On the morning of October 23, 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon did precisely what Costa Rican DEA agent Sandy González had told him not to do: he drove down to L.A. County Municipal Court, went before a judge, and applied for a warrant to search the Nicaraguans’ drug operation. His twenty-one-page sworn statement described a “large scale cocaine distributing organization” made up of “well over 100 persons storing, transporting and distributing cocaine for Danilo Blandón.”
Gordon linked up Blandón with Freeway Rick’s first major drug supplier, Ivan Arguellas, exposing the Contra drug pipeline into South Central. Blandón, he wrote, “has up to 20 kilos of cocaine per week delivered to Arguellas who, in turn, sells mainly to blacks living in the south central Los Angeles area.” Another South Central distribution point was a bar at Central Avenue and Adams Street, which Blandón uses “to distribute as much as 10 kilos of cocaine per week,” the affidavit said.
And the detective didn’t pull any punches when it came to the Contras. “Danilo Blandón is from Nicaragua, a Central American country which has been at civil war for several years,” Gordon wrote. “One side of this civil war is the ‘Contra army.’ Inf[ormant] #2 stated to your affiant that Blandón is a ‘Contra’ sympathizer and a founder of the ‘Fronte [sic] Democratica Nicaragua’ [FDN] an organization that assists the Contra movement with arms and money. The money and arms generated by this organization comes through the sale of cocaine.”
Gordon listed more than a dozen locations across southern California where Blandón and his cohorts were storing drugs and cash. He traced the money trail from Los Angeles across the country, writing that the “monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered thru Orlando Murillo who is a high ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”
Gordon’s sworn statement would prove to be a remarkably accurate portrait of the drug ring. A decade later Blandón would admit under oath that he was one of the founders of the FDN, and that nearly all of the people and locations Gordon named in his warrant were part of his drug operation. Blandón would also admit sending money to Orlando Murillo, who did, in fact, work for Government Securities Corporation, a chain of securities brokerages in southern Florida that went belly-up in 1987 amid federal allegations of fraud. The one accusation Blandón denied was that his father—Julio Blandón, the ex-slumlord—stored cocaine in his San Gabriel apartment.
Gordon’s affidavit was pure political dynamite. At the time, the Contras were the hottest story in the country. Less than three weeks earlier, drug smuggler Barry Seal’s old C-123K cargo plane had been shot out of the sky over Nicaragua, carrying a full load of weapons. Since then, new revelations about illegal U.S. government involvement in the Contra war had been appearing in the media almost daily. The White House, the State Department, and the CIA had immediately denied that the cargo plane—which was part of Oliver North’s resupply operation—had any connections to the government, but those lies began unraveling the moment Sandinista patrols got back from the site of the smoldering wreck.
“The Sandinistas announced that the flight crew had not been flying with what we call in the business ‘clean pockets,”’ said Alan Fiers, the CIA officer then in charge of the Contra program. “They had all sorts of pocket litter that identified and connected them back to Ilopango. They had the cards of some of the NHAO—one particular NHAO employee, flight logs, essentially enough information so that the Sandinistas could put together, and did in fact, a lot of information relative to the connections of that flight.”
If that wasn’t enough, the Sandinistas also had one slightly battered cargo kicker named Eugene Hasenfus, the only crew member carrying a parachute. Hasenfus, who’d worked for the CIA’s Air America airline during the agency’s secret war in Laos, told the press that he was again working for the CIA—at a time when the agency was allegedly not involved with the Contras. Hasenfus identified his CIA handlers as Ramon Medina, the alias of the Cuban terrorist and suspected drug trafficker Luis Posada Carriles, and Max Gόmez, an alias of former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. Hasenfus also exposed the secret Contra air base at Ilopango.
Aside from the legal problems Hasenfus presented for the administration, he was an even bigger political headache—living proof that the CIA and the White House had been lying about U.S. involvement with the Contras. The burgeoning scandal threatened to derail the administration’s hard-fought efforts to win congressional approval for $100 million the CIA needed to restart the Contra war.
When the cargo plane went down, the new aid bill was in the final stages of passage through Congress. Reagan administration officials scrambled to keep a lid on the incident, sending out false press advisories, booking administration spokesmen on political talk shows to spread the official line, and sending CIA officials to Capitol Hill to give false testimony to bewildered congressional committees. The disinformation campaign, combined with a strange reluctance by the congressional intelligence committees to delve too deeply into the matter, worked long enough to get the $100 million aid bill through Congress.
