Though he had successfully navigated the treacherous waters of the cocaine industry for nearly a decade, Blandón learned that he was unprepared for the sharks of legitimate commerce.
His twenty-four-location rent-a-car business, Alpha II, suffered when a deal to rent thousands of cars to hordes of German sightseers in the 1988-89 season vaporized at the last minute. “I make a contract—3,000 cars to be rented to the German people,” Blandón explained. “But I didn’t have enough cars. So I get a credit from Chrysler for 250 cars, and I get a credit from General Motors of 300 cars.” But when Chrysler discovered he was making deals with GM, he said, his $1.5 million line of credit was yanked. He was forced to go out and beg cars from other rental companies. “I lost $300,000 in three months.” In early October 1988 his lender filed a notice to foreclose on the rental agency’s office near the Miami airport, and by early January 1989 his company was bleeding money. “I had to get cash,” Blandón said. Fortunately he knew just where to get it.
Alpha II Rent-a-Car had apparently been the Doper’s Choice for wheels in sunny Miami, and Danilo had gotten to know some very heavy hitters. “I did a lot of favors to the Colombians in Miami with my rent-a-car [business]. They used to go—they don’t have a credit card, so I rent it with a deposit, $500 deposit, and they rented the car. So I, I got a lot of connections in, in those three years that I was running my business.... They were my friends because of my business.”
He felt particularly close to Colombian Humberto Cardona, because Cardona was supplying Danilo’s Nicaraguan associates in South Central. “This guy used to go every week to my place, this Mr. Cardona. He used to go every week. He had a lot of business.” Cardona, whom Blandón called “El Fruco,” was one of Colombia’s better known cocaine kings. When the Colombian government agreed to extradite him and five other traffickers to the United States in late 1985, it was international news, hailed as a sign of increasing cooperation between the Colombian and U.S. governments. (There was one trafficker the Colombians were refusing to extradite, UPI noted: Juan Matta Ballesteros, the Honduran billionaire whose airline, SETCO, was flying supplies for the Contras. Instead of turning Matta over to U.S. courts, the Colombians deported him to Honduras, which did not extradite its citizens, and he continued dealing drugs.)
Humberto Cardona’s extradition to the United States appears to have been equally painless. A mere three years later, according to Blandón, he was jetting around the world, and supplying the South Central crack market through Meneses’s men, Roger Sandino and Jose González Morales.
Blandón poured out his tale of financial woe to the chunky Colombian, and El Fruco had a novel idea: Why not get back into the cocaine business? It was hotter than ever. Why, he’d just sold Blandón’s friends in L.A. a ton of cocaine—literally. Two thousand kilos. “So if you want to go back, I can get some merchandise in L.A. and you don’t have to worry about the money that you have been losing down here,” Blandón said Cardona told him. “So I started thinking. And I got back.”
Blandón put his rental car agency into bankruptcy and moved his family back to California, settling in San Diego in a house owned by his old college buddy Sergio Guerra, the smooth Mexican millionaire. Guerra had become a well-known figure in San Diego business circles, owning profitable parking lots and car dealerships. He was on the board of the San Diego YMCA and had generously donated property in downtown San Diego to the Chamber of Commerce, to build a tourist information center. He was also smuggling cocaine and gold into the United States, court records say.
Perched high on a hillside overlooking San Diego’s busy harbor, Blandón began the task of reassembling his cocaine network. He immediately reunited with the Meneses family. “In ’89, back in business, I started doing business with Jose González in San Francisco. He was the contact with the Meneses family because I know all the Meneses family—their names, OK? But I never, at that time, I never come to deal with them because Norwin didn’t let me be in touch with them. So I was in touch with Jose González, spoke with the people, with Omar [Meneses], with Guillermo [Meneses]—they introduced me to Guillermo by phone the first time—and all the people: [Rafael] Corñejo, Roger [Meneses], Omar, and Jairo Morales [Meneses].”
When Norwin was away in Central America, Blandón said, nephew Jairo Morales ran the family cocaine business in San Francisco, and Norwin was away a lot. About two weeks after former CIA director George Bush had been sworn in as president, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco brought a secret indictment against Meneses, finally charging him with a few of the crimes he’d committed back in the mid-1980s. The two-count indictment accused him of conspiracy to import cocaine between 1984 and 1985 and possession of one kilo in 1985—during the period when he was having meetings with CIA agent Adolfo Calero, hosting FDN breakfasts, squiring FDN officials around L.A., and holding FDN functions at the T-shirt factory Blandón was managing.
Norwin was declared a fugitive, and a federal magistrate signed an arrest warrant. Then, curiously, both the warrant and the indictment were locked away in the vaults at the San Francisco federal courthouse, where they would remain sealed from public view for the next nine years.
Meneses called the indictment “a phony,” suggesting it was filed to protect the U.S. government in case its relationship with him was ever revealed. He hadn’t been coddled or protected, it could now be argued; he’d been indicted.
Eric Swenson, the federal prosecutor who filed the case against Meneses, said the indictment was returned because the case against Meneses was so old that it was fast approaching the statute of limitations. If an indictment wasn’t returned soon, it never could be. Secondly, Swenson said, “it materialized that there was some information that he was back in the [cocaine] business and it was like, ‘All right, we’ll indict his ass and if he gets arrested and comes back into the country, we’ll see if he wants to cooperate then.’”
But what Swenson apparently didn’t know is that Meneses was cooperating—with the Costa Rican DEA—and that he had been for the past two years, which makes those reports of Meneses’ continued involvement with drug trafficking even more intriguing.
