vault backup: 2026-10-05 17:57:45
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title: Carlos Cabezas
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aliases:
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- Carlos Cabezas
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- Carlos Augusto Cabezas
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- Carlos Augusto Cabezas Ramirez
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- Carlos Augusto Cabezas-Ramirez
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created: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-10-05
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category: "Organized Crime"
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tags:
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- Person
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@ -12,62 +14,67 @@ tags:
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- Contra
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- Nicaragua
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- SanFrancisco
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- CIADrugTrafficking
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- FrogmanCase
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- 1980s
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- DarkAllianceInvestigation
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summary: "Nicaraguan cocaine trafficker in San Francisco who testified that drug profits from the Meneses organization were going to the Contras, was convicted in the Frogman Case, and in 1996 admitted on the record to delivering millions in drug money to the Contras."
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summary: "Nicaraguan cocaine dealer convicted in the 1983 San Francisco Frogman case who later said part of his proceeds went to the Contras, a claim the Justice Department and CIA inspectors found unsupported."
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location: "San Francisco, California"
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relations:
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- type: relative_of
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with: "[[Julio Zavala]]"
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role: "former brother-in-law; Zavala's first wife Maritza was Cabezas's sister"
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fn: 5
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- type: prosecuted
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with: "[[Mark Zanides]]"
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reverse: true
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start: 1983-02-15
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end: 1984
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role: "Frogman case, Northern District of California"
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fn: 5
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---
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Carlos Augusto Cabezas Ramirez was a [[Nicaragua|Nicaraguan]] exile, former [[Nicaraguan National Guard|National Guard]] fighter pilot, lawyer, accountant, and banker who became a cocaine dealer for [[Julio Zavala]]'s drug organization in [[San Francisco]]. As a U.S. government witness, Cabezas testified that his drug profits were going to [[Contras|Contra]] organizations in [[Costa Rica]].[^1]
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Carlos Augusto Cabezas Ramirez was a [[Nicaragua|Nicaraguan]] exile in [[San Francisco]] who was arrested on February 15, 1983 in the "Frogman Case," cooperated, testified against his former brother-in-law [[Julio Zavala]], and received a ten-year sentence.[^1] After his conviction he said that part of what he sold went to the [[Contras]] through the Nicaraguan exiles [[Horacio Pereira]] and [[Troilo Sanchez|Troilo Sánchez]] in [[Costa Rica]], and that a [[Central Intelligence Agency]] man called "Iván Gómez" watched over the arrangement; [[Gary Webb]] treated the account as the earliest documented Contra cocaine pipeline.[^2] The Justice Department's Inspector General found that Cabezas was the only person who claimed to have trafficked for the Contras, that his accounts changed over time and that no one else supported them; the CIA's Inspector General found no CIA relationship with him or Zavala.[^1][^3][^4]
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### Background in Nicaragua
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### Nicaragua and San Francisco
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By age fourteen Cabezas was helping his mother support nine brothers and sisters. In 1970 he went to the [[United States]], spending four years studying to become a commercial pilot while working nights as a janitor. He returned to Nicaragua with his pilot's license, joined the National Guard, and flew for [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]]'s army while managing a crop-dusting company on the side.[^2]
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Webb wrote that Cabezas helped his mother support nine siblings by age fourteen, studied in the [[United States]] from 1970 to 1974 to become a commercial pilot while working nights as a janitor, returned to join the [[Nicaraguan National Guard]] and fly for [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]]'s army while running a crop-dusting company, earned an accounting degree at the National University, worked at the [[Bank of America]] and became head of the foreign division of its [[Managua]] branch, took a law degree in 1978 and practiced in Managua; that he took part in the bombing of Masaya late in the war; and that on July 15, 1979, four days before the shooting ended, he caught the last flight out of Managua.[^2] In San Francisco, Webb wrote, his wife, three daughters, mother and siblings were already living; he sold insurance for Lincoln Insurance Company, which named him Sales Agent of the Year in 1980, worked nights as a janitor at the San Francisco Hilton, and by 1981 had a $10,000 down payment on a row house in Daly City. Needing money to attend law school so he could be admitted to the [[California]] bar, he approached Zavala for a loan.[^2] The CIA's Inspector General recorded that he was a lawyer in Nicaragua at the time of its report.[^4]
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Cabezas later enrolled in the National University of Nicaragua, earned an accounting degree, and was hired by the [[Bank of America]], becoming head of the [[Managua]] branch's foreign division. He obtained a law degree in 1978 and set up a practice in Managua. Near the end of the war, Cabezas participated in the terror bombings of the city of Masaya. On July 15, 1979, four days before the shooting stopped, he caught the last flight out of Managua.[^2]
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### The Frogman Case
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### Life in San Francisco
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In January 1982 the FBI's San Francisco division began an investigation, run with the [[DEA]] and the [[U.S. Customs|Customs Service]], that became the country's first Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case. The case agent was David Alba, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Lassart supervised the investigation and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Zanides prosecuted; a six-month wiretap led to more than 50 convictions and the seizure of about 555 pounds of cocaine, fourteen vehicles, about $300,000 and about $100,000 in jewelry. On January 17, 1983 twelve people, some in wet suits, were arrested bringing 430 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter in San Francisco Bay, and on February 15, 1983 agents arrested Zavala, Cabezas and others on warrants for twenty-two further defendants.[^5] Webb wrote that agents placed at least four informants inside the group and monitored more than 13,000 telephone conversations; the U.S. Attorney, Joseph Russoniello, wrote in 1986 of 11,000 intercepted calls and the case agent recalled about 10,000.[^2][^6][^4]
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Cabezas came to San Francisco where his wife, three daughters, mother, and siblings were already living. He worked as a sales agent for Lincoln Insurance Company and as a night janitor at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel. In 1980 Lincoln Insurance named him Sales Agent of the Year. By 1981 he and his wife had scraped together $10,000 for a down payment on a row house in Daly City.[^2]
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Webb wrote that Zavala offered Cabezas $500 per kilo delivered plus a percentage of collected debts and said some of the profits would help the Contras, and that within weeks DEA agent [[Sandra Smith]] saw Cabezas pick up two Los Angeles dealers at the airport and drive them to his Daly City house.[^2] The Inspector General found that on November 12, 1981 Smith followed the Los Angeles dealer Julio Bermudez to Cabezas's house in Dale City and then to the house of [[Norwin Meneses]]'s nephew Jairo Meneses; Smith's surveillance report says Cabezas lived there. Zavala's and Cabezas's source of supply, according to the prosecutors, was the Colombian [[Alvaro Carvajal Minota]] and his mother; the FBI's November 8, 1982 teletype named Pereira, Troilo Sánchez and Fernando Sánchez as a second source, and added that the DEA had called Pereira "the major source of cocaine smuggling from Costa Rica to the United States" but had been unable to penetrate his "extremely closely knit organization." Pereira and Troilo Sánchez were never charged for lack of evidence.[^7][^3][^8]
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To become a lawyer in [[California]], Cabezas needed to attend law school full-time and pass the bar exam. Unable to afford quitting his two jobs, he approached his former brother-in-law Julio Zavala for a loan.[^2]
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### Cabezas's account
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### Recruitment into Drug Trafficking
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Cabezas has described the arrangement in five forms. At Zavala's trial in November 1984 he testified that he and Zavala imported ten or eleven kilograms from Pereira between November 1981 and September 1982 and split the profits with him, and that Pereira said he was helping the "Contra Revolution"; he did not mention the CIA. In the March 16, 1986 *San Francisco Examiner* article he said the proceeds "belonged to the contra revolution." In an October 8, 1987 interview with FBI agent Fred Fresques he said they imported 18 or 19 kilos, that Pereira and Troilo Sánchez asked him to handle the Contra cocaine because "they did not trust Julio Zavala," and that he stopped over losses, the Contras' insistence on a fixed price of $54,000 a kilo and a wish to quit; again there was no mention of the CIA. To the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee's staff in March 1988 he said he moved 25 to 30 kilos and $1.5 million. In Webb's account, and in interviews with the CIA's and the Justice Department's inspectors in 1997, he said that at a December 1981 meeting at a San José hotel Pereira and Sánchez proposed raising money for the Contras by selling cocaine; that Peruvian cocaine was packed into hollow reeds woven into baskets and carried by "Contra mules," typically airline flight attendants, one kilogram at a time; that he carried one such basket himself, unaware at first of its contents; and that he made about twenty trips with an average of $64,000, once with about $250,000, to Pereira and Sánchez in Honduras and Costa Rica and, two or three times, $40,000 to $50,000 to Aristides Sánchez at the Contras' Miami office. He told the CIA's inspectors that he saw Pereira give money to a Contra named Joaquín Vega near Danlí, Honduras to feed troops and their families, and said Zavala at first handled the baskets and later skimmed the money, so that Pereira and Sánchez gave the collection to him.[^1][^3][^8][^2][^4]
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Zavala, who was facing mounting legal pressure from [[DEA]] surveillance, offered Cabezas a job delivering cocaine and collecting money. Zavala told him he would pay $500 per kilo delivered, plus a percentage of drug debts collected, and that some of the cocaine profits would help finance the Contras. Cabezas accepted.[^2]
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Webb wrote that Pereira told Cabezas he represented [[UDN-FARN]] and the [[FDN]], that the CIA would control delivery of the money, and that Cabezas took over the Contra side on a fifty-fifty split with Zavala; that Cabezas carried twelve kilos in the first part of 1982, earning about $17,000; and that he delivered money to the Contras' Miami office in a shopping center near the airport.[^2] Webb described Cabezas's meeting in Costa Rica with the man called Iván Gómez: Pereira and Troilo Sánchez introduced him in April or May 1982 as "the CIA's man in Costa Rica," who said he was there "to ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone's pocket," and Cabezas saw him once more, in late summer, at the San José airport, where Gómez said nothing.[^2]
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Within weeks DEA agent Sandra Smith spotted Cabezas picking up two L.A. drug dealers at the airport and driving them to his Daly City home. The [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] soon joined the investigation, placing at least four confidential informants inside the operation and eventually monitoring more than 13,000 phone conversations.[^2]
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### What the inspectors found
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### The Contra Cocaine Connection
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The Justice Department's inspectors compared the account with the records. The ledger the FBI seized at Cabezas's arrest begins in August 1982 and does not separate two organizations or two suppliers; it appears to show seven or eight kilograms imported, not the 10 or 11, 18 or 19, or 25 to 30 he gave on different occasions; it shows no trip carrying $100,000 and no deliveries of $40,000 to $50,000 to Miami; its entry "Envio con CC 56.000 = 100882" appears to record a payment of $56,000 leaving a balance of $100,882 owed for cocaine. Cabezas said different things about whether Zavala or he ran the Contra enterprise, about when the Gómez meetings occurred (early and mid-1981 to the Justice Department, April or May and late summer 1982 to the CIA), and about how he learned that Gómez worked for the CIA, saying in one interview that Gómez said so and in another that Pereira and Sánchez did. At the end of his Justice Department interview he said he "did not believe the United States was involved in the 'Contra cocaine' network." He could not name the Contra group, describing it as the former National Guard and "not Eden Pastora's group."[^1][^3]
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Cabezas's cocaine came from two sources: Álvaro Carvajal Minota, a Colombian in San Francisco connected to the nascent [[Cali Drug Cartel]]; and a Costa Rican source that supplied higher-quality Peruvian cocaine. It was the Peruvian cocaine, Cabezas said, that belonged to the Contras.[^2]
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The CIA's inspectors confirmed that an independent contractor used the alias "Ivan Gomez" in Costa Rica in the 1980s, but he was shorter and slighter than the man Cabezas described, CIA records placed him in the United States in April and May 1982, and he denied meeting Cabezas, Zavala, Sánchez or Pereira. Shown sixteen photographs, which included two of the contractor, one in operational disguise, Cabezas became visibly shaken and picked two other men as "possibilities," both with no relationship to the CIA. The inspectors noted that on August 8, 1984 a Nicaraguan newspaper had printed a photograph captioned "Ivan Gomez," described as working for the CIA.[^4][^3] Zavala, who recalled a meeting in a San José hotel in late 1981 or early 1982, said no one there claimed CIA affiliation; Zavala told the INS agent Michael Hardman after his 1996 arrest that Cabezas lied to "scam his way out of prison"; Zavala's wife Doris Salomon said she did not recall the men meeting and called Cabezas "a liar to me"; Troilo and Fernando Sánchez denied the arrangement; Troilo Sánchez said he knew of a "Roberto," introduced by Meneses in 1987, who claimed CIA work.[^1][^4] An FBI informant in the case, "Source 1," told the inspectors he heard Cabezas and Zavala say the money went to the Contras but that no one had mentioned the CIA; his FBI file contained no such reporting, and the Inspector General noted in a footnote that he had been a CIA asset before he worked for the FBI, that the FBI asked the CIA in March 1982 to debrief him about Zavala and that the CIA ended its use of him in 1982.[^1]
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In December 1981, Zavala sent Cabezas to Costa Rica to meet two of [[Norwin Meneses]]'s associates: [[Horacio Pereira]], a drug dealer and gambler known as "La Burra," and [[Troilo Sanchez|Troilo Sánchez]], a playboy brother of [[FDN]] leaders [[Aristides Sanchez|Aristides]] and [[Fernando Sanchez|Fernando Sánchez]]. Cabezas told [[Central Intelligence Agency]] investigators this meeting "was the genesis of an effort to raise money for the Contras by selling drugs."[^2]