But now, with the legislation sitting on Reagan’s desk awaiting his signature, a respected Los Angeles narcotics detective was formally accusing the Contras in court of raising money by selling cocaine to black Americans. It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to the Contra project had that information gotten out. Unlike the earlier allegations of Contra drug dealing that had appeared sporadically in the press over the past ten months, Gordon’s charges would not be easy for the law-and-order Reagan administration to dismiss as the fantasies of a Sandinista sympathizer or a convicted drug dealer. This time, the accusations were coming from the police—under oath—in black and white.
Gordon’s affidavit was persuasive enough for Municipal Court Judge Glenette Blackwell. She gave the detective his search warrant.
The next day, October 24, Gordon conducted a lengthy preraid briefing at the sheriff’s training center, handing out raid plans, briefing booklets, raid assignments, and radio frequencies, and locating command centers.
As drug raids went, this was going to be a big one. “On Monday, October 27, 1986, a 30-day investigation will culminate by executing a search warrant that will be served at fourteen locations in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino Counties,” the briefing book stated. It would involve more than forty-five agents from the Majors, the DEA, the IRS, the ATF, the San Bernardino County sheriff, and Bell police. Gordon split the officers into seven groups, each responsible for searching two locations.
Gordon’s briefing left no doubts about who and what the police were up against: “The investigation centers around a male Nicaraguan named Danilo Blandón. The Blandón organization is believed to be moving hundreds of kilos of cocaine a month in the Southern California area and the money is laundered through a variety of business fronts and then sent to Florida where the money goes toward the purchase of arms to aid the ‘Contra’ rebels fighting the civil war in Nicaragua.”
Gordon also mentioned that the drug ring involved a crooked ex-cop from Laguna Beach, Ronald Lister, who was known to have access to large quantities of heavy weapons. He was to be considered extremely dangerous.
Several of the officers in attendance distinctly recalled being warned that the federal government was unhappy that the Majors were going ahead with the raids. Deputy William Wolfbrandt said Gordon reported that he had “been contacted by someone from the government who told him not to do the warrant.... I thought it was pretty bitchin’ just going out and doing it anyhow.”
Lieutenant Mike Fossey, the Majors’ intelligence officer, said it “was before the warrant [was served] that we were forewarned that there may be a CIA link” information had “filtered down” that the “CIA and the Contras were dealing in arms and cocaine for Nicaragua.”
According to Deputy Virgil Bartlett, the general belief among the police that day was that “the U.S. government backed the operation.... The government was bringing drugs into the country and shipping weapons back out.” Bartlett said he was informed that Ronald Lister “had done jobs for the federal government, and we weren’t so sure he hadn’t done hits for them.” (No evidence has surfaced linking Lister to murder.)
Jerry Guzzetta, who was assigned to search Blandón’s mountain cabin near Big Bear ski resort, glanced around the briefing room to see which federal agents were there. To his surprise, they were not the ones he’d been working with during the investigation. Guzzetta thought it “strange that federal agents from the Riverside DEA and FBI offices initially worked with the L.A. Sheriff’s Narcotics investigators on the Blandón case, but Los Angeles DEA and FBI agents were present at the briefing and later during the warrant execution.”
Around 7:00 A.M. on Monday, October 27, the raid teams gathered at their designated staging areas, taking their last few gulps of coffee and strapping on their bulletproof raid vests. As they methodically went through their final preparations, coincidentally, another kind of ritual was unfolding back in Washington.
That day Ronald Reagan would triumphantly sign his name to the bill authorizing the CIA to spend $100 million on the Contras. It was now official. After a two-year absence, the CIA was back in the Contra business.
As Danilo Blandón’s neighbors stepped onto their porches to retrieve that morning’s edition of the L.A. Times—the front page was headlined “Contras Seek Quick Results on Two Fronts”—four big cars roared up to Blandón’s elegant home and disgorged eleven heavily armed men wearing flak jackets. They quickly surrounded the house and banged on the front door, hollering that they had a warrant. “We’d certainly never seen the likes of it,” one elderly neighbor said. “It was the talk of the neighborhood for quite some time, I can tell you. And they seemed like such a nice family. They had a maid, and the two little girls were so cute.”
Chepita Blandón, wearing a pink housecoat, sleepily opened the door, and Deputy Dan Garner of Majors II thrust Gordon’s warrant in her face. The raid team shouldered her aside and fanned out through the two-story house, emptying drawers and closets. Blandón, wearing a pair of green shorts and a brown shirt, stood silently by his ten-year-old daughter and watched the agents rummage around. The maid, Rosa Garcia, cuddled the Bland?ns’ twenty-one-month-old daughter.
