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AMERICA'S 'CRACK' PLAGUE HAS ROOTS IN NICARAGUA WAR
Colombia-San Francisco Bay Area drug pipeline
helped finance CIA-backed Contras Published: Aug. 18, 1996
BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer
sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los
Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American
guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury
News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine
cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known
as the "crack'' capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in
helped spark a crack explosion in urban America =85 and provided the
cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.
It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union
of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary
socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas'' of Compton and
South-Central Los Angeles. Other stories
Testimony links U.S. to drugs-guns trade
Dealers got their 'own little arsenal'
The army's financiers -- who met with CIA agents both before and
during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. -- delivered
cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack
dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
[LINK] Unaware of his suppliers' military and political connections,
"Freeway Rick" -- a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug
world -- turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to
gangs across the country.
The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records show, was then used
to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza
Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the
largest of several anti-communist commonly called the Contras.
document link
Biographical information on Rick Ross
Photo link
More photos of Rick Ross While the FDN's war is barely a memory
today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects.
Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack
addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison
sentences for selling cocaine -- a drug that was virtually
unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's army
started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at
bargain-basement prices.
And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm
themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving,
turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.
[LINK] "There is a saying that the ends justify the means,'' former
FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during
a recent cocaine trafficking trial in San Diego. "And that's what Mr.
Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras,
OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution.''
Recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover
tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of
interviews over the past 12 months leave no doubt that Blandon was no
ordinary drug dealer. document link
Biographical information on Danilo Blandon
audio link
Blandon's testimony
[INLINE] 100K AIFF
[INLINE] 301K WAV
Shortly before Blandon -- who had been the drug ring's Southern
California distributor -- took the stand in San Diego as a witness for
the U.S. Department of Justice, federal prosecutors obtained a court
order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the
CIA.
Blandon, one of the FDN's founders in California, "will admit that he
was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no additional
benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central Intelligence
Agency,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale argued in his motion
shortly before Ross' trial on cocaine trafficking charges in March.
document link
Motion to preclude reference to CIA involvement The most Blandon
would say in court about who called the shots when he sold cocaine for
the FDN was that "we received orders from the -- from other people.''
The 5,000-man FDN, records show, was created in mid-1981 when the CIA
combined several existing groups of anti-communist exiles into a
unified force it hoped would topple the new socialist government of
Nicaragua.
From 1982 to 1988, the FDN -- run by both American and Nicaraguan CIA
agents -- waged a losing war against Nicaragua's Sandinista
government, the Cuban-supported socialists who'd overthrown
U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. Blandon, who began
working for the FDN's drug operation in late 1981, testified that the
drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that year
-- $54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear
how much of the money found its way back to the CIA's army, but
Blandon testified that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit
was going to the Contra revolution.'' audio link
Blandon's testimony
[INLINE] 137K AIFF
[INLINE] 412K WAV At the time of that testimony, Blandon was a
full-time informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a job the
U.S. Department of Justice got him after releasing him from prison in
1994.
Though Blandon admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life,
the Justice Department turned him loose on unsupervised probation
after only 28 months behind bars and has paid him more than $166,000
since, court records show. document link
Motion for reduction of Oscar Danilo Blandon's sentence "He has been
extraordinarily helpful,'' federal prosecutor O'Neale told Blandon's
judge in a plea for the trafficker's release in 1994. Though O'Neale
once described Blandon to a grand jury as "the biggest Nicaraguan
cocaine dealer in the United States,'' the prosecutor would not
discuss him with the Mercury News.
A KNOWN DEALER SINCE '74 HAS STAYED OUT OF U.S. JAILS
[LINK] Blandon's boss in the FDN's cocaine operation, Juan Norwin
Meneses Cantarero, has never spent a day in a U.S. prison, even
though the federal government has been aware of his cocaine dealings
since at least 1974, records show.
Meneses -- who ran the drug ring from his homes in the San Francisco
Bay Area -- is listed in the DEA's computers as a major international
drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal
investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing relatives lived quite
openly in the Bay Area for years, buying homes in Pacifica and
Burlingame, along with bars, restaurants, car lots and factories in
San Francisco, Hayward and Oakland. document link
Biographical information on Norwin Meneses
Photo link
More photos of Norwin Meneses "I even drove my own cars, registered
in my name,'' Meneses said during a recent interview in Nicaragua.
Meneses' organization was "the target of unsuccessful investigative
attempts for many years,'' prosecutor O'Neale acknowledged in a 1994
affidavit. But records and interviews revealed that a number of those
probes were stymied not by the elusive Meneses but by agencies of the
U.S. government.
Agents from four organizations -- the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los
Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the California Bureau of
Narcotic Enforcement -- have complained that investigations were
hampered by the CIA or unnamed "national security'' interests.
1988 INVESTIGATION HIT A WALL OF SECRECY
One 1988 investigation by a U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into a wall
of official secrecy at the Justice Department.
In that case, congressional records show, Senate investigators were
trying to determine why the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Joseph
Russoniello, had given $36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer
arrested by the FBI.
The money was returned, court records show, after two Contra leaders
sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had been given
the cash to buy weapons for guerrillas. Russoniello said it was
cheaper to give the money back than to disprove that claim.
"The Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access
to people, records -- finding anything out about it,'' recalled Jack
Blum, former chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee that
investigated allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking. "It was one of
the most frustrating exercises that I can ever recall.''
It wasn't until 1989, a few months after the Contra-Sandinista war
ended and five years after Meneses moved from the Peninsula to a ranch
in Costa Rica, that the U.S. government took action against him --
sort of.
