Man Who Indicted Noriega Resigns : Miami U.S. Attorney to Kick Controversy Habit ‘Cold Turkey’

U.S. Atty. Leon Kellner and his wife were out of town when the FBI tracked them down to say that an assassination team tied to the world’s biggest cocaine cartel had targeted them. Ellen Kellner thought instantly of the friend who was house-sitting for them.

“You have to trust me completely,” Ellen told her on the phone. “Take the dog; take my personal telephone book; remove all the family photos. Leave the house. And don’t say anything to anybody.” There was dead silence on the other end of the line. “You just have to trust me,” Ellen repeated.

Within minutes her friend had fled the house in Coral Gables, stripping it of identifying photos of the Kellners and Ellen’s grown daughters. As the Kellners recall them, those months of living dangerously seem bizarre and remote. They could be any attractive, ordinary couple surrounded by the trappings of suburban living as they serve coffee on the gazebo-style screened porch, furnished in wicker and awash in sunlight.

FBI Command Post

But for two months last spring this porch was turned into a command post for the FBI; bodyguards watched them around the clock; men with rifles searched the streets from the garage roof. “It took a military maneuver to get in and out the front door,” said Leon Kellner--the nation’s most powerful prosecutor on the drug war front, a man who made national headlines recently for Just Saying No to dropping drug indictments his office had brought against Panama’s strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Such extraordinary security precautions might seem peculiar in any other place, but here in this multibillion-dollar business, murder--of informers, rival gangs, witnesses or prosecutors--is considered part of the overhead.

And so, last March, when a Mercedes with tinted windows cruised slowly down the block as Ellen Kellner was walking the dog, the agent assigned to her shouted: “Hit the dirt!” Ellen dove behind a neighbor’s bush. “It turned out to be a little old lady who was lost and looking slowly for house numbers.”

Returning to Civil Law

For six years Leon Kellner has been consumed by drugs, as surely as any addict. Next month, he hopes to kick the habit, returning to a more normal life as a civil lawyer in a Washington law firm. As reasons for his resignation, which was announced weeks ago, Kellner cites burnout, the trauma of his wife’s bout with thyroid cancer and anger at attacks on his performance.

Once a sleepy Southern jurisdiction, Kellner’s office has been transformed by Miami’s drug explosion into the busiest in the nation. Since 1984, the Southern District of Florida has led the United States in the number of felony cases, filing 1,352 in 1987, contrasted with 899 in the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan.

In this overworked and underfinanced office, Kellner’s team of prosecutors has had major successes. In addition to countless routine drug cases, his office successfully prosecuted the “River Cops” case, uncovering a major drug smuggling scandal in the Miami police force and convicting 15 officers.

Assailed on Contra Case

Kellner also has been sharply criticized, most notably for delaying a grand jury investigation that might have revealed Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s secret Contra supply network in May, 1986, six months before it was exposed. Kellner has testified that evidence was insufficient to take to a grand jury. Dissatisfied members of Congress, however, continue their probes of the matter.

Stung by criticism that the drug flow continues, Kellner is quick to defend his office and the Reagan Administration:

“What other Administration, Republican or Democrat, has ever gone after foreign corrupt officials? We have indicted the former minister of interior of Bolivia, Bahamian immigration and customs officials, indicted and convicted a general from the army in Suriname, indicted the former Cuban ambassador to Colombia, a colonel in the Haitian Army, Noriega, the Medellin cartel.”

Taking on Colombia’s infamous Medellin cartel, the international smuggling ring believed responsible for 80% of the cocaine entering the United States, was not exactly a day at the beach. But critics scoff that such indictments are headline grabbers (“Neon Leon” became Kellner’s nickname after Noriega) because the chances of extradition for trial are slim.

Lehder Convicted in Drug Case

Referring to the Colombian cartel, Kellner conceded that “unless there is a change in their government, they are going to be free.” But such indictments, he said, nonetheless send a vital message. And this month in Jacksonville, Fla., a kingpin of the cartel, Carlos Lehder, was convicted of running a billion-dollar drug smuggling operation. Lehder could be sentenced to life in a U.S. prison.

The threats on Kellner’s life came soon after Lehder was arrested and extradited to Florida. The cartel--blamed for having killed scores of judges, journalists and more than 300 police officers in Colombia--also threatened to kill five Americans for every extradition.

Kellner’s loyal-scout defense of the Administration does not extend to the State Department. He slammed his fist in his hand when he talked about the possible deal to drop charges against Noriega in return for the general’s agreement to fade from sight.

“What has always bothered us is that the State Department has always had a different view--narcotics was never the priority that the people of this country believe in. That is exactly a microcosm of what is going on today.”

