Iwas swept into Ross’s decade-long relationship with Danilo Blandón in late September 1995, two months into my investigation and six months after Ross’s arrest. Quite unexpectedly, my tipster’s allegations about the CIA, the Contras, and cocaine had led me to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego, a bleak, windowless skyscraper where the former crack king was being held without bail until his trial.
Entering the tiny interview room, Ross exuded an air of self-assurance and confidence. He appeared unfazed by his predicament, but by the time the interview was over, he had dropped the pretense. Blandón’s betrayal had clearly left him hurt and bewildered. “I can’t believe he done me like this,” Ross commented as I packed up my tape recorder and note-books. “Why’d he do it? You figure that out yet?”
I told him what I’d culled from the court files about Blandón’s arrest in May 1992—how he’d faced a mandatory life sentence and the prospect of having his wife behind bars as well, leaving their two young daughters orphaned. It was hard to blame someone for trying to squirm out of a jam like that, I said. Ross nodded. “So how much dope did they catch him with?” None, I said. But they had him on tape talking to informants about cocaine deals, bragging about how many thousands of kilos he’d sold. Ross’s reaction brought me up short.
“That’s it?” Ross asked incredulously. “They didn’t find no dope on him? Then what would he roll over for? Think about it. You ain’t gonna pull a life sentence just for talking to somebody about selling dope. That’s bullshit. Somebody ain’t tell you something.”
LAPD narcotics detective Ron Hodges, who had investigated Blandón in conjunction with the DEA in 1991-92, made a similar observation when I interviewed him a few weeks later. “What’s hard to understand [is] when we actually did the investigation on him and it came to a conclusion, I think he was charged with what they consider a ‘no-dope conspiracy’—which is like nothing. It’s so minimal. It’s like trying to do something when there is nothing there.” Blandón’s lawyer, Brad Brunon, pointed out that his client had no criminal record, and the DEA had nothing more than some loose talk with criminal informants. There was no evidence of actual drug dealing, Brunon argued.
It made no sense. Why, then, had Blandón so readily agreed to become a government informant? And why had the Justice Department accorded him such a high degree of trust and faith? Blandón was an international criminal, a man who’d brazenly sold drugs and weapons to gang members for more than a decade. Yet here he was jetting in and out of the country at government expense, with no law enforcement supervision whatsoever—free to do as he pleased. Maybe Ricky Ross’s suspicions were right, I thought. Perhaps Blandón had worked for the U.S. government before, just as Norwin Meneses had. If he had a track record, it would certainly explain his extraordinary treatment.
I quickly got a taste of how protective the Justice Department was of the Nicaraguan. In October 1995 I received an unsolicited phone call from the big blond man I’d met in the bathroom at the San Francisco federal courthouse a few weeks earlier, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall, Rafael Corñejo’s prosecutor.
There were some people who wanted to talk to me, Hall said. My activity “has a number of people extremely worried because of an ongoing narcotics investigation that Blandón is working on for the government.” Before I printed anything, I needed to know the situation. If I wasn’t careful, “there is a distinct possibility that real harm, possibly death, would come to Mr. Blandón and that an investigation we have been working on for a couple of years would be compromised.” The DEA wanted to know if some kind of an accommodation could be reached.
Like what? I asked.
Well, Hall said, it had been proposed that if I held off on the story for a couple of months, they might be able to arrange an exclusive interview with Blandón for me.
I told him I didn’t think my editors would agree to a delay, but if lives were in danger, I’d certainly be willing to hear them out. On October 19, 1995, I walked into a roomful of DEA agents in the National City regional office, squirreled away in an industrial complex south of San Diego.
Two of the agents I recognized from court and reading their names in the court files: Blandón’s handlers, the immaculately coiffed Chuck Jones and his worried-looking sidekick, Judy Gustafson. The other four I didn’t know. The agent behind the desk, a tall man with an easy smile, got up and shook my hand warmly. Craig Chretien, he said, special agent in charge.
“This is a little awkward for us,” Chretien began. They knew generally the story I was working on, he said, and unfortunately I was getting into some rather sensitive areas. There were undercover operations—more than four of them—that I was in danger of exposing, putting agents and their families at risk. They couldn’t give me any details, of course, but I needed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. “What’s your angle here?” Chretien asked. “Is it that the DEA sometimes hires scumbags to go after people?”
“No. It’s about Blandón and Norwin Meneses and the Contras,” I said. “And their dealings with Ricky Ross.”
The agents looked at each other quickly out of the corners of their eyes, but at first said nothing.
“That whole Central American thing,” Chretien said dismissively. “I was down there. You heard all sorts of things. There was never any proof that the Contras were dealing drugs. If you’re going to get involved in that, you’ll never get to the truth. No one ever will.”
“I think that’s been pretty well established,” I said. “Your informant was one of the men who was doing it.”
Chretien gave Jones a sidelong glance and Jones came to life. “I can tell you that I have never, ever heard anything about Blandón being involved with that,” he said firmly. “Not once. His only involvement with the Contras was that his father was a general or something down there.”
“And these two have practically lived with the man for two years now,” Chretien added, pointing to Jones and Gustafson. “If it had happened they would know about it.”
I could not quite believe what I was hearing. What kind of scam was this?
“Have you ever asked him about it?” I asked Jones.
“I’ve already said more than I should.”
“Did you ever ask him about doing it with Norwin Meneses?”
“You’d better go check your sources again,” Jones snapped.
“My source is Blandón,” I said. “He testified to it under oath, before a grand jury. You’re telling me you don’t know about that?”
Jones threw up his hands. “Oh, listen, he understands English pretty well, but sometimes he gets confused, and if you ask him a question the wrong way he’ll say yes when he means no.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got the transcripts. These weren’t yes or no questions. He gave very detailed responses.”
Jones’s face and forehead grew beet red and his voice rose. “You’re telling me that he testified that he sold cocaine for the Contras in this country? He sold it in this country?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. You want to see the transcripts? I’ve got them right here.”
“I cannot believe that those two U.S. attorneys up there, if they had him saying that before a grand jury, that they would ever, ever, ever put him on a witness stand!” Jones fumed. “They’d have to be insane! They’d have to be total idiots!”
“They didn’t put him on the witness stand,” I reminded him. “They yanked him at the last minute.”
“That’s because the judge ordered them to turn over all that unredacted material!” Jones blurted. “We’re not going to...” He looked quickly at Chretien and clammed up. Just as I suspected. They knew all about this. The DEA had nixed Blandón’s appearance because Rafael Corñejo’s attorney had discovered the Contra connection and the government had been ordered to turn over the files.
Chretien told me that it would be best for all concerned if I simply left out the fact that Blandón was now working for the DEA. “Your story can just go up to a certain point and stop, can’t it? Is it really necessary to mention his current relationship with us? If it comes out that he is in any way connected to DEA, it could seriously compromise some extremely promising investigations.”
I said I thought it was important to the story, which prompted another angry outburst from Jones. “Even after what we just told you, you’d still go ahead and put it in the paper? Why? Why would you put a story in the paper that would stop us from keeping drugs out of this country? I don’t know if you’ve got kids or not... ”
“I’ve got three kids,” I interrupted, “and I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“So you’ll screw up an investigation we’ve been working on for a long time, just so you can have a story? Is that it?” Jones demanded. “You think this story is more important than what we’re doing for this country? How is that more important?”
“I don’t buy it,” I replied. “You have to put Blandón on the witness stand at Ross’s trial. So in five months everyone in the world is going to know he’s a DEA informant. Hell, if they want to know now they can just go down to the courthouse and look it up, like I did. So that’s one problem I’m having with all this. The other thing is, I think the American public has been lied to for ten years, and I think telling them the truth is a whole lot more important than this investigation of yours.”
Jones and I glared at each other, and Chretien stepped in. “I think we’re getting off the topic here. Please understand, we’re not telling you not to do your story. But your interest is in Meneses primarily and his association with the U.S. government and the Contras, correct?”
That was one of my interests, I said.
“Well, I think we can help him there, can’t we?” Chretien asked, glancing around the room at the other agents. “Maybe if we got you that information, you could focus your story more on him and less on Blandón? And maybe you wouldn’t have to mention some other things?”
“That all depends,” I said, “on what that other information is.”
Chretien smiled and stood up. “Okay, then! We’re going to have to talk about this among ourselves. I’m not even sure what we have in mind is legal, but we’d at least like to explore it. Could we ask that you please not print anything until we’ve talked again? Can you give us a week or two?”
I told him I’d wait for his call.
When I returned to Sacramento, I phoned former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who had investigated allegations of Contra drug trafficking at Ilopango air base in El Salvador in the mid-1980s. I asked him if he’d ever heard of Craig Chretien.
“Yeah, sure,” Castillo said. “I know him. He was one of the people DEA sent to Guatemala to do the internal investigation of me.” He said Chretien and another DEA official had ordered him to put the word “alleged” in his reports to Washington about Contra drug shipments from Ilopango. “They said, ‘You cannot actually come out and say this shit is going on.’ And I told them, ‘I’m watching the fucking things fly out of here with my own eyes! Why would I have to say ‘alleged’?”
