How to Get Away With Murder in America (2 page)

ATF
: U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

CENTAC
: Central Tactical unit, a federal task force that combined Miami-Dade Police Department detectives with DEA and FBI agents to target drug traffickers.

CTC
: The Counterterrorism Center, the CIA’s main unit dedicated to fighting terrorism.

MDPD
: Miami-Dade Police Department.

OCS
: An Organized Crime Squad in the Miami-Dade Police Department that was federalized and augmented with FBI agents to investigate Bobby Erra for RICO violations.

RICO
: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Several federal laws aimed at organized crime.

In 2008, Jon Roberts, a convicted cocaine trafficker, made a startling claim to me: that more than three decades earlier he had participated in a murder with a man named Ricky Prado, who later entered the Central Intelligence Agency and became a top American spy. The murder to which Roberts referred was one of Miami’s most infamous, that of Richard Schwartz, stepson of the legendary mobster Meyer Lansky. Schwartz was killed on the morning of October 12, 1977, behind a restaurant near Miami Beach. He was exiting his car when a person unknown approached him and fired twice with a shotgun, at such close range that cotton wadding from the shells impregnated Schwartz’s flesh. The murder has never been solved.

Roberts claimed that Prado was the shooter, provided by a local Cuban drug kingpin named Alberto “Albert” San Pedro, for whom Prado worked as an enforcer and occasional hit man. Roberts confessed to planning the murder with two mafiosi, Gary Teriaca and Robert “Bobby” Erra. According to Roberts, the three of them waited near the scene of the shooting in his boat, in order to take Prado’s weapon and dispose of it in Biscayne Bay.

The politics of Roberts’s story made sense. Months earlier, Schwartz had fatally shot Teriaca’s younger brother in a dispute at the Forge restaurant, in Miami Beach. As Roberts explained it, the three of them participated in the murder to avenge the death of Teriaca’s brother. Prado entered the picture because his boss, San Pedro, was eager to prove his loyalty to the Mafia.

What made Roberts’s story unbelievable was his claim that four years after the shooting, Prado joined the CIA. In Miami, thugs often claim ties to the CIA. The agency recruited hundreds of Cuban immigrants for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and many of them later became drug traffickers. But Roberts’s story was different. He claimed Prado had been a criminal
first
and then become a career CIA officer. This seemed doubtful until I discovered that there was a CIA officer named Enrique Prado (“Ricky” or “Ric” for short), whom federal agents had targeted in a 1991 RICO and murder investigation into his alleged career—before he entered the agency—as an enforcer for San Pedro.

The investigators had obtained evidence implicating Prado in the murder of Schwartz and several others, as well as in numerous acts of extortion and arson undertaken in support of San Pedro’s drug-trafficking enterprise. Prado was interviewed by federal investigators at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and served with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury.

But somehow the subpoena was quashed. No charges were ever filed against him. Within a few years, the CIA promoted Prado into the highest reaches of its Clandestine Services and made him a supervisor in the unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was the chief of counterterrorist operations. With the rank of SIS-2—the CIA equivalent of a two-star or major general—he was among a small circle of officers who helped implement the CIA-led invasion of Afghanistan and directed SEAL Team Six on missions there. Throughout his later years at the agency and then at Blackwater, the private military contracting firm where Prado held a senior position, he worked closely with J. Cofer Black, now a top adviser to Mitt Romney.

The story Roberts told, and the two halves of Prado’s life in the 1990s—murder suspect/stellar CIA officer—made no sense. When I initially searched for the case files of the investigation into Prado—conducted jointly by the FBI and the Miami-Dade Police Department—I discovered they’d disappeared from the MDPD’s records bureau. When I located them elsewhere through a tip from a federal investigator, they were far more extensive than I had expected. There were some three thousand pages, including interviews with eyewitnesses who placed Prado at numerous crimes. I eventually interviewed more than two dozen people involved with the investigation—cops, FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and witnesses—who provided a disturbing portrait of a case abandoned because of CIA intervention, political maneuvering, and possibly corruption. The evidence against Prado was so compelling that one investigator from the case described him as “technically, a serial killer.”

“It was a miscarriage of justice that Prado never faced charges,” says Mike Fisten, the lead homicide investigator on the case. “The CIA fought us tooth and nail, and basically told us to go fuck ourselves.”

Another investigator from the case, who is now a Florida law enforcement official, said, “You can’t indict people like Prado. It doesn’t work that way.”