Federal prosecutors in San Francisco charged Meneses with conspiracy
to distribute one kilo of cocaine in 1984, a year in which he was
working publicly with the FDN.
IN SAN FRANCISCO PHOTO, MENESES SEEN WITH CIA OPERATIVE
Meneses' work was so public, in fact, that he posed for a picture in
June 1984 in a kitchen of a San Francisco home with the FDN's
political boss, Adolfo Calero, a longtime CIA operative who became the
public face of the Contras in the United States.
According to the indictment, Meneses was in the midst of his alleged
cocaine conspiracy at the time the picture was taken.
But the indictment was quickly locked away in the vaults of the San
Francisco federal courthouse, where it remains today =85 inexplicably
secret for more than seven years. Meneses was never arrested. Photo
link
1984 meeting of anti-communist group in San Francisco
document link
Biographical information on Adolfo Calero Reporters found a copy of
the secret indictment in Nicaragua, along with a federal arrest
warrant issued Feb. 8, 1989. Records show the no-bail warrant was
never entered into the national law enforcement database called NCIC,
which police use to track down fugitives. The former federal
prosecutor who indicted him, Eric Swenson, declined to be interviewed.
After Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on cocaine charges in Managua
in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that the infamous smuggler
went unmolested by American drug agents during his years in the United
States. document link
Indictment of Norwin Meneses
Photo link
Photo of the arrest warrant (58K) "How do you explain the fact that
Norwin Meneses, implicated since 1974 in the trafficking of drugs ...
has not been detained in the United States, a country in which he has
lived, entered and departed many times since 1974?'' Judge Martha
Quezada asked during a pretrial hearing.
"Well, that question needs to be asked to the authorities of the
United States,'' replied Roger Mayorga, then chief of Nicaragua's
anti-drug agency.
U.S. OFFICIALS AMAZED MENESES REMAINED FREE
His seeming invulnerability amazed American authorities as well.
A Customs agent who investigated Meneses in 1980 before transferring
elsewhere said he was reassigned to San Francisco seven years later
"and I was sitting in some meetings and here's Meneses' name again.
And I can remember thinking, "Holy cow, is this guy still around?'.''
Blandon led an equally charmed life. For at least five years he
brokered massive amounts of cocaine to the black gangs of Los Angeles
without being arrested. But his luck changed overnight.
On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police and the
Los Angeles County sheriff fanned out across Southern California and
raided more than a dozen locations connected to Blandon's cocaine
operation. Blandon and his wife, along with numerous Nicaraguan
associates, were arrested on drug and weapons charges.
The search warrant affidavit reveals that local drug agents knew
plenty about Blandon's involvement with cocaine and the CIA's army
nearly 10 years ago.
"Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and
distribution organization operating in Southern California,'' L.A.
County sheriff's Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the 1986 affidavit. "The
monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and
laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a
chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation.
From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy
arms in the war in Nicaragua.''
Corporate records show that Murillo -- a Nicaraguan banker and
relative of Blandon's wife -- was a vice-president of Government
Securities Corporation in Coral Gables, a large brokerage firm that
collapsed in 1987 amid allegations of fraud. Murillo did not respond
to an interview request.
Despite their intimate knowledge of Blandon's operations, the police
raids were a spectacular failure. Every location had been cleaned of
anything remotely incriminating. No one was ever prosecuted.
Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block,
said Blandon somehow knew that he was under police surveillance.
Others thought so, too.
"The cops always believed that investigation had been compromised by
the CIA,'' Los Angeles federal public defender Barbara O'Connor said
in a recent interview. O'Connor knew of the raids because she later
defended the raids' leader, Sgt. Gordon, against federal charges of
police corruption. Gordon, convicted of tax evasion, declined to be
interviewed.
LAWYER SUGGESTS AID WAS AT ROOT OF PROBLEM
FBI records show that soon after the raids, Blandon's defense
attorney, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff's department to suggest
that his client's troubles stemmed from a most unlikely source: a
recent congressional vote authorizing $100 million in military aid to
the CIA's Contra army. According to a December 1986 FBI Teletype,
Brunon told the officers that the "CIA winked at this sort of thing.
... (Brunon) indicated that now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for
the Nicaraguan Contra movement, U.S. government now appears to be
turning against organizations like this.''
That FBI report, part of the files of former Iran-Contra Special
Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was made public only last year, when it was
released by the National Archives at the Mercury News' request.
document link
FBI Teletype regarding conversation with attorney Bradley Brunon
Blandon has also implied that his cocaine sales were, for a time,
CIA-approved. He told a San Francisco federal grand jury in 1994 that
once the FDN began receiving American taxpayer dollars, the CIA no
longer needed his kind of help.
"When Mr. Reagan get in the power, we start receiving a lot of
money,'' Blandon testified. "And the people that was in charge, it was
the CIA, so they didn't want to raise any (drug) money because they
have, they had the money that they wanted.''
"From the government?" asked Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall.
"Yes," for the Contra revolution," Blandon said. "So we started -- you
know, the ambitious person -- we started doing business by ourselves."
Asked about that, prosecutor Hall said, "I don't know what to tell
you. The CIA won't tell me anything."
None of the government agencies known to have been involved with
Meneses and Blandon over the years would provide the Mercury News with
any information about them.
A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on
national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were
denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the
State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have
produced nothing so far.
None of the DEA officials known to have worked with the two men would
talk to a reporter. Questions submitted to the DEA's public affairs
office in Washington were never answered, despite repeated requests.