Jerry Guzzetta brought in a drug-sniffing dog, and the hound alerted in the master bedroom and the rec room. A search of the bedroom turned up an envelope with a gram of cocaine in it, a maroon briefcase with three-tenths of a gram of cocaine inside, an AR-15 assault rifle with five full magazines of ammunition, a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun with three boxes of shells, $163, and some assorted papers.
Out in the detached recreation room, which had a full bar and pool table overlooking the golf course, Deputy Wolfbrandt found an envelope behind the bar with a folded $10 bill inside; the bill held one and a half grams of cocaine. He also found “pay-owe” sheets—records of drug transactions.
It wasn’t much, but a couple grams of coke and some pay-owes were all the detectives needed to justify an arrest for possession for sale of a controlled substance. They slapped handcuffs on both Blandón and his wife, read them their rights, and marched them out to the waiting cars for a trip to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s station—and jail.
“As the suspects were being taken from the location to be booked,” the police report said, “suspect #1 [Danilo Blandón] spontaneously stated, ‘The cocaine is mine. The cocaine is mine. It’s mine.’”
Now the cops had a confession to go with the coke. The drug kingpin was as good as convicted.
Across town, however, the other raid teams were not doing as well. Location after location was coming up dry. Some of the houses looked as if they had been scrubbed clean. One officer reported finding an empty safe with a garden hose running into it. Another said an occupant told him he’d been expecting him for an hour.
DEA agent Hector Berrellez—who would later discover evidence of CIA drug trafficking in Mexico—was one of the L.A. agents assigned to the Blandón raids. He accompanied the team that hit Roberto Aguilar’s house, who was reputed to be Blandón’s chemist. “There was a safe at the house which the occupants were told to open,” Berrellez told Justice Department inspectors. Inside was “a box containing photographs, and ledgers typical of those that big drug dealers keep...the photographs were of men in military uniforms, and military operations.” The agent specifically recalled seeing “a photograph of a man in an aviator’s flight suit standing before a warplane and holding an automatic weapon.”
Berrellez said the people in Aguilar’s house told the police they knew the search was coming and had been expecting the raid team. They didn’t say how they knew, Berrellez said, but he’d heard the CIA may have monitored the Blandón case through the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center—EPIC—from which the CIA, among other agencies, draws sensitive narcotics intelligence.
The word started circulating among the raiders. Something was fucked. “We’re just going through the motions,” one of the officers griped.
Down the coast in Orange County, Detective Bobby Juarez and his team were banging on Ronald Lister’s door in Mission Viejo. Receiving no reply, they kicked it open. The house was uninhabited, but it wasn’t empty. The detectives came out carrying bags of records, card files, video monitors, and photographs, which they tossed in a patrol car. A neighbor wandered over and told them that the Listers didn’t live there anymore. They’d moved recently to an even bigger house a couple miles away. “Male and female Latins were now living at the Lagarto address,” the neighbor reported. Some of the seized paperwork showed the neighbor was right: there were letters, video rental receipts, and bank records for someone named Aparieio Moreno and his wife, Aura.
The discovery of those documents corroborated another accusation that the DEA informant inside Blandón’s ring had made: that Aparieio Moreno, a Colombian, was involved in the Contra drug operation. The informant described Moreno as a cocaine supplier and money launderer to both Norwin Meneses’s San Francisco-based branch and Blandón’s network in L.A., and said Moreno, his wife, and his family had hauled millions in drug profits to Miami for the two Nicaraguans, hidden in an innocuous-looking motor home.
Blandón would later admit that Moreno had supplied him with “so many” thousands of kilos of cocaine in 1984 and 1985 that he couldn’t put an exact number on them. He said he was introduced to Moreno by Norwin Meneses and worked with the Colombian until 1987. It is likely that Meneses turned Blandón over to Moreno when Meneses moved to Costa Rica to work as a DEA informant. Ronald Lister would tell police in 1996 that Moreno was “affiliated with [the] FDN,” and Blandón strongly suggested the same thing during his interviews with the CIA Inspector General’s Office.
Blandón claimed that Moreno arranged “at least one 1-ton delivery that was delivered by air via Oklahoma,” a summary of his CIA interview states. Blandón said “he and his associates thought the plane might be connected with the CIA because someone had placed a small FDN sticker somewhere on the airplane. This was just a rumor though.”
It was a rumor that the CIA Inspector General apparently never bothered investigating, as there is no further mention of Aparieio Moreno in the entire declassified report. But considering what else is known about the mysterious Colombian, the omission is not surprising. Moreno had an affinity for dealing dope to people with CIA connections.
