How to Get Away With Murder in America (5 page)

Ricky Prado remained an unremarked-upon presence in the community. His separate personas—fireman, Transworld detective, Air Force reservist, street enforcer, family man—coexisted without incident. He had no more problems at work. His superiors gave him good performance ratings.

Maria sometimes noticed funny things, though. Once, she later told investigators, while putting away laundry she found what looked like a grenade in Ricky’s sock drawer. When she asked Ricky about it, he told her it was a toy, but he warned her that if she ever saw one again, never to touch it, pull the pin on it, or tell anyone about it.

In late 1979, according to Maria, Ricky grew dissatisfied with his life in Miami and applied to federal law enforcement agencies. Once, she came home to find him destroying photographs of him and Albert together. She asked what he was doing and, according to her statement to the OCS, he “bluntly told her it was none of her business.” In early 1980, he took a leave of absence from the fire department and told Maria the State Department had hired him. They moved to Seabrook, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Ricky put on a suit every morning and told Maria he “worked in a lab doing medical work.” About eight months later, in January 1981, Ricky told Maria he was moving the family back to Miami to resume his job at the fire department. They returned, but Maria divorced him a few months later.

As the OCS would learn in its 1991 investigation, the story Ricky had told Maria of working for the State Department was a cover. In Maryland he had entered a CIA training program to become a paramilitary officer. (The CIA calls its full-time employees officers, not agents, as they’re known in movies; an “agent” refers to an outside asset recruited for a specific job.) Since the 1950s, CIA paramilitaries had served as advisers to foreign armies or resistance groups and had led covert military operations, such as the capture and execution of Che Guevara. Ricky’s experience in Air Force special operations gave him an edge in qualifying as a paramilitary, but after completing training he withdrew his application. According to sources interviewed by the OCS, he feared he would not pass final background checks.

Becoming a CIA officer required passing rigorous checks, similar to those performed on prospective FBI agents. The CIA routinely rejected applicants who had no criminal record but had dubious personal associations. Ricky had likely destroyed photographs of him and Albert to try to erase evidence of their relationship. But the CIA normally interviewed an applicant’s spouse, employers, and friends. Had it done so with Ricky, his ties with Albert would have come to light. Albert’s felony convictions and police intelligence reports identifying him as a major drug dealer would have been enough to scuttle Ricky’s chances. Ricky’s ties with El Oso also would have been problematic. In 1980, after having become an enforcer for the Tabraue smuggling clan, El Oso was convicted on federal weapons charges and was a suspect, later convicted, in the murder and beheading of an ATF informant. That Ricky had worked with him at Transworld and had become godparent to his son in a public ceremony would have raised red flags.

But Ricky had withdrawn his application from the CIA, perhaps before a background check had been completed. When he did so in late 1980, the CIA was on the verge of a transformation. In January 1981, after President Reagan was sworn in, he named a pugnacious new CIA director, William Casey, who began ramping up covert anticommunist operations in Latin America. The agency began to rapidly expand its paramilitary forces. As Ricky later told OCS investigators, in September 1981—nine months after he had withdrawn his application—someone from CIA headquarters invited him to reapply for a “paramilitary assignment in South America.” Ricky resubmitted his application on November 23, 1981.

OCS investigators who later reviewed Ricky’s second application saw that it elided many details about his life. There was no mention of his employment at Transworld. For personal references, Ricky listed five people, such as the owner of the clothing store where he’d worked during high school, who had had very little contact with him after graduation. Mike Fisten, who reviewed the application and had undergone similar FBI checks to join CENTAC, says, “From a security-clearance standpoint, Ricky’s application was a joke.”

Nevertheless, the CIA hired Ricky in January 1982 as a paramilitary officer in the Special Activities Division, its most secretive section. Perhaps in the rush to add personnel, Ricky slipped in by mistake. Or perhaps the agency knew of his criminal associations and ignored them, or viewed them as an asset. In any case, Ricky’s first assignment with the CIA was to help break American law.