Blandon's lawyer, Brunon, said in an interview that his client never
told him directly that he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but the
prominent Los Angeles defense attorney drew his own conclusions from
the "atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities'' that surrounded
Blandon and his Nicaraguan friends.
"Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with drugs?
Most definitely,'' Brunon said. "Were those two things involved with
each other? They've never said that, obviously. They've never admitted
that. But I don't know where these guys get these big aircraft ...''
That very topic arose during the sensational 1992 cocaine trafficking
trial of Meneses after Meneses was arrested in Nicaragua in connection
with a staggering 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His chief accuser was
his friend Enrique Miranda, a relative and former Nicaraguan military
intelligence officer who had been Meneses' emissary to the cocaine
cartel of Bogota, Colombia. Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and
agreed to cooperate in exchange for a seven-year sentence.
In a long, handwritten statement he read to Meneses' jury, Miranda
revealed the deepest secrets of the Meneses drug ring, earning his old
boss a 30-year prison sentence in the process.
"He (Norwin) and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the Contra
revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold,'' Miranda
wrote. "This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the
collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel. They met
with officials of the Salvadoran air force, who flew (planes) to
Colombia and then left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in
Texas, as he told me.''
Meneses -- who has close personal and business ties to a Salvadoran
air force commander and former CIA agent named Marcos Aguado --
declined to discuss Miranda's statements during an interview at a
prison outside Managua in January. He is scheduled to be paroled this
summer, after nearly five years in custody.
U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El Salvador's air
force was supplying the CIA's Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and
flight support services throughout the mid-1980s.
Miranda did not name the Air Force base in Texas where the FDN's
cocaine was purportedly flown. The same day the Mercury News requested
official permission to interview Miranda, he disappeared.
While out on a routine weekend furlough, Miranda failed to return to
the Nicaraguan jail where he'd been living since 1992. Though his
jailers, who described him as a model prisoner, claimed Miranda had
escaped, they didn't call the police until a Mercury News
correspondent showed up and discovered he was gone.
He has not been seen in nearly a year.
MONDAY: How the drug ring worked, and how crack was "born" in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Plus, the story of how the U.S. government gave
back $36,000 seized from a drug dealer after he claimed the money
belonged to the Contras.
_________________________________________________________________
Additional reporting for this series in Nicaragua and Costa Rica was
done by Managua journalist Georg Hodel. Research assistance at the
Nicaraguan Supreme Court in Managua was done by journalist Leonore
Delgado.
_________________________________________________________________
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From alt.conspiracy
Path:
DARK ALLIANCE PART TWO
http://cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/stories.htm
DARK ALLIANCE:The Story Behind the Crack Explosion
A THREE PART RADIO Program that Started Monday. Go the the above Web Page
REALLY check this story out. The excerpt I copied here does not do this
story justice.
Ralph
http://cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/stories.htm
Welcome to Mercury Center
Day Two
Dark Alliance
Frames: [ Enable | Disable ]
SHADOWY ORIGINS
OF 'CRACK' EPIDEMIC
Role of CIA-linked agents
a well-protected secret until now Published: Aug. 19, 1996
BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer
IF THEY'D BEEN IN a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses,
Danilo Blandon and ''Freeway Rick'' Ross would have been hailed as
geniuses of marketing.
This odd trio -- a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto
teen-ager -- made fortunes creating the first mass market in America
for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally
kill to get it: ''crack'' cocaine.
Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the
evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack
plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati. On Aug.
23, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
But those same officials won't say a word about the two men who turned
Rick Ross into L.A's first king of crack, the men who, for at least
five years, supplied him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn
crack markets in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the
country's crack explosion, a Mercury News investigation found, has
been a strictly guarded secret -- until now.
To understand how crack came to curse black America, you have to go
into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the capital of the
Republic of Nicaragua. Other stories
San Francisco agent thought she was onto something big
Meneses' trail was getting warm when her superiors took her off the
case
'Crack' born in San Francisco Bay Area in '74
It was a failed attempt to copy something else
During June 1979, those hills teemed with triumphant guerrillas called
Sandinistas -- Cuban- assisted revolutionaries who had just pulled off
one of the biggest military upsets in Central American history. In a
bloody civil war, they'd destroyed the U.S.-trained army of
Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The final assault on Somoza's
downtown bunker was expected any day.
In the dictator's doomed capital, a minor member of Somoza's
government decided to skip the war's obvious ending. On June 19, Oscar
Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered his wife and young daughter, slipped
through the encircling rebels and flew into exile in California.
Blandon, the then 29-year-old son of a wealthy slumlord, left a life
of privilege and luxury behind. Educated at the finest private schools
in Latin America, he had earned a master's degree in marketing and had
become the head of a $27 million program financed by the U.S.
government. As Nicaragua's director of wholesale markets, it had been
his job to create an American-style agricultural system. Today, Danilo
Blandon is a well-paid and highly trusted operative for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration. Federal officials say he is one of the
DEA's top informants in Latin America, collecting intelligence on
Colombian and Mexican drug lords and setting up stings.
In March, he was the DEA's star witness at a drug trial in San Diego,
where, for the first time, he testified publicly about his strange
interlude between government jobs -- the years he sold cocaine to the
street gangs of black Los Angeles. web link
Drug Enforcement Agency
DEALER SAYS PATRIOTISM FOR NICARAGUA WAS MOTIVE
A stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair, a trim mustache and a
distinguished bearing, Blandon swore that he didn't plan on becoming a
dope dealer when he landed in the United States with $100 in his
pocket, seeking political asylum. He did it, he insisted, out of
patriotism.