I told him of Chretien’s remark that there was no proof the Contras were involved in drugs. He snorted. “Aw, bullshit. Of all people, he knows perfectly well what was going on. He was reading all my reports—looking for grammatical errors.”
After two weeks I’d heard nothing back, so I called the San Diego office and asked for Chretien. He no longer works in this office, I was told. He’d been transferred to Washington.
The head of the International Division, Robert J. Nieves—Norwin Meneses’s old control agent—had unexpectedly resigned eight days after my meeting with Chretien, I discovered. Chretien had been picked to replace him.
I never spoke to Chretien again, and I suspected that the meeting in San Diego had been set up to find out what I knew and where I was heading. My suspicions on that score were confirmed in early 1998 with the release of a CIA Inspector General’s report, which referenced three CIA cables about me, titled “Possible Attempts to Link CIA to Narcotraffickers,” written within weeks of my meeting with the DEA agents in San Diego.
“In November 1995, we were informed by DEA that a reporter has been inquiring about activities in Central America and any links with the Contras,” a heavily censored December 4, 1995, cable from CIA headquarters in Langley stated. “DEA has been alerted that Meneses will undoubtedly claim that he was trafficking narcotics on behalf of CIA to generate money for the Contras. Query whether Station can clarify or amplify on the above information to better identify Meneses or confirm or refute any claims he may make. HQS trace on (FNU) Meneses reveal extensive entries.” (Those extensive entries were not revealed in the declassified version of the CIA’s 1998 IG report.)
The DEA’s public affairs office in Washington later attempted to work out a deal with me to set up an interview with Meneses if I would leave Blandón’s DEA ties out of the story, but fortunately my colleague in Nicaragua, freelance journalist Georg Hodel, beat them to the punch. He’d found the massive files of Meneses’s 1992 court case in the Nicaraguan Supreme Court and had tracked the drug lord down to a prison outside of Managua.
“The clerk says I am the first journalist ever to ask to see those files, can you imagine?” Hodel asked me. “All the stories written about this case, and not one of those reporters ever looked at the files. I have one of my journalism students, Leonor Delgado, going through and making us an index of all the pages. There are some peculiar things in there, I can tell you.”
My tipster had told me the truth about Blandón and Meneses, Georg reported. He’d checked it with former Contra commander Edén Pastora, former Contra lawyer Carlos Icaza, and others who knew both men. They were friends and business partners, and their families were very close to Somoza. They were considered to have been among the founders of the Contras. And, he said, Meneses’s chief aide, Enrique Miranda, had admitted at trial that Meneses sold cocaine for the Contras, flying it out of an air base in El Salvador into a military airfield in Texas.
“In some of the newspaper stories I’m sending you, you will see that Meneses makes the same claim,” Georg said. “It was part of his defense that the Sandinistas persecuted him because of his work for the Contras.”
I told him of my conversations with the DEA and suggested that we might want to get to Meneses quickly, before someone else did. He agreed and told me that there was another person we needed to talk to as well: Meneses’s chief accuser, Enrique Miranda. According to the files, Miranda was also still in jail, having been moved to a prison in the city of Granada after Meneses had allegedly hired someone to kill him.
He’d already put in a request to the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Interior to arrange an interview, Georg said. “I think we can speak to both of them. How quickly can you come down?”
“As soon as I clear it with my editors,” I told him. “I’m not sure if they even know about this story yet. Dawn’s been running interference for me with the other editors until I got this somewhat nailed down, but it seems pretty solid to me. We need to get to Meneses before the DEA does, so if you want to go ahead and set up the interviews, do it. I’ll start the ball rolling here.”
But Georg ran into an inexplicable roadblock. The normally cooperative prison officials in Managua began dodging his calls, offering one excuse and one delay after another. He waited a week, then hopped in his creaky blue Mazda and drove to the prison where Miranda was being held, to see what the problem was.
A nervous prison official informed him that Miranda was not available. Why not? Georg asked. Well, the official stammered, unfortunately, the prisoner had escaped. He’d been out on a weekend furlough, and he’d never come back. It was extremely out of character, Georg was assured, because Miranda had been a model inmate and had only a short time left in his sentence.
Astounded, Georg drove to the police station to see how the manhunt for the notorious trafficker was coming along. The police looked at him blankly. Someone had escaped from prison? Who? When? Miranda had been gone for over a week, and the police had not been notified. Georg’s discovery was front-page news in all the Managua papers. Official investigations were launched.
“He supposedly escaped the same day I made my interview request,” Georg reported. “My sources tell me he’s in Miami and they say the DEA got him out of the country. Do you suppose they don’t want us talking to him?”