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Prosecutors and agents described Cabezas differently. Lassart called him a "jolly BS-er" and "Mr. Hyperbole," Zanides said he could fabricate a story in his interest, and Alba called him a "BS-er." Fresques, who interviewed him in 1987, said he respected him and thought he dealt in only a couple of kilograms with part of the proceeds meant for the Contras.[^3] The CIA's inspectors recorded that a different FBI agent, who dealt with Cabezas after his 1984 conviction and release from prison in 1992, said he told him in 1987 that he sold cocaine for the Contras but provided few details. The inspectors found no information to support the claim that Cabezas gave financial help to the Contras from his trafficking, and the Justice Department's inspectors wrote that it appeared likely that Cabezas and Zavala got some of their cocaine from Pereira and Sánchez but that there was no clear or sufficient evidence the cocaine was handled for the Contras.[^4][^3]
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Horacio Pereira told Cabezas he was representing [[UDN-FARN]] and the FDN in Costa Rica and that the CIA would control the delivery of the money. When Pereira grew suspicious of Zavala's drinking and money management, he cut Zavala out and insisted Cabezas personally handle the Contra money. Cabezas agreed to a 50/50 profit split with Zavala in exchange for assuming financial responsibility.[^2]
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### The money returned to Zavala
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Cocaine from Costa Rica was smuggled inside woven Peruvian baskets. Each basket contained about a kilo of cocaine hidden inside wax-coated strings within the framework. Cabezas personally brought back twelve kilos during the first part of 1982, earning about $17,000. He told CIA inspectors that "Contra mules, typically airline flight attendants" were also bringing baskets into the United States.[^2]
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When agents arrested Zavala they seized $36,020 from his bedroom. In 1984 his lawyer Judd Iversen asked to depose two men in Costa Rica, Francisco Aviles Saenz and Vicente Rappaccioli, who he said would show that the money belonged to Contra groups; documents on the letterhead of the Conservative Party of Nicaraguans in Exile and of UDN-FARN said Zavala had been given $45,000 in San José in January 1983. Cabezas told the Justice Department's inspectors that the money was drug proceeds a co-defendant had received from a customer the night before the arrests, and that Salomon obtained the letters to "minimize" Zavala's crimes. The CIA's station in Costa Rica believed Rappaccioli was a former CIA asset, which was a mistake, and an August 24, 1984 cable from headquarters said the CIA's Office of General Counsel had asked the San Francisco U.S. Attorney's office and "at CIA OGC request, the U.S. Attorney has agreed to return the money to Zavala"; the depositions were cancelled and a check for $36,800 issued in September 1984. The former U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello and his deputies said the money went back because Costa Rica depositions were too expensive; only Zanides remembered the CIA's contact, and the Inspector General concluded it was unresolved which reason governed. The Inspector General judged that the claim the money was Contra money was most likely a ploy to keep drug proceeds.[^5][^6] The CIA recorded in 1986 that Aviles was expelled from [[UDN-FARN]] after the *Examiner* article and that its leader [[Fernando Chamorro|Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro]] and his staff had never met Cabezas, Zavala, Pereira or Salomon.[^4]
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Cabezas delivered drug money directly to FDN leader Aristides Sanchez at the Contras' [[Miami]] offices in a shopping center near the airport, and to Horacio Pereira or FDN logistics officer Joaquín "Pelón" Vega in [[Honduras]]. On average, Cabezas carried $64,000 on each of his twenty trips to [[Central America]], and once helped deliver about $250,000 to Pereira and Sánchez.[^2]
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### Later statements
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### Meeting with CIA Agent "Iván Gómez"
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In April or May 1982, Pereira and Troilo Sánchez introduced Cabezas to a man calling himself [[Ivan Gomez|Iván Gómez]], who identified himself as the CIA's "man in Costa Rica." Gómez told Cabezas he was there to "ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone's pocket." Cabezas saw Gómez only once more, in late summer 1982.[^2]
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### Arrest and Testimony
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On February 15, 1983, federal agents raided fourteen locations in the San Francisco area. Cabezas, his mother, and numerous others were arrested. Cabezas's attorney advised him to cooperate, and he became a government witness against Julio Zavala.[^2]
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At Zavala's trial in late 1984, Cabezas testified under oath that drug profits were going to the Contras. Pages from his ledger books showing cocaine transactions with Contra official Fernando Sánchez were introduced into evidence. Zavala was convicted. Cabezas's testimony went unchallenged and unreported. Though San Francisco media had extensively covered the arrests, not a single reporter covered the trial.[^2]
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Cabezas pleaded guilty to drug charges in 1984 and served several years in prison. He later returned to Managua and was practicing law there as of 1998.[^1]
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### Post-Series Interview
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In December 1996, journalist [[Georg Hodel]] located Cabezas in Managua. Cabezas admitted on the record that he had delivered millions of dollars in drug money to the Contras and identified CIA agent Ivan Gómez as having direct knowledge of the operation. He provided names, dates, amounts, and pages from his drug ledgers. "We've got it," Hodel told [[Gary Webb]]. "Cabezas is willing to talk on the record."[[^3]
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In 1987, Cabezas had written to [[Doyle McManus|McManus]] of the [[Los Angeles Times|L.A. Times]] after McManus reported there was "no supporting evidence" for Contra drug allegations, telling the reporter: "I am going to tell you that there was indeed 'supporting evidence,' hidden by the government." Cabezas described his trip to Costa Rica with $250,000 and noted the FBI made no attempt to stop him despite his traveling with an FBI informant. He also told McManus the FBI had tape-recorded conversations between Fernando Sánchez, Troilo Sánchez, and himself about drug transactions. McManus replied asking Cabezas to substantiate his "allegations" and inquired about Sandinista drug trafficking. Cabezas sent documents about the Contras and never heard from McManus again.[^3]
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Cabezas pleaded guilty in 1984 to conspiracy to import cocaine and importation, was convicted of continuing criminal enterprise on stipulated facts and received ten years.[^1] Webb wrote that Cabezas testified under oath at the trial that profits went to the Contras and that pages from his ledger showing transactions with [[Fernando Sanchez|Fernando Sánchez]] were introduced, and that no reporter covered the trial; the Inspector General's account of the trial testimony contains neither claim.[^2][^1] In 1987, Webb wrote, Cabezas wrote to the *Los Angeles Times* reporter [[Doyle McManus]], who had reported "no supporting evidence" for Contra drug allegations, saying there was such evidence "hidden by the government," described his Costa Rica trip with $250,000 and said the FBI tape-recorded conversations between Fernando Sánchez, Troilo Sánchez and himself; McManus asked him to substantiate and he sent documents and heard nothing more.[^9] In December 1996 the journalist [[Georg Hodel]] located Cabezas in Managua, and Webb wrote that Cabezas said on the record that he had delivered millions of dollars to the Contras and named Gómez.[^9] The Kerry subcommittee's staff interviewed Cabezas in March 1988; its report found that Zavala and Cabezas had a second source of supply in Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica, whom FBI documents identified as Pereira, Troilo Sánchez and Fernando Sánchez, and the Inspector General read it as reaching no conclusion on the validity of their Contra claims.[^8]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters
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[^2]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 5: "God, Fatherland and Freedom"
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[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 27: "A very difficult decision"
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[^1]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter IX (Carlos Cabezas), sections A-E, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch09p1.htm
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[^2]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 5: "God, Fatherland and Freedom." Sole source for the passages so cited.
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[^3]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter IX, sections F-G (assessment of Cabezas' allegations), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch09p2.htm
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[^4]: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, *Report of Investigation (96-0143-IG)*, Volume I: The California Story, January 29, 1998, Findings (Northern California story, the Frogman Case), https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine/findings2.html
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[^5]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter VIII (Julio Zavala), sections A-B, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch08p1.htm
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[^6]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter VIII, sections C-G (CIA documents, interviews, the 1986 Examiner article, the return of the money), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch08p2.htm
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[^7]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter III (Norwin Meneses), sections A-E, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p1.htm
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[^8]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, *Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy* (December 1988), pp. 59-60 (the San Francisco Frogman case, UDN-FARN and PCNE), https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras
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[^9]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 27: "A very difficult decision." Sole source for the passages so cited.
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@ -2,241 +2,188 @@
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title: Danilo Blandon
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aliases:
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- Danilo Blandon
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- Danilo Blandón
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- Danilo Blandón Reyes
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- Oscar Danilo Blandón
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- Oscar Danilo Blandon
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- Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes
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- Chanchin
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created: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-10-05
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category: "Organized Crime"
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tags:
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- Person
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- DrugTrafficker
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- Nicaragua
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- Contra
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- CIADrugTrafficking
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- DEAInformant
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- CrackCocaine
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- 1980s
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- 1990s
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- DarkAllianceInvestigation
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summary: "Nicaraguan cocaine trafficker in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1991, Ricky Ross's principal supplier, arrested in 1992 and later a paid DEA informant after a sentence cut to 28 months."
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born: 1951-07-29
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location: "Managua, Nicaragua"
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relations:
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- type: partner_of
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with: "[[Norwin Meneses]]"
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start: 1982
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role: "cocaine supply"
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fn: 16
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role: "cocaine distribution, Los Angeles"
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fn: 1
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- type: partner_of
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with: "[[Ronald Lister]]"
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start: 1982
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end: 1986
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role: "weapons and security equipment"
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fn: 3
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- type: spouse_of
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with: "[[Chepita Blandon]]"
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fn: 1
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fn: 11
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- type: informant_for
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with: "[[DEA]]"
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start: 1992
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role: "cooperating witness, then paid informant from 1994"
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fn: 16
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role: "cooperating defendant from mid-1992; paid informant from November 29, 1994"
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fn: 21
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- type: prosecuted
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with: "[[LJ Oneale]]"
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reverse: true
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start: 1992-05-05
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end: 1994-09-19
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
category: "Organized Crime"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- KeyFigure
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- DrugTrafficker
|
||||
- Nicaragua
|
||||
- Contra
|
||||
- 1980s
|
||||
- DarkAllianceInvestigation
|
||||
summary: "Nicaraguan cocaine trafficker who operated a multimillion-dollar distribution ring in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1991, serving as the primary supplier to Freeway Ricky Ross while maintaining connections to the Contra movement."
|
||||
born: 1951-07-29
|
||||
location: "Managua, Nicaragua"
|
||||
fn: 11
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Douglas Aukland]]"
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
start: 1986-07-11
|
||||
end: 1987-07-17
|
||||
role: "FBI Riverside case and Los Angeles OCDETF investigation"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[FDN]]"
|
||||
start: 1981
|
||||
end: 1983
|
||||
role: "Los Angeles supporters' group"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
---
|
||||
"Oscar" Danilo Blandón Reyes was a [[Nicaragua|Nicaraguan]] cocaine trafficker who operated a multiton distribution ring in [[Los Angeles]] from 1981 to 1991.[^2] Blandón was the first major trafficker to establish a direct connection between [[South Central Los Angeles|South Central L.A.]] street gangs and the [[Colombia|Colombian]] cocaine cartels. He was the longtime primary supplier to [[Ricky Ross|"Freeway" Ricky Ross]], the leader of South Central L.A.'s largest [[Crack Cocaine|crack]] distribution network.
|
||||
Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, born July 29, 1951, in [[Managua]], was a [[Nicaragua|Nicaraguan]] exile and cocaine wholesaler in [[Los Angeles]] who supplied [[Ricky Ross|"Freeway" Ricky Ross]] and who, after his arrest in 1992, became the [[DEA]]'s principal witness and paid informant against Ross.[^1] He told a federal grand jury in 1994 that he began selling cocaine to raise money for the [[Contras]]; the Justice Department's Inspector General and the CIA's Inspector General each concluded that his contributions were small and found no [[Central Intelligence Agency]] relationship, while [[Gary Webb]] wrote in *Dark Alliance* that the proceeds of his Los Angeles sales went to the Contra war.[^2][^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Family Background and Early Life
|
||||
### Family and Nicaragua
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón was the second son of a wealthy landowning family deeply embedded in the [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]] power structure.[^3] His father, Julio Blandón, owned the land on which was built one of the worst slums in [[Managua]] - OPEN #3, an emergency housing district built after the 1972 earthquake leveled the city. The neighborhood, later renamed Ciudad Sandino and numbering over 70,000 residents, was a constant source of recruits for the [[Sandinistas]]. Economist [[Orlando Murillo]], an uncle of Blandón's wife, stated: "It was called Via Misery. People there lived like the niggers in Los Angeles. But it made Danilo's father a very rich man."
