THEY DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW

When I came to work in the sprawling newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
in the early 1980s, I was assigned to share a computer terminal with a tall
middle aged reporter with a long, virtually unpronounceable Polish name. To
save time, people called him Tom A.

To me, arriving from a small daily in Kentucky, Tom A. was the epitome of
the hard-boiled big-city newspaperman. The city officials he wrote about
and the editors who mangled his copy were "fuckin-jerks." And when his
phone rang he would say, "It's the Big One," before picking up the receiver.

The Big One was the reporter's holy grail the tip that led you from the
daily morass of press conferences and cop calls onto the trail of The
Biggest Story You'd Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your
career into an anticlimax. I never knew if it was cynicism or optimism that
made him say it, but deep inside, I thought he was jinxing himself.

The Big One, I believed, would be like a bullet with your name on it. You'd
never hear it coming. And almost a decade later, long after Tom A., the
Plain Dealer and I had parted company, that's precisely how it happened. I
didn't even take the call.

It manifested itself as a pink While You Were Out message slip left on my
desk in July, 1995, bearing an unusual and unfamiliar name: Coral Marie
Talavera Baca.

There was no message, just a number, somewhere in thc East Bay.

I called, but there was no answer, so I put the message aside. Several days
later an identical message slip appeared. This time Coral Marie Talavera
Baca was home.

"I saw the story you did a couple weeks ago," she began. "The one about the
drug seizure laws. I thought you did a good job."

"Thanks a lot," I said, and I meant it. I asked what I could do for her.

"My boyfriend is in a situation like that," she said, "and I thought it
might make a good follow-up story for you. What the government has done to
him is unbelievable."

"Your boyfriend?"

"He's in prison right now on cocaine trafficking charges. He's been in jail
for three years, and he's never been convicted of anything."

"He must have waived his speedy trial rights," I said.

"No, none of them have," she said. "There are about five or six guys who
were indicted with him, and most of them are still waiting to be tried,
too. They want to go to trial because they think it's a bullshit case.
Rafael keeps writing letters to the judge and the prosecutor, saying, you
know, try me or let me go."

"Rafael's your boyfriend?"

'~Yes. Rafael Cornejo."

"He's Colombian?"

"No, Nicaraguan. But he's lived in the Bay Area since he was like two or
something."

It's interesting, I thought, but not the kind of story likely to excite my
editors. Some drug dealers don't like being in jail? Oh.

She was not dissuaded.

"There's something about Rafael's case that I don't think you would have
ever done before," she persisted. "One of the government's witnesses is a
guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it."

"What now?" I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly.

"The CIA. He used to work for them or something. He's a Nicaraguan too.
Rafael knows him, he can tell you. He told me the guy had admitted bringing
four tons of cocaine into the country. Four tons!

And if that's what he's admitted to, you can imagine how much it really
was. And now he's back working for the government again."

"You say you can document this?"

"Absolutely. I have all the files here at home. You're welcome to look at
all of it if you want."

I asked her where she lived.

"Oakland. But Rafael's got a court date in San Francisco coming up in a
couple weeks. Why don't I meet you at the courthouse? That way you can sit
in on the hearing, and if you're interested we could get lunch or something
and talk."

"OK, fine," I said. "But bring some of those records with you, OK? I can
look through thcm while I'm sitting there in court."

She laughed. "You don't trust me, do you? You probably get a lot of calls
like this." "Not many like this," I said.

Flipping on my computer, l logged into the Dialog data-base, which contains
full-text electronic versions of millions of newspaper and magazine
stories, property records, legal filings, you name it.

I called a newspaper story that had appeared a year before in the San
Francisco Chronicle.

My eyes widened.

"4 Indicted in Prison Breakout Plot-Pleasanton Inmates Planned to Leave in
Copter, Prosecutors Say."

I quickly scanned the story. Son of a bitch.

Four inmates were indicted yesterday in connection with a bold plan to
escape from the federal lock-up in Pleasanton using plastic explosives and
a helicopter that would have taken them to a cargo ship at sea. The group
also considered killing a guard if their keepers tried to thwart the
escape, prosecutors contend.

Rafael Cornejo, 39, of Lafayette, an alleged cocaine kingpin with reputed
ties to Nicaraguan drug traffickers and Panamanian mooev launderers, was
among those indicted for conspiracy to escape.

That's some boyfriend she's got there, I mused. The newspaper stories make
him sound like Al Capone.

When I pushed open the doors to the vast courtroom in the San Francisco
federal courthouse a few weeks later, I found a scene from Miami Vice.

