Ex-Noriega Aide Says He Never Saw Drug Cash

A former military aide to deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega acknowledged under cross-examination Tuesday that he never examined the contents of alleged drug-money envelopes he said he delivered to Noriega in the 1980s.

Lt. Col. Luis A. del Cid, a prosecution witness who had told Monday of taking cash-filled envelopes to Noriega in his office, conceded to defense attorney Frank Rubino that he never looked inside. Nor did Noriega or Floyd Carlton-Caceres, the alleged drug pilot who gave him the packages, ever discuss their contents in his presence, he said.

“He didn’t tell me, but it was drug money,” Del Cid declared, referring to Carlton. “I felt it, and I knew.”

Del Cid reiterated that Noriega placed the envelopes in one of four office safes he maintained at his military headquarters in Panama City. Like Del Cid, Carlton also is a confessed co-conspirator in the drug case and is expected to testify later against Noriega.

Rubino revealed the same gap in Del Cid’s knowledge about a 1984 incident in which he said he picked up at the airport in Panama City suitcases brought from Miami by Marcella Tason, Noriega’s confidential secretary.

Del Cid said he never saw them opened, but that Noriega had placed them in a much larger safe.

The government is seeking to prove that Noriega, who was toppled and captured in the U.S. invasion of Panama in December, 1989, accepted millions of dollars in payoffs from Colombian drug traffickers who used Panama as a safe haven for transshipping cocaine into the United States. Noriega faces a maximum penalty of 140 years in prison and fines exceeding $1 million, if convicted on 10 separate charges brought by a Miami grand jury in 1988.

In earlier testimony, Del Cid had said that Noriega’s ties to Colombia’s murderous Medellin drug cartel were evident as early as 1981, when Noriega instructed him to try to resolve the kidnaping of Marta Ochoa, a relative of the cartel leaders. The woman had been taken for ransom by the Colombian M-19 guerrilla organization, and Del Cid said he helped free her.

Rubino sought to picture Noriega as a humanitarian ruler who brought freedom to other hostages, too.