Records show DEA agent Celerino Castillo III ran across Aparieio Moreno’s trail in Guatemala in 1988 while investigating allegations of drug trafficking by a Guatemalan CIA agent, Julio Roberto Alpirez. A high-ranking officer in the Guatemalan military and a fixture on the CIA’s payroll there, Colonel Alpirez was accused by the president’s Foreign Intelligence Oversight Board in 1996 of covering up the murder of an American innkeeper in Guatemala, Michael Devine.
Castillo said he discovered that Aparieio Moreno was both supplying Colonel Alpirez with cocaine and selling drugs for Alpirez that had been seized by the Guatemalan military. Castillo believes Devine was killed by Guatemalan soldiers after he had discovered that the military was moving cocaine, a theory that has never been proven.
DEA files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act confirmed that Castillo reported Moreno’s activities in Guatemala to the DEA, but the agency censored all of the information in his reports. From the records, it appears Moreno was also working as a DEA informant, in addition to his other activities.
After securing Moreno’s residence, Juarez and his crew raced over to Lister’s new house and performed a “soft knock.” Since they didn’t have a warrant for that address, they needed Lister’s permission to search it. A rumpled man in a bathrobe opened the door and stood there calmly while Juarez explained the facts of life to him. “If you don’t give me permission to come in, I’m going to stand out here with these guys until a judge signs it and then we’re going to come later on today,” Lister said Juarez told him. “So that’s your choice. What’s it gonna be?” Lister said he was living in “a nice community” and didn’t like the idea of heavily armed officers hanging around in public view, so he invited them in.
According to Juarez, he told Lister they were executing a search warrant for drugs and asked him to sign a consent form. Lister’s response brought the deputy up short.
“I know why you’re here,” Lister told him, “but why are you here? Mr. Weekly knows what I’m doing and you’re not supposed to be here.” Lister “told me that he had dealings in South America and worked with the CIA and added that his friends in Washington weren’t going to like what was going on,” Juarez’s report of the search stated. “I told Mr. Lester [sic] that we were not interested in his business in South America. Mr. Lester replied that he would call Mr. Weekly of the CIA and report me.”
Juarez decided to call Lister’s bluff. “I don’t know who Mr. Weekly is,” the detective told Lister. “Let me talk to him. If I find out I’m not supposed to be here, I’ll leave.”
Juarez silently urged Lister to make the call so “I could get a phone record trace and find out who it was he was calling.” Lister walked over to the phone and started dialing a number. “He looked at me, smiled, and then put it back down again,” Juarez said. “He figured out what I was doing.”
“Never mind,” Lister told the deputy. “I’ll talk to him later.”
Lister claimed later he was planning to call his attorney and decided not to antagonize Juarez by doing so. He denied telling anyone he was working with the CIA, but other members of the raid team had very different recollections.
Sergeant Art Fransen said Lister erupted in a “tirade” and began shouting, “You guys don’t know what you are doing. Oh, you don’t know who you’re dealing with. I deal with the CIA. I got power!”
Deputy Richard Love said Lister warned them, “You don’t know what you’re doing. There’s a bigger picture here. I’m working for the CIA. I know the director of the CIA in Los Angeles. The government is allowing drug sales to go on in the United States.” Love said Lister also “seemed to have some intimate details about a plane loaded with guns that crashed in Nicaragua and about the pilot. Lister alluded to the fact that he had been on one of those planes before and had actually been down there on a gun run.”
Sergeant Fransen, an ex-Marine, poked around in a file cabinet in Lister’s garage and said he found “stuff that a civilian shouldn’t have or be privy to...paperwork, pamphlets and manuals relating to technical stuff concerning armaments.”
Lister would later say that the cops may have gotten the wrong idea about him because he “was involved in legal arms sales. The deputies saw various weapons, scopes, pictures, literature or paperwork on arms and items that were tagged ‘Not for Sale in U.S.’” In Lister’s account, members of the raid team “became fascinated with what they found,” and Sergeant Fransen walked by him later and muttered, “Man, you’ve gotta be CIA.”
No drugs were found, and Lister was not arrested. The raiders packed up the paperwork and hauled it back down to the sheriff’s station, where it was logged into the Master Narcotics Evidence Control ledger as “miscellaneous CIA info.” Another report noted that there was “a lot of Contra rebel correspondence found.”
As the raid teams straggled back to the sheriff’s headquarters throughout the morning and early afternoon, the deputies compared notes and concluded that they’d been had. Someone had burned their warrant—and their suspicions immediately fell on the federal agents.
“After the search warrants had been served, the word among the investigators was that the operation had been compromised,” said former Lieutenant Mike Fossey. “It appeared to have been snitched off by somebody in another agency, which is probably not a local agency, but probably an agency back towards the cast, a big agency, a government agency.”
