When Ross was led from his cell at the MCC to meet the representatives of the Justice Department, his thoughts had been with Danilo Blandón. The feds, Ross assumed, wanted his source. It was what the task force had been after when they came to see him the last time he’d been locked up. That was the way things worked. You got busted, and they came to you with The Choice: be a rat or be a jailbird.
He’d managed to duck the situation the last time, but he wouldn’t have that luxury again. The feds had him by the balls. Now, it appeared, he would be forced to confront the question he’d always dreaded: Could he rat out Danilo? “He was Danilo, you know? He was, he was like my God, my number one person,” Ross said. “Hadn’t many people been there for me, you know, when I was coming up. So Danilo was somebody that I felt had always been in my corner and he always showed like he cared about me.”
But to Ross’s surprise and relief, the federal people had no interest in the Nicaraguan. “They didn’t ask me nothing about who I was getting it from,” Ross said. All the Justice Department wanted to hear about were his experiences with the detectives on the Freeway Rick Task Force. They’d been reading those complaints he and his friends had filed against the officers. Were they true? And would he be willing to testify to it?
Ross was dumbfounded. He’d been willing to testify two years ago, but nobody had wanted to hear about it then. Besides, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division had already looked into his complaints and dismissed them for lack of evidence, or so he’d been told. Yet now they wanted to know if he would be a U.S. government witness against the police. A drug dealer helping to put nares in jail? If that didn’t beat all.
Ross had one question: What was in it for him? It could change the way certain people felt about him, he was told. If he cooperated and testified truthfully and honestly, it would help when he appeared before the judge in Ohio for sentencing. Plus, the government might decide not to seize his properties or his remaining cash under the asset forfeiture laws. And there was the added attraction of getting back at the cops who had harassed him and his family.
To the Justice Department, Ricky Ross was no longer a dope peddler. He had become “a percipient witness in a case involving allegations of serious misconduct” by members of the Majors and the Freeway Rick Task Force. An FBI sting called “Operation Big Spender”, was behind Ross’s newfound credibility with the federal government. “This may be a terrible thing to say,” said L.A. County sheriff Sherman Block, “but as we got into this thing, it became obvious that the stories being told by the crooks were more credible than the stories told by our officers.”
In the fall of 1989, after Block received anonymous complaints that the Majors were ripping off drug dealers, the FBI sent an undercover agent into the Majors’ territory posing as a courier for a money launderer. The Majors were tipped off that he was carrying a load of cash, which could be found in his room at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills. The FBI had reserved three adjoining rooms at the hotel. The “courier” was in the middle. On one side were agents manning video and audio gear; on the other, a SWAT team.
It was like dangling a pork chop in front of a dog. Seizing cash had become the Majors’ specialty by the end of the 1980s. They were no longer real narcotics detectives anymore. Thanks to expanded asset forfeiture laws, the Majors had become sin-tax collectors for Sheriff Block and L.A. County.
In 1988 alone, the sheriff’s office hauled in an astonishing $33.9 million in cash, and another $33 million the following year—along with 66 houses, 110 vehicles, 4 airplanes, and 2 businesses. Of the $33 million seized in 1988, the Majors had brought in $13.6 million of it all by themselves, along with 4,470 pounds of cocaine.
The lion’s share of that booty had been produced by the Majors II crew, which was now under the command of Sergeant Robert Sobel—“El Diablo.” After the Freeway Rick Task Force disbanded in late 1987, Sobel was hand-picked to lead Majors II, and he had driven his squad to Olympian heights. “My men are all trained to tear flesh when they scent blood!” Sobel had bragged in an interdepartmental newsletter.
The Majors zeroed in on the FBI’s “courier” so fast they had a surveillance team in place before the FBI agents arrived at the hotel. The detectives quickly learned that the “courier” had reserved the rooms on either side of him and got suspicious, wondering if they were being led into some trap. Worried that the deputies would bust into the other rooms and expose the sting, an FBI agent cautiously approached Sobel’s crew and told them they’d done their jobs too well. They had stumbled on a federal undercover operation and were about to expose it (which was technically the truth). Would they be so kind as to leave the area?
Two weeks later, the FBI tried again, this time renting a room at the Valley Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks. Again the Majors snapped at the bait. A hidden video camera was rolling as two plainclothes officers burst into the courier’s room and found $480,000 in a garment bag. “‘Ohhhhh ho ho!” one deputy exclaimed as she pulled the bag from under the bed and opened it. “Is this your bag?”
