Bahamas Leader Denies Drug Ties : Pindling Blames U.S. Officials for Accusations of Payoffs

Sir Lynden O. Pindling, prime minister of the Bahamas, blames racism and overzealous U.S. officials for persistent accusations that over the past decade he amassed a fortune in payoffs from drug traffickers.

Pindling, a feisty and articulate London-trained lawyer who has led the country since independence from Britain in 1973, flatly denies he has ever been tainted by drug money. And he questions the motives of members of Congress and other U.S. officials who doubt him.

“I can’t read their minds, so I don’t profess to know what their rock-bottom reasons are,” Pindling said in a recent interview. “But I thought it might have been convenient for them to find some black scapegoat. I’m the nearest one.”

He blamed the media and “some overzealous (U.S.) Drug Enforcement agency agents” for keeping suspicions about the sources of his wealth alive. “They think we’re all a bunch of fools,” he said.

Although the extent of Pindling’s wealth is not generally known, a partial accounting of his fortune was documented by a blue-ribbon panel chosen by his government in 1984. The Civil Commission of Inquiry produced evidence that between 1977 and 1983 Pindling and his wife deposited in their bank accounts $3.5 million more than he earned as prime minister.

A majority of the commission’s members concluded that “none of the known sources of funds . . . appear to have been drug-related.” But a minority report by commission member Drexel W. Gomez, bishop of the Bahamas, said that “the circumstances raise great suspicions, and it is impossible to say that the payments were all nondrug-related.”

“Every single cent was accounted for,” Pindling insisted in the interview. “In the accounting, none of it was ever traced to any drug source. That is the whole answer, the total answer and the truthful answer. Nothing funny about it at all.”

Many of his funds came from a variety of loans, mortgages and contributions by foreign business executives, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the 58-year-old prime minister is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Tampa, Fla., as a result of testimony last year in the trial of Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder. A witness said Pindling accepted large sums of money to protect traffickers moving drugs through the Bahamas en route to the United States.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Tampa declined to comment on the case, but a congressional source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that federal investigators recently uncovered convincing evidence against Pindling.

Congressional and State Department officials have privately expressed doubt that federal prosecutors will seek to indict Pindling. The reluctance was said to be based in part on the frustrations that grew out of last year’s unproductive indictment of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, the Panamanian strongman.

Another and probably stronger reason for the reluctance is the growing cooperation given by Pindling and his government to the U.S. drug interdiction program aimed at choking off the flow of drugs from Latin America via the Bahamas. Whatever the Bahamas’ past record as a channel for drugs, the crackdown by teams from the DEA, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and the Bahamian police has had a measurable impact in the past two years, according to U.S. and Bahamian officials.

“They’ve passed a stiff new law and implemented it,” a U.S. official said. “Anyone possessing more than 2 pounds of cocaine, 10 pounds of marijuana or 20 grams of heroin must be held without bail and faces 5 years to life if found guilty. Before, they just made bail and skipped away free.”

Cocaine-carrying planes and boats have been forced to move farther and farther south as patrols have been increased around the major islands in the Bahamas. Marijuana smuggling, which was carried out mostly by large, slow boats, has all but ceased, according to Jack Crusak, a former DEA agent who works as a special adviser to the Bahamas’ attorney general.

As another measure of success, U.S. officials report that drug money, which as recently as 1987 represented at least 6% of the Bahamas’ gross national product, has virtually dried up, leading to a severe shortage of U.S. currency in Bahamian markets.

“In the Bahamas we have greater latitude and support for what we are doing than in any other country in the world, “said U.S. Ambassador Carol Boyd Hallett, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan. As a result, according to another U.S. official here, Hallett has recommended that the country not be punished under a 1986 U.S. law that requires the President to annually certify to Congress that countries along major drug routes are “fully cooperating” in the effort to halt the flow of drugs. Last year, certification for the Bahamas barely squeaked through because of continued congressional skepticism concerning Pindling.

“We’re still skeptical,” one congressional source said. “It’s a great show of outward cooperation, but is the flow of drugs down significantly? Are they beginning to lock up some of the major players?”

According to Ann B. Wrobleski, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters, U.S. authorities are pleased with the leeway Pindling’s government has given U.S. anti-drug forces in the Bahamas, but are still disappointed at the country’s own drug enforcement efforts.

Defending his government’s anti-drug effort, which he says absorbs 14% of the national budget, Pindling said:

“We have been doing all we could do, every year. The level of our effort surpasses that of practically every other country that I know about, including the United States.”

Pindling has been so angered over suggestions that he may be indicted on drug charges in the United States that he has even begun an international diplomatic campaign to induce as many countries as he can to object to U.S. legal pursuit of foreign leaders, whatever their perceived crimes.