When duty called in late 1981, he was working as a car salesman in
East Los Angeles. In his spare time, he said, he and a few fellow
exiles were working to rebuild Somoza's defeated army, the Nicaraguan
national guard, in hopes of one day returning to Managua in triumph.
Like his friends, Blandon nursed a keen hatred of the Sandinistas, who
had confiscated the Blandon family's cattle ranches and sprawling
urban slums. His wife's politically prominent family -- the Murillos,
whose patriarch was Managua's mayor in the 1960s -- lost its immense
fortune as well. ''Because of the horror stories and persecution
suffered by his family and countrymen, Blandon said he decided to
assist his countrymen in fighting the tyranny of the (Sandinista)
regime,'' stated a 1992 report from the U.S. Probation and Parole
Department. ''He decided that because he was an adept businessman, he
could assist his countrymen through monetary means.''
But the rallies and cocktail parties the exiles hosted raised little
money. ''At this point, he became committed to raising money for
humanitarian and political reasons via illegal activity (cocaine
trafficking for profit),'' said the heavily censored report, which
surfaced during the March trial. document link
Oscar Danilo Blandon probation report That venture began, Blandon
testified, with a phone call from a wealthy friend in Miami named
Donald Barrios, an old college classmate. Corporate records show
Barrios was a business partner of one of the ex-dictator's top
military aides: Maj. Gen. Gustavo ''The Tiger'' Medina, a steely eyed
counterinsurgency expert and the former supply boss of Somoza's army.
Blandon said his college chum, who also was working in the resistance
movement, dispatched him to Los Angeles International Airport to pick
up another exile, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Though their families
were related, Blandon said, he'd never met Meneses -- a wiry,
excitable man with a bad toupee -- until that day.
''I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to (raise)
some money and to send to Honduras,'' Blandon testified. He said he
flew with Meneses to a camp there and met one of his new companion's
old friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez. document link
Medina's quotation in a restaurant review [LINK] Bermudez -- who'd
been Somoza's Washington liaison to the American military -- was hired
by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the
remnants of Somoza's vanquished national guard, records show. In
August 1981, Bermudez's efforts were unveiled at a news conference as
the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) -- in English, the
Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-organized of
the handful of guerrilla groups Americans would know as the Contras.
Bermudez was the FDN's military chief and, according to congressional
records and newspaper reports, received regular CIA paychecks for a
decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved
slaying in Managua in 1991. document link
Biographical information on Col. Enrique Bermudez
audio link
Blandon's testimony about Bermudez
[INLINE] 101K AIFF
[INLINE] 305K WAV
REAGAN'S SECRET ORDER NOT ENOUGH TO FUND CONTRAS
White House records show that shortly before Blandon's meeting with
Bermudez, President Reagan had given the CIA the green light to begin
covert paramilitary operations against the Sandinista government. But
Reagan's secret Dec. 1, 1981, order permitted the spy agency to spend
only $19.9 million on the project, an amount CIA officials
acknowledged was not nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.
After meeting with Bermudez, Blandon testified, he and Meneses
''started raising money for the Contra revolution.'' ''There is a
saying that the ends justify the means,'' Blandon testified. ''And
that's what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK?''
While Blandon says Bermudez didn't know cocaine would be the
fund-raising device they used, the presence of the mysterious Mr.
Meneses strongly suggests otherwise.
Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as ''Rey de la Droga''
(King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and
the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show.
And Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He
had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were
generals in Somoza's army. Somoza himself spoke at the 1978 funeral of
Edmundo Meneses, who was slain by leftists shortly after his
appointment as Nicaragua's ambassador to Guatemala, hailing him as an
anti-communist martyr.
A violent death -- someone else's -- had also made brother Norwin
famous in his homeland. In 1977 he was accused of ordering the
assassination of Nicaragua's chief of Customs, who was gunned down in
the midst of an investigation into an international stolen car ring
allegedly run by Norwin Meneses.
Though the customs boss accused Meneses on his deathbed of hiring his
killer, Nicaraguan newspapers reported that the Managua police, then
commanded by Edmundo Meneses, cleared Norwin of any involvement.
Despite that incident and a stack of law enforcement reports
describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed
into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a
visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and
for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of
kilos of cocaine into California.
It arrived in all kinds of containers: false-bottomed shoes, Colombian
freighters, cars with hidden compartments, luggage from Miami. Once
here, it disappeared into a series of houses and nondescript
storefront businesses scattered from Hayward to San Jose, Pacifica to
Burlingame, Daly City to Oakland.
And, like Blandon, Meneses went to work for the CIA's army.
At the meeting with Bermudez, Meneses said in a recent interview, the
Contra commander put him in charge of ''intelligence and security''
for the FDN in California. document link
Presidential directive ordering support of paramilitary operations
against Nicaragua
Photo link
A copy of the order signed by President Reagan (122K)
audio link
Blandon's testimony
[INLINE] 100K AIFF
[INLINE] 301K WAV
audio link
Blandon's testimony about Meneses
[INLINE] 74K AIFF
[INLINE] 224K WAV
document link
Article reporting death of Edmundo Meneses Cantanero ''Nobody (from
California) would join the Contra forces down there without my
knowledge and approval,'' he said proudly. Blandon, he said, was
assigned to raise money in Los Angeles.
Blandon testified that Meneses took him back to San Francisco and,
over two days, schooled him in the cocaine trade.
Meneses declined to discuss any cocaine dealings he may have had,
other than to deny that he ever ''transferred benefits from my
business to the FDN. Business is business.''