|
||||
Blandón attended college in Canada and Mexico, took a business degree, returned to Nicaragua in 1974 to work in his father's real estate business, earned a master's degree in business in [[Colombia]] in 1978, and then worked for the Nicaraguan government as a director of retail and wholesale markets.[^1] Webb wrote that he was the second son of a landowning family close to the [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]] government: his father Julio Blandón owned the land under OPEN #3, a post-earthquake housing district that became Ciudad Sandino; his mother came from the Reyes family, and her father, Colonel Rigoberto Reyes, had been minister of war under the first Anastasio Somoza; and his wife [[Chepita Blandon|Chepita]] belonged to the Murillo family, whose members had provided Managua's mayor and the president of the National Assembly. Webb added that the $27 million market program Blandón directed was financed jointly by Nicaragua and the [[United States]], that it paid for his degree, and that he also ran an import-export company, a travel agency and a firm supplying food to the [[Nicaraguan National Guard]]. Webb quoted the economist [[Orlando Murillo]], an uncle of Chepita's, on the source of the family fortune.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The Blandóns were social friends of the Somozas and shared common business interests; Julio Blandón and Somoza were two of the biggest landlords in Managua. Blandón's mother was from the Reyes family - his grandfather was Colonel Rigoberto Reyes, former minister of war and [[Nicaraguan National Guard|National Guard]] commander under Somoza's father, Anastasio I.
|
||||
The immigration service's records show that Blandón entered the United States on a business visa on June 17, 1979, and applied for asylum in Los Angeles on February 15, 1980. The Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied the request on January 25, 1983, and he filed a new application before an immigration judge on June 27, 1983; the judge granted it on August 19, 1985, finding a well-founded fear of persecution if he returned.[^1] Webb wrote that Blandón put his wife and three-year-old daughter on a flight to Los Angeles on June 19, 1979, and followed through [[Miami]] with his brother Julio Jr.; Webb quoted Blandón's cousin Flor Reyes on how little he arrived with, and Orlando Murillo's statement that he paid the airfares and gave the couple $5,000. In Los Angeles Blandón sold used cars at Torres Used Cars in East Los Angeles, run by two Nicaraguan brothers, [[Jacinto Torres|Jacinto]] and [[Edgar Torres]], whom Webb described as later major cocaine traffickers.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón's in-laws, the Murillos, were stalwarts of Somoza's Liberal party. The Murillos had provided leaders for the National Assembly for generations. Orlando Murillo's father had been the assembly's president, and [[Chepita Blandon|Chepita Blandón]]'s father had been Managua's mayor. The Murillos owned large tracts of the capital, including the national telecommunications company headquarters, along with cattle ranches and plantations.
|
||||
### Contra supporters in Los Angeles, 1980 to 1983
|
||||
|
||||
### Pre-Revolution Career
|
||||
Blandón told the Justice Department's Inspector General that in 1980 or 1981 he began attending informal meetings of about twenty opponents of the [[Sandinistas]] in Los Angeles, and that when [[Enrique Bermudez|Enrique Bermúdez]] visited the group it affiliated with the [[FDN]].[^1] He told the CIA's Inspector General that Bermúdez asked the group to adopt the FDN's colors and flag, and that the group held no position in the FDN leadership in [[Honduras]].[^3] Webb wrote that Blandón said he formed the first organized Contra group in Los Angeles, that its five organizers raised money through car loans obtained on his credit and used to send a pickup truck to Honduras, and that he lost his credit when the payments went unmade.[^5] The group's driver, Carlos Rocha, described it to the Justice Department as APRONIC, the Association of Professional Nicaraguans, which approached the FDN in December 1981; he said its members were invited to FDN meetings but refused official titles, that a 1982 Los Angeles fundraiser lost money, that Blandón fronted about $900 for it and was repaid, that the group ceased to exist by early 1983, and that he knew of nothing else Blandón gave other than two trucks sent to Honduras, which Blandón later reported stolen and for which he collected insurance.[^2] The FDN's San Francisco representative at the time, Tony Navarro, told the inspectors he met Blandón once and saw no evidence he gave the Contras money; [[Ivan Torres]] put Blandón's gifts at $800 at most and two station wagons.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón held a cushy government job as director of wholesale markets, running a program to introduce a free-market economy to Nicaragua's farmers. The $27 million program was jointly financed by the Nicaraguan and [[United States|U.S.]] governments and paid for his M.B.A. from the University of Colombia in [[Bogota|Bogotá]]. He also ran an import-export company, a travel agency, and a firm with a lucrative contract to supply American food to the Nicaraguan National Guard.
|
||||
Blandón told the inspectors that in 1982 he flew with [[Norwin Meneses]] to Honduras on the way to [[Bolivia]] to buy cocaine, that they met Bermúdez, who said the Contras were short of money and that "the end justifies the means," and that on leaving the country he was stopped with $100,000 he was carrying for Meneses for the Bolivian purchase; a man he knew from the FDN told the Honduran police the money was for the Contras, and it was returned to him. He said he did not believe Bermúdez knew they were selling drugs, and he estimated that he gave the Contras about $40,000 in all, of which 70 to 80 percent came from drug sales.[^1][^3] He said that in 1983, at a meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Bermúdez told Contra supporters that "the train is running," meaning, in Blandón's understanding, that the CIA was funding the war.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Flight from Nicaragua
|
||||
On February 3, 1994, Blandón testified before a federal grand jury in San Francisco in a case involving Meneses's nephew Roger Meneses. Asked how he progressed in the business, he said that in the beginning he sold "just because the Contra," that in 1983 "the Contra gets a lot of money from the United States," that "the people that was in charge, it was the CIA, so they didn't want to raise any money," and that he then started business by himself. The Inspector General, working from a transcript posted on the internet by the *San Jose Mercury News*, concluded that Blandón meant the CIA controlled the money going to the Contras and not that it knew of or approved his sales; Blandón told the inspectors the same, and said he used "Cheles," "U.S. Government" and "CIA" interchangeably.[^6] On the stand in San Diego in 1996, according to Webb, Blandón began a sentence about the Contra fundraising, "When we raise money for the Contra revolution, we received orders from the," then looked at the prosecutor and said "from another people"; Webb wrote that a court order barring CIA testimony prevented Ross's lawyer [[Alan Fenster]] from pursuing the answer.[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón stayed in Managua through the first weeks of June 1979 as Sandinista forces closed in.[^3] On June 19, 1979, he placed his wife and three-year-old daughter on a flight for Los Angeles, where Chepita had relatives, while he and his brother Julio Jr. flew to [[Miami]]. His cousin Flor Reyes said he arrived "[with] one hand in the front and one in the back." Blandón claimed he arrived with only $100 after selling a Sony television; Orlando Murillo said he paid for the airline tickets and gave the couple $5,000.
|
||||
### Los Angeles under Meneses
|
||||
|
||||
After briefly washing cars in Miami, Blandón rejoined his family in Los Angeles in early July 1979, landing a job as a salesman at Torres Used Cars in East Los Angeles, run by two Nicaraguan brothers ([[Jacinto Torres|Jacinto]] and [[Edgar Torres]]) who would later become major [[Cocaine]] traffickers known as "the Trees" or "the Twin Towers."
|
||||
Blandón said he met Meneses in 1981 or 1982 when a friend asked him to collect Meneses from the Los Angeles airport; Meneses offered to give him cocaine and teach him to sell it and to send the profits to the Contras. Meneses fronted him two kilograms at $60,000 each, which he had trouble selling until Meneses supplied customers, and he began collecting drug money for Meneses in Los Angeles.[^1][^3] Webb added that Meneses gave him a two-day seminar on assessing quality and concealing cocaine in vehicle door panels, that Donald Barrios introduced the two men, and that Blandón became Meneses's "administrator" in Los Angeles, keeping the books, collecting from customers and delivering cash to Meneses's Colombian suppliers.[^4] Meneses opened the Chicalina restaurant on Hoover Street, which Blandón helped oversee, and in August 1982 Blandón and Maritza Meneses founded JDM Artwork Inc., a silk-screen shop that Webb wrote became part of the Contra support network: [[Eden Pastora]] visited it in 1982 and it printed T-shirts with his likeness, former Pastora aide Karol Prado told Webb it was used to launder drug money, and a Puerto Rican former associate convicted of counterfeiting told Webb it printed counterfeit twenty-dollar bills that financed the FDN. The associate's claim is attributed to him; the CIA's cables recorded in December 1984 that Meneses was known for "laundering of counterfeit money."[^4][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contra Fundraising and FDN Chapter
|
||||
A DEA debriefing report of March 1983 was the first mention of Blandón in DEA files; it named him as a member of a Miami-to-Los Angeles organization headed by Robert Arana. A January 1985 source told the DEA that Meneses had begun taking cocaine from Blandón's supplier in early 1983 and that Blandón owed Meneses $200,000. The Inspector General wrote that this information was treated as background intelligence and that the DEA conducted no investigation of Blandón before 1986.[^1][^8] Webb wrote that the DEA opened a NADDIS file on him on May 24, 1983, and that his lawyer [[Brad Brunon|Bradley Brunon]] said in court in 1992 that he held some 300 DEA-6 reports on Blandón dating from about 1981 to May 1992; Webb wrote that in early 1984 an informant told the DEA Blandón was "the head" of his own distribution organization.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón claimed his was the first organized Contra group in Los Angeles, calling themselves the [[FDN]]:[^3] "I was the first. We formed a group in L.A. to go and fight against the Sandinistas that we called FDN. We were five people in charge of it in L.A. We were in charge to get some money."
|
||||
Blandón's accounts of when he left Meneses changed over time. He told the grand jury in 1994, the CIA Inspector General in 1998 and the Justice Department that the break came in 1983, over money. The records place the two together later. A confidential informant told the DEA in August 1986 of a loose confederation between "the Blandon organization" in southern California and "the Meneses organization" in San Francisco, in which Blandón gave drugs to Meneses; Meneses's nephew Jairo Meneses told the DEA after his November 1984 arrest that Blandón was one of ten to twelve buyers who took cocaine from the Meneses organization on consignment; and the December 1990 DEA San Diego application, which does not mention the Contras, records that between 1982 and 1984 Blandón "operated directly under Menesis" and that in 1984 he "disassociated himself" and began working independently.[^1][^10][^11] Webb wrote that FBI and DEA files placed the two as associates as late as 1991, that an August 1986 DEA report called the Blandón group "the focal point for drug supply and money laundering for the others," and that Jacinto Torres told the FBI in 1992 that Meneses was Blandón's supplier in 1984.[^12] At Ross's 1996 trial Blandón moved the date at which he stopped selling for the Contras from 1986 to 1984 to 1982, Webb wrote, and conceded on cross-examination that he did not know whether the Contras had received United States aid; the Inspector General records that after the trial he told the CIA that he had given nothing after 1983.[^7][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1981, CIA agent [[Enrique Bermudez|Enrique Bermúdez]] visited Blandón's group, gave a pep talk, and asked them to adopt the FDN colors and flag. Blandón's group began raising funds through car theft and loan fraud, using Blandón's credit history to obtain auto loans for vehicles sent to the Contras in [[Honduras]]. "We were the first people, the first group that sent a pickup truck to the Contra revolution in Honduras," Blandón said. When the organization failed to make payments, Blandón lost his credit: "But at that time I didn't care because they [the Contras] were my idea, my cause."
|
||||
### Lister and the weapons
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón testified before a federal grand jury (Grand Jury Number 93-5, Northern District of California) on February 3, 1994, that he had begun dealing cocaine to raise funds for the [[Contras]] in Los Angeles during the early 1980s.[^1] According to Blandón, after [[Ronald Reagan]] took office, the CIA decided his fundraising services were no longer required, and he continued in the drug business on his own.