To my left, a dark-suited army of federal agents and prosecutors - huddled
around a long, polished wooden table, looking grim and talking in low
voices. On the right, an array of long-haired, expensively attired defense
attorneys were whispering to a group of long-haired, angry-looking
Hispanics - their clients. The judge had not yet arrived.

I had no idea what Coral Baca looked like, so I scanned the faces in the
courtroom, trying to pick out a woman who could be a drug king-pin's
girlfriend. She found me first.

"You must be Gary," said a voice behind me.

I turned, and for an instant all I saw was cleavage and jewelry. She looked
to be in her mid-twenties. Dark hair. Bright red lipstick. Long legs. Short
skirt. Dressed to accentuate her positive attributes. I could barely speak.

"You're Coral?"

She tossed her hair and smiled. "Pleased to meet you.

She pointed out Rafael, a short, handsome Latino with a strong jaw and long
wavy hair parted in the middle.

"Uh, why was he trying to break out of jail?" I asked.

"He wasn't. He was getting ready to make bail, and they didn't want to let
him out, so they trumped up these phony escape charges. Now, because he's
under indictment for escape, he isn't eligible for bail anymore."

The escape charges were in fact the product of an unsubstantiated
accusation by a fellow inmate, a convicted swindler. They were later thrown
out of court on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, and Cornejo's
prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall, was referred to the Justice
Department for investigation by federal judge Saundra Brown Armstrong.

"Can we go out in the hall and talk for a minute?" I asked her.

We sat on a bench just outside the door. I told her I needed to get case
numbers so I could ask for the court files. And, by the way, did she bring
those documents she'd mentioned?

She reached into her briefcase and brought out a stack an inch thick. I
flipped through the documents. Most of them were federal law enforcement
reports. At the bottom of the stack was a transcript of some sort. I pulled
it out.

"Grand Jury for the Northern District of California, Grand Jury Number 93-5
Grand Jury lnv. No. 9301035. Reporter's Transcript of Proceedings.
Testimony of Oscar Danilo Bland6n February 3,1994." whistled. 'Federal
grand jury transcripts? I'm impressed. Where'd you get these?"

"The government turned them over under discovery. Dave Hall did. I heard he
really got reamed out by the DEA when they found out about all the stuff he
gave us."

I skimmed the thirty-nine-page transcript. Whatever else this Blandon
fellow may have been, he was pretty much the way Coral had described him. A
big-time trafficker who'd dealt dope for many years; A started out dealing
for the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla army, in Los Angeles.
He'd used drug money to buy trucks and supplies. At some point after Ronald
Reagan got into power, the CIA had decided his services as a fund-raiser
were no longer required, and he stayed in the drug business for himself.

What made the story so compelling was that he was appearing before the
grand jury as a U.S. government witness. He wasn't utter investigation. He
wasn't trying to heat a rap. He was there as a witness for the prosecution,
which meant that the U.S. Justice Department was vouching for him.

But who was the grand jury investigating? Every time the testimony led in
that direction. words-mostly names-were blacked out.

"Who is this family they keep asking him about?"

"Rafael says it's Meneses. Norwin Meneses and his nephews. Have you heard
of them?"

"Nope."

"Norwin is one of the biggest traffickers on the West Coast. When Rafael
got arrested, that's who the FBI and the IRS wanted to talk to him about.
Rafael has known [Norwin and his nephews] for years. Since the Seventies, I
think. The government is apparently using Blandon to get to Meneses."

I kept trying to recall where I had heard about this Contra-cocaine
business before. Had I read it in a book? Seen it on television'? It
bothered me.

Like most Americans, I knew the Contras had been a creation of the CIA, the
darlings of the Reagan Right, made up largely of the vanquished followers
of deposed Nicaraguan die-tator Anastasio Somoza and his brutal army, the
National Guard. But drug trafficking? Surely, I thought, if there had been
some concrete evidence, it would have stuck in my mind. Maybe I was
confusing it with something else.

A few days later I was in balmy San Diego, squinting at microfiche in the
clerk's office of the U.S. District Court. I found Blandon's case file
within a few minutes.

He and six others, including his wife, had been secretly indicted May 5,
1992, for conspiring to distribute cocaine. According to the indictment,
he'd been a trafficker for ten years, had clients nationwide, and had
bragged on tape of selling other L.A. dealers between two and four tons of
cocaine.

He was such a big-timer that the judge had ordered him and his wife held in
jail without bail because they posed "a threat to the health and moral
fiber of the community."

