Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Webb Gary

Author:Webb, Gary [Webb, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781908699756
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2015-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

16

“It’s a burn”

It was time to put the Torres brothers to the test. Providing intelligence and letting the cops follow them around was one thing. But if the investigation was going to progress beyond that level, the Majors had to be sure the two Nicaraguans could take the next, critical step: they had to give someone up.

The brothers chose one of the Colombians they’d named as a source for the black dealers, Jaime Ramos. One day in early September 1986, they told Bell narcotics detective Jerry Guzzetta that Ramos and another man were going to be making a pickup from two dealers that day at an abandoned apartment house in South Central. Around 1:00 P.M., the Majors set up surveillance on the building.

Within an hour, a red Chevy carrying two Latinos and a black Mustang with two black men inside rumbled up the driveway. They chatted briefly and drove off, leading the detectives on an aimless six-hour ride around Los Angeles.

About 8:00 P.M., near the intersection of 159th and Vermont Streets, the cars pulled over, and one of the black men got out and tossed a blue nylon gym bag into the Chevy. The Chevy sped off to a restaurant in Glendale, where the bag was transferred to a white car and driven to a house on Kenwood Avenue.

After a short wait, the Majors burst in, yelling and wav­ing their guns. Jaime Ramos and the blue gym bag were found in the bedroom, the latter stuffed with $120,005 in small bills and $101,000 in cashier’s checks. In a closet, they found a suit­case and six more nylon gym bags—with 114 kilos of cocaine inside. At another house a brown suitcase contained 17 kilos. Ramos, who was car­rying ID from the Colombian military, and three other Colombians, were arrested.

Two million dollars worth of dope and a quarter million in cash. Not bad for an afternoon’s work. It looked as if the Torres brothers were for real. While Detective Tom Gordon and the Majors plotted their next moves, Jerry Guzzetta asked the Torres brothers to show him around South Central. He wanted to know more about this mysterious black dealer they called “Rick,” and needed to determine how well the Torreses really knew him.

They drove Guzzetta by a vacant two-story apartment complex off South Avalon Boulevard and told Guzzetta that a cocaine lab was lo­cated there. The building was occupied only when the dealers were at work, measuring, testing, and packaging the product. The rest of the time it was vacant, so there would be no suspicious traffic in and out of the dilapidated structure.

Near an entrance ramp to the Harbor Freeway, they pointed out a multistory apartment building, which they said served as one of Rick’s distribution centers. Even during the middle of the week there was a lot of activity—young men lounging along the curb, hanging in the door­ways—but the Torreses told Guzzetta to come by the place on a Friday or Saturday night if he really wanted to see some action.

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