|
||||
[[Ronald Lister]], a former Laguna Beach police officer who ran a private security firm, became Blandón's partner in late 1981 or early 1982. Blandón told the Justice Department he, Meneses and Lister agreed informally to sell weapons abroad, and that the partners were to take their share in arms for the Contras; he also said he did not believe Lister's claims of CIA contacts. Lister told the CIA's inspectors that he met Blandón in late 1981 through a Beverly Hills business contact, that Blandón then introduced him to Meneses, that he and his employees bought 15 to 20 semiautomatic weapons and a few night-vision devices for Blandón in 1982 and 1983, and that talk of the Contras was "beer talk" because "the money always went back into our pockets."[^3][^4] Webb wrote that Lister's partner [[William Downing]] and the [[Mundy Security Group]] in Laguna Beach supplied the weapons, and that Blandón was the company's vice president.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Los Angeles Operations
|
||||
Blandón said Lister arranged a presentation of weapons to Contra leaders including Pastora and Adolfo Chamorro in 1983 or 1984; the attendees showed no interest, and Blandón concluded the CIA or another agency was already supplying the military arm.[^3] According to Webb, Blandón sold Ross a free silenced .22 pistol and then more than a hundred weapons, including Uzis and an AR-15, and electronics equipment, procured through Lister, for use in the cocaine business; Ross told the CIA's inspectors he bought handguns and automatic weapons from Blandón.[^9][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
After being sent to Los Angeles by [[Norwin Meneses]] to sell cocaine, Blandón struggled to establish a customer base in a city he didn't know, unlike [[San Francisco]] where Meneses's drug network was well established. While distributing cocaine, Blandón served as Meneses's "administrator" in L.A., keeping the books for the drug operation, collecting money from customers, and delivering cash to pay Meneses's Colombian cocaine suppliers. Blandón made clear that the profits from the L.A. operation went to the Contra revolution: "whatever we were running in L.A. goes - the profit is - was going to the Contra revolution."[^4]
|
||||
### Ross
|
||||
|
||||
Meneses also opened a restaurant on Hoover Street in East Los Angeles called the Chicalina, which Blandón helped oversee. Blandón described it to a federal grand jury as a "marketing" operation. In August 1982, Blandón and Maritza Meneses set up JDM Artwork Inc., a silk-screen printing company that quickly became part of the Contras' support network in Los Angeles. [[ARDE]] commander [[Eden Pastora]] visited the firm during a trip to L.A. in 1982, and it printed T-shirts with his likeness. Former Pastora aide Carol Prado claimed the company was used to launder money from drug sales for the Contras. A former associate also claimed the company printed counterfeit twenty-dollar bills that provided operating cash for the FDN.[^4]
|
||||
The Inspector General fixed the beginning of the Blandón-Ross relationship later than Webb did. [[Ivan Arguellas]] (Claudio Villavicencio) supplied Ross through [[Henry Corrales]], who bought from Blandón; Villavicencio was shot in October 1983, Corrales tried to continue and then introduced Blandón to Ross and left the country, and the Inspector General concluded that direct sales began after October 1983 and probably in 1984, with the volume rising after Blandón acquired the Colombian supplier Aparicio Moreno in about 1985. Ross put his first kilogram from Blandón at $40,000 in 1984. Blandón testified at Ross's trial that he sold Ross 100 kilograms a month in 1984 and that by 1986 he was selling 100 kilograms a week to four or five customers; he told the inspectors that during 1985 and 1986 the weekly amounts to Ross ran from nothing to 50 kilograms. Ross estimated his own career total at 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms, and the Inspector General found that credible; a July 1990 recording of Blandón has him estimating that he sold 2,000 to 4,000 kilograms to black dealers. In 1991 testimony in an unrelated trial Ross did not name Blandón, and he later said he wanted to protect him.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Partnership with Ronald Lister
|
||||
Webb placed the first direct sale in late 1982 or early 1983 and wrote that Corrales sold Ross 10 to 15 kilograms a week by then, that Ross reached 100 kilograms a week and sometimes 150, that Blandón arranged credit of 20 to 25 kilograms from his Colombian suppliers, that Ross counted cash with two or three machines running day and night, and that Blandón and the [[Torres Brothers]] sometimes shared $5.7 million a week.[^12][^9] Webb also wrote that Ross described Blandón as "almost like a godfather to me," that Ross knew nothing of the Contras and said "he's been working for the government the whole damn time," and that Blandón's rivals called him "Chanchin," the fat pig, after he grew heavy and reclusive in Rialto.[^9] Ross told the CIA's inspectors that he believed the CIA was involved with Blandón only because of Blandón's short prison term.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón picked up [[Ronald Lister]] as a partner shortly after going to work for Meneses in late 1981 or early 1982. Lister would remain at Blandón's side for seven years. Blandón told [[Department of Justice|Justice Department]] interviewers that he and Meneses "entered into an informal partnership [with Lister] for the purpose of selling weapons abroad," specifically in [[El Salvador]]. The plan was for the three partners "to get their share of the profits in weapons, which they would then give to the Contras." Lister introduced a weapons and sophisticated electronics dimension to Blandón's drug ring, though Blandón said he "never believed Lister because he lied too much" about his claimed CIA connections.[^4]
|
||||
Webb wrote that Blandón moved his family to a house in Rialto in 1984 or 1985, bought through Orlando Murillo with $175,000 withdrawn from a Panama account; that he opened the Nicamex restaurant and a used-car lot with the Mexican millionaire [[Sergio Guerra]], whose family owned the Gateway parking lot at the border; and that he once hired a former Nicaraguan officer to kill one of the Torres brothers after Chepita told him of an affair, then called it off.[^9] The Torres brothers told LASD detective [[Jerry Guzzetta]] in 1986 that Blandón was dangerous because of "his access to information" about police activity.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Split from Meneses
|
||||
### October 1986
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón testified that when Ronald Reagan took office and the CIA began funding the Contras directly in 1983, he stopped sending cocaine profits to the Contras. "In 1983, okay, the Contra gets a lot of money from the United States," he told a federal grand jury in 1994. "And the people that was in charge, it was the CIA, so they didn't want to raise any money because they had the money that they wanted." He claimed he then went into business for himself: "So we started, you know, the ambitious person, we started doing business by ourselves."[^5]
|
||||
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department began its case on Blandón in September 1986 from an informant developed by Bell police officer Jerry Guzzetta, who described Blandón as a peripheral supplier of the black cocaine market run by "Rick" and "Ollie." Deputy [[Thomas Gordon]] swore an affidavit on October 23, 1986, and Judge Glennette Blackwell signed fourteen warrants; thirteen locations were searched on October 27. The affidavit said an informant described Blandón as a Contra sympathizer and founder of the FDN and that "money and arms generated by this organization comes thru the sales of cocaine." Deputy Eufrasio Cortez later said that an incident in the affidavit, a scale hidden under a jacket at Guerra Auto Sales, never occurred and that Gordon made things up; Gordon was convicted of tax charges in 1990 in the "Big Spender" case, in which deputies were shown to have stolen money and drugs from suspects. Deputy John Hurtado admitted taking about $50,000 from a briefcase in Blandón's bedroom.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
However, substantial evidence contradicts Blandón's timeline. FBI and DEA files showed Blandón and Meneses were still working together as late as 1991. In August 1986, their NADDIS files listed both men as current associates. An August 1986 DEA report stated: "The principal group is controlled by Blandón and is the focal point for drug supply and money laundering for the others. The other group is run by Meneses and is located principally in the San Francisco area... Per CI cocaine is often transported to the Blandón association and then from Blandón to Meneses in San Francisco." Blandón's associate Jacinto Torres told the FBI in 1992 that "Blandón's supplier as of 1984 continued to be Norwin Meneses" and that Meneses was flying planeloads of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami. Jairo Meneses was arrested on November 26, 1984, the same day Blandón and Meneses were celebrating a 40-50 kilo drug deal at Meneses's house - roughly two years after Blandón claims he quit dealing with Norwin. [[Rafael Cornejo]] confirmed Blandón and Meneses were still working together in 1984.[^5]
|
||||
The deputies found about one gram of cocaine, a folded ten-dollar bill with cocaine, and .3 grams in Blandón's house, and arrested Blandón and Chepita; the report attributed to him the statement "the cocaine is mine," which he denied. Among the papers seized were records of seven bank accounts, with deposits marked "U.S. Treasury/State" totaling about $9,000,000 and Cayman Islands deposits of about $883,000, and a note in Spanish signed "Leysla" that said "These are the bank statements of the suppliers of the Contra." Blandón told the inspectors his sister Leysla Balladares sent them because she thought he would find the Contra leaders' skimming of funds interesting; Balladares said they came from a friend, the physician Aureliano Rugama, killed in Honduras with the Contras. The Inspector General concluded the papers did not tie Blandón's drug dealing to the Contras; the Rolodex from his car lot listed a number for Eden Pastora in Costa Rica.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
A 1990 DEA report stated the two "disassociated" in 1984 but had reunited by the late 1980s to head "a criminal organization that operate(s) internationally from Colombia and Bolivia, through the Bahamas, [[Costa Rica]], or Nicaragua to the United States." The ring was getting cocaine from the politically connected Suarez family in Bolivia and the Ochoa family in Colombia, founders of the [[Medellin Cartel|Medellín cartel]]. The Bolivian cocaine came through Miami and the Colombians' powder landed in L.A.[^5]
|
||||
At Lister's second house the deputies recorded him saying that his friends in Washington would not like the search and that he would call "Mr. Weekly of the CIA"; a document seized there mentioned a "DIA Sub contractor Scott Weekly." Lister later said he meant a call to his attorney. The DIA told the FBI that Weekly was not employed by or cleared through it.[^8] Blandón's attorney Bradley Brunon, according to a deputy's chronology and an FBI teletype of November 17, 1986, told the sheriff's department on October 27 that he thought the "CIA winked at this sort of thing"; Brunon told the inspectors he did not recall saying it and had no information that Blandón was involved with the CIA.[^8] A cable from a CIA station on October 30, 1986, titled "Three Persons Claiming CIA Affiliation," told headquarters that three individuals claiming CIA affiliation had been arrested by the sheriff's department and asked for traces; headquarters answered on October 31 that it had none on Lister or Blandón and had reports of December 1984 and March 1985 describing Meneses as the "Nicaraguan Mafia." The cable erred in saying Meneses and Lister were arrested. When the FBI asked the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on December 11, 1986 whether Blandón, Lister, Meneses, Orlando Murillo, Aparicio Moreno and "Oklahoma Dick" were of operational interest, the CIA replied on December 17 with its Meneses traces and said it had none on the others.[^3][^8] The Inspector General found that Blandón learned of the surveillance beforehand, from Rocha, who told him the FBI had questioned him about Blandón in the summer, and from being followed, and that he cleaned his houses about a month before; it found no evidence that anyone tipped him.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Expansion of Drug Operations
|
||||
The federal agents copied the seized documents on October 31 and November 3, 1986, about 1,112 pages by a later count. The Inspector General recorded that the FBI, the Los Angeles United States Attorney's Office and the DEA each could not find their copies, that the sheriff's department released many originals to Blandón's and Lister's lawyers months later, and that the IRS retained a box of over 1,000 pages that it produced.[^8] The sheriff's department dropped the possession charges and transferred the case to federal authorities; Sergeant Ed Huffman's chronology states "No case filed to protect on going investigation & informants."[^8] Webb wrote that on December 10, 1986 Blandón was told no charges would be filed, that he wrote on a residency application "No complaint filed. They exonerated me 12-10-86," and that the immigration lawyer he hired, John M. Garrisi, was under indictment for immigration fraud and was later convicted and disbarred.[^15] Documents from Blandón's house were forwarded to the Iran-Contra independent counsel's office, which the Inspector General found did not investigate Blandón or use them.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
As 1982 drew to a close, Blandón's cocaine trafficking business in Los Angeles exploded. Almost overnight he went from receiving small one- or two-kilo packages to multimillion-dollar loads. Lister described the logistics: "I'd go over to D's [Blandón's] house, take my Mercedes over there, put three U-Haul boxes which will cover about 100 keys, about 33 per box plus one you'd squeeze in, in the trunk, go over to south L.A. It was the slickest deal you've ever seen." Two interrelated reasons drove this expansion: the arrival of crack cocaine smoking in Los Angeles, and a street-smart ghetto teenager who would come to be known as "Freeway" Rick.[^4]
|
||||
### The 1987 OCDETF case and Operation Perico
|
||||
|
||||
### Path to Ricky Ross
|
||||
[[Douglas Aukland]], an FBI agent in Riverside whose first drug case this was, had opened a case on July 11, 1986 on information from an unsolicited informant, LA CI-1, who said Blandón and Meneses were founding members of the FDN and that in January 1985 Pastora had met Blandón in Miami seeking funds; LA CI-1 told the inspectors he meant that the funds were cocaine funds, that Blandón never claimed to sell for the Contras, and that he would have "laughed in Blandon's face" at the suggestion.[^1][^2] Assistant U.S. Attorney Crossan Andersen wrote the IRS on November 25, 1986 that the case "is a sensitive matter since it involves allegations of drug running in support of the CONTRA movement in Nicaragua and wholly unconfirmed allegations of CIA involvement." The Los Angeles Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force committee accepted it on January 21, 1987, naming Blandón, Lister, Meneses, Moreno, Murillo and "Oklahoma Dick" as targets.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón observed the cocaine operation run by Ivan Arguellas (also known as Claudio Villavicencio), another Nicaraguan exile, who was supplying Ross in South Central L.A. "I wished I could have known Ricky... because all the time I want to grow in the business," Blandón said. He was jealous - despite all his work for Norwin Meneses (keeping books, working for the Contras, helping run the restaurant and T-shirt company), Meneses was charging him $60,000 a kilo and taking nearly every penny. "I didn't have my own car. I have to rent cars. I used to work with him, you know, coming from San Francisco, going back, and I thought, 'Hey, what are you doing? You're not doing nothing, you know? You're not making no - no money.'"[^5]
|
||||
