Bodyguard Tells of Cash Deliveries to Noriega and His BCCI Banker

A former Panamanian bodyguard testified Tuesday that he delivered more than $300,000 in cash to the home and office of former dictator Manuel A. Noriega and gave an additional $1.7 million to Noriega’s personal banker at the now discredited Bank of Credit & Commerce International.

The amounts detailed by Enrique Pereira, ex-bodyguard to Noriega associate Cesar Rodriguez, are separate from alleged payoffs to Noriega of $600,000, which his former personal pilot said he had delivered. The new amounts also are apart from $500,000 in a suitcase that a convicted Colombian drug dealer described as seeing Noriega receive at a meeting with drug barons.

Pereira said that Rodriguez, his employer, told him in September, 1982, “to take a briefcase to the ‘Old Man’s’ home, to Gen. Noriega’s home,” repeating a nickname that some of the former dictator’s associates used.

Pereira said his boss “showed me what was inside--money--and said it was $250,000.”

The witness added that he went to Noriega’s home where “the security chief told me to put it on top of a table, that the Old Man was having dinner.”

Pereira told jurors at Noriega’s racketeering and drug-smuggling trial that he did not know the source of the cash, but that he had accompanied Rodriguez on a flight to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to get an aluminum suitcase filled with the money. Previous testimony has established that Colombia’s notorious Medellin cartel often assembled U.S. cocaine profits at Ft. Lauderdale.