PART ONE
PROLOGUE "It was like they didn't want to know"When I came to work in the sprawling newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the early 1980s, I was assigned to share a computer terminal with a tall middle-aged reporter with a long, virtually unpronounceable Polish name. To save time, people called him Tom A.
To me, arriving from a small daily in Kentucky, Tom A. was the epitome of the hard-boiled big-city newspaperman. The city officials he wrote about and the editors who mangled his copy were "fuckinjerks." A question prompting an affirmative response would elicit "fuckin-a-tweetie" instead of "yes." And when his phone rang he would say, "It's the Big One," before picking up the receiver.
No matter how many times I heard that, I always laughed. The Big One was the reporter's holy grail—the tip that led you from the daily morass of press conferences and cop calls on to the trail of The Biggest Story You'd Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your career into an anticlimax. I never knew if it was cynicism or optimism that made him say it, but deep inside, I thought he was jinxing himself.
The Big One, I believed, would be like a bullet with your name on it. You'd never hear it coming. And almost a decade later, long after Tom A., the Plain Dealer, and I had parted company, that's precisely how it happened. I didn't even take the call.
It manifested itself as a pink While You Were Out message slip left on my desk in July 1995.
There was no message, just a woman's name and a phone number, somewhere in the East Bay.
I called, but there was no answer, so I put the message aside. If I have time, I told myself, I'll try again later.
Several days later an identical message slip appeared. Its twin was still sitting on a pile of papers at the edge of my desk.
This time the woman was home.
"I saw the story you did a couple weeks ago," she began. "The one about the dmg seizure laws. I thought you did a good job."
"Thanks a lot," I said, and I meant it. She was the first reader who'd called about that story, a front-page piece in the San Jose Mercury News about a convicted cocaine trafficker who, without any formal legal training, had beaten the U.S. Justice Department in court three straight times and was on the verge of flushing the government's multibillion-dollar asset forfeiture program right down the toilet. The inmate, a lifer, had argued that losing your property and going to jail was like being punished twice for the same crime—double jeopardy—and seventeen judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with him. (Faced with the prospect of setting thousands of dopers free or returning billions in seized property, the U.S. Supreme Court would later overturn two of its own rulings in order to kill off the inmate's suit.)
"You didn't just give the government's side of it," she continued. "The other stories I read about the case were like, 'Omigod, they're going to let drug dealers out of jail. Isn't this terrible?"'
I asked what I could do for her.
"My boyfriend is in a situation like that," she said, "and I thought it might make a good follow-up story for you. What the government has done to him is unbelievable."
"Your boyfriend?"
"He's in prison right now on cocaine trafficking charges. He's been in jail for three years."
"How much more time has he got?"
"Well, that's just it," she said. "He's never been brought to trial. He's done three years already, and he's never been convicted of anything."
"He must have waived his speedy trial rights," I said.
"No, none of them have," she said. "There are about five or six guys who were indicted with him, and most of them are still waiting to be tried, too. They want to go to trial because they think it's a bullshit case. Rafael keeps writing letters to the judge and the prosecutor, saying, you know, try me or let me go."
"Rafael's your boyfriend?"
"Yes. Rafael Cornejo."
"He's Colombian?"
"No, Nicaraguan. But he's lived in the Bay Area since he was like two or something."
It's interesting, I thought, but not the kind of story likely to excite my editors. Some drug dealers don't like being in jail? Oh.
"What's the connection to the forfeiture story?" I asked.
Rafael, she explained, had been a very successful "businessman," and the government, under the asset forfeiture program, had seized and sold his automobiles, his houses, and his businesses, emptied his bank accounts, and left him without enough money to hire a lawyer. He had a court-appointed lawyer, she said, who was getting paid by the hour and didn't seem to care how long the case took.
"Rafael had the most gorgeous house out in Lafayette, and the government sold it for next to nothing. Now what happens if he's acquitted? He spends three or four years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, and when he gets out, someone else is living in his house. I mean, what kind of a country is this? I think it would make a good story."
It might, I told her, if I hadn't done it half a dozen times already. Two years earlier, I'd written a series for the Mercury called "The Forfeiture Racket," about the police in California busting into private homes and taking furniture, televisions, Nintendo games, belt buckles, welfare checks, snow tires, and loose change under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers. Many times they'd never file charges, or the charges would be dropped once the victims signed over the loot.
The series created such an outcry that the California legislature had abolished the forfeiture program a few weeks later. But I knew what I would hear if I pitched the woman's story to my editors: We've done that already. And that was what I told her.
She was not dissuaded.
"There's something about Rafael's case that I don't think you would have ever done before," she persisted. "One of the government's witnesses is a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it."
"What now?" I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly.