The deputies skimmed $48,000 of the marked cash, stuffed it into a gym bag, and left. Sobel and other deputies then entered the room and questioned the undercover FBI agent, Indalecio Guzman, about the money. After the agent claimed no knowledge of where the cash came from, one deputy persuaded him to sign a form disclaiming ownership of the remaining money. “[You] can say room service left it,” Sobel joked.
In a series of lightning raids that night, the authorities found some of the marked cash in the homes and cars of the deputies. Sheriff Block immediately suspended nine members of the squad.
Within forty-eight hours, distraught and appearing heavily medicated, “El Diablo” Sobel approached the feds and volunteered to testify against his crew. He admitted that much of what Ross and his partners had accused them of was true: the task force had routinely beaten suspects, a practice known as giving someone a “tune-up”; planted dope, called “flaking” a suspect; lied in court; falsified search warrant affidavits; and stolen drug money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—by turning in only a portion of what they had seized.
With their ill-gotten gains, the Majors had gone on spending sprees, buying vacation homes on the Colorado River, big-screen TVs, jewelry, fancy cars, boats, helicopter lessons, and Hawaiian vacations. The FBI discovered that LAPD detective Polak had liposuction performed on his buttocks, and his wife had paid cash for a breast enlargement operation. The agents were told of Dom Perignon-drenched parties; officers were dabbling in stocks and bonds and starting side businesses. Remarkably, considering their line of work, the detectives had left a paper trail of their excesses a mile long.
On February 22, 1990, a federal grand jury indicted ten deputies on twenty-seven counts of theft, income tax evasion, and conspiracy. And prosecutors promised they were just getting started. There were more indictments to come.
One of the first to be charged was Deputy Daniel Garner, a hard-nosed detective who had been one of the spiritual leaders of Majors II. Garner decided that if he was going down, he was going down fighting. He hired one of L.A.’s most high-profile criminal lawyers, Harland W Braun, who had defended Lee Marvin in his famous “palimony” suit and would later successfully represent one of the officers in the Rodney King beating case.
“Dan Garner came in my office and told me that there was nothing the feds were going to be able to do to them because he had proof that they were dealing in drugs and laundering drug money,” Braun recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘They can’t touch us.’ And he gave me these papers he said they had seized in a drug raid several years earlier.” They were some of the documents the Majors had taken from Ronald Lister’s house in 1986, which Garner had secreted away as “insurance.” Though Braun privately doubted the records would have the impact Garner expected, he agreed they could be a useful bargaining chip down the road. Certainly, the Majors had little else to pin their hopes on. While the FBI had an incriminating videotape, marked cash, and tape recordings Sobel had secretly made of the deputies plotting their defense at a bar, all the detectives had were some lame stories about hitting jackpots in Las Vegas and loans from relatives.
Garner and his codefendants went on trial in October 1990, and the federal prosecutors led off their case by playing the devastating videotape for the jurors, who became noticeably upset at the sight of police officers helping themselves to bundles of suspected drug money and then joking about it. Braun decided it was time to spring the Lister papers on the government. While he was cross-examining one of the FBI agents who had participated in the Big Spender sting, he casually asked if the agent knew anything about seized drug money being laundered by the federal government and then diverted to the Contras by the CIA. Federal prosecutors leaped to their feet to object, and Braun let the question hang for a bit before moving on to another topic.
After court, Braun walked out onto the steps of the federal building in downtown Los Angeles and held his usual post-trial spin session with the reporters covering the case. One scribe asked about the strange question he’d put to the FBI agent about the Contras and the CIA. Braun calmly replied that he was laying the groundwork for his client’s defense: outrageous government conduct. Deputy Garner, Braun pointed out, was a court-certified expert in money-laundering issues, and Garner would explain how some of the cash they were accused of stealing from drug dealers had been laundered by the CIA and used to buy arms for the Contras and other covert operations.
Braun’s startling claims were mentioned in the seventeenth paragraph of the L.A. Times’s trial story the next day, but the Justice Department reacted as if he’d written them in the sky while riding a broom. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Hagemann ran to Judge Edward Rafeedie and demanded a gag order against all of the defense attorneys in the case, complaining that they had “publicized matters that are likely to seriously impair the right of the defendants, the government and the public to a fair trial.” He singled out Braun in particular, reporting his accusations that “the government laundered drug profits which were diverted by the CIA to the Nicaraguan Contras and Iran.”