Lessons over, Blandon said, Meneses gave him two kilograms of cocaine
(roughly 4 pounds), the names of two customers and a one-way ticket to
Los Angeles.
''Meneses was pushing me every week,'' he testified. ''It took me
about three months, four months to sell those two keys because I
didn't know what to do. ... In those days, two keys was too heavy.''
At the time, cocaine was so costly that few besides rock stars and
studio executives could afford it. One study of actual cocaine prices
paid by DEA agents put it at $5,200 an ounce.
But Blandon wasn't peddling the FDN's cocaine in Beverly Hills or
Malibu. To find customers, he and several other Nicaraguan exiles
working with him headed for the vast, untapped markets of L.A.'s black
ghettos.
UNCANNY TIMING MADE MARKETING STRATEGY WORK
Blandon's marketing strategy, selling the world's most expensive
street drug in some of California's poorest neighborhoods, might seem
baffling, but in retrospect, his timing was uncanny. He and his
compatriots arrived in South-Central L.A. right when street-level drug
users were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable: by changing
the pricey white powder into powerful little nuggets that could be
smoked -- crack.
Crack turned the cocaine world on its head. Cocaine smokers got an
explosive high unmatched by 10 times as much snorted powder. And since
only a tiny amount was needed for that rush, cocaine no longer had to
be sold in large, expensive quantities. Anyone with $20 could get
wasted. It was a ''substance that is tailor-made to addict people,''
Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale University cocaine expert, said during
congressional testimony in 1986. ''It is as though (McDonald's
founder) Ray Kroc had invented the opium den.''
Crack's Kroc was a disillusioned 19-year-old named Ricky Donnell Ross,
who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of
South-Central Los Angeles.
A talented tennis player for Dorsey High School, Ross had recently
seen his dream of a college scholarship evaporate when his coach
discovered he could neither read nor write.
At the end of tennis season, Ross quit high school and wound up at Los
Angeles Trade-Technical College, a vocational community college where,
ironically, he learned to bind books. But a bookbinding career was the
last thing Ross had in mind. L.A. Trade-Tech had a tennis team, and
Ross was still hoping his skills with the racquet would get his dreams
back on track. document link
Hearing before the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control
''He was a very good player,'' recalled Pete Brown, his former coach
at L.A. Trade-Tech. ''I'd say he was probably my No. 3 guy on the team
at the time.''
To pay his bills, however, Ross picked up a different racket: stolen
car parts. In late 1979, he was arrested for stealing a car and had to
quit the trade while the charges were pending.
'FREEWAY RICK' HEARS ABOUT POPULARITY OF JET-SET DRUG
During this forced hiatus, Ross said, a friend home on Christmas break
from San Jose State University told him about the soaring popularity
of a jet-set drug called cocaine, which Ross had only vaguely heard
about. In the impoverished neighborhoods of South-Central, it was
virtually non-existent. Most street cops, in fact, had never seen any
because cocaine was then a parlor drug of the wealthy and the trendy.
Ross' friend -- a college football player -- told him ''cocaine was
going to be the new thing, that everybody was doing it.'' Intrigued,
Ross set off to find out more.
Through a cocaine-using auto upholstery teacher Ross knew, he met a
Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales, who began selling Ross and his best
friend, Ollie ''Big Loc'' Newell, small amounts of remarkably
inexpensive cocaine.
Thanks to a network of friends in South-Central and Compton, including
many members of various Crips gangs, Ross and Newell steadily built up
clientele. With each sale, Ross reinvested his hefty profits in more
cocaine.
Eventually, Corrales introduced Ross and Newell to his supplier,
Danilo Blandon. And then business really picked up.
''At first, we was just going to do it until we made $5,000,'' Ross
said. ''We made that so fast we said, no, we'll quit when we make
$20,000. Then we was going to quit when we saved enough to buy a house
...''
Ross would eventually own millions of dollars' worth of real estate
across Southern California, including houses, motels, a theater and
several other businesses. (His nickname, ''Freeway Rick,'' came from
the fact that he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los
Angeles.)
Within a year, Ross' drug operation grew to dominate inner-city Los
Angeles, and many of the biggest dealers in town were his customers.
When crack hit L.A.'s streets hard in late 1983, Ross already had the
infrastructure in place to corner a huge chunk of the burgeoning
market.
$2 MILLION WORTH OF CRACK MOVED IN A SINGLE DAY
It was not uncommon, he said, to move $2 million or $3 million worth
of crack in one day.
''Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money,'' Ross said.
''We got to the point where it was like, man, we don't want to count
no more money.'' Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto Torres, another
former supplier of Ross and a sometime- partner of Blandon, told drug
agents in a 1992 interview that after a slow start, ''Blandon's
cocaine business dramatically increased. ... Norwin Meneses, Blandon's
supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400
kilograms from Miami to the West Coast.''
Leroy ''Chico'' Brown, an ex-crack dealer from Compton who dealt with
Ross, told the Mercury News of visiting one of Ross' five cookhouses,
where Blandon's powder was turned into crack, and finding huge steel
vats of cocaine bubbling atop restaurant-size gas ranges. document
link
Record of FBI interview with Jacinto Jose Torres ''They were stirring
these big pots with those things you use in canoes,'' Brown said with
amazement. ''You know -- oars.'' Blandon told the DEA last year that
he was selling Ross up to 100 kilos of cocaine a week, which was then
''rocked up'' and distributed ''to the major gangs in the area,
specifically the "Crips' and the "Bloods,''' the DEA report said.
