Hotel Scarface by Roben Farzad

Author:Roben Farzad [Farzad, Roben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780698409828
Goodreads: 35034143
Publisher: New American Library
Published: 2017-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

He regrets nothing, he told the Herald. Morales said he would gladly bomb the Cubana Airlines DC-8 again if he thought it was necessary. “I don’t repent doing it, despite the 73 that died. Just as if there had been 273 . . . if I had to, I would do it over again.”

Translation: the Machiavellian end of finishing suspected Castro agents justified the gruesome means of killing civilians. That might well have endeared him to Miami’s most hardened anticommunists. But why would anyone confess to an act of international terrorism right as he was taking the stand as the star witness in Miami’s biggest drug trial (especially if there wasn’t even solid evidence that placed him as the bomber)?

At this point, it was not so much the Table 14 cocaine conspiracy on trial as it was the credibility of Monkey Morales and his backers in law enforcement. And the star witness only egged on his own reputational demise. In the evenings, he dialed reporters, including John Rothchild, his Harper’s profiler, to boast about his many crimes, from bombings to hits to wholesale drug dealing. The joke in Little Havana was that Monkey must have shot J.R., too.

Rothchild said he struggled to interpret the informant’s real motivations. Raul Diaz said Morales told him he was increasingly seeing little green men—that he was drunk and coked out beyond rationality.

Building a case this big around someone as unpredictable as Morales became a nightmare for prosecutors. “For several days,” Rothchild wrote, “the state of Florida struggled to defend Morales against his own evidence, planted in the morning editions. What absurd theater it was. To support Morales and save the wiretaps, a Miami policeman testified under oath that blowing up a Cuban airliner was not such a bad thing to do.”

In late June, as eight weeks of testimony and legal positioning drew to a close, lead defense attorney Douglas Williams declared before the judge: “One feels like a great white shark running into a batch of seals. Everything looks so fleshy, I don’t know which one to go after.”

That same month, Monkey Morales made the cover of Newsday magazine:

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