As Ricky revealed in a résumé he posted online in 2010, he was “the first CIA officer living in the anti-Sandinista ‘Contra’ camps.” Advising an insurgent group such as the contras—then battling the government of Nicaragua—was a classic CIA paramilitary assignment. After decades of talk, Ricky finally had a chance to kick some communist ass. But as he arrived at the contra camps in Honduras, Congress passed a series of laws that forbade the CIA from arming contras or helping them to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. To follow his orders, Ricky had to in effect commit a bunch of felonies. The camps were at the receiving end of the CIA’s illegal arms-smuggling pipeline, as the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s would reveal. Based on interviews I conducted with intelligence sources, Ricky’s job included training contras and assisting them in hostile operations—runs across the border into Nicaragua to blow up pipelines, torch grain stores, and kill Nicaraguan soldiers or civilians who tried to stop them.

When the OCS investigated Ricky’s work for Albert as a Transworld detective, they would tie him to similar activities—bombings, arsons, killings. On a transactional level, there was little difference between the jobs he is alleged to have done for Albert in Miami and what he did for the U.S. government in the Nicaraguan guerrilla war.

The lines blurred in other ways, too. Investigators discovered that a Miami gun dealer who had sold weapons to Ricky in the 1970s met him in Honduras in 1983 to discuss his CIA operations with the contras, presumably with an eye to supplying weapons for the effort. Ricky’s former supervisor in the fire department, Captain McCallister, told the investigators he’d received a bizarre phone call from him in 1982. Ricky told his old boss that he was overseas “studying karate and the use of swords” and asked if he could obtain swords in Miami and sell them to him. McCallister never followed up on the request. In the Central American wars of the 1980s, combatants commonly used machetes for torture and beheadings. Was Ricky’s request a variation on that theme?

Whether it was or not, OCS detectives would learn that Ricky was a stellar CIA employee. After the contra program, he was posted to Peru to help fight the CIA’s covert war against leftist guerrillas and then, in the late 1980s, to the Philippines. Along the way he earned a diploma from George Mason University, enabling his promotion to staff officer. The leap from paramilitary to a managerial position was not typical, but Bill Casey’s reinvigorated CIA valued men of action. As one former CIA officer described him to me: “Ricky was a hard guy, a stud.”

Throughout Ricky’s CIA career, he remained in contact with Albert. He visited him in Miami, and when he was abroad Albert phoned him through U.S. embassies where he was posted. (Albert took such pains to protect the secrecy of his contact with Ricky that in the mid-1980s he instructed his political operative Donald Dugan to hide his number from the police should he be arrested.) OCS investigators would develop a theory to explain Ricky’s ongoing contact with Albert: that Ricky never stopped working for him.

While Ricky ascended the CIA ranks, Albert continued his social advances in Florida. In 1985, when President Reagan came to Miami’s Omni Hotel to tout successes in the War on Drugs, Albert was given a seat of honor. If irony were an explosive substance, the room would have blown sky-high. Reagan devoted part of his speech to attributing to Fidel Castro the flow of cocaine into Miami and issuing him a warning: “I have a message for Fidel Castro about the drug trade. Nobody in his regime is going to get away with this dirty drug business.”

Blaming Castro and other communists for America’s drug woes was a surrealist narrative the administration was selling to the American public, in part to justify its wars in Central America. Albert must have understood the absurdity of Reagan’s remarks better than anyone. But later, when speaking unwittingly to an undercover cop, he was struck by something else—that he had gained such close access to the president. As Albert put it, “Here’s a guy—me—organized crime, all kind of bullshit. The fucking CIA or Secret Service clears me, and I’m sitting next to the president. These are things I can’t figure out.”

