Richard Gregorie : The Man Who Took on Noriega While Fighting Drug Trafficking

The trial of Manual A. Noriega began as a gleam in the eye of Richard D. Gregorie. The top narcotics prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami in the mid-1980s, Gregorie wrote the indictment that eventually landed Noriega in a Miami courtroom.

It was a natural move for Gregorie. Born in Boston, his personal style is brash and streetwise; his entire professional career has been devoted to cracking major criminal conspiracies. Gregorie joined the Justice Department in 1972, straight out of Georgetown Law School, and spent the next decade prosecuting organized crime and racketeering cases up and down the East Coast. In 1982, Gregorie became chief of the Narcotics Section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. Drug prosecutors in Southern Florida, where more than two-thirds of illicit drugs enter the United States, were confronted by a steady stream of drug conspiracy cases. In 1986, Gregorie won the Justice Department’s distinguished service award, one of the department’s highest honors.

By the time he indicted Noriega, in February, 1988, Gregorie had risen to the No. 2 position in the Miami office. The indictment conflicted with the Reagan Administration’s foreign-policy agenda, which was then focused on behind-the-scenes efforts to ease Noriega quietly from power. Four months later, the top federal prosecuting job in Miami came open. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III passed Gregorie over in favor of a Republican state legislator with little prosecutorial experience. In January, 1990, Gregorie quit. He supplemented his private practice with a busy schedule of talking to the media about drug cartels and testifying before Congress about his proposals for fighting drug trafficking.

In July, 1991, he returned to his first love, criminal prosecution, taking a job with the State Attorney’s Office in Dade County (Miami). In his first case back, he won a murder conviction against a cab driver who beat a passenger to death. Gregorie, 44 and married, recently celebrated the birth of his first child.

Question: When you started going after major traffickers, what did you think was going on in international drug trafficking?

Answer: Unfortunately, when we started here, there really wasn’t an outline of the major organizations, who was in them or how they were operating. They were making large seizures, but there was no outline of what the Colombian organizations were like . . . . I began to see that, in order for the drug dealers to succeed, that they had to be able to corrupt levels of their own government and police departments, and then levels of the transhipment point’s government and police department, and then arrive here in the U.S. Essentially, the bottom line of all this is: The drug problem is not a local law-enforcement problem--not from the sense of stamping it out. It is a foreign-policy problem . . . .

Q: When did you begin to focus on allegations of corruption in Panama?

A: We first found the allegations as far back as 1983, when we seized $5 million from a fellow named (Ramon) Milian Rodriguez, who’s now serving 40 years. . . . We had a surveillance before he was arrested. (We watched) a planeload of about 14 boxes being taken out of Miami, flown in his personal jet to Panama, being met by members of the Panamanian Defense Force. . . . The boxes (were) put in a truck and taken to the Panamanian National Bank. . . . The next week, we stopped another 14 boxes--and this 14 boxes had $5 million in cash. That sparked an interest, but it didn’t give us any hard evidence that we could make a case with.

Q: What was the Inair case in 1984.?

A: Inair was a commercial airline flying freight, but (its name) should have been “Cocaine Air,” because its primary purpose was to fly cocaine coming from Colombia through Panama to the U.S . . . . (In 1984) we had seized a load of refrigerators (containing 1,100 pounds of cocaine), which were flown by Inair Airlines out of Panama to the U.S.

Q: Were there indications of a Panamanian government connection in that?

A: Well, the owner of the airline, Ricardo Balonick, was tightly connected with Noriega and everybody knew that. The problem was having enough evidence to show that Balonick was directly related to the cocaine that was flown in. I think in testimony in (the Noriega) case, Balonick will be shown to have been bringing in tons of cocaine, and using Inair, and doing it at the direction of the general . . . .

The next thing that happened was, in 1984, Barry Seal began to cooperate and that’s when we first got an outline of the true structure of the Medellin cartel . . . . Barry Seal was a convicted drug trafficker who . . . decided that, rather than go to jail, he wanted to cooperate. (He) said if we sent him down to Colombia, he could meet with the leaders of the cartel . . . . When he came back, he said, “When I was down there I met with (Pablo) Escobar and Jorge (Ochoa, the heads of the Medellin cartel) in Panama City.” . . . (He said) they were bribing Gen. Noriega so they could hide out in Panama while the Colombian government was looking for them.

Q: Was that the first time you had come across Noriega’s name in connection with trafficking?

A: The possibility of making a case itself didn’t come about until an agent came to see me and told me he had followed up on an investigation of a load (of cocaine) . . . that related back to a pilot for Noriega, a fellow named Floyd Carlton Caceres . . . . When he (Carlton) began cooperating, in 1987, is when the investigation got going. Then we had a first-hand witness who could give us eye-witness testimony of some events.

Q: While you were doing this, did you know about the other two attempts by U.S. prosecutors in the 1970s to indict Noriega on drug trafficking charges?

A: . . . . There isn’t a broad-based, institutional knowledge that goes from one area to another. You have different agencies, different agents. This institutional history that should be passed on, doesn’t get passed on.

. . . . What you have to understand is the FBI has their own computer system, OCIS; DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) has their own computer system, NADDIS; the Customs Service has its own computer system, TECS; the IRS has its own computer system. As you go on down the line, you’ll find that there are numerous computer systems, none of which intersect, none of which are shared . . . . The thing you need to do is coordinate them, and we haven’t done it.