"The CIA. He used to work for them or something. He's a Nicaraguan too. Rafael knows him, he can tell you. He told me the guy had admitted bringing four tons of cocaine into the country. Four tons! And if that's what he's admitted to, you can imagine how much it really was. And now he's back working for the government again."
I put down my pen. She'd sounded so rational. Where did this CIA stuff come from? In seventeen years of investigative reporting, I had ended up doubting the credibility of every person who ever called me with a tip about the CIA.
I flashed on Eddie Johnson, a conspiracy theorist who would come bopping into the Kentucky Post's newsroom every so often with amazing tales of intrigue and corruption. Interviewing Eddie was one of the rites of passage at the Post.
Someone would invariably send him over to the newest reporter on the staff to see how long it took the rookie to figure out he was spinning his wheels.
Suddenly I remembered who I was talking to—a cocaine dealer's moll.
That explained it.
"Oh, the CIA. Well, you're right. I've never done any stories about the CIA. I don't run across them too often here in Sacramento. See, I mostly cover state government—"
"You probably think I'm crazy, right?"
"No, no," I assured her. "You know, could be true, who's to say? When it comes to the CIA, stranger things have happened."
There was a short silence, and I could hear her exhale sharply.
"How dare you treat me like I'm an idiot," she said evenly. "You don't even know me. I work for a law firm. I've copied every single piece of paper that's been filed in Rafael's case and I can document everything I'm telling you. You can ask Rafael, and he can tell you himself. What's so hard about coming over and at least taking a look at this stuff?"
"That's a fair question," I allowed. Now, what was my answer? Because I lied and I do think you're crazy? Or because I'm too lazy to get up and chase a story that appears to have a one-in-a-thousand chance of being true?
"You say you can document this?"
"Absolutely. I have all the files here at home. You're welcome to look at all of it if you want. And Rafael can tell you—" In the background a child began yowling. "Just a minute, will you? That's my daughter. She just fell down."
The phone thunked on the other end, and I heard footsteps retreating into the distance.
Well, that's a promising sign, I thought. Were she a raving dope fiend, they wouldn't let her raise an infant. She came back on, bouncing the sobbing toddler. I asked her where she lived.
"Oakland. But Rafael's got a court date in San Francisco coming up in a couple weeks. Why don't I meet you at the courthouse? That way you can sit in on the hearing, and if you're interested we could get lunch or something and talk."
That cinched it. Now the worst that could happen was lunch in San Francisco in mid-July, away from the phones and the editors. And, who knows, there was an off chance she was telling the truth.
"Okay, fine," I said. "But bring some of those records with you, okay? I can look through them while I'm sitting there in court."
She laughed. "You don't trust me, do you? You probably get a lot of calls like this."
"Not many like this," I said.
Flipping on my computer, I logged into the Dialog database, which contains full-text electronic versions of millions of newspaper and magazine stories, property records, legal filings, you name it. If you've ever been written about or done something significant in court, chances are Dialog will find you.
Okay. Let's see if Rafael Cornejo even exists.
A message flashed on the screen: "Your search has retrieved 11 documents. Display?" So far so good.
I called up the most recent one, a newspaper story that had appeared a year before in the San Francisco Chronicle. My eyes widened.
"4 Indicted in Prison Breakout Plot—Pleasanton Inmates Planned to Leave in Copter, Prosecutors Say."
I quickly scanned the story. Son of a bitch.
Four inmates were indicted yesterday in connection with a bold plan to escape from the federal lockup in Pleasanton using plastic explosives and a helicopter that would have taken them to a cargo ship at sea. The group also considered killing a guard if their keepers tried to thwart the escape, prosecutors contend.
Rafael Cornejo, 39, of Lafayette, an alleged cocaine kingpin with reputed ties to Nicaraguan drug traffickers and Panamanian money launderers, was among those indicted for conspiracy to escape.
The story called Cornejo "a longtime drug dealer who was convicted in 1977 of cocaine trafficking in Panama. He also has served time in a U.S. prison for tax evasion. He owns several homes and commercial properties in the Bay Area."
This sure sounds like the same guy, I thought. I scrolled down to the next hit, a San Francisco Examiner story.
The four men were charged with planning to use C-4 plastic explosives to blow out a prison window and with making a 9-inch "shank" that could be used to cut a guard's "guts out" if he tried to block their run to the prison yard. Once in the yard, they allegedly would be picked up by a helicopter and flown to a Panamanian cargo ship in the Pacific, federal officials said.
The remaining stories described Cornejo's arrest and indictment in 1992, the result of an eighteen-month FBI investigation. Suspected drug kingpin. Head of a large cocaine distribution ring on the West Coast. Allegedly involved in a major cocaine pipeline that ran from Cali, Colombia, to several West Coast cities. Importing millions of dollars worth of cocaine via San Diego and Los Angeles to the Bay Area.