Braun responded with an inflammatory motion opposing the gag order, in which he exposed the long-hidden details of the Majors’ 1986 raid on Ronald Lister’s house. Lister, who wasn’t identified by name, was referred to as “a money launderer who [Majors II] knew was associated with a major drug and money laundering ring connected to the Contras in Nicaragua.”
Braun told of Lister’s claim of CIA connections and the strange items the deputies had hauled from his house: “Films of military operations in Central America, technical manuals, information on assorted military hardware and communications and numerous documents indicating that drug money was being used to purchase military equipment for Central America. The officers also discovered blown-up pictures of the suspect in Central America with the Contras showing military equipment and military bases. The suspect also was discovered to have maintained a ‘way-station’ for Nicaraguan transients in Laguna Niguel, California. Officers also pieced together the fact that this suspect was also working with the Blandón family which was importing narcotics from Central America into the United States.”
Braun’s motion linked “the Blandón family” to the crash of Eugene Hasenfus’s C-123K cargo plane in Nicaragua in October 1986, the same crash Scott Weekly claimed on tape that he’d been “tied into.” It also told of the Lister files disappearing as “federal agents swooped down on the sheriff’s headquarters and removed all the recovered property. Mysteriously all records of the search, seizure and property also ‘disappeared’ from the Sheriff’s Department.”
Garner, Braun wrote, had secretly made copies of “10 pages of the documents seized from the CIA operative,” which he said “give the name of CIA operatives in Iran, specifically mention the Contras, list various weaponry that was being purchased and even diagram the route of drug money out of the United States, back into the United States purchasing weaponry for the Contras as well as naming the State Department as one of the agencies involved.”
Braun said he’d asked the Justice Department to provide a letter “stating explicitly that no drug money was used by the United States government or any United States government agency to purchase weapons for the Contras or weapons to be traded for hostages from Iran” but it had refused to do so, which Braun interpreted as “a tacit admission” that Garner’s claims were true. “The court will note that nowhere in the declaration by the United States attorney does he state that this allegation is false. From this counsel concludes that in fact the government concedes the truth of the statement and only attempts to again suppress it so the public will not know about these illegal activities,” Braun wrote. “The government obviously fears the exposure of its drug financed Central American operations.”
The seven deputies on trial, Braun noted, weren’t the ones complaining about unfair publicity, even though they had been pilloried in the media by federal prosecutors since the day they were indicted. “The only party that complains about the publicity is the very party that was arguably using drug money to buy weapons for the Contras,” Braun wrote.
The next day the Justice Department fired back with a motion of its own. Once again sidestepping the issue of whether Garner’s allegations were true or false, prosecutors asked Judge Rafeedie to issue a court order “excluding any questions, testimony, or other evidence relating to any alleged CIA plot to launder drug money to finance Nicaraguan operations or operations in Iran.” Those claims, prosecutor Hagemann wrote, were “wholly irrelevant” to the case, and “would be nothing more than a smokescreen to divert the jury’s attentions from the issues.” Since the raid had occurred in 1986, Hagemann argued, it was “well outside the time frame of any allegations in the indictment...there is thus no connection of any kind between this scheme involving the CIA and this case. This evidence would do nothing more than confuse the jury and be a waste of time.”
Judge Rafeedie called the lawyers into his courtroom the next morning and lashed out at Braun, calling him sneaky and unprofessional. The motion he’d filed, Rafeedie stormed, was a “bad faith” effort to get the information out to the public. “Even if everything that you have said in this document is true, it has nothing to do with whether or not your client filed a false income tax return or whether or not he was stealing money and making purchases with the money that was stolen,” Rafeedie raged. “That is, what the CIA or the government did has nothing to do with that, so far as I can see. I cannot conceive of any theory under which that evidence would be admissible in the case and therefore, putting this information out in the guise of an opposition to a restraining order simply to ensure that it gets into the public print and perhaps might contaminate this case or create undue prejudice—frankly, I am disappointed in you, Mr. Braun. I do not believe that a lawyer of your ability and skill would ever even consider that this evidence would be admissible.”
