Noriega May Be Here; After All, He Can Afford a House

For $1 million, I’ll venture a guess.

Gen. Manuel A. Noriega is hiding out behind the counter at Banana Republic in South Coast Plaza.

I called the Noriega hot line to see if I was close, but they wouldn’t tell me.

“Do you know where Noriega is or not?” the woman said. “We’ve had a ton of calls.”

The Noriega hot line is for real, by the way. It’s the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington.

Of course! Why didn’t we send in the narcs in the first place? Noriega is a major druggie and no offense intended, but what do the boys from Ft. Benning, Ga., know about narcotraficantes ?

So I called up someone who should know about these things, someone who spoke only on the deepest of background, about how they would have done it. It was a local call.

“If we were going to take somebody, we would have had him in our hip pocket for a period of time,” says the knowing source. “You’ve got to snatch the head rat in the first 10 minutes. . . . When our time comes to take him off, he never knows what or why.”

Not that it does us much good now, of course. We’ve got some 12,500 soldiers on the ground in Panama, most of them looking for the guy.

Noriega, taunting devil that he is, sent out a message over the airwaves the other night. “Come and get me if you can,” was the gist of it. We can’t, apparently.

I say broaden the search.

When you think about it, isn’t it a bit of a cliche, all this taking to the mountains stuff? Che Guevara, Fidel . . . I mean, it’s been done.

And Ol’ Pineapple Face is nothing if not an iconoclast. You want to be head of state? Steal an election. You want to be taken seriously? Declare war on the United States.

So what I think is that Noriega must be right under our noses, if only we’d look. Certainly, affordable housing for him in Orange County should be no problem.

And Cuba and Nicaragua can get awfully dreary with all that rationing. Stand in line for this, stand in line for that. . . .

But Noriega is on the lam, after all, so I imagine he’ll be keeping a rather low profile here.

Maybe he’s taken up with some obscure county organization, say, the Liability Claims Settlement Committee, where no one ever ventures.

Or how about this? He’s fudged on his resume and joined the California State University Board of Trustees. They don’t seem to check credentials too closely there. Just ask board chairwoman Marianthi Lansdale of Huntington Beach.

But I don’t know, there is Laguna Beach, the land of laid-back tolerance. Has anybody tried looking in the Boom Boom Room?

Now that I think of it, I did hear something about someone spotting what looked like Manuel at a Cal State Fullerton game. He was sitting next to Elvis, doing a wave.

Somebody else says they could have sworn Noriega was leading the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland the other night.

But no, seriously folks. Manuel Noriega comes to Orange County, he’s going to have to lease a Jag. I mean, doesn’t everybody?

Let’s see, personalized license plates. How about, BADFACE or NARCO 1?

So be on the lookout. Obviously, we can’t depend on military force to solve all our problems.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.