Later he e-mailed me: “Your target is bad news and dangerous. Be careful.”

When I phoned him, he said, “Forget this story. I dropped Prado’s name on a friend of mine from the CIA and he said, ‘Leave this one alone. You don’t want to fuck with this guy.’ ”

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“You’re going to get whacked.”

No public official I’d interviewed had ever made such a comment. Yet his warning is in keeping with the amazing story of Ricky Prado and his rise from the criminal underworld into the top echelons of the national-security establishment. It’s a story you’d expect to encounter in the twilight stages of a corrupt dictatorship, but this one takes place mostly in Miami. It centers on Prado’s long relationship with San Pedro, and on the cop who began pursuing them more than two decades ago and still hopes to put them in prison for murder. In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole—an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests—to penetrate its command.

Jon Roberts first told his tale of Prado’s role in the murder of Richard Schwartz while he and I were working on
American Desperado,
a book about Roberts’s life as a cocaine smuggler. In 1986, the U.S. government indicted Roberts for helping the Medellín cartel import billions of dollars’ worth of coke. He fled the country and wasn’t rearrested until 1992, when he pleaded guilty and served just three years in federal prison. Despite the featherweight sentence, he insisted he’d never cooperated.

When I met Roberts he was fifty-nine, married to a young, beautiful wife, and living in grand style in Hollywood, Florida, in a faux-Spanish McMansion that I later learned he had apparently purchased by committing bank fraud with his portion of our book advance. He had recently achieved notoriety in
Cocaine Cowboys,
an almost celebratory 2006 documentary about the drug wars that ripped through Miami in the late 1970s. Roberts was a charismatic presence in the film, with the eyes of a killer and a streetwise but genial voice. The proposal for our book had sold in a week. Paramount locked up the film rights, and Mark Wahlberg signed on to play him. Roberts was a fantastic storyteller but also, I worried, the more I interviewed him, a potentially colossal bullshitter.

His bona fides as a violent criminal were above reproach. In 1970, the
New York Times
had profiled him as a prime suspect in a Mafia slaying. On the lam in Miami, Roberts had hooked up with local gangsters, then got in on the ground floor of the cocaine trade when he befriended an associate of Pablo Escobar’s at a racing-boat event. Roberts would rise to become, as the U.S. government branded him in its 1986 indictment, the “American representative” of the Medellín cartel.

But some of Roberts’s stories seemed fraudulent—tales of serving in the Army Special Forces in Vietnam; his assertion that he once rescued Jimi Hendrix from a kidnapping; his claims about Prado. He also seemed slightly crazy at times. One morning, I found him firing his pistol—a felony for him to possess—off a balcony at a flock of birds, explaining that they had been sent as omens by “Satan, or God maybe.”

Research confirmed some of his wilder stories. A Hendrix biography did cite Roberts as having played a role in his kidnapping—though as Hendrix’s abductor, not rescuer. Some stories did not hold up so well. The National Archives found no records of his alleged military service. I was sure that his story of murdering Lansky’s stepson with a future CIA officer was bunk.

But Roberts insisted on driving me to the crime scene, the parking lot where Schwartz was gunned down. He walked me to the nearby canal, where he claimed to have waited in his Cigarette boat to dispose of Prado’s gun. The geometry of the crime—the parking lot, the location of the boat, the roadway where Roberts claimed Prado’s boss, San Pedro, picked him up and drove him away—made sense. The story veered slightly over the top in his description of Prado, whom he called San Pedro’s “main hitter”—or hit man.

The image Roberts presented of Prado resembled that of a hit man from a 1970s exploitation movie, like a younger version of Charles Bronson in
The Mechanic.
“Ricky had been in the Special Forces, with training in explosives and karate,” Roberts said. He described Prado as a master of disguise, who the day of the shooting “dressed like a tourist. He put on a fake beard, wore a flower shirt and a Panama hat. He carried his shotgun in a Bal Harbour Mall shopping bag. Ricky was very professional.”

Roberts added that Prado also worked steadily as a drug and money courier for San Pedro, and that he had seen him regularly until a few years later, when Prado entered the CIA. “Ricky was involved with Oliver North and the contras. He was their all-American hero.”

Yet Roberts wasn’t even exactly sure of Prado’s name. Sometimes he referred to him as “Ricky Perdio” or “Pardio.” He also said, “It might have been his name was Alex.”