‘That’s Not My Major Goal!’

Kellner is not thinking of political sensitivities. Secretary of State George P. Shultz “gets up and says our major goal is to get democracy for Panama!” he said. “That’s not my major goal! My major goal is to send a doper to jail. The second is to send a message that no one, I don’t care what position you are, that no one is going to be above the law.”

He has in some ways been a man in the middle, at once praised for the Noriega indictment and attacked for not making deals with “dopers” and for his handling of the gunrunning Contra case.

“My major frustration,” said the 42-year-old prosecutor, “is that I’ve given six years of my life, we’ve gotten more resources, better laws, the agents work hard, my lawyers work incredibly hard, we indict more defendants and we’ve done bigger things than ever before, and yet the price of cocaine has gone from $50,000 a kilo to $10,000 a kilo in Miami. I can’t deny that there is more cocaine coming into this country than ever before. And I can’t deny that there are more people using cocaine than ever before.” He sighed. “That’s the frustration.”

It’s time, Kellner said, to let someone else try putting his finger in the dike.

‘Don’t Go Out Much’

“We’re a very boring couple,” Ellen Kellner said with a laugh. “Couch potatoes. Don’t go out much.” A tall, striking brunette with wide-set blue eyes, she grew up “very protected” in New York, studied art and settled into a first marriage in Virginia. Now 49, her role of “providing a little oasis” from the drug world for her husband was shattered last fall when a biopsy revealed a cancerous thyroid.

Her illness came at the same time as the Contra flap, and Ellen said: “I felt badly for Leon because he suffered so much. He was so incredible. I’d be lying in my bed in the hospital, looking so horribly ugly, and he’d come in and say: ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful.’ ”

The Kellners met six years ago, after her first husband, a physician, had died from a long bout with leukemia. A lawyer in Kellner’s law firm, who had done some work for her first husband, sat the two of them together at a dinner. “It was one of those insane things,” she said. “We just hit it off. We’ve been together from that day on.”

Friends and co-workers describe Kellner as affable and aggressive, a man who goes at everything full tilt. The son of German Jewish immigrants who fled Europe just before World War II, Kellner grew up in New York, where his father was a wholesale jewelry salesman. After the State University of New York in Buffalo, he attended Harvard Law School. In an era of anti-Vietnam War protest, Kellner enlisted in the reserves.

Corporate Law in Manhattan

After graduation, Kellner eased into life as a Manhattan corporate lawyer, then helped form Anderson, Russell, Kill & Olick, the firm he will rejoin in a few weeks.

Kellner might never have left corporate law had his Harvard roommate, Stanley Marcus, not been named Southern Florida’s U.S. attorney. He asked Kellner to join. The New Yorker fell in love with Miami. “The first day, I drove five minutes to work, found a parking place, and said: ‘I’m never leaving.’ ”

When Marcus became a federal judge, Kellner took over in 1985. He has been attacked by anonymous sources in publications for not having a background in criminal justice, for relying too heavily on his staff, for being in over his head. Others, like Marcus, say that “some of the finest” U.S. attorneys have not had criminal justice experience.

Kellner sidesteps political questions, speaking no evil of his much-investigated boss, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, or Vice President George Bush, the former CIA director who contends that he knew nothing about Noriega’s drug role, an open secret for years.

Previous administrations have long looked the other way, said Kellner, who himself sounds frustrated when asked how the nation might attack the perplexing, seemingly hopeless drug morass.

‘Who Is Going to Take Over?’

“If the next generation has its brains fried by crack and coke, who is going to take over running the corporations, the government?” Kellner touched on the litany of roadblocks, saying that budget restrictions and the Administration’s cuts in Coast Guard funds were major “mistakes.”

But, Kellner said, law enforcement is not the sole answer. “The states aren’t willing to put their money where their mouths are”--they are unwilling to build courthouses and prisons to handle beefed-up caseloads or to fund vital rehabilitation programs and education, he said. “I disagree with all these people who say ‘Just Say No’ is a bad idea. I think it had a great impact.”

Frustration with the violent drug trade has led to a renewed debate about what was once unthinkable: legalizing drugs. “I have problems with legalizing cocaine and, therefore, crack. That’s extraordinarily serious stuff. And the cartels would still smuggle to avoid paying the taxes.

“I happen to think Meese’s idea of an international force is excellent. And if it takes a Marshall Plan, it takes a Marshall Plan.”

Of one thing Leon Kellner is certain. There is no quick solution. From one who has felt the brunt of the storm comes the terrible truth: “It took a long time of neglect to get where we are. And it will take a long time to get out of it.”