(Rafeedie would later display the same sensitivity to suggested CIA links during one of the trials involving the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. When defense lawyers tried to introduce evidence alleging CIA and Contra involvement with Mexican drug lords, Rafeedie ruled the information was irrelevant to the murder and refused to allow the jury to hear it.)
Stunned by Rafeedie’s vehemence, Braun tried to reply, but the judge told him to sit down and shut up. “This opposition which you filed is the most clear and convincing evidence that an order—a restraining order—in this case is necessary,” Rafeedie told him. “This document manifests a continuing intention to use the media to make statements in the public... which violate the American Bar Association model rules of professional conduct and I have, after receiving this, decided that it is appropriate to issue an order in this case, and I intend to do that.”
Braun once again asked to be heard, but Rafeedie told him it didn’t matter what he had to say; he was issuing the gag order immediately. The order, he was informed, prevented him from saying anything “that a reasonable person would expect to be disseminated by means of public communication.” Any violation would be “viewed as contempt of this court and punished accordingly.” It was, Rafeedie noted, only the second time in his twenty-one years on the bench that he’d had to gag an attorney.
Finally Braun was permitted to speak. He asked Rafeedie to give him some time and some leeway to gather additional evidence to substantiate Garner’s claims.
“We are not trying to determine the Iran-Contra affair,” Rafeedie snapped. “Suppose I accept as true everything you have said...I don’t see the relevance.”
Braun complained that Rafeedie’s gag order would make it impossible for him to find witnesses to corroborate Garner’s contentions, but Rafeedie was unmoved, and he refused to allow Braun to pursue the subject. Garner, during his testimony, did manage to tell the jury that he discovered “the CIA was doing, conducting illegal activities in which the guys in the CIA were getting rich,” but the jurors were told to disregard the comments.
Six of the seven deputies were convicted of corruption charges and sent to prison. Garner received one of the harshest sentences—fifty-four months. In 1996 he was released from prison. He emerged defiant. “I didn’t pump 500 tons of cocaine into the ghetto,” Garner said. “I stole American money and spent it in America. The United States government can’t say that.”
Before the Big Spender investigation was over, most of the officers who had worked on the Majors’ investigation of Blandón and the Freeway Rick Task Force would be charged with crimes or forced out of law enforcement.
Bell PD detective Jerry Guzzetta—the narcotics officer who originally began the investigation into the Blandón operation—was accused of stealing cocaine, but never charged. In 1988 IRS agent Carl Knudsen, who’d had a falling-out with Guzzetta over his handling of the Torres brothers, blamed Guzzetta for the disappearance of six kilos of cocaine the police department had stored in a public storage locker. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Office was called in to investigate but could find no evidence that Guzzetta had anything to do with the theft. (Indeed, it was discovered that the Bell police had given one of the keys to the locker to a convicted drug dealer working as a police informant.) Though two prosecutors examined the case and declined to press charges, Guzzetta said the investigation ruined his career. He filed a lawsuit against the city, which was later settled out of court, and retired on a partial disability.
He remains convinced that he and the Majors were targeted for destruction because of their investigation of Blandón. “Every policeman who ever got close to Blandón was either told to back off, investigated by their department, forced to retire or indicted,” Guzzetta complained to police investigators in 1996. He “felt that he had been victimized by a conspiracy which damaged and ruined many police officers who had attempted to bring Blandón and his organization to justice.”
Former deputy Virgil Bartlett, who assisted on the Blandón raids, disagreed. “Nobody humbugged Operation Big Spender. Nobody set us up. We screwed ourselves. Nobody prosecuted me for anything I didn’t do.”
The last Big Spender indictment to come down was against Sergeant Thomas Gordon, the chief investigator of the Blandón case, who was accused of spending stolen drug money to fix up his house in San Dimas. He was charged with money laundering and tax evasion and, representing himself, fought the government to a draw on money-laundering charges. He was convicted on the tax charges.
Defense lawyer Harland Braun had no way of knowing it, of course, but his efforts to drag Ronald Lister into the 1990 Big Spender case came perilously close to exposing the Contra drug connection—which may explain the Justice Department’s frenzied efforts to gag Braun and keep the lid on the 1986 raids on Lister and Blandón.
By the time of the deputies’ trial, Ronald Lister was working for the DEA as an informant, and had been briefing federal prosecutors about his work on behalf of the Contras and the CIA during the 1980s. The DEA considered him to be such a valuable source of information that it had interceded with local police to keep him out of prison.