(Georg’s sources would later prove to have been well-informed. Miranda was captured a little over a year later in December 1996 in Miami, where he was living with his wife. It emerged that he had gained entry with the help of a visa the U.S. embassy in Managua had issued him the day he’d “escaped.” Though Miranda had been in the State Department’s computers as a convicted drug trafficker in 1992 and was therefore ineligible for a visa, the State Department claimed two simultaneous computer failures that day resulted in him “erroneously” receiving one. The DEA also denied any involvement but admitted that Miranda was put on the DEA payroll as an informant “soon after he came to Miami” and was sent to Central and South American to work drug cases. The DEA never bothered to inform the Nicaraguan authorities it was harboring one of their fugitives.)
But Georg had some good news as well. Meneses was willing to talk. George had cleared it through the drug kingpin’s wives and lawyers and urged me to come to Nicaragua as soon as possible. We needed to move quickly and carefully, he warned, because there was something about this story that was beginning to give him the creeps.
“I can’t say what it is,” he said nervously, “but things are moving all around us.”
In December I gathered up all my notes and files and wrote a four-page project memo for my editors, outlining the story as I saw it. I proposed to tell the tale of how the infant L.A. crack market had been fueled by tons of cocaine brought in by a Contra drug ring, which helped to spread a deadly new drug habit “through L.A. and from there to the hinterlands.”
“This series will show that the dumping of cocaine on L.A.’s street gangs was the back end of a covert effort to arm and equip the CIA’s ragtag army of anti-Communist Contra guerrillas,” I wrote. “While there has long been solid—if largely ignored—evidence of a CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, no one has ever asked the question: ‘Where did all the cocaine go once it got here?’ Now we know.”
I met with Dawn and managing editor David Yarnold in San Jose, and we spent an hour discussing the progress of the investigation and the proposed series. Yarnold reread the project memo, shook his head, and grinned.
“This is one hell of a story,” he said. “How soon do you think you can finish it?”
I told him I needed to go to Miami and Nicaragua to do some interviews with Meneses, some former Contras, and the Nicaraguan police. If that came off, we might be able to have the series ready by March 1996, in time for the Ross trial, which would give it a hard news angle. But, I said, I wanted to get some assurances right up front from both of them.
Because the story had what I called a “high unbelievability factor,” I wanted to use the Mercury’s Web site, Mercury Center, to help document the series. I wanted us to put our evidence up on the Internet, so readers could see our documents and reports, read the grand jury transcripts, listen to the undercover DEA tapes, check our sources, and make up their own minds about the validity of the story. After seeing the government’s reaction to the Contra-cocaine stories of the 1980s, I didn’t want to be caught in the old officials-say-there’s-no-evidence trap.
The technology now exists for journalists to share our evidence with the world, I told them, and if there was ever a story that needed to be solidly backed up, it was this one. Not only would it help out the story, I wrote in my memo, it would hopefully raise the standards of investigative reporting by forcing the press to play show and tell, rather than hiding behind faceless sources and whisperings from “senior administration officials.”
The editors enthusiastically agreed. It would be a good way to showcase the Mercury’s cutting-edge Web site, they said, and it was good timing—management directives were coming out to incorporate the Web page into our print stories whenever possible. We were, after all, the newspaper of the Silicon Valley. This would be a chance to use the Internet in a way that had never been done before, they agreed. No problem. What else?
The second point I made was something I was sure they were tired of hearing about. We’re going to need space to tell this story, I told them, a lot more space than the paper usually devotes to its investigative projects. It was the one issue that drove me crazy about working for the Mercury News.
After writing for the Plain Dealer for five years and having as much space as I’d wanted, I’d found the Mercury’s mania for brevity almost unbearable. My forfeiture series, for example, had been held to two parts, and even those stories had been chopped up into bite-sized bits. I’d had other stories held for weeks and even months because I wouldn’t give in to editors’ demands to cut them in half.
No one reads long stories, I was told. Our focus groups had shown that readers wanted our stories to be even shorter than they already were—“tighter and brighter” was the answer to dwindling readership. Details were boring. Readers didn’t like having to turn pages to follow jumps. If you couldn’t tell a daily story in twelve inches or less, then maybe it was too complicated to tell. For a time, we even had a rule: no stories could be longer than forty-eight inches. Period. And that was for Sundays. Daily stories had an absolute max of thirty-six inches.
“We’ve got to lay out everything we know,” I told Yarnold, “because people are going to come after us on this, and I don’t ever want to be in a position where I have to say, ‘Oh, yeah, we knew that, but we didn’t have the space to put it in the paper.’ And I don’t think you want to be in that position either.”
You’ll get as much space as you need, Yarnold assured me. Don’t worry about it. Just go out and bring this thing home.