Kings of Cocaine by Guy Gugliotta & JEFF LEEN

Author:Guy Gugliotta & JEFF LEEN
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-89105-334-4
Publisher: Garrett County Press
Published: 2017-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

20. UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

When Jorge Ochoa was arrested in Spain, Barry Seal’s value to the U.S. government skyrocketed. If Ochoa was extradited to the United States for trial in Miami, Seal would be the only eyewitness to his crimes. Yet despite the fact that Seal had made the most important case in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, federal officials in Baton Rouge and New Orleans had not given up trying to indict him for drug smuggling in Louisiana.

Federal law enforcement is broken up throughout the United States into fiefdoms known as federal districts. Seal’s problems centered on crimes he allegedly committed in the Middle District of Louisiana before he became an informant in the Southern District of Florida. Seal had been targeted by a joint federal and state task force run out of Baton Rouge and New Orleans by veteran federal Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor Al Winters, a big, bearish man with a rumbling basso voice. As a strike force prosecutor, Winters worked directly for the Justice Department out of Washington, but the man who ultimately called the shots on the Seal investigation was Stanford Bardwell, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana. Bardwell was a political appointee of the Reagan administration, a civil lawyer who had never tried a criminal case. But like the rest of the law enforcement community in Baton Rouge, Bardwell badly wanted to indict Barry Seal.

Soon Al Winters found himself caught between two federal districts with wildly conflicting visions of Barry Seal. Louisiana knew Seal as a cunning, arrogant manipulator who had made fools out of law enforcement in Baton Rouge while bringing tons of cocaine into the state. But in the Southern District of Florida, Seal was the contrite informant who had had a change of heart and become the DEA’s most productive undercover operative. Both visions were accurate. “Miami thinks the guy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is usual because he’s helping them,” Winters said. “And Baton Rouge thinks he’s the worst drug dealer in the history of Louisiana, which he was.”

Federal drug conspiracy investigations are usually made with informants. Federal prosecutors find some of them by inducing convicted drug dealers to “flip.” Others are intimidated by the threat of a federal grand jury, where witnesses can be summoned to testify under oath without an attorney present and can be thrown in prison if caught in a single lie.

When Seal found out in August 1984 that a federal grand jury in Baton Rouge was hauling his friends in, he held true to form and took the offensive. First he tried to get his federal friends in Miami to intervene. It seemed logical. The federal investigation of Seal in Louisiana made the south Florida feds uneasy. An indictment of Seal in Louisiana could damage Seal as a witness in Florida. The Miami feds understandably wanted things resolved in Louisiana before Seal testified for them. But the Louisiana feds thought they had a case against Seal, and they intended to make it.

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