The file contained a transcript of a detention hearing, held to determine
if the couple should be released on bail. Blandn's prosecutor, Assistant
U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale, brought out his best ammo to persuade the judge
to keep the couple locked up until trial.

"Mr. Blandon's family was closely associated with the Somoza government
that was overthrown in 1979," O'Neale said. Bland6n had been partners with
a Jairo Meneses in 764 kilos of cocaine that had been seized in Nicaragua
in 1991, O'Neale claimed, and he also owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua
with Mene-ses. He had a house in Costa Rica. He had a business in Mexico,
relatives in Spain, phony addresses all over the -United States, and
"unlimited access to money."

Bland6n's lawyer, Brad Brunon, confirmed the couple's close ties to Somoza
and produced a photo of them at a wedding reception with El Presidente and
his spouse. That just showed what fine families they were from, he said.
The accusations in Nicaragua against Bland6n, Brunon argued, were
"politically motivated because of Mr. Blandon's activities with the Contras
in the early 1980s."

Damn, here it is again. His own lawyer says he was working for the Contras.

>From the docket sheet, I could see that the case had never gone to trial.
Everyone had pleaded out, starting with Bland6n. Five months after his
arrest, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and the charges against his wife
were dropped. After that, his fugitive code-fendants were quickly arrested
and pleaded guilty. But they all received extremely short sentences. One
was even put on unsupervised probation.

As I read on, I realized that Bland-6n was already back on the streets
- -totally unsupervised. No parole. Free as abird.

The last page of the file told me why. It was a motion filed by U.S.
Attorney O'Neale, asking the court to unseal Blandon's plea agreement and a
couple of internal Justice Department memorandums. "During the course of
this case, defendant Oscar Danilo Btandon cooperated with and rendered
substantial assistance to the United States," O'Neale wrote. At the
govern-ment's request his jail sentence had been secretly cut twice.
O'Neale then persuaded the judge to let Blandon out of jail completely,
telling the court he was needed as a full-time paid informant for the U.S.
Department of Justice. Since he'd been undercover, O'Neale wrote, he
couldn't very well have probation agents checking up on him. He was
released on unsupervised probation.

Back in Sacramento, I did some checking on the targets of the 1994 grand
jury investigation - the Meneses family - and again Coral's description
proved accurate, perhaps even un-derstated. I found a 1991 story from the
San Francisco Chronicle and a 1986 Suo Francisco Examiner piece that
strongly suggested that Meneses, too, had been dealing cocaine for the
Con-tras during the I 980s. One of the stories described him as the '~king
of cocaine in Nicaragua" and the Cali cartel's representative there. The
Chronicle story mentioned that a U.S. Senate investigation had run across
him in connection with the Contras and allegations of cocaine smuggling.

That must have been where I heard about this Contra drug stuff before, I
decided. A congressional hearing.

At the California State Library's Government Publications Section, 1
scoured the CSl indices, which catalog congressional hearings by topic and
witness name. Meneses wasn't listed, but there had been a series of
hearings back in 1987 and 1988, 1 saw, dealing with the issue of the
Contras and cocaine: a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

For the next six days I sat with rolls of dimes at a microfiche printer in
the quiet wood-paneled recesses of the Library, reading and copying many of
the 1,100 pages of transcripts and exhibits of the Kerry Committee
hearings, growing more astounded each day. The committee's investigators
had uncovered direct links between drug dealers and the Contras. Many of
the Kerry Committee witnesses, I noted, later became U.S. Justice
Department witnesses against Noriega.

Kerry and his staff had taken video-taped depositions from Contra leaders
who acknowledged receiving drug profits, with the apparent knowledge of the
CIA. The drug dealers had admitted under oath - giving money to the
Contras, and had passed polygraph tests. The pilots had admitted flying
weapons down and cocaine and marijuana back, landing in at least one
in-stance at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The exhibits included
U.S. Customs reports, FBI reports, internal Justice Department memos. It
almost knocked me off my chair.

I called Jack Blum, the Washing-ton, D.C., attorney who'd headed the Kerry
investigation, and he confirmed that Norwin Meneses had been an early
target. But the Justice Department, he said, had stonewalled the
committee's requests for information and he had finally given up trying to
obtain the records, moving on to other, more productive areas. "There was a
lot of weird stuff going on out on the West Coast, but after our
experiences with Justice... we mainly concentrated on the cocaine coming
into the East."

"Why is it that I can barely remember this?" I asked. "I mean, I read the
papers every day."

"It wasn't in the papers, for the most part," he said. 'The big papers
stayed as far away from this issue as they could. It was like they didn't
want to know."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski