DRUG SAGA ENDS WITH CONVICTION OF INFORMANT

MIAMI -- 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 loopholes in
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."

A Star Witness: 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 murders from California to New York in
the 1980s. He received broad protections and a new identity, but 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 half a dozen unsolved murders on St. Kitts that prosecutors
claim were linked to Miller; local murder charges against Miller were
dropped when the island's prosecutors failed to show up at a preliminary
inquiry in 1995.

Off the Federal Payroll: 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 private 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."

Commenting on the case after Tuesday's verdict, Frank Figueroa, 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.

"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.