On January 7 and 15, 1987, Meneses and a DEA informant the Inspector General calls DEA CI-1 met Blandón and Ivan Torres in Los Angeles under a plan that the DEA's Costa Rica agent [[Sandalio Gonzalez]] filed as "Operation Perico." DEA CI-1 reported Torres saying that his brothers were distributing up to 1,000 kilograms of cocaine a month, that the CIA "looks the other way" while the Contras traffic outside the United States, and, in Gonzalez's later report, that CIA representatives "don't mind" and encourage trafficking as a source of income. Torres told the inspectors he had no CIA contacts and that the talk was a joke made to impress a man they suspected of being an informant; DEA CI-1 told the inspectors it was the FBI Torres said looked the other way. The same reporting recorded that Blandón's organization had supplied Pastora with weapons until about two years earlier and that Pastora lived in a Blandón house in Costa Rica; and that Blandón was keeping a low profile and had refused to rent them a car. Gonzalez told the inspectors that DEA CI-1 claimed to have worked for the CIA years earlier in Europe and the Soviet Union. Webb wrote that the informant was a CIA operative known as "Roberto" and that the DEA mounted the operation without telling Aukland; the Inspector General found Aukland learned of it only in January 1987 and was angry that he could not debrief Meneses.[^17][^18]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón got his break when Ivan Arguellas was shot by his wife and paralyzed. Ivan's brother-in-law, [[Henry Corrales]], took over but had no cocaine sources beyond Blandón. Blandón supplied Henry, who sold to Ross, splitting commissions fifty-fifty. By late 1982 or early 1983, Corrales was selling Ross 10 to 15 kilos a week - roughly 50 kilos a month. But Corrales grew paranoid from the volume and decided to retire to Honduras. Before leaving, he introduced Blandón directly to Ross, in exchange for continuing commissions. The meeting took place at the home of Mary Monroe, a friend of Ross. Blandón recalled Ross's operation: "We went to an apartment... there was a guy with a shotgun: 'Who are you?' We identify ourselves, then you have to pass another guy with another machine gun. And inside, near the dinner table in the living room, there were about five guys, and all the guys were there with a gun at the table."[^5]
|
||||
The investigation never produced a purchase. Aukland's informants could not infiltrate the group, Blandón had become, in the FBI's phrase, "almost a recluse," and on July 17, 1987 Andersen declined prosecution "based upon the inability of investigative techniques to adequately prove criminal allegations." Aukland's closing memorandum of September 16, 1987 said the case "may have been viable with the assistance of DEA." The Inspector General found Aukland was the only full-time investigator, that the Meneses coordination failed, and that no one from the CIA contacted or pressured him.[^19] Susan Bryant-Deason, a Los Angeles assistant district attorney cross-designated to the federal office, told police in 1996, Webb wrote, that agents were frustrated at insufficient evidence; she told the inspectors that she recalled a box of neatly photocopied bank documents with references to the U.S. Treasury and being told they would go to a "special prosecutor" in Washington, and that the person she called at the U.S. Attorney's office was misidentified in a sheriff's report as an attorney who had died by suicide on December 27, 1986.[^16][^18]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón said his direct sales to Ross grew geometrically: "In those times, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe seven a day. Every day." At seven kilos a day, that meant over 200 kilos per month. During 1982 and 1983, Blandón said he and Meneses brought "three or four" planeloads of cocaine from Miami to Los Angeles, with each load ranging between 200 and 400 kilos according to the Torres brothers. These flights continued until at least 1984.[^5]
|
||||
### Miami, 1987 to 1990
|
||||
|
||||
### Criminal History
|
||||
Blandón moved to Miami in 1987. Webb wrote that he sold his Los Angeles car lot and restaurants, carried $1.6 million, handed his customers to [[Roger Sandino]] and Jose "Chinito" Gonzalez, and remained their middleman; that he invested in Mex-US Import and Export with the exiled Nicaraguan judge [[Jose Macario]], Rene Gonzalez of Peat Marwick, Guerra and the Panamanian banker Jose Fernando Soto, bought Pupi's Children's Boutique for Chepita and an interest in La Parrilla, the restaurant of former National Guard general [[Gustavo Medina]] and [[Donald Barrios]]; and that his main business was Alpha II Rent-a-Car, with 24 locations.[^20] On September 26, 1988 Blandón applied in Miami for permanent residence, disclosing the 1986 arrest and answering no when asked if he had trafficked in narcotics.[^21] Meneses, reactivated as a DEA informant, met Blandón in Miami in September 1987 and in May 1989, when Blandón said he was laundering money on a small scale and expected the business to grow; in Los Angeles, a target drew a gun on Meneses saying Blandón had called him a police informer.[^22][^23] In April 1990 Meneses told DEA agent James Rivera that Blandón had asked for his help moving "very large quantities of cocaine from Central America to Florida," and he was reactivated on May 10, 1990.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón was secretly indicted on May 5, 1992, along with six others including his wife Chepita Blandón, for conspiring to distribute cocaine.[^1] On May 15, 1992, INS agent [[Robert Tellez]] asked him to come to the INS office to collect his green card, and DEA agents arrested him and his wife when he arrived.[^16] He had been buying wholesale quantities from suppliers and reselling to other wholesalers nationwide. He bragged on tape of selling between two and four tons of cocaine to L.A. dealers. The judge ordered him and his wife held without bail, declaring they posed "a threat to the health and moral fiber of the community."
|
||||
Webb wrote that Alpha II failed after a German tourist contract fell through and Chrysler withdrew a $1.5 million credit line, that the Colombian trafficker [[Humberto Cardona]] told him he had just sold 2,000 kilograms in Los Angeles, and that Blandón returned to cocaine, settled in a San Diego house owned by Guerra, reconnected with the Meneses family through Jose Gonzalez, and supplied about 425 kilograms, roughly $8.5 million at wholesale, to the Meneses family in 1990 and 1991.[^24] The Inspector General found that Blandón returned to Los Angeles in 1990, sold up to 25 kilograms at a time to dealers connected with Ross, and moved to San Diego in 1991 after running up a debt to his suppliers.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón's wife Chepita Blandón was identified by the [[DEA]] as being closely involved in his trafficking activities.
|
||||
### San Diego, 1990 to 1992
|
||||
|
||||
### U.S. Political Asylum
|
||||
The DEA in San Diego opened a case after learning that Blandón was trying to deal with John Arman, a trafficker cooperating with the agency; the case received task-force status in December 1990, and its application recorded that Blandón headed a criminal organization moving about 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine a year from Colombia and Bolivia through the Bahamas, [[Costa Rica]] or Nicaragua, with Suarez family cocaine from Bolivia and Ochoa family cocaine from the [[Medellin Cartel]]. The application named Meneses, Sandino and Moreno as leaders and did not mention the Contras.[^11] INS agent Robert Tellez wrote on February 15, 1991 that "this major cocaine traffickers [sic] may have had a degree of influence from the C.I.A.," which he later told the inspectors was an informant's rumor.[^11] On August 26, 1991 Customs agents stopped Guerra's car at the border with $117,040 in cash and money orders in it and Blandón as passenger; only Guerra was charged, and the case was moved to Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale.[^11] On December 9, 1991 Los Angeles police arrested Blandón with cash and a dollar bill holding white powder; the Los Angeles charges were dropped when the San Diego office asked, and the money was not returned.[^11] Webb quoted LAPD sergeant Ron Hodges, "I think they just let him run."[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón entered the United States on a business visa on June 17, 1979, and applied for asylum in Los Angeles on February 15, 1980. The INS denied the request on January 25, 1983; on June 27, 1983, he filed a new application before an immigration judge, who granted it on August 19, 1985, finding that he had "a well-founded fear of prosecution" if returned to Nicaragua. The earliest information on him in DEA files dated from March 1983, but the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that "the DEA had not conducted investigations of him before 1986."[^16] Gary Webb wrote that the DEA opened a NADDIS file on Blandón on May 24, 1983, after a confidential informant named him as a member of a cocaine trafficking organization.[^6] His attorney [[Brad Brunon|Bradley Brunon]] stated in court in 1992 that the DEA's knowledge of Blandón's drug dealing stretched back even further: "I have some 300 DEA-6 reports regarding Mr. Blandón, and the reports relate to activities between approximately 1981 and May 1992." In early 1984, while Blandón's asylum application was under review, the DEA learned from an informant that he was "the head" of his own cocaine distribution organization based in Los Angeles.[^6]
|
||||
A sealed indictment of May 5, 1992 charged Blandón, Chepita, Guerra, Armando Reyes, Mauricio Gonzales, Raul Vega and Eduardo Cardona with conspiring to distribute cocaine and with money laundering. O'Neale called it "a historic, no-dope conspiracy" whose lead defendant evaded every attempt to catch him with powder, including one in which he aborted a 125-kilogram deal hours before it closed after learning an informant had been arrested.[^11] DEA agents arrested Blandón and Chepita on May 15, 1992 when Tellez asked him to collect his green card; both were held without bail. The NADDIS database then carried a January 1987 informant allegation that Blandón planned to have three informants killed and another informant's statement that he had "killed 3 persons"; DEA agent Chuck Jones said he had not seen it and would not have acted on an informant's unsupported word.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
The same pattern occurred with Blandón's wife, Chepita. In early 1985 she was reported to the DEA as a "member of a cocaine distribution organization," and the agency opened a NADDIS file on her on March 15, 1985. Later that same year she was granted political asylum. Immigration experts noted that normally even the slightest hint of drug involvement results in deportation, and [[State Department]] policy requires checking with the DEA before approving asylum applications. When the [[Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General|Justice Department's Inspector General]] examined the Blandóns' immigration records, he found them "in disarray."[^6]
|
||||
### Plea, sentence and cooperation
|
||||
|
||||
### Move to Rialto and Business Fronts
|
||||
Blandón pleaded guilty on October 13, 1992 to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, which carried up to life and a $4 million fine, a ten-year minimum, and a presumptive guideline sentence of life; the Ninth Circuit later described the plea as to 125 kilograms.[^11][^25] O'Neale first said Blandón would have to "give the government the moon and stars," then, as Blandón recorded calls from jail and met targets under escort of ten to twelve agents, moved to ask for less. Judge Rudi Brewster sentenced him on December 20, 1993 to 48 months and five years of supervised release on the government's substantial-assistance motion; on September 16, 1994 O'Neale moved under Rule 35(b) to reduce it to time served as of September 19, 1994, 28 and a half months, citing his testimony before the grand jury in the Northern District of California against "a significant well-established drug trafficking organization" and the wish of Jones and Tellez to "enlist Mr. Blandon as a full-time, paid, informant."[^11] The Inspector General listed his cooperation: Guerra's guilty plea; the grand jury against [[Rafael Cornejo]] in San Francisco; a corrupt Customs inspector convicted; undercover introductions in other cases; and willingness to testify against a Bolivian cartel leader, who was convicted without him. Chepita's charges were dismissed in 1994 because the only evidence was uncorroborated informant testimony; Guerra received 30 months, Vega 18 months and Reyes probation.[^11] Jones called Blandón "a dream informant" and the Inspector General concluded the leniency "was based on nothing other than its assessment of his cooperation," finding no evidence of CIA intervention.[^11] He told a probation officer that his problems "stemmed from the Nicaraguan Contra Revolution," which the Inspector General judged an overstatement of his Contra commitment.[^11] Webb quoted Brunon as saying the Contras' cocaine "was arriving in the United States literally by the planeload"; Brunon told the Inspector General that his statement to Webb outlined only a "possibility" drawn from public information and from deputies' rumors that he considered "apocryphal."[^26][^8]
|
||||
|
||||
During the peak of his trafficking empire in 1984–85, Blandón moved his family from Northridge to a sprawling Spanish-style home in Rialto, [[San Bernardino]] County, some thirty miles outside Los Angeles. He withdrew $175,000 in cash from his bank account in Panama and gave it to Orlando Murillo, who purchased the house under his name to keep Blandón's name off the property rolls.[^6]
|
||||
### The green card and the payments
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón opened a restaurant called the Nicamex and bought a used car lot in nearby Fontana with an old college buddy, Sergio Guerra, a Mexican millionaire whose family owned major automobile franchises in Guadalajara. Guerra owned the last parking lot on the California side of the Mexican border in San Ysidro, valued at approximately $29 million in the early 1990s. These businesses served as fronts to launder drug money. The car lot, a favorite ploy among Nicaraguan traffickers, was especially useful: cars sold for $2,000 were declared as sold for $4,000, and the lot paid taxes on the inflated amount at a rate cheaper than any money launderer would charge, giving drug profits a legitimate pedigree.[^6]
|
||||
In October 1994 Tellez arranged for Blandón to receive permanent resident status although his felony conviction made him ineligible, after the DEA and O'Neale asked him to obtain travel documents so Blandón could work abroad. Tellez told the immigration examiner, Loren Montgomery, that Blandón knew people with CIA and Contra contacts, which he said was to speed the application; Montgomery and his supervisor said Tellez never disclosed the conviction. Tellez kept the judgment out of the alien file. The Inspector General concluded Tellez deliberately withheld the conviction and acted out of laziness, with no evidence of a bribe or outside direction; the INS moved to rescind the status on December 12, 1996. O'Neale told Ross's lawyers in February 1996 that Blandón "retains the permanent resident status that he had before his May 1992 arrest," which was wrong because of Tellez's report.[^21] Between November 29, 1994 and October 17, 1996 Blandón received 41 DEA payments totaling more than $166,000, including $80,000 for a sensitive case abroad that led to a seizure of cocaine and vessels, $40,000 for the Ross case and $5,000 for another.[^21] The Ninth Circuit recorded that Tellez was demoted.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
### Weapons Sales to Crack Dealers
|
||||
### The Ross sting and trial
|
||||
|
||||
Beginning in 1984, Blandón sold high-powered weapons to Ricky Ross and his associates, procured through Ronald Lister and his partner [[William Downing]] at the [[Mundy Security Group]] in Laguna Beach. Blandón gave Ross his first gun (a .22 pistol with a silencer) as a free gift, then began selling him an array of firearms. Ross described Blandón's inventory: "I mean, he sold what is called a Streetsweeper, the Thompsons...he sold Uzi's, he sold pistols, brand new pistols, .38, .357, any kind of pistol that you wanted...any kind of gun that you wanted, he got it for you." Ross and his fellow dealers bought more than a hundred guns from Blandón, who admitted selling Ross a .22 pistol, an Uzi machine pistol, and an Armalite AR-15 assault rifle, the civilian version of the military's M-16 - a weapon the Contras bought by the thousands.[^6]
|
||||
Beginning in October 1994, according to Webb, Blandón called and paged Ross, and Chepita pressed Ross to find buyers to cover a debt owed by Ross's associate Tony McDonald. On March 2, 1995, undercover agent Pedro Pena, with Blandón beside him, delivered a Chevrolet Blazer with 100 kilograms of cocaine to [[Leroy Brown|"Chico" Brown]] and Curtis James at Bonita Plaza Mall in exchange for about $170,000; Ross was arrested with them.[^27][^25] At Ross's March 1996 trial the court instructed the jury to accept Blandón's testimony "only with great caution," and the jury convicted Ross on March 19, 1996.[^25] The Ninth Circuit held on June 21, 2004 that the government's failure to disclose how Tellez obtained Blandón's green card, which would have shown that Tellez violated the law, did not prejudice Ross's entrapment defense.[^25]
|
||||
|
||||
When asked how a drug dealer knew arms merchants, Blandón replied: "Because I was in the Contra revolution." Lister admitted to the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] that he began acquiring weapons for Blandón between 1982 and 1983, selling him one or two guns a week including "assorted handguns, semiautomatic Uzi machine pistols, KG99 Tec Nine machine pistols, and possibly semi-automatic AK47's," as well as night vision devices.[^6]
|
||||
### Law enforcement and Webb's reporting
|
||||
|
||||
### Electronics Sales
|
||||
Webb wrote that in October 1995 Assistant U.S. Attorney [[David Hall]] warned him that publishing details about Blandón would endanger Blandón's life; that on October 19 DEA Special Agent in Charge [[Craig Chretien]], Jones and Judy Gustafson asked him to omit Blandón's DEA ties; and that Jones denied knowing of Blandón's Contra history until Webb said he held grand jury transcripts. Webb recorded that the DEA's public affairs office later proposed an interview with Meneses in exchange. Webb reported that O'Neale called Blandón before a grand jury "the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States"; the Inspector General wrote that it is not aware how Webb could have obtained a prosecutor's remarks before a grand jury, which are released only by court order.[^28][^11] In 1996 the CIA's Directorate of Operations told the court in the Ross case that it had located no relationship with Ross, Blandón, Meneses, Lister or Weekly, and the CIA Inspector General confirmed that statement from the records.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón also sold electronics equipment to cocaine dealers: walkie-talkies, pagers, police scanners, voice scramblers, cellular phones, and anti-eavesdropping equipment, all procured by Ronald Lister. Ross's crew carried police scanners in their cars during drug deliveries and used one in the counting house. During a 1987 raid, L.A. County Sheriff's Sergeant [[Robert Sobel]] complained that the dealers had "electronic police-detection systems, sophisticated weapons, better equipment than we have." An LAPD summary by Deputy Chief Glenn Levant listed "numerous 9-mm Uzies [sic] were seized, along with an AK-47 assault rifle, a fully automatic Mac-11 machine gun, a fully automatic machine gun complete with silencer, and state-of-the-art handguns, rifles and shotguns" at Ross-associated locations.[^6]
|
||||
### Associates and other allegations
|
||||
|
||||
### Rivalry with Torres Brothers
|
||||
Webb listed Blandón's network as Chepita, Lister, Corrales, Guerra and the Colombian supplier [[Aparicio Moreno]], whom Webb described as having reported ties to the FDN and the CIA and whom Blandón said Meneses introduced to him in 1985; the Inspector General records Blandón's statement that he and his associates thought a one-ton air delivery of Moreno's cocaine routed through Oklahoma "might be connected to the CIA because someone had placed a small FDN sticker somewhere on the airplane," which he called "just a rumor."[^29][^3] Webb added that Blandón had a partnership with Jairo Meneses in the 764 kilograms seized in Nicaragua in 1991 and owned hotels and casinos there with the Meneses family; the Inspector General's report mentions neither the hotels nor the 425-kilogram figure.[^29][^24]
|
||||
|
||||
As Blandón grew complacent in Rialto, drinking heavily, snorting cocaine, and refusing to leave his house, Ross began buying from the [[Torres Brothers]], Nicaraguan traffickers who had previously worked for Blandón. Ross used the competition to drive down prices from both suppliers. The other Nicaraguan dealers began calling Blandón "Chanchin," meaning "the fat pig," a nickname that turned up as an alias in his DEA files.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The rivalry turned deadly when Blandón, told by Chepita that she had an affair with one of the Torres brothers, hired a former Nicaraguan army officer to kill the man. The Torres brothers confirmed to police that Blandón "became enraged and hired a former military officer of the Nicaraguan army to kill him," but "apparently realized his wife had lied to him about the affair and called off the hit man." Blandón had also proposed that Ross set up a cocaine buy as an ambush, offering: "tell that motherfucker to bring it at such-and-such a place, and I'm going to have some guys there waiting and you keep the dope."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Credit Arrangements and Volume
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón arranged with his Colombian suppliers to give Ross large amounts of cocaine on credit - initially 20 to 25 kilos, worth approximately $1 million wholesale. Ross was purchasing 100 or more kilos per week from Blandón at the operation's peak. Ross used a South Central apartment as a counting house where money was sorted and wrapped using two or three counting machines running day and night. Blandón acknowledged the volume: "Those times, they were using two or three machines, counting machines, and they were counting day and night." If Ross was moving 150 kilos weekly, Blandón and the Torres brothers were sometimes sharing approximately $5.7 million per week in cash.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Relationship with Ricky Ross
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón was "Freeway" Ricky Ross's primary source of cocaine from approximately 1981-82 onward.[^1] Ross described Blandón as "almost like a godfather to me. He's the one who got me going." Ross stated that everyone he knew in the drug trade, he knew through Blandón: "He was. Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source."
|
||||
|
||||
Ross had no knowledge of Blandón's Contra connections. To Ross, Blandón was simply "a nice guy with a lot of cheap dope." When Webb informed Ross that Blandón had been working for the Contras, Ross responded: "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."
|
||||
|
||||
### Plea Deal and Government Employment
|
||||
|
||||
On October 13, 1992, five months after his arrest, Blandón entered a plea agreement and pleaded guilty to conspiracy.[^1][^16] Despite facing a minimum sentence of life plus a $4 million fine, he was sentenced on December 20, 1993, to forty-eight months and five years' probation, a reduction the government sought for his "substantial assistance."[^16] His wife's charges were dropped entirely when he agreed to become a DEA informant.
|
||||
|
||||
On September 16, 1994, Assistant U.S. Attorney [[LJ Oneale]] moved under Rule 35(b) to reduce the sentence to time served as of September 19, 1994, and to drop supervised release, allowing Blandón's immediate release after twenty-eight months. His affidavit said Blandón had testified before a grand jury in the Northern District of California against "a significant well-established drug trafficking organization," and that DEA agent Jones and Tellez wished "to enlist Mr. Blandon as a full-time, paid, informant after his release from prison."[^16] Tellez had written in a memorandum of February 15, 1991, during the investigation of Blandón's organization, that "This major cocaine traffickers [sic] may have had a degree of influence from the C.I.A."; he told the inspector general that it was a rumor from an informant, and that he had told an immigration examiner that Blandón knew people with CIA and Contra contacts only "to impress the examiner" and speed up Blandón's application.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón subsequently became the chief confidential informant in a DEA reverse sting operation that led to the arrest of Ricky Ross and others in [[San Diego]].
|
||||
|
||||
### Associates
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón's network included his wife Chepita Blandón; money launderer and weapons dealer Ronald Lister; cocaine distributor Henry Corrales; Mexican millionaire and money launderer Sergio Guerra; and [[Aparicio Moreno]], a Colombian supplier with reported ties to the FDN and CIA.[^2] He also had a partnership with Jairo Meneses involving 764 kilos of cocaine seized in Nicaragua in 1991, and owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua with the Meneses family. The Torres Brothers became his principal rivals for Ricky Ross's business. Weapons were procured through William Downing and the Mundy Security Group. He was vice president of Mundy Security Group Inc., a company incorporated by Ronald Lister in Laguna Beach.
|
||||
|
||||
### Law Enforcement Warnings
|
||||
|
||||
The Torres brothers told detective [[Jerry Guzzetta]] during 1986 debriefings that "Blandón is extremely dangerous because of his access to information" about law enforcement activity. They warned Guzzetta to "be extremely careful about releasing any information to other law enforcement agencies. . .because they were afraid that Blandón had somebody inside the police department or whatever that was feeding him information." The brothers reported Blandón was "working with an ex-Laguna Beach police officer by the name of Ronnie" (Ronald Lister) who "transported 100 kilos of cocaine to the Black market and has transported millions of dollars to Miami for Danilo Blandón." Once cash arrived in Florida, Orlando Murillo would launder it.[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contra Cocaine Arriving by the Planeload
|
||||
|
||||
According to Blandón's attorney Brad Brunon, the Contras' cocaine was arriving in the United States literally by the planeload. "The transportation channel got established and got filled up with cocaine rather quickly," Brunon said. "As I understood it, these large transports were coming back from delivering food and guns and humanitarian aid and things like that and they were just loading them up with cocaine and bringing them back. I think 1,000-kilo shipments were not unheard of." Former Meneses aide [[Enrique Miranda]] confirmed that Meneses's drug-laden planes were flying out of [[Ilopango Airbase|Ilopango Air Force Base]] in El Salvador, which [[Oliver North]] had selected as the hub for his Contra air force. North's operatives worked there "practically unfettered," according to Iran-Contra prosecutor [[Lawrence Walsh]].[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### 1986 Raid and Release
|
||||
|
||||
On October 27, 1986, [[LASD Major Violators]] detective [[Thomas Gordon]] executed search warrants at fourteen locations across Southern California. Gordon's twenty-one-page affidavit described "a large scale cocaine distributing organization" of "well over 100 persons" and linked Blandón to the FDN, writing that "money and arms generated by this organization comes through the sale of cocaine." At Blandón's home, deputies found small amounts of cocaine, an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun, and pay-owe sheets. Blandón spontaneously confessed: "The cocaine is mine." But most raid locations came up dry; suspects appeared to have been forewarned. The CIA's Los Angeles office sent an "Immediate Director" cable asking for traces on Blandón, Ronald Lister, and Norwin Meneses.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
No charges were filed. The seized documents (including bank records showing $9 million in deposits marked "U.S. Treasury/State" and a note from Blandón's sister about Contra corruption) disappeared from sheriff's evidence storage. Federal agents copied over 1,000 pages that subsequently vanished. On December 10, 1986, Blandón was told no charges would be filed. The next day he hired an immigration attorney and applied for permanent residency, disclosing his arrest but writing: "No complaint filed. They exonerated me 12-10-86." The attorney he hired, John M. Garrisi, was under federal indictment for immigration fraud and was later convicted and disbarred.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### FBI Surveillance and Operation Perico
|
||||
|
||||
After the October 1986 raids, Blandón and Ross continued buying and selling millions of dollars worth of cocaine every week, even as the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] watched. Records show Blandón was under periodic surveillance through the first half of 1987. Former L.A. County deputy district attorney Susan Bryant-Deason, who had been cross-designated as a special assistant U.S. attorney, told police in 1996 that she met several times with federal agents trying to keep the Blandón investigation alive, but the agents "were frustrated and wanted to do something but had insufficient evidence."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
In early January 1987, a series of meetings took place in Los Angeles between Blandón, Norwin Meneses, the CIA operative known as "Roberto," and FDN official [[Ivan Torres]]. The meetings were part of the Costa Rican DEA office's secret "Operation Perico," conducted without the knowledge of [[Douglas Aukland|FBI agent Aukland]], who was leading the federal investigation. During these meetings, Torres boasted that the Majors' raids had not interfered with cocaine sales to "Los Angeles black organizations" and had merely caused management changes.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Move to Miami
|
||||
|
||||
Despite telling Ross nothing would change, Blandón had decided to leave Los Angeles. The raids had blown his cover, his best customer was under siege, and his wife Chepita was showing signs of a nervous breakdown. "When I went to Miami to visit my family, the doctor told me. My wife was sick from the nerves. . .The doctor called me and told me I have to change from L.A. 'If you want to have a wife. . .change from that place, [or] your wife will be in a psychiatric hospital.'" His used car business had been ruined by the publicity from the raids. After being told in December 1986 that no criminal charges would result, Blandón quietly closed up shop, sold his car lot and restaurants, put his house up for sale, and sent Chepita and their daughters ahead to Miami to stay with her uncle, Orlando Murillo. By the time he was ready to go, he was packing $1.6 million in cash.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Handoff to Roger Sandino
|
||||
|
||||
"I was prepared to change my life," Blandón testified. But he did not let the cocaine ring go to waste. "I handed it to the Nicaraguans. I introduced my customers to them and they continued doing the business," using his old contacts, his supplier, and his buyers. Blandón's successors were [[Roger Sandino]] and Jose "Chinito" Gonzalez, both Meneses associates. After Blandón moved, Ross called him in Miami to place orders, and Sandino's partner Gonzalez handled pickups and deliveries. Blandón continued as middleman, solving problems, settling disputes, and collecting commissions. "They used to be calling me all the time if they have some problem. I was the middleman, you see, like, I was making something."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Miami Business Empire
|
||||
|
||||
After arriving in Miami, Blandón invested his L.A. drug profits in a string of companies, sometimes in partnership with exiled Nicaraguan judge [[Jose Macario|Jose Macario Estrada]], a family friend who was also his immigration lawyer. Both men became directors of Mex-US Import and Export Inc., along with accountant Rene Gonzalez of the Peat Marwick & Mitchell office in Caracas, Blandón's Mexican college friend Sergio Guerra, and Panamanian banker Jose Fernando Soto, the longtime representative of the Swiss Bank Corp. in Panama and an old friend of Orlando Murillo. Blandón also bought his wife a business, Pupi's Children's Boutique, which Chepita ran from a shopping mall in Sweetwater.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón bought into La Parrilla, a Nicaraguan restaurant co-founded by former National Guard major general [[Gustavo Medina]] and FDN supporter [[Donald Barrios]]. Henry Corrales, Blandón's former cocaine distributor, also owned a piece. The elegant restaurant became a hangout for Contra leaders and was the site of pro-Contra demonstrations and seminars. The [[Miami Herald]] named it "the best Nicaraguan restaurant in Dade [County]" in 1987 and awarded it four stars.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón's main investment was Alpha II Rent-a-Car, which began with an office outside [[Miami International Airport]] and spread to twenty-four other locations in southern Florida. The business was so successful he became an authorized outlet for Chrysler Corporation and [[General Motors]] vehicles.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Continued Drug Oversight
