The Mafia, CIA & Barry Seal
Larry-Jennie
The Mafia, CIA & George Bush
By Pete Brewton
S.P.I. Books, 1992
Pg. 154-160
There was something more to Herman K. Beebe than just the drinking, the
skirt chasing, the business wheeling and dealing, the La Costa hangout, the
Teamsters, Carlos Marcello and the Mafia.
There were the helicopters for the CIA agent in Guatemala who was training
Contras in Belize; there was Gilbert Dozier, the former Louisiana
agriculture commissioner serving time for extortion and bribery, who was
going to turn state's evidence against Beebe until President Reagan pardoned
him at the request of CIA Director William Casey," there was Beebe's
financing the establishment of Palmer National Bank in Washington, D.C.,
which was helping funnel money to the Contras three blocks from the White
House; and there was E. Trine Starnes, Jr., one of the biggest borrowers at
Beebe-controlled S&Ls and one of the biggest private donors to the Contras.
But first there was Barry Seal and the C-4 explosives in a Shreveport
warehouse destined for anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico.
Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal - "El Gordo" - the fat man, also known as
"Thunder Thighs," was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Called the world's
greatest pilot, he was at least the youngest ever to captain a Boeing 747,
at the age of twenty-six. But several years later he turned to the Dark Side
of the Force: He was caught dealing with Mafia associates and CIA operatives
in one of the most bizarre and inexplicable criminal cases on record.
It went down this way:
On July 1, 1972, Seal was taking some sick leave from his job as a captain
flying 707s and 747s out of New York to Europe for Trans World Airlines. As
he walked out of his motel room near the New Orleans International Airport,
he was arrested by federal agents and charged with violating the Mutual
Security Act of 1954, which prohibited the exportation of weapons without
the permission of the U.S. State Department.
Also involved in the plot and arrested that day were eight other individuals
in Shreveport, Louisiana, New Orleans and Eagle Pass, Texas. A DC-4 that
Seal had recently purchased in Miami was seized at the Shreveport Regional
Airport. On board were 13,500 pounds of C-4 explosives, 7,000 feet of
explosive primer cord, 2,600 electric blasting caps and 25 electrical
detonators. The explosives, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in
Louisiana, were destined for Cuban exiles in Mexico, who were going to use
them in an effort to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
Arrested in New Orleans along with Seal was a man from Brooklyn, New York,
named Murray Morris Kessler. Kessler was the key middle man in the deal. He
was the one who agreed to sell the explosives to the Cubans and then
arranged for the transportation.
Kessler, who had six previous criminal convictions and was awaiting trial in
New York on income-tax fraud when he was arrested, was well known to the
Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force. He was a friend and business
associate of Emmanuel "Mannie" Gambino, a member of the Gambino Mafia crime
family and nephew of Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambino family.
Kessler and Mannie Gambino were partners in Neptune's Nuggets, a Long Island
frozen stuffed-seafood packaging firm that had been criticized in Newsday
articles for having a product that was extremely low in seafood and
extremely high in bacteria. About a month before Kessler was arrested in the
explosives scheme, Mannie Gambino dropped out of sight. Gambino, reported by
Jonathan Kwitny in Vicious Circles to be a loan shark, had been murdered.
The man who brought Kessler into the scheme was just as interesting as the
mob associate from Brooklyn. He was Richmond C. Harper, a millionaire banker
and meat-packing plant owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, a small town on the Rio
Grande between Laredo and Del Rio. After he was charged in the conspiracy,
Harper told reporters, "I do know Murray Kessler. He is a friend of mine.
And I have loaned him my airplane occasionally when he is down in this part
of the world. I don't know what business he is in. To be truthful, I really
don't."
In a statement Seal made after the trial, he said that the "request for arms
and ammunition was brought across the border to a rancher/ banker by the
name of Mr. Richmond Harper in Eagle Pass, Texas, who had very deep ties
right into the White House." One of those people in Washington close to
Harper was Myles J. Ambrose, the U.S. Customs Commissioner, who at that time
was also in charge of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, the predecessor of the
Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose would come to visit Harper and go
hunting with him on his ranch in Mexico, according to a former Customs
official under Ambrose: "We tried to warn him [Ambrose]. Tell him that this
guy [Harper] is bad. He wouldn't listen." Ambrose's visits to Harper were
also discovered in 1976 by the House banking subcommittee investigating the
Texas rent-a-bank scandal.
Ambrose resigned his position in November 1972, apparently after learning
that Harper was going to be indicted in the case. Harper was indicted the
next month.