Guzzetta was convinced federal agents had burned the investigation, pointing out that previous raids they’d conducted on the basis of the Torres brothers’ information had always produced large amounts of cocaine and money. The only difference between those raids and Blandón’s, he said, was the involvement of the FBI and DEA.
Deputy Love said it “was mutually agreed upon between narcotics investigators that the suspects had been tipped off.”
In a case chronology prepared in late 1986, Majors II supervisor Sergeant Ed Huffman noted that “items seized (such as scales, weights, cocaine cutting agents) indicate cocaine activity. The small amount of cocaine (approx. 3 grams) seized is in contrast to the investigation indicators (informant’s information, surveillance observations, background information). Did a burn occur? Possible, but can’t say where or by who.”
The Torres brothers would claim that the investigation was uncovered by Lister, who’d spotted police surveillance teams outside of Blandón’s car lot and near his old house in Mission Viejo. Lister told the police and the CIA the same story and said he informed Blandón about it two weeks before the raids. “Lister states that Blandón simply smiled, but did not comment,” a 1998 CIA report states.
However, Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O’Neale, who investigated Lister and Blandón for several years, said the sheriff’s probe was compromised by an FBI agent who did “a clumsy investigation and contacted somebody who knew Blandón and this person told Blandón about the inquiry.” In an interview with the CIA, Blandón said he “suspected there would be searches after FBI agents interviewed one of his employees.”
But the Justice Department’s Inspector General was unable to find evidence of any contact between FBI agents and Blandón’s associates in the weeks leading up to the raids.
The deputies’ suspicions of federal interference grew even stronger once they began examining the stacks of papers they’d hauled out of the houses. These people weren’t just dope dealers, they realized. They were dope dealers who were dealing with the Contras and, apparently, the U.S. government. Deputy Bartlett recalled seeing photos of Lister in a Contra military compound “standing with a general, and in the background were tents, munitions and automatic weapons.” He also saw “U.S. Army training manuals and videotapes concerning deployment, supply, ordnance and bomb disposal,” telephone records showing calls to Nicaragua, letters bearing Nicaraguan postmarks, and “possibly one document...which had an FBI letterhead.”
“Some of the paperwork contained what he recognized from his military career as Department of Defense codes,” according to Deputy John Hurtado. Other papers, Hurtado told police investigators, “contained some type of reference to the Central Intelligence Agency. Hurtado believed some of the papers had ‘CIA’ handwritten or typed on them. He also recalled a note pad was written in what he described as some type of Department of Defense code.” When Hurtado questioned raid leader Tom Gordon, Gordon told him “they had gotten involved in something over their heads.”
Deputy Dan Garner saw handwritten lists of weapons—specifically AR-15 assault rifles—and papers that involved “transporting weapons from one location to another.” He also recalled “that there were manuals on various weapons, military training films, and photographs of military bases...the manuals and films seemed to have been standard U.S. government military issue.” Garner said that they involved “higher-tech equipment such as ground-to-air missiles,” and that it was “unusual to have recovered these items in a search warrant.”
Deputy Juarez described some of the paperwork as containing “references about Mr. Weekly and his contacts in Teheran relating to the hostages.” He saw “training manuals and training films for state of the art weapons—Stinger missiles, tanks, and other armored vehicles.”
Observed Lieutenant Fossey: “If it was just arms they were talking about on that paperwork, it’s still interesting that we had a drug investigation going here.”
What was even more interesting were some of the files the cops had found in Blandón’s house: a big stack of bank records, showing deposits in seven bank accounts. “Some of these deposits were marked ‘U.S. Treasury/State’ and totalled approximately $9,000,000,” the Justice Department Inspector General wrote. “Other deposits were marked Cayman Islands and totaled about $883,000.” Stuck amongst the bank records was a note, in Spanish, from Blandón’s sister, Leysla Balladares, an FDN member who did Contra fundraising in San Francisco.
“Little brother,” the note began. “There are the bank statements of the suppliers of the Contra. They have issued checks to different persons and companies, the same to the Cayman Islands. These are just one part and is the continuation of the report you have. I’ll later send you the rest so you can laugh.”
Balladares told Justice Department investigators that she got the documents from a Contra official shortly before he was killed in Honduras, and said they documented how Contra officials were stealing money and perhaps laundering it through the Cayman Islands. She’d sent Danilo copies because she thought he would be “amused at the level of corruption of some of the Contras.”
The documents partly solved one of the day’s mysteries—the identity of Lister’s purported CIA contact, Mr. Weekly. Weekly’s name was found in a sheaf of handwritten papers dealing with weapons and equipment sales. The documents included a list of armaments: antiaircraft weapons, fire bombs, 1,000 AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, air-to-sea torpedos, and napalm bombs.