At wholesale prices, that's roughly $65 million to $130 million worth
of cocaine every year, depending on the going price of a kilo.
"He was one of the main distributors down here," said former Los
Angeles Police Department narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was
part of the Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up in 1987 to put
Ross out of business. "And his poison, there's no telling how many
tens of thousands of people he touched. He's responsible for a major
cancer that still hasn't stopped spreading."
document link
Report of DEA investigation But Ross is the first to admit that being
in the right place at the right time had almost nothing to do with his
amazing success. Other L.A. dealers, he noted, were selling crack long
before he started. What he had, and they didn't, was Danilo Blandon, a
friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine and
an expert's knowledge of how to market it.
''I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a dope dealer without Danilo,''
Ross stressed. ''But I wouldn't have been Freeway Rick.''
The secret to his success, Ross said, was Blandon's cocaine prices.
''It was unreal. We were just wiping out everybody.'' audio link
John Arman and Blandon discuss high-grade cocaine
[INLINE] 55K AIFF
[INLINE] 164K WAV
That alone, Ross said, allowed him to sew up the Los Angeles market
and move on. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross
or got left behind.
''It didn't make no difference to Rick what anyone else was selling it
for. Rick would just go in and undercut him $10,000 a key,'' Chico
Brown said. ''Say some dude was selling for 30. Boom -- Rick would go
in and sell it for 20. If he was selling for 20, Rick would sell for
10. Sometimes, he be giving (it) away.''
Before long, Blandon was giving Ross hundreds of kilos of cocaine on
consignment -- sell now, pay later -- a strategy that dramatically
accelerated the expansion of Ross' crack empire, even beyond
California's borders.
Ross said he never discovered how Blandon was able to get cocaine so
cheaply. ''I just figured he knew the people, you know what I'm
saying? He was plugged.''
But Freeway Rick had no idea just how ''plugged'' his erudite cocaine
broker was. He didn't know about Norwin Meneses, or the CIA, or the
Salvadoran air force planes that allegedly were flying the cocaine
into an air base in Texas.
And he wouldn't find out about it for another 10 years.
TUESDAY: The impact of the crack epidemic on the black community, and
why justice hasn't been for all.
_________________________________________________________________
Additional reporting for this series in Nicaragua and Costa Rica was
done by Managua journalist Georg Hodel. Research assistance at the
Nicaraguan Supreme Court was performed by journalist Leonore Delgado.
_________________________________________________________________
Go to: Home | Dark Alliance: [The stories]__
_________________________________________________________________
http://TeamInfinity.com/bible/
DARK ALLIANCE PART Three
http://cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/stories.htm
DARK ALLIANCE:The Story Behind the Crack Explosion
A THREE PART RADIO Program that Started Monday. Go the the above Web Page
REALLY check this story out. The excerpt I copied here does not do this
story justice.
Ralph
http://cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/stories.htm
Welcome to Mercury Center
Day Three
Dark Alliance
Frames: [ Enable | Disable ]
WAR ON DRUGS HAS UNEQUAL IMPACT ON BLACK AMERICANS
Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A.
dealer faces life Published: Aug. 20, 1996
BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer
FOR THE LAST YEAR and a half, the U.S. Department of Justice has been
trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California's
federal courts of ''crack'' cocaine trafficking is black.
Critics, who include some federal court judges, say it looks like the
Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be
a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Federal prosecutors, however, say there's a simple, if unpleasant,
reason for the lopsided statistics: Most crack dealers are black.
''Socio-economic factors led certain ethnic and racial groups to be
particularly involved with the distribution of certain drugs,'' the
Justice Department argued in a case in Los Angeles last year, ''and
blacks were particularly involved in the Los Angeles area crack
trade.'' Other stories
Flawed sentencing the main reason for race disparity
In 1993, crack smokers got 3 years; coke snorters got 3 months
San Francisco Bay Area man tangled in drug web
Tales to DEA of gun running, drug trafficking fall on deaf ears But
why -- of all the ethnic and racial groups in California to pick from
-- crack planted its deadly roots in L.A.'s black neighborhoods is
something only Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes can say for sure.
Danilo Blandon, a yearlong Mercury News investigation found, is the
Johnny Appleseed of crack in California -- the Crips' and Bloods'
first direct-connect to the cocaine cartels of Colombia. The tons of
cut-rate cocaine he brought into black L.A. during the 1980s and early
1990s became millions of rocks of crack, which spawned new crack
markets wherever they landed.
On a tape made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1990,
Blandon casually explained the flood of cocaine that coursed through
the streets of South-Central Los Angeles during the previous decade.
''These people have been working with me 10 years,'' Blandon said.
''I've sold them about 2,000 or 4,000 (kilos). I don't know. I don't
remember how many.''
''It ain't that Japanese guy you were talking about, is it?'' asked
DEA informant John Arman, who was wearing a hidden transmitter.
''No, it's not him,'' Blandon insisted. ''These ... these are the
black people.''
Arman gasped. ''Black?!''
''Yeah,'' Blandon said. ''They control L.A. The people (black cocaine
dealers) that control L.A.''
U.S. HAS PAID BLANDON MORE THAN $166,000
But unlike the thousands of young blacks now serving long federal
prison sentences for selling mere handfuls of the drug, Blandon is a
free man today. He has a spacious new home in Nicaragua and a business
exporting precious woods, courtesy of the U.S. government, which has
paid him more than $166,000 over the past 18 months, records show --
for his help in the war on drugs.