When I warned Roberts about the risk of confessing to his role in the Schwartz murder—a crime with no statute of limitations—he said, “Don’t worry about it. This is one murder I have a free pass on.”

Roberts’s image as an unrepentant outlaw was built around his assertion that he was “never a rat.” A “free pass” implied that he had cooperated. The transcripts of Roberts’s 1993 sentencing hearing—in which any cooperation he provided to the government would have been disclosed—were sealed by order of the court.

Months later, the mystery of Roberts’s “free pass” was solved when I found a proffer letter buried in a box of legal documents Roberts had provided. A proffer outlines areas in which a potential witness is willing to testify in exchange for immunity. His had been written in 1992 by his attorney following negotiations with the FBI and federal and state prosecutors. Among several murders the proffer mentioned, it stated Roberts’s willingness to testify that a man named “Ricky” had killed Richard Schwartz with a shotgun, and that he, Gary Teriaca, and Bobby Erra had helped dispose of the weapon—the same story Roberts told me more than fifteen years later. The existence of the proffer didn’t mean the story was true, of course. And even if someone named “Ricky” had shot Schwartz, that didn’t mean the same guy went on to work for the CIA.

In late 2008, the only Prado associated with the CIA to come up in Google searches was “Enrique.” There were fewer than a dozen references to “Enrique Prado” online, and all of them linked to a single company called Total Intelligence Solutions. Its website indicated that the company was a corporate security firm affiliated with Blackwater. The “About Us” page contained this item: 

Obviously, this Ric Prado was a very successful spy. It seemed unlikely he had any connection with Roberts’s murder tale.

I focused on other chapters of Roberts’s book until the summer of 2009, when Prado rudely thrust himself back into the narrative. It happened in June, when CIA director Leon Panetta triggered a brief media storm by revealing that after 9/11 the CIA had created a “targeted assassination unit” to hunt terrorists. The agency had breached its trust with Congress by keeping the unit a secret. Quickly dubbed the “death squad” by reporters, the unit, CIA officials promised, had never been activated. Prado’s name emerged in subsequent reports that the CIA had outsourced the assassination unit to Blackwater. Pamela Hess and Adam Goldman reported for the Associated Press that first at the CIA, and then at Blackwater, “Prado ran the death squad program.”

Could the man who ran the CIA/Blackwater death squad also be the hit man Roberts described? It seemed both too perfect and insane.

As Prado was appearing in more national news accounts about the death squad program, I found someone who was an expert on Jon Roberts’s proffer and who might be able to shed some light on the validity of his claims. I was told by an MDPD detective that Florida state police lieutenant Mike Fisten had investigated the Schwartz murder and had testified about Roberts’s proffer at his sealed sentencing hearing. At the time, Fisten had been an MDPD detective serving on a federal organized-crime task force.

I phoned Fisten and asked if the narrative that Roberts’s proffer contained was true, and if the “Ricky” named in it could possibly be Enrique Prado, who joined the CIA. Fisten replied, “Based on the evidence we gathered, the story Jon tells about the Schwartz murder appears to be true, and his Ricky is the same Ricky Prado at the CIA.”

“Why was Prado never indicted?” I asked.

“Buddy, you’re going to have to come to my house for that one. I’ll explain to you how to get away with murder in America, from the Albert San Pedro and Ricky Prado school of crime.”

Fisten’s condo was inside a mazelike Broward County development. His unmarked police Impala was parked in front. He greeted me in jeans and a polo shirt. Showing me inside his modest home, he joked about his downward economic trajectory due to a recent divorce. The living room was dominated by a birdcage containing a noisy parakeet that scattered seeds everywhere. The bird belonged to his girlfriend, a state police lieutenant (whom, over the next two years, Fisten would marry, father a child with, acrimoniously divorce, and then start dating again). The chaos of his personal relations, I would learn, was a running theme.

At fifty-two, Fisten had a bantam build, but with a wide chest indicating time spent at the gym. His hair was graying but thick, brushed back as if it was blow-dried (though it apparently grew that way). A gold chain with a Magen David was tangled in his collar. Right before I arrived, he’d changed out of his suit after testifying in court. Named Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer of the Year by the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, he’d just wrapped up a stint attached to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. His career in the state police and his work with the FBI amounted to something of a comeback. “The case against Ricky Prado and Albert San Pedro destroyed me inside the MDPD,” he said. “It wrecked a lot of careers.”