“Surprisingly, in 1989, even after the San Francisco indictment and arrest warrant were issued, Meneses continued to work as an informant for the DEA in Costa Rica and travel to the United States on behalf of the DEA,” the Justice Department Inspector General marveled. “During this time, the FBI was apparently unaware of his activities...” Records show DEA agents were regularly sending the drug kingpin on still-classified missions to San Francisco, Miami, L.A., Panama, and Colombia and paying him thousands of dollars for his time. Moreover, the Costa Rican DEA office continued to protect him, mainly from the FBI, which was trying to arrest him on the San Francisco indictment. In 1990, in response to an FBI request for help, the DEA’s Costa Rican attaché, Ron Lard, described Meneses as a “very valuable and current active DEA source in Costa Rica.” The San Francisco FBI reacted furiously. In February 1990, it demanded to know when the DEA had suddenly discovered Meneses’ amazing worth—before or after the FBI had indicted him? “San Francisco FBI would not have pursued an indictment of Meneses if it had been aware of Meneses’ cooperation with any law enforcement or intelligence agency,” the FBI cable complained. “Did DEA conduct appropriate checks to determine Meneses’ legal status prior to [activating] him?”
Oops, the DEA replied. Our mistake. Norwin was no longer an active DEA informant and, once again, no one knew where he was. One FBI agent complained that he “did not believe that the DEA in Costa Rica, or the Costa Rican authorities, would arrest Meneses.”
As to what he was doing and why the DEA was so protective of him, the Justice Department Inspector General’s report in 1998 provided a significant clue: among Norwin’s targets were “some Nicaraguan government officials.” Norwin, it seems, was still fighting Communism with cocaine. Though combat between the Contras and Sandinistas all but ceased in March 1988 with the truce of Sapoa, the CIA continued its covert war to destabilize the Sandinista government throughout the rest of the decade, and it now appears that Norwin Meneses was a part of the U.S. government’s arsenal of secret weapons.
In 1990 a Nicaraguan public weary of a decade of war and strife and tension with the United States voted the Sandinistas out of office. With U.S. backing, Norwin’s former business partner, Violeta Chamorro, was elected president, and she immediately began returning to Anastasio Somoza’s friends and relatives the companies and properties that the Sandinistas had confiscated.
Meneses and his family moved back into their mansion on the outskirts of Managua, and he began reclaiming the holdings—valued at $12 million—that had once belonged to him and his assassinated brother, Edmundo.
Norwin also began reconstructing his drug trafficking network in Nicaragua, a riskier business. Even though the Sandinistas were no longer running the government, they still controlled the country’s military and national police. If they caught him dealing cocaine, he’d be at the mercy of his old enemies.
To cover his bets, Norwin recruited a turncoat Sandinista intelligence officer, Enrique Miranda Jaime, to help him reestablish his smuggling pipeline through Nicaragua. It was a move that would prove to be his undoing.
A slippery character who was a lifelong Sandinista, Enrique Miranda had been a paid CIA informant between 1984 and 1985, spying on his comrades and peeking into shipping crates to keep the agency up to date on the latest Sandinista weapons purchases. He says he was one of two CIA operatives working inside the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior’s super-secret dirty-tricks unit, the Bureau of Special Operations.
In addition to having extensive political connections, Miranda was an experienced smuggler in his own right. During the early years of the Contra war, Miranda said, he was responsible for arranging clandestine shipments of Sandinista arms from Panama to revolutionary groups throughout Central America, and he had helped the Sandinistas design a string of secret arms caches in and around Managua—fortified concrete bunkers hidden in hillsides and in dense patches of jungle. As a result, he not only knew most of the smuggling routes through the isthmus but had places to hide cocaine that few people even knew existed.
In interviews with Nicaraguan police in 1991, Meneses corroborated many details of Miranda’s past. He said Miranda, who is married to a cousin of Norwin’s wife, Blanca, had been a friend of his for a decade, and he confirmed that Miranda “was the person who was sending guns to the FMLN in El Salvador.” He also confirmed that Miranda “sold himself to the CIA” and provided the agency with intelligence on Sandinista leaders. The CIA refused to confirm or deny that.
In 1989 Meneses hired the former double agent to serve as his emissary to the Colombians, primarily the cartel of Bogota. Posing as Norwin’s nephew, Miranda said he arranged the drug shipments, plotted the routes, and handled the cash deliveries, while Meneses negotiated prices, put up the money to finance the purchases, and arranged for the cocaine’s transportation from Nicaragua to the United States.
Most of the cocaine they were shipping, Miranda said, was being sold in Los Angeles through Meneses’s brother Luis Enrique, who was later convicted in Nicaragua of drug trafficking. In San Francisco, Miranda said, Norwin was dealing through his nephews, Guillermo and Jairo. The drugs were being smuggled into California through two different routes. Meneses “had on his payroll a series of American pilots and had taken charge of a control tower in the state of Texas,” Miranda testified. Norwin’s cargo planes, based in Costa Rica, had established flight plans to haul commercial goods to Texas. Before they left, Miranda said, a space would be cleared in the cargo hold big enough to conceal 300 kilos of cocaine. “When overflying their route to the U.S.A., they would be allowed to drop in for a quick landing at the airstrip at Rosita,” he testified, referring to a 2,600-meter runway in the isolated jungles of northern Nicaragua, near the mining town of Rosita.