That turn of events both amuses and angers ''Freeway Rick'' Ross,
L.A.'s premier crack wholesaler during much of the 1980s and Danilo
Blandon's biggest customer.
''They say I sold dope everywhere but, man, I know he done sold 10
times more dope than me,'' Ross said with a laugh during a recent
interview. audio link
1990 conversation between John Arman and Oscar Danilo Blandon
[INLINE] 78K AIFF
[INLINE] 233K WAV
audio link
Blandon discusses his contacts with Arman
Note: Strong language used in excerpt.
[INLINE] 103K AIFF
[INLINE] 308K WAV
audio link
More of the conversation between Arman and Blandon
[INLINE] 86K AIFF
[INLINE] 260K WAV
document link
Confirmation of Blandon's identity as an informant Nothing epitomizes
the drug war's uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the
intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and
his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master's degree
in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of
an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Called the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN),
it became known to most Americans as the Contras. In recent court
testimony, Blandon, who began dealing cocaine in South-Central L.A. in
1982, swore that the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was
to raise money for the CIA's army, which was trying on a shoestring to
unseat Nicaragua's new socialist Sandinista government.
After Blandon crossed paths with Ross, a South-Central teen-ager who
had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the
army's cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos.
Former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective Stephen W. Polak said he
was working the streets of South-Central in the mid-1980s when he and
his partners began seeing more cocaine than ever before. audio link
Oscar Danilo Blandon testifies about a conversation he had with Norwin
Meneses
[INLINE] 74K AIFF
[INLINE] 224K WAV
''A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying, hey, these blacks,
no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing
ounces; they were doing keys,'' Polak recalled. But he said the
reports were pooh-poohed by higher-ups who couldn't believe black
neighborhoods could afford the amount of cocaine the street cops
claimed to be seeing.
''Major Violators (the LAPD's elite anti-drug unit) was saying,
basically, ahh, South-Central, how much could they be dealing?'' said
Polak, a 21-year LAPD veteran. ''Well, they (black dealers) went
virtually untouched for a long time.''
It wasn't until January 1987 -- when crack markets were popping up in
major cities all over the U.S. -- that law enforcement brass decided
to confront L.A.'s crack problem head-on. They formed the Freeway Rick
Task Force, a cadre of veteran drug agents whose sole mission was to
put Rick Ross out of business. Polak was a charter member.
''We just dedicated seven days a week to him. We were just on him at
every move,'' Polak said.
Ross, as usual, was quick to spot a trend. He moved to Cincinnati and
quietly settled into a home in the woodsy Republican suburbs on the
east side of town.
''I called it cooling out, trying to back away from the game,'' Ross
said. ''I had enough money.''
His longtime supplier, Blandon, reached an identical conclusion around
the same time. A massive police raid on his cocaine operation in late
1986 nearly gave his wife a nervous breakdown, he testified recently,
and by the summer of 1987 he was safely ensconced in Miami, with $1.6
million in cash.
Some of his drug profits, records show, were invested in a string of
rental car and export businesses in Miami, often in partnership with
an exiled Nicaraguan judge named Jose Macario Estrada. Like Blandon,
the judge also worked for the CIA's army, helping FDN soldiers and
their families obtain visas and work papers in the United States.
Estrada said he knew nothing of Blandon's drug dealings at the time.
BLANDON INVESTED IN FOUR-STAR STEAK HOUSE
Blandon also bought into a swank steak-and-lobster restaurant called
La Parrilla, which became a popular hangout for FDN leaders and
supporters. The Miami Herald called it the ''best Nicaraguan
restaurant in Dade County'' and gave it a four-star rating, its
highest.
But neither Ross nor Blandon stayed ''retired'' for long.
A manic deal-maker, Ross found Cincinnati's virgin crack market too
seductive to ignore. When he left Los Angeles, the price of a kilo was
around $12,000. In the Queen City, Ross chuckled, ''keys was selling
for $50,000. It was like when I first started.''
document link
Review of La Parrilla Plunging back in, the crack tycoon cornered the
Cincinnati market using the same low-price, high-volume strategy --
and the same Nicaraguan drug connections -- he'd used in L.A. Soon, he
was selling crack as far away as Cleveland, Indianapolis, Dayton and
St. Louis.
''There's no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to
Ross,'' police officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati newspaper three
years ago.
But Ross' reign in the Midwest was short-lived. In 1988, one of his
loads ran into a drug-sniffing dog at a New Mexico bus station and
drug agents eventually connected it to Ross. He pleaded guilty to
crack trafficking charges and received a mandatory 10-year prison
sentence, which he began serving in 1990.
In sunny Miami, Blandon's retirement plans also had gone awry. His
24-city rental car business collapsed in 1989 and later went into
bankruptcy. To make money, he testified, he came to the Bay Area and
began brokering cocaine again, buying and selling from the same
Nicaraguan dealers he'd known from his days with the FDN. In 1990 and
1991, he testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine in Northern
California -- $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.
But unlike before, when he was selling cocaine for the Contras,
Blandon was constantly dogged by the police.
Twice in six months he was detained, first by Customs agents while
taking $117,000 in money orders to Tijuana to pay a supplier, and then
by the LAPD in the act of paying one of his Colombian suppliers more
than $350,000.
The second time, after police found $14,000 in cash and a small
quantity of cocaine in his pocket, he was arrested. But the U.S.
Justice Department -- saying a prosecution would disrupt an active
investigation -- persuaded the cops to drop their money laundering
case.