When I later asked other cops about Fisten, several reached for the same description: “asshole.” Even those who liked him used the term. They called him that for a variety of reasons: for pursuing cases that put other cops in prison, for bragging, for epic philandering, for his irritating self-righteousness. But Major Charles Nanny, head of the MDPD’s Narcotics Bureau, who served with Fisten in the past, offered a different view. “He’s one of the last true crime fighters. Fuck anybody who tells you different.”

Fisten has a great backstory: “I’m a Jew with Irish cop blood.” As a child in Queens, New York, he became ill and needed an emergency transfusion. The neighborhood beat cop, an Irishman, donated his blood. In a family of dentists, salesmen, and merchants, Fisten got the urge to wear a badge. There was a period after his bar mitzvah when he played in a rock band, but at the age of eighteen, he says, the “Irish cop blood kicked in.” In 1978, after his father retired to Miami, Fisten, who was too short to join the NYPD, found an opening with the South Miami Police, then laterally transferred into the MDPD. Still a long-haired kid, he ended up on the decoy squad, where he impersonated drug buyers in sting operations. “It was like playing cops and robbers.”

Fisten arrived on the streets a couple of years after Albert San Pedro, with Ricky Prado by his side, began his ascent as a crime boss. All of them rode the same wave cresting in South Florida. Thanks to its coastline, an abundance of natural landing fields, and an enterprising populace, South Florida became a smugglers’ paradise, and then a battlefront in the War on Drugs. Between 1975 and 1982, the annual murder rate in Dade County soared from about fifty to more than six hundred. Corruption was another by-product of the flood of narco-dollars. Nearly half the cops in Fisten’s academy class wound up in jail. One of the MDPD’s worst scandals involved a gang of cops who ripped off and murdered drug dealers. After Fisten turned a key witness in the case and helped send more than a dozen cops to prison, he became the department’s youngest homicide detective.

One of his fortes was his ability to gain the confidence of suspects and flip them—in the game of good cop/bad cop, Fisten could play both roles. He was both likable and ruthless. His superiors recommended him for a Central Tactical (CENTAC) unit, a federal task force created to bypass local corruption. CENTACs recruited cops, who were sworn in as federal agents, and paired them with DEA and FBI teams to pursue drug-trafficking and RICO cases. Fisten’s CENTAC took on one of Florida’s biggest smuggling rings, the Tabraue organization (named for the family who ran it). The Tabraues had halted an earlier ATF investigation when their enforcer, a man named Miguel “El Oso”—the Bear—Ramirez, shot the ATF’s undercover informant and used a circular saw to behead him. The CENTAC brought down the Tabraue organization, and Fisten got Ramirez to confess to the murder.

Despite the triumph, the case taught Fisten a bitter lesson. During the trial, the CIA provided a defense witness who testified that while smuggling drugs, the elder Tabraue, a Bay of Pigs veteran, had been on the CIA’s payroll as an informant. Based on this testimony, the judge suspended his sentence. Fisten vowed never again to become involved in a “doomed case.”

But a year later, in 1990, he was assigned to a new federal task force, Organized Crime Squad–2, or OCS, which was initially created to pursue a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case against Jon Roberts’s friend, the reputed gangster Bobby Erra. The focus quickly turned, however, to San Pedro and Prado and to a series of murders they appeared to have been involved in before
and
after Prado entered the CIA. The investigation lasted nearly five years and resulted in racketeering convictions for several men, but not for San Pedro or Prado. Nor were any of the murders brought to trial. “They kicked our asses,” Fisten says. “My reputation was shot. I wound up in uniform. My partner killed himself.”

Along the way, San Pedro’s attorney accused Fisten of fabricating evidence and branded him “Detective Fiction.” An internal-affairs probe exonerated Fisten, and San Pedro’s attorney was disbarred (for conduct unrelated to the accusations he leveled at Fisten). But the damage to the case and to Fisten’s reputation was done. His nickname stuck, too. Soon after we met, Fisten warned me, “If we go out to any cop bar, we’ll probably run into some asshole who’s going to call me that ‘Detective Fiction’ name. If I get into a fight, stay back, or you might be arrested.”

Most people connected with the investigation moved on, but Fisten remains committed to a simple, if quixotic, proposition: “Ricky and Albert are guilty of murder and need to go to prison for it.” They beat the case, he says, mostly because of “Albert San Pedro’s power to corrupt the American justice system.” He adds, “Ricky and Albert are two sides of the same coin, gangster and CIA officer. Those two are always connected. You can’t get one without the other.”