(One of Ambrose's running buddies was Jack Caulfield, a White House
undercover spy and aide to John Ehrlichman, and one of the conceptual
fathers of Richard Nixon's White House Plumbers, the leak-pluggers who
turned to perpetrating dirty campaign tricks.)
In addition to the scheme to sell explosives to anti-Castro Cubans, Harper
had also been observed by Customs agents flying arms and ammunition to
Shreveport, and earlier to Alexandria, Louisiana. It may be just a
coincidence, but Herman K. Beebe moved from Alexandria to Shreveport in
1971.
In a written statement after the trial, Seal said that "Flores [one of the
defendants] contacted Richmond Harper, who contacted alleged Mafia
connections in New York, who contacted a representative of theirs in
Louisiana, who contacted me, Adler B. Seal, for the contract for the
flying."
This statement is important because it shows Seal - for the first time that
I am aware of - admitting to a connection to the Mafia. Was it Beebe's
doing?
The possibility that it was increases with three additional pieces of
information. One, the warehouse where the explosives were stored in
Shreveport was owned by Beebe, according to a private investigator and a
Customs official who is familiar with the case. Two, with the help of
Beebe's partner, Ben Barnes, Harper obtained a $1.9 million loan from Surety
Savings in Houston - where Beebe was doing business and brokering deposits.
And three, one of the principals of a helicopter company that Beebe financed
was a longtime, childhood friend of Seal's.
Seal, Harper, Kessler and the other defendants were not brought to trial
until the summer of 1974. The trial seemed to be proceeding in a normal
fashion until the fifth day, when Seal's attorney requested a mistrial and
the judge granted it.
It seems that the government prosecutors couldn't produce two key witnesses
against the defendants. One, Jaime Fernandez, was involved in the explosives
scheme when the government began its investigation and later became a
government informant, according to prosecutors. Jimmy Tallant, the lead
prosecutor from the Organized Crime Strike Force, told the judge that
Fernandez was a co-conspirator until he went to Mexican authorities with the
scheme. Tallant stated that he went to Mexico to try to get Fernandez to
come to Louisiana to testify, but Fernandez refused.
The second witness, Francisco "Paco" Flores, was a defendant, but federal
agents couldn't find him. The judge declared a mistrial and the charges were
later dismissed by an appeals court. End of story, or so it seemed.
However, after the trial, Seal wrote out a four-page statement, apparently
because he felt he was being unjustly harassed by the Customs Service in his
subsequent travels into and out of the United States. In this statement,
Seal spins a fantastic story about how the whole scheme was a government
sting operation set up to ingratiate our government with Fidel Castro so
that he would sign an anti-hijacking agreement. In the proposed agreement
Castro would let American planes hijacked to Cuba return without having to
pay stiff fines.
The Customs Service undercover agent who carried out the sting was Cesario
Diosdado, according to Seal, who "through records I have obtained from a
private investigative agency in Denver, Colorado, has been proved to have
been an ex-CIA agent who worked in the Bay of Pigs invasion and had been
working both sides of the fence in the Miami/Cuban area."
Diosdado testified in the trial that his investigation began with Jaime
Fernandez, but earlier stories indicated that Diosdado had either started
the ball rolling or picked it up and ran with it, even traveling to New York
to show Kessler some letters of credit with which to buy the explosives.
But much later, ten years after the trial, Seal changed his story about the
purpose of the operation. In sworn testimony in a trial in Las Vegas in
which he was a government witness, after he had turned informant, he
testified that the explosives were for CIA-trained anti- Castro Cubans.
Several law enforcement officials familiar with the case said that
regardless of whether the scheme was a Customs sting or a CIA operation for
or against Castro, the CIA pulled the plug on it during the middle of the
trial. The agency did so because some of the key participants and witnesses
worked for the CIA and it didn't want to compromise their identities as CIA
assets.
Russell Welch, an officer with the Arkansas State Police who has spent years
investigating Barry Seal, said the case was dismissed because "Seal and
others were protected, because the informant was protected, the CIA didn't
want to burn him."
Richard Gregorie, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Miami, who used Seal
as a drug informant in 1984, told Rodney Bowers of the Arkansas Democrat
that the case was dismissed because of "government misconduct."
"Although Gregorie said he had no knowledge of prior undercover work,"
Rodney Bowers reported in December 1989, "he told the Democrat in a recent
interview that the 1972 incident gave an 'indication' that Seal might have
been involved in a government operation at that time."