That's some boyfriend she's got there, I mused. The newspaper stories make him sound like A1 Capone. And he wants to sit down and have a chat? That'll be the day.
When I pushed open the doors to the vast courtroom in the San Francisco federal courthouse a few weeks later, I found a scene from Miami Vice.
To my left, a dark-suited army of federal agents and prosecutors huddled around a long, polished wooden table, looking grim and talking in low voices. On the right, an array of long-haired, expensively attired defense attorneys were whispering to a group of long-haired, angry-looking Hispanics—their clients. The judge had not yet arrived.
I had no idea what my tipster looked like, so I scanned the faces in the courtroom, trying to pick out a woman who could be a drug kingpin's girlfriend. She found me first.
"You must be Gary," said a voice behind me.
I turned, and for an instant all I saw was cleavage and jewelry. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. Dark hair. Bright red lipstick. Long legs. Short skirt. Dressed to accentuate her positive attributes. I could barely speak.
"You're. . .?"
She tossed her hair and smiled. "Pleased to meet you." She stuck out a hand with a giant diamond on it, and I shook it weakly.
We sat down in the row of seats behind the prosecutors' table, and I glanced at her again. That boyfriend of hers must be going nuts.
"How did you know it was me?" I asked.
"I was looking for someone who looked like a reporter. I saw you with a notebook in your back pocket and figured—"
"That obvious, is it?" I pulled out the notepad and got out a pen. "Why don't you fill me in on who's who here?"
She pointed out Rafael, a short handsome Latino with a strong jaw and long, wavy hair parted in the middle. He swiveled in his chair, looked right at us, and seemed perturbed. His girlfriend waved, and he whirled back around without acknowledging her.
"He doesn't look very happy," I observed.
"He doesn't like seeing me with other men."
"Uh, why was he trying to break out of jail?" I asked.
"He wasn't. He was getting ready to make bail, and they didn't want to let him out, so they trumped up these phony escape charges. Now, because he's under indictment for escape, he isn't eligible for bail anymore."
The escape charges were in fact the product of an unsubstantiated accusation by a fellow inmate, a convicted swindler. They were later thrown out of court on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, and Cornejo's prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall, was referred to the Justice Department for investigation by federal judge Saundra Brown Armstrong.
(In a San Francisco Daily Recorder story about the misconduct charge, it was noted that "it is not the first time that Hall has been under such scrutiny. While serving with the Department of Justice in Texas, the Office of Professional Responsibility reviewed Hall after an informant accused Hall of approving drug smuggling into the U.S.Hall said the office found no merit in the charge.")
She pointed out Hall, a large blond man with broad features.
"Who are the rest of those people?" I asked.
"The two men standing over there are the FBI agents on the case. The woman is Hall's boss, Teresa Canepa. She's the bitch who's got it in for Rafael."
As she was pointing everyone out, the FBI agents whispered to each other and then tapped Hall on the shoulder. All three turned and looked at me.
"What's with them?"
"They probably think you're my hit man." She smiled, and the agents frowned back. "Oh, they just hate me. I called the cops on them once, you know."
I looked at her. "You called the cops on the FBI."
"Well, they were lurking around outside my house after dark. They could have been rapists or something. How was I supposed to know?"
I glanced back over at the federal table and saw that the entire group had now turned to stare. I was certainly making a lot of friends.
"Can we go out in the hall and talk for a minute?" I asked her.
We sat on a bench just outside the door. I told her I needed to get case numbers so I could ask for the court files. And, by the way, did she bring those documents she'd mentioned?
She reached into her briefcase and brought out a stack an inch thick. "I've got three bankers' boxes full back at home, and you're welcome to see all of it, but this is the stuff I was telling you about concerning the witness."
I flipped through the documents. Most of them were federal law enforcement reports, DEA-6s and FBI 302s, every page bearing big black letters that said, "may not be reproduced—property of u.s. government." At the bottom of the stack was a transcript of some sort. I pulled it out.
"Grand Jury for the Northern District of California, Grand Jury Number 93-5 Grand Jury Inv. No. 9301035. Reporter's Transcript of Proceedings. Testimony of Oscar Danilo Blandon. February 3, 1994."
I whistled. "Federal grand jury transcripts? I'm impressed. Where'd you get these?"
"The government turned them over under discovery. Dave Hall did. I heard he really got reamed out by the DEA when they found out about all the stuff he gave us."
I looked through the transcript and saw parts that had been blacked out.
"Who did this?"
"That's how we got it. Rafael's lawyer is asking for a clean copy. As you'll see, they also cut out a bunch of stuff on the DEA-6s. There's a hearing on his motion coming up."
I skimmed the thirty-nine-page transcript. Whatever else this Blandon fellow may have been, he was pretty much the way Cornejo's girlfriend had described him. A big-time trafficker who'd dealt dope for many years; started out dealing for the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla army, in Los Angeles. He'd used drug money to buy trucks and supplies. At some point after Ronald Reagan got into power, the CIA had decided his services as a fund-raiser were no longer required, and he stayed in the drug business for himself.
