S. never arrested Lasnaud, an arms dealer accused of secretly brokering weapons smuggled around the world. Jeffrey Denner, a criminal defense attorney who helped rewrite the U.S.–U.K. extradition treaty, says that it is common procedure to make an immediate arrest in such cases, because the aim is to make sure the suspect doesn’t flee. At that point, Denner says, questioning the other country’s evidence is rare. ‘It’s not up to us to decide whether he’s guilty under Argentinean law. There’s some basic due process that has to be covered, but beyond that, it’s just not something we look into, ever.’

The Frontline/World broadcast cited several sources indicating Lasnaud probably was also working with American intelligence services. “Another source in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami says that when the Justice Department does not honor a red notice in the usual procedural manner, there ‘must be something else going on’ related to U.S. national security or U.S. intelligence agencies,” it reported.

In fact, Lasnaud was promoting U.S. interests when he arranged for some of the “excess” Argentinian weaponry to be smuggled into Croatia in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. The United States wanted to halt ethnic cleansing by Yugoslavia’s government in the breakaway Muslim republic and was under significant diplomatic pressure by several Middle Eastern nations. However, an arms embargo was in place, so the U.S. government had to turn to Lasnaud.

Frontline/World reported: “Dr. Daniel Nelson, a former arms proliferation consultant to the State Department, was in Croatia during the time of the sales. Nelson says that in the early 1990s, the U.S. was in favor of arming Croatia but did not want to openly violate the U.N. embargo; instead, officials simply ‘winked’ at weapons shipments from Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine and Iran. ‘U.S. people were engaged in trying to find sources [of arms]—Islamic, and those that weren’t. And Argentina was one of those,’ Nelson says.”

After fleeing his gated community in Fort Lauderdale in 2002, Lasnaud was arrested in Geneva, Switzerland, and extradited to Argentina, where he was questioned. The online newspaper Los Andes reported on October 12, 2004, that Lasnaud was released and left Argentina. His whereabouts are now unknown.

The case of Lasnaud displays the uneasy relationship between governments and private arms smugglers. “A former U.S. intelligence agent stationed in Latin America tells Frontline/World he has confirmed that Lasnaud has been a CIA asset ‘since the Iran-Contra days,’ but says it is unclear whether he still has that status,” the broadcast reported. Lasnaud’s easy life in Fort Lauderdale under protection of the U.S. government while facing a red notice is just one benefit of working at the interface between private business and government intelligence. And where, I wonder, is the SCUD missile Lasnaud posted for sale on his website?

At approximately the same time Lasnaud was smuggling bad ammo to the Ecuadorians, a Lithuanian in Miami was proposing to sell Russian Strela missiles (similar to the U.S. Army’s Stinger—shoulder-fired, ground-to-air, anti-aircraft missiles) to a Colombian drug cartel. At least Alexander Darichev thought he was selling to the Colombians. His customer was actually a U.S. Customs agent setting up a Miami sting operation.

The customs agent established a phony corporation called Phoenix International, sent a representative to Lithuania to look over the merchandise and established bank accounts on the Isle of Man to facilitate the transfer. The all-important End-User Certificate was signed by the (soon to be disgraced and former) Lithuanian Defense Minister. Using the bogus documentation, the missiles were to be shipped from Bulgaria to Puerto Rico.

Darichev asked the agent if, after the missiles were delivered, he would be interested in small nuclear weapons. The question released a bombshell in the U.S. national security organization. Weeks of intense bureaucratic negotiation ensued before it was decided to terminate the sting and not pursue the nuclear offer.

On June 30, 1997, Darichev and his confederate Aleksandr Pogrebezskij were arrested. One element of their indictment was unique in American history: an offer to procure nuclear weapons. “It was further part of the conspiracy that defendants, Aleksandr Pogrebezskij and Alexander Darichev, would offer to procure and broker the sale of tactical nuclear weapons upon the completion of the missile systems sale,” the indictment said.

Darichev received a sentence of four years and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. They later confirmed forty more anti-air missiles were awaiting shipment in Bulgaria, having made their way from Lithuania.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on July 2, 1997, intercepted a Radio Bulgaria broadcast denying any wrongdoing by either the arms manufacturer or the ministry of trade. “The ministry says the deal did not go through because payments were never made. Bulgarian authorities say Aleksandr Darichev, who was recently arrested in Florida by U.S. agents, worked as a representative of Phoenix Arms International. The ministry also says Darichev’s firm presented all the documentation needed to legalize the purchase,” the state-run broadcast reported.

While the customs agents were stopped from pursuing “loose Russian nukes,” their easy ability to obtain more than forty anti-air missiles demonstrated the ease with which terrorists could purchase them. While designed to attack military helicopters and other low-flying aircraft, such missiles could be useful in attacking commercial airliners at takeoff and landing.

Florida’s career in arms smuggling starts with the founding of the first European colony, includes a three-hundred-plus-year state of war with Native Americans, features a Florida governor with a gunrunning past and concludes as the home base of international arms traffickers offering ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Its munitions traffic has also indirectly saved religious tolerance, replaced governments, destroyed the Confederate economy and now supplies just about anything to just about anybody. Whether the guns are coming in or going out, Florida seems always to be a player in the international arms bazaar.

THE GUNS OF FLORIDA