After the charges were dismissed, Seal, who had been fired by TWA, began to
work full-time as a CIA asset and a drug smuggler. His activities between
the explosives case and his murder on the parking lot of a halfway house in
Baton Rouge in February 1986 - allegedly by associates of the Colombian
Medellin drug cartel - have been well reported by journalists Kwitny,
Bowers, John Cummings, John Camp and Jerry Bohnen, who revealed that:
After the explosives case was dismissed, Seal began working full- time for
the CIA, traveling back and forth from the United States to Latin America.
By 1977 he had turned to narcotics trafficking, and became one of the most
proficient, if not THE most proficient, drug smuggler in this country. But
in 1983 he was turned in by an informant in Florida, convicted and sentenced
to a long jail term. Desperate, he tried to make a deal with the DEA to turn
informant, but no one would listen to him until he spoke to George Bush's
Vice Presidential Task Force on Drugs.
Seal told Bush's Task Force that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were involved
in drug smuggling. Even though there was not one shred of evidence for it,
and still isn't, this "revelation" thrilled the task force to bits, and Seal
was basically forced onto the DEA as an informant.
One of his first tasks was to catch the Sandinistas in the act. So he took
his C-123K cargo plane to the CIA, which installed a hidden camera in it.
Seals flew the wired plane to Nicaragua and allegedly took some pictures -
he said the camera malfunctioned and he had to operate it by hand - of a
purported Sandinista official loading cocaine onto the plane. The CIA and
Oliver North decided to blow Seal's cover and use the pictures as
anti-Sandinista propaganda. The story appeared in the Moonie paper, the
Washington Times, and President Reagan displayed the picture on national
television in an attempt to get Congress to restore aid to the Contras.
Several journalists later blew the story out of the water as a setup, and
there has been no evidence before or since then that the Colombian cartels
have transshipped narcotics through Nicaragua. There has been, however, much
evidence that some Contras and their supporters were trafficking in drugs.
Meanwhile, Seal had been busy training Contras at his new base of operations
in Mena, Arkansas. At least seven pilots have told reporters of Seal's work
with the Contras. The last one to go public, Terry Reed, said he was
introduced to Seal by Oliver North. Reed said that North wanted him to turn
over a light plane he owned to North's Enterprise and then report it as
stolen and collect the insurance. Reed declined to do so, but the plane was
later stolen, and Reed collected on his insurance. The plane turned up in
Seal's Contra resupply operation and Reed was charged with fraud.
After Reed began talking about Seal, North and the Contras, and subpoenaed
North for his trial, the government, after going after Reed with everything
it had, dropped the case against him - but not before requiring the local
prosecutor to get a security clearance and requiring Reed not to comment on
the case for 30 days afterwards.
The federal government also went after Bill Duncan, an agent with the
Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, who was
investigating the flow of drug money through Barry Seal's operations. When
Duncan was called to testify before the House Subcommittee on Crime
regarding federal interference in Arkansas and Louisiana police
investigations of Seal, he was ordered by one of his IRS superiors to
perjure himself if he were asked questions about Seal's relationship to
then-Attorney General Ed Meese and whether Meese had ordered evidence
withheld from a federal grand jury investigating activities at Mena, Arkansas.
Duncan resigned over the matter, after 17 years with the IRS. He then went
to work for the House Subcommittee on Crime in an investigation of Seal's
operation, but eventually got stymied there as well. He was arrested when he
took a gun inside a House office building, even though he was authorized to
carry a weapon. The House subcommittee cut his travel funds, and once again
he resigned in frustration.
Another investigator probing into Seal's operations was Gene Wheaton, the
former Pentagon criminal investigator who went to work for the Christic
Institute after parting company with Oliver North and Richard Secord.
Wheaton said he tracked Seal's C-123K cargo plane flying from Mena to
William Blakemore's Iron Mountain Ranch in West Texas. (There is also an
Iron Mountain in Arkansas near Seal's Contra training grounds.)
Blakemore said he had no knowledge of this.
Seal's C-123K, which he called the Fat Lady, would go down in history after
its "Fat Man" was murdered. This was the C-123K that was shot down in
October 1986 by the Sandinistas as it was making a resupply run to the
Contras. The resulting crash blew the lid off the White House's secret
support of the Contras, as the plane and its occupants were tracked to the
CIA-connected Southern Air Transport in Miami and to Oliver North.
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$$ The CIA cocaine smuggling on behalf of the Contras $$
$$ through Mena, Arkansas corrupted the Presidencies $$
$$ of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. $$
$$ For details, see: $$
$$ ftp://pencil.cs.missouri.edu/pub/mena/ $$
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