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón denied he was personally selling drugs after moving to Miami but admitted overseeing the drug sales of his successors. "I knew everything," he said. Because of the way the cocaine business worked, he had to vouch for Roger Sandino and Jose Gonzalez, which meant mediating disputes between Ricky Ross's crew, the Nicaraguans, and their Colombian suppliers. "They were calling me all the time. 'Hey, the order didn't come with the money. The order didn't come with the merchandise.'" Blandón agreed that Ross's replacements "weren't taking care of the business" and said there were frequent feuds with Meneses's men.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón continued pursuing Ross, calling two or three times a month to lure him back into the cocaine trade. In the fall of 1987, Blandón called from Detroit and offered Ross fifteen kilos. Blandón and Sandino visited Ross in Cincinnati, and Ross wired money to Florida in Chepita's name, which Blandón said was paid to Sandino. Ross also met with Blandón and a Colombian named Tony in [[New York City]] to place cocaine orders. "He kept saying he could get me some stuff for really cheap and we could make a lot of money with it in Cincinnati," Ross said.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Pressure on Ross and DEA Sting
|
||||
|
||||
After Ross's release from prison in August 1993, Blandón called him out of the blue, having seen him on television. Chepita followed up, inviting Ross to dinner and pressuring him to find someone to sell drugs to repay a debt owed by Ross's associate Tony McDonald. Ross refused repeatedly. "I told him basically, 'You know what I'm going through right now, you know, and I'm trying to stay clean.'"[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
In October 1994, Ross asked Blandón about buying cocaine, but negotiations stalled because Ross had no money. Blandón kept calling and paging him. In February 1995, [[Leroy Brown|"Chico" Brown]], to whom Ross owed $30,000, proposed putting up the money for a deal with Blandón. Ross agreed to make the introduction. In late February and early March 1995, Ross, Brown, and Brown's associate Curtis James met Blandón and a Colombian associate in National City and Chula Vista, south of San Diego. On March 2, 1995, at the Bonita Plaza Mall, Brown handed over $169,445 and the Colombian handed over keys to a Chevy Blazer containing 100 kilos of cocaine. The DEA, which had been running Blandón as an informant, had booby-trapped the vehicle. Federal agents swarmed the parking lot. Ross was captured after a brief foot chase. Blandón served as the chief confidential informant in the case.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
### Return to Drug Dealing and San Diego
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón's Alpha II Rent-a-Car business suffered when a deal to rent 3,000 cars to German tourists fell through, and Chrysler yanked his $1.5 million credit line. He lost $300,000 in three months and the lender filed to foreclose. Colombian trafficker [[Humberto Cardona]], who was supplying Blandón's Nicaraguan associates in South Central, suggested he return to cocaine trafficking, telling Blandón he had just sold 2,000 kilos in L.A. Blandón put Alpha II into bankruptcy and moved to San Diego, settling in a house owned by Sergio Guerra.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Blandón reassembled his cocaine network, reconnecting with the Meneses family through Jose Gonzalez in San Francisco. Between 1990 and 1991, he estimated he provided about 425 kilos of cocaine to the Meneses family, roughly $8.5 million at wholesale. He also reconnected with the Torres Brothers in L.A. DEA informant John Arman infiltrated Blandón's circle, secretly recording conversations about cocaine deals, international suppliers, and Blandón's political connections in Nicaragua. Blandón boasted on tape: "Yeah, I know all the people from the government. They like you, see?"[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
Despite intensive DEA surveillance, Blandón evaded arrest repeatedly. In August 1991, he was caught at the border with $114,000 in money orders in Sergio Guerra's car, but only Guerra was charged. In December 1991, an LAPD strike force arrested Blandón with $14,000 and cocaine, but the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego had the charges dropped to protect the DEA investigation. LAPD sergeant Ron Hodges, who had his own case against Blandón, said: "I think they just let him run." Blandón was finally secretly indicted on May 5, 1992.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### DEA Protection and the Webb Investigation
|
||||
|
||||
The Justice Department went to considerable lengths to protect Blandón's status as an informant. In October 1995, Assistant U.S. Attorney [[David Hall]] contacted [[Gary Webb]] to warn that publishing details about Blandón would endanger his life and compromise ongoing investigations. The DEA's San Diego office arranged a meeting where [[Craig Chretien|SAC Craig Chretien]] and Blandón's handlers [[Chuck Jones]] and Judy Gustafson pressed Webb to omit Blandón's DEA ties. Jones firmly denied any knowledge of Blandón's Contra drug history, but when Webb revealed he possessed grand jury transcripts proving Blandón had testified about it, Jones inadvertently confirmed the DEA knew. Blandón's case was a "no-dope conspiracy," as [[LAPD]] detective Ron Hodges described it, with no physical evidence of actual drug dealing, only taped conversations with informants. Brunon pointed out that his client had no criminal record and the government had nothing more than loose talk.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Trial Testimony in the Ross Case
|
||||
|
||||
At Ross's 1996 trial in San Diego, Blandón testified for the prosecution wearing tinted aviator glasses and a dark suit, escorted by U.S. marshals. Prosecutor LJ Oneale led Blandón through testimony in which he admitted Meneses had recruited him to sell cocaine for the Contras but progressively shifted the date he claimed to have stopped. O'Neale had initially said the split occurred in 1986, then revised it to 1984 before trial, and by the end of his testimony Blandón was insisting he quit in 1982, before he had met Ross. Government documents showed Blandón was still selling cocaine for the Contras through 1986.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
When defense attorney [[Alan Fenster]] cross-examined Blandón about his Contra fundraising, Blandón began to say: "When we raise money for the Contra revolution, we received orders from the," then paused, looked at O'Neale, and said "from another people." Because of the court order prohibiting CIA testimony, Fenster was unable to pursue the admission. Blandón also confessed under cross-examination that he did not know whether the Contras had received $19 million in CIA aid, contradicting his claim that he quit because the organization had sufficient funds. After the trial, Blandón admitted to the [[Senate Select Committee on Intelligence|Senate Intelligence Committee]] and the CIA Inspector General that his Contra contributions continued through 1985.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The trial court instructed the jury to accept Blandón's testimony only with "great caution." The government had not disclosed the circumstances in which INS agent Robert Tellez had obtained permanent resident status for him, which would have shown that Tellez violated the law in processing his file. The [[Ninth Circuit]] held in 2004 that the omission did not prejudice Ross's entrapment defense.[^17]
|
||||
Webb wrote that Blandón's electronics, procured by Lister, included walkie-talkies, pagers, police scanners, voice scramblers and anti-eavesdropping equipment; that during a 1987 raid on Ross associates Los Angeles County Sheriff's sergeant [[Robert Sobel]] complained that the dealers had "better equipment than we have"; that Blandón proposed to Ross that Ross set up a cocaine buy as an ambush, offering "you keep the dope"; and that Ross also bought police-raid warnings from him.[^9] Webb wrote that Meneses's later aide [[Enrique Miranda]] said Meneses's drug planes flew out of [[Ilopango Airbase]] in El Salvador, the hub [[Oliver North]] used for his Contra air force, where, according to Iran-Contra prosecutor [[Lawrence Walsh]], North's operatives worked "practically unfettered"; the Inspector General found Miranda's account second-hand and uncorroborated.[^26][^30]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know"
|
||||
[^2]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters
|
||||
[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 2: "We were the first"
|
||||
[^4]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty"
|
||||
[^5]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 8: "A million hits is not enough"
|
||||
[^6]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 10: "Teach a man a craft and he's liable to practice it"
|
||||
[^7]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 12: "This guy talks to God"
|
||||
[^8]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 14: "It's bigger than I can handle"
|
||||
[^9]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 18: "We bust our ass and the government's involved"
|
||||
[^10]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 20: "It is a sensitive matter"
|
||||
[^11]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 21: "I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope"
|
||||
[^12]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 24: "They're gonna forget I was a drug dealer"
|
||||
[^13]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 23: "He had the backing of a superpower"
|
||||
[^14]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 25: "Things are moving all around us"
|
||||
[^15]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 26: "That matter, if true, would be classified"
|
||||
[^16]: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General. *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions.* December 1997, chapter II and appendix E. https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/
|
||||
[^17]: *United States v. Ross,* 372 F.3d 1097, 1101-1102 (9th Cir. 2004), No. 02-50226. https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/786678/united-states-v-ricky-d-ross/
|
||||
[^1]: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions* (December 1997, released July 1998), Chapter II (Oscar Danilo Blandon), sections A-D, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p1.htm
|
||||
[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter IV, section B (OIG investigation regarding support of the Contras by Blandon and Meneses), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch04p2.htm
|
||||
[^3]: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, *Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (96-0143-IG)*, Volume I: The California Story, January 29, 1998, Findings (Ross, Blandon, Meneses), https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine/findings1.html
|
||||
[^4]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^5]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 2: "We were the first." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^6]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter IV, section A (sources of the allegations), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch04p1.htm
|
||||
[^7]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 26: "That matter, if true, would be classified." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^8]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, section E (Los Angeles Sheriff's Department investigation of Blandon), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p2.htm
|
||||
[^9]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 10: "Teach a man a craft and he's liable to practice it." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^10]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter III (Norwin Meneses), sections A-E, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p1.htm
|
||||
[^11]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, section K (the 1992 San Diego prosecution of Blandon), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p6.htm
|
||||
[^12]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 8: "A million hits is not enough." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^13]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter VI, section C (the roles of Ross and Blandon in the spread of crack), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch06p2.htm
|
||||
[^14]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 14: "It's bigger than I can handle." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^15]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 18: "We bust our ass and the government's involved." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^16]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, section F (initiation of the federal OCDETF case), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p3.htm
|
||||
[^17]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, section G (the 1987 Los Angeles OCDETF investigation), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p4.htm
|
||||
[^18]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 20: "It is a sensitive matter." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^19]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, sections H-J (closure, transfer and assessment of the OCDETF case), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p5.htm
|
||||
[^20]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 21: "I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^21]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter II, sections L-N (Blandon's green card, the green cards of his wife and daughter, DEA payments), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p7.htm
|
||||
[^22]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter III, sections F-G ("David Morrison," alleged DEA corruption, DEA use of Meneses as an informant), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p2.htm
|
||||
[^23]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter III, sections H-I (the 1989 indictment and post-indictment activities), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p3.htm
|
||||
[^24]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 23: "He had the backing of a superpower." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^25]: *United States v. Ross*, 372 F.3d 1097 (9th Cir. June 21, 2004), No. 02-50226, https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2004/06/21/0250226.pdf
|
||||
[^26]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 12: "This guy talks to God." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^27]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 24: "They're gonna forget I was a drug dealer." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^28]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 25: "Things are moving all around us." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^29]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^30]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter VII (Enrique Miranda-Jaime), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch07.htm
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -3,53 +3,81 @@ title: Enrique Bermudez
|
|||
aliases:
|
||||
- Enrique Bermudez
|
||||
- Enrique Bermúdez
|
||||
- Enrique Bermudez Varela
|
||||
- Enrique Bermúdez Varela
|
||||
- Colonel Bermudez
|
||||
- Commandante 380
|
||||
- Comandante 380
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
category: "Military"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- KeyFigure
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Contra
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- Nicaragua
|
||||
- CIADrugTrafficking
|
||||
- Assassination
|
||||
- 1980s
|
||||
- DarkAllianceInvestigation
|
||||
summary: "Supreme military commander of the FDN and former Somoza military attaché in Washington who was hired by the CIA in 1980 to reassemble the National Guard into a Contra fighting force, and was murdered in Managua in 1991."
