American Desperado (66 page)

I mapped out the route with a TripTik road map from the Automobile Club of America and flew with Bryan to Baton Rouge. We met our drivers there and drove two rental cars to Corpus Christi. When we arrived that afternoon, the ATI trucks were in their spot by the market. There was a government guy in a car parked nearby who gave me the keys. He said, “You need to get started now.”

I said, “My guys got to eat first.”

“Those trucks can’t sit there.”

“How about you shove these keys up your ass and drive the trucks yourself.”

I didn’t like getting attitude from this jerk. The more I thought about it, I was doing the government a favor. Not the other way around.

I fed Bryan and my drivers, and we got going after dark. Bryan and I followed the trucks in the rental cars. We got back to Barry Seal’s hangar early the next morning and unloaded the trucks. The weapons we were giving to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua weren’t the kind you could buy in Miami. There were M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade guns, LAWs rockets,
^*
and ten thousand pounds of ammo.

We split the weapons between the two C-123s. Each plane was
a little over half full, but they carried big bladders of extra fuel. Barry and his guys did one run successfully.

The next run I flew with Barry to see Nicaragua for myself. We landed on a farm. The freedom fighters we met were dressed in rags. They were peasants, none over five feet tall. They had women with them, tough little broads with guns. They helped unload the planes. One of the men told me the women fought by their side, even though some had babies with them. In Vietnam a girl in a village might have had a gun, but these freedom fighter broads were out living in the mud. They had heart. We stayed an extra couple hours just to see the broads test-fire an M-60. They were sensational.

After that trip I distanced myself from the operation as much as I could. Barry moved the C-123s to a new airport he had in Arkansas. Bryan took over getting the guns from different National Guard armories. The one thing I had to do was get the radio codes from Homestead. The government guys wouldn’t give them to anyone else.

I didn’t like smuggling guns for the government. I didn’t get any kick from it. It was the opposite of a kick. The government made everything difficult. They initially promised to pay me in a convenient bank in Panama. But they changed their minds. They paid in cash—bulky small bills. It’s probably just a coincidence, but the amount they paid me to smuggle was about equal to what I’d paid the congressman. It was as if I’d paid for them to hire me and Barry.

I never flew cocaine for the Cartel on the government planes. The radio codes we got meant we could fly back into the United States with impunity. But I never trusted the government not to trick us. I just stuck to flying their illegal guns.
^*
After a half-dozen runs, they told me we should leave the planes in Honduras. They were changing their smuggling operations, and they didn’t need me no more.

I did my part for the country. I wrote checks to the Republican League. I gave cash to the congressman. I smuggled guns. Nobody could say I wasn’t a good American. I’m still waiting for my handshake from Vice President Bush.

*
The National Republican Reelection League is a pseudonym for a real Republican fund-raising organization to which Jon was a contributor. Evidence of Jon’s participation in the organization appears to be authentic, but due to the prominence of its members, the name has been changed here.

*
Representative Ted Jones is a pseudonym for a congressional leader who was one of the most powerful figures in Washington in the 1980s. There is evidence Jon had contact with him, but the allegations of wrongdoing that Jon makes against him cannot be proved.

*
Between 1982 and 1984 Congress passed a series of laws known as the Boland Amendments forbidding the U.S. government to provide weapons to the Contras, who were then fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

*
The Fairchild C-123 was a military cargo plane, smaller than the C-130s and C-17s used today by the military, but still large enough to drive a small armored vehicle into or to carry seventy armed troops.

*
During the 1991 racketeering investigation of Albert San Pedro, investigators learned that San Pedro placed calls to foreign embassies where Prado was stationed as a CIA officer through the 1980s and early 1990s. In a 1991 interview with federal investigators at CIA headquarters, Prado admitted he visited with San Pedro in Miami even after San Pedro had been convicted of cocaine trafficking and bribery of a public official.

*
Barry Seal’s history as a CIA-connected weapons smuggler is noted in chapter 47.

*
The M-60 is a belt-fed machine gun used by infantry or mounted on helicoptors that was widely used by the U.S. military in Vietnam; the M-79 is a single-shot grenade launcher also used in Vietnam; the LAW rocket was also used in Vietnam. The LAWs provided to the Contras had a design flaw that caused them to occasionally blow up when launched, which was detrimental to the person launching it.

*
Jon first told his story of helping the CIA arm the Contras to an attorney in 1986—more than a decade before Prado was outed as a CIA officer. Law enforcement officials involved in the racketeering investigation of San Pedro believed Jon’s statements regarding Prado’s alleged role in the murder of Richard Schwartz were credible. His statements regarding his alleged involvement with Prado in the arming of Contras were not examined as part of that investigation. But three Miami-Dade detectives I interviewed who served on the task force that led the investigation of Prado told me that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami was pressured by the CIA to stop looking into Prado on the grounds that their case threatened to “reopen the Contra scandal.” One assistant U.S. Attorney I interviewed who dealt with the matter recalled that he had meetings with CIA associate counsel E. Page Moffett regarding Prado. But this Assistant U.S. Attorney could not remember what he discussed with Moffett, or why a subpoena his office had served Prado to compel him to testify was quashed. When I asked Dexter Lehtinen—the U.S. Attorney at the time of the investigation—about the matter, he vigorously rejected the notion that his office would ever bow to pressure from the CIA. Jon’s assertions about helping to arm the Contras are plausible because of his previous relationship with Prado, but he has provided no additional supporting evidence. I have attempted to ask Prado about this, but he has not responded to my inquiries.