Lister’s transformation from a drug trafficker to a drug warrior began in August 1988, when he met a prostitute at a party and confided that he could get her some cocaine if she wanted it. The hooker, a police informant, ran to tell the cops, and the Costa Mesa Police Department sent out an undercover agent, who ended up buying two kilos of cocaine from the ex-detective. But after just two days in jail, Lister was released on his own recognizance and put back on the streets, apparently having convinced the Costa Mesa detectives that he would be more valuable to them as an undercover informant.
In late 1989, to the chagrin of Costa Mesa authorities, Lister was arrested by DEA agents in San Diego and charged with conspiracy to distribute thirteen kilos of cocaine.
But the same thing happened again. Instead of being taken off the streets, Lister was soon back walking them as an undercover police informant. Lister had mesmerized the DEA and U.S. Attorney’s office as easily as he had charmed the Costa Mesa police. Why were these police agencies so eager to drop slam-dunk drug cases for the honor of having Ronald J. Lister as an informant? Easy. He was their ticket to the big time. He was going to lead them to the crime of the century.
Today, the cops and lawyers who worked with Lister call him a pathological liar, a master manipulator, a charlatan, a con man, a louse. But that wasn’t what they thought when they signed him up as an informant and turned him loose on an unsuspecting public. They thought he was James Bond. And they fancied themselves as M.
During the negotiations for Mr. Lister’s services, his attorney, Lynn Ball, sent the San Diego DEA and U.S. Attorney’s office a resume of his client’s work history, touting him as a man who “has the experience to be one of the most outstanding [informants] any agency could have.” Lister “knows the cocaine business better than most people,” Ball said. He’d worked “for the governments of El Salvador, Colombia, Italy, and Iran.” He knew intelligence operatives and weapons smugglers. He had worked with the Contras, including Edén Pastora. And, he could finger Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amalia Meza, in a 1997 interview with CIA inspectors, said San Diego DEA agent Chuck Jones suggested using Lister as an informant in an investigation he was conducting of Danilo Blandón, so she asked Lister’s attorney, Lynn Ball, if Lister would be interested. The reaction from Lister’s lawyer was memorable. “Ball indicated that Lister was going to have to check with ‘the Agency’ first to see if he could provide information regarding the Blandón organization,” prosecutor Meza recalled. “Ball later indicated that Lister had been given ‘clearance’ to cooperate.” Lister then began a series of extensive debriefings and grand jury appearances. “Lister alluded to the CIA during debriefings, but no one from the investigative team pursued that subject,” Meza reported. “The focus of the U.S. Attorney’s investigation was on cocaine smuggling.” She claimed she “never questioned Lister about, nor allowed him to discuss, any involvement of CIA or any other U.S. government agency during these debriefings” [emphasis added].
But Lister said there was another motive behind the prosecutor’s lack of curiosity about such an interesting topic. In a letter to his reputed “CIA contact,” David Scott Weekly, written while Lister was in prison in July 1990, Lister said his debriefers “are purposely staying away from anyone who might be connected to the Agency, like Pastora. They would like me to tell them who they can’t get because of a nat’l sec [national security] block,” Lister informed Weekly. “They are extremely afraid of a nat’l security block. So their logic is to go after...people and assoc....where personal gain is clear and no Contra activity appears. They say they don’t even want to know about the Contra organization or anything related.”
Lister appeared before a federal grand jury four times providing detailed physical evidence, a complete chronology from 1982 to 1986 of “a big Central American operation,” and naming roughly 80 people who worked with the Blandón drug ring. He also provided information to San Francisco FBI agent Don Hale, Norwin Meneses’ pursuer. Lister said Hale was convinced that Lister and the Nicaraguans “were connected with the CIA...[Hale] wanted to prove a connection between the U.S. government, the Contras and drug smuggling.”
On December 20, 1990, ten days after the verdicts in the first Big Spender case were handed down, Ronald Lister was released from federal custody and sent out into the world as an undercover DEA informant “to assist the government in an investigation.” He went to work as a salesman for a San Diego company called Markon Inc., an international barter brokerage owned by Scott Weekly, aka “Dr. Death.” Whether the DEA was using Weekly’s company as cover or if Lister was also spying on Weekly is not clear.