The next page bore a list of names and phone numbers. Near the name “Aparieio,” Lister had written: “FDN coordinator.” Another list of names included Bill Nelson, the CIA’s former deputy director of operations; Salvadoran politicians Roberto D’Aubuisson and Ray Prendes; and someone named Scott Weekly.
In another document, Lister had written, “I had regular meeting with DIA subcontractor Scott Weekly. Scott had worked in E1 Salvador for us. Meeting concern my relationship with Contra grp. in Cent. Am.” (The DIA—Defense Intelligence Agency—is the Pentagon’s version of the CIA, responsible for collecting military-related foreign intelligence. It was heavily involved in the Contra war and in the civil war in El Salvador.)
The detectives were confused. DIA? Hadn’t Lister said Weekly was with the CIA? What the hell was the DIA? When the detectives read the confidential security proposal that Lister’s Pyramid International security company made to the government of El Salvador in 1982, they knew they were in unfamiliar territory. They’d never run into drug dealers who did business with heads of state.
Detective Juarez, who also translated the bulky document from Spanish to English for the flabbergasted detectives, said he became concerned that the records “would not remain in evidence for very long because of their sensitive subject matter.” He made a copy of the Pyramid International proposal and took it home with him. That decision, Juarez suspects, probably cost his brother-in-law, Manuel Gόmez, a 32-year-old Salvadoran jeweler, his life. Juarez told the author that in 1993 he gave Gόmez a copy of Lister’s security proposal. His brother-in-law sympathized with the leftist rebels in El Salvador and was active in the Salvadoran solidarity movement in Los Angeles. Gόmez was going to get the documents to an underground radio station in El Salvador in hopes of publicizing this example of the U.S. government’s unsavory involvement in Salvadoran internal affairs.
“Two weeks after the document made its way to the underground radio station in February 1993, Manuel Gόmez was found murdered in his car,” Juarez told police investigators. He said Gόmez “had apparently been tortured and strangled with a wire. His body was found wrapped in a blanket.” When the police checked out Juarez’s claims, they found that Manuel Gόmez had indeed been strangled in 1993, his body dumped in the trunk of a car in South Central L.A. They also found a note in the homicide case files reporting that Deputy Juarez had called the police five days after the murder to tell them that his brother-in-law “had government documents in his possession that may have provided a motive for the murder.” But the homicide investigators decided politics had little to do with the killing. After picking up rumors that Gόmez was dealing drugs in South Central, they wrote the death off as drug-related and didn’t pursue it much further. The killer was never apprehended.
Juarez sat down at a computer terminal and entered Ronald Lister’s name into the NIN (Narcotics Information Network) database to make sure that any other narcotics agents who encountered him knew what they were dealing with. He reported that Lister had been searched in connection with a narcotics investigation, “and locations were cleaned out. Documents recovered indicate that Suspect Lister is involved in buying and selling police and government radio equipment and heavy duty weapons. Suspect possibly FBI informant and private detective.”
Other deputies also began furtively copying some of Lister’s papers. Deputy Garner grabbed a handful of records, including Lister’s handwritten notes, as did Lieutenant Fossey. Fossey and Garner took the copies home with them “to safeguard them from loss or theft,” Fossey explained. It would prove to be a wise precaution.
A few hours after the raids, Blandón’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff’s station to ask where his clients were and how he could bail them out. He said Tom Gordon answered the phone and tore him a new asshole.
“He was a vile, vicious son of a bitch,” Brunon recalled. He said Gordon screamed, “I’m not telling you anything! You’re worse than they are!”
“‘Fuck,’ I said, ‘I just called up to find out where you’re going to arraign the guy.’
“‘Fuck you! I don’t have to tell you!’ I mean just, boom, off the wall.”
So Brunon called Gordon’s supervisor, Sergeant Ed Huffman. Huffman took notes of the odd conversation, which he later passed along to the FBI. Huffman had suspected all along that there was something creepy about the Blandón case, and the phone call from Brunon clinched it. “Thought you knew CIA kinda winks at that activity,” Brunon told the astonished detective. “Now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for Nicaraguan Contra movement, U.S. government now appears to be turning against organizations like this.”
In an interview, Brunon confirmed that as “not far from what I said.”
According to former narcotics bureau captain Robert Wilber, Sergeant Huffman came to see him afterward and sourly remarked, “We bust our ass and the government’s involved.” The deputies “were upset about the incident,” Wilber said, but he didn’t take it too seriously because he thought they were using it as an excuse not to work with federal agents again.