†
Prado’s initial assignment in the CIA, after being hired in 1981, was to help train and equip the Contras. Recently, Prado has publicly stated that he was the “first CIA officer living in anti-Sandinista Contra camps.” In his capacity as a CIA employee living abroad, he appears to have maintained ties with members of the Miami underworld and to have attempted to leverage these contacts for his CIA mission. In the 1991 racketeering investigation of San Pedro, investigators interviewed a Miami gun dealer with a criminal history who informed them that he had met with Prado in Central America and that Prado had asked for his help in acquiring weapons in Miami and shipping them to Central America—presumably as part of his CIA job.

†
According to a former CIA official I interviewed, Homestead is home to one of the CIA’s oldest domestic stations. It was opened in South Florida in the late 1950s to oversee preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

‡
According to an FBI report I viewed, as early as 1959, the CIA directed operatives to steal weapons from domestic military bases in order to supply its various anti-Castro activities.

67

J
.
R
.:
There were many strains on my relationship with Toni. One of the biggest was her dream to be a movie star. When we met, she’d got a small part in a film with Ryan O’Neal called
So Fine
. It was a stupid movie about a guy who invents jeans with plastic windows in the back to show off people’s asses. Toni had maybe one line in the whole movie. But because she was so beautiful—and because her ass was so good—when
So Fine
came out in 1981, they put Toni in the movie poster with Ryan O’Neal. That little success played with her mind, and Toni kept nursing her Hollywood dream.

We were both busy in Delray—with my business and our work with horses—but with that Hollywood dream still burning bright, Toni still did her modeling in New York, and after
So Fine
she traveled to Los Angeles for auditions. When I went with her, we’d stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
^*
They had bungalows where we could bring
dogs. Toni and I would hit our favorite spots—Mr. Chow’s and Spago
^*
—and we’d work. She had auditions, and I had my business. I’d usually take Bryan with us, and we’d make sure everything was running smooth with the planes I was landing at Van Nuys airport. Sometimes I’d hold my coke in suitcases in the Beverly Hills Hotel luggage room and do transfers around town. I used Nate ’n Al’s
^†
deli in Beverly Hills because I liked the food, and there was a city lot nearby where my coke cars could be safe. Nobody stole cars in Beverly Hills.

Toni auditioned for
Red Sonja
, a movie where they wanted a big blonde to run through the jungle in a cape. Toni was perfect for the part, but they gave it to Sylvester Stallone’s girlfriend, Brigitte Nielsen.

It was the same outcome with
Clan of the Cave Bear
—a film where they wanted a big blonde to run around with wild animals. Toni did a few readings, but it went to another giant blonde, Daryl Hannah.

My friend Joey Ippolito had connections at a company called TriStar Pictures through his coke business. He introduced me to some executives there. I told them, “Let me buy a fucking movie for my girl so she can star in it.”

They agreed to help. What was even better was, these guys liked cash. I gave them a couple million dollars in shoeboxes. I even unloaded a box of small bills on them that I got from the government for flying the guns. These guys didn’t care. Throw in a couple extra bricks of coke to keep them happy, and we were in the movie business. They got a writer to make up a script. Ryan O’Neal agreed to play a role in the movie. But in the end it never got shot.
^‡
I believed those guys fleeced me, but Joey Ippolito said, “Jon, who the fuck
knows? It’s Hollywood. It’s not like the coke business where a kilo’s a kilo.”

I worked every angle for Toni. When they started filming
Miami Vice
in our hometown, I had a friend introduce me to Don Johnson. We met at a club in Coconut Grove called Mutiny on the Bay. The whole club was glass inside so people could snort coke on any surface. It was blowhead heaven, and I’m in there with people who got to be stars playing cops and smugglers on TV. My friend walks me over to Don Johnson and the black guy who played Tubbs
^*
and says, “Jon, meet the guys who pretend to be hunting you every week on TV.”

Nose powder makes us all instant friends, and the next night we’re at a fish restaurant in South Beach. The black guy tells me, “Don and I are so famous, I can do anything. I can get any part I want. I’m bigger than the Beatles.”
^†

As I remember, the black guy wasn’t doing coke like the rest of us, but he sure was high on himself. Fame can delude people as bad as drugs. I say, “Are you a fucking wacko? You’re the fucking black-guy sidekick on the TV show. Fuck you.”

Don Johnson says, “I’m sorry about my friend, man. Is there anything I can do to make you forget the dumb shit he’s saying?”

“Can you get my girl a part on TV?”

To his credit, Don Johnson tried, but all Toni got were background parts. Once I hung out with the director and watched him film a show. He gave me a spiel about how he brought realism to TV. “Don’t you think so?”

“You’re filming a drug dealer opening the trunk of a car with coke in it in the middle of the street. That’s amateur shit.”

This jackass director says, “No, they do it this way. I have an expert who advises me.”

“Okay. You’re the Hollywood guy. What do I know?”

I told Toni she was better off not making it in the movies if it
meant dealing with these full-of-shit morons. But she went to auditions until her dream crushed her. The last time in L.A., I left her alone at our hotel for a week while I went to Mexico on business. When I got back, she was a mess. She’d taken a suitcase from storage with some kilos in it. She got a straw and poked through the kilo packs. They looked like Swiss cheese. I said, “Did you have a good time?”

She was high. She said, “Yeah! I’ve had months of great fun out here.”

I said, “Come home to Florida. Your actressing career is finished.”

Someone had to tell her the truth.
Smokey and the Bandit III
—that was the only movie she got after
So Fine
. Nobody was giving her an Oscar for being Background Girl Number Two in a
Smokey and the Bandit
sequel.

O
UR LIFE
in Delray was becoming tense. Toni couldn’t get out of bed sometimes. When my sister visited, the aggravation was endless. Those two didn’t get along.