Whatever the reason, DEA records show that Lister began engaging in some very unorthodox activities for a federal informant—moving mountains of cash for drug traffickers, just as he’d done while working with Blandón in South Central. Barely six months after he began working for the DEA, Lister strolled into Anthony’s Fish Grotto, a waterfront San Diego restaurant, to have lunch with several Colombian drug traffickers and their associates. Unbeknownst to Lister, two of the men at the table were undercover DEA agents, posing as money launderers.
According to their reports, one of the Colombians demanded to know what Lister had done with some $500,000 he’d been given to launder. “At this time, Lister commenced to explain how he had originally received instructions from Colombia to wire transfer the money to a European bank, only later to be told to transfer it to another account,” the DEA report stated. “Lister went on to say that he could not wire transfer the money from the account again since it was originally laundered with the assistance of the CIA. At this time, Lister explained how he and the CIA used to transport multi-hundred kilo loads of cocaine from Cali, Colombia and Costa Rica to the U.S.” The DEA agent wrote that Lister had a paper in his hand that “appeared to be a copy of an outgoing wire transfer. On it, the agent noticed the following: ‘Swiss Bank of New York, World Trade Center, #101-WA’ (the rest of the numbers not obtained.)”
Lister was asked by one of the undercover agents “if he knew what would happen to him if he refused or failed to pay back the money. Lister replied that he had nothing to fear since he worked for the CIA. At this time the agent asked Lister if he was also employed with the FBI or the DEA, to which he replied, ‘No.’” Lister’s explanation apparently didn’t mollify the Colombians. The group’s leader, Osvaldo Montalvo, was overheard telling his associates “that Lister was a dead man.”
A few days later, according to a federal prosecutor familiar with the case, “one of our undercover agents was being contacted by the Colombians and they said, ‘By the way, we want to kill this guy Lister, and if we can’t kill him we’re going to kidnap his mother and put her on the phone and torture her so he pays us back the $600,000 he stole from us.’ We ran Lister through the indices and he showed up as an informant, so we brought him in, actually brought him into San Diego PD and said, ‘We have reason to believe there is a threat against your life, a serious threat. We are taking it seriously, we are offering to protect you if you want it.’”
Lister, he said, laughed off the offer to place him in the Witness Protection Program and said he wasn’t afraid of any “fucking Colombians.” The prosecutor made Lister sign a waiver of liability absolving the Justice Department of any responsibility in case he turned up dead.
Lister went back to one of the Colombians and told him that he knew what they were up to. He was so unconcerned, he said, that he had declined federal protection, which he proved by whipping out the liability waiver he’d signed. He told the Colombian that he “did not need any protection since he and his associate, Scott Weekly, could take care of themselves. Lister further commented that Weekly was a U.S. Seal and well equipped to take care of anything.”
To show the Colombian he was serious, Lister also pulled out some surveillance photos of the undercover DEA agents who’d been at lunch with him. “The photographs appeared to have been taken from a top floor,” a DEA report stated. “Lister claimed that the photographs were taken by his surveillance people.”
In mid-June 1991, the prosecutor said, federal agents intercepted the hit team the Colombians had sent to kill Lister. “They were stopped at the Temecula immigration check point with a picture of Lister and a map to his mother’s house and they were in the country illegally and we deported them,” he said. “We saved his worthless life.”
Embarrassed by the fact that another DEA team had discovered their prize informant was laundering money for Colombian drug dealers, Lister’s DEA handlers threw him in jail for violating the terms of his plea agreement. In a motion filed to cancel their deal and send Lister to prison, the case agents claimed Lister was involved in money laundering through Weekly’s company, Markon Corp., which they said “was set up to launder money from narcotics and weapons sales...defendant intended to sell weapons as well.” Weekly insisted Markon was a legitimate trading company. In any event, no charges were ever filed against Markon or Weekly.
Lister and his attorney bitterly protested the DEA’s attempt to toss the ex-cop back in prison, and argued that Lister had provided quite a bit of help on the investigation of Blandón and Meneses. If the feds couldn’t bust the Nicaraguans, they said in a court motion, that wasn’t Ronald Lister’s fault. “These reasons may have more to do with so-called ‘national security’ and political decisions made by the Attorney General, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies,” the motion stated. “A decision not to prosecute individuals in order to avoid embarrassing high government officials for possible complicity in drug dealing should not be sufficient reason for this defendant not to be able to have the advantage of his plea bargain for cooperation.” In a letter to federal Judge Rudi Brewster, who was handling the case, Lister warned him that the federal government had been playing games with the Blandón case for a long time. “In 1986, the main players and myself came very close to indictment but the government chose not to proceed because of ‘matters of national security,’” Lister wrote.