If the Majors needed any more excuses, they got another one quickly enough. According to Deputy Bartlett, “Two federal agents came into the office looking angry. With the agents were a ‘zone’ lieutenant and the Narcotics Bureau admin lieutenant, both of whom also appeared angry.... The agents put some of the evidence into boxes and then walked out of the office.” Sergeant Huffman’s daily diaries and other records recently found in the Sheriff’s Office’s archives confirm that agents from the DEA, FBI, and 1RS arrived at the narcotics bureau on October 30 and for two days pored through the seized files, making copies of everything.
Later that night, a cable from the CIA’s Los Angeles office marked “Immediate Director” buzzed out of the teletype machine at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Entitled “Three Persons Claiming CIA Affiliation,” the once-secret cable stated, “Three individuals claiming CIA affiliation have been arrested by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on narcotics related charges. Details received via FBI are sketchy. However, request preliminary traces to determine if any of the three listed below have CIA connections.” The first person named was Ronald Lister, who “claims that for many years he has assisted in supplying small arms and helicopters to CIA contacts in Latin and Central America.” The cable also named Danilo Blandón, identified as an accomplice of Lister. Curiously, it also asked for a trace on Norwin Meneses, who was identified as another accomplice of Lister’s. Why the Los Angeles CIA was asking about Meneses in connection with the Blandón raid is unclear, since he was neither arrested, named in the search warrant affidavit, nor even living in the United States.
“Please respond immediate indicating what portions of response may be passed to local law enforcement authorities,” the cable concluded. Langley cabled back the next day; there were no headquarters traces on Blandón and Lister, but Meneses was “apparently well known as the Nicaraguan Mafia, dealing in drugs, weapons, and smuggling and laundering of counterfeit money.” What happened next is still a matter of dispute.
After the raids, Sergeant Gordon and Deputy Juarez said they took a couple of days off. When they returned to work, Gordon said, he was told by deputy Dan Garner that the CIA had come into the offices and taken the records the Majors had seized during the raid. Gordon didn’t believe it and went to the evidence room to check.
The papers were no longer there.
According to Garner, Gordon walked back into the squad room and announced, “The evidence is gone.” Juarez said he ran over to the evidence lockup and confirmed what Gordon was saying. Nothing was left. Both Juarez and Gordon claimed they never saw the documents again.
In addition to the seized documents, said Blandón’s attorney, Brad Brunon, the official police records of the raid seemed to disappear also. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to come up with more than an informal note about the preraid briefing, and that only by accident a couple years after the raid. “For a long time, they (the Sheriff’s Office) never acknowledged the existence of this warrant. I mean the whole thing was quite mysterious. Boom, they did 15 locations. Nothing turned up. Nobody got busted. There was a little tiny bit of cocaine found in one location. Nobody got filed on. They gave all the stuff back. The whole thing just was very strange,” Brunon said. “I’d never had a case where all the reports disappeared. I mean, early on, the only theory I had was the CIA involvement.”
An investigation by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office in late 1996 strongly disputed the idea that “mysterious federal agents swooped down...and stole away with any documents relating to this case. Investigators have determined that this allegation was apparently spread through second-hand rumor and innuendo among some members of the narcotics team personnel.” The department said that for each item seized, “there is a consistent paper trail.”
The paper trail, however, raises more suspicions than it quiets. If the Sheriff’s Office files are accurate, nearly all of the seized evidence was given back to Blandón and Lister within days of the raid, and apparently no copies were retained by the department, even for intelligence purposes. The Sheriff’s 1996 investigation failed to find a single document that had been seized during the raids. As for the piles of copies made by the federal agents in the days following the raids, nearly all of those have disappeared also. According to the Justice Department Inspector General, neither the DEA, the FBI, or the U.S. Attorney’s office could locate a single one of the more than 1,000 pages of documents the agents copied. The IRS, fortunately, still had some stashed away.
All of the property that wasn’t claimed—including the cocaine and the weapons manuals—was allegedly destroyed within six months. That destruction occurred while the investigation was still listed as open and active.
As Jerry Guzzetta had done earlier, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office soon concluded that the Blandón case was just too big for it to handle alone. Sergeant Huffman “did not believe it was the proper responsibility of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department to investigate the activities of the CIA,” he said; he and his superiors “felt it would be more appropriately handled by federal agencies from that point because there was evidence that there was a continuing narcotics trafficking organization which involved a very large geographical area.” When the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in and offered to adopt the investigation, the Majors had no objections. Sergeant Gordon, in fact, was no longer around, having been promoted and transferred out of the Majors.