Despite his efforts to build a good civic image, the old Albert sometimes peeked out from behind the mask. In 1984, while eating dinner at a Hallandale Beach restaurant with Bobby Erra and a mafioso named Carmine Scarfone, Albert argued with Scarfone, produced a gun, and shot at him, wounding him in the arm. Although news of the shooting circulated widely, witnesses, including Scarfone, refused to testify. More than a thousand dignitaries attended Albert’s next San Lazaro dinner.

Albert’s success inspired him to dream. He told people he wanted to run for office. There was one impediment, however: He was not a U.S. citizen, and his felony convictions posed a challenge to becoming one. Albert petitioned the governor’s office for a pardon of his old crimes. He persuaded Florida’s outgoing attorney general, Robert Shevin, to write a letter stating that he found Albert’s “integrity, character, and personal conduct to be irreproachable.” Congressman Pepper wrote one describing Albert as “a friend, a conscientious young man, and a very responsible businessman.”

His effort to clear his record would prove to be his undoing. Albert began paying crooked cops in the Hialeah and Miami-Dade police departments to destroy files pertaining to his past crimes, believing that if the records no longer existed, his lawyers might find it easier to have his records legally expunged. When an MDPD intelligence unit got wind of his activities, the department set up a sting.

In July 1985, an Irish Cuban cop named Rosario Kennedy met with Albert at a mall in Doral to offer to sell him files. Kennedy was wired with a recorder, and he inspired such trust that during the half-dozen meetings that followed, Albert poured out his heart. In the first meeting, Albert spoke of his ambitions to enter legitimate business:

Albert schooled Kennedy on the ways of the world:

And Albert grew introspective:

Albert offered a tip to help Kennedy score points with his superiors: He gave him the location of a nightclub where Bobby Erra allegedly ran an illegal casino. He explained that he was angry that Erra wouldn’t give him a cut of it, and launched a diatribe against the Mafia as comical as it was self-incriminating: 

When Kennedy steered the conversation to Albert’s political involvement, Albert made a declaration of principles:

When Kennedy suggested Albert was exaggerating, he appeared to grow angry, saying, “You think I pump myself up?” Kennedy soothed him by bringing up the happy memory of Reagan’s visit. Albert rhapsodized:

Seemingly overcome with patriotic emotion, Albert got down to specifics. He told Kennedy he would pay $6,000 for every police file Kennedy showed him, and $100,000 for files he could destroy in the MDPD Records Bureau.

Armed with the taped conversations, Kennedy’s squad obtained subpoenas to bug Albert’s phones and his home office. They persuaded one of Albert’s girlfriends, a twenty-three-year-old club girl named Roxanna Greene, to conceal a microphone in a Louis Vuitton purse he’d given her. During six months of taping, the microphone captured the strange inner workings of a man who was both gangster and public benefactor. Interspersed with recordings of Albert strategizing about political and charitable contributions with his lobbyists and trading jokes with his hanger-on-in-chief, Rick Sanchez, Albert could be heard picking up the phone to discuss drug deals and other crimes. Another frequent visitor to the home was Bobby Erra. In recorded conversations with Erra and Carlos Redondo, Albert’s high school weight-lifting friend who now served as his bodyguard, they discussed details of what appeared to be an extensive drug-trafficking operation.

Not surprisingly, Dade County’s political leaders did not go unscathed in the recordings. Albert detailed payoffs and other apparently illicit contacts with the Hialeah police chief, six of the city’s seven council members, seven judges, three county commissioners, the mayors of three other cities, dozens of cops, and several other officials. In one series of calls, he and his cohorts recounted an incident in which, after police raided a strip club he controlled, Albert summoned the mayor of Miami to a meeting and slapped him in the face.

One of the detectives assigned to the case—who prefers to be quoted by his nickname, “Detective McGruff”—says, “The wiretaps were a gold mine, but they were also a potential shit storm.”

As it would turn out, there would be no storm. Very little of what the MDPD cops uncovered during their surveillance of Albert would be investigated at the time. Most of the tapes would end up buried in a department evidence locker for almost five years.