Two ICE vans with six agents each, four FBI agents, and Miami-Dade Tactical Ops, plus the Bomb Disposal Unit with its robot, streamed across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, using sirens to the halfway point, then a single ambulance siren from there onto Miami Beach.
Miami Beach SWAT and a fire truck arrived first at the Escobar house on the bay. The Miami-Dade Marine Patrol came on the water with two boats, no lights, no sirens. SWAT went in from the front and the back of the house at the same time.
A police helicopter was overhead, flapping the frayed old wind sock by the house’s helipad.
Programmed to avoid entanglement, the robot was dubious about the narrow staircase but, with some encouragement from its operator, it went down the steps to the basement room. The barrel of the robot’s twelve-gauge shotgun was filled with water to interrupt the firing circuit in a bomb. The shotgun shell had an electric cap where the primer used to be.
The robot’s camera showed the open vault, its upper shelves empty, kilo packs of Semtex on the bottom shelf. The bomb squad was glad to see through the robot’s camera a tangle of bright detonating cord, detached from the explosives and piled on the card table, and beside the cord was a mercury switch, harmless now. This was a courtesy not lost on the bomb squad.
Three heavy magnets and Favorito’s tools, wiped down with oil, were in a loose pile under the stairs.
They found no one in the house but the mannequins, the plaster monsters, the toys.
Police from the various agencies milled in the house. When the explosives left in the bomb truck the dread went with them.
The bomb squad gathered around the antique electric chair in the living room and speculated on whether or not you could use it to heat a pizza. Their sergeant, sitting in the electric chair, said it would simmer but not sauté and that’s why it was not still at Sing Sing. Everything seemed funny to them when the bomb was gone.
The Marine Patrol closed off the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway and the Julia Tuttle Causeway and searched every boat passing beneath.
Terry Robles gathered the weapons at the house, one AK and the AR-15 from the room of the late Umberto. Wearing gloves, he shucked the AR-15 and took out the sear, a small boxlike aluminum structure from the fire control group that permitted the gun to fire full auto. He showed the sear to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers at the scene.
An ATF agent looked at it. His eyebrows went up. “New made,” the agent said.
Legal drop-in sears for an AR-15 were all made before 1986. A legal, registered sear will cost you $15,000 if you can find a bargain and have a Class 3 license.
A newly made illegal sear will cost you up to $250,000 in fines and twenty years in Coleman federal prison without possibility of parole.
“Do me a favor,” Robles said to the ATF agent. “See if you can move this through the lab pretty quick.”
In Hans-Peter’s room he found a folder, copies of drawings that were terrible to look at.
Two days later Detective Robles would be undercover with the ATF at the windowless self-storage that looked like a slaughterhouse, where both Don Ernesto’s crew and Hans-Peter rented guns.
The proprietor told Robles to call him Bud. His real name, on the warrant in Detective Robles’s pocket, was David Vaughn Webber, WM 48, two priors for cocaine possession, and a DUI.
Detective Robles and agents of the ATF found him because his fingerprint was inside the little drop-in sear on Umberto’s rifle.