What made the story so compelling was that he was appearing before the grand jury as a U.S. government witness. He wasn't under investigation. He wasn't trying to beat a rap. He was there as a witness for the prosecution, which meant that the U.S. Justice Department was vouching for him.
But who was the grand jury investigating? Every time the testimony led in that direction, words—mostly names—were blacked out.
"Who is this family they keep asking him about?"
"Rafael says it's Meneses. Norwin Meneses and his nephews. Have you heard of them?"
"Nope."
"Norwin is one of the biggest traffickers on the West Coast. When Rafael got arrested, that's who the FBI and the IRS wanted to talk to him about. Rafael has known [Norwin and his nephews] for years. Since the Seventies, I think. The government is apparently using Blandon to get to Meneses."
Inside, I heard the bailiff calling the court to order, and we returned to the courtroom. During the hearing, I kept trying to recall where I had heard about this Contra-cocaine business before. Had I read it in a book? Seen it on television? It bothered me. I believed that I had a better-than-average knowledge of the civil war in Nicaragua, having religiously followed the Iran-Contra hearings on television. I would videotape them while I was at work and watch them late into the night, marvelling the next morning at how wretchedly the newspapers were covering the story.
Like most Americans, I knew the Contras had been a creation of the CIA, the darlings of the Reagan Right, made up largely of the vanquished followers of deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and his brutal army, the National Guard. But drug trafficking? Surely, I thought, if there had been some concrete evidence, it would have stuck in my mind. Maybe I was confusing it with something else.
During a break, I went to the restroom and bumped into Assistant U.S. Attorney Hall. Just in case he and the FBI really did think I was Coral's hit man, I introduced myself as a reporter. Hall eyed me cautiously.
"Why would the Mercury News be interested in this case?" he asked. "You should have been here two years ago. This is old stuff now."
I considered tap dancing around his question. Normally I didn't tell people what I was working on, because then they didn't know what not to say. But I decided to hit Hall with it head-on and see what kind of reaction I got. It would probably be the last thing he'd expect to hear.
"I'm not really doing a story on this case. I'm looking into one of the witnesses. A man named Blandon. Am I pronouncing the name correctly?"
Hall appeared surprised. "What about him?"
"About his selling cocaine for the Contras."
Hall leaned back slightly, folded his arms, and gave me a quizzical smile. "Who have you been talking to?"
"Actually, I've been reading. And I was curious to know what you made of his testimony about selling drugs for the Contras in L.A. Did you believe him?"
"Well, yeah, but I don't know how you could absolutely confirm it. I mean, I don't know what to tell you," he said with a slight laugh. "The CIA won't tell me anything."
I jotted down his remark. "Oh, you've asked them?"
"Yeah, but I never heard anything back. Not that I expected to. But that's all ancient history. You're really doing a story about that?"
"I don't know if I'm doing a story at all," I said. "At this point, I'm just trying to see if there is one. Do you know where Blandon is these days?"
"Not a clue."
That couldn't be true, I thought. How could he not know? He was one of the witnesses against Rafael Cornejo. "From what I heard," I told him, "he's a pretty significant witness in your case here. He hasn't disappeared, has he? He is going to testify?"
Hall's friendly demeanor changed. "We're not at all certain about that."
When I got back to Sacramento, I called my editor at the main office in San Jose, Dawn Garcia, and filled her in on the day's events. Dawn was a former investigative reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle and had been the Mercury's state editor for several years, overseeing our bureaus in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. We had a good working relationship and had broken a number of award-winning stories. Unlike many editors I'd worked with, Dawn could size up a story's news value fairly quickly.
I read her several portions of Blandon's grand jury testimony.
"Weren't there some stories about this back in the 1980s?" she asked.
"See, that's what I thought. I remember something, but I can't place the source."
"Maybe the Iran-Contra hearings?"
"I don't think so," I said. "I followed those hearings pretty closely. I don't remember anything about drug trafficking."
(Dawn's memory, it turned out, was better than mine. During one part of Oliver North's congressional testimony in July 1987, two men from Baltimore had jumped up in the audience with a large banner reading, "Ask about the cocaine smuggling." The men began shouting questions—"What about the cocaine dealing that the U.S. is paying for? Why don't you ask questions about dmg deliveries?"—as they were dragged from the room by the police.)
"So, what do you think?" she asked, editorese for "Is there a story here and how long will it take to get it?"
"I don't know. I'd like to spend a little time looking into it at least. Hell, if his testimony is true, it could be a pretty good story. The Contras were selling coke in L.A.? I've never heard that one before."
She mulled it over for a moment before agreeing. "It's not like there's a lot going on in Sacramento right now," she said. That was true enough. The sun- baked state capital was entering its summertime siesta, when triple-digit temperatures sent solons adjourning happily to mountain or seashore locales.
With any luck, I was about to join them.
"I need to go down to San Diego for a couple days," I said. "Blandon testified that he was arrested down there in '92 for conspiracy, so there's probably a court file somewhere. He may be living down there, for all I know. Probably the quickest way to find out if what he was saying is true is to find him."
Dawn okayed the trip, and a few days later I was in balmy San Diego, squinting at microfiche in the clerk's office of the U.S. District Court. I found Blandon's case file within a few minutes.
He and six others, including his wife, had been secretly indicted May 5, 1992, for conspiring to distribute cocaine. He'd been buying wholesale quantities from suppliers and reselling it to other wholesalers. Way up on the food chain. According to the indictment, he'd been a trafficker for ten years, had clients nationwide, and had bragged on tape of selling other L.A. dealers between two and four tons of cocaine.
He was such a big-timer that the judge had ordered him and his wife held in jail without bail because they posed "a threat to the health and moral fiber of the community."
The file contained a transcript of a detention hearing, held to determine if the couple should be released on bail. Blandon's prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O'Neale, brought out his best ammo to persuade the judge to keep the couple locked up until trial. "Mr. Blandon's family was closely associated with the Somoza government that was overthrown in 1979," O'Neale said. Blandon had been partners with a Jairo Meneses in 764 kilos of cocaine that had been seized in Nicaragua in 1991, O'Neale claimed, and he also owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua with Meneses. He had a house in Costa Rica. He had a business in Mexico, relatives in Spain, phony addresses all over the United States, and "unlimited access to money."
"He is a large-scale cocaine trafficker and has been for a long time," O'Neale argued. Given the amount of cocaine he'd sold, O'Neale said, Blandon's minimum mandatory punishment was "off the charts"—life plus a $4 million fine—giving him plenty of incentive to flee the country.
Blandon's lawyer, Brad Brunon, confirmed the couple's close ties to Somoza and produced a photo of them at a wedding reception with El Presidente and his spouse. That just showed what fine families they were from, he said. The accusations in Nicaragua against Blandon, Brunon argued, were "politically motivated because of Mr. Blandon's activities with the Contras in the early 1980s."
Damn, here it is again. His own lawyer says he was working for the Contras.
Brunon argued that the government had no case against his client, and no right to keep him in jail until the trial. "There is not the first kilogram of cocaine that had been seized in this case," Brunon said. "What you have are accusations from a series of informants." But the judge didn't see it that way. While allowing Chepita to post bond, he ordered Danilo held without bail.
From the docket sheet, I could see that the case had never gone to trial.
Everyone had pleaded out, starting with Blandon. Five months after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and the charges against his wife were dropped. After that, his fugitive codefendants were quickly arrested and pleaded guilty. But they all received extremely short sentences. One was even put on unsupervised probation.
I didn't get it. If O'Neale had such a rock-solid case against a major drug¬ trafficking ring, why were they let off so easily? People did more time for burglary. Even Blandon, the ringleader, only got forty-eight months, and from the docket sheet it appeared that was later cut almost in half.
As I read on, I realized that Blandon was already back on the streets—totally unsupervised. No parole. Free as a bird. He'd walked out of jail September 19, 1994, on the arm of an INS agent, Robert Tellez. He'd done twenty-eight months for ten years of cocaine trafficking.
The last page of the file told me why. It was a motion filed by U.S. Attorney O'Neale, asking the court to unseal Blandon's plea agreement and a couple of internal Justice Department memorandums. "During the course of this case, defendant Oscar Danilo Blandon cooperated with and rendered substantial assistance to the United States," O'Neale wrote. At the government's request, his jail sentence had been secretly cut twice. O'Neale then persuaded the judge to let Blandon out of jail completely, telling the court he was needed as a full-time paid informant for the U.S. Department of Justice. Since he'd be undercover, O'Neale wrote, he couldn't very well have probation agents checking up on him. He was released on unsupervised probation.
All of this information had once been secret, I noticed, but since Blandon was going to testify in a case in northern California (the Cornejo case, I presumed), O'Neale had to have the plea agreement and all the records relating to his sentence reductions unsealed and turned over to defense counsel.
I walked back to my hotel convinced that I was on the right track. Now there were two separate sources saying—in court—that Blandon was involved with the Contras and had been selling large amounts of cocaine in Los Angeles. And when the government finally had a chance to put him away forever, it had opened up the cell doors and let him walk. I needed to find Blandon. I had a million questions only he could answer.
I began calling the defense attorneys involved in the 1992 conspiracy case, hoping one of them would know what had become of him. I stmck out with every call. One of the lawyers was out of town. The rest of them remembered next to nothing about the case or their clients. "It was all over so quickly I barely had time to open a file," one said. The consensus was that once Blandon flipped, his compadres scrambled to get the best deal they could, and no one prepared for trial. Discovery had been minimal.
But one thing wasn't clear. What had the government gotten out of the deal that was worth giving Blandon and his crew such an easy ride? O'Neale claimed he'd given information about a murder in the Bay Area, but from what I could see from his DEA and FBI interviews, he'd merely told the government that the man had been murdered—something the police already knew.
Back in Sacramento, I did some checking on the targets of the 1994 grand jury investigation—the Meneses family—and again my tipster's description proved accurate, perhaps even understated. I found a 1991 story from the San Francisco Chronicle and a 1986 San Francisco Examiner piece that strongly suggested that Meneses, too, had been dealing cocaine for the Contras during the 1980s. One of the stories described him as the "king of cocaine in Nicaragua" and the Cali cartel's representative there. The Chronicle story mentioned that a U.S. Senate investigation had run across him in connection with the Contras and allegations of cocaine smuggling.
That must have been where I heard about this Contra drug stuff before, I decided. A congressional hearing.
At the California State Library's Government Publications Section, I scoured the CIS indices, which catalog congressional hearings by topic and witness name. Meneses wasn't listed, but there had been a series of hearings back in 1987 and 1988, I saw, dealing with the issue of the Contras and cocaine: a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
For the next six days I sat with rolls of dimes at a microfiche printer in the quiet wood-paneled recesses of the library, reading and copying many of the 1,100 pages of transcripts and exhibits of the Kerry Committee hearings, growing more astounded each day. The committee's investigators had uncovered direct links between drug dealers and the Contras. They'd gotten into BCCI years before anyone knew what that banking scandal even was. They'd found evidence of Manuel Noriega's involvement with drugs—years before the invasion. Many of the Kerry Committee witnesses, I noted, later became U.S. Justice Department witnesses against Noriega.
Kerry and his staff had taken videotaped depositions from Contra leaders who acknowledged receiving drug profits, with the apparent knowledge of the CIA. The drug dealers had admitted—under oath—giving money to the Contras, and had passed polygraph tests. The pilots had admitted flying weapons down and cocaine and marijuana back, landing in at least one instance at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The exhibits included U.S. Customs reports, FBI reports, internal Justice Department memos. It almost knocked me off my chair.
It was all there in black and white. Blandon's testimony about selling cocaine for the Contras in L.A. wasn't some improbable fantasy. This could have actually happened.
I called Jack Blum, the Washington, D.C., attorney who'd headed the Kerry investigation, and he confirmed that Norwin Meneses had been an early target. But the Justice Department, he said, had stonewalled the committee's requests for information and he had finally given up trying to obtain the records, moving on to other, more productive areas. "There was a lot of weird stuff going on out on the West Coast, but after our experiences with Justice. . .we mainly concentrated on the cocaine coming into the East."
"Why is it that I can barely remember this?" I asked. "I mean, I read the papers every day."
"It wasn't in the papers, for the most part. We laid it all out, and we were trashed," Blum said. "I've got to tell you, there's a real problem with the press in this town. We were totally hit by the leadership of the administration and much of the congressional leadership. They simply turned around and said, 'These people are crazy. Their witnesses are full of shit. They're a bunch of drug dealers, drug addicts, don't listen to them.' And they dumped all over us. It came from every direction and every corner. We were even dumped on by the Iran- Contra Committee. They wouldn't touch this issue with a ten-foot pole."
"There had to have been some reporters who followed this," I protested. "Maybe I'm naive, but this seems like a huge story to me."
Blum barked a laugh. "Well, it's nice to hear someone finally say that, even if it is ten years later. But what happened was, our credibility was questioned, and we were personally trashed. The administration and some people in Congress tried to make us look like crazies, and to some degree it worked. I remember having conversations with reporters in which they would say, 'Well, the administration says this is all wrong.' And I'd say, 'Look, the guy is going to testify to X, Y, and Z. Why don't you cover the fucking hearing instead of coming to me with what the administration says?' And they'd say, 'Well, the guy is a drug dealer. Why should I do that?' And I used to say this regularly: 'Look, the minute I find a Lutheran minister or priest who was on the scene when they were delivering 600 kilos of cocaine at some air base in Contra-land, I'll put him on the stand, but until then, you take what you can get.' The big papers stayed as far away from this issue as they could. It was like they didn't want to know."
There were two reporters, Blum said, who'd pursued the Contra drug story— Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press—but they'd run into the same problems. Their stories were either trashed or ignored. There were also two reporters in Costa Rica—a New York Times stringer named Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan, an ABC cameraman, who had gone after the story as well, he said. Honey and Avirgan wound up being set up on phony drug charges in Costa Rica, spied on in the States by the FBI and former CIA agents, smeared, and ruined financially.
"I know Bob Parry is still here in Washington somewhere. He did the first stories and was one of the few who seemed to know what he was doing. You might want to talk to him," Blum suggested.
Parry sounded slightly amused when I called him in Virginia. "Why in the world would you want to go back into this?" he asked. I told him of my discoveries about Meneses and Blandon, and the latter's cocaine sales in Los Angeles. I wondered if he or anyone else had ever reported this before.
"Not that I'm aware of," Parry said. "We never really got into where it was going once the cocaine arrived in the United States. Our stories dealt mainly with the Costa Rican end of things. This is definitely a new angle. You think you can show it was being sold in L.A.?"
"Yeah, I do. Well, one of the guys has even testified to it before a grand jury. But this is an area I've never done any reporting on before so I guess what I'm looking for is a little guidance," I told him. "Have you got any suggestions?"
There was a short silence on the other end of the phone. "How well do you get along with your editors?" Parry finally asked.
"Fine. Why do you ask?"
"Well, when Brian and I were doing these stories we got our brains beat out." Parry sighed. "People from the administration were calling our editors, telling them we were crazy, that our sources were no good, that we didn't know what we were writing about. The Justice Department was putting out false press releases saying there was nothing to this, that they'd investigated and could find no evidence. We were being attacked in the Washington Times. The rest of the Washington press corps sort of pooh-poohed the whole thing, and no one else would touch it. So we ended up being out there all by ourselves, and eventually our editors backed away completely, and I ended up quitting the AP. It was probably the most difficult time of my career."
He paused. "Maybe things have changed, I don't know."
I was nonplussed. Bob Parry wasn't some fringe reporter. He'd won a Polk Award for uncovering the CIA assassination manual given to the Contras, and was the first reporter to expose Oliver North's illegal activities. But what he'd just described sounded like something out of a bad dream. I told him I didn't think that would be a problem at the Mercury. I'd done some controversial stories before, but the editors had stood by them, and we'd won some significant awards. I felt good about the paper, I told him.
"One place you might try is the National Archives," Parry offered. "They're in the process of declassifying Lawrence Walsh's files, and I've found some pretty remarkable things over there. It's a long shot, but if I were you, I'd file a FOIA for the men you mentioned and see if anything turns up."
It was a long shot, but Parry's hunch paid off. My Freedom of Information Act request produced several important clues, among them a 1986 FBI report about Blandon that alluded to a police raid and reported that Blandon's attorney, Brad Brunon, had called the L.A. County Sheriff's Office afterward and claimed that the CIA had "winked" at Blandon's activities. I also obtained 1987 FBI interviews with a San Francisco Contra supporter, Dennis Ainsworth, in which he told of his discovery that Norwin Meneses and a Contra leader named Enrique Bermudez were dealing arms and drugs.
I tracked down Ainsworth and had another disconcerting conversation. You've got to be crazy, he said. He'd tried to alert people to this ten years ago, and it had ruined his life. "Nobody in Washington wanted to look at this. Republican, Democrat, nobody. They wanted this story buried and anyone who looked any deeper into it got buried along with it," Ainsworth said. "You're bringing up a very old nightmare. You have no idea what you're touching on here, Gary. No idea at all."
"I think I've got a pretty good idea," I said.
"Believe me," he said patiently, "you don't understand. I almost got killed. I had friends in Central America who were killed. There was a Mexican reporter who was looking into one end of this, and he wound up dead. So don't pretend that you know."
"If the Contras were selling drugs in L.A., don't you think people should know that?"
Ainsworth laughed. "L.A.? Meneses was selling it all over the country! Listen, he ran one of the major distributions in the U.S. It wasn't just L.A. He was national. And he was totally protected."
"I think that's the kind of thing the public needs to know about," I told him. "And that's why I need your help. You know a lot more about this topic than I do."
He was unmoved. "Look, when I was trying to tell Congress, I was getting death threats. And you're asking, you know, if I'm Jewish, would I like to go back and spend another six months in Dachau? Leave this alone. Take my advice. You can go on and write a lot of other things and maybe win a Pulitzer Prize, but all you're going to be after this is over is a persona non grata. Please. Everyone's forgotten about this and moved on with their lives."
A few days later I got a call from Cornejo's girlfriend. My one chance to hook up with Blandon had just fallen through. "He isn't going to be testifying at Rafael's trial after all," she told me. "Rafael's attorney won his motion to have the DEA and FBI release the uncensored files, and the U.S. attorney decided to drop him as a witness rather than do that. Can you believe it? He was one of the witnesses they used to get the indictment against Rafael, and now they're refusing to put him on the stand."
I hung up the phone in a funk. Without him, I didn't have much to go on. But there was always his boss—this Meneses fellow. Getting to him was a tougher nut to crack, but worth a shot. The girlfriend said she thought he was in jail in Nicaragua, and the Chronicle clip I'd found noted that he'd been arrested there in 1991. Maybe, I hoped, the Nicaraguans locked their drug lords up longer than we did. I was put in touch with a freelance reporter in Managua, Georg Hodel, an indefatigable Swiss journalist who spoke several languages and had covered Nicaragua during the war. He taught college journalism classes, knew his way around the Nicaraguan government, and had sources everywhere. Better yet, with his Swiss-German-Spanish accent, it was like talking to Peter Lorre. I persuaded Dawn to hire Georg as a stringer, and he set off to find Meneses.
Meanwhile, the San Diego attorney who had been out of town when I was looking for Blandon returned my call. Juanita Brooks had represented Blandon's friend and codefendant, a Mexican millionaire named Sergio Guerra. Another lawyer in her firm had defended Chepita Blandon. She knew quite a bit about the couple.
"You don't happen to know where he is these days, do you?"
"No, but I can tell you where he'll be in a couple of months. Here in San Diego. Entirely by coincidence, I have a case coming up where he's the chief prosecution witness against my client."
"You're kidding," I said. "What case is this?"
"It's a pretty big one. Have you ever heard of someone named Freeway Ricky Ross?"
Indeed I had. I'd run across him while researching the asset forfeiture series in 1993. "He's one of the biggest crack dealers in L.A.," I said.
"That's what they say," Brooks replied. "He and my client and a couple others were arrested in a DEA reverse sting last year and Blandon is the Cl [confidential informant] in the case."
"How did Blandon get involved with crack dealers?"
"I don't have a lot of details, because the government has been very protective of him. They've refused to give us any discovery so far," Brooks said. "But from what I understand, Blandon used to be one of Ricky Ross's sources back in the 1980s, and I suppose he played off that friendship."
My mind was racing. Blandon, the Contra fund-raiser, had sold cocaine to the biggest crack dealer in South Central L.A.? That was too much.
"Are you sure about this?"
"I wouldn't want you to quote me on it," she said, "but, yes, I'm pretty sure. You can always call Alan Fenster, Ross's attorney, and ask him. I'm sure he knows."
Fenster was out, so I left a message on his voice mail, telling him I was working on a story about Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and wanted to interview him. When I got back from lunch, I found a message from Fenster waiting. It said: "Oscar who?"
My heart sank. I'd suspected it was a bum lead, but I'd been keeping my fingers crossed anyway. I should have known; that would have been too perfect. I called Fenster back to thank him for his time, and he asked what kind of a story I was working on. I told him—the Contras and cocaine.
"I'm curious," he said. "What made you think this Oscar person was involved in Ricky's case?"
I told him what Brooks had related, and he gasped.
"He's the informant? Are you serious? No wonder those bastards won't give me his name!" Fenster began swearing a blue streak.
"Forgive me," he said. "But if you only knew what kind of bullshit I've been going through to get that information from those sons of bitches, and then some reporter calls me up from San Jose and he knows all about him, it just makes me --"
"Your client didn't tell you his name?"
"He didn't know it! He only knew him as Danilo, and then he wasn't even sure that was his real name. You and Ricky need to talk. I'll have him call you." He hung up abruptly.
Ross called a few hours later. I asked him what he knew about Blandon. "A lot," he said. "He was almost like a godfather to me. He's the one who got me going."
"Was he your main source?"
"He was. Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source. In a sense, he was."
"When was this?"
"Eighty-one or '82. Right when I was getting going."
Damn, I thought. That was right when Blandon said he started dealing drugs.
"Would you be willing to sit down and talk to me about this?" I asked.
"Hell, yeah. I'll tell you anything you want to know."
At the end of September 1995 I spent a week in San Diego, going through the files of the Ross case, interviewing defense attorneys and prosecutors, listening to undercover DEA tapes. I attended a discovery hearing and watched as Fenster and the other defense lawyers made another futile attempt to find out details about the government's informant, so they could begin preparing their defenses. Assistant U.S. Attorney O'Neale refused to provide a thing. They'd get what they were entitled to, he promised, ten days before trial.
"See what I mean?" Fenster asked me on his way out. "It's like the trial in Alice in Wonderland."
I spent hours with Ross at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He knew nothing of Blandon's past, I discovered. He had no idea who the Contras were or whose side they were on. To him, Danilo was just a nice guy with a lot of cheap dope.
"What would you say if I were to tell you that he was working for the Contras, selling cocaine to help them buy weapons and supplies?" I asked.
Ross goggled. "And they put me in jail? I'd say that was some fucked-up shit there. They say I sold dope all over, but man, I know he done sold ten times more than me. Are you being straight with me?"
I told him I had documents to prove it. Ross just shook his head and looked away.
"He's been working for the government the whole damn time," he muttered.