Soon after that, Blandon and his wife, Chepita, were called down to
the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service office in San Diego on
a pretense and scooped up by DEA agents, on charges of conspiracy to
distribute cocaine. They were jailed without bond as dangers to the
community and several other Nicaraguans were also arrested.
Blandon's prosecutor, L.J. O'Neale, told a federal judge that Blandon
had sold so much cocaine in the United States his mandatory prison
sentence was ''off the scale.''
Then Blandon ''just vanished,'' said Juanita Brooks, a San Diego
attorney who represented one of Blandon's co-defendants. ''All of a
sudden his wife was out of jail and he was out of the case.''
The reasons were contained in a secret Justice Department memorandum
filed in San Diego federal court in late 1993.
PROSECUTOR FOUND BLANDON 'EXTRAORDINARILY VALUABLE'
Blandon, prosecutor O'Neale wrote, had become ''extraordinarily
valuable in major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers.''
And even though probation officers were recommending a life sentence
and a $4 million fine, O'Neale said the government would be satisfied
if Blandon got 48 months and no fine. Motion granted. document link
Motion for downward departure from sentencing guidelines Less than a
year later, records show, O'Neale was back with another idea: Why not
just let Blandon go? After all, he wrote the judge, Blandon had a
federal job waiting.
O'Neale, saying that Blandon ''has almost unlimited potential to
assist the United States,'' said the government wanted ''to enlist Mr.
Blandon as a full-time, paid informant after his release from
prison.''
And since it would be hard to do that job with parole officers
snooping around, O'Neale added, the government wanted him turned loose
without any supervision. Motion granted. O'Neale declined to comment.
After only 28 months in custody, most of it spent with federal agents
who debriefed him for ''hundreds of hours,'' he said, Blandon walked
out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, was given a
green card and began working on his first assignment: setting up his
old friend ''Freeway Rick'' for a sting operation. document link
Motion for reduction of sentence for Oscar Danilo Blandon
TARGETED FOR A STING WHILE SITTING IN PRISON
Records show Ross was still behind bars, awaiting parole, when San
Diego DEA agents targeted him for a ''reverse'' sting -- one in which
government agents provide the drugs and the target provides the cash.
The sting's author, DEA agent Chuck Jones, has testified that he had
no evidence Ross was dealing drugs from his prison cell, where he'd
spent the past four years.
But during his incarceration Ross did something that, in the end, may
have been even more foolhardy: He testified against Los Angeles police
officers, as a witness for the U.S. government.
Soon after Ross went to prison for the Cincinnati bust, federal
prosecutors from Los Angeles came to see him, dangling a tantalizing
offer. A massive scandal was sweeping the L.A. County sheriff's elite
narcotics squads, and among the dozens of detectives fired or indicted
for allegedly beating suspects, stealing drug money and planting
evidence were members of the old Freeway Rick Task Force. document
link
1994 statement regarding Ricky Ross and Danilo Blandon
document link
Grand jury testimony by DEA agent Chuck Jones If Ross would testify
about his experiences, he was told, it could help him get out of jail.
In 1991, he took the stand against his old nemesis, LAPD detective
Steve Polak, who eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of
excessive use of force and retired. But the deal Ross got from federal
prosecutors for testifying -- five years off his sentence and an
agreement that his remaining drug profits would not be seized --
galled many.
''Ross will fall again someday,'' Polak bitterly told a Los Angeles
Times reporter in late 1994.
By then, the trip wires were already strung.
Within days of Ross' parole in October 1994, he and Blandon were back
in touch and their conversation quickly turned to cocaine. It was
almost like old times, except that Ross was now hauling trash for a
living. He was also behind on his mortgage payments for an old theater
he owned in South-Central, which he was trying to turn into a youth
academy. According to tapes Blandon made of some of their discussions,
Ross repeatedly told Blandon that he was broke and couldn't afford to
finance a drug deal. But Ross did agree to help his old mentor, who
was also pleading poverty, find someone else to buy the 100 kilos of
cocaine Blandon claimed he had.
DRUG-LADEN VEHICLE WAS A TRAP FOR ROSS
On March 2, 1995, in a shopping center parking lot in National City,
near San Diego, Ross poked his head inside a cocaine-laden Chevy
Blazer and the place exploded with police. Photo link
Drugs used in DEA's bust (15K) Ross jumped into a friend's pickup and
zoomed off ''looking for a wall that I could crash myself into,'' he
said. ''I just wanted to die.'' He was captured after the truck
careened into a hedgerow and has been held in jail without bond since
then.
Ross' arrest netted Blandon $45,500 in government rewards and
expenses, records show. On the strength of Blandon's testimony, Ross
and two other men were convicted of cocaine conspiracy charges in San
Diego last March -- conspiring to sell the DEA's cocaine. Sentencing
is set for Aug. 23. Ross is facing a life sentence without the
possibility of parole. The other men are looking at 10- to 20- year
sentences. Photo link
Ross' truck at time of his capture by the DEA (13K) Acquaintances say
Blandon, who refused repeated interview requests, is a common sight
these days in Managua's better restaurants, drinking with friends and
telling of his ''escape'' from U.S. authorities.
According to his Miami lawyer, Blandon spends most of his time
shuttling between San Diego and Managua, trying to recover Nicaraguan
properties he left behind in 1979, when the socialists seized power
and sent him running to the United States.
_________________________________________________________________
Additional reporting for this series in Nicaragua and Costa Rica was
done by Managua journalist Georg Hodel. Research assistance at the
Nicaraguan Supreme Court was performed by journalist Leonore Delgado.
_________________________________________________________________
Go to: Home | Dark Alliance: [The stories]__