At the abandoned airfield, according to Miranda, Meneses had hundreds of kilos of cocaine hidden in underground bunkers. The kilos would be loaded aboard the cargo planes and hidden amidst the commercial cargo, and the planes would continue on into Texas. “This operation would last approximately 15 or 20 minutes,” Miranda said. “The advantage is that here in Nicaragua there is no radar system with the capacity to reach this airstrip.”
The other method was equally inventive. Meneses would purchase automobiles in the United States through a dealership, import them, fill their frames and hollow spaces with cocaine-filled PVC pipes, and weld them shut inside. Then the cars were loaded aboard an auto transporter—also packed with tubes of cocaine—and driven across the border in Texas or California. “For the amounts that were coming in, you almost needed flatbed trucks,” recalled Meneses lieutenant Rafael Corñejo.
Blandón said his first job once he got back into the California drug market was serving as a broker for Norwin’s nephew, Jairo, in San Francisco. He collected cocaine from hotel rooms all over the Bay Area and sold it to customers in Alabama, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco. At least two of Blandón’s biggest customers, Mike Smith in L.A. and Reggie Rash in Alabama, were black dealers who’d worked for Ricky Ross before Ross went to prison.
Then Blandón had another well-timed series of lucky breaks. Jairo was arrested and sent to jail; Jose González moved back to Nicaragua; and the only experienced distributor left was Danilo Blandón. He took on the job of doling out cocaine to the other members of the Meneses ring and some of their Bay Area customers. Between 1990 and 1991, Blandón estimated, he provided somewhere around 425 kilos of cocaine to the Meneses family in San Francisco, about $8.5 million worth at wholesale prices.
Blandón also began putting his L.A. connections back together. Though he was reasonably sure the Torres brothers had ratted him out to the cops four years earlier—and they knew he’d hired a hit man to kill them after he became convinced that one of them was sleeping with his wife—the old friends let bygones be bygones and started buying and selling drugs from each other again.
Rafael Corñejo recalled visiting the Torres brothers in North Hollywood with Blandón in 1990, where Jacinto offered to sell him a chrome-plated .45. “There was a fight on TV and Danilo and I went over there to watch it. I was staying at a hotel...that’s when I first met the Torres brothers. And he [Blandón] was working with them and to my belief he was involved with narcotics with them at that time. He offered some to me but I didn’t take the offer. He told me he was back trying to open up the gates again that he had lost.”
Blandón said Corñejo was very “picky” about cocaine quality and deemed the kilos Blandón offered substandard. Though Corñejo said he never liked Blandón personally—“he always had an agenda”—he valued his experience and his connections and began dealing with him on an almost daily basis. “Sometimes, you know, you gotta dance with the devil,” Corñejo shrugged. “Danilo knew some very important people in Nicaragua, important people in society, and I was talking about taking my money and moving down there, you know, taking my assets and starting a business. And he told me he would use his connections with the World Bank to help me out.” Whether Blandón actually had any connections to the World Bank is unknown, but undercover DEA tapes show that he was openly boasting of having received massive loans around that time from the Canadian government and, according to one DEA summary, the U.S. government.
Those discussions were secretly taped between 1990 and 1991 by DEA informant John Arman, a skinny, nasal-voiced drug dealer who’d been indicted in Nebraska in the early 1980s for cocaine trafficking and fled to Mexico. The Mexicans booted him out eventually, turning him over to FBI agents at the border, and Arman agreed to become an informant for the DEA office in San Diego.
He was one of the first people Blandón contacted when he reentered the southern California cocaine market, apparently due to a long-standing friendship with Arman’s ex-wife. In March 1990, a week after the Sandinistas were voted out of office, Arman called San Diego DEA agent Charles Jones and told him that “Blandón is preparing to move back to Nicaragua from Miami, due to the favorable political climate at present. Blandón also reportedly had a large amount of cash in Los Angeles, California, that lie was preparing to transport to Nicaragua.” Arman reported that Blandón “owned property in Nicaragua that he rented to the government for $100,000 for five years,” and was so tight with the new regime, he’d told Arman, he’d take him to the upcoming inauguration of Nicaragua’s new president, Violeta Chamorro.
“Yeah, I know all the people from the government,” Blandón boasted in one taped conversation with Arman. “They like you, see? Shit, they like you, all the fucking government—they know.”
Blandón wasn’t just bragging. A DEA informant who had worked for Blandón informed federal agents in 1991 that the drug dealer “had extensive contacts in the Nicaraguan government and obtains cocaine from the Cali cartel on credit.”
In July 1990, Blandón flew back to Miami to deal with his failing rental car company and returned to L.A. a few days later. Arman met him up at the airport, where an expansive Blandón announced that he’d just received a $40 million loan to build houses in Nicaragua.
On the drive to San Diego, Blandón killed time by filling Arman in on his latest cocaine deals. His supplier, Humberto Cardona, was now in France and was looking to cross 2,000 kilos he’d stored in Guadalajara, Mexico. A Canadian associate was bringing in a load from Mexico through Houston. Some of his Japanese customers had the bad luck of buying a boatload of cocaine in Colombia, and then having the trawler tracked and seized off the coast of Hawaii.
Arman dropped Blandón off at the Nicaraguan’s hilltop home in Bonita, a few miles from the Mexican border, and they made plans to meet for dinner later that evening. Shortly before 7:30 P.M. on July 21, 1990 Arman arrived at the Old Bonita Store, a quaint lobster restaurant near Blandón’s house, wired for sound. He was accompanied by undercover DEA agent Judy Gustafson, who was posing as a money launderer interested in doing business with Blandón and his friend Sergio Guerra, the parking lot magnate. Blandón rolled up fifteen minutes later behind the wheel of a silver Mercedes 450 SL, Guerra at his side.
