FORMER PROTECTED WITNESS CONVICTED ON DRUG CHARGES

MIAMI -- He Was A Drug Lord And Convict And Became A Protected Star
Witness. Then He Went Back To His Ruthless Business.

After six days of gripping testimony and four hours of deliberation,
a Miami federal jury Tuesday convicted former U.S. federal witness
Charles ``Little Nut'' Miller on narcotics charges, ending one of the
most bizarre and enduring tales in America's war on drugs.

Miller was found guilty of conspiring to send hundreds of pounds of
Colombian cocaine from his native island of St. Kitts to the United
States in the 1990s. His court-appointed defense attorney, John
Howes, said he will appeal the verdict, which ends the reign of one
of the Caribbean's most notorious figures - a wily drug lord-
turned-informant-turned-drug lord who became U.S. law enforcement's
worst nightmare.

Miller spent hours on the witness stand, trying to navigate U.S. drug
laws. He said he was merely a businessman - the ``tax man,'' he
called himself - who took millions of dollars in ``fees'' from
Colombian drug cartels for safeguarding cocaine shipments as they
passed through tiny St. Kitts.

But Miller also claimed the drugs were destined for Europe, not
America, and thus he violated no U.S. law. Assistant U.S. Attorney
Russell Killinger called this claim ``absurd.''

Miller's trial came nearly 11 years after he took the stand in a
Miami federal court as the star witness against a vicious Jamaican
drug gang blamed for nearly 1,000 killings from California to New
York in the 1980s. He received broad protections and a new identity,
but he fled the country for St. Kitts in 1991 and returned to a life
of mayhem. U.S. law enforcement officials said his intimate knowledge
of the U.S. justice system made him all the more dangerous.

In testimony last week, Clifford Henry, one of four men indicted in
the 1994 conspiracy case, testified that Miller handcuffed,
blindfolded and interrogated Vincent ``Seko'' Morris, the son of a
former St. Kitts deputy prime minister, before fatally shooting him
because ``the boy knows too much.'' Miller flatly denied the
accusation.

``I cried. I pleaded with Mr. Miller. I begged Mr. Miller,'' said
Henry, who was convicted in an earlier trial and sentenced to life in
prison without parole.

``Mr. Miller pulled out his gun, and he shot Seko,'' added Henry, who
told the jury he decided to speak out for the first time in six years
to clear his conscience. ``He shot him in the head. And Iboo
[Miller's lieutenant, Kirk Hendrikson] shot the girl.''

The Oct. 2, 1994, slayings of Morris and his girlfriend, Joan Welch,
were among more than six unsolved murders on St. Kitts that
prosecutors say were linked to Miller; local murder charges against
Miller were dropped when the island's prosecutors didn't show up at a
preliminary inquiry in 1995.

Taken together, the U.S. prosecutors' nine witnesses and 27 exhibits
here cast the eastern Caribbean island of 45,000 people as a land
that Miller had corrupted and endangered while transforming it into
his own drug fiefdom.

The testimony also sharply underscored concerns among some federal
agencies that U.S. taxpayers paid and protected a man such as Miller,
described by a federal judge in the 1989 trial as ``worse than the
people on trial.''

From the witness stand Monday, Miller, 40, confirmed much of his
checkered past. After leaving St. Kitts for Jamaica at age 14, he
said, he served as a political enforcer for then-U.S.-backed Jamaican
Labor Party leader Edward Seaga in the 1970s, working for an armed
street gang that intimidated voters and stuffed ballot boxes.

As a reward for his 1989 testimony, federal prosecutors gave Miller,
who had spent two years in prison for a cocaine-distribution
conviction in New York, immunity, protection and an identity as
manager of a Domino's Pizza parlor in Maine, Miller testified Monday.

After Tuesday's verdict, Frank Figueroa, the chief of the U.S.
Customs Service's Miami office, said of the federal
witness-protection program: ``In this case, it may not have worked
out as well as it should have. You never have a crystal ball. But the
important thing is Miller is no longer in a position to do anyone any
harm, and I think everyone involved is better off for it.''

Miller's sentencing is set for Feb. 13; he faces a term of life
without parole. Glenroy Matthew, the last of the defendants in the
St. Kitts conspiracy case, remains free on the island - and on the
White House's list of the 10 most-wanted international drug dealers.