|
||||
summary: "FDN military commander and former Somoza attaché in Washington, named in two drug allegations the CIA recorded and never substantiated, shot dead in Managua on February 16, 1991."
|
||||
born: 1932-12-11
|
||||
died: 1991-02-16
|
||||
location: "León, Nicaragua"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Nicaraguan National Guard]]"
|
||||
start: 1952
|
||||
end: 1979
|
||||
role: "officer, Corps of Engineers; defense attaché in Washington 1976 to 1979"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[FDN]]"
|
||||
start: 1981
|
||||
end: 1990-02
|
||||
role: "military commander (Chief of Military Affairs from February 1984)"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Legion of September 15]]"
|
||||
start: 1981
|
||||
role: "chief of the military arm of ADREN"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
---
|
||||
Enrique Bermúdez "Commandante 380" was the supreme military commander of the [[FDN]], the largest [[Contras|Contra]] faction.[^3] A former military attaché for the [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]] regime in [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]], he was hired by the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] in 1980 to reassemble Somoza's scattered [[Nicaraguan National Guard|National Guard]] brigades into a fighting force.
|
||||
Enrique Bermúdez Varela, known as "Comandante 380," was the military commander of the [[FDN]], the largest [[Contras|Contra]] force, from its founding until his removal in February 1990, and was shot dead in a hotel parking lot in [[Managua]] on February 16, 1991.[^1] The Central Intelligence Agency's Inspector General recorded two reports of drug trafficking involving him, neither of which said he took part; the Justice Department's Inspector General found no evidence contradicting the Contra leaders' denials that they knew drug money was coming to the movement; and [[Gary Webb]], naming [[Norwin Meneses]], wrote that Bermúdez was a close friend of Meneses who reportedly dealt arms and cocaine with him.[^1][^2][^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### Contra Leadership
|
||||
### Career in the Guard
|
||||
|
||||
Bermúdez commanded the FDN throughout the Contra war and was a close friend of the [[Norwin Meneses|Meneses]] family. He reportedly trafficked in arms and [[Cocaine]] with Norwin Meneses. [[Dennis Ainsworth]], a [[San Francisco]] Contra supporter, told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] in 1987 that he had discovered Meneses and Bermúdez were dealing arms and drugs together.[^1]
|
||||
Bermúdez served in the [[Nicaraguan National Guard]] Corps of Engineers from 1952 to 1979 and studied at the [[U.S. Army School of the Americas]], the Army Command and General Staff College and the [[Inter-American Defense College]]. He was Nicaragua's defense attaché in Washington from 1976 to 1979 and was, the CIA's Inspector General recorded, openly critical of the [[Anastasio Somoza|Somoza]] government and its general staff.[^1] Webb wrote that Bermúdez was deputy commander of a Nicaraguan infantry company sent to support the 1965 [[United States]] intervention in the [[Dominican Republic]], that he had been in the United States since 1975, and that American officials considered him one of six Guard officers to head the force in the regime's last days and a safe choice because he spent the war in Washington and could not be blamed for its abuses. Webb wrote that after Somoza fell he delivered Newsweek magazines for a living.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Earlier Career
|
||||
### The FDN
|
||||
|
||||
Before the revolution, Bermúdez served in the Nicaraguan National Guard under Somoza.[^4] In 1965 he was deputy commander of an infantry company Somoza sent to support a [[United States|U.S.]]-led invasion of the [[Dominican Republic]] to suppress a leftist political movement.
|
||||
Webb wrote that Somoza's cousin Luis Pallais Debayle visited Bermúdez to gauge his interest in leading a resistance, that Major General Charles E. Boyd of the U.S. Air Force then invited him to the [[Pentagon]] and said he had a friend at the CIA who wished to speak to him, and that by mid-1980 Bermúdez had moved to [[Miami]] and was on the CIA payroll; an American official told the journalist Sam Dillon that "he fit the profile. He was malleable, controllable, docile."[^4] The CIA's Inspector General traced the organizational record: Bermúdez was identified in the first half of 1980 as "War Chief" of the Democratic Armed Force; in spring 1981 he was chief of the military arm of the Nicaraguan Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ADREN), the [[Legion of September 15]]; in September 1981 ADREN merged with the Nicaraguan Democratic Union to form the FDN. He was displaced as chief of staff in late 1982 and became "Political-Military Coordinator" of the directorate while remaining the de facto leader of the military organization; in February 1984 the FDN's command was reorganized with [[Adolfo Calero]] as commander in chief and Bermúdez as Chief of Military Affairs. He was ousted by the Army of the Nicaraguan Resistance's northern general staff in February 1990.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Bermúdez had been in the U.S. since 1975, first as a student attending courses on subversion and counterinsurgency at the [[Inter-American Defense College]] in Washington and later as the Nicaraguan government's liaison to the American military. The Americans considered him one of six Guardia officers they recommended to head the National Guard during the final days of the Somoza regime. The [[State Department]] considered Bermúdez a safe choice because he had spent most of the revolution in Washington and could not be held responsible for the Guardia's human rights violations. Somoza picked someone else. When the Somoza government collapsed, Bermúdez began a new career as a truck driver, delivering Newsweek magazines.[^4]
|
||||
Webb wrote that in 1981 Bermúdez visited the Los Angeles group around [[Danilo Blandon|Danilo Blandón]], gave a pep talk and asked it to adopt the FDN's colors and flag; Blandón told the Justice Department the same.[^4][^5] Blandón also told the inspectors that in 1982 he and Meneses met Bermúdez in Honduras, where Bermúdez said that the Contras were short of money and "the end justifies the means," and that in 1983 Bermúdez told Contra supporters in the United States that the cause no longer needed their money because "the train is running."[^2] Blandón said he did not believe Bermúdez knew they sold drugs and that Bermúdez never asked anyone to raise money that way.[^6] In the Los Angeles case, the informant LA CI-1 told the Justice Department that Meneses cultivated Bermúdez to use the relationship for his own shipments, that he had no information that Bermúdez was involved in drugs, and that Meneses "tried to position himself to help the Contra movement, but little came of his efforts."[^2]
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### Recruitment by the CIA
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### Meneses and the allegations
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Somoza's cousin, Luis Pallais Debayle, visited Bermúdez to gauge his interest in leading a resistance force. Soon after, Major General Charles E. Boyd, a top U.S. Air Force official, invited Bermúdez to the [[Pentagon]] to discuss ideas. Boyd told him he had a friend at the CIA who was interested in speaking with him. By mid-1980 Bermúdez had moved to [[Miami]] and was on the CIA payroll.[^4] He began traveling widely, gauging the sentiment of vanquished National Guardsmen hiding in the U.S. and [[Central America]] and reporting findings to his CIA handlers.
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Meneses said he had known Bermúdez since Bermúdez was a lieutenant and that his brother [[Edmundo Meneses]] had been Bermúdez's friend since childhood; Webb quoted him that way and wrote that Meneses became Bermúdez's "intelligence and security adviser" in California.[^7] [[Dennis Ainsworth]], a San Francisco Contra supporter, told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] in 1987 that he had learned Meneses and Bermúdez were dealing arms and drugs together.[^8] [[Renato Pena]], the FDN's self-described representative in northern California, told the Justice Department he was present when Meneses telephoned Bermúdez in Honduras and heard Bermúdez ask for silencers (which Meneses obtained in Los Angeles), crossbows and other military equipment; Meneses would bring back bulletins and communiques from Bermúdez that Pena put in newsletters.[^2] Meneses told the CIA's Inspector General that Bermúdez had asked him to recruit Nicaraguans and was "very strict and did not want anyone involved in drugs"; Calero told the Justice Department that Bermúdez told him Meneses had visited the Contras' first Honduran camp and given the troops a crossbow.[^6][^2] Pena also said Bermúdez must have been a CIA agent because "all Latin American military attachés" were recruited by the agency, and that Meneses told him Bermúdez knew of the drug dealing; the Inspector General found that Pena "has said different things to different people at different times" and that the CIA connection he asserted rested on nothing but the chain of Meneses to Bermúdez to the CIA.[^2] Meneses's former associate [[Enrique Miranda]] told the Justice Department that Meneses told him in 1981 that Calero and Bermúdez knew of his arrangement; the Inspector General found everything Miranda said was second-hand.[^9] Tony Navarro, the FDN's San Francisco representative from 1986, said he thought Bermúdez was "straight" but did not really know.[^2]
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A U.S. official later told journalist Sam Dillon: "He fit the profile. He was malleable, controllable, docile."[^4]
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### What the CIA recorded
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According to Boyd, the CIA "put Bermúdez in touch" with the [[Legion of September 15]] in [[Guatemala]]. He also co-commanded the Legion along with [[Ricardo Lau|Ricardo "El Chino" Lau]]. In 1981, Bermúdez visited [[Danilo Blandon|Danilo Blandón]]'s FDN group in [[Los Angeles]], giving a pep talk and asking them to adopt the FDN colors and flag.[^4]
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A September 1981 CIA cable to headquarters reported that Bermúdez had advised the ADREN leadership against smuggling drugs into the United States, but that the leadership had decided to do so to finance its operations and that an initial effort had been made in July 1981 when an ADREN member carried cocaine to Miami on a commercial flight. The Inspector General noted that Bermúdez was ADREN's military chief but that nothing indicated he was directly involved. The report went to the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command and ambassadors in Central America on September 14, 1981, and as an intelligence report titled "ADREN Operations to Smuggle Narcotics Into the U.S. to Finance Its Anti-Sandinista Activities" to the DEA, FBI, Customs Service, Treasury and intelligence community agencies on October 28, 1981. In February 1982 headquarters answered a name trace by stating that Bermúdez "is not associated with the 'renegade' 15th of September Legion members who are probably using their acquaintance with him as a means to gain some respectability"; the same cable described the Legion as engaged in criminal activities including drug smuggling.[^1]
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[[Renato Pena|Renato Peña]] Cabrera, the FDN's San Francisco representative, told federal investigators that he was present "on many occasions" when Meneses telephoned Bermúdez in Honduras. "Meneses told Pena of Bermúdez's requests for such things as gun silencers (which Meneses obtained in Los Angeles), cross bows, and other military equipment for the Contras." Meneses would also bring back military information, bulletins, and communiques from Bermúdez that Peña put into newsletters.[^5]
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In February 1988 a cable reported that a Nicaraguan exile had alleged at a Miami meeting, held to invite former National Guardsmen to return under a Sandinista amnesty, that Bermúdez, Calero, Aristides Sanchez and another person were all involved in drug smuggling. The exile offered no substantiation and was characterized by both a United States law enforcement source and the CIA as mentally unstable and, in the cable's words, as a swindler with a reputation as a drug dealer in Nicaragua; the CIA forwarded the report to the FBI on February 9, 1988. The Inspector General found no record that either allegation was reported to Congress.[^1] Calero told the Justice Department's inspectors that he was never aware of drug trafficking by the Contras and that it was "preposterous" to suggest any United States official asked the FDN to engage in it.[^2] The CIA's Central American Task Force chief [[Alan Fiers]] testified to the Iran-Contra committees on August 5, 1987 that drug trafficking by Contra forces "is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people"; he also said, "We knew that everybody around Pastora was involved in cocaine."[^10]
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### Death
|
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Bermúdez was murdered in [[Managua]] in 1991. The slaying has never been solved.[^2]
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On February 16, 1991, the CIA's Inspector General recorded, Bermúdez was assassinated in Managua, and speculation was widespread that Sandinista supporters killed him.[^1] Webb wrote that the slaying has never been solved; the Justice Department's report places the killing in Honduras, which is inconsistent with the CIA's account of Managua.[^3][^2]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know"
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[^2]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters
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[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Glossary of Organizations and Locations
|
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[^4]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 2: "We were the first"
|
||||
[^5]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty"
|
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[^1]: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, *Report of Investigation (96-0143-IG)*, Volume II: The Contra Story, October 8, 1998, section on Northern Front Contras, https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine2/north.html
|
||||
[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter IV, section B (OIG investigation regarding support of the Contras by Blandon and Meneses), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch04p2.htm
|
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[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^4]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 2: "We were the first." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^5]: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions* (December 1997, released July 1998), Chapter II (Oscar Danilo Blandon), sections A-D, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p1.htm
|
||||
[^6]: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, *Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (96-0143-IG)*, Volume I: The California Story, January 29, 1998, Findings (Ross, Blandon, Meneses), https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine/findings1.html
|
||||
[^7]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 3: "The brotherhood of military minds." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^8]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know." Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^9]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter VII (Enrique Miranda-Jaime), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch07.htm
|
||||
[^10]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, *Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy* (the Kerry report), December 1988, p. 38, quoting the August 5, 1987 testimony of the CIA Central American Task Force chief before the Iran-Contra Committees, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras
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