According to Sergeant Huffman’s notes, one of the first things the federal agents did was to put Gordon’s bombshell search warrant affidavit under court seal, which kept it from becoming public. The affidavit also disappeared from the Sheriff’s Office case files and was never found again. (In 1996 Sheriff Sherman Block sheepishly admitted that his investigators were unable to locate a copy of the affidavit in the department’s files and had to use the author’s copy, which had been posted by the San Jose Mercury News on its Web site. And again, the only reason that copy existed was because an officer took a copy of the affidavit home shortly after the raid.)
Huffman was then informed that no charges would be filed against Blandón, “to protect the ongoing investigation and informants.” Despite being caught red-handed with cocaine—and admitting it was his—the drug kingpin was set free. Federal prosecutors interviewed called that a stunning decision, given Blandón’s stature as one of L.A.’s biggest traffickers and the fact that he was in the U.S. seeking political asylum at the time. The mere fact of the arrest should have been enough to deport him, his wife, and every other Nicaraguan implicated. “If he was a major trafficker and we got him with even a little bit, he’d have been prosecuted,” said former federal strike force attorney Brian Leighton, who worked in central California during those years. “You could also charge him with conspiracy, because in conspiracy cases you don’t need any dope. I’ve done plenty of no-dope conspiracy cases. Just because he has [only] a half a gram doesn’t mean you let him go.”
But Blandón was not merely turned loose. On December 10, 1986, he has said, he was formally notified that the case against him had been dropped and that there would be no charges filed. That day, records show, he drove into Los Angeles and hired a lawyer to file an application for permanent residency with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which would make it much more difficult to deport him in the future.
Blandón’s choice of attorneys was interesting; he hired a man who was then under federal indictment for immigration fraud, and a cocaine addict to boot. Just a week before Blandón retained him, attorney John M. Garrisi had been charged with illegally smuggling Iranian scientists into the United States. Garrisi’s lawyer, Roy Koletsky, said Garrisi had “a pipeline” into the Iranian community and had been bringing Iranians into the States since “around the time the Shah was deposed. He had a number of Iranians working in his office. They spoke Farsi at the office.”
At Garrisi’s disbarment hearing, it was alleged that he had been crisscrossing the globe in his quest to get Iranians into the United States, creating phony immigration records with an apparently genuine stamp from the Iranian Ministry of Justice and referring clients to an expert document forger. He was also accused of cheating clients of money. Garrisi “repeatedly stated he believed he had a duty (emphasizing repeatedly the word ‘duty’) to bring ‘these people’ (most of his visa clients are Iranian) into the United States,” a California Bar Association report stated. “He strongly inferred that he would pursue that duty even against their expressed wishes.”
Koletsky had no idea what “duty” Garrisi was talking about, he said, and Garrisi did not respond to interview requests. After one mistrial, he was convicted in 1987 of making false statements and sent to federal prison for a year.
Blandón’s application for permanent residency, which disclosed his membership in an unnamed “anti-communist organization,” reported that he had been arrested for “possession of drugs and weapons” in October 1986 but added, “They didn’t find nothing.” Under “Outcome of Case,” Blandón wrote: “No complaint filed. They exonerated me 12-10-86.”
On December 11, 1986, one day after Blandón says he was “exonerated,” the director of the FBI sent a long teletype to the CIA’s deputy director for operations and the director of the DIA. The teletype said the FBI was doing an “investigation focused on a cocaine distribution operation principally comprised of Nicaraguan nationals. Significant quantities of cocaine are reportedly distributed throughout the West Coast.” Furthermore, “Information provided to FBI Los Angeles indicates that subject Ronald Jay Lister has made statements concerning his ‘CIA contact,’ identified by Lister as ‘Mr. Weekly.’ Investigation has also identified documents indicating that Lister has been in contact with ‘Scott Weekly’ of the DIA.”
The CIA replied that it had information only on Meneses and Murillo. The DIA claimed it didn’t know anything at all.
But that didn’t keep Riverside FBI agent Doug Aukland from digging a little further. He decided to do some checking on “Mr. Weekly,” Ronald Lister’s alleged CIA contact.
“Scott Weekly is an arms dealer in San Diego,” the agent told Sergeant Huffman in mid-January 1987. “Can’t confirm Weekly is or isn’t CIA connected.” But that was only because Aukland wasn’t asking the right people: his own bosses in Washington. By then, records show, senior officials at the U.S. Department of Justice had Weekly under investigation and were intimately familiar with him because they had been reading transcripts of his telephone conversations. Those transcripts suggested that Scott Weekly was connected not only to the CIA but to the National Security Council and the U.S. State Department as well.