The four made chitchat for a while—Guerra asked the DEA agent if she’d ever snorted methamphetamine—and then Blandón motioned Arman outside so they could discuss something privately. If Arman was looking to sell, Blandón said, he had customers looking for about 200 kilos. If he could get more, they’d buy that too.
“These people have been working with me 10 years,” Blandón informed him. “I’ve sold them about 2,000 or 4,000, I don’t know. I don’t remember how many.”
“It ain’t that Japanese guy you were talking about, is it?” Arman asked.
“The Japanese? You know him?”
“No, you told me.”
“No,” Blandón insisted. “No, it’s not him. These...these are the black people.”
“Black?!”
“Yeah,” Blandón replied. “They control L.A. The people that control L.A.”
“I don’t like niggers,” Arman fretted.
“Well . . . ”
“They pay cash though?”
“Yeah,” Blandón said. “They pay cash.”
“Can they come up with enough money to buy 50 at one time?”
“Yes.”
“Oooh,” Arman shivered. “That scares me, you know that?”
“No, no. Don’t worry. I don’t do with anybody else, just with black people,” Blandón reassured him. “The thing is, with these people, you are making [money] every day or every week. They’re all there. You don’t have to be worried about nothing. You don’t have to pay warehouses, because the warehouse would be only one day, you see?”
Arman told Blandón he’d see what he could do, and they returned to the table, where Arman pressed the Nicaraguan for details on his new housing project.
“What were you doing... what was the deal, you’re doing some building, planning on doing some building, some houses down in...?”
“Nicaragua.”
“Nicaragua?”
“I get a loan from the Canadian government, $40 million, for 5,000 houses,” Blandón said.
“Like mass housing, neighborhood... ”
“For the poor people, the poor people. You know, the government of Canada, they sometimes have, it’s better for them, for construction, to give us 5,000 houses, a government loan for three years, you pay 3 1/2 % per year... ”
“Then they get a United States company to... ?”
“Well,” Blandón said, “we will be supervising, see? Then they will build the house in Canada, how you say, prefabricated... ”
Blandón also mentioned that he was due to receive a $1 million settlement from the U.S. government for some unspecified claim.
Arman steered the conversation to Roger Sandino, the Meneses associate wanted by the DEA in connection with the giant Bolivian drug bust in Virginia in 1986. Laughing, Blandón told the group how Sandino had a planeload of cocaine flown into Nicaragua, but the plane belly-flopped on a dirt field near a small town. The crash was swarmed by local peasants, who carted away much of the dope. “The people, the campesinos, they found it and they were selling it at the market—10 dollars, 20 dollars a fucking key!” Blandón chuckled. He said that when a horrified Sandino discovered the situation, he flew down from Miami and frantically tried to buy his remaining cocaine back from the peasants.
Nicaraguan aviation records show the airplane, loaded with 1,000 pounds of coke, crash-landed near San Rafael del Sur on June 4, 1990. The pilot, who was arrested, was a captain in the Colombian Air Force.
For the next two years the San Diego DEA would keep a close eye on Blandón, recording his telephone calls, tracking his movements, videotaping his meetings with informants and his negotiations to buy cocaine. They would hear him confess to many crimes and brag “about having customers in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other locations.” But even after being informed that Blandón was back in South Central L.A., once again selling massive amounts of cocaine to “leaders of black gangs,” the DEA made no move to arrest him.
“Blandón stated that one of the groups that he supplied cocaine to were black gang members in Los Angeles that didn’t care about the quality of cocaine because they were going to convert it to crack anyway,” a 1991 DEA report stated laconically. On the tape of that conversation, Blandón and Arman can be heard commiserating over the decline in standards in the cocaine business. A kilo of “beautiful” white flake meant nothing to these crack dealers, Blandón lamented. “They don’t care. They, they, they, they cook everything.”
The investigation of Blandón crept along at a snail’s pace until July 1991, when Texas DEA agents finally nailed longtime fugitive Roger Sandino, who was tooling along outside Plano, Texas, with fifty-four kilos of cocaine in his car. The feds took him to Dallas for a detention hearing, shipped him to Oklahoma City, and indicted him, and within two weeks the San Diego DEA had him working the phones, making tape-recorded calls to Blandón in an effort to set him up for a reverse sting.
But Blandón’s intelligence network was as good as ever. During one conversation, Sandino suggested that they do a deal with a certain couple in Miami. Blandón’s voice suddenly hardened. “They are going to put you in jail, dumb fuck, but quickly,” he said.
“Are they, are they working for the police?”
“Yes,” Blandón said evenly. “They are the ones who fucked Jairo.”
Sandino’s suggestion apparently prompted Blandón to do a little checking up on his old friend. A few days later, Blandón called and asked Sandino to explain the circumstances behind his recent legal troubles in Oklahoma City. Sandino hurriedly made up a story about getting busted after an auto accident of no consequence. He insisted that everything was fine and encouraged Blandón to come to San Diego to complete a cocaine transaction they had discussed. Blandón assured him he would be there, but never arrived. He also quit returning Sandino’s calls. Four days later, on August 16, 1991, the DEA admitted defeat. Blandón had once again beaten the narcs at their own game. “The investigation,” a DEA report stated, “had been compromised.”