After first granting Lister’s motion for a hearing, Judge Brewster quickly changed his mind and ordered Lister to serve eight years in prison for drug trafficking. The Blandón investigation was taken away from Lister’s handler, Amalia Meza, and given to Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O’Neale, a man who is quick to inform people that he has a top secret security clearance and is an expert in handling national security cases. (Coincidentally, O’Neale was the Assistant U.S. Attorney who five years earlier indicted former Green Beret Colonel James “Bo” Gritz for misuse of a passport, shortly after Gritz and Scott Weekly returned from Burma singing songs of CIA involvement with heroin trafficking.) O’Neale would eventually become Blandón’s biggest booster within the Justice Department.
DEA agent Judy Gustafson said Lister dropped by her office shortly after his release from prison in 1996 to pick up some belongings and once again “discussed his connection to the CIA.” If the Justice Department thought the CIA would ever tell them anything about him, Lister laughingly told the agent as he headed out the door towards freedom, they were dreaming.
For Ricky Ross, Operation Big Spender brought only glad tidings. He became one of the federal government’s star witnesses in the second round of corruption trials in 1991, and his appearance on the witness stand was, in some ways, an historic occasion. It was the first time that the man who had helped touch off L.A.’s crack explosion appeared in public to tell his story.
The federal prosecutor handling the case called Ross “probably the most significant drug dealer” ever to testify for the government. Freeway Rick, along with a host of lesser dealers appearing as government witnesses, opened up the inner world of big-time crack dealing to a wide-eyed public.
Ross bluntly told the jurors that by the end of the 1980s he’d sold thousands and thousands of kilos of cocaine in South Central L.A., becoming a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-two. He told of the properties he owned, the big speedboat he had docked at Marina Del Rey, his fleet of cars, his ski trips to Aspen, and his fourteenth-row seats at the Lakers games. Another major L.A. crack dealer who testified for the government, Alander Smith, corroborated Ross’s story.
“Smith waxed at length on the economic empire—including a thriving tire shop, apartment investments and motel construction—of Ricky Ross, a convicted trafficker who has been described as the godfather of the rock cocaine trade in South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
But Smith, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, made his federal handlers cringe when he launched into an impromptu lecture on the Drug War. Peering intently at the jury from behind steel-rimmed glasses and firmly gripping the microphone at the witness stand, Smith accused government officials of bringing drugs into the United States. “Yes, I mean President Bush,” Smith told the jurors pointedly. “When he was with the CIA and now.... The government is the only people that have the access to the equipment, but the minorities are the ones who do the time for it.”
Such comments, combined with the sentence reductions and other favors Ross and his cohorts had been given by the government to secure their cooperation against the deputies, didn’t sit well with the jurors, who had difficulty accepting the testimony of drug dealers over the denials of the accused officers. Under cross-examination, Ross admitted that the Justice Department had agreed to cut his sentence in half and had permitted him to keep his remaining properties and his money, which he valued at around $2 million.
Outraged, the jurors acquitted most of the indicted officers and cited Ross’s deal as one of their reasons. “They really gave away the farm on that one,” one juror told the Los Angeles Times.
The LAPD detective who was the architect of the Freeway Rick Task Force, Ross’s nemesis Steve Polak, was one of those acquitted. He was later reindicted on civil rights and income tax charges and pleaded guilty to violating Ollie Newell’s civil rights by beating him up. Embittered, Polak retired from the police force, complaining that he’d been sold out by his own department and persecuted by government lawyers who’d “crawled into bed with drug dealers to go after cops.”
Though the Big Spender investigation was ultimately a flop for the Justice Department, Ross had lived up to his end of the bargain. In February 1992, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Emmick (who would later gain notoriety as a member of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater prosecution team) dutifully went to court and urged that the crack lord be given a break, praising his cooperation as “more than satisfactory.” Ross, Emmick said, “was on the stand for three to four days. He was cross-examined in excruciating detail about all imaginable subjects. Ross answered those questions without hesitation and, in my opinion, did so honestly and candidly.”
His sentence was trimmed from ten years to fifty-one months, which made him eligible for release in a little over a year. Ross was sent to the federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, to serve the rest of his time.