Q: Looking back on the difficulties of bureaucratic cooperation, did they hinder developing the case against Noriega?

A: No, because the case against Noriega was made by the DEA. There was really no other agency involved . . . . I had four agents assigned to the case. The lead case agent, Steve Grilli, is still on the case. He was a young guy, a go-getter, who had some experience doing conspiracy cases . . . . Then they had a guy who had been the agent assigned to the airport in Chicago for 17 years, had never worked a major conspiracy in the Caribbean before . . . . Then they had a guy right out of DEA school, and I had an agent who was extremely experienced and spoke fluent Spanish, except that . . . he was disabled, and, in fact, most times he sat nearly in tears and his hand shaking because his back was so badly injured. That man deserved a medal for the task he performed. That’s all we had.

Q: Why so few resources on a major case involving a prominent public official?

A: I wish somebody would tell me. I don’t know.

Q: In the Noriega case, we’re going to hear a lot about this major alleged trafficker meeting regularly with top U.S. government officials, with National Security Adviser John Poindexter, with Oliver North.

A: . . . . The question is what our foreign policy was. Did we make it clear to the foreign governments we dealt with that anybody dealing in narcotics traffic was going to incur the wrath of the U.S. government? (That) did eventually happen when we went in and pulled the guy (Noriega) out with the U.S. Army. But can I tell you what the level and type of discussion was going on with U.S. officials? I have no idea. As a prosecutor I can tell you that when we found out there was evidence . . . (of) violations of the law, we went after them, and nobody stopped me from doing it.

Q: Norman Bailey, a staff member at the National Security Council, said there wasn’t just a smoking gun on Noriega in the files available to people at the NSC, there was “a 21-gun salute.”

A: Norman is far more knowledgeable about that than I. What I’m saying to you is that, as a prosector, on my level, those people didn’t contact me and ask me, “What are you doing?” or “How much evidence do you have?” . . . . They didn’t volunteer information to me. I didn’t get to see their files . . . nor did I go and try to subpoena it or demand it of them. We worked on two different levels, and the two didn’t intersect, which is a problem.

That’s why I think (there should be) a true drug czar, or a chief of staff, as I choose to call him: Someone who would sit down with the head of the various law-enforcement agencies responsible and have a working group that could settle disputes and intersect intelligence information and know where the major (drug) cases were . . . . They found with the military that they had intermilitary arguments and disagreements, and they settled that by creating a Joint Chief of Staff. I don’t see why law enforcement ought to be different . . . . The drug czar’s been in now for four or five years. What does he do? You tell me . . . .

There ought to be one Treasury enforcement agency . . . . It’s crazy to have five or six different Treasury enforcement agencies when what you really need is one so you can avoid the bureaucratic hassle . . . . The best agents in the world to do that are in the IRS. (But) to get an IRS agent to do anything requires such a bureaucratic morass . . . .

What (we) need to do is go after the financial side of it . . . . You can buy a corporation in Panama, in the Netherlands, Antilles, in Luxembourg, for probably less than $50. You then have a foreign corporation that . . . buys property, opens bank accounts, does business, and nobody knows who the financial backers or the actual owners of the corporation are. They launder huge amounts of money, invest huge amounts of money in the U.S., all of which is dope money, . . . and there’s no way to investigate it . . . .

All you need to do is pass a law that if you’re going to operate as a corporation in the U.S. . . . you have to fill out a financial affidavit saying who the stockholders and who the financial backers are. If you fill it out falsely, you do it under penalty of perjury . . . (and) you subject yourself to forfeiture of any interests in the United States that corporation holds if you are hiding the true interests of the dealers behind it.

It’s simple legislation, it could be enforced . . . if you have bank examiners and IRS and Treasury and Customs guys working on it together . . . . The trouble is, you’d also stop a number of other clandestine businesses, including gun runners and arms dealers who I’m not sure everybody wants to stop.

Q: Let’s go back to the Noriega case. What about the connivance argument--that officials of the U.S. government were aware of what Noriega was doing and condoned it?

A: No U.S. official has authority to send drugs into the U.S. . . . It would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history if some official of the U.S. government was allowing Noriega to send the amounts of dope involved in this case into the U.S. . . .

Q: What about that sort of testimony as a play to a jury? Would you worry about it?

A: In order for him to get in that kind of testimony, he’s got to get a witness to put it in there. If that witness is Noriega, I think his credibility is going to come greatly in question when you have cross-examination . . . . I’m extremely concerned (about) Mike Harari, a general in the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency), who was Noriega’s right-hand man for years, and was sitting right in the middle of all these (drug) transactions. When the U.S. invaded (Panama), the U.S. Army picks him up, lets him go, he goes back to Israel, and nobody but nobody has questioned him as to what he was doing there. Is somebody like that going to show up out of the blue to testify? I doubt it, but who knows?

Q: Will the government win this case?

A: I like to leave to juries the judging of the facts . . . . Absent (Noriega) surprising the world with some evidence of some U.S. agent or agency’s complicity, I don’t see that there’s a great challenge to the evidence that’s going to be put up. I think the important thing about this trial is it’s going to answer loads of questions . . . about the way the cartel operated . . . . Noriega was just one of a long line of police officials and foreign officials who were on the payroll of the Medellin cartel. . . . The essence of this case, is it’s a dope case. This is not a foreign spy case. The only way the foreign intelligence aspect of it can come in is that Noriega, . . . besides being on the take from the Medellin cartel, also happens to have connections with intelligence agencies.