“At first I thought it was just a keen sense of paranoia, but now I believe that he [Blandón] was tipped off,” said a federal prosecutor who worked on the case. He declined to say whom he suspected. But one of the agents assigned to the Blandón investigation, INS agent Robert Tellez, wasn’t as reticent. “Intelligence information provided should be highly protected,” Tellez wrote in a memo in February 1991. “This major cocaine traffickers [sic] may have had a degree of influence from the CIA.”
When DEA agent Jones drove out the next morning to collect Sandino from the Chula Vista hotel where they had him holed up, he found an empty room. Just as he had done in Virginia five years earlier, Sandino had given the DEA the slip. He fled to Nicaragua “as a result of the pressure of cooperating,” a DEA report stated.
The DEA refused to explain why it left unattended a federal fugitive who had just been captured after five years on the lam, or what attempts it had made, if any, to recapture him.
“He had a big wedding here a couple years ago out at the Montelimar resort,” said Roger Mayorga, the Nicaraguan government’s former antidrug czar, in 1997. “If the DEA wanted Roger Sandino he is very easy to find. They never asked us to arrest him, I can tell you that.”
Just ten days after Sandino’s disappearance, the federal government was presented with another golden opportunity to arrest Blandón. Once again, though, it declined. While on a trip to Tijuana on August 26, 1991, Blandón and Sergio Guerra stopped at the checkpoint on the international border in Guerra’s silver Mercedes, and U.S. Customs inspector Phillip Lemon asked Guerra if he had more than $10,000 on him. The Mexican said no.
“How much do you have?” Lemon asked.
“About $100,” Guerra answered.
Eyeing the $35,000 car and the expensive clothing the men were wearing, Lemon told them to pull over to the side for a vehicle inspection.
The Mercedes was a giant piggy bank. In the glove compartment, Customs agent Douglas Montone discovered $2,700 in cash rolled up with a rubber band. The trunk produced $110,550 in bank money orders and $1,300 in cash in a black bag. Guerra had $490 in his wallet and a second search of the trunk revealed an additional $2,000 in money orders. The money orders were blank and had been purchased within the past week.
Asked why he was driving around with a small fortune in his trunk, Guerra babbled that “he does not have a safe and he uses his two Mercedes Benzes in lieu of a safe deposit box to store his valuables.” In truth, the money wasn’t Guerra’s. It was Blandón’s. “The money orders were on their way to Mexico as a partial payment for cocaine,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O’Neale, who handled the case. Blandón had sent three of his assistants out to snap up 339 money orders, O’Neale said, because he’d “overloaded the delivery systems” of his cocaine suppliers with cash. After dumping $900,000 on them a few days earlier, O’Neale said, Blandón had been instructed to “hold off on the cash.”
While a cursory check of the Customs database would have revealed that Blandón was a known cocaine trafficker and Guerra had no criminal record, it was Guerra who was arrested and indicted by a federal grand jury on two felony counts. He also had his Mercedes seized. Blandón was briefly questioned and released.
By Christmas, he would be three for three. In late December 1991 a special LAPD strike force arrested him and two other men on charges of money laundering and conspiracy after they caught him with $14,000 and a small amount of cocaine in his pocket. Blandón had been seen leaving the apartment of his old friend Raul “El Tuerto” Vega, the one-eyed Meneses flunky who’d helped break Blandón in when he started dealing coke for the Contras. In Vega’s apartment, police found $350,000 in cash, a miraculous amount for a man who claimed to be a warehouse worker.
Then the LAPD got a call from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego, asking that all the charges be dropped. Federal agents were working on an investigation, the police were told, which would be ruined if Blandón was put in jail. When the trafficker appeared for his arraignment, he was released without bail and the charges were subsequently dismissed. Once again, he’d walked away from an almost certain conviction. The federal prosecutor who made that decision said he intervened to protect the DEA’s investigation of Blandón from a premature termination. “It wasn’t done as a favor to Blandón,” he insisted.
LAPD sergeant Ron Hodges heard a similar story while working his own case against Blandón in 1991. Hodges, a narcotics detective who was also looking into the Torres brothers, was attempting to arrange a hand-to-hand sale with Blandón, when he discovered that DEA agents were following the Nicaraguan around. The DEA asked Hodges to cooperate with their investigation, so he shelved his case and relegated himself to helping the DEA tail Blandón around L.A., surveilling his meetings with the Torres brothers. “I actually had a better case against him if it would have come about,” Hodges said. “I think they just let him run.”
In stark contrast to their U.S. counterparts, Nicaraguan lawmen were onto Norwin Meneses from the moment they learned the drug lord was back in Managua.
René Vivas, the chief of the Nicaraguan National Police, and Commander Roger Mayorga, the head of its criminal investigations section, were well acquainted with Norwin and his family and the work they’d done for Somoza and the Contras. Mayorga, a short, stocky man with hard eyes, had been chief of state security in Meneses’s hometown of Esteli. Vivas, one of the earliest members of the Sandinista underground, had known Norwin since his days as a teenage informant for Somoza’s secret police, through his attempts to infiltrate anti-Somoza groups. They were itching for a reason to arrest him. And they got one sooner than they expected.
In November 1990 a white Volkswagon microbus was putt-putting through Chiapas, Mexico, on its way to Los Angeles when Mexican police pulled it over. Inside were forty-two kilos of cocaine and a beautiful Nicaraguan airline stewardess, Ivis Hernández, who had been one of the Sandinistas’ fiercest urban guerrillas during the revolution, known as “La Negra.”
“She was something else,” sighed Roberto Vargas, an ex-Marine who fought with the Sandinistas and later became their ambassador to China. “La Negra was part of a special squad during the revolution that attacked National Guard buildings. They were the worst missions—suicidal almost—but oh my God, could she fight. I think every man who met her fell in love with her.”
Certainly Enrique Miranda had. At the time of her arrest, she and Miranda were lovers. And it was his microbus she was driving. Roger Mayorga said the Mexican police told him about the arrest, which they said resulted from a DEA tip. Mayorga might want to look into it, they suggested, because he could have a drug ring operating in Managua. When Mayorga learned who owned the van and who was driving it, he was intrigued. He knew Ivis Hernández, and she’d never struck him as a cocaine trafficker. Enrique Miranda was a different story. Mayorga knew the kinds of things he’d done during the war.
Mayorga dropped by Ivis’s house and asked her mother, who knew nothing of the arrest, if he could talk to Ivis. Her daughter was in Mexico, she said, receiving some medical treatment at the suggestion of her boyfriend, Enrique Miranda. “So I went to see him and I challenged him and I told him he was responsible for her arrest,” Mayorga said. “He was very nervous and he denied everything, but I could tell. At that point, we decided to focus our investigation on him.”
Miranda unwittingly led the police to Frank Vigil, the former advertising man who’d allegedly dealt cocaine with Blandón in L.A. in the early 1980s and was Meneses’s partner in the Costa Rican chicken restaurant. Mayorga learned that Vigil had just formed a new company in Managua in partnership with a major Colombian drug trafficker, Hector Román Carvajal.
Mayorga saw from the incorporation papers that the company, called PZP S.A. (for Processadora Zona Pacifica), had been put together by a prominent Somoza lawyer, Adolpho Garcia Esquivel, a Nicaraguan assemblyman who also served as one of Norwin Meneses’s lawyers. Among PZP’s owners, the records showed, was Luis Henry Pallais, the son of Somoza’s closest political adviser, and Nicaraguan assemblyman Frank Duarte, another longtime Somoza supporter who headed the Assembly’s antinarcotics committee. The company, according to its records, planned to operate fishing boats to export seafood to Taiwan.
Miranda was also seen making trips to a motel in the hills overlooking Managua, the Auto Hotel Nejapa—one of a strange breed of small Nicaraguan hostelries that allow patrons to drive their cars into shielded carports and enter their rooms unseen from the outside. Such hideaways are usually used for trysts with hookers and mistresses. The Hotel Nejapa, police learned, had once belonged to General Edmundo Meneses. The Chamorro government had recently returned it to the Meneses family, and it was now being run by Norwin Meneses, business records showed. The incorporator of the new hotel business was—surprise—Somoza lawyer Garcia Esquivel, the incorporator of PZP.
Mayorga surmised that Miranda was working for Meneses and Frank Vigil, and he suspected they were plotting to use the fishing company as a front for a cocaine smuggling venture. In the summer of 1991, he said, his men began following Meneses and his wife, Blanca Margarita. One September evening Mrs. Meneses drove to a restaurant near her house, the Lobster Inn, and got a table. A few moments later, DEA agent Federico G. Villarreal arrived. Hot on his heels was Norwin Meneses.
To the shock of the Nicaraguan police, Villarreal was having dinner with Meneses and his wife. (Their shock would have been greater had they known that Meneses, at the time, was technically a fugitive from justice.) When his men excitedly returned from the stakeout with their news, Mayorga was dumbfounded. Villareal, the senior agent in the DEA’s office in Costa Rica, had just met with Mayorga to discuss the idea of the DEA starting a formal, cooperative relationship with the Sandinista police. What was he doing meeting with Nicaragua’s top cocaine trafficker in Mayorga’s backyard? Behind Mayorga’s back?
Running a clandestine operation in a foreign country without informing the local authorities, Mayorga knew, violated just about every DEA policy there was. Either Villarreal was a friend of Meneses, which also violated DEA policy, or the DEA and the drug kingpin were up to something that the Nicaraguan National Police weren’t supposed to know about. Something here was very fishy.
Mayorga went to see his boss, Nicaraguan National Police commander Rene Vivas, who shared his concerns. Checking with sources in Costa Rica, they learned Meneses and Villarreal had been seen together in San José as well. There was definitely something going on between Meneses and the Americans, they concluded. A lid of secrecy was clamped on their investigation. No one else in government, and especially not the DEA, would be informed until after it was all over. Their agents were sworn to absolute secrecy and given as little advance notice as possible of upcoming operations.
The precautions paid off. On a Sunday morning in early November 1991, Mayorga’s men executed a series of simultaneous raids on Meneses’s drug ring. At the Quinta Wichita, a small ranch ten miles south of Managua, they caught Norwin’s engineers in the act of welding cocaine-filled PVC pipes into the frame of an auto transport trailer. A couple of Mercedes sedans were in the process of having the same alterations performed. They found 130 kilos there. In a bedroom in Miranda’s mother’s house, they found hundreds more hidden under blankets with spare tires thrown on top. In an abandoned military bunker they found more kilos, packed into air conditioner and television boxes that bore the address of the Auto Hotel Nejapa.
In all, the Nicaraguan police seized 725 kilos of cocaine, worth roughly $15 million wholesale. They also found Uzi submachine guns, Makarov pistols, and California license plates. Meneses, his brother Luis, Enrique Miranda, Frank Vigil, and the engineers and craftsmen Norwin had hired to prepare the vehicles were arrested.
(The auto transport trailer Meneses’s men were busy stuffing with cocaine had recently been purchased for $125,000 in El Salvador from none other than former CIA pilot Marcos Aguado. Aguado, who’d helped run the secret Contra air base at Ilopango during the war, was not charged in the connection with the case, and his involvement was never publicly revealed. In an interview, he denied knowing how Meneses would use the trailer, although Miranda said he was present when Aguado and Meneses discussed drug trafficking one evening at Norwin’s mansion.)
The Meneses drug bust was major news in Central America. It was the largest cocaine seizure in Nicaragua’s history, and it prompted an uproar in the highly partisan Nicaraguan press, as two prominent Nicaraguan politicians were seemingly implicated. They were never charged.
The story made several U.S. newspapers as well. Reporter Jonathan Marshall of the San Francisco Chronicle—who had just coauthored a book called Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America—wrote a detailed piece about Meneses and his relationship with the FDN and its leaders. Marshall’s story also questioned the seeming inability of U.S. authorities to capture the drug kingpin during the years he was living in America. The Chronicle buried the story deep inside the paper, and it was ignored by the rest of the American media, which was then consumed with the “scandal” over Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, using military planes for personal trips.
Commander Vivas went to the Tipitapa prison outside Managua to personally take charge of Meneses’s interrogation. He found the trafficker relaxed—almost smug. “He said he wasn’t worried about me because he had the backing of a higher power, a superpower,” Vivas recalled. “He said he was working for the United States to get Sandinista officials on drug charges, and that I was one of his targets. I told him not to fuck with me because I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just trying to impress me. But he insisted it was true and said I would find out for myself.”
The evening of the raids, Mayorga called the Costa Rican DEA office to inform Villarreal of the arrests, but since it was Sunday no one was in. He stuck an arrest report into the fax machine and zapped it to the U.S. embassy in San José.
“Then, big surprise, I get to my office at 9 A.M. Monday, and Villarreal is there waiting for me,” Mayorga grinned. “He wants more information. I asked him what was his special interest in this case?” After getting some evasive answers, Mayorga said, he provided Villarreal with the basic facts and waited for the American to tell him about Meneses’s relationship with the DEA. Nothing was said.
Villarreal came back later looking for more information. By then, Mayorga said, “we’d had a chance to analyze the phone book that we had found on Norwin when we arrested him, and inside were phone numbers for Ronald Lard, the DEA country attaché in Costa Rica. I challenged Villarreal to explain this, and he couldn’t.”
Then Mayorga told the DEA agent that his men had seen him dining with Meneses less than two weeks before the raid. Why, Mayorga asked, was the DEA secretly meeting in Managua with a drug trafficker who was in the process of bringing 725 kilos of cocaine into his country? And why hadn’t the Nicaraguan police been informed? Villareal simply lied, denying that he’d met with the drug kingpin. He told Justice Department inspectors that he “did not believe he knew the [Nicaraguan] police well enough to share that information.” Actually, Mayorga only knew half the story. Villareal had met with Meneses two or three times in Managua, not just once, yet Villareal claims he can’t remember what those discussions concerned or if Meneses became his informant afterwards. In the end, Villareal placated Mayorga by providing him with some intelligence reports of Meneses’ criminal activities in the U.S., but Mayorga described the DEA’s assistance as minimal and grudging.
It had been Meneses, Mayorga learned, who’d tipped off the DEA to the trip Ivis Hernández was taking in the cocaine-laden microbus. The cocaine Hernández was taking north was not Norwin’s, he said; it was Frank Vigil’s. He theorized that Meneses ratted out the shipment to allay the DEA’s concerns that he was dealing on the side. “Villarreal made it clear to me that they did not completely trust Meneses,” Vivas said. “He made me understand that Meneses was playing both sides.”
Armed with that information, Mayorga paid Enrique Miranda a visit. He reminded him of his earlier denials regarding his girlfriend, and Miranda morosely admitted “having abused his relationship with her,” Mayorga said. “Then he asked me why the police had stopped her car in the first place. How did they find out?”
It was your boss, Mayorga told him. Norwin. He’d told the DEA. And now your girlfriend is in jail in Mexico, undergoing God-knows-what humiliations. How’s that for loyalty? Miranda repaid it in kind. He started talking. “We used Norwin’s cooperation with the DEA to get Miranda to cooperate with us,” Mayorga said.
Combining the information provided by Miranda, Villarreal, and Meneses, the Nicaraguan police pieced together a picture of what Meneses and the DEA were working on. Meneses, they believed, had been sent to Nicaragua on a secret DEA mission to snare high-ranking Sandinista military officials in a drug sting. The first person Meneses had approached was Commandante Bayardo Arce Castaño, a cousin of Meneses’s wife Blanca and one of the most influential of the nine Sandinista leaders. According to Meneses, Arce agreed to participate in a cocaine deal, and he offered to provide the protection of the Sandinista military. Arce admitted that Meneses had come to see him but denied making any drug deals.
Meneses’s lawyers, who tried unsuccessfully to force Arce to testify, dug up some evidence to support their client’s claim. According to affidavits they gathered from eyewitnesses, the Colombian airplane carrying the 725 kilos of cocaine had been met at the Rosita airstrip by a Sandinista army truck, which was loaded with boxes from the airplane. Two Sandinista army officers supervised the unloading, the witnesses said.
But when the Nicaraguan police arrested the DEA’s sting man, Norwin Meneses, the operation was blown wide open and Meneses’ American handlers left him to twist in the wind. According to two Nicaraguan prison officials, soon after his arrest Meneses gave his wife Blanca a letter to deliver to the U.S. Embassy, addressed to two American officials, asking them to intercede with the Chamorro government. The sources were unaware if the letter was answered.
The DEA denies there was any such plan but those denials are hard to believe in light of some of the cables released by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1998. Both the State Department and the Department of Defense, the CIA report revealed, were monitoring Meneses’ movements at the time. “Those reports included reference to a trip to Colombia by Meneses and Miranda in September 1991 and to the group’s loss of a Ford Escort ‘loaded with cocaine’ in Houston in September 1991,” the CIA report stated. Why those agencies would be so interested in Meneses then is not explained in the declassified version of the CIA report.
Had the sting worked, the resultant drug scandal would almost certainly have crippled the last vestiges of Sandinista power in the new Nicaraguan government: their control of the military and the police. President Violeta Chamorro was being subjected to intense pressure to purge her government of Sandinistas by conservatives in Washington, particularly Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose staff had been intimately involved in the creation and funding of the Contra movement. Helms was then stalling a $50 million foreign aid bill for Nicaragua over the continued presence of Sandinistas—particularly Rene Vivas—in the national police and military.
The 1991 Meneses operation, in all likelihood, was simply another version of the 1984 DEA/CIA sting involving trafficker Barry Seal, which the Reagan administration had used to accuse the Sandinistas of drug trafficking right before a crucial Contra aid vote. Had Meneses been successful, the Sandinistas would have been loudly denounced as drug dealers by the Bush administration—which already had a history of invading Latin American countries run by unfriendly traffickers—and might have been forced out of the Chamorro government.
At Norwin’s trial in August 1992, Miranda took the stand against his former boss and bared all, explaining Norwin’s relationship with the DEA and the Contras, the drug flights from El Salvador to Texas, and the meetings with CIA pilot Aguado and CIA agent Enrique Bermúdez, the FDN’s former military commander. “Norwin even arranged a party in his residence for Bermúdez, celebrating his possible appointment as Army Chief by the new government,” Miranda testified. “I also took part in meetings where Norwin Meneses and Bermúdez discussed the possibility to use the Army to send drug loads to the U.S. and Europe...but these plans were truncated by Bermúdez’s sudden death.”
Bermúdez had been murdered in the parking lot of the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua in February 1991 by someone who shot him in the back of the head. The slaying was never solved.
Meneses denied everything. The cocaine wasn’t his, he insisted. It belonged to drug-dealing Sandinistas—Rene Vivas, Roger Mayorga, and Bayardo Arce. He claimed the Sandinistas had set up him and his brother on phony drug charges as “revenge” for their years of assistance to the FDN. “I was an important part of the FDN since 1982. And they [the Sandinistas] proclaimed themselves as my mortal enemies in 1984,” he testified. Meneses blamed the Sandinistas for planting false stories about him in American and Costa Rican newspapers and pointed to his spotless record as proof that he was no criminal.
“I have never been arrested in the United States and in any other part of the world. I’ve never been the subject of a court trial. I’ve never been subpoenaed as a witness,” Meneses testified. “I have been mentioned by some other people in some other eases, but that’s because of the long arm of Sandinismo.”
The Nicaraguan judges were bothered by Meneses’s lack of a criminal record, court transcripts show, and they challenged Roger Mayorga on his public declarations that Meneses was “the king of drugs” in Nicaragua, and his country’s representative to the Cali cartel. “How do you explain the fact that Norwin Meneses, implicated since 1974 in the trafficking of drugs, and where an arrest warrant exists issued by a court in San Francisco in the United States, has not been detained in the United States, a country in which he has lived, entered and departed many times since 1974?” one judge asked Mayorga.
“Well, that question needs to be asked to the authorities of the United States because I’m limited to the information that was supplied to us by...the DEA,” Mayorga said stiffly.
“Explain then, that after 22 years, you have not been asked on the part of the anti-narcotics police in the U.S. to arrest the Nicaraguan citizen Norwin Meneses for drugs, if he has resided for much time in the United States and Nicaragua? He was very easy to find in the United States because of his residency card, and in Nicaragua, because he’s highly well-known.”
“With respect to his residence in the United States, in the previous answer I explained ignorance as to why the authorities in the United States had not stopped him,” Mayorga testily replied. “With respect to Nicaragua, be clear that this Meneses had a year and a half in Nicaragua...and in the year and a half he was captured for drug trafficking.”
Meneses was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in jail. As a result of his cooperation, Miranda was given a seven-year sentence. A few days after the trial, Nicaraguan prison authorities reported that Meneses had paid a deranged inmate $10,000 to knife Miranda in revenge for his damning testimony. Meneses denied it, but Miranda was quickly transferred to a prison in another city.
After a lifetime of crime and the ruination of countless lives, Norwin Meneses was finally behind bars. Almost single-handedly, an underpaid, middle-aged Nicaraguan policeman had, in eighteen months, done something that the entire U.S. government—with its spy satellites, international wiretapping capabilities, and an army of drug agents—had been unable to do for twenty years. Three weeks after the verdicts came down, under pressure from the U.S. State Department and the White House, the Chamorro government fired Rene Vivas as Nicaraguan National Police commander.
Roger Mayorga, who by then had begun looking into Danilo Blandón’s relationship with the Meneses drug ring and its money-laundering tendrils in Central America, was fired soon afterwards. Meneses, meanwhile, was released from prison in 1997, having served only six years of his sentence. That same year, his and Blandón’s suspected money launderer, Orlando Murillo